J. David Singer, a globally recognized scholar of international politics, died Monday, December 28, 2009, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was involved in an auto accident on September 22 and had been hospitalized since. At the time of his death, Singer was Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he'd been on the faculty from 1958 until retiring in 2002. He was 84 years old.

In What is History, E.H. Carr (1961, 23, 9) lectured on how historical facts are “like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean.” What the “historian catches will depend, partly on chance,” but may also be “determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch.” In The New Twenty Years’ Crisis, Philip Cunliffe casts his net into deep waters, yielding a catch that is insightful, provocative, and troubling for the discipline of international relations (IR) and for champions of the liberal international order. Cunliffe relies on Carr's classic, The Twenty Years Crisis 1919–1939, to inform his critique and foretell dangers looming, drawing parallels between Carr's utopian thinkers of the 1930s and supporters of the current liberal order, especially the “EUtopians.” He also targets the discipline's failures to engage the liberal project critically, reserving the most vitriol for British critical IR theorists....

Abstract The question of theoretical dominance has been the source of longstanding debates in the field of International Relations (IR). The folklore of the field tells of how realism fell from dominance and was replaced by liberalism in the 1990s. The systematic evidence, however, shows that neither theory was as dominant as many claimed. While the early period of postwar IR was dominated by realism, the past 35 years can be characterized by its plurality of theories. This plurality of theories, however, may not reflect a diverse field. Diversity denotes some degree of variation within an interacting community or system. Meaningful interactions between distinct research sects in IR appear to be very rare, as characterized by the so-called paradigm wars. Instead of a diverse field, IR may be characterized as insular, Balkanized sects that are hostile to differing theories and approaches.

This essay explores the connections between Paine's international thought and the theory of liberal internationalism in the field of Political Science. Paine was first to provide a coherent theory of how democracy, free trade, and limited military spending would promote both peace and prosperity. One troubling inconsistency in Paine's liberal internationalism rests in his advocacy for both small military budgets and active military intervention to spread democracy. By comparing Paine's divergent views regarding democracy promotion and intervention in Louisiana and in England, we emerge with a far more nuanced understanding of Paine's promotion of democracy. I argue that Paine's vision for active military interventionism is not inconsistent with a small military.

Bananas, Beaches and Bases 2 was first published in 1989, towards the end of the Cold War and the beginning of feminism's engagement with International Relations (IR). The book has gained iconic status and, with subsequent works on related themes, 3 Enloe has achieved broad recognition as a key contributor to both feminism and IR scholarship. A critical appraisal of Bananas, Beaches and Bases therefore has to deal with its ambiguous position in and between the discipline of IR and the field of Gender or Women's Studies. Arguably any work that seeks to expose gaps in 'traditional' disciplines risks a very partial kind of success — appreciated somewhat selectively, as an intriguing curiosity perhaps, but rarely absorbed into the established 'canon'. It is encouraging then that Bananas, Beaches and Bases has made it through to this collection of classics in IR. Like other outliers such as Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas 4 and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, 5 Bananas, Beaches and Bases intervenes in IR by means of a different form and field of representation. More than 20 years after publication it is still original and unruly enough not to be ignored, while Enloe herself remains a scholar who persistently uses a non-academic arsenal to challenge IR scholarship from within. What is striking from the start is the breadth of the book's register, its accessibility of tone and above all the wit with which Enloe sets out her argument and in so doing, the stealth by which she intercepts and plays upon our preconceptions and expectations — of IR, of feminism, and of the world around us. In such ways, Bananas, Beaches and Bases is not simply about showing an alternative view of international relations. Drawing from feminist theory and practice, Enloe's work requires its readers not only to see but to think in new ways: with the situatedness of their knowledge rather than the illusion of objectivity; with a reflexive sense of familiarity that throws what is unfamiliar, because hidden, into relief; or to think at the intersection of multiple, analytical categories such as gender, race and sexuality rather than taking a single, linear approach. As such, Bananas, Beaches and Bases is a kind of collage that cuts up the neatly delineated, ethnocentric fabric of IR and brings these monotone pieces together with fragments from political and cultural reality as it is lived and experienced, embodied or enacted by different people around the world. Assembled together in this way, Enloe is able to reveal new and surprising angles from which international relations might be understood and conceptualized.

A common theme in the Centennial Issue of the American Political Science Review was how subfields have grown more specialized and insulated from one another. In this essay I argue that this trend has been hastened by the inappropriate incorporation of paradigm mentalities, first presented by Thomas Kuhn and later developed by Imre Lakatos. I show how paradigm mentalities help justify rigid opposition to theoretical alternatives and limit critical insight. While paradigm mentalities may be fitting for disciplines that demonstrate Kuhn's concrete scientific achievements, they constrain the study of political science and international relations in particular. I begin with a primer that compares Kuhn and Lakatos to Karl Popper. Next, I point to harmful consequences resulting from applying paradigm mentalities to the study of international relations. Among these is the tendency to act as if realism has earned the status of a paradigm and then invoke criteria of incommensurability and “subsumption” to deflect criticism. I conclude by discussing how Popper's model of science provides a better platform for the study of politics by encouraging theoretical and methodological pluralism.

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Compared with the realist tradition, relatively few students of international relations explore variations within liberalism. This paper introduces a particular interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s evolutionary liberalism and then compares it with Thomas Paine’s revolutionary liberalism. Paine was an ebullient optimist while Kant was more guarded and cautious. These different assumptions lead to distinct liberal views on voting rights, how trade fosters peace, and defense policies. The most striking disagreement, and one that endures in contemporary liberal circles, revolves around the question of military interventions to spread democratic rule. Kant advocated nonintervention while Paine actively pursued military intervention to spread democratic rule. Differences between Kant and Paine represent some enduring tensions still residing within the liberal tradition in international relations.

In this paper, we evaluate the liberal claim that democratic states devote fewer resources to their militaries. Low military spending is thought to avert conflict spirals and release more resources to fund domestic programs. While prominent in many liberal international relations theories, most notably in Immanuel Kant's, this proposition has received little empirical scrutiny. Using several indicators of military resource allocation and data on a wide range of states since 1816, we find empirical support for the liberal argument, although regime type is not necessarily the strongest influence on military resource allocation.

Re-Assessing the “Power of Power Politics” Thesis: Is Realism Still Dominant? Thomas C. Walker, Thomas C. Walker Department of Political Science, University at Albany, SUNY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jeffrey S. Morton Jeffrey S. Morton Department of Political Science, University at Albany, SUNY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Studies Review, Volume 7, Issue 2, June 2005, Pages 341–356, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2486.2005.00504.x Published: 31 August 2005

The recent questions about the viability of political realism highlight a need for alternative theoretical frameworks to guide international relations research, These alternatives, however, have been slow to emerge, due in part to the field's traditional neglect of political theory. In this essay I present an alternative based on a survey of Paine's international thought. Sir Michael Howard referred to Paine as the most important internationalist writer of all time, but his contributions have been largely ignored by students of international relations. Paine was a classic second image theorist who first posited how democratic governance would promote a peaceful world. Paine's works leave us with all the features of cosmopolitan thinking in international relations: Faith in reason and progress, the evils of authoritarian regimes, the democratic peace, the peaceful effect of trade, nonprovocative defense policies, open diplomacy, obsolescence of conquest, the universal respect for human rights, and the democratic propensity to engage in messianic interventionism. I conclude with a comparison of Kant and Paine where I argue that Paine is the more faithful representative of the Enlightenment for students of international relations.

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