International Relations and the Problem of Difference has developed out of the sense that IR as a discipline does not assess the quality of cultural interactions that shape, and are shaped by, the changing structures and processes of the international system. In this work, the authors re-imagine IR as a uniquely placed site for the study of differences as organized explicitly around the exploration of the relation of wholes and parts and sameness and difference-and always the one in relation to the other.

This book assesses diverse ways to think about “others” while also emphasizing the advantages of decolonial intersectionality. The author analyzes a number of struggles that emerge among Andean indigenous intellectuals, governmental projects, and International Relations scholars from the Global North. From different perspectives, actors propose and promote diverse ways to deal with “others”. By focusing on the epistemic assumptions and the marginalizing effects that emerge from these constructions, the author separates four ways to think about difference, and analyzes their implications. The genealogical journey linking the chapters in this book not only examines the specificities of Bolivian discussions, but also connects this geo-historical focal point with the rest of the world, other positions concerning the problem of difference, and the broader implications of thinking about respect, action, and coexistence. To achieve this goal, the author emphasizes the potential implications of intersectional decoloniality, highlighting its relationship with discussions that engage post-colonial, decolonial, feminist, and interpretivist scholars. He demonstrates the ways in which intersectional decoloniality moves beyond some of the limitations found in other discourses, proposing a reflexive, bottom-up, intersectional, and decolonial possibility of action and ally-ship. This book is aimed primarily at students, scholars, and educated practitioners of IR, but its engagement with diverse literature, discussions of epistemic politics, and normative implications crosses boundaries of Political Science, Sociology, Gender Studies, Latin American Studies, and Anthropology.

In International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy Andrew C. Gilbert argues for an ethnographic analysis of international intervention as a series of encounters, focusing on the relations of difference and inequality, and the question of legitimacy that permeate such encounters. He discusses the transformations that happen in everyday engagements between intervention agents and their target populations, and also identifies key instabilities that emerge out of such engagements. Gilbert highlights the struggles, entanglements and inter-dependencies between and among foreign agents, and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that channel and shape intervention and how it unfolds. Drawing upon nearly two years of fieldwork studying in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, Gilbert's probing analysis identifies previously overlooked sites, processes, and effects of international intervention, and suggests new comparative opportunities for the study of transnational action that seeks to save and secure human lives and improve the human condition. Above all, International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy foregrounds and analyzes the open-ended, innovative, and unpredictable nature of international intervention that is usually omitted from the ordered representations of the technocratic vision and the confident assertions of many critiques.

This exciting new textbook challenges the implicit notions inherent in most existing International Relations (IR) scholarship and instead presents the subject as seen from different vantage points in the global South. Divided into four sections, (1) the IR discipline, (2) key concepts and categories, (3) global issues and (4) IR futures, it examines the ways in which world politics have been addressed by traditional core approaches and explores the limitations of these treatments for understanding both Southern and Northern experiences of the "international." The book encourages readers to consider how key ideas have been developed in the discipline, and through systematic interventions by contributors from around the globe, aims at both transforming and enriching the dominant terms of scholarly debate. This empowering, critical and reflexive tool for thinking about the diversity of experiences of international relations and for placing them front and center in the classroom will help professors and students in both the global North and the global South envision the world differently. In addition to general, introductory IR courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels it will appeal to courses on sociology and historiography of knowledge, globalization, neoliberalism, security, the state, imperialism and international political economy.

A host of voices has risen to challenge Western core dominance of the field of International Relations (IR), and yet, intellectual production about world politics continues to be highly skewed. This book is the second volume in a trilogy of titles that tries to put the "international" back into IR by showing how knowledge is actually produced around the world. The book examines how concepts that are central to the analysis of international relations are conceived in diverse parts of the world, both within the disciplinary boundaries of IR and beyond them. Adopting a thematic structure, scholars from around the world issues that include security, the state, authority and sovereignty, globalization, secularism and religion, and the "international" - an idea that is central to discourses about world politics but which, in given geocultural locations, does not necessarily look the same. By mapping global variation in the concepts used by scholars to think about international relations, the work brings to light important differences in non-Western approaches and the potential implications of such differences for the IR discipline and the study of world politics in general. This is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the history, development and future of International Relations.

The long separation of health and International Relations, as distinct academic fields and policy arenas, has now dramatically changed. Health, concerned with the body, mind and spirit, has traditionally focused on disease and infirmity, whilst International Relations has been dominated by concerns of war, peace and security. Since the 1990s, however, the two fields have increasingly overlapped. How can we explain this shift and what are the implications for the future development of both fields? Colin McInnes and Kelley Lee examine four key intersections between health and International Relations today - foreign policy and health diplomacy, health and the global political economy, global health governance and global health security. The explosion of interest in these subjects has, in large part, been due to "real world" concerns - disease outbreaks, antibiotic resistance, counterfeit drugs and other risks to human health amid the spread of globalisation. Yet the authors contend that it is also important to understand how global health has been socially constructed, shaped in theory and practice by particular interests and normative frameworks. This groundbreaking book encourages readers to step back from problem-solving to ask how global health is being problematized in the first place, why certain agendas and issue areas are prioritised, and what determines the potential solutions put forth to address them? The palpable struggle to better understand the health risks facing a globalized world, and to strengthen collective action to deal with them effectively, begins - they argue - with a more reflexive and critical approach to this rapidly emerging subject.

The book is written for active learners – those keen on cutting their own path through the complex and at times hardly comprehensible world of THEORY in International Relations. To aid this process as much as possible, this book employs the didactical and methodical concept of integrating teaching and self-study. The criteria for structured learning about IR theory will be derived from an extensive discussion of the questions and problems of philosophy of science (Part 1). Theory of IR refers to the scientific study of IR and covers all of the following subtopics: the role and status of theory in the academic discipline of IR; the understanding of IR as a science and what a ""scientific"" theory is; the different assumptions upon which theory building in IR is based; the different types of theoretical constructions and models of explanations found at the heart of particular theories; and the different approaches taken on how theory and the practice of international relations are linked to each other. The criteria for the structured learning process will be applied in Part 2 of the book during the presentation of five selected theories of International Relations. The concept is based on ""learning through example"" – that is, the five theories have been chosen because, when applying the criteria developed in Part 1 of the book, each single theory serves as an example for something deeply important to learn about THEORY of IR more generally.

Analyses the effectiveness of international organisations as problem solvers of key issues in global politics.

This text brings together a selection of accepted and contested knowledge in the field of international relations, in an attempt to offer a unifying perspective. Together these elements enable the pragmatic application of theories to different cases.

Perspectives on International Relations: Power, Institutions, and Ideas shows students new to the field how theories (perspectives) of international affairs—realism, liberalism, constructivism (identity), and critical theory—play a decisive role in explaining every-day debates about world affairs. Why, for example, do politicians and political scientists disagree about the causes of the ongoing conflict in Syria, even though they all have the same facts? Or, why do policymakers disagree about how to deal with North Korea when they are all equally well informed? The new Sixth Edition of this best-seller includes updates on Brexit, the rise of Donald Trump and other populist leaders, and continuing developments for ISIS, Syria, and Russia.