Contemporary International Relations (IR) typically treats anarchy as a fundamental, defining, and analytically central feature of international relations. Furthermore, it is usually held that IR since its inception has been structured around a discourse of anarchy. In fact, however, until the 1980s anarchy was rarely employed as a central analytical concept, as I show by examining 145 books published between 1895 and 1978. The conceptual and analytic centrality of anarchy is not imposed on us by international reality. Rather, it is a recent and contingent construction. Given the shortcomings of standard uses of ‘anarchy’ – especially the facts that there is no clear, generally agreed upon definition, that ‘the effects of anarchy’ are not effects of anarchy (alone), and that anarchy is not the structural ordering principle of international systems – I argue for returning to earlier practice and putting anarchy back in the background of IR.

Can concerns for one’s reputation cause non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to alter their behavior to the detriment of achieving their policy goals? To answer this question, we explore the relationship between NGOs and their donors. Our theoretical model reveals that reputation can be a key piece of information in the decision to fund an NGO’s activities. Reputation can become so important to the NGO’s survival that it interferes with the long-term policy goals of the organization. As such, reputations can become a double-edged sword, simultaneously providing the information donors seek while constraining NGOs from realizing policy goals. We apply this logic to the problem of NGO accountability, which has received increasing attention in recent years, and demonstrate that the tools used by donors to improve accountability can trigger unintended consequences. We illustrate this strategic dynamic with two types of NGO activity: water improvement and international crisis mediation.

How does the understanding of time and temporality in international relations (IR) shape the study of international politics? IR is centrally concerned with the study of issues such as armed conflict, but wars are events – a series of occurrences that only come into being through their relationship across time. The concept of time at work in the understanding of this event thus plays an inextricable role in the scholarship produced. IR shares an understanding of time that pervades (traditional) social science and is based on the Western notion of clock-time. This conception of time encourages a spatiotemporal model of the past that epistemologically privileges temporal understandings that value generalizable, time-invariant theory and discount temporal fluidity and context. These temporal commitments operate at a deep level, informing and shaping theory construction in important ways and de-emphasizing alternative approaches that may more accurately reflect the contingency of international events, discontinuities in political practice, and the radical shifts in international structures, which are often most in need of scholarly analysis. This article concludes that by treating temporality as a stand-alone issue, IR can better model and predict international political practices.

Should constructivist research engage empirical debates with other approaches, especially non-constructivists? Recent calls for ‘eclectic’ and ‘pluralistic’ scholarship seem to encourage engagement, including across epistemological divides many constructivists have long perceived with non-constructivists. Yet this literature downplays competition between approaches, instead emphasizing that they answer different parts of questions. In seeming to evoke a division of labor, the eclectic turn actually strengthens a sense that approaches occupy distinct spaces. This article offers a sympathetic corrective to the eclectic turn, and to common accounts of older epistemological divides. Before eclectic combinations, empirical work necessarily begins from contrasting accounts on the same terrain. Only a naïve positivist imagines that meaningful scholarship tests solitary hypotheses against reality. Today’s scholars vary in how far they move toward more socially based epistemologies, with constructivists moving furthest – and the further we move, the more the shape and significance of our accounts depends on contrasts to others. Thus, all scholars should seek out competing alternatives, especially constructivists. After making this point, the article unpacks how it has been obscured by four arguments that limit competition between constructivist claims and alternatives, concerning constitutiveness, understanding, holistic methodology, and anti-foundationalism. Each view contains errors that can be corrected without undercutting the epistemological commitments of its proponents. This clears the way for introducing more competition into constructivism and into the eclectic turn more generally. All scholars, including all constructivists, working within their own epistemologies, will do their best work through contrasts to alternatives across our old divides.

Pogge has repeatedly compared the causes of global poverty with historical crimes against humanity. This claim, however, has been treated as mere rhetoric. This article argues that there are good reasons to take it seriously. It does this by comparing Pogge’s thesis on the causes of global poverty with the baseline definition of crimes against humanity found in international law, especially the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It argues that the causes of global poverty are comparable with the crimes of slavery and apartheid. This has important consequences for cosmopolitan thought, as it makes the need for practical solutions to global poverty more urgent and raises questions about the global poor’s right to resist the international system by violent means.

Building on John Ruggie’s pioneering study of multilateralism, this paper presents an analogous study of multistakeholder governance, or multistakeholderism. Its central argument is that multistakeholderism is, as yet, a much less well-defined institutional form. Cases exhibit significant variation both in the combinations of actor classes entitled to participate and the nature of authority relations among those actors. The first section discusses multistakeholderism as an institutional form, and proposes a taxonomy of its types. This section also briefly addresses the implications of the analysis for International Relations theory. The paper then conducts a comparative analysis of multistakeholderism, applying the taxonomy to five illustrative cases. It demonstrates the degree of inter-case variation, and the range of issue-areas across which the institutional form is employed and invoked by actors. Three cases are drawn from the increasingly contentious area of Internet governance; the paper thus makes a secondary contribution to this growing literature. The paper’s most striking finding in this regard is that Internet governance often fails to live up to its multistakeholder rhetoric. Other cases include governance of securities regulation and the governance of corporate social responsibility. The paper concludes by examining the implications of our argument, and identifying areas for further research.