[audio updated to fix a mixing error]The second installment of our live taping at the British International Studies Association annual convention in Glasgow is a "Whisky Optional" roundtable on status and international-relations theory. Our guests are: Ali Bilgic of Loughborough University, Michelle Murray of Bard College, Rohan Mukherjee of the London School of Economics, and Steven Ward of the University of Cambridge. The taping was sponsored by the Clydeside Distillery.Related readings: ...

Robert Cox's landmark article, "Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory," appeared in the journal Millennium in 1981. Among other things, it introduced the distinction between "critical" and "problem-solving" theory to international-relations scholars. But this isn't just any old episode where Patrick and Dan ramble their way through some decades-old academic article. No, it's the first-ever live recording of Whisky and IR Theory, which took place in...

Back in 2019, Uri Friedman wrote that we "find ourselves—as you will have heard in the corridors of power and conference rooms of think tanks, and read in the government’s strategy documents and the media’s coverage of international relations—in an era of “great-power competition." "As Friedman noted, "great-power competition" has even" achieved hallowed acronym status—GPC..." It's been nearly eight years since the term took off, and international-relations theorists are only just starting to...

It's our first "actual" installment of Whiskey & IR Theory in Space! We discuss Star Trek: The Next Generation's 'gay rights' episode, "The Outcast," which Dan uses to introduce his students to different modes of "reading" the politics of (and in) science fiction. PTJ and Dan summarize the episode (can you spoil an 30+ year-old TV show?), discuss their own reactions to it, and then Dan talks about how his students respond to it differently now than they did a 10-15 years ago. The two...

Patrick and Dan talk about the newest feature of the podcast: a series in which they combine their long-running seminars on (international) politics and science fiction.In each episode of "Whiskey & IR Theory... in Space!" Patrick and Dan will discuss a book, television episode, or film that they've assigned in classes past. Here, though, they introduce the series by talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly of using popular culture in general — and science fiction in particular — to...

PTJ and Dan discuss Cynthia Weber's 1994 book, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange. Weber examines "the justifications for intervention offered by the Concert of Europe, President Wilson's administration, and the Reagan-Bush administrations" and analyzes them via a combination of "critical international relations theory and foreign policy analysis." Topics include: why "sovereignty" was so important to critical and constructivist scholars in the 1990s, Jean...

It's a nostalgia episode for our two hosts, Patrick and Dan.They tackle Mustafa Emirbayer's 1997 article in the American Journal of Sociology, "Manifesto for a Relational Sociology." According to Emirbayer, "Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily in substances or processes, in static 'things' or in dynamic, unfolding relations."Was that also true of International Relations? PTJ and Dan certainly thought so back...

The University of Chicago's Paul Poast claims that G. Lowes Dickinson was the OG "modern" theorist of international relations—and also an "offensive realists." John Mearsheimer invokes Dickinson in Tragedy of Great Power Politics, but notes that Dickinson vocally supported the creation of the League of Nations. Brian Schmidt pays close attention to Dickinson in his work on the history of the discipline. Andreas Osiander also sees Dickinson's account of anarchy as realist, but emphasizes that...

Scholars of international relations don't agree on much, but they at least agree that anarchy (the lack of a common authority to make and enforce rules) is the defining feature of international politics, right? Not exactly. There's a long history of research that emphasizes the hierarchical character of international relations. Now a new wave of scholarship argues that international-relations theory should move beyond anarchy. Some advocate giving it a downgrade. Others want to banish the...

What is the topography of international-relations theory in the People's Republic of China? What is the "Chinese School of International Relations?" Astrid Nordin (King's College, London), Yan Xuetong (Tsinghua University), and Qin Yaqing (Peking University) join the podcast to answer these – and other – questions about Chinese international-relations scholarship. 

