Reflexivity has become a common term in IR scholarship with a variety of uses and meanings. Yet for such an important concept and referent, understandings of reflexivity have been more assumed rather than developed by those who use it, from realists and constructivists to feminists and post-structuralists. This volume seeks to provide the first overview of reflexivity in international relations theory, offering students and scholars a text that : provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of the current reflexivity literature develops important insights into how reflexivity can play a broader role in IR theory pushes reflexivity in new, productive directions, and offers more nuanced and concrete specifications of reflexivity moves reflexivity beyond the scholar and the scholarly field to political practice Formulates practices of reflexivity. Drawing together the work of many of the key scholars in the field into one volume, this work will be essential reading for all students of international relations theory.

This volume provides a novel approach to international relations. In the course of fifteen essays, scholars write about how life events brought them to their subject matter. They place their narratives in the larger context of world politics, culture, and history. Autobiographical International Relations believes that the fictive distancing associated with academic prose creates disaffection in both readers and writers. In contrast, these essays demonstrate how to reengage the "I" while simultaneously sustaining theoretical precision and historical awareness. Authors highlight their motives, their desires, and their wounds. By connecting their theoretical and practical engagements with their needs and wounds, and by working within the overlap between theory, history, and autobiography, these essays aim to increase the clarity, urgency, and meaningfulness of academic work. These essays are autobiographical, but focused on the academic aspect of authors’ lives. Specifically, they are set within the domain of international relations/global politics. They are theoretical, but geared to demonstrate that theoretical decisions emerge from theorists’ needs and wounds. Theoretical precision, rather than being explicitly deduced, is instead immanent to the autobiographical and the historical/cultural narrative each author portrays. And, these essays are framed in historical/cultural terms, but seek to bind together theory, history, culture, and the personal into a differentiated and vibrant whole. This book moves the field of International Relations towards greater candidness about how personal narrative influences theoretical articulations. No such volume currently exists in the field of international relations.

This volume ws the winner of The International Studies Association Theory Section Book Award 2013, presented by the International Studies Association and The Yale H. Ferguson Award 2012, presented by International Studies Association-Northeast. There are many different scientifically valid ways to produce knowledge. The field of International Relations should pay closer attention to these methodological differences, and to their implications for concrete research on world politics. The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations provides an introduction to the philosophy of science issues and their implications for the study of global politics. The author draws attention to the problems caused by the misleading notion of a single unified scientific method, and proposes a framework that clarifies the variety of ways that IR scholars establish the authority and validity of their empirical claims. Jackson connects philosophical considerations with concrete issues of research design within neopositivist, critical realist, analyticist, and reflexive approaches to the study of world politics. Envisioning a pluralist science for a global IR field, this volume organizes the significant differences between methodological stances so as to promote internal consistency, public discussion, and worldly insight as the hallmarks of any scientific study of world politics. This important volume will be essential reading for all students and scholars of International Relations, Political Science and Philosophy of Science.

What kind of ethics in world politics is possible if there is no foundation for moral knowledge or global reality is at least complex and contingent? Furthermore, how can an ethics grapple with difference, a persistent and confounding feature for global politics? This book responds to the call for a bold and creative approach to ethics that avoids assuming or aspiring to universality, and instead prioritizes difference, complexity and uncertainty by turning to reflexivity, not as method or methodology, but as a practice of ethics for politics. This practice, ‘ethical reflexivity’, offers individuals, organizations and communities tools to recognize, interrogate and potentially change the stories they tell about politics—about constraints, notions of responsibility and visions of desirability. The benefits and limits of ethical reflexivity are investigated by the author, who engages writing on critique, rhetoric, affect and relationality, and carefully considers dominant and alternative framings of difficult issues in International Relations (IR)—the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and the US policies of ‘enhanced interrogation’ and drone strikes. This path-breaking study provokes new possibilities for agency and action and contributes to a growing literature in IR on reflexivity by uniquely elaborating its promise as an ethics for politics, and by drawing on thinkers less utilized in discussions of reflexivity such as Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Aristotle. This book will appeal to scholars and upper-level graduates in several sub-fields of IR, including international/global ethics, IR theory, global governance, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, foreign policy analysis and US foreign policy.

How can international aid professionals manage to deal with the daily dilemmas of working for the wellbeing of people in countries other than their own? A scholar-activist and lifelong development practitioner seeks to answer that question in a book that provides a vivid and accessible insight into the world of aid – its people, ideas and values against the backdrop of a broader historical analysis of the contested ideals and politics of aid operations from the 1960s to the present day. Moving between aid-recipient countries, head office and global policy spaces, Rosalind Eyben critically examines her own behaviour to explore what happens when trying to improve people’s lives in far-away countries and warns how self-deception may construct obstacles to the very change desired, considering the challenge to traditional aid practices posed by new donors like Brazil who speak of history and relationships. The book proposes that to help make this a better world, individuals and organisations working in international development must respond self-critically to the dilemmas of power and knowledge that shape aid’s messy relations. Written in an accessible way with vignettes, stories and dialogue, this critical history of aid provides practical tools and methodology for students in development studies, anthropology and international studies and for development practitioners to adopt the habit of reflexivity when helping to make a better world.

Arguing for a theory of international politics committed to human emancipation, this text suggests that international relations theory must move in a nonpositivist direction. It explores recent developments in the discipline, including critical, Gramscian, postmodernist, feminist and normative approaches.

The end of the Cold War has opened up a 'real world laboratory' in which to test and refine general theories of international relations. Using the frameworks provided by structural realism, institutionalism and liberalism, The Post-Cold War International System examines how major powers responded to the collapse of the Soviet Union and developed their foreign policies over the period of post-Cold War transition. The book argues that the democratic peace has begun to generate powerful socialisation effects, due to the emergence of a critical mass of liberal democratic states since the end of the Cold War. The trend this has produced is similar to a pattern that classical realists have interpreted as 'bandwagoning' within a unipolar power structure. Case studies of Germany, China and Japan - identified as key states with the potential to challenge US dominance - provide evidence to support the assessment of international change. The author concludes by exploring the implications of September 11th for the analysis developed. This important volume argues that the end of the Cold War was a major historical turning point in the development of world politics with fundamental implications for the basic way in which the dynamics of the international system are conceptualised.