{"title":"Converging paths: bounded rationality, practice theory and the study of change in historical international relations","authors":"Quentin Bruneau","doi":"10.1017/S1752971920000494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971920000494","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Bounded rationality and practice theory have both become popular theories of action for major strands of work in constructivist and rationalist International Relations (IR). Based on this observation, I make two arguments. The first is that although they underpin what are generally seen as opposed theoretical camps in IR, bounded rationality and practice theory share two fundamental assumptions. They both accept that how agents process information and make decisions depends on where they are situated in social space, and where they stand in historical time. In turn, these shared assumptions imply that they agree on the existence of a common type of change: change in terms of how groups of people process information and make decisions over time. My second argument is that by studying this type of change, it is possible to shed new light on major transformations of international relations, and that one way of engaging in this type of research is to study international practitioners' education over substantial time periods. With these arguments, this article makes a methodological contribution to the study of change in historical international relations and charts a practical course for pluralist dialogue in IR.","PeriodicalId":46771,"journal":{"name":"International Theory","volume":"14 1","pages":"88 - 114"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1752971920000494","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46959196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"International vs. area? The disciplinary-politics of knowledge-exchange between IR and Area Studies","authors":"S. Aris","doi":"10.1017/S1752971920000184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971920000184","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Within the political-economy of the social sciences, Area Studies (AS) is supposed to supply contextually-informed knowledge on (non-Western) areas to the other social sciences, in exchange for theory to guide further empirical investigations. Based on this assumption, there are regular calls for greater engagement with AS to counteract the shortcomings of International Relations’ (IR) knowledge-base on many areas, perspectives, and practices of the international. However, there has been little work empirically detailing knowledge-exchange practices between IR and AS, so it remains an open question if the relationship functions as an exchange of ‘international’ theory-for-‘area’ empirics. This paper provides a macro-sociological analysis of the practices of IR–AS knowledge-exchange. By focusing on citation practice, it moves beyond accounts that treat the two disciplines as ‘black boxes’, to trace which parts of the ‘dividing discipline’ of IR are active in exchanging knowledge with which ‘area’ scholarships. Hence, it asks: Are there ‘area’ blindspots in IR's knowledge-production? And, what type of IR theory is exported to AS? This analysis informs an assessment of whether AS represents a significant resource for IR in its efforts to, one, better inform its knowledge-production about ‘other’ areas of the international, and two, assert its disciplinary-relevance within the academy.","PeriodicalId":46771,"journal":{"name":"International Theory","volume":"13 1","pages":"451 - 482"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1752971920000184","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45377704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Whither Chinese IR? The Sinocentric subject and the paradox of Tianxia-ism","authors":"Sinan Chu","doi":"10.1017/S1752971920000214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971920000214","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay critically assesses the Tianxia Theories, a line of indigenous International Relations (IR) theorizing in China organized around the concept of Tianxia (‘all-under-heaven’). My goal is to tackle a seemingly prevalent issue among non-Western IR theories, that is, the indigenous scholars' subservience to state cues and often uncritical attitude toward their own ethnocentrism. To that end, I strategically target a recent contribution to this scholarship that explicitly seeks to articulate a non-ethnocentric theory: Xu Jilin's New Tianxia-ism (xin tianxia zhuyi). I first examine the main thesis of New Tianxia-ism to reveal its internal tensions. Then I examine what enables the formulation of New Tianxia-ism from a discursive perspective. I argue that a particular subject position, to which I refer as the ‘Sinocentric Subject’, plays an instrumental role in enabling contemporary Chinese intellectuals to think along the logics of New Tianxia-ism. The result, however, undermines the agenda to articulate an alternative theory that rectifies the ethnocentrism in IR. In conclusion, I suggest that Chinese indigenous scholarship ought to engage more critically the ideological inclination and the politics of knowledge within its own epistemic community.","PeriodicalId":46771,"journal":{"name":"International Theory","volume":"14 1","pages":"57 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1752971920000214","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43698354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Protean power as a plea for an open social ontology, non-efficient causal explanations, and cautious political practice","authors":"Stefano Guzzini","doi":"10.1017/S1752971920000287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971920000287","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper probes the attempt to use power analysis to link three domains: ontology, explanation, and the strategy of political actors. It shows how Katzenstein and Seybert develop an open social ontology that serves as the backdrop for explanations that need to be causal but indeterminate, and a cautious political practice. It exposes tensions in two important links. First, the open ontology becomes retranslated as an explanatory cause. Second, the call for being cautious because of ‘unknown unknowns’ may just as well invite strategies of doubling down in control power.","PeriodicalId":46771,"journal":{"name":"International Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"449 - 458"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1752971920000287","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43504741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"International Theory Book Symposium on Peter J. Katzenstein and Lucia A. Seybert, eds, Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics","authors":"J. Hymans","doi":"10.1017/S1752971920000275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971920000275","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Katzenstein and Seybert's Protean Power offers a fresh perspective on the concept of power in international relations (IR) theory. Standard IR