In Man, the State, and War (1959), Kenneth Waltz identifies Spinoza as a “first-image theorist.” Alongside Augustine, Niebuhr, and Morgenthau, Spinoza holds the view, according to Waltz, that “political ills [are deducible] from human defects.” The description is disputable. And the inclusion of two contemporary thinkers alongside two classics cannot but provoke intellectual historians fearful of anachronism.
In his most recent book, An Australian Band of Brothers, Dr Mark Johnston tells the story
of Don Company of the 2/43rd Australian Infantry Battalion – part of the 9th Division, which sustained more casualties and won more decorations than any other Australian division
in the Second World War. Like his previous works on Australians at war, the book is a ‘warts and all’ exploration of the life of front-line servicemen.
Ellen Ravndal, ‘Acting Like a State: Non-European Membership of International Organizations in the Nineteenth Century’, in Jens Bartelson, Martin Hall and Jan Teorell, eds, De-Centering State M
Ellen Ravndal, ‘Trygve Lie (1946-1953)’, in Manuel Fröhlich and Abiodun Williams, eds, The UN Secretary-General and the Security Council: A Dynamic Relationship (Oxford: Oxford University
Pacifism, in its most familiar form, is the view that waging war is never morally justified—call this the pacifism-of-acts. This is to be carefully distinguished from what we might call the pacifism-of-institutions. The latter position is not characterised by an absolute objection to waging war with the military resources that we have amassed. It is characterised, rather, by an objection to the amassing of those resources to begin with.
Does acquisition of nuclear weapons by security rivals increase their level of conventional militarised conflict? Some recent theoretical and quantitative work has supported the ‘stability-instability paradox’, the proposition that while nuclear weapons deter nuclear war, they may also provide the conditions for nuclear-armed rivals to increase conventional military conflict with each other. However, other quantitative analysis and qualitative studies of the India–Pakistan dyad have delivered more equivocal assessments.
In this Centre of Gravity paper, Professor Emeritus Rosemary Foot, Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, outlines the evoluti
One question that International Relations’ (IR) feminist and decolonial theorists grapple with is how can ‘the invisible’ be made ‘visible’ in such a way that recognises its agency? In this seminar, Sophie Harman explores a new method of research to explore this question: the co-production of a narrative feature film Pili, between an academic researcher, a film crew, and a group of women from rural coastal Tanzania living below the international poverty line of US$2 a day. This project is the first use of narrative feature film as method in IR.
