The conduct of international relations has always involved skillful use of persuasive discourse. Relations between states might depend on factors such as military capability and natural resources, but the decisions made about the conduct of peace and war are also a result of the successes, failures, habits, and nuances of persuasive appeal among elites and publics alike. For the most part, however, academic research in international relations has not focused on the forms and effects of conversations, speeches, debates, narratives, or discourses in political practice. This systematic inattention to the role of words in foreign affairs is the result of...

Critics of realism often point to its impersonality. Realist doctrine presumes an objective world that operates according to natural laws; its first lesson is to look for those constraints on action that will thwart one’s intentions; it culminates in rational analysis. Yet this impersonal model can not be quite right, for it is difficult to think of realism without thinking of realists. Realism is not only a set of precepts but also the personae of Kissinger, Kennan, Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and others. It is both a tradition of political thought and a genealogy of thinkers, each of whom has affected its...

One consequence of realism being deeply embedded in Western culture is that it can operate effectively in fragments. The entire code can be activated any time we are reminded, e.g., that people are by nature self-interested, that law is useless without enforcement, or that testaments of common ideals are mere rhetoric. As we accept these and similar nostrums, we enter a world of states competing for power, experts capable of calculating advantages, and idealists and other amateurs counseling folly. As these beliefs cohere, they shape our attitudes, our sensitivities (or lack of them), and our political identity.

Some speakers are...

Fear is a feature of human nature that political realists typically factor into their pessimistic view of international affairs. The world as it actually “is,” they assume, consists of nation-states inherently conflicted over competing interests and limited resources, arbitrating their differences and seeking security through the elusive agency of power. Humankind is motivated less by morality and law than by fear and greed, motives which must be managed through the intelligent application of power—not just military power, but economic and ideological might as well. Providing for national security and fulfilling national interests are constant aspirations and tenuous achievements in...

It is very difficult for an academic audience at the end of the twentieth century to imagine a time when the college preaching circuit was a way for theologians to influence large numbers of students and make a good income, or a time when listening to preaching was at least an occasional experience even for secular intellectuals. Religion remains an important legitimating device for the Republican Party and for what remains of the civil rights movement among African Americans, but religious symbols and themes—the sin of national pride, the tension between thecivitas deiandcivitas terrena—have been...

The Twenty Years’ Crisisis the of the work of E. H. Carr most familiar to students of international relations. In this book Carr took great pains to situate himself precisely half way between utopianism and realism.¹ Yet the strategy has generally been regarded as little more than a flourish. Carr has consistently been taken for a political realist. A lecture not long ago by William Fox, subtle and knowledgeable in its treatment of Carr, unhesitatingly referred to “Carr’s realist vision” and his “version of realist doctrine,” and Carr certainly exhibited many of the characteristic marks of the realist school.²...

Martin Wight’s reputation as a realist rests primarily on two texts. The first is his 1946 tract,Power Politics,which framed what became the conventional analysis of the League of Nations in the language associated now with realism: in the end, the League was a facade made possible, then shattered by a shifting balance of power; it had not supplanted the international anarchy.Power Politicswas greeted by one emigre scholar as a “brilliant summary of ideas which we share”—ideas which in the “appeasement period” had been a “minor heresy.”³ The second text is the well-known essay whose title—“Why...

The dramatic ending of the Second World War—the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the revelation of the holocaust, the establishment of the United Nations, and the transformation of the Soviet Union from wartime ally to global competitor—challenged prevailing precepts and practices of international relations. Abjuring the traditional language of diplomacy, elite and public policy discourses of the 1940s were spoken within the horizons of global necessities and apocalyptic fears. A Soviet atomic test in 1949 yet again disrupted the contexts of international relations. “In truth, the first atomic explosion on Russian soil has shattered American foreign policy as...

One rewrites in order to improve a text. Sometimes the result is thought to be the better expression of an original meaning; at other times, it extends the idea in a new direction. In any case, textual revision is a process characterized by imperfection, change, negotiation, and fallibility. Traditionally, realism has seemed to be above this process: One identifies the relations of power or suffers the consequences. This attitude is reflected in the standard invocation of the classics of realism, which are seen as equivalent statements of a core doctrine of universal truths. From Thucydides to Machiavelli to Morgenthau, there...

Sovereignty is the vote. The union card. The insignia of membership in the club. Less exclusive than it once was, the club now encompasses much of the globe and those not members at present continue to seek entry, often utilizing rather impolite methods to that end. Sovereignty remains the “essential qualification for full membership in international society, or, to express the point more comprehensively, the qualification which makes a state eligible for full membership.”¹ Sovereignty names an aspiration; serves as a goad to action; signifies an accomplishment; defines an opposition (state/society); and encodes a legalistic construction (formal sovereignty).

Why is...

“And, you all know, security is mortals’ chiefest enemy.” These are the words of Hecate to the three Witches inMacbeth.A modern reader may experience momentary difficulty in constructing a meaning for them, sincesecurityhas come to be regarded in twentieth-century anglophone culture as one of the chiefest goods. Hecate’s words are thus paradoxical, unless one is a critic of the security culture itself. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, however, although they had begun to use the word also in something like its modern sense, knew a different meaning based on the word's Latin etymology.Securityderives fromse...