In this “Whiskey Optional” episode, PTJ facilitates a conversation among four colleagues from different countries and different kinds of academic institutions about the current global pandemic – not primarily about research on the pandemic, but about the experience of being an academic during the pandemic. Since part of that experience involves bringing our theoretical predilections to bear on the contemporary situation, we drift back and forth between the pandemic as a scholarly object and...

In 2014, John Mearsheimer authored a Foreign Affairs article in which he blamed that year's Ukraine crisis on the U.S., NATO, and the EU. The next year he gave a talk on the subject which the University of Chicago uploaded to YouTube.Last week the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs used excerpts from Mearsheimer's article and talk as part of its efforts to propagandize in favor of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Isaac Chotiner subsequently interviewed Mearsheimer for the New...

Is Constructivism best understood as a scholarly disposition, a body of theory, or an intellectual movement? Is it still relevant, or has it exceeded its shelf life? What if there are lots of Constructivists but they use different labels for their work?In our third "Whiskey Optional" episode, Dan Nexon sits down with Michelle Jurkovich (University of Massachusetts, Boston) . David McCourt (University of California, Davis), Swati Srivastava (Purdue University), and Brent Steele (University of...

In this installment of "Whiskey Optional," Stacie Goddard (Wellesley), Evelyn Goh (Australian National University), and Kyle Lascurettes (Lewis and Clark) join the podcast. You'll never guess what the subject of discussion is. Unless you read the title of this episode. Then you'll know that it's about "International order." The panelists tackle such pressing questions as: What is international order, anyway? Is it everything... or nothing at all? Why do academic debates about international...

PTJ and Dan pick up where they left off – on Chapter 5 of Arnold Wolfers' Discord and Collaboration. There's a lot going on, including a discussion of revisionism, the question of whether "friendship" is possible in world politics, and the distinction between "power" and "influence." They cover classic essays on, for example, the balance of power and "'National Security' as an Ambiguous Symbol." They ask if Wolfers offers an alternative vision of the study of realpolitik... and if that vision...

Arnold Wolfers is one of the most important figures of "mainstream" mid-20th century international-relations theory, but is now mostly cited for his definition of "revisionism" and for perhaps his most famous essay, "'National Security' as an Ambiguous Symbol." Discord and Collaboration (1962) collects previously published essays and intersperses them with new ones that are aimed at making the collection more cohesive. It covers a variety of issues that remain subjects of debate in the field,...

Less than a year after the appearance of "The False Promise of International Institutions," the journal International Security published replies from Robert Keohane and Lisa Martin, John Ruggie, Clifford and Charles Kupchan, and Alexander Wendt. Patrick and Dan discuss this important moment in the "paradigm wars" of the 1990s and 2000s.

Patrick and Dan continue their nostalgic tour of 1990s international-relations theory and spend some time with John J. Mearsheimer's 1994 article "The False Promise of International Institutions." This episode runs over two hours, so you can always skip to: biographical material and the whisky selection (13:40); framing of the article (26:55); the article begins (33:50); realism according to Mearsheimer (53:00); the article's criticisms of liberal institutionalism (1:24:30), "collective...

Patrick and Dan discuss J. Ann Tickner's 1997 article, "You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR Theorists." Topics include liberalism and feminist theory, articles as coalition-building efforts, and Australian whisky.

It's not quite Song of Ice and Fire territory, but we're sure a few people will be pleased that the second half of our discussion of David Campbell's Writing Security has dropped.

In a sequel (of sorts) to Episode 11, Patrick and Dan talk about Susan Strange's "Cave! hic dragones: a critique of regime analysis." Topics include a comparison of "American" and "European" IR, realism as critical theory, the evolution of liberal order (redux), and cats.

John Ruggie's 1982 article, which appeared in a special issue of International Organization on 'international regimes', is an important milestone for theories of hegemony, understandings of liberal (economic) order, and in the evolution of constructivism. Patrick and Dan revisit a piece they remember fondly from graduate school.

We discuss Cynthia Enloe's classic work of feminist international-relations theory. Note that this is a repost of the episode.