Vassilios Paipais

• University of St Andrews

This introduction casts International Political Theory (IPT) not as a narrow niche production at the margins of the discipline of International Relations (IR) but rather as a key dimension of theorising international relations that challenges disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and geographical boundaries and inseminates other theoretical IR...

The question of transcendence and its relation to immanence is not new in the history of philosophy, theology, and political theory. Two positions seem to demarcate post-metaphysical political thought on this issue. On the one hand, there is the radical view of transcendence, a hyper-transcendence that is ever more beyond, unalloyed by any mundane...

In a famous exchange with his brother H. Richard in the pages of The Christian Century over the U.S. response to the Manchurian crisis, Reinhold Niebuhr reproached the moral complacency of the pacifist’s detachment from the affairs of the world. Christian realists, however, have always had an uneasy relationship with pacifism. Striving to reconcile...

This book offers a timely exploration of the still burgeoning field of International Political Theory (IPT). IPT is approached in this volume not merely as a subfield at the margins of the discipline of International Relations (IR) but rather as a key dimension of theorising international relations that challenges disciplinary, theoretical, methodo...

This chapter serves as the introduction to this edited volume. It makes an argument in favour of transcending the secular/post-secular dichotomy that is currently plaguing the study of religion in world politics by turning attention to an engagement with theological modes of thought that take faith-based arguments and traditions seriously. Recognis...

Situated within the wider post-secular turn in politics and international relations, this volume focuses not on religion per se, but rather explicitly on theology. Contributions to this collection highlight the political theological foundations of international theory and world politics, recasting theology and politics as symbiotic discourses with...

This book challenges received notions of ontology in political theory and international relations by offering a psychoanalytically informed critique of depoliticisation in prominent liberal, post-liberal, dialogic and agonistic approaches to pluralism in world politics. Paipais locates the temptation of depoliticisation in their labouring under the...

In Waltz?s famous classification, human nature?s propensity to evil is catalogued as a first-image causal explanation of war. Ever since, human nature explanations of conflict have been attacked for resting on metaphysical assumptions and a priori pessimism. This paper argues that modern conceptions about the inherent wickedness of human nature or,...

This paper takes issue with approaches that relate realist political theology exclusively back to its Schmittian and neo-orthodox roots. While not entirely denying those influences, it argues that realist thought is more accurately described as rooted in the tensions characterizing Augustine's anti-heretic diatribes rather than taking inspiration f...

This article situates H. Morgenthau's thought in the context of post-foundationalist theorisations of the difference between politics and the political. In doing so, it shows how Morgenthau's sophisticated realism refused to circumscribe the antagonistic dimension of politics and introduced the study of international politics as a struggle with neg...

This article revisits the early realist understanding of tragedy in international relations in order to highlight its debt to continental philosophical thought and tragic theology. Far from sharing a view of tragedy as objective externality, early realists engaged with the existential conditions that make up the paradoxical structure of experience:...

This article is principally concerned with the way some sophisticated critical approaches in International Relations (IR) tend to compromise their critical edge in their engagement with the self/other problematique. Critical approaches that understand critique as total non-violence towards, or unreflective affirmation of, alterity risk falling back...