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Introduction
Please note that I no longer post articles or papers on Research Gate or Academia.edu. If you want a copy of a publication that is not already available here, it is likely to be on my personal website (dhnexon.net).
If it is neither here nor on my personal website, then you should email me directly to ask for a copy. I am usually happy to send it to you. But do not use the Research Gate “request” function. I do not respond to it.
Publications
Publications (69)
Advancing a new approach to the study of international order, this book highlights the stakes disguised by traditional theoretical languages of power transitions and hegemonic wars. Rather than direct challenges to US military power, the most consequential undermining of hegemony is routine, bottom-up processes of international goods substitution:...
Advancing a new approach to the study of international order, this book highlights the stakes disguised by traditional theoretical languages of power transitions and hegemonic wars. Rather than direct challenges to US military power, the most consequential undermining of hegemony is routine, bottom-up processes of international goods substitution:...
Advancing a new approach to the study of international order, this book highlights the stakes disguised by traditional theoretical languages of power transitions and hegemonic wars. Rather than direct challenges to US military power, the most consequential undermining of hegemony is routine, bottom-up processes of international goods substitution:...
Post-Cold War expansion of liberal order rested on three legs: the implosion of major alternative ordering projects, the enjoyment by liberal democracies of a “patronage monopoly,” and the dominance of liberalizing transitional activist networks and movements. By 2019, all three of those legs have been turned upside down. China and Russia, among ot...
Donald Trump and Trumpism are less the cause of the current crisis in the American system than a symptom and accelerant of underlying trends. This chapter examines the continuities and differences between Trump foreign policy and that of his predecessors. It demonstrates that Trump is, in fact, unusual in the scope and scale of his dismissal of mul...
Russia and China are engaged in substantial efforts to contest existing international architecture while building alternative infrastructure. A desire for greater influence and status drives some of these efforts. At the same time, a number of autocratic regimes, including Russia and China, now consider international political liberalism—especially...
After two decades, American global hegemony is almost certainly reaching its expiration date. America will remain a great power, if the not greatest power. But, barring a major shock to emerging powers—and especially China—the world will fully transition to a new global order. This chapter sketches out some possible futures. These include a new bip...
Right-wing illiberal movements have enjoyed a run of political success. This manifests in Trump’s capture of the Republican Party and subsequent election; the number of illiberal, right-wing parties that hold or share power in Europe; and the largely right-wing coalition that successfully pushed for the UK to trigger withdrawal from the European Un...
The rise of states interesting in altering international order, or with little interest in promoting domestic liberal institutions, broke the post–Cold War “patronage monopoly” enjoyed by the United States and its democratic allies. The emergence of new patrons—including not just Russia and China but also regional powers—allows recipients of intern...
We live in a period of uncertainty about the fate of American global leadership and the future of international order. The 2016 election of Donald Trump led many to pronounce the death, or at least terminal decline, of liberal international order—the system of institutions, rules, and values associated with the American-dominated international syst...
Nearly every recent National Security Strategy of the United States takes for granted that the United States is a hegemonic power, that it constructed a liberal international order after World War II, and that it expanded that order from the 1990s onward. This chapter looks closely at these assumptions. What is international liberalism? What is heg...
This chapter identifies three drivers of hegemonic unraveling and transformation in international orders: great-power contestation and alternative order building; how the dominant power’s loss of its “patronage monopoly” enhances the bargaining leverage of weaker states; and the rise of counter-order movements, especially transnational ones, that w...
Analysts have pronounced the end of American leadership since at least the 1970s. In the 1980s, some confidently proclaimed that the United States was in decline and Japan was on the rise. But in 1989, Moscow allowed its satellite regimes in Eastern Europe to collapse; in 1991 the Soviet Union fell apart under the pressure of nationalist movements....
What is ‘relational theorizing’ in International Relations and what can it offer? This article introduces a thematic section that responds to these questions by showing two things. First, relational theorizing is not a doctrine or a method, but a set of analyses that begin with relations rather than the putative essences of constitutively autonomou...
After the end of World War II, various iterations of hegemony studies focused on such topics as the connection between hegemonic powers and the provision of international public goods, the causes of war during hegemonic transitions, and the stability of hegemonic orders. In this article, we discuss and forward the emergence of a new wave of interna...
Do international systems tend to remain anarchic because of recurring balances of power, or do they tend toward imbalances and hierarchy? Leading structural theories posit competing predictions about systemic outcomes, and the historical record offers evidence to support both claims. This suggests the need to theorize conditions under which one ten...
