Course Overview
International Political Sociology (IPS) is a field defined not by a single theory but by a set of commitments about how to study world politics. Where mainstream International Relations tends to take actors, interests, and structures as given, IPS asks how they are produced, stabilised, contested, and transformed through social processes.
This course introduces students to the three foundational commitments that structure the field as defined by the Oxford Handbook of International Political Sociology (Goddard, Lawson, and Sending, 2025): relationalism, which insists that social reality is constituted through connections and interactions rather than pre-formed entities; intersubjectivity, which holds that meaning, identity, and political possibility emerge from shared interpretive frameworks and practices; and historicism, which demands that social phenomena be understood in their historical specificity rather than as expressions of timeless laws. From these three commitments flows the distinctive analytical vocabulary of the field: fields, networks, assemblages, discourse, practices, repertoires, recognition, order, rule, sovereignty, resistance, and power in its symbolic, military, economic, and corporeal dimensions.
By taking sociological theory seriously as a resource for understanding world politics, students develop the capacity to ask different questions, read different materials, and reach conclusions that positivist IR frameworks systematically foreclose. Teaching combines seminar discussion, applied analytical exercises, discourse analysis, structured debates, and a research-based simulation of contested international ordering processes.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- Explain and critically evaluate the three foundational commitments of International Political Sociology — relationalism, intersubjectivity, and historicism — and their implications for the study of world politics.
- Identify and articulate the ontological and epistemological assumptions that distinguish IPS approaches from rationalist and positivist IR frameworks.
- Apply the analytical concepts of the field — networks, fields, assemblages, discourse, practices, repertoires, recognition, order, rule, sovereignty, resistance, and power — to concrete historical and contemporary cases.
- Engage critically with debates about historical sociology and world politics, including the relationship between imperialism, modernity, and the constitution of international order.
- Conduct close readings of primary sociological texts alongside policy documents and empirical case material, identifying the assumptions embedded in each.
- Critically assess the decolonial critique of mainstream IR knowledge and evaluate its methodological and normative implications for the study of international politics.
- Construct independent, evidence-based analytical arguments in written and oral forms, demonstrating command of the IPS literature and its application to specific problems in world politics.
- Develop well-reasoned analytical positions on contested questions about power, order, and resistance in world politics, and defend them in structured seminar debate.
Assessment
Seminar Participation and Analytical Engagement — 15%
Analytical Development Portfolio — 35%
Applied Exercise and Reflection — 15%
Final Research Essay — 35%
Seminar Participation and Analytical Engagement — 15%
Students are assessed on the quality, consistency, and analytical depth of their contributions to seminar discussions throughout the semester.
Strong performance demonstrates:
- sustained engagement with weekly readings
- ability to apply theoretical and conceptual frameworks
- critical discussion of empirical cases and policy developments
- constructive engagement with the arguments of others
Students are encouraged to incorporate comparative perspectives, primary sources, and contemporary international developments into seminar discussions.
Analytical Development Portfolio — 35%
This is a two-stage analytical assignment submitted in connected parts across the semester. Part II builds explicitly on Part I, and students may revise aspects of their earlier analysis in light of feedback received before incorporating it into the second submission.
Part I: Conceptual Positioning Paper (Week 5) — 1,000 words — 15%
Students select one of the core conceptual debates of the course from a list provided by the lecturer and produce a focused positioning paper that takes a clear analytical stance. The paper should state and justify the conceptual question being addressed; set out the main positions within the selected debate; identify the ontological and epistemological assumptions underlying each position; and advance a reasoned argument in favour of one position, or in favour of a synthesis or critique that goes beyond any single IPS approach.
Part II: Critical Conceptual Essay (Week 8) — 1,500 words — 20%
Building on the Part I positioning paper, students produce a critical essay that tests, extends, or challenges the argument developed in Part I. The essay should revisit the conceptual stance taken in Part I in light of feedback and further reading; test the argument against a competing approach or an empirical case that complicates it; and develop a more refined or better-defended version of the original argument, or honestly revise it in light of the challenges identified.
Students may revise the argument of their Part I paper as part of developing Part II.
