This Working Paper explores the notion of 'essential concepts' and their contestation with an eye on the field of International Relations (IR). The title plays on W.B. Gallie's famous essay to pursue the argument that a debate over the meaning of an essential concept has analytical, normative...

Under the Bush administration, the US portrayed itself as a necessary Empire. 'Given its extraordinary power, the US has a special responsibility to intervene in world politics and can be exempted of the usual constraints put on such interventions.' The present Working Paper analyses the role of...

Samuel Barkin's "Realist Constructivism" has often been read as a way to synthesise realist theory and constructivist meta-theory. Guzzini argues that it is better understood as an attempt to combine realist foreign policy doctrine with constructivist theory. It is an invitation to explore...

In early 2018 Francisco Javier Peñas Esteban, Paco for his friends, unexpectedly died in Argentina. Prof. Peñas has been a major force for institutionalising the IR theory (International Relations) in Spain. Working at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and against many odds and resistance,...

This Working Paper is a chapter forthcoming in Piki Ish-Shalom, Markus Kornprobst, and Vincent Pouliot, eds, Perspectives on Cognitive Evolution and World Ordering: Opening New Vistas, discussing Emanuel Adler's opus magnum on World Ordering. It uses Adler's analysis of power to unpack his...

The concept of power derives its meanings and theoretical roles from the theories in which it is embedded. There is hence no one concept of power, no single understanding of power, even if these understandings stand in relation to each other. Besides the usual theoretical traditions common to...

The DIIS Working Paper 'From the geography of politics to the politics of geography' is the English version of the preface for the Brazilian edition of A return of geopolitics in Europe?. The book originally published with Cambridge University Press was translated by Bárbara Motta and published...

This Working Paper provides a dual historisation of 'securitisation', i.e. of the origins of the Copenhagen School in terms of its direct world historical context and of the historical origins of the specific bias in our political discourse which is prompted by security discourses. Born almost...