During the Vietnam War, the objectives of American policy toward Vietnam centered not on the strategic importance of the “real estate” involved, but on the effects a defeat in Vietnam would have on the United States’ prestige in the world and its reputation for keeping its commitments.¹ American policy makers spoke often of these considerations. And they measured American actions in Vietnam against them, weighing the costs in lives and resources of deepening intervention against the costs in prestige and reputation of halting that intervention.² If prestige and reputation are, as many claim, the intangible side of power, then in...

In the post-Cold War era, nationalism has finally come to be recognized as probably the most explosive political force of our century. However, this belated recognition—forced upon us by dramatic historical events such as the implosion of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, and the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia—in no way eliminates the need to reexamine the reasons behind the sustained failure of most Western social sciences to generate serious theoretical interest in a foremost historical phenomenon.² For the neglect-of-nationalism-problem has resulted in “the most striking example of a general failure among experts to anticipate social developments.”³...

This chapter argues that moving beyond realism—to post-realism—requires moving beyond the gender-blindness of conventional accounts.¹ My argument weaves together areas of inquiry that are usually treated in isolation. Intellectual developments associated with the rise of systematic inquiry in ancient Greece—marked by the shift from rhetoric to philosophy and its foundational dichotomies of reason over affect, mind over body—comprise one area of inquiry. Another is the study of historical-political developments—the shift to centralized authority and its dichotomies of public over private, civilized over “other”—within which Western science and political theory “emerged.” A third area of...

Realism. Historical, social, philosophical, political, economic, artistic, cinematic, literary, legal realism. Machiavellian, Hobbesian, Rousseauian, Hegelian, Weberian, Kissingerian realism. Optimist, pessimist, fatalist realism. Naive, vulgar, magical realism. Technical, practical, empirical realism. Classical and scientific realism. Structural, structurationist, poststructuralist realism. Minimalist, maximalist, fundamentalist, potentialist realism. Positivist, post-positivist, liberal, neoliberal institutionalist, radical, radical interpretivist realism. Critical, nuclear, epistemic realism. Sur-, super-, photo-, anti-, neo-, post-realism. And now at your local malls and supermarket check-outs, hyper-realism.

Clearly, realism comes in many flavors, and everyone has their favorite. Yet in international relations the meaning of realism is more often than not presented as uniform, self-evident,...

From the perspective of realism, writing policy is the least of the tasks of statecraft. Action, not words, is the credo, and written statements are incidental accoutrements/or means of deception/or the hallmark of institutions that lack the force to back up their pronouncements. Once again, however, the realist is caught unaware. As the essays in this section demonstrate, foreign policy is a mixture of manifold practices of composition. Whether dependent on unacknowledged texts, or extending cultural practices of racial labeling into state action, or rein scribing the general text of modernity on indigenous peoples, or constructing a common narrative through...

At the Yalta Conference, in February 1945, Roosevelt and Stalin briefly discussed Indochina and the role that the French should play therein after the world war ended. During their colloquy, “the President said that the Indochinese were people of small stature, like the Javanese and Burmese, and were not warlike.”¹ Five years later, Roosevelt’s successor approved an official policy statement in which those Indochinese fighting against the French were described as “a determined adversary who manufactures effective arms locally ... and who was, and is able, to disrupt and harass almost any area within Vietnam ... at will.”² In the...

The categories “western peoples” and “inferior races” to which the above quotation refers have undergone several transformations over the past century. Just as these categories were once accepted as natural, the contemporary categories of “first world/third world,” “core/periphery,” “developed/underdeveloped,” “modern/traditional,” and “North/South” are widely regarded in international relations as neutral and unproblematic. They function as a pre-conceptual frame within which relations among countries so classified can be analyzed. This is true of a variety of approaches that differ radically in other ways, yet share these same classificatory schemes. The approach taken in this study suggests that relations among countries classified...

Seneca historian John Mohawk tells a story of a phone call he received while he was editor ofAkwesasne Notes.¹ The phone rang at 3 A.M. At the other end was a very excited voice yelling into the receiver “Please help us! You must help us quickly! They are going to wake up the lizard and we willalldie!”

John rubbed his eyes, and realized upon waking more fully that this middle-of-the-night caller spoke English with a strange, non-European but British accent. “Wait a minute, calm down now. Who is this andwhere are you calling from?” John asked....

The speeches of United States senators are important political data. The Senate has major foreign policy responsibilities under the American Constitution. Senators are substantial American political leaders, playing a significant foreign policy role; their speeches are notable verbal political acts. Actions and events, without words to explain them, are mute. When senators talk, they articulate an American vision of the map of the world. They express many of the thoughts and motivations that lie behind American foreign policy. They give foreign policy a meaning that American citizens can understand.

Some of what the senators say may be “just” talk, public...

The realist is right about one thing: Much of the time, international politics boils down to strategy. The calculation of advantage in the game of nations is the first condition, the final necessity, and—not to be underestimated—the continuing attraction for those who presume to be players. Therefore, it is not enough for post-realists to articulate a broader conception of scientific inquiry; if we are to move beyond realism, we shall have to provide decision makers with better instruments for strategic analysis. It may seem that these two objectives are mutually contradictory. For example, the post-realist perspective exemplifies the...