Applied Exercise and Reflection — 15%
Students participate in a structured theoretical debate held across Weeks 10 and 11. Each student is assigned an IPS approach — relationalism, practice theory, historicism, or a specific account of power or resistance — and required to argue its position on a contested question about international order or transformation, engage critically with competing positions, and defend their argument under questioning. Assessment has three components:
- Argument preparation sheet (500 words), submitted before the debate — 5%
- Debate participation and quality of argument — 5%
- Reflective commentary (750 words), submitted after the debate — 5%
The reflective commentary should evaluate the student’s performance in articulating the assigned approach, the dynamics of the debate, and what the exercise revealed about the strengths, limits, and political stakes of the approach the student was assigned to represent.
Final Research Essay — 35%
A research essay of 3,000 to 4,000 words addressing a substantive question in international political sociology. Students may develop an argument arising from any area of the course, provided they engage with the relevant IPS literature with precision, situate their argument clearly within an existing debate, and advance an original analytical claim. Summaries of existing positions are insufficient; the essay must demonstrate independent sociological reasoning applied to a concrete problem in world politics. A one-page essay proposal with a preliminary bibliography is submitted at the end of Week 7 for formative feedback. The final essay is due in Week 13.
Submission, Formatting Requirements and Academic Integrity
- All written work must be submitted as a PDF file, regardless of the word processor used.
- Use font at 12 points Times New Roman or Arial. Pages must be numbered. Include your name, student number, course name, assignment title, and word count on the first page; a separate cover page is not required.
- The word count stated in the assignment brief is a guide to scope and depth, not a rigid threshold. Work within 10 per cent of the stated count in either direction. The word count covers the main body of the text, including in-text citations, but excludes the reference list, any tables or figures, and any appendices.
- All written work must follow APA 7th edition throughout. In-text citations use the author-date format: (Yergin, 2020) or Yergin (2020) argues that… For direct quotations, include the page number: (Yergin, 2020, p. 47). The reference list appears at the end of the document, ordered alphabetically by surname. Do not use footnotes for references; footnotes may be used sparingly for substantive clarifications that would otherwise interrupt the argument.
- Formal policies on academic integrity and the use of AI tools vary by institution and will be communicated where applicable. The question beneath those policies does not change: is the goal to understand, or simply to appear to have understood? A qualification obtained without the knowledge it is meant to represent is a transaction, not an education, and it shortchanges the holder as much as anyone else. I invest genuine effort in connecting students to scholarship, practitioners, and professional networks that extend well beyond any syllabus. Whether that investment meets a reciprocal commitment is, in the end, a question of character rather than compliance.
Literature
- Atkinson, W. (Ed.). (2026). For a new political sociology: The relational approach of Pierre Bourdieu. Routledge.
- Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford University Press.
- Dobratz, B. A., Waldner, L. K., & Buzzell, T. (2019). Power, politics, and society: An introduction to political sociology (2nd ed.). Routledge.
- Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Pantheon.
- Goddard, S. E., Lawson, G., & Sending, O. J. (Eds.). (2025). The Oxford handbook of international political sociology. Oxford University Press.
- Guillaume, X., & Bilgin, P. (Eds.). (2020). Routledge handbook of international political sociology. Routledge.
- Tilly, C. (2008). Contentious performances. Cambridge University Press.
Students are expected to work across three categories of source material:
- Academic literature provides theoretical frameworks, meta-theoretical arguments, and empirical analyses across the major traditions the course examines.
- Primary theoretical texts (the foundational works of each tradition within the discipline) should be read directly and not only through secondary interpretation. Learning to engage with original theoretical arguments, identify their internal assumptions, and trace their implications is itself a core analytical skill of the course.
- Policy documents, official statements, diplomatic records, and international legal instruments provide the empirical material through which theoretical claims are tested against political practice, and through which the assumptions embedded in statecraft can be critically examined.
Learning to read across all three, and to identify the assumptions, interests, and limitations embedded in each, is itself a core intellectual skill of the course.
Research articles do not appear in the bibliography above. This is intentional. Each week, students are expected to identify a peer-reviewed article relevant to that week’s topic, bring it to the seminar, and share it with the group. The lecturer contributes selections alongside the class. This practice develops independent literature-searching habits, exposes the seminar to a wider range of scholarly perspectives than any fixed reading list could provide, and keeps the course in sustained contact with current debates in the field.
Structure
Week 1 — What is International Political Sociology, and why does it challenge mainstream IR?