theory defines power as control power, which exists in the world of calculable risk. But IR must also grapple with protean power, which exists in the world of incalculable uncertainty. In this symposium, scholars representing a variety of theoretical perspectives evaluate the concept of protean power as it stands now and as it should develop in the future.","PeriodicalId":46771,"journal":{"name":"International Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"408 - 409"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1752971920000275","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49371442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to the symposium. The concept of protean power: change we can believe in?","authors":"J. Hymans","doi":"10.1017/S175297192000024X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192000024X","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This introductory article to the symposium first presents and then critiques the protean power concept of the Katzenstein and Seybert volume. Although the volume underestimates the value of rational choice models to explain some cases of protean power, it rightly demonstrates that our conventional theoretical toolkit insufficiently anticipates many such disruptions. Drawing on the examples of post-World War I veterans' movements and India's 1998 decision to test nuclear weapons, I argue that the protean power research agenda should focus on the reciprocal relationship between radical uncertainty and psychological and behavioral rigidity.","PeriodicalId":46771,"journal":{"name":"International Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"410 - 421"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S175297192000024X","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48006271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Irreparable ignorance, protean power, and economics","authors":"G. DeMartino, Ilene Grabel","doi":"10.1017/S1752971920000263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971920000263","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The ongoing crisis in mainstream economics has opened the door to recognition of true uncertainty. Economists are increasingly embracing uncertainty and tracing its implications for responsible economic practice and policy design that foregrounds rather than dismisses the limits to knowledge. Protean Power (PP) promotes a similar shift in international relations. PP advances a key distinction between operational and radical uncertainty. We argue that a complementary and perhaps more productive way to theorize the epistemic insufficiency facing agents as they map and implement strategies is to distinguish between ‘reparable’ and ‘irreparable’ ignorance, which leads to ‘Hirschmanian’ pragmatism.","PeriodicalId":46771,"journal":{"name":"International Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"435 - 448"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1752971920000263","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49576586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Levels, centers, and peripheries: the spatio-political structure of political systems","authors":"J. Donnelly","doi":"10.1017/S1752971920000160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971920000160","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article develops a ‘spatio-political’ structural typology of (national and international) political systems, based on the arrangement of homogeneous or heterogeneous political centers and peripheries in layered political spaces. I then apply this typology to Eurocentric political systems from the high middle ages to today. Rather than see no fundamental change across nearly a millennium (the system remained anarchic) or a singular modern transition (with several centuries of fundamental structural continuity on either side), I depict a series of partial structural transformations on time scales of a century or two. I also recurrently step back to consider the nature and significance of such structural models; why and how they explain. International systems, I try to show, do not have just one or even only a few simple structures; their parts are arranged (structured) in varied and often complex ways. Structural change therefore is common and typically arises through the interaction and accumulation of changes in intertwined elements of interconnected systems (not from radical innovations or dramatic changes in core principles). And structural models, I argue, explain both continuity and change not by identifying causes (or mechanisms) but through configurations; the organization of the parts of a system into a complex whole.","PeriodicalId":46771,"journal":{"name":"International Theory","volume":"13 1","pages":"1 - 35"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1752971920000160","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43293860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Control power as a special case of protean power: thoughts on Peter Katzenstein and Lucia Seybert's Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics","authors":"E. Adler","doi":"10.1017/S1752971920000226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971920000226","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Human experience of control is an illusion; all forms of power are a special, transient, and unstable case of protean power. Taking risks is governed by critical uncertainty less because of our lack of perfect knowledge than because the world is physically and socially indeterminate. Power, thus, lies not only in agents' potential to dominate each other, but also in acting in concert to turn propensities into reality. Radical uncertainty is, therefore, not necessarily bad news. Whether protean power endangers or protects humanity depends less on calculating risks than on agents practicing common humanity values. I revise Katzenstein's and Seybert's concepts accordingly and illustrate by discussing Artificial Intelligence's challenges to humanity.","PeriodicalId":46771,"journal":{"name":"International Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"422 - 434"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1752971920000226","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48038512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Protean power: a second look","authors":"P. Katzenstein","doi":"10.1017/S1752971920000238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971920000238","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper restates the central point of Protean Power, pushes the analysis forward by engaging each of the commentators, and concludes by underlining the importance of uncertainty and potentialities and mapping some of the areas that need further attention.","PeriodicalId":46771,"journal":{"name":"International Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"481 - 499"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2020-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1752971920000238","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46172217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}