Haunted by History: Myths in International Relations

A series of studies on interpretations of history and their use in political debates. Includes: Beatrice Heuser & Cyril Buffet: ‘Michel and Marianne’ Beatrice Heuser & Cyril Buffet: ‘Of Myths and Men’, Beatrice Heuser & Cyril Buffet: ‘Historical Myths and the Denial of Change’, Beatrice Heuser: ‘Dunkirk, Dien Bien Phu, and Suez, or why France doesn't trust allies and has learned to love the bomb’.

International relations theory and peacebuilding

The chapter examines the contribution that International Relations theory has made to the reading and practice of peacebuilding.

The heuristic application of explanatory theories in international relations

Explanatory theorists increasingly insist that their theories are useful even though they cannot be deductively applied. But if so, then how do such theories contribute to our understanding of international relations? I argue that explanatory theories are typically heuristically applied: theorists’ accounts of specific empirical episodes are shaped by their theories’ thematic content, but are not inferred from putative causal generalizations or covering laws. These accounts therefore gain no weight from their purely rhetorical association with theories’ quasi-deductive arguments: they must be judged on the plausibility of their empirical claims. Moreover, the quasi-deductive form in which explanatory theories are typically presented obscures their actual explanatory role, which is to indicate what sort of explanation may be required, to provide conceptual categories, and to suggest an empirical focus. This account of how theoretical explanations are constructed subverts the nomothetic–idiographic distinction that is often used to distinguish International Relations from History.

Causation, complexity, and the concert: the pragmatics of causal explanation in international relations

A causal explanation provides information about the causal history of whatever is being explained. However, most causal histories extend back almost infinitely and can be described in almost infinite detail. Causal explanations therefore involve choices about which elements of causal histories to pick out. These choices are pragmatic: they reflect our explanatory interests. When adjudicating between competing causal explanations, we must therefore consider not only questions of epistemic adequacy (whether we have good grounds for identifying certain factors as causes) but also questions of pragmatic adequacy (whether the aspects of the causal history picked out are salient to our explanatory interests). Recognizing that causal explanations differ pragmatically as well as epistemically is crucial for identifying what is at stake in competing explanations of the relative peacefulness of the nineteenth-century Concert system. It is also crucial for understanding how explanations of past events can inform policy prescription.

Unwritten law in Hobbesian political thought

In Hobbesian terminology, ‘unwritten laws’ are natural laws enforced within a polity, by a non-sovereign judge, without some previous public promulgation. This article discusses the idea in the light of successive Hobbesian accounts of ‘law’ and ‘obligation’. Between De Cive and Leviathan, Hobbes dropped the idea that natural law is strictly speaking law, but he continued to believe unwritten laws must form a part of any legal system. He was unable to explain how such a law could claim a legal status. His loyalty to the notion, in spite of all the trouble that it caused, is a sign of his belief that moral knowledge is readily accessible to all.

Waltz and the world: neorealism as international political theory?

The recent recovery of an empirically and ethically richer realist tradition involves an explicit contrast with neorealism's more scientistic explanatory aspirations. This contrast is, however, incomplete. Although Waltz's theoretical work is shaped by his understanding of the requirements of scientific adequacy, his empirical essays are normatively quite rich: he defends bipolarity, and criticizes US adventurism overseas, because he believes bipolarity to be conducive to effective great power management of the international system, and hence to the avoidance of nuclear war. He is, in this sense, a theorist divided against himself: much of his oeuvre exhibits precisely the kind of pragmatic sensibility that is typically identified as distinguishing realism from neorealism. His legacy for a reoriented realism is therefore more complex than is usually realized. Indeed, the nature of Waltz's own analytical endeavour points towards a kind of international political theory in which explanatory and normative questions are intertwined.