International Political Sociology is often presented as one approach among many in a crowded theoretical field. That framing understates its ambition. IPS does not simply add sociological variables to existing IR frameworks; it challenges the ontological assumptions on which those frameworks rest. Where realism treats states as given units pursuing interests fixed by structure, and liberal institutionalism treats actors as rational individuals navigating incentive environments, IPS asks how actors, interests, structures, and identities are constituted through social processes. The first week establishes this challenge by introducing the three foundational commitments of the Oxford Handbook — relationalism, intersubjectivity, and historicism — and situating them in relation to the positivist mainstream that IPS contests. Students leave this week with a map of the field, a vocabulary for the weeks that follow, and a clear sense of what is analytically at stake in the choice between sociological and rationalist approaches to world politics.
Key Themes
- The sociological turn in IR: origins, ambitions, and contributions
- Relationalism, intersubjectivity, and historicism as foundational commitments
- Ontology, epistemology, and the limits of positivist IR
- The distinction between explaining and constituting social reality
- IPS in relation to constructivism, post-structuralism, and critical theory
Case Studies
- The 2003 Iraq War: what can IPS see that rationalist theories cannot?
- International organisations as social actors: constituted, not given
Seminar Exercise
- Mapping exercise: students position the major IR traditions along two axes — positivist to post-positivist, and materialist to ideational — and then identify where IPS sits, where it overlaps with adjacent approaches, and what remains distinctive about its commitments. Groups discuss what the map forecloses as well as what it reveals.
Analytical Focus
- Introduction to the field’s three commitments; distinguishing IPS from rationalist IR; establishing the analytical vocabulary of the course.
Week 2 — If social reality is constituted through relations, what becomes of states, actors, and structures?
Relationalism is the first of IPS’s foundational commitments, and it is the most disorienting for students trained in mainstream IR. The claim is not simply that relations matter — most IR theories acknowledge that — but that relations are ontologically prior to the terms they connect. States, interests, and identities do not pre-exist their interactions; they are constituted through them. Go and Nexon’s contribution to the Oxford Handbook lays out this argument in its fullest form, drawing on Elias, Tilly, and Bourdieu to argue for a relational sociology of international politics that takes seriously the processual and interactive character of social life. This week examines what relationalism means in practice, how it differs from the methodological individualism of rationalist IR and the structural holism of Waltzian neorealism, and what analytical tools it generates. Network analysis, field theory, and the concept of the assemblage are introduced as distinct relational approaches, each carrying its own assumptions about what kinds of relationships matter and how they shape political outcomes.
Key Themes
- Relationalism versus methodological individualism and structural holism
- The ontological priority of relations: Elias, Tilly, and Bourdieu
- Network analysis and its limits as a tool for IR
- Fields as structured spaces of social struggle
- Assemblages and the problem of coherence in social analysis
Case Studies
- Alliance politics as relational process: NATO’s post-Cold War expansion
- Global governance networks: the G20 as a field of competing capitals
- Security assemblages in post-conflict reconstruction
Seminar Exercise
- Network versus field analysis: students select a specific international institution or policy domain and apply, first, a social network analysis approach and, second, a Bourdieusian field analysis. The exercise asks what each approach reveals, what it hides, and whether the relational commitments of the two frameworks are compatible or in tension.
Analytical Focus
Applying relational ontology to concrete cases; distinguishing network, field, and assemblage approaches; identifying the empirical implications of each.
Week 3 — How do fields and assemblages illuminate power and social interaction in global politics?
The field concept, developed by Bourdieu and applied to international politics by Mérand, Bigo, and others, offers a rigorous account of how social space is structured by the unequal distribution of different forms of capital, and how actors struggle within that space to accumulate, convert, and defend their positions. Fields have their own internal logic, their own doxa, the taken-for-granted assumptions that actors within the field rarely question , and their own dynamics of reproduction and transformation. This week develops the field concept in depth before turning to assemblage theory, which offers a different relational approach: rather than the structured and hierarchical space of the field, the assemblage emphasises heterogeneity, emergence, and the capacity of diverse elements to be articulated in contingent and unstable configurations. The tension between these two approaches, one more attentive to reproduction and durability, the other to contingency and change, is itself a productive site for analytical reflection on the relative weight of structure and indeterminacy in international life.
Key Themes
- Field theory in detail: capital, doxa, illusio, and social space
- The international as a field: diplomacy, security, and development
- Assemblage theory: heterogeneity, emergence, and contingency
- Reproduction versus transformation in relational social analysis
- Methodological implications: how to study relations empirically
Case Studies
- The EU security field: the doxa of technocratic governance
- Military-humanitarian assemblages in the Sahel
- The UN development field and the capital of expertise
Seminar Exercise
- Field mapping workshop: students select an international policy domain — climate negotiations, international criminal justice, or nuclear non-proliferation — and construct a field map identifying the major actors, the forms of capital at stake, the doxa of the field, and the key axes of struggle. Maps are compared and contested in full-group discussion.
