Abstract This reply responds to criticism of our original symposium, ‘Global IR and the Essentialism Trap.’ We respond to four particular charges and end with a call for Global IR to move beyond its current emphasis on creating a more diverse, equal, and inclusive discipline to identifying specific research programs that demonstrate the necessity of moving beyond the West. We nominate global order and disorder.

Abstract The existing literature offers contrasting views on the causes and effects of non-aggression pacts. Some scholars contend that these agreements impose audience costs that prevent an ongoing rivalry from escalating to war. Others claim that states use non-aggression pacts to signal to others that their rivalry is over and that their future relations will be peaceful. Scholars disagree as to the impact non-aggression pacts have on violent conflict. I demonstrate that various definitional and coding issues beset the literature, resulting in the incorporation of many agreements that should not be considered as non-aggression pacts. I then make a threefold argument about non-aggression pacts. First, non-aggression pacts came into being in the 1920s amid emerging norms proscribing interstate warfare. Second, they saw frequent use in interstate Europe. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used them to manipulate those norms so as to make themselves appear more acceptable despite their revisionism. Finally, many friendship treaties, which have been miscast as non-aggression pacts, are a separate type of agreement that became common among those post-colonial states that acquired independence during and immediately after the Cold War. Timeless arguments regarding non-aggression pacts thus reify these agreements and overlook key motives behind their use.

Abstract This paper critiques a core premise of Global IR: the association of knowledge with geography, which we term geo-epistemology. It argues that ‘American’ and Global IR share a Eurocentric spatial imaginary, one that was a product of Western expansion and empire. Through its geo-epistemology, Global IR enables a conservative appropriation of the critique of Eurocentrism in IR. Globality becomes a matter of assembling sufficient geographic representation rather than an analysis of the discipline's political, historical, and spatial assumptions. Anglo-American policymakers and intellectuals invented the national/international world to replace the world of empires and races that came apart in the era of the world wars. This UN world of sovereign nation-states and their regional groupings was the foundational move of both what Stanley Hoffman called ‘the American social science’ – IR – and the American-centred world order. The paper uses the reception and legacy of Hoffman's classic essay to show how culture replaced power and history in the study of the discipline, obfuscating the Eurocentrism of Global IR.

Abstract Advocates of global international relations (IR) present IR as a Eurocentric discipline that should now diversify its theoretical and empirical focus to the non-west. This paper turns this argument on its head, arguing that IR was ‘global at birth’. Concentrating in particular on the implications that global IR debate has for our understanding of the historical development of disciplinary knowledge, the article argues that both conventional and critical stances within this debate tend to express a substantialist conception of knowledge formations, one which encourages diffusionist ideas of the spread of knowledge from an origin to a destination, and essentialist representations of specific geographies of knowledge. In order to address this, the paper proposes a relational sociology of disciplinary knowledge that offers a more historically grounded understanding of the ongoing, provisional, connected, and configurational nature of knowledge construction, without losing sight of the hierarchies that inflect this. The article applies this framework to archival work on the intellectual history of international thought in India, offering an approach that allows a global account of the development of disciplinary IR that operates within and beyond imperial frames, encompassing the entangled histories of colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial lineages of what became known as ‘International Relations’ in the 20th century.

Abstract As the origin story of the present world political order the globalization of international society serves as a unifying frame for the discipline of international relations. This paper considers the consequences of the shift from the ‘expansion’ to the ‘globalization’ of international society in relation to two main texts: Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society and Tim Dunne and Christian Reus-Smit's The Globalization of International Society. The analysis shows that Bull's conception of world order depends on a key distinction between aggregate and system which marks the difference between an aggregate of local political orders and a systematically unified world political order (a global international system). Because recent histories of the globalization of international society remain guided by Bull's distinction, they are unable to explain this transition in historical terms without transforming the global international order from the explanandum of the globalization of international society to its explanans. As a result, global histories of the globalization of international society grant a global international system a structural permanence the original expansion story was meant to contest. In doing so they change profoundly the kind of questions that can be asked regarding the origins, character, and future of political order on earth.

Abstract The study of global politics is frequently organized around fields, but the boundaries of these fields are little understood. We explore the relationship between two proximate fields, human rights (HR) and democracy promotion (DP), in order to understand the emergence and maintenance of field boundaries. The two fields are closely linked in international law and practice, yet they have remained largely separate as fields of action, despite vast changes in global politics over four decades. The disjuncture has been largely maintained by HR organizations who police the boundary to keep DP out. We identify differences in anchoring norms as the key factor driving boundary maintenance. Actors in the two fields hold different foundational ideas about how to protect and advance rights, norms that we describe as cosmopolitan and statist. This account is superior to alternate explanations that emphasize functional demands or resource flows, and complements historical institutionalist accounts. Our research offers a theoretical contribution to the study of fields and practical insight into two important areas of global practice. Our qualitative research is supplemented by digital annotations, supported by the Qualitative Data Repository.

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Abstract The paper focuses on two problems with Alexander Wendt's unification of physical and social ontology on the basis of quantum theory. Firstly, by endowing social phenomena with an ontological foundation in physical reality defined in quantum terms Wendt risks reducing a plurality of worlds as ‘fields of sense’, ordered by their immanent rules, to the physical world ordered by the laws of quantum theory. Secondly, by defining his quantum social science as an ontology Wendt risks excluding from consideration all that which violates ontological laws, yet may still be said to exist or take place: event, potentiality, and alterity. Although the advantages of a scientific ontology are indisputable, the price we pay for it is a sense of ontological captivity, whereby everything that is definitely is so, being and non-being rigorously distinguished and separated with nothing between them. This captivity may be escaped by supplementing quantum ontology with ethics in the Levinasian sense of ‘otherwise than being’.

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