Unimensional accounts of revisionism – those that align states along a single continuum from supporting the status quo to seeking a complete overhaul of the international system – miss important variation between a desire to alter the balance of military power and a desire to alter other elements of international order. We propose a two-dimensional...
Issues involving ‘statecraft’ lie at the heart of most major debates about world politics, yet scholars do not go far enough in analyzing how the processes of statecraft themselves can reshape the international system. We draw on the growing relational-processual literature in international relations theory to explore how different modes of statecr...
Even in the North American and European context, relationalism comes in many flavours. We identify the common features of relational approaches, including varieties of practice theory, pragmatism and network analysis. We also identify key disagreements within relationalism, such as the relative explanatory importance of positional and process-orien...
Do international systems tend to remain anarchic because of recurring balances of power, or do they tend toward imbalances and hierarchy? Leading structural theories posit competing predictions about systemic outcomes, and the historical record offers evidence to support both claims. This suggests the need to theorize conditions under which one ten...
Many scholars now argue for deemphasizing the importance of international anarchy in favor of focusing on hierarchy – patterns of super- and subordination – in world politics. We argue that only one kind of vertical stratification, governance hierarchy, actually challenges the states-under-anarchy framework. But the existence of such hierarchies ov...
Gender in the International Studies Quarterly Review Process - Dani K. Nedal, Daniel H. Nexon
Why do leading actors invest in costly projects that they expect will not yield appreciable military or economic benefits? We identify a causal process in which concerns about legitimacy produce attempts to secure dominance in arenas of high symbolic value by investing wealth and labor into unproductive (in direct military and economic terms) goods...
This article outlines a field-theoretic variation of hegemonic-order theory — one inspired primarily by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. We argue that hegemony derives from the possession of a plurality of meta-capital in world politics; hegemons exercise “a power over other species of power, and particularly over their rate of exchange.” Recasting con...
In White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations , Robert Vitalis presents a critical disciplinary history of the field of international relations, and the discipline of political science more broadly. Vitalis argues that the interconnections between imperialism and racism were “constitutive” of internationa...
Buzan and Lawson’s The Global Transformation establishes that many of the basic parameters of world politics originated in the ‘long 19th century’. Despite finding much to admire in their book, we are concerned that it lacks an explicit theory of change. In its drive to highlight the novelty and exceptionalism of the 19th century, it offers insuffi...
We call for a research program focused on the dynamics of global power politics. Rather than link realpolitik to structural-realist theoretical frameworks or the putatively anarchical character of world politics, the program treats power politics as an object of analysis in its own right. It embraces debate over the nature of global power politics...
This book examines world politics through the lens of diplomatic practice. It argues that many global phenomena of our time, from the making of international law to the constitution of international public power, through humanitarianism and the maintenance of global hierarchies, are made possible and shaped by evolving forms of diplomacy. The study...
Many commentators refer to the U.S. overseas network of military installations as an “empire,” yet very few have examined the theoretical and practical significance of such an analogy. This article explores the similarities and differences between the basing network and imperial systems. We argue that American basing practices and relations combine...
Concerns about the end of International Relations theory pivot around at least three different issues: the fading of the ‘paradigm wars’ associated with the 1990s and early 2000s; the general lack of any sort of ‘great debate’ sufficient to occupy the attention of large portions of the field; and claims about the vibrancy of middle-range theorizing...
Musgrave, Paul and Daniel H. Nexon. (2013) Singularity or Aberration? A Response to Buzan and Lawson. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/isqu.12030 © 2013 International Studies Association
Buzan and Lawson (2012) urge IR scholars to consider what the 19th century can teach us about the contemporary world. Although we agree that IR schola...
This chapter addresses the complex and contingent interplay between liberal order and empire. It draws attention to the seemingly irresolvable dilemma that the United States maintains imperial relations with other political communities, whilst also rejecting the legitimacy of empire. The solution has been to ‘democratize’ imperial functions and to...
In this chapter, we put forth a better definition of empire. We offer an ideal-typical account of the structure of empires that allows us to spot the existence of imperial relations in international and domestic politics. This approach makes clear which aspects of international liberalism generate an impulse toward empire and which mitigate it. Neo...
