Liane Hartnett’s research while affiliated with University of Melbourne and other places

This forum urges international relations (IR) practitioners to rethink the nature of both failure and success, and their own responsibility in building an academy that enables scholars of all backgrounds to thrive. Reflecting on their own experiences, the contributors detail factors that commonly stymie promising work in IR. These range from the quotidian-rejections during peer review and frustrations around network-building-to more serious impediments, including the growing neoliberalization of the academy, employment precarity, illness and disability, and limits on academic freedom. The forum offers four central insights: First, we must recognize the difference between constructive and non-constructive research failure and create greater space for the former. Second, we must work harder to identify and address those contributors to research failure that should not be tolerated. This includes a recognition of privilege and positionality and an understanding of failure as fundamentally situational. Concurrently, third, we must also resist narratives that fetishize meritocracy and individual resilience, and render invisible structural barriers to success. Finally, we must better distinguish researcher failure from research failure. The barriers that slow or foreclose promising research harm not only our intellectual community but also our discipline, limiting its potential to address the most significant challenges of the present moment.

Love plays an important role in the normative production and sustenance of order. Historically implicated in imaginaries of order, it has been evoked to constitute community, legitimate coercion and (dis)empower. Put differently, love provides the affective glue that binds groups, frames feelings to enable and constrain action and is integral to the workings of power. Love can be evoked and governed for various political ends. Complicating accounts of love as a positive emotion, this article uncovers love’s neglected history in disciplinary International Relations (IR) as an ideological mask that conceals its implication in violent worldmaking projects of empire, war and domination. To illustrate this, it identifies three ideal-typical – or Hegelian, Augustinian and Nietzschean – logics that exemplify love’s ordering work and examines how they find expression in the work of three leading figures of disciplinary IR, namely Alfred Zimmern (1859–1957), Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) and Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980).

Love constitutes the global because it is normatively implicated in worldmaking work. I illustrate this empirically via a close and contextualized reading of the political novel Gora, which was set during a key moment of worldmaking during empire and penned by the first non-European Nobel Laureate in literature, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Tagore is an underappreciated figure in global international relations (IR) who not only traversed multiple political circles during the British empire but also saw himself as a confluence of several cultures. I read Gora as lending insight into love as a site of normative contestation—ethically indeterminate, and intimately involved in worldmaking projects, including nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and inter-communalism in an India on the eve of its independence. Setting Tagore's thought in conversation with contemporary research in international history, and normative and anti-colonial international political theory, makes two important offerings to the study of IR: it reveals how a sociological examination of the micropolitics of love helps us to understand and explain the innumerable ways in which intimacies animate worldmaking and equips us with a normative typology for engaging it. El amor constituye lo global porque está normativamente incluido en el trabajo de creación del mundo. Ilustro esto empíricamente mediante una lectura cercana y contextualizada de la novela política Gora, ambientada en un momento clave de la construcción del mundo durante el imperio, y escrita por el primer ganador del premio Nobel de literatura no europeo, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Tagore es una figura infravalorada en las Relaciones Internacionales (RR. II.) mundiales, que no solo atravesó múltiples círculos políticos durante el imperio británico, sino que también se vio a sí mismo como una confluencia de varias culturas. Considero que Gora refleja una visión del amor como lugar de contestación normativa, éticamente indeterminado e íntimamente implicado en proyectos de creación de mundo, incluidos el nacionalismo, el cosmopolitismo y el intercomunismo en una India en vísperas de su independencia. Al poner el pensamiento de Tagore en conversación con la investigación contemporánea de la historia internacional y la teoría política internacional normativa y anticolonial, se hacen dos importantes aportes al estudio de las relaciones internacionales: se revela cómo un examen sociológico de la micropolítica del amor nos ayuda a comprender y explicar las innumerables formas en que las intimidades animan la construcción del mundo, y nos equipa con una tipología normativa para abordarla. L'amour constitue le monde car il est normativement impliqué dans le travail de création du monde. J'illustre cela sur le plan empirique par une lecture attentive et contextualisée du roman politique Gora, qui se déroule à un moment clé de la création du monde à l’ère de l'empire britannique et qui a été écrit par le premier lauréat non européen du prix Nobel de littérature, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Tagore est une figure sous-estimée des relations internationales (RI) mondiales qui a non seulement traversé plusieurs cercles politiques durant l'empire britannique mais qui s'est également vu comme étant à la confluence de plusieurs cultures. J'ai lu Gora comme source de renseignements sur l'amour en tant que site de contestation normative éthiquement indéterminé et intimement impliqué dans les projets de création du monde, notamment dans le nationalisme, le cosmopolitisme et l'intercommunautarisme dans une Inde à la veille de son indépendance. Confronter la pensée de Tagore aux recherches contemporaines en histoire internationale et en théorie politique internationale normative et anticoloniale apporte deux contributions importantes à l’étude des RI : cela révèle la façon dont un examen sociologique de la micropolitique de l'amour nous aide à comprendre et à expliquer les innombrables manières dont les intimités animent la création du monde et nous équipe d'une typologie normative pour l'aborder.

