The democratic peace program arguably constitutes one of the most successful empirical research programs in the discipline. Its main empirical finding motivated extensive theorizing (e.g., challengers, as well as distinct theoretical enterprises), sparked further debate about how to conceptualize and operationalize democracy, and shifted the foreign policy discourse, particularly in the United States

AbstractDid “America First” construct America irrelevant? Answering this question has been the subject of much debate in the popular press, the policy community, and scholarly circles. That asked, it is worth remembering that scholars and policymakers have long argued that one of the most enduring and important aspects of the US role in the world is American structural power. Perhaps nowhere has the

The goal of this study is to evaluate the application of the flipped classroom (FC) format in the international studies curriculum. Previous research has examined the impact of the FC on students’ performance, operationalized by test scores, and demonstrated the utility of this technique in the learning process. Our research goes beyond student performance to evaluate the impact of the FC on student

Scholars have detailed the benefits of active learning, particularly the impact that simulations can have on promoting engagement and evaluative thinking. Scholars have discussed the positive effects of active learning on first-generation college students, but there is minimal research on how simulations contribute to developing interpersonal skills, especially among first-generation college students

AbstractHow should teachers of international relations in settler-colonial states engage with First Nations’ sovereignty claims? While a growing body of recent scholarship explores how teaching might acknowledge and move beyond the discipline's racist and colonial origins, less research investigates how pedagogy might rectify inattention to Indigenous sovereignty. This paper reports on a class activity

International organizations increasingly resort to strategies of legitimation in order to justify their authority and policies. This article explores one such strategy of the European Commission that targets organized interest groups with the aim to build a legitimating constituency. The members of this constituency not only contribute expertise to a policy, but also benefit from that policy and, therefore

AbstractIn non-English-speaking countries, international relations (IR) scholars often face considerable pressure to publish in international journals and address international debates. At the same time, they are expected to cater to national publics, politicians, and funding agencies. In this article, we investigate how German IR scholars navigate this terrain and whether a national IR discourse still

AbstractThe most frequent practice in teaching western undergraduate students about international relations (IR) is either to avoid gender studies altogether or at best to compartmentalize them to a single week. This practice marginalizes feminist research by amalgamating highly heterogeneous publications under the pretense that “they look at gender.” Rather than treating gender studies as a unified

AbstractCurrent wargaming techniques are effective training and research instruments for military scenarios with fixed tools and boundaries on the problem. Control cells composed of officiants adjudicating and evaluating moves enforce these boundaries. Real-world crises, however, unfold in several dimensions in a chaotic context, a condition requiring decision-making under deep uncertainty. In this

Observers of the evolution of international relations (IR) theory often point to an American hegemony in the discipline on a global level. However, more recent analyses show that there has been a systematic and increasing Canadianization of IR scholarship in Canada since the 1990s, facilitated by government policies that fostered the hiring of domestic candidates and the creation of Canadian foreign

AbstractSoft power is a perennial buzzword in policy discussions, but its popularity has not translated into scholarly or policy impact. In this policy article, I argue that this is because many references to soft power are vague and undefined, referring to any use of culture or ideology in a state's foreign policy and leaving unclear soft power's relationship with hard power. Drawing on recent scholarly

AbstractThis article presents an innovative teaching and learning method based on collaborative and inquiry-based learning implemented in a Middle East Politics course. It consists of a series of online workshops in which students work in teams to analyze three different current conflicts in the region: Libya, Syria, and the Israeli-Palestinian. The aim of this method was twofold: on the one hand,

How do intellectual leaders of professional schools of international affairs, whose institutions primarily educate and train master's students for careers in government, the non-governmental sector, and the private sector, differ from academic administrators in disciplinary departments, whose primary raison d’être is producing the next generation of scholars whose primary task is to conduct basic research

AbstractAcknowledging the role of discourses as the entry door to social reality, the article highlights the value that discourse analysis (DA) can add to the cognate fields of foreign policy analysis (FPA) and international relations (IR). It argues that DA offers researchers an analytical platform to focus in parallel on the interaction between levels of analysis traditionally considered as separate

The puzzle of the African Union mediation is that it enjoys regional effectiveness in leading peace processes and yet often fails to prevent atrocity crimes. While existing studies focus on the lack of capacity to explain failures, I draw on atrocity mediation literature that emphasizes coercive strategies for ripening to explore widely significant factors associated with the AU mediation. I adopt

