Social Darwinism was a pathbreaker in the history of Chinese international thought. In this study, we explore the hitherto sparsely discussed process of the reception of social Darwinism in China, which led to a fundamental transformation in Chