Morality and progress:IR narratives on international revisionism and the status quo

Scholars debate the ambitions and policies of today’s ‘rising powers’ and the extent to which they are revising or upholding the international status quo. While elements of the relevant literature provide valuable insight, this article argues that the concepts of revisionism and the status quo within mainstream International Relations (IR) have always constituted deeply rooted, autobiographical narratives of a traditionally Western-dominated discipline. As ‘ordering narratives’ of morality and progress, they constrain and organize debate so that revisionism is typically conceived not merely as disruption, but as disruption from the non-West amidst a fundamentally moral Western order that represents civilizational progress. This often makes them inherently problematic and unreliable descriptors of the actors and behaviours they are designed to explain. After exploring the formations and development of these concepts throughout the IR tradition, the analysis is directed towards narratives around the contemporary ‘rise’ of China. Both scholarly and wider political narratives typically tell the story of revisionist challenges China presents to a US/Western-led status quo, promoting unduly binary divisions between the West and non-West, and tensions and suspicions in the international realm. The aim must be to develop a new language and logic that recognize the contingent, autobiographical nature of ‘revisionist’ and ‘status quo’ actors and behaviours

The coexistence of peace and conflict in South America: toward a new conceptualization of types of peace

South America's predominant democratic regimes and its increasing interdependence on regional trade have not precluded the emergence of militarized crises between Colombia and Venezuela or the revival of boundary claims between Chile and Peru. This way, how can we characterize a zone that, in spite of its flourishing democracy and dense economic ties, remain involved in territorial disputes for whose resolution the use of force has not yet been discarded? This article contends that existing classifications of zones of peace are not adequate to explain this unusual coexistence. Thus, its main purpose is to develop a new analytical category of regional peace for assessing this phenomenon: the hybrid peace. It aims to research the evolution of security systems in South America during the previous century and build a new, threefold classification of peace zones: negative peace zones, hybrid peace zones, and positive peace zones

Correspondence: Institutionalized Disagreement

A correspondence between the authors regarding international relations leads Jervis, Schweller, and Nau to discuss some of the most important foundations of international relations. To the Editors (Robert Jervis writes): Randall Schweller's discussion of John Ikenberry's book After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars is acute, but his criticisms of the role of institutions miss the dynamics that can be involved. Schweller is convincing when he argues that international institutions are too weak to restrain major powers when their leaders decide that their interests call for breaking the rules or disregarding the views of the institution's other members. He does not discuss, however, the more important if more elusive role of institutions: their ability to shape even a powerful state's preferences. Thus while at the point of decision a major power will not be bound by the institution, its capabilities, outlook, and even values may have already been affected by how the institution operated previously. What Schweller downplays is how things can change over time—how institutions can strengthen themselves by altering the environment and the views of policymakers