Analytical Focus
- Applying Bourdieusian field analysis to international institutions; identifying the analytical differences between field and assemblage approaches; developing empirical methods for relational sociology.
Week 4 — How does shared meaning constitute international political reality?
The second foundational commitment of IPS is intersubjectivity: the claim that political meaning, identity, and the range of possible action are not products of individual minds or structural imperatives but emerge from shared interpretive frameworks, practices, and symbolic systems. This commitment is distinct from constructivism in important respects. Where much constructivist IR focuses on norms and their diffusion, IPS draws more heavily on phenomenology, practice theory, and the sociology of knowledge to ask how the very categories through which actors make sense of the world are produced and reproduced through interaction. Discourse, as Aalberts argues in the Oxford Handbook, is not merely language but a structured set of rules that determines what can be said, thought, and done within a given political space. Practices are the routinised, pre-reflective actions through which social competence is demonstrated and social reality is reproduced. This week introduces both concepts and examines their methodological implications for the study of international politics.
Key Themes
- Intersubjectivity versus individual subjectivity and structural determination
- Discourse as structured meaning: beyond language to rules of possibility
- Practice theory: routines, competence, and the pre-reflective
- Recognition and misrecognition: the Hegelian inheritance in IPS
- Performing international politics: theatre, ritual, and symbolic action
Case Studies
- Diplomatic protocol and the performance of sovereignty
- Nuclear deterrence as a shared practice of mutual constitution
- Humanitarian intervention discourse: what it makes possible and what it forecloses
Seminar Exercise
- Discourse analysis exercise: students analyse a specific political text — a UN Security Council resolution, a head-of-state speech, or a multilateral treaty preamble — applying Foucauldian discourse analysis to identify the rules of formation, the assumptions, and the political exclusions the text normalises. What alternatives does the discourse render unthinkable?
Analytical Focus
- Introduction to discourse analysis as a method; distinguishing IPS accounts of meaning from constructivist norm theory; applying practice theory to diplomatic and security behaviour.
Week 5 — What are repertoires and visual regimes, and how do they shape the range of possible political action?
Charles Tilly’s concept of repertoires of contention, the established, culturally learned routines through which collective actors make claims, offers IPS a powerful tool for understanding why political actors do what they do and why certain forms of action appear natural and available while others remain unthinkable or beyond reach. MacDonald’s contribution to the Oxford Handbook extends the repertoire concept beyond contention to international politics more broadly, asking how the repertoires through which states, movements, and international organisations act are shaped by historical experience, social position, and the interactive context in which claims are made. Alongside repertoires, this week examines the sociology of visual politics: how images, spectacle, and visual regimes constitute international political reality in ways that text-centred analysis cannot capture. Callahan’s work on visual securitisation and visual governance shows that IPS must account not only for what is said and practised but for what is seen, shown, and made visible or invisible in international political life.
Key Themes
- Repertoires of contention and repertoires of international action
- The historical formation of political possibility
- Visual governance: images, spectacle, and international politics
- Securitisation as visual and discursive practice
- Misrecognition in international diplomacy and conflict
Case Studies
- Protest repertoires in transnational social movements
- Visual securitisation: refugee photography and political mobilisation
- Misrecognition in the 1994 Rwanda genocide: how international actors failed to see
Seminar Exercise
- Repertoire tracing exercise: students select a contemporary international actor — a state, an NGO, or a transnational movement — and reconstruct the repertoire of action available to it, identifying the historical formation of that repertoire, the structural conditions that sustain it, and the forms of action presently outside its range.
Analytical Focus
- Applying repertoire analysis to international actors; examining visual politics as a dimension of IPS; connecting recognition and misrecognition to diplomatic failure.
Week 6 — What does historicism demand of International Relations, and why does putting imperialism back at the centre change everything?
