A reinterpretation of world politics drawing on Chinese cultural and philosophical traditions to argue for a focus on relations amongst actors, rather than on the actors individually.

It is time for International Relations (IR) to join the relational revolution afoot in the natural and social sciences. To do so, more careful reflection is needed on cosmological assumptions in the sciences and also in the study and practice of international relations. In particular it is argued here that we need to pay careful attention to whether and how we think 'relationally'. Building a conversation between relational cosmology, developed in natural sciences, and critical social theory, this book seeks to develop a new perspective on how to think relationally in and around the study of IR. International Relations and Relational Cosmology asks: What kind of cosmological background assumptions do we make as we tackle international relations today and where do our assumptions (about states, individuals, or the international) come from? And can we reorient our cosmological imaginations towards more relational understanding of the universe and what would this mean for the study and practice of international politics? The book argues that we live in a world without 'things', a world of processes and relations. It also suggests that we live in relations which exceed the boundaries of the human and the social, in planetary relations with plants and animals. Rethinking conceptual premises of IR, Kurki points towards a 'planetary politics' perspective within which we can reimagine IR as a field of study and also political practices, including the future of democracy.

This book offers the first relational theory of International Relations (IR). By engaging with the phenomenon of relationality, Emilian Kavalski invokes the complexity of possible worlds and demonstrates new possibilities for powerful ethical-political innovations in IR theorizing.

International relations are generally understood as a realm of anarchy in which countries lack any superior authority and interact within a Hobbesian state of nature. In Hierarchy in International Relations, David A. Lake challenges this traditional view, demonstrating that states exercise authority over one another in international hierarchies that vary historically but are still pervasive today. Revisiting the concepts of authority and sovereignty, Lake offers a novel view of international relations in which states form social contracts that bind both dominant and subordinate members. The resulting hierarchies have significant effects on the foreign policies of states as well as patterns of international conflict and cooperation. Focusing largely on U.S.-led hierarchies in the contemporary world, Lake provides a compelling account of the origins, functions, and limits of political order in the modern international system. The book is a model of clarity in theory, research design, and the use of evidence. Motivated by concerns about the declining international legitimacy of the United States following the Iraq War, Hierarchy in International Relations offers a powerful analytic perspective that has important implications for understanding America's position in the world in the years ahead.

This book offers a relational theory of International Relations (IR). To show the ways in which the relationality is foreshadowed in IR conversations it makes the following three points: 1) it recovers a mode of IR theorizing as itinerant translation; 2) it deploys the concept and practices of guanxi (employed here as a heuristic device revealing the infinite capacity of international interactions to create and construct multiple worlds) to uncover the outlines of a relational IR theorizing; and 3) it demonstrates that relational theorizing is at the core of projects for worlding IR. By engaging with the phenomenon of relationality, Emilian Kavalski invokes the complexity of possible worlds and demonstrates new possibilities for powerful ethical-political innovations in IR theorizing. Thus, relational IR theorizing emerges as an optic which both acknowledges the agency of ‘others’ in the context of myriad interpretative intersections of people, powers, and environments (as well as their complex histories, cultures, and agency) and stimulates awareness of the dynamically-intertwined contingencies through which meanings are generated contingently through interactions in communities of practice. The book will have a strong appeal to the broad academic readership in Asian Studies, Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Relations theory and students and scholars of non-/post-Western International Relations and non-/post-Western Political Thought.

This book shows how changing diplomatic practices are central in explaining key dimensions of world politics, from law to war.

Within the realist school of international relations, a prevailing view holds that the anarchic structure of the international system invariably forces the great powers to seek security at one another's expense, dooming even peaceful nations to an unrelenting struggle for power and dominance. Rational Theory of International Politics offers a more nuanced alternative to this view, one that provides answers to the most fundamental and pressing questions of international relations. Why do states sometimes compete and wage war while at other times they cooperate and pursue peace? Does competition reflect pressures generated by the anarchic international system or rather states' own expansionist goals? Are the United States and China on a collision course to war, or is continued coexistence possible? Is peace in the Middle East even feasible? Charles Glaser puts forward a major new theory of international politics that identifies three kinds of variables that influence a state's strategy: the state's motives, specifically whether it is motivated by security concerns or "greed"; material variables, which determine its military capabilities; and information variables, most importantly what the state knows about its adversary's motives. Rational Theory of International Politics demonstrates that variation in motives can be key to the choice of strategy; that the international environment sometimes favors cooperation over competition; and that information variables can be as important as material variables in determining the strategy a state should choose.