The Oxford Handbook of International Relations

by Reus-Smit, Christian; Snidal, Duncan

• ISBN13: 9780199219322
• ISBN10: 019921932X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Oxford Handbook of International Relations offers the most authoritative and comprehensive overview to date of the field of International Relations. The Handbook debates the nature of the field itself, critically engages with the major theories, surveys a wide spectrum of methods, addresses the relationship between scholarship and policy making, and examines the field's relation with cognate disciplines. In so doing the Handbook gives readers authoritative and critical introductions to the subject and establishes a sense of the field as a dynamic realm of argument and inquiry. The Handbook has two key and distinctive organizing principles. The first is its ground-breaking approach to the normative component in theorizing about International Relations. Earlier volumes have concentrated almost exclusively on theories as purely empirical or positive theories, with small sub-sections left for 'ethics and International Relations'. But all International Relations theories have both empirical and normative aspects; even methodological choices entail implicit normative commitments. Without this understanding, some of the arguments in International Relations are routinely miscast. The Oxford Handbook of International Relations offers a comprehensive survey of the field that deepens our understanding of how empirical and normative theorizing interact to constitute International Relations as a field of study. A second organizing principle is the analysis of how different perspectives have developed in relation to one another. Previous overviews of the field have treated contending theories and methods as isolated bodies of thought, or organized them into stylized 'great debates'. But these approaches obscure the dynamic interplay, conversation, and contestation between different perspectives. The Handbook examines this interplay, with chapter authors probing how their theory or approach has been affected by contestation with, and borrowing from, other approaches. In doing so it shows how diversity within International Relations has promoted, or perhaps sometimes stultified, progress in the field. The Oxford Handbook of International Relations advances a markedly different perspective on the field of International Relations and will be essential for reading for those interested in the advanced study of global politics and international affairs.

Author Biography

Professor Reus-Smit's research focuses on the politics of international ethics and institutions, and he has published widely on issues of global governance, multilateralism, human rights, and international relations theory. Professor Reus-Smit is currently engaged in projects on Resolving International Crises of Legitimacy (funded by the British Academy and the Rockefeller Foundation), and on the role of rights politics in the development of the modern international system (funded by the Australian Research Council).
Duncan Snidal is an associate professor in the Harris School, the Department of Political Science, and chair of the Committee on International Relations. Snidal's research focuses on international relations with an emphasis on international political economy and institutions. He has worked on problems of international cooperation, including how the distribution of capability and interests affects outcomes. He is currently working on the role of international institutions, including law and formal organizations, in promoting cooperation. Snidal is also interested in applying formal techniques to policy analysis. He is director of the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security (PIPES) and is currently chair of the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal: Between utopia and reality: the practical discourses of international relations

Imagining the discipline

The state and international relations

From international relations to global society

The point is not just to explain the world but to change it

A disabling discipline?

Major theoretical perspectives

Eclectic theorizing in the study and practice of international relations

Realism

The ethics of realism

Marxism

The ethics of Marxism

Neoliberal institutionalism

The ethics of neoliberal institutionalism

The new liberalism

The ethics of the new liberalism

The English School

The ethics of the English School

Constructivism

The ethics of constructivism

Critical theory

The ethics of critical theory

Postmodernism

The ethics of postmodernism

Feminism

The ethics of feminism

The question of method

Methodological individualism and rational choice

Sociological approaches

Psychological approaches

Pevehouse: Quantitative approaches

Case study methods

Historical methods

Bridging the subfield boundaries

International political economy

Strategic studies

Foreign policy decision-making

International ethics

International law

The scholar and the policy-maker

Scholarship and policy-making: who speaks truth to whom?

International relations: the relevance of theory to practice

The question of diversity

International relations from below

International relations theory from a former hegemon

Old and new

The concept of power and the (un)discipline of international relations

Locating responsibility: the problem of moral agency in international relations

Big questions in the study of world politics

The failure of static and the need for dynamic approaches to international relations

Six wishes for a more relevant discipline of international relations

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