The third foundational commitment of IPS is historicism: the demand that social phenomena be understood in their historical specificity rather than as expressions of timeless laws or universal structures. For IPS, historicism is not merely a methodological preference but a political stance. The international order that mainstream IR theory describes as natural or inevitable is, from a historicist perspective, a specific historical product whose origins lie in European imperial expansion, capitalist development, and the violent reorganisation of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Morefield’s argument that imperialism must be placed back at the centre of IR theory is not merely a corrective to the historical record but a demand that the discipline reckon with the political conditions of its own production. This week examines the varieties of historicism available within IPS, from Weberian historical sociology to world-systems theory, and introduces the Global Transformation thesis as an alternative periodisation of modern international order that challenges the Westphalian mythology on which mainstream IR is founded.
Key Themes
- Historicism as a methodological and political commitment
- Imperialism, colonialism, and the making of international order
- Modernity, capitalism, and Eurocentrism in IR theory
- The Global Transformation: periodisation and the limits of Westphalia
- Historical international orders: variation, change, and comparison
Case Studies
- The Scramble for Africa and the constitution of the modern state system
- The standard of civilisation: historicising the admission criteria of international society
- Structural adjustment and the long twentieth century of Western economic order
Seminar Exercise
- Comparative historiography: students read two accounts of the same international episode — one from a mainstream IR perspective, one from a historical sociological or world-systems perspective — and identify the differences in periodisation, causal mechanisms, and normative orientation. The exercise asks how changing the historical frame changes what can be seen as a political problem and what counts as a solution.
Analytical Focus
- Applying historicist methodology to IR; situating imperialism as a structural condition of modern international order; engaging with alternative periodisations of international history.
Week 7 — What does decolonising International Political Sociology require, and what does it make possible?
Sabaratnam’s chapter on decolonising International Political Sociology is one of the most demanding contributions to the Oxford Handbook, and deliberately so. The decolonial challenge is not simply a matter of adding perspectives from the Global South to a field whose epistemological foundations remain intact; it requires asking how those foundations (the categories, concepts, and methods of IPS) are themselves products of a particular historical and political context, shaped by European imperial power and its aftermath. Decolonising IPS means examining who produces knowledge, under what conditions, in whose interest, and with what consequences for those whose political lives are being analysed. This week examines the decolonial critique in both its diagnostic and constructive dimensions: what it reveals about the limits of existing IPS frameworks, and what alternative approaches, drawing on Fanon, Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Quijano, Wynter, and others, it proposes in their place. The week challenges students to consider what it would mean to take the decolonial challenge seriously as a methodological commitment rather than an additional perspective.
Key Themes
- The coloniality of knowledge: Quijano and the global power matrix
- Epistemic freedom and the decolonisation of IPS
- Fanon on violence, recognition, and colonial subjectivity
- Southern theory and the geography of knowledge production
- Beyond critique: decolonial reconstruction and alternative frameworks
Case Studies
- African Union peace and security: local agency analysed by Northern scholars
- Development knowledge: who counts as an expert and why
- Truth and reconciliation commissions: whose healing, whose justice?
Seminar Exercise
- Reflective seminar: students examine a canonical IPS text alongside a decolonial critique of that text, identifying the epistemological assumptions the canonical text relies on and what the decolonial critique makes visible. The seminar asks what it would mean to take the decolonial challenge seriously as a methodological commitment, not merely as an additional perspective.
Analytical Focus
- Engaging with the decolonial critique of IPS; examining the conditions of knowledge production in IR; evaluating constructive decolonial proposals for the field.
Week 8 — How does IPS reframe international order and who bears its costs?
International order is one of the central preoccupations of IR theory, but the discipline has tended to approach it in ways that naturalise its constitutive inequalities. Realists treat order as the product of power distribution; liberals see it as the product of shared norms and institutions; English School theorists locate it in the values and practices of international society. IPS asks a different question: how is order produced, maintained, and contested as a social and political accomplishment? Reus-Smit and Towns argue in the Oxford Handbook that order is not a neutral background condition but an active achievement that reflects and reproduces particular distributions of power, recognition, and legitimacy. This week examines the IPS concept of order alongside the related concepts of rule and sovereignty, asking how they are constituted, contested, and transformed. Special attention is given to the racial, gendered, and spatial dimensions of international order, which mainstream frameworks have systematically obscured, and to the structural order of neoliberal racial capital as a foundational condition of contemporary global politics.
Key Themes
- Order as social accomplishment: production, maintenance, and contestation
- Rule in global politics: authority, legitimacy, and compliance
- Sovereignty as a contested social institution
- Neoliberal racial capital and the structural order of the global economy
- Gender and the ordering of global political authority
Case Studies
- The post-1945 liberal international order: whose order, and for whom?
