The debate about whether state or non-state players have primacy has been a major preoccupation for International Relations researchers. This chapter argues the key is not so much to determine which players are dominant, but how they interact to produce the prevailing order. The 1985 book Bringing the State Back In declared the return of the state for international politics and political economy (Evans et al. 1985). This chapter argues instead for bringing state–society relations ‘back in’ to the centre of what makes international relations.

This chapter examines the rise and growth of human rights. First, it discusses the historical development of human rights. Second, it outlines how human rights are understood today. Third, it explains how the liberal universalism that lies behind human rights has come up against cultural resistance. Finally, the chapter touches on some challenges that lie ahead in the struggle for human rights.

Processes of arms control and disarmament remain relevant in a world where armed conflict between states is still highly visible in international politics, and where civil wars and domestic conflicts claim hundreds of thousands of lives every year. Much attention is focused on the need to control and eliminate weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), especially nuclear weapons, given the hugely destructive nature of these armaments, but controlling so-called ‘conventional weapons’ – those not classed as WMDs – is also important. Conventional weapons, especially small arms and light weapons, are responsible for most of the casualties we see today, even as arms control efforts have only recently begun to focus on these.

This chapter introduces the principal actor in international relations: the sovereign state. First, it defines the state. Second, it explores the origins of the state in the transition from the medieval to the modern world. Third, it examines the concept of sovereignty, especially as it was articulated in early modern political thought. Fourth, it surveys different historical explanations of how the sovereign state triumphed over alternative forms of political society. Finally, it outlines some of the continuing debates about the modern state.

While nations and nationalism have become the dominant mode of ascribing political culture in world politics, understanding the meaning and political importance of these terms has been a notoriously challenging task. One survey of concepts in International Relations said of the term ‘national interest’ that it was ‘the most vague and therefore easily used and abused’; of nationalism, that ‘there is a lack of consensus about what it is and why it has maintained such a firm hold over so much of the world’s population’; and that ‘Nations and states seem identical but they are not’ (Griffiths and O’Callaghan 2002: 202–13). Notwithstanding this confusion, nationalism is typically characterised as both an important form of cultural identity and a pervasive political ideology affirming that territorial communities called nations are necessary for human flourishing and that each nation should therefore be accorded a degree of autonomy in determining its own affairs (Woods et al. 2020: 813).

This chapter outlines the significance of the digital revolution for International Relations. The first section establishes the political context that shaped the development of the internet, showing how this informed both its technical building blocks and modes of governance. The second section explains how these new technologies also entailed a distinct set of vulnerabilities. In doing so, it highlights the emergence of cybersecurity as an issue of national security, including the potential for cyber warfare between states. The third section introduces the politics of social media platforms that have enhanced pro-democracy movements such as the Arab Spring, but also driven polarisation, fostered extremism and been harnessed by a range of actors, from terrorist groups and intelligence services through to diplomats and even heads of state. The final section tracks the rise of internet sovereignty, which began in the early 2000s and has since become a significant international political tension point. We highlight how some states have sought to control information within their geographical borders, and use online censorship, propaganda and surveillance to govern their populations.

This Introduction begins by outlining what is meant by international relations. It then tells the story of how and why the academic study of international relations emerged in the early twentieth century before considering the need to ‘globalise’ the study of international relations – to make it an academic discipline more open to non-Western perspectives. It sketches the changing agenda of international relations, a shift that some scholars describe as a transition from international relations to world politics or from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘new’ agenda. Although there is little doubt that, as political reality has changed, new theoretical tools have become necessary to grasp it, we should not assume that the myriad changes in our world have rendered the ‘traditional’ agenda obsolete. As we shall see, the ‘new’ agenda supplements, but does not supplant, the ‘traditional’ agenda. It is now more important than ever to consider the relationships between ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ agendas, and to globalise IR.

This chapter introduces students to the range of theoretical issues that have animated the study of international relations through the years. First, it explains why theoretical reflection is indispensable to explaining and understanding international relations. Second, it addresses unavoidable ontological and epistemological issues in the quest for theoretical understanding. Third, it traces the growth of mainstream International Relations theory up to the present conflict in Ukraine. Finally, it touches on some of the diverse critical approaches to the study of international relations.

This chapter explains how international society emerged and was globalised. Its main purpose is to explore how the European sovereign states-system expanded across the globe to become the truly international order of sovereign states that we see today. The first part of the chapter examines how the expansion of the states-system came about and how it has been analysed. The second part provides a critical discussion of how the spread of the states-system has been understood in IR. It aims provoke thinking about the enduring Eurocentrism that continues to bedevil our theorising of international politics.

Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021 despite peace talk efforts in late 2020 and early 2021. International pundits had been predicting that Ashraf Ghani’s government might need to share power with a resurgent Taliban, but none had expected such a swift and complete takeover as the Americans readied to leave for good. Two decades of international intervention in Afghanistan were erased. The efficacy and desirability of intervention has been thrown into serious doubt, and with it the prospects for post-conflict state-building. This chapter introduces the rise, and possible fall, of the post-conflict state-building agenda. It introduces the reader to important concepts, noting the relationships between state-building, peace-building and nation-building, as well as underscoring the role of liberal ideology in shaping post-conflict state-building efforts, asking readers to reflect on what they believe external actors should, or should not, do.

For millennia, health and disease have shaped human society in profound and fundamental ways. While events such as the Justinian Plague and ‘Black Death’ decimated the European populations in the sixth and fourteenth centuries respectively, arresting urban development and impacting the relationship between church and state, the introduction of European and African diseases into Latin America is believed to have caused the deaths of up to 90 per cent of some of the continent’s indigenous populations. Biological weapons used during World War I led to international moratoriums on their use, even as more recent ‘naturally occurring’ events extending from the 2003 SARS outbreak, the 2013–16 West African Ebola outbreak and the COVID-19 pandemic have had widespread social, economic and political impacts.

This chapter introduces an idea that has enjoyed a remarkable, if hotly contested, development in the post-Cold War era: humanitarian intervention. Based on a commitment to principles of humanity and respect for life, such action seeks to alleviate the unnecessary suffering caused by violent conflict through intervening in another state, with force under limited conditions. The chapter outlines the origins of humanitarianism and the history of humanitarian intervention before discussing the shift to the responsibility to protect (R2P). As world politics becomes ever more complex, debate about global responsibilities to protect suffering strangers will continue to shape the theory and practice of international relations. While abuse of human beings has not become less widespread, the preoccupation with COVID-19 and domestic priorities meant that little consideration was given to robust action against middle powers perpetrating mass atrocities in such places as Myanmar and Tigray, let alone against major powers in Ukraine and Xinjiang.

This chapter examines the politics of global poverty, inequality and development. The first section provides the background for our analysis of global poverty and inequality. Any meaningful discussion of poverty and inequality necessarily has to be in relation to development – which, as we show, is itself contested in theory and practice. The second section provides an outline of a relational perspective of global development. The third section focuses on the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda. We conclude with some critical observations about the political significance of the relationship between development, poverty and inequality.

This chapter gives an overview of the theory and practice of global climate politics. First, it provides a brief history of the politics of climate change as they play out in the international negotiations on the issue overseen by the United Nations . Second, it looks at the formal organisational and institutional structures that exist to manage the international community’s response to climate change. Third, it reviews the ways in which different theories of International Relations have been applied to climate change, assessing both their potential and their limitations. Finally, the conclusion offers some thoughts on the evolving nature of the ‘global’ governance of climate change.

This chapter introduces a new research program on the politics of religion and secularism. A focus on the politics of religion and secularism offers a productive port of entry into the study of international politics. Following a brief introduction to religion and international relations, it offers a basic introduction to the concept of secularism, explains why the politics of secularism is significant to the study of global politics and concludes with a discussion of the politics of secularism in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79.

This chapter explores the role of three global economic institutions (GEIs) in contemporary economic governance: the International Monetary Fund, (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). GEIs are key components of global economic governance, and their activities are central to the pursuit of accountability, efficiency and equity in the global economy. The impact of GEIs on states and societies is complex and widely varying assessments of the performance of these organisations can be found in the literature. Given the absence of theoretical consensus on the roles and functions of GEIs, the first part of the chapter examines competing perspectives on international organisations.

This chapter presents the outlines of a constructivist understanding of world politics. We begin with a discussion of state identity and explore how identity defines and bounds state actions. To illustrate this concept, we address issues central to the study of world politics: change, governance and security. Overall, our goal is to present a textured, layered understanding of the international realm based on a notion taken for granted in much of IR theory, meaning. Constructivism is the newest but perhaps the most dynamic of the main theories of international relations. Unlike liberalism and realism (see Chapters 2 and 3), which have taken their bearings from developments in economic and political theory, constructivism – like Critical Theory (see Chapter 4) – is rooted in insights from social theory (e.g. Berger and Luckmann 1967; Giddens 1984) and the philosophy of knowledge (Golinski 2005; Hacking 1999; Searle 1995).