Realist Constructivism: Rethinking International Relations Theory. By BarkinJ. Samuel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 202p. $85.00 cloth, $29.99 paper. Rational Theory of International Politics. By GlaserCharles L.. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. 328p. $70.00 cloth, $27.95 paper. - Volume 9 Issue 4 - Daniel H. Nexon
HANNES MÖHRING. Saladin: The Sultan and His Times, 1138–1193, trans. David S. Bachrach. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. xxiii, 113. $20.00 (us), paper. Reviewed by Konrad Hlrschler
American scholars routinely characterize the study of international relations as divided between various Kuhnian “paradigms” or Lakatosian “research programmes.” Although most international relations scholars have abandoned Kuhn’s account of scientific continuity and change, many utilize Lakatosian criteria to assess the “progressive” or “degenerat...
This article reviews four recent books on balancing and the balance of power. Both in isolation and when taken together, they provide strong analytical and empirical warrants against the proposition that balance of power equilibria represent the “normal condition” or “natural tendency” of international relations. They also reflect the growing disse...
Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations sp...
This article cautions against a number of errors endemic to recent attempts to derive “lessons of empire” for United States foreign policy and grand strategy: (1) justifying the comparison between the United States and past imperial polities based on shared characteristics unrelated to the analytic category of empire, (2) failing to offer recommend...
Scholars of world politics enjoy well-developed theories of the consequences of unipolarity or hegemony, but have little to say about what happens when a state's foreign relations take on imperial properties. Empires, we argue, are characterized by rule through intermediaries and the existence of distinctive contractual relations between cores and...
Continuity and transformation in international history is both a central concern of international-relations theory and a subject that is often marginalized in the field. Indeed, international-relations scholars frequently engage work in disciplines that have interests and orientations distinct from those of political science. Although this tendency...
Mustapha Kamal Pasha, Mark B. Salter, and Catarina Kinnvall each grapple with the political dimensions of civilizational discourse. Pasha reminds us that “civilizational essentialism can be effectively mobilized to consolidate hegemony” (62). Salter focuses on how the “war on terror is portrayed in American policy and public discourse simultaneousl...
Religion is once again becoming a central source of contention in European politics. As the contributors to this volume note, European political and cultural integration is now expanding to include political communities that did not experience the same process of secularization that took hold in Western and Central Europe during the second half of...
Constructivists attack the social theory of Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (TIP), arguing its positions on change, agent-structure interaction and culture are irrevocably flawed. We argue that many of these criticisms are mispecified, as they overlook the structural-functionalist assumptions of Waltz’s theory. Seen in this light,...
What Moves Man: The Realist Theory of International Relations and Its Judgment of Human Nature. By Annette Freyberg-Inan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 266p. $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.
Human nature is the subject of Annette Freyberg-Inan's sustained attack on political realism. She argues that all realist theory shares a common...
In his article “Realist Constructivism,”Barkin (2003:338) described constructivism as a cluster of research methods and analytical tools: a “set of assumptions about how to study world politics” rather than a “set of assumptions about how politics work.” As such, constructivism is subject to E.H. Carr's dialectic between realism and utopianism. Bar...
Part I. Introduction: 1. What's at stake in 'bringing historical sociology back into international relations?' John M. Hobson 2. Historical sociology: back to the future of international relations? Stephen Hobden Part II. Historical Sociologies of International Relations: 3. The two waves of Weberian historical sociology in international relations...
The Star Trek franchise, which now includes ten films and five television series, has long provided scholars and fans with rich material for the analysis of politics in general, and United States foreign policy in particular. Many argue that specific episodes and/or elements of the Star Trek mythology—such as alien races and its historical timeline...
In a recent article in the ReviewofInternationalStudies, Stephen Hobden does a great service by initiating a critical evaluation of the potential for historical sociology in international relations theory. Hobden considers seminal studies by Michael Mann, Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, and Immanuel Wallerstein, and concludes that each is inadequate...
In recent years, paradigmatic debates in International Relations (IR) have focused on questions of epistemology and methodology. While important in their own right, these differences have obscured the basic divide in the discipline between substantialism, which takes entities as primitives, and relationalism, which takes processes of social transac...
Commentators have recently referred to the U.S. overseas network of military installations as an empire, yet very few have examined the theoretical and practical significance of such an analogy. This article explores the analytical similarities and differences that the U.S. basing network exhibits compared to that of an archetypical imperial system...
Abstract will be provided by author.
Abstract will be provided by author.
Thesis (A.B., Honors in Government)--Harvard University, 1995. Includes bibliographical references.