- Sovereignty and statehood: contested recognition in contemporary international politics
- The World Bank and the gendered ordering of development
Seminar Exercise
- Order analysis workshop: students apply the IPS framework of order as social accomplishment to a specific international institution or regime, identifying how it produces order, who bears its costs, and where the fractures of contestation are visible. The workshop asks whether the current moment is best described as order fragmentation, order transformation, or order consolidation by other means.
Analytical Focus
- Applying IPS frameworks to international order; connecting order, rule, and sovereignty as related concepts; examining racial, gendered, and spatial dimensions of international ordering.
Week 9 — How do racial, gender, and spatial orders structure the international system, and how does power operate through them?
Mainstream IR theory has been slow to recognise that international order is structured not only by the distribution of material power but by racial hierarchies, gender regimes, and spatial arrangements that determine who belongs where and on whose terms. The contributions of Tilley, Gabay, Sjoberg, and Yao to the Oxford Handbook constitute a sustained argument that these dimensions of order are not peripheral concerns but central to how international politics operates. Racial capital, as Tilley argues, is not simply a matter of historical injustice but a structural feature of the current global economy, producing systematic inequalities in wealth, security, and recognition that conventional IPE frameworks cannot adequately theorise. Gender, as Sjoberg argues, is not merely an identity category but an ordering principle of global politics that shapes who can speak, who can fight, who can be protected, and who remains unprotected. Spatial order connects these dimensions of order to the materiality of place and movement, and to the border trajectories through which durability and friction are reproduced across political geographies.
Key Themes
- Racial orders in international politics: Du Bois, Wynter, and structural racism
- Neoliberal racial capital: exploitation, extraction, and dispossession
- Gender orders and the organisation of global political authority
- Territoriality, borders, and the spatial ordering of international politics
- Power and order: how domination is reproduced as normality
Case Studies
- The racial geography of vaccine distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Gendered border violence and the spatial politics of migration
- Land dispossession and territorial order in post-colonial settings
Seminar Exercise
- Intersectional order analysis: students select a specific policy domain — migration, trade, climate finance, or security — and apply racial, gender, and spatial order frameworks simultaneously, examining how these ordering principles reinforce, complicate, or contradict each other. The exercise asks what a genuinely intersectional IPS analysis looks like in practice, and what methodological challenges it encounters.
Analytical Focus
- Applying racial, gender, and spatial order frameworks to international politics; connecting structural inequality to ordering processes; developing an intersectional analytical approach.
Week 10 — How does IPS reconceive power beyond material capability?
Power is the concept at the centre of international politics, yet mainstream IR has worked with a remarkably thin account of it. Realism reduces power to material capability: military force, economic size, technological capacity. Even more sophisticated accounts treat power as something that actors have and exercise over others. IPS draws on a richer sociological tradition (Foucault, Bourdieu, Arendt, and Lukes) to argue that power operates through symbolic systems, institutional arrangements, bodily regimes, and economic structures in ways that cannot be reduced to capability or coercion. Guzzini and Klausen’s contribution to the Oxford Handbook argues for a relational and multi-dimensional account of power that is sensitive to both its enabling and its constraining dimensions. This week examines four specific modalities of power — military, symbolic, economic, and corporeal — and asks how they interact to produce and reproduce international order. Each modality carries its own analytical commitments and opens distinct empirical questions that the others cannot address alone.
Key Themes
- Relational and multi-dimensional power: beyond capability and coercion
- Symbolic power: Bourdieu and the violence of classification
- Military power in sociological perspective: beyond kill chains
- Economic power: market domination, structural dependency, and financialisation
- Corporeal power: the body, vulnerability, and international politics
Case Studies
- Sanctions as symbolic and economic power: Iran and the politics of recognition
- Debt and structural power: the IMF, sovereign creditors, and the Global South
- Drone warfare and corporeal power: the politics of distance and vulnerability
Seminar Exercise
- Multi-dimensional power analysis (debate preparation week): students analyse a specific international episode using each of the four modalities of power — military, symbolic, economic, corporeal — and examine how these modalities interact, reinforce, or conflict. Each student receives their assigned approach for the Week 11 structured debate and begins preparing their argument preparation sheet.
Analytical Focus
- Applying multi-dimensional power analysis to international cases; distinguishing symbolic, military, economic, and corporeal power as analytical categories; examining how power modalities interact.
