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The increasing popularity of game modeling in international relations theory has fostered a tendency toward theoretical elegance to the detriment of empirical concerns. In this article attention is focused on the empirical implications of a series of choices that users of game theory must make when they model social interactions. In particular, possible trade-offs between theoretical complexity and empirical robustness are evaluated. This is done both abstractly and with specific references to recent modeling efforts in the fields of security and international political economy.

This article posits empirical and political reasons for recent 'micro-moves' in several contemporary debates, and seeks to further develop them in future International Relations studies. As evidenced by growing trends in studies of practices, emotions and the everyday, there is continuing broad dissatisfaction with grand or structural theory's value without 'going down' to 'lower levels' of analysis where structures are enacted and contested. We suggest that empirics of the last 15 years — including the war on terror and the Arab Spring — have pushed scholars into increasingly micropolitical positions and analytical frameworks. Drawing upon insights from Gilles Deleuze, William Connolly and Henri Lefebvre, among others, we argue that attention to three issues — affect, space and time — hold promise to further develop micropolitical perspectives on and in International Relations, particularly on issues of power, identity and change. The article offers empirical illustrations of the analytical purchase of these concepts via discussion of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring uprisings.

A plea for theory as the core of the discipline of international relations, stressing that the present confusion concerning the proper method & purposes of the discipline can be dispelled only by systematic empirical theory divorced from 'policy scientism' & reconnected with pol'al philosophy. The main contemporary theories are reviewed & critically discussed: the `realist' theory of power politics, philosophies of history, behavioral `systems' theory (based on a confusion between the methods of the physical sci's & the purposes of the soc sci's & consequently unable to explain world politics), & attempts at organizing the discipline around a central unifying concept such as equilibrium or decision-making. Instead of such theories, 2 kinds of systematic res are suggested: (1) historical sociol (description & comparison of historical systems of international relations, analyzed in terms of 4 series of data: the structure of the world, the forces which cut across the units, the relations between the domestic & the foreign policy of those units, the relations between them); & (2) the building of `relevant utopias' (a resumption of the traditional task of pol'al philosophy which would take into account the realities of world politics so as to avoid impatient perfectionism). AA-IPSA.