The Busy Person's Guide to IR Theory

Professor, you forgot to mention your own Blog. This is the live, up-to-date and interacting entity on IR Theory compared to out-of-date and dead articles you have listed. Everyone who posts here shows implicitly, if not explicitly how the Theory is used. If you are not satisfied with it than you should bring your alternative theory and use it to impress us other than saying "Look! there are more theories hanging around out there, perhaps you should have a look at them to bring some variety here!". If you haven't found them good/useful enough to use on your Blog, why would others bother to have glance on them. You have a fashionable theory in use here and the Bloggers including yourself is quite happy and satisfied with it as far as I can see. Are you on the verge of changing your mind on it so that you are preparing a ground for the Bloggers for their support;->>

In other words tell us what is wrong/useless with the SATFP;->>

Professor, please don't tell us that when you post a message here usually you are not composing it according to "the theory", you are using ordinary language concepts. Even if so, it would help a lot if you qualify your statements when they are according to a theory, which theory.

Grand Sen~or.

Note: Professor, Obama is calling NK to obey International Law, what is that?
Axiom 4 of the SATFP reads:

4. It is imagined that there exists no central authority in that arena that can enforce moral or legal constraints.

Are we imagining Legal Constraints and a Central Authority to implement it now?!;->>

Professor, we need to learn a lot from a Jungle how it maintains and sustains itself for millions of years till a natural disaster - human-kind came and screw it up with their half cooked theories. There is an excellent order in Jungle with networks of intricate sets of laws in effect. It is idiotic to exclaim "It is jungle out there!".
Professor, for God's sake do you see a State structure in a Jungle with a Lion King and Babar dressed in three-piece straight-jacket;->>
Why do we cater such stupid comics Mate;->>

Obama also says "NK test is grave threat!", for me we are already in grave threat, one more test or one less wouldn't make it more/less grave, really. We brought ourselves on the verge of self annihilation with our very hands, we don't know how to use intellect anymore. I can't imagine a Jungle getting equipped to self annihilate itself before it's end of term.
If I were Obama I would tell NK leadership "Don't waste your time and resources on testing those old fashioned A-bombs Mates!, here, we have some junked ones, take as many as you need, free of charge, we wanted to get rid of them but we don't know how! Come help yourself! For us now they are nothing but inorganic garbage!, We don't need them anymore, we have more destructive better ones and we have so many of them, we lost the count of it, I mean if we will we could blow the world out a few times, so cross your fingers we will not, yeah just like that: By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes!!!..";->>

Luke 4:12 Thou shall not tempt thy Lord...

Thanks for the recommendations.

Perhaps you could write your next book on what you learned and valued from each.

If the definition of 'classics' requires some antiquity, as it often does, this list is very good. But are there no 'classic' - in the sense of outstanding - articles on IR theory in the last ten years?

Delighted he's in the top 10.

The articles I always read with pleasure are:

1) Wohlfrorth, Realism and the End of the Cold War. For some time, we had to hear all this stuff about Realism being unable to explain the end of the Cold War. Wohlforth simply disintegrated all this.

2) Waltz, Structural Realism after the end of the Cold War. Well, Waltz's theory was already been mentioned. But this article breaks up into small, small pieces 2-decades of criticism against it: from institutionalism to democratic peace, and so forth.

3) Moravchik's Taking preferences seriously. Well, I am not a fan of Liberalism, but this article is really superior.

4) Mearsheimer's The False Promise of International institutions: well, another debate, another victory for Realism (big surprise!). We had all these guys out there telling us that international organizations shape world politics. COntradicted as well.

5) Robert Cox's Social Forces... (1981, Millenium: Journal of International Relations). I am not a Marxist, I am not a gramscian. But this article, although wrong, has some merits. It forces us to reason and to think and to rethink our assumptions. We cannot ask more from a wrong article.

... that's it, for now.

Nothing is complete without good old Hans Morgenthau, and Mark Twain´s sarcastic wrtting about US Foreign Policy (including those thatn now --beleive it or not-- Israel primer minister is using to further justitify Israeli existence).

Twain was a realist as you or anyone can be.

