International law, International Relations theory and post-atrocity justice: towards a genuine dialogue

For much of the twentieth century, a chasm divided the disciplines of international relations and international law, with relatively little communication and even less mutual comprehension. In particular, this period saw the increasing exclusion of international law from the study of international relations, with key texts removed from reading lists. Perhaps the most obvious and significant reason for this exclusion was the dominance of the realist, and later, neorealist schools of thought in international relations. This phenomenon was certainly most notable in the United States, where the dominance of realism was most extensive. However, in recent decades, a rapprochement between the two disciplines has been attempted, led in the first instance largely by international lawyers. Despite significant efforts at bridging the gap, however, this article argues that a genuine dialogue has yet to emerge. Using insights from debates in and across each discipline about appropriate responses to mass atrocities, this article offers suggestions for creating such a dialogue.     

Fear, interest and honour: outlines of a theory of International Relations

This article justifies the need for a new paradigm of politics based on the spirit. Fifth-century Greeks considered it one of three psychic drives, the other two being appetite and reason. The spirit reflects the universal human need for self-esteem, which is achieved by emulating the skills, character and accomplishments of people considered praiseworthy by our society. According to Socrates, the spirit loves honour and victory. It responds with anger to any impediment to self-assertion in private or civic life. It desires to avenge all slights of honour or standing to ourselves and our friends. It demands immediate action, which can result in ill-considered behaviour, but can be advantageous in circumstances where rapid responses are necessary. Even a cursory examination of international relations in this modern period indicates the continuing importance of the spirit, and the need to conceptualize it in a manner that helps us to understand this important but hitherto ignored dimension of politics at every level of social aggregation.     

国际关系视角下的博物馆对外展览:作用与挑战

在国际关系视角下,博物馆对外展览既可以被归为服务于一国对外政策的文化外交,也可以被归为致力于长远宏观目标的人文交流.每个对外展览因动因不同,所发挥的作用也不尽相同,但通常作用包括形塑国家形象、搭建沟通桥梁、增进相互理解.与此同时,国内外政治形势、法律框架、国家政策等都是对外展览发生的重要背景和能够发生的决定条件,而展览能否真正改变观众的行为或态度又受到文化偏见的干扰,这就造成了博物馆对外展览影响力的不可控性和缓释性.面对这些挑战,中国博物馆作为民族国家的形象代表,应当致力于在更高层次上将独特性转化成普遍性,以自己的方式表现其他社会和文化同样注重的价值,为推动构建人类命运共同体贡献力量.     

Halliday's revenge: revolutions and International Relations

Fred Halliday saw revolution and war as the dual motors of modern international order. However, while war occupies a prominent place in International Relations (IR), revolutions inhabit a more residual location. For Halliday, this is out of keeping with their impact—in particular, revolutions offer a systemic challenge to existing patterns of international order in their capacity to generate alternative orders founded on novel forms of political rule, economic organization and symbolic authority. In this way, dynamics of revolution and counter‐revolution are closely associated with processes of international conflict, intervention and war. It may be that one of the reasons for Halliday's failure to make apparent the importance of revolutions to IR audiences was that, for all his empirical illustrations of how revolutions affected the international realm, he did not formulate a coherent theoretical schema which spoke systematically to the discipline. This article assesses Halliday's contribution to the study of revolutions, and sets out an approach which both recognizes and extends his work. By formulating ideal‐typical ‘anatomies of revolution’, it is possible to generate insights that clarify the ways in which revolutions shape international order.     

世界历史、英国学派与国际关系理论

针对当前西方国际关系理论在解释现实和预测未来上的混乱和无力,作者提出理解过去成为重构国际关系研究的前提;并且在介绍和评论沃尔兹、吉尔平等为代表的现实主义世界史观和沃勒斯坦世界史观的联系与区别之后,对世界历史中国际力量的结构提出了新的证据,尤其着重介绍了英国学派国际体系和国际社会概念的缘起、演化及理论家们的批判。虽然本文作者即是当前英国学派的代表人物之一,但他并不避讳英国学派在理论上的缺憾,指出巴里·布赞构建在没有共同文化的条件下国际体系也可以转化为国际社会理论框架同时,关闭了一个布尔曾经试图打开的空间。作者认为在解读国际社会的世界历史方面还有很多课题需要深入探讨。     

International History and International Relations Theory: A Dialogue Beyond the Cold War

Until recently, there has been little 'real' dialogue in Cold War studies between International Relations theorists and international historians. In many ways this is not surprising. For the most part, International Relations theorists took the Cold War as an immutable feature of the international system. Historians did indeed seek to explain the outbreak of the Cold War and the historic features that had given rise to American hegemony and Soviet opposition, but they did so primarily by concentrating largely on archival and related research with only limited attention given to the bigger issues of the Cold War world. However, as the article demonstrates, a dialogue between historians and theorists over some key aspects of the Cold War, such as the role of ideology, is now timely. The evolution of both a broader conception of International History, as well as the partial opening of communist archives and a range of new developments in International Relations, means that it is now possible to 'rethink' the Cold War using both history and International Relations theory.     

Political theorising: Four conceptions of the nature of theory

This paper is focused upon the issue of the nature of political theorising. The paper presents four different conceptions of political theorising derived from literature on the subject written by those concerned with the nature of political theory or philosophy. These four different conceptions constitute alternative practices for those who designate themselves political theorists. They constitute alternative practices because they are based upon different understandings of the nature of thinking, the role of the intellectual, the function of language or the character of social science. The intention behind this paper is to map the intellectual terrain occupied by those who engage in political theorising. The final recommendation is that each of the four conceptions be accepted as legitimate alternative practices and any temptation toward designating one conception as true political theorising be resisted.     

The Australian National University's Department of International Relations: the early years

This article is a contribution to the re-evaluation of the formative years of the emergent international relations discipline. Work on this topic, extensive over the past decade and a half, has overturned a number of the foundational myths of the global discipline, especially regarding the period between the two world wars. The literature on international relations in Australia, slow to reflect this re-evaluation, generally still locates the first important developments in the 1960s, and characterises the scholarship that emerged as predominantly ‘realist’. This study both pushes back the boundaries and challenges the theoretical perspectives used to categorise thinking in Australia at that time. A student of C. A. W. Manning and thus conversant with British ideas of ‘international society’, George Modelski's early exposure to theoretical work in the USA and his endeavours to give his department a strongly regional focus gave his work a richness and multifaceted character not easily captured by the ‘realist–rationalist’ dichotomy. Modelski went on from the Australian National University to become a major figure in international relations in the USA, contributing to the original debates on globalisation and best known for his work on ‘long cycles’ in world politics.     

International political theory and the question of justice

The aim of the international justice theorist is to find coherence among ideas about justice at the international or global level. Linking justice to coercion and law can bridge the gap between just war theory and theories of international distributive justice. The idea of humanitarian intervention illustrates how the argument might go. Underlying that idea is the idea of a duty to protect. That duty is often thought to be an imperfect and therefore unenforceable duty based on a principle of beneficence. But we can also think of it as a perfect, enforceable duty to resist the violent, where that duty rests directly on the principle of respect, unmediated by beneficence. Respect also implies action to prevent non-violent harms. To do nothing while people are dying of starvation or disease is to fail to respect them as human beings by making their wellbeing a matter of indifference. We can therefore justly be compelled to prevent such harms by being taxed to support efforts to prevent them. A theory of justice that made the duty to protect central would ground the theory of international distributive justice in the justice—coercion link that underlies just war theory.