In contrast to growing public attention to geoeconomics as the new mode of conducting great power competition, the IR discipline has not actively engaged in conceptual and theoretical analysis from the geoeconomic viewpoint. This article examines issues that geoeconomics needs to solve to become a new theoretical framework in the positivist “American” IR scholarship that dominates research on great

The purpose of this paper is to present considerations about the use of music as a critical and radical pedagogy in an International Relations class in the Global South. How can music help students understand the processes of marginalization, resistance, and struggle? Can it be understood as a tool to be used in the classroom to transcend traditional and marginalizing pedagogies? The contribution of

L'International, a journal published in Paris in the 1840s that brought together an international team of intellectuals aiming to advance international studies, represents not only a forgotten milestone in the development of international studies but also provides an important case study shedding light on the challenges that need to be overcome in the development of international studies as a distinctive

AbstractThe initial key international climate policy and carbon market hub was the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Over time several international organizations and networks have been added to the “international carbon market web,” such as several World Bank (WB) initiatives. As to the latter, the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (CPLC) was launched in 2015. A key question

Within genocide studies, a group of early scholars known as pioneers of the field made crucial contributions to genocide studies, raising the field's visibility and stature prior to its great expansion that began around the turn of the century. While recognizing the significance of the early contributions to the field, it is important that we also recognize their origins—mostly white American, European

AbstractMuch has been written about the need to “bridge the gap” between the academic study of international relations—particularly policy-oriented subfields such as foreign policy analysis and security studies—and the needs of policymakers. This important agenda largely focuses on encouraging academics to produce more policy-relevant, accessible research. While such efforts are indispensable, they

AbstractDifference, a central concern to the study of international relations (IR), has not had its ontological foundations adequately disrupted. This forum explores how existential assumptions rooted in relational logics provide a significantly distinct set of tools that drive us to re-orient how we perceive, interpret, and engage both similarity and difference. Taking their cues from cosmological

AbstractAlthough many international relations (IR) theory and international political economy textbooks consistently reference dependency theory, it is commonly considered a passé, outdated, or defunct theoretical approach. This paper challenges conventional wisdom, stressing the continued relevance of dependency as an analytical approach. Overall, it argues that Dependency theory represents a successful

AbstractHow similar are the institutional designs of regional organizations (ROs)? Is there a trend toward particular designs such as the European Union's, or is there greater institutional variety as more regions have created an increasing number of ROs? Which designs have spread through the system, and which remain idiosyncratic? To answer these questions, the Comparative Regional Organizations Project

AbstractPolicymakers employ economic sanctions to deal with a wide range of international challenges, making them an indispensable foreign policy tool. While scholarship on sanctions has tended to focus on the factors affecting their success, newer research programs have emerged that explore the reasons for why sanctions are threatened and initiated, the ways they are designed and enforced, and their

This paper argues that works of popular culture, specifically horror films, offer valuable insights into dominant and critical perceptions of the sources of violence in ongoing armed conflicts—an issue of concern for scholars of International Relations (IR) scholars, which as yet has not received sufficient attention. Accordingly, we present a new approach that IR scholars can utilize in their analysis

AbstractAs international relations has started to grapple with its geo-cultural parochialism, the focus has been on its “Western-centrism” and on how “non-Western” international relations might be different. This article argues that attempts to deprovincialize “Western” (i.e., Euro-American) international thought do not always revolve around “non-Westernness,” a negation with often cultural-civilizational

AbstractThis article is concerned with conceptualizing those actors who seek to undo the collective normative standard that has already been achieved. I call these actors norm saboteurs. Unlike norm entrepreneurs, who promote a new norm, or norm antipreneurs, who resist a new norm, saboteurs seek to obstruct the implementation of an already accepted norm. They not only oppose a norm, but also seek

Author(s): Norrlof, Carla; Poast, Paul; Cohen, Benjamin J; Croteau, Sabreena; Khanna, Aashna; McDowell, Daniel; Wang, Hongying; Winecoff, W Kindred | Abstract: Abstract The recent “liberal international order” (LIO) debate has been vague about the institutions and issue areas that constitute the order. This is likely driven by competing views of “liberal” and, perhaps more importantly, by security

