This chapter examines several feminist approaches to the study and practice of international relations. It highlights the similarities between these approaches, but also the differences. It does this first by tracing the interventions made by feminists into international relations and the creation of a distinctly feminist IR agenda. Second, it uses the ‘gender lens’ to demonstrate and analyse how experiences and understandings in international relations can be ‘gendered’. Finally, it explains and examines the critiques made by the different feminist approaches to international relations.

The Cold War was the most important feature of the international system in the second half of the twentieth century. The rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States shaped the contours of conflict and cooperation among states and peoples between 1945 and 1991 and its dynamics permeated almost all corners of the globe. Whether in Baghdad, Bangkok or Brussels, the influence of geopolitical and ideological conflict was unmistakable. The Cold War created rivalries and political faultlines that have continued to shape international relations years after its passing. Sino-American competition has become so intense that many think the world is on the brink of another period of bipolar rivalry.

While nations and nationalism have become the dominant mode of ascribing political culture in world politics, understanding the meaning and political importance of these terms has been a notoriously challenging task. One survey of concepts in International Relations said of the term ‘national interest’ that it was ‘the most vague and therefore easily used and abused’; of nationalism, that ‘there is a lack of consensus about what it is and why it has maintained such a firm hold over so much of the world’s population’; and that ‘Nations and states seem identical but they are not’ (Griffiths and O’Callaghan 2002: 202–13). Notwithstanding this confusion, nationalism is typically characterised as both an important form of cultural identity and a pervasive political ideology affirming that territorial communities called nations are necessary for human flourishing and that each nation should therefore be accorded a degree of autonomy in determining its own affairs (Woods et al. 2020: 813).

This chapter examines the rise and growth of human rights. First, it discusses the historical development of human rights. Second, it outlines how human rights are understood today. Third, it explains how the liberal universalism that lies behind human rights has come up against cultural resistance. Finally, the chapter touches on some challenges that lie ahead in the struggle for human rights.

Despite all the burgeoning ’Institutes of Futurology’, the record of predictions of political events has been, up to date, most unimpressive. Wisdom after the event has been the most ego-preservative role of political scientists. Nevertheless, attempts to foresee at least parts of the future, often in the hope of making preparations to absorb, or even to redirect process of social and political change, seem to be a psychological necessity for man.

This chapter explains the global-historical context in which rebel leaders make decisions about how to govern. The chapter argues that although rebel groups have undertaken governance for centuries, they have frequently saved costly and potentially burdensome governance projects until after war ends. Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), however, knowingly and repeatedly introduced burdensome and occasionally perilous governance during war, in addition to some more popular projects. By the 1930s, the CCP had begun propagating this governance strategy globally as a model for later rebel groups. The CCP’s eventual victory provided a larger platform to disseminate information about its experience and governance strategy, including introducing a training program for would-be and active rebel leaders. As a result of the CCP’s efforts, the international system was saturated with information about the CCP’s approach to governance. The CCP’s efforts made a strategy for relatively more burdensome wartime governance cognitively available to later rebel leaders, and it is within this international informational structure that rebel leaders make decisions about governance.

This chapter describes the basic features and lasting influence on climate governance of the international system of states. When the problem of climate change became apparent, countries responded to it through diplomacy leading to international agreements for collective action. This chapter describes major aspects of this process. It summarizes how countries have negotiated a regime of international agreements and institutions intended to address climate change collectively and individually. A quarter-century was devoted to top-down measures – internationally agreed conventions and protocols setting out allowable greenhouse gas emissions for individual countries. More recently, the focus has been on bottom-up measures – nationally determined contributions to wider global efforts to govern climate change. While these efforts have resulted in a wide array of actions around the world to address climate change, they also demonstrate concretely the ways in which the international system, and the countries operating within it, have precluded aggressive collective action.

The decolonization, a process that leads to the nominal independence and international recognition of states, gained momentum in the late-1950s, having its peak in 1960, the African year, when 18 colonies, protectorates, and trust territories became independent. This chapter explores the decolonization of Africa from three perspectives: of the colonial powers, of the colonial states, i.e. the colonies themselves, and of the international system. It argues that there is not one explanation to capture the decolonization. Only if we scrutinize decolonisation from all three perspectives, we are able to comprehend that process in its complexity.

This chapter argues that the emergence of what we recognize as the modern international system develops through evolving practices of diplomacy. IR literature has increasingly paid attention to the early modern development of diplomacy to understand the origins of the system. This chapter offers a distinct interpretation of the importance of diplomacy from the perspective of the closure thesis. In contrast to the typical account of diplomacy as mediating the political fractures that resulted from the breakdown of Christendom, it argues that the adoption and diffusion of specific diplomatic practices, such as the permanent resident ambassador, facilitated closure and boundary-drawing by narrowing the types of actors invested with rights of political representation. Diplomatic practices emerged in part as a means of producing common goods and securing privileged access to those goods for some political actors, while facilitating the political exclusion and subordination of others. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the argument’s contemporary relevance. In reflecting on an historical age in which the sovereign state was not yet the only legitimate political agent, the contemporary question is whether today’s legal and representational rights at the global level can or should be emancipated from the state.

The international relations (IR) literature appears to be divided into two fundamentally different views about the basic structure of the international system and its institutions. On one view, the expansion and opening of international institutions in the 20th Century to include more actors and greater geographical reach, combined with strengthening democracy norms, are driving the democratization of international institutions. At the same time, a more critical literature is emerging that instead views the system as permeated by multiple forms of hierarchy and deep structures of domination. This chapter, in contrast, argues that political equality and inequality obstinately co-exist in international institutions because of their very role in regulating access to collective goods. It develops what I call the closure thesis to explain how institutional designs reflect an ongoing struggle between the assertion of equal rights and the preservation of unequal privileges. This argument requires re-thinking three premises: that equality and inequality are antagonistic; that greater inclusiveness typically promotes a move towards greater equality; and that international institutions provide global public goods. This chapter elaborates on these points, situates them in the literature, introduces the closure thesis, and outlines the rest of the book.