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Academic freedom is one of the most important principles of the modern university. Yet, defenders of academic freedom, and the associated concept of free speech, are now often projected as being either aligned with or enabling, right-wing views. This is a puzzling development. Academic freedom is typically understood to be a set of principles that protect academics from external – primarily state – interference. In this article, I examine this puzzling development and argue that academic freedom is a higher order value than free speech and that as such, it requires greater protections. Second, the biggest dangers to academic freedom today, at least in democratic societies, are coming from within the academy. Underlying these self-inflicted attacks on academic freedom is a deeper set of disagreements about the concept of truth and the production of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines change and continuity in the function, role and moral judgement of violence in international relations. In terms of change, the conclusions are mostly pessimistic if the aim is the complete eradication of political violence. The control of violence, on the other hand, and the ability to hold those who employ it to increasing moral and legal standards is perhaps one of the most significant changes in international relations from 1919 to 2019. However, this does not mean that violence has been replaced or even transformed. Violence is constitutive of the political. It is the first and the last word in politics. This is the continuity of violence. Violence, of which war is only the most visceral expression, has not been transformed or replaced, but rather it has been displaced into legal systems, institutional orders and new forms of conflict. Inter-state war may be in decline, but intra-state conflict is rising. To develop this argument, the article argues that change can only be understood as change against a horizon of continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the current state of the discipline of International Relations(IR) and assesses the prospects for integration of new voices to the global conversation. The article argues that the current state of theoretical fragmentation that infects the discipline will be a severe barrier to the introduction of alternative visions of IR. Two factors explain the source of this problem. First is the dominant understanding of epistemology, which not only misunderstands the place of epistemology in the research process but also helps reproduce a social structure of fragmentation. Second, I briefly explore the dynamics of that disciplinary structure and argue that when combined with the approach to epistemology the two become mutually reinforcing, limiting the possibilities of a form of pluralism that can incorporate alternative voices unless they give up what it is that makes them different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a polemical essay against the rise of post-truth in academia with standpoint epistemology and the ideology of lived experience as a condition for truth claiming. It is mentioned that academia cannot function if it believes that the ideal of objective truth is simply a cipher for ideology. The article also focuses on philosophical realism, and explaining why we cannot study International Relations without some ontological sense.

The article presents a commentary on the book "Queer Wars" by Dennis Altman and Jonathan Symons. Topics discussed include how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBT(QI)) might engage with international polarization in global affairs on LGBT(QI) rights, and public debate an activism in the field.

The author comments on the concept of social ontology in relation to the agency-structure problem in international relations. He discusses four levels or planes of existence under which all human activity occurs, including material transactions with nature and social relations. He also examines the views of philosophers Jean Searle and Lawson on the concept of social ontology.

Abstract: This piece is an abstract to a commentary section on Alexander Wendt's (2015) book, Quantum mind and social science : unifying physical and social ontology. In this book, Wendt, one of the core theorists of constructivism in international relations, undertakes a bold new initiative in grand theorizing. The commentators, followed by Wendt's own response to them, analyze this new direction from a number of angles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Conduct of Inquiry is a tour de force that carefully unpacks the idea of ‘inquiry’ in International Relations and reconstructs debates surrounding this issue in a way Jackson believes will foster genuine debate and, potentially at least, facilitate progress in the discipline. However, it is not without its problems. In this contribution to the forum, I present three challenges to Jackson’s position. Firstly, I challenge the validity of the monism–dualism split that he believes underpins all approaches to the field. Secondly, I take issue with Jackson’s account of science and methodology. Thirdly, I briefly highlight some problems with Jackson’s account of pluralism and argue that it fails to provide the conditions of possibility for ‘engagement’ that Jackson is so committed to. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I would like to thank the editors for giving me the opportunity to respond to some of the criticisms raised in the forum on Critical Realism, or what is sometimes known as scientific realism (CR/SR). In this short response I shall attempt to correct some of the misunderstandings of Critical Realism in the forum, but also highlight a fundamental philosophical disagreement that has important political consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author responds to a commentary about his article on terrorism. He cites the arguments presented by Dani Nedal concerning terrorism. He believes that Nedal is confusing a theoretical account of state legitimacy with empirical aspects of that legitimacy. He discussess the focus of contemporary state theory.

The article presents the author's thoughts regarding the considerations that need to be addressed before terrorism can be studied effectively. The considerations are described, noting that they include integrating theories of the state and state development into terrorism studies, the favoring of an approach that is more structural than psychological, and the consideration of terrorism from a historically-grounded approach.

The essay presents the views of the author regarding the importance of the application of scientific realism to the political science of international relations. An overview of the doctrines and major tenets of scientific realism is given focusing on the practical interaction with real scenarios rather than idealized "systems" and "structures." Criticisms by major opponents of scientific realism such as the neopositivism of Fred Chernoff and the constructivism of Friedrich Kratochwil are presented and discussed. The author concludes that the field must progress beyond the "epistemological wars" and begin to grapple with the existing problems of international relations rather than categorize and theorize its events.