This forum compares and contrasts national experiences in the development of intelligence studies from the perspective of seven countries: France, Japan, Israel, Romania, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The discussion is structured around a comparative framework that emphasizes five core dimensions that, we posit, are essential to the emergence of this subfield: access to relevant

AbstractAcross politics and public discourse, feminism is experiencing a global renaissance. Yet feminist academic work is divided over the burgeoning use of the term, particularly in reference to economic and international development policy. For some, feminism has been co-opted for neoliberal economic ends; for others, it remains a critical force across the globe. This article explores the nascent

AbstractThis article contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning in international studies by modeling how a capstone course and multimedia project can support students’ integration of study abroad experiences and learning into their academic work and personal development. The multimedia video collage capstone project empowered students to (re)examine their study abroad site and narrate

A “pedagogy of discomfort” (Boler 1999) recognizes the degree to which epistemology, emotions, and ethics are closely entwined both within and beyond our classrooms shaping who, what, where, why, and when we can see. It recognizes not only the intellectual and cognitive focus of education but also its embodied and affective dimensions. A pedagogy of discomfort which engages with the historically, politically

AbstractSince the early twenty-first century, tertiary education has witnessed a dramatic shift with the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Celebrated by some as the ultimate “democratization” of education, this development has not been without controversy. The main purpose of this article is neither to confirm nor dispel the controversies rather it seeks to critically examine one MOOC to

African borderlands are sites where the state, borderlanders, criminal groups, and other groups compete and cooperate to achieve diverse interests. They are also zones of competing perspectives on security. However, current border security policies and practices operate within a restrictive neorealist theoretical paradigm with the state as the referent object of security thereby ignoring other perspectives

The Internet and digital technologies have become indispensable in academia. A world without email, search engines, and online databases is practically unthinkable. Yet, in this time of digital dependence, the academy barely demonstrates an appetite to reflect upon the new challenges that digital technologies have brought to the scholarly profession. This forum’s inspiration was a roundtable discussion

A series of crises over the last decade have put pressure on Europe's fundamental ordering principles. In response, German policymakers have scrambled to reinterpret Germany's foreign policy for a new era. To understand this process, the authors utilize an interpretivist approach, analyzing the discourse of German foreign policymakers through the lens of four traditions of thought informing debates:

AbstractSince the 1990s, when a global anti-corruption norm emerged which in part targeted the use of bribery in international business activities, international support has been growing for a related norm against the use of facilitation (or “grease”) payments. Despite ambiguous language in the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions and

The study of religion and international religions has witnessed an exponential growth in recent decades. Courses and programs exploring the complex entanglements between faith and global politics have likewise mushroomed around the world. Despite this ferment, reflections on teaching religion and international relations have so far lagged behind. This forum seeks to remedy this general silence. It

Abstract Slow outbreak reporting by states is a key challenge to effectively responding to global health emergencies like Zika, Ebola, and H1N1. Current policy focuses on improving domestic outbreak surveillance capacity globally in order to reduce reporting lags. However, governments also face economic and political incentives to conceal outbreaks, and these incentives largely are ignored in policy

In this article, we engage with IR's recently rediscovered interest in peace and connect it with the visual turn in international relations. We move the field's focus on representations of war to representations of peace and develop the concept of peace photography. We suggest both understanding photography as a social agent promoting visions of peace and incorporating analysis of peace photography

This forum comes from a 2016 panel at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association. The forum participants offered midterm assessments of the foreign policy of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This forum considers whether Modi heralded in a new era in Indian foreign policy, or whether Modi's policies just repackaged older policies. The authors in this forum answer these questions

The author thanks Sergio Catignani, Rob Freathy, Patrick Porter, the anonymous reviewers, and especially Helena Mills for invaluable comments/discussion. He also thanks the University of Exeter for “Impact Accelerator” funding, and the UK Economic and Social Research Council [Grant Number ES/H015906/1] for its support of an intra-PhD policy secondment.

