Christian Reus-Smit

• The University of Queensland

The advent of ‘conference diplomacy’ is a prominent feature of the modern international order, emerging notably at the Congress of Vienna and persisting today in institutions such as the G7 and the G20. This chapter considers how the politics of legitimacy has affected, and been affected by, this distinctive form of diplomacy. The connection is the...

Australian International Relations (IR) has grown dramatically in recent years, but more importantly, it has internationalised and diversified. Australian scholars areleading voices in many of the field’s central debates, addressing a multiplicity of questions, empirical and theoretical. Globally, however, the field of IR is at a crossroad. It is c...

The liberal international order is a fragmented institutional complex, comprising often disparate elements. One of these is a distinctive institutional approach to the global organization of cultural difference. This approach combines universal Westphalian sovereignty (and the pluralist interstate order it facilitates) with international human righ...

Culture and Order in World Politics - edited by Andrew Phillips January 2020

Culture and Order in World Politics - edited by Andrew Phillips January 2020

Cambridge Core - Political Sociology - Culture and Order in World Politics - edited by Andrew Phillips

Christian Reus-Smit is one of the leading experts on international theory, history, and international law. He has pioneered new conceptualizations of individual rights and political legitimacy in the development of international orders, generating innovative debates around concepts of legitimacy, power and social and political theory at the interse...

Cambridge Core - International Relations and International Organisations - On Cultural Diversity - by Christian Reus-Smit

Mainstream international relations continues to assume that the world is governed by calculable risk based on estimates of power, despite repeatedly being surprised by unexpected change. This ground breaking work departs from existing definitions of power that focus on the actors' evolving ability to exercise control in situations of calculable ris...

The modern international order faces profound challenges. Power is shifting to non-Western states and diffusing to non-state actors, including transnational insurgents. This is more than a power transition: it also about culture. Western states now share the stage with powers such as China who bring their own cultural values, practices, and histori...

How can we tell what state the laws of war are in today, and whether they face exceptional pressures? Standard accounts of the condition of this body of law focus on problems of compliance and effectiveness. In particular, there is a dominant international legal diagnosis that most non-compliance is accounted for by the prevalence of non-state bell...

In International Relations arguments about historical origins provoke theoretical debates, as origins assume an emergent theoretical unit of inquiry – an international order, system, society, etc. – while at the same time defining its core properties and dynamics. By boldly casting the long 19th century as the origin of global modernity and, in tur...

Legitimacy is not something distinct from power; it is one of the vital sources of power. And if power shapes the nature and development of international orders, then the politics of legitimacy features prominently in the construction, maintenance, and dissolution of such orders. This article begins by exploring the concepts of power and legitimacy...

When international relations scholars think about international law they either ignore culture or offer highly deterministic accounts of its role. For the majority of scholars, international law is a rational construction, an institutional solution to the problem of order in an anarchical system, a body of rules and practices that reflect the conte...

Since the end of the Cold War, the number of books and articles on intervention in world politics has grown dramatically. Yet curiously little of this work subjects the concept of intervention itself to critical scrutiny. Scholars often preface their analyses with definitional discussions about what intervention is, but these definitions take a com...

Liberal internationalism represents a package of evolving and contending commitments, and this article traces the development within it of one practice with a longer history, namely the allocation of special responsibilities. Responsibilities are those things for which actors are held accountable and, internationally, these have negotiated between...

Metatheory is out of fashion. If theory has a purpose, we are told, that purpose is the generation of practically relevant knowledge. Metatheoretical inquiry and debate contribute little to such knowledge and are best bracketed, left aside for the philosophers. This article challenges this all-too-common line of reasoning. First, one can bracket me...

Exploring contradictions inherent in liberal orders, this chapter questions the treatment of liberalism in the International Relations academy as a relatively straightforward set of beliefs about the individual, the state, the market, and political justice. It asserts that the contradictions and tensions within liberal internationalism are in fact...

For many scholars, policymakers, and media commentators, it is self-evident that we live today in a liberal international order and that the big questions concern the durability of this order; its ability, in particular, to survive the rise of non-liberal great powers and the politics of anti-liberal social forces. But what is an international orde...

It is now commonplace to bemoan our field’s lack of practical relevance, and to blame this sorry situation on our penchant for ever-more abstract theorising over the analysis of real-world phenomena. This article challenges this rendition of the problem. Not only is the theory versus relevance thesis difficult to sustain empirically, there are good...

The language of special responsibilities is ubiquitous in world politics, with policy-makers and commentators alike speaking and acting as though particular states have, or ought to have, unique obligations in managing global problems. Surprisingly, scholars are yet to provide any in-depth analysis of this fascinating aspect of world politics. This...

fundamental standards of political legitimacy. This article advances an alternative understanding, pursuing John Vincent's provocative, yet undeveloped, suggestion that while the notion of human rights has its origins in European culture, its spread internationally is best understood as the product of a 'universal social process'. The international...

We live today in the world's first universal, multicultural, and multiregional system of sovereign states. Five centuries ago, emergent sovereign states were confined to Europe and contained within the bounds of Latin Christendom. Through five great waves of expansion this nascent European system globalized. The Westphalian settlement, the independ...