Two decades after the “war on terror” was first waged, there is little conceptual clarity about what it means to win a war. Indeed, despite the burgeoning literature on endless war and victory, there is no substantive engagement with how these themes intersect when thinking ethically about the question of war and what passes for peace. This forum seeks to spark a conversation to address this gap. Bringing together theorists and ethicists working on the themes of war and peace, we ask: What might we render visible and redress by thinking critically of the politics of victory in an era of endless war? Further, to the extent that just-war theory has long offered a grammar for the ethics of war, how does it help or hinder this quest?

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) is perhaps the best known North American theologian of the twentieth century. Over the course of his life he was a Christian socialist, pacifist, a staunch anti-communist, and an architect of vital-centre liberalism. Niebuhr wrote on themes as diverse as war, democracy, world order, political economy and race. So significant was Niebuhr’s intellectual influence that George Kennan once described him as ‘the father of us all’. Indeed, from the thought of Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King Jr. to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Hans Morgenthau to Kenneth Waltz, E.H. Carr to Jean Bethke Elshtain, Niebuhr has helped shape International Relations. Bringing together intellectual historians and international political theorists, this special issue asks whether Niebuhr’s thought remains relevant to our times? Can he help us think about democracy, power, race, the use of force, and cruelty in a moment when ethnonationalism appears ascendant and democracy in decline?

Love has been long lauded for its salvific potential in U.S. anti-racist rhetoric. Yet, what does it mean to speak or act in love’s name to redress racism? Turning to the work of the North American public intellectual and theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), this essay explores his contribution to normative theory on love’s role in the work of racial justice. Niebuhr was a staunch supporter of civil rights, and many prominent figures of the movement such as James Cone, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., J. Deotis Roberts and Cornel West drew on his theology. Indeed, Niebuhr underscores love’s promise and perils in politics, and its potential to respond to racism via the work of critique, compassion, and coercion. Engaging with Niebuhr’s theology on love and justice, then, not only helps us recover a rich realist resource on racism, but also an ethic of realism as antiracism.

Scholars interested in just war theory have paid insufficient attention to how the soldiers tasked to carry out its demands think about it. Reflecting on this gap between theory and experience, this essay asks: What do soldiers think about the idea of just war and the demands it places upon them? Focusing on war memoirs, we argue that while most soldiers ostensibly endorse the principles of just war theory, they are not averse to highlighting, its absurdity. To understand this and what it means, one needs only to think about what makes soldiers laugh. Building on the work of Albert Camus, we suggest soldiers’ laughter renders audible their lucid recognition of war's absurdity – an articulation of the gap between the idea of “just war” and their experience of waging it – and a candid appraisal of their role in it as sad and laughable and strange.

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) and Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) each espoused love as a practice of peace. In the twentieth century, Tolstoy’s ‘law of love’ was to inspire civil disobedience internationally; Mohandas Gandhi’s ahimsa comprised an important element of the Indian independence movement, and Martin Luther King’s conception of love formed the cornerstone of his civil rights activism in the U.S. These continuities are not a coincidence. Tolstoy’s influence on Gandhi and Gandhi’s influence on King have been well documented. What has formed less of a focus are the distinct theological underpinnings and articulations of love, and consequently, praxes of pacifism. This chapter offers an engagement with this transnational history of love and non-violence and its various transmutations in the thought of three significant figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It seeks to illuminate how a thematic focus on love renders visible a more plural politics and a more expansive international.