In this piece the author takes issue with Mario Bunge's claims that conceptual and semiotic systems have "compositions, environments and structures, but no mechanisms." Structures, according to Bunge, can never be mechanisms in conceptual and semiotic systems. Contra this the author argues that in social systems, social structures (which are concept-dependent and reproduced and/or transformed, at least in part, semiotically), can be mechanisms in the sense that such structures are one of the processes in a concrete system that makes it what it is. As such, not only may conceptual and semiotic systems have mechanisms, but they may also themselves be considered some of the mechanisms that make the social what it is. As such, they can be said to possess powers and liabilities that neither reside at lower levels nor are explainable in terms of the lower level. To hold out the prospect of social explanation by conceptual and/or semiotic mechanisms does not represent an attempt to decouple these systems from material factors. What it does mean is that conceptual and/or semiotic systems can, potentially at least, play a role in social explanation; and themselves be subject to explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim here is to demonstrate the relevance of meta-theoretical speculation to policy design and implementation through an examination of the agent–structure problem. I then apply this problem to the concept of institutional racism as developed in the Macpherson inquiry into the death and subsequent police (mis)investigation of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. When considered through the lens of the agent–structure problem, the account of institutional racism developed in the Macpherson inquiry still lacks a solid analysis of the structural causes that help explain the phenomenon. Policies developed on the basis of the account will necessarily fail to address some of the causes of institutional racism. Careful attention to the agent–structure problem can help illuminate potentially unexplored areas of the social field that might help in controlling or eradicating racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a reply to some of the points made by Roxanne Lynn Doty on the issue regarding differences in interpretation. It notes that the possibility of being wrong constitutes an ethico-political moment in all dialogical exchanges that all parties to the debate should acknowledge. What the author is saying in this article is that Doty's reading is wrong on certain fundamental issues and he considers it a legitimate part of the intellectual enterprise to say so. To claim this does not entail that one has access to the authentic interpretation. Doty's position betrays an oppositional logic at play. Either there is the authentic interpretation, or there are simply a number of equally valid interpretations between which on cannot choose and the attempt to do so constitutes an act of closure. The point, however, as Paul Feyerabend has noted, is that Doty's form of radical subjectivism is simply the mirror image of radical objectivism and is actually a denial of the possibility of being wrong.

Argues that the understanding of international relations theory is misconceived and that it is time to move beyond the stagnant positivism/postpositivism debate. Inclusion of both positivism and post-positivism in a discourse of philosophical anti-realism; Occurrence of anti-realism as a result of post-Kantian-Humean problem field of international relations.

Although the agent-structure problem has been the subject of intense debate within International Relations the focus has been on epistemological problems or reconceptualizations of structure. This article attempts to redress the balance between agents and structures by outlining a theory of agency that shows the manner in which agency is embedded within, and dependent upon, structural contexts. The article takes as a starting point Roxanne Lynn Doty's poststructuralist attempt to address the agent-structure problem and provides a critique of her attempt to locate agency in the indeterminancy of structures. Doty's poststructuralist approach to this problem re-inscribes structuralist determinism predicated upon empiricist ontology. Specifically, it is argued that Doty's approach to this perennial problem tests upon — (i) a mischaracterization of the problem; (ii) an oppositional logic; and, (iii) a series of misunderstandings of the accounts of agency and structure embedded within contemporary approaches to this problem. The article suggests a multi-layered approach to the issue of agency in an attempt to go beyond the aporia identified by Doty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article (re)examines the incommensurability thesis within IR theory, and assesses the prospects and conditions of possibility for cross-paradigm communication among scholars of International Relations. Drawing on Roy Bhaskar's Critical Realist philosophy, the author problematises the manner in which the incommensurability thesis has now become an institutionalised assumption within ZR theory, accepted and/or rejected more by appeal to a set of legitimating citations (Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend) and/or by an unswerving commitment to 'difference', than by serious engagement with the incommensurability thesis itself. Rejecting the twin errors of uncritical acceptance and outright rejection of the incommensurability thesis, as well as notions of 'incommensurable but comparable' paradigms, the article argues that much 'critical thinking' within IR theory, whilst having challenged the epistemological lens of the 'positivist orthodoxy', has failed to transcend its associated ontology. Without an examination of the ontological conditions of possibility for cross-paradigm communication, the only hope of avoiding 'communicative redundancy' is through a commitment to a universalist epistemology. This, the author rejects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors offer opinions and information on the editing of and publishing of this periodical. The goal of providing a European perspective on issues of international relations is cited as the rationale for the periodical's founding in the 1990s. A change in the editors directing the publication is announced, from a group of teachers at the London School of Economics to a joint group of English and Danish international relations professors. The authors believe this change marks the progress of the publication towards its goal.

The article focuses on the forum of scholars who discusses various aspects of international relations. The topics include Diversity of scholars and diversity of scholarship by Brett Ashley Leeds of Rice University, Discipline of International Studies by J. Ann Tickner of American University, and Living on the Margins: Producing a Periphery of International Relations by Colin Wight of University of Sydney, Australia.

With a view to providing contextual background for the Special Issue, this opening article analyses several dimensions of ‘The end of International Relations theory?’ It opens with a consideration of the status of different types of theory. Thereafter, we look at the proliferation of theories that has taken place since the emergence of the third/fourth debate. The coexistence and competition between an ever-greater number of theories begs the question: what kind of theoretical pluralism should IR scholars embrace? We offer a particular account of theoretical engagement that is preferable to the alternatives currently being practised: integrative pluralism. The article ends on a cautiously optimistic note: given the disciplinary competition that now exists in relation to explaining and understanding global social forces, International Relations may find resilience because it has become theory-led, theory-literate and theory-concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]