Big and important things in International Relations: what are they and how should we study them?

This section is intended as a broad platform to launch investigations into major phenomena in International Relations (the discipline) and international politics (the object of investigation). In ontological terms, panels comprising this section ask what these phenomena are, or should be. Themes such as war and peace, conflict and cooperation, order and disorder, or anarchy and hierarchy have historically defined the discipline. However, the evolving character of conflict and the complex nature of challenges like the ongoing pandemic, global warming, and socio-technological change pose the question whether our field is still up to the task of explaining and addressing, as Ken Waltz put it, ‘big and important things’ – or whether some of the ‘big’ phenomena we used to study have become less exigent and instead we should focus on more immediate problems, or choices faced by policy practitioners. Naturally, panels and papers associated with this section will also address the epistemological issue of how to study these phenomena. Political realism old and new The theoretical vantage point for this section lies within the tradition of political realism in IR. Arguably, its representatives have made some of the most momentous contributions to the field (to the extent that the historically and substantively disparate scholarship associated with realism can even be considered a self-contained paradigm): Thucydides is credited with founding the practice of scientific history and his narration of the Peloponnesian War is the earliest – perhaps a universal – account of the forces of honour, fear, and profit that play out in international politics. Niccolò Machiavelli linked analysis and policy practice, theorised how domestic and international politics are interconnected, and became the eponym for manipulative, callous, and immoral personality traits but also a leadership style that might be geared towards preserving stability, order, and the prosperity of the polity. Mid-twentieth century realists like Hans Morgenthau not only systematised the concept of human nature but brought their own legal and diplomatic experience to bear on transnational phenomena like fascism and communism, and theorised the interconnectedness of universal patterns of thought and behaviour – specifically the human emotions – and how they impact foreign policy. By formalizing the tripartite distinction between levels of analysis, Waltz continued the effort of so-called classical realists to turn European diplomatic practice into an American social science, yet also caused an unprecedented paradigm shift in the young discipline. Finally, representatives of neoclassical realism have sought to address criticisms of realism being unable to account for change in international politics, by providing mid-range theory and empirical cases of foreign policy analysis at the three levels of analysis, and the links between them. Nonetheless, ‘realists’ have continued to face criticism of ad-hocism in analysis and being engaged in a degenerative and inconsistent research programme, which has not always been unwarranted. However, there are good reasons why realism – as a designation for a dispassionate analysis of group interests and material capabilities that attaches little value to sanctifying rhetoric and maintains a keen focus on the potential for conflict – will continue to exert appeal on a diverse group of people: IR scholars, foreign policy analysts, strategists, tacticians, diplomats. Theoretical introspection, however, is not an end in itself. The questions that all these realists old and new raised, and which we continue to grapple with, determine both the kinds of empirical phenomena being studied and the character of systematic investigation. The empirical precedent for a section centred around foreign-policy realism is manifest: the re-emergence of great power competition as evidenced by the Sino-American rivalry and the return of great power politics (also, occasionally erroneously, characterised as the ‘return of geopolitics’) as illustrated by Russian foreign policy. Which is also to say, and to ask: What does this renewed struggle for power and peace mean for the EU and the European order? Where are we headed? The multi-layered nature of above-mentioned realist contributions shall also be illustrative of the broad scholarly audience targeted by this section: both micro- and macro-level explanations of international politics and foreign policy and how they might be connected; those studying transnational phenomena like populism, the rise of authoritarianism, and the threats posed by climate change; research raising questions of morality and ethical dilemmas; academics investigating the role of history, collective memory, analogies, and metaphors; and those broadly engaged in political psychology and the revival of the ‘first image.’ How are our research agendas interconnected, and how do they relate to the phenomena being studied? Are we looking at the right issues, and making use of all the tools available to study them? How would we know change when we see it? And what might we be missing?