Search

This volume's focus on establishing a direct exchange between History and International Relations is unique in the contemporary literature on international institutions. While there have been attempts in both disciplines to engage with the other and to integrate their respective insights, a direct, focused exchange on core issues of international institutional development has rarely taken place. The volume takes this lacuna as a starting point. The structure of the volume is strictly symmetrical. In each of the four main sections, one historian and one IR scholar elaborate their views on one of four main aspects of conference diplomacy: inclusion/exclusion, effectiveness, legitimacy, and international order. This approach allows the authors to tackle the more general role of institutions in international order in a long-term historical perspective. The diagnosed crisis of contemporary, liberal order appears in a different light when viewed before the background of continuity and change in the past 200 years. This book has the potential to become essential reading for scholars and practitioners alike.

Are theoretical tools nothing but political weapons? How can the two be distinguished from each other? What is the ideological role of theories like liberalism, neoliberalism or democratic theory? And how can we study the theories of actors from outside the academic world? This book examines these and related questions at the nexus of theory and ideology in International Relations.The current crisis of politics made it abundantly clear that theory is not merely an impartial and neutral academic tool, but instead is implicated in political struggles. However, it is also clear that it is insufficient to view theory merely as a political weapon. This book brings together contributions from a number of different scholarly perspectives to engage with these problems. The contributors, drawn from various fields of International Relations and Political Science, cast new light on the ever-problematic relationship between theory and ideology. They analyse the ideological underpinnings of existing academic theories and examine the theories of non-academic actors such as staff members of international organisations, Ecovillagers and liberal politicians.This edited volume is a must-read for all those interested in the contemporary political crisis and its relation to theories of International Relations.