..personally I would say he single most important article for smashing institutionslism (at least what JJ calls liberal institutionalism) is

Grieco, 1988, Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation, International Organization

Then, for good arguments "against" constructivism, I admire

Copeland, 2000, The Constructivist Challenge to Structural Realism

Interestingly George Kennan's "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published in Foreign Affairs in July, 1947 (which Professor Walt rates as an "honorable mention" though it deserves more than that)was first published under the pseudonym "X." Kennan spent the rest of his prodigiously long life (he lived to the ripe old age of 101)trying to prevent the article from being misinterpreted. Of even greater interest than this classic article is its precursor; the long telegram Kennan sent from his station in Moscow to Secretary of State James Byrnes outlining his suggestions for how to engage the Soviet Union diplomatically.

Although they're not published in academic journals some of Walter Lippman's pieces responding to Kennan are also worth a look.

Of more recent vintage, Jerry Z. Muller's "Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism" Foreign Affairs, March, April, 2008 is well worth a read though I must say that I'm not surprised that Professor Walt ignores it.

Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games (Putnam, IO, 1988)

A former student

Stephen,
As always I enjoy your posts that connect me back to the days of grad seminars, as well as those that serve as brief bibliographies for my students to read. However, your glaring omission of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society (1977) in the Honorable Mentions category is borderline scandalous. Bull's famously unscientific approach, the recognition of how order emerges despite the complexity of world politics, his policy prescriptions for governments to rely on a multitude of formal and informal international institutions to pursue their interests, and his prescient arguments about the breakdown of international order and the system of states remain relevant a generation after they we first penned.
Best,
/cgleek

Stephen,
As always I enjoy your posts that connect me back to the days of grad seminars, as well as those that serve as brief bibliographies for my students to read. However, your glaring omission of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society (1977) in the Honorable Mentions category is borderline scandalous. Bull's famously unscientific approach, the recognition of how order emerges despite the complexity of world politics, his policy prescriptions for governments to rely on a multitude of formal and informal international institutions to pursue their interests, and his prescient arguments about the breakdown of international order and the system of states remain relevant a generation after they we first penned.
Best,
/cgleek

Schweller's Fantasy Theory. This article makes justice of the irrelevance of critical theory.

I agree on Ruggie for modern political economy, but I would add also something from Charles Kindleberger for the debate on hegemonic stability.

What about articles on China? I would mention at least Alastair Iain Johnston, "Is China a Status Quo Power?", IS (2003).

My top 6 IR articles of all time are:

1) Schweller: "Neorealism's Status Quo Bias: What Security Dilemma?", Security Studies (1996).

2) Aron, "The Anarchical Order of Power", Daedalus (1995).

3) Gilpin: "No One Loves a Political Realist", Security Studies (1996).

4) Trachtenberg: "The Question of Realism", Security Studies (2003).

5) Waltz: "Structural Realism After the Cold War", International Security (2000).

6) Layne: "The Unipolar Illusion", International Security (1993). Also the revisited 2006-version is very interesting.

Hope you like them as well, Stephen.

Well,

gourevitch, the second image reversed, international organization 1978 is a classic and a must read. contra the theories that claim domestic institutions shape a country's foreign policy, it summarizes in a very well fashioned way how systemic forces affect domestic institutions. The article probably does not add anything new, as it draws from Hintze, Gerschenkron and others. But it deserve credit for having made people rethink about the second image.

Does the Olson-Zeckhauser type of analysis apply to the US-Israel alliance?

Except for occasional hasbarah from Jewish Zionists pretending to engage in scholarly research, overall there seems to be a paucity of discussion of the topic.

While I was quite disappointed how little account The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy took of the economics of the Israel Lobby, the book does mention the inadequacies Organski's The $36 Billion Bargain: Strategy and Politics in U.S. Assistance to Israel?.

In 2002 Thomas Stouffer produced a low-ball estimate of the cost of Israel to the USA in 2002.

I brought up the issue during my Sunday Iranian PressTV interview, but the policy professionals seem to avoid discussing the economics of the US Israel alliance openly and honestly.

Because the interplay of IR, transnational ethnic politics, and economics should be particularly interesting to academics in this case, I can only assume that they avoid the topic out of fear of punishment by the Israel Lobby.

or Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War, by John Mearsheimer.

I need to go back and re-read it since it's been awhile, but this was the article that made me realize academics could have an impact beyond the classroom. John may have misjudged where the world was heading (a unipolar world instead of a multipolar world) but it is still a classic in my mind. His "False Promise" article is just as good.

Nice to read it
http://www.perceptionsystem.com/