Nicholas Rengger

On the just war tradition in the twenty-first century

This article argues that the rebirth of interest in the just war tradition, both academically and practically, over the last few years rests on a shaky foundation. It suggests that the character of the just war as a tradition is ill suited to certain aspects of the contemporary intellectual and political world and that historical developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have combined unhelpfully to narrow the traditions concerns. It also suggests that, especially after 11 September, there is a growing temptation to resent the restraints that the tradition is held to impose on warmaking and thus to ignore or abandon the just war as a way of thinking about the relationship between war and politics. Nevertheless, the article argues, to abandon the just war tradition would still bring about more loss than gain and that as an aid to moral reflection and practice on the use of force, it is still a powerful tool and an invaluable aid.

Still critical after all these years? The past, present and future of Critical Theory in International Relations

Twenty-five years ago, theoretical reflection on International Relations (IR) was dominated by three broad discourses. In the United States the behavioural revolution of the 1950s and 1960s had helped to create a field that was heavily influenced by various assumptions allegedly derived from the natural sciences. Of course, variety existed within the behaviourist camp. Some preferred the heavily quantitative approach that had become especially influential in the 1960s, while others were exploring the burgeoning literature of rational and public choice, derived from the game theoretic approaches pioneered at the RAND corporation. Perhaps the most influential theoretical voice of the late 1970s, Kenneth Waltz, chose neither; instead he developed his Theory of International Politics around an austere conception of parsimony and systems derived from his reading in contemporary philosophy of science.1 These positivist methods were adopted not just in the United States but also in Europe, Asia and the UK. But in Britain a second, older approach, more influenced by history, law and by philosophy was still widely admired. The ‘classical approach’ to international theory had yet to formally emerge into the ‘English School’ but many of its texts had been written and it was certainly a force to be reckoned with. 2

Tragedy or Scepticism? Defending the Anti-Pelagian Mind in World Politics

This article discusses the claims of Mervyn Frost and James Mayall that scholars of politics and international relations should take the notion of tragedy much more seriously than they, generally, have done, at least recently. It does this by also considering the arguments in favour of a tragic vision of politics outlined in Ned Lebow’s influential restatement of the realist tradition, The Tragic Vision of Politics, and traces these concerns back to their locus classicus in twentieth-century realism, Hans Morgenthau. It then considers Michael Oakeshott’s critique of Morgenthau, and argues that to develop an ‘anti-Pelagian’ political theory (as both Morgenthau and Oakeshott sought to do) we would be better to follow Oakeshott’s scepticisms than Morgenthau’s sense of the tragic.

Political Theory and International Relations: Promised Land or Exit from Eden?

Political theory and International Relations have become increasingly interpenetrated over the last few years. This article traces the evolution of this relationship and the emergence of a literature now termed international political theory. It also suggests that a convergence of contemporary political and economic factors, together with a particular intellectual fashion, run the risk of promoting an unnecessarily and inappropriately narrow international political theory, and closes by suggesting how this might be avoided.

The Role(s) of Rules: Some Conceptual Clarifications

This article explores the various roles that rules play in international relations. The article responds to the current international situation in which rules are being contested by numerous agents in a range of issue areas. While rules, by their very nature, will result in conflicting interpretations in social and political realms, these disagreements at the international level have the added danger of undermining international order. The article explores the nature of rules, focusing on moral and legal dimensions as they operate at the international level. We then turn to an exploration of debates about legitimacy, the impact of technology on rules and rule-making, and the dilemmas of enforcement. We conclude that while rules are a necessary part of any just political order, the dilemmas generated at the global level necessitate careful consideration of the very nature of rules. The responses to the article that follow this one seek to explore some of these issues and their relevance to more specific international issues.

On theology and international relations: World politics beyond the empty sky

In previous periods, scholarship about international relations often drew on writing in theology, as well as more familiarly, history, law or philosophy. Some very influential scholars of international relations – think of Rheinhold Niebuhr, Martin Wight and Herbert Butterfield – were extremely widely read in theological topics, and their theological concerns influenced their understanding of international relations. This article looks at some contemporary writing with overtly theological concerns and asks how might contemporary international relations scholarship benefit from an engagement with contemporary philosophical and political theology.

Special forum on Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics

In a dialogue discussing issues of the relation between empirical and normative theory, four contributors comment upon the edited volume by Richard Price, Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics , and Richard Price responds. The contributions principally revolve around the following themes: (1) whether a division of labor between normative and empirical theory can or should be overcome, which in turn presupposes notions of (2) just what constitutes normative and empirical international relations as such; and (3) the ethics of constructivism itself, including what if anything is distinctive about how constructivism might respond to the question of ‘how we should act’.

BISA at thirty: reflections on three decades of British International Relations scholarship

Last December, in the university town of St Andrews, the British International Studies Association (BISA) celebrated its 30th anniversary conference. As it was a rather special occasion, BISA members took this opportunity to indulge in some reminiscences about its founding, some studies of the work that had been carried out since the founding of the Association and reflect upon the relationship of British scholarship in international studies to scholarship elsewhere. It has been customary for there to be, at the BISA conference, a plenary address given by a prominent British or overseas scholar or (on occasion) a practitioner. It has also long been a tradition that The Review of International Studies , the Journal of the Association produced in association with Cambridge University Press, publishes the plenary of the conferences. For the thirtieth anniversary, however, BISA commissioned three plenary lectures. In this edition of the Journal, therefore, we devote a section to the lectures that were given by Professors Chris Brown, Lawrence Freedman and Geoff Roberts. We will come on to the content of these lectures in a moment, but thought that, by way of introduction, it would be timely to reflect upon the circumstances in which BISA was born, and say something about the changes in the environment of British International Studies from the mid 1970s until today.

Practical Judgement: Inconsistent—Or Incoherent?

The chapter offers a brief summary of the notion of practical judgement in Brown’s work in general, and the manner in which he deploys it in the two essays in question. Secondly, it probes what we might assume such an account of practical judgement requires and asks how far, and to what extent, Brown’s account meets these requirements. Finally, it poses a question that applies not just to Brown’s account of practical judgement but to all similar accounts (many of which he has discussed in his work over the years).

A Postsecular Global Order: Metaphysical Not Political?

It is a relative commonplace, in the political and international theory of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, to talk of the political and philosophical worlds as being “postmetaphysical.” While the idea of “postmetaphysical thinking” is most obviously associated with Habermas,1 other influential contemporary thinkers have also argued that key aspects of the contemporary condition can be best characterized as “postmetaphysical.” This would be true, for instance, of most poststructural thought and of the thought of the late Richard Rorty who described a postmetaphysical culture as one where what is common to religion and metaphysics—to find an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one’s thinking, something into which everything can fit, independent of one’s time and place—has dried up and blown away. It would be a culture in which people thought of human beings as creating their own life-world, rather than as being responsible to God or “the nature of reality,” which tells them what kind it is.2