Abstract: Border control authorities, vigilantes, and criminal organizations use drones to track movement across the US-Mexican border. EU member states’ military drones patrol the Mediterranean Sea for migrants alongside drones operated by humanitarian organizations. This paper examines the complex security landscape that is unfolding as states deploy military drones for border security and non-state

This article explores the rationales for using interviews as a research method to study national security intelligence, and provides a step-by-step guide for researchers to prepare, conduct, and use interviews in research fields limited by government secrecy. The epistemological and methodological challenges posed by qualitative interviews in the field of intelligence studies are not fundamentally

How do we teach and learn the human experience of war? How far removed is this experience from a classroom? This article uses these questions as the starting point for an investigation into the presence/absence of war experience, the effects of narratives distancing war, and the consequences of challenging these narratives. It draws on the experience of an undergraduate module at the University of

International Relations (IR) has increasingly paid attention to critical pedagogy. Feminist, post-colonial and poststructuralist IR scholarship, in particular, have long been advancing the discus-sions about how to create a pluralist and democratic classroom where ‘the others’ of politics can be heard by the students, who can critically reflect upon complex power relations in global poli-tics. Despite

Scholars in the field of peace and conflict studies have long worried that their discipline is divided – between studies of war and war making, and studies of peace and peacemaking. However, empirical research into the existence, extent, and nature of such a division is scarce. We remedy this by addressing two questions: 1) how is work in the field of peace and conflict studies distributed between

Humanitarian nonprofit nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) today exhibit signs of “marketization” and behave like firms, according to a frequently uttered claim in the scholarly literature. However, it is not precisely clear what marketization and behaving like a firm mean. Drawing on the literature concerning nonprofit organizations and public administration, we offer a more sophisticated and multifaceted

Anxieties regarding colonial and neoliberal education have generated multiple calls for critical international pedagogies. Scholars of critical pedagogy have analyzed the pedagogies of the neoliberal project, whose ethos and economic imperatives aim to produce apolitical consumers and future citizens. Such calls, this article argues, articulate a concern about other-regardedness, critiquing the impact

In recent years, growing concern in International Relations to offer a more inclusive and active learning experience has led to the increased use of practical exercises, visual teaching materials like movies and fictional television, as well as social media and e-learning tools to address this concern. Despite noteworthy achievements in bridging the everyday lives of International Relations students

In this paper I advance the proposition that Western policymakers' perceptions and understandings of the conflict in Afghanistan are heavily influenced by certain political ideas emerging from seventeenth-century Enlightenment philosophy. This is particularly evident with counterinsurgency practitioners' usage of social science disciplines to produce "objective" information about the local societies

This article explores narratives that university students in Germany and Japan tell about World War II. Studying these narratives offers insights into how conflict, reality, and knowledge are socially constructed. Scholars in reconciliation and memory studies have mainly focused on the differences between how Germany and Japan choose to remember their wartime pasts in history curricula and textbooks

This collection of articles contributes to the growing body of research on how technology is affecting peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, and research methodologies in the field. Assumptions about the use of technology for peace are interrogated, such as the purported deepening of inclusivity and widening of participation that technology provides to peacebuilders and communities. It frames

This article aims to present the main challenges related to violence and crime in South America and to analyze how the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) has responded. A content analysis of the official documents and minutes of three UNASUR councils is presented. The councils examined are the Defense Council, the World Drug Problem Council, and the Council on Citizen Security, Justice and Coordinated

Attempts to build a liberal peace and a concurrent neoliberal state in Kosovo have not managed to produce a sustainable and emancipatory peace. Instead, they have produced a local and negative hybrid peace that has been co-opted by the dynamics of local state formation and state contestation. These dynamics have overshadowed a meaningful transition from ethnic hostility to sustainable peace that should

This article examines how the discipline of international relations (IR) engages with the policy process by investigating the discipline’s responsiveness to world events. To this end, the article deploys a mixed-methods approach using historical data of journal articles in twelve top IR journals covering 1980 to 2012 from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project as well as a

The year 2015 marked the fifteenth anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women and Peace and Security. This article analyzes the marginalization of the resolution’s prevention mandate in the theoretical and policy literatures. Our feminist analysis reveals that shortcomings in the policy arena are foreshadowed in conflict prevention scholarship. Conflict prevention

Geopolitics is a topic that again has taken the frontline in discussions of how to interpret Russia’s foreign policy or Russia’s relations with the West. Geopolitical thinking in Russia has often been identified with different schools of neo-Eurasianism, extreme versions of which contain expansionist, nationalist ideas. However, these schools do not characterize university teaching of geopolitics in

Popular culture is a significant interest for scholars of International Relations and world politics. This article explores the capacity of video games to articulate, represent, and simulate the practice of international politics in both narrative and procedural capacities through a study of the highly popular Mass Effect science fiction series of video games. The introduction of procedural rhetoric