Week 11 — How does resistance operate in international politics, and what forms does it take?
Resistance is a concept that mainstream IR has tended either to subsume under security studies, as threat, insurgency, or terrorism, or to romanticise as the authentic voice of the oppressed. IPS offers a more rigorous account. Drawing on Scott’s concept of everyday resistance, de Certeau’s tactics of the weak, and the traditions of critical theory, the Oxford Handbook’s contributions on resistance map the full range of strategies through which actors challenge, subvert, and partially transform the orders of power under which they live. Huysmans and Nogueira argue that transgressive politics is a constitutive feature of international political life, not an exceptional disruption of order. Guillaume and Lemay-Hébert show how everyday acts of non-compliance, evasion, and appropriation constitute a politics of the ordinary that accumulates into structural pressure. Selbin asks the harder question of whether revolutionary transformation remains a possibility in the contemporary international system, and what conditions make it more or less likely. Ecological and conservative resistance are examined as analytically distinct phenomena that complicate any simple progressive account of political change.
Key Themes
- Transgressive politics: beyond compliance and defection
- Everyday resistance: Scott, de Certeau, and the politics of the ordinary
- Ecological resistance and the politics of planetary limit
- Conservative resistance: backlash, sovereignty, and anti-globalisation
- Revolution in the contemporary international system: conditions and possibilities
Case Studies
- Indigenous environmental movements and the limits of ecological governance
- Populist sovereignty claims and the conservative resistance to liberal order
- The Arab Spring and the sociology of revolutionary possibility
Seminar Exercise
- Structured theoretical debate (Applied Exercise component): students argue their assigned IPS approach — relationalism, practice theory, historicism, or a specific account of power or resistance — on the question of how to understand the relationship between international order and its contestation. Debate is followed by brief individual presentations and the submission of reflective commentaries.
Analytical Focus
- Analysing resistance as a structured field of practice; distinguishing forms of resistance from everyday non-compliance to revolutionary transformation; examining ecological and conservative resistance as analytically distinct phenomena.
Week 12 — Who acts in world politics, and what can IPS tell us about the future of international order?
The final week addresses two questions simultaneously. The first is substantive: who are the actors of world politics, and what does an IPS account of agency look like? Weldes and Duvall argue that the very concept of an actor — self-directed, coherent, intentional — is itself a sociological achievement rather than a pre-given starting point. States, international organisations, expert communities, and objects themselves exercise what different analysts call agency, but in forms that vary considerably and carry different conditions of possibility. Neumann’s account of polities, Littoz-Monnet’s analysis of expertise as political authority, and van Wingerden’s argument about the agency of non-human things each challenge the anthropocentric and state-centric assumptions of mainstream IR in distinct ways. The second question is synthetic: what does IPS, taken as a whole, have to say about the contemporary condition of international order and its possible futures? The final seminar brings together the analytical frameworks developed across the course and asks students to deploy them in a structured scenario exercise oriented toward the politics of the next generation.
Key Themes
- Agency as sociological achievement: beyond rational action theory
- Polities, international organisations, and the social constitution of actorhood
- Expertise as a form of political authority in global governance
- Non-human agency: objects, technologies, and the limits of anthropocentrism
- IPS and the future: synthesising relationalism, intersubjectivity, and historicism
Case Studies
- The IPCC as an actor: expertise, authority, and contested knowledge
- Algorithmic governance: when code becomes a political actor
- US-China competition through an IPS lens: fields, practices, and historical orders
Seminar Exercise
- Scenario synthesis workshop: students work in teams to construct two contrasting scenarios for the international order in 2050, grounding each scenario in a coherent IPS framework — one drawing primarily on relational and practice-based analysis, one foregrounding historicist and decolonial perspectives — and specifying the key variables, driving forces, and normative implications. Teams present their scenarios to the full seminar and respond to critical questioning.
Analytical Focus
- Synthesising the three foundational commitments of IPS; applying IPS frameworks to questions of agency and actorhood; constructing and defending scenario-based analyses of international order transformation.
*** This course is designed to be adaptable. The weekly structure, assessment components, and reading load can be adjusted to suit the requirements of a particular higher education institution or the context of individual tutoring, and can be scaled to meet the demands of bachelor’s and master’s degree students alike. The analytical framework and intellectual ambitions of the course remain constant; the format is a starting point, not a constraint.
Updated – May 2026