We live today in the first global system of sovereign states in history, encompassing all of the world's polities, peoples, religions and civilizations. Christian Reus-Smit presents a new account of how this system came to be, one in which struggles for individual rights play a central role. The international system expanded from its original Europ...

This book seeks to explain why different systems of sovereign states have built different types of fundamental institutions to govern interstate relations. Why, for example, did the ancient Greeks operate a successful system of third-party arbitration, while international society today rests on a combination of international law and multilateral di...

The Oxford Handbook of International Relations offers the most authoritative and comprehensive overview to date of the field of international relations. Bringing together an impressive collection of international relations scholars, this Handbook debates the nature of the field itself, critically engages with the major theories, surveys a wide spec...

This article explains the Handbook's broad approach and advances a series of arguments about the nature of international relations as a field, arguments informed by a reading of the rest of the book. The book is concerned, in particular, with three interrelated questions. What is the nature of the theoretical endeavour in international relations? H...

Constructivism and the English School are often said to bear striking family resemblances, a view encouraged by their mutual concern for the social dimensions of international life. Realist critics have been quick to tar both with the same brush, criticizing them for overemphasizing ‘logics of appropriateness’ in relations between states. ‘The Engl...

Since the end of the Cold War there has been a renaissance in the study of history by International Relations scholars. Constructivists have been at the forefront of this rediscovery, turning to historical inquiry to highlight the contingent meaning and evolution of a myriad of international practices, processes, and social structures. To what exte...

This article critically examines the current relationship between constructivism and the English School. Scholars in each school have worked largely with stereotypes of the other, and this has greatly impeded productive dialogue and cross–fertilization. A more fruitful strategy is to treat both schools as bounded fields of debate, as rich and diver...

What is an international crisis of legitimacy? And how does one resolve such crises? This article addresses these conceptual issues, laying the theoretical foundations for the special issue as a whole. An actor or institution experiences a crisis of legitimacy, it is argued, when the level of social recognition that its identity, interests, practic...

Introduction Determining when states can use force legitimately is the central normative problematic in world politics. Domestically, constraining the state's use of force with social and legal norms that confine state-sanctioned violence to a limited and clearly defined set of purposes and circumstances is essential to the maintenance of civil soc...

This collection of essays demonstrates the continuing importance of the work of Michael Polanyi for the understanding, not only of the great events of the 20th century, but also of the problems that face us in the 21st century. Polanyi moved liberalism away from a negative, sceptical and rationalist basis towards an acceptance of trust, tradition a...

The final two chapters in Part One investigate the evolving research agenda of the English School of International Relations and its contribution to contemporary international relations. In this chapter, the author investigates the emerging dialogue between English School and constructivist approaches in order to explore how they help to understand...

Why do states recognize an obligation to observe the rules of international law? Existing accounts of international legal obligation suffer from the problem of ‘interiority’. They first ground obligation in some internal feature of the international legal system — such as consent, fairness or dialogue — but when these turn out to be insufficient, t...

Different societies of states develop different fundamental institutions to govern relations between their constituent units. Whereas the governance of modern international society rests on the institutions of contractual international law and multilateralism, no such institutions evolved in Ancient Greece. Instead, the city-states developed a soph...

Sovereignty and human rights are generally considered separate, mutually contradictory regimes in international society. This article takes issue with this conventional assumption, and argues that only by treating sovereignty and human rights as two normative elements of a single, inherently contradictory modern discourse about legitimate statehood...

This article contends that the move to recast liberal international relations theory in positivist terms has undermined its status as a political theory, and that attempts to use such a theory as the basis of a liberal international legal theory undermine its proponents' capacity to reason normatively about international change, a crucial quality o...

The substantially revised second edition of this widely-used text provides a broad-ranging introduction to the main theoretical approaches to the study of International Relations. The introduction focuses on the nature of theory in the study of global politics and the discipline's internal debates. The following nine substantially revised and updat...

The 1990s have seen the emergence of a new `constructivist' approach to international theory and analysis. This article is concerned with the relationship between constructivism and critical international theory, broadly defined. Contrary to the claims of several prominent critical theorists of the Third Debate, we argue that constructivism has its...

The 1990s have seen the emergence of a new 'constructivist' approach to international theory and analysis. This article is concerned with the relationship between constructivism and critical international theory, broadly defined. Contrary to the claims of several prominent critical theorists of the Third Debate, we argue that constructivism has its...

How can humans beings organize their social relations to enhance individual and collective security and physical well-being and to enable the pursuit of common goals and the management of common problems? This is the perennial question of governance, a question confronted by all social groups, in all cultural and historical settings, a question und...

This book explores the nature and problems of global governance as we enter the next millennium. It focuses on the United Nations, the most ambitious experiment to date in multilateral management of world society. Leading scholars, policy-makers, and representatives of non-governmental organizations examine the economic, security, and civil politic...

In the context of a collaborative project on the meaning and legacy of a cultural construction commonly called ‘the West,’ and specifically its key Anglo-American dimension, this paper provides a comparative examination of two key bilateral relationships at the core of that construction: US-Canada and US-Australia. In building relationships with Ca...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Cornell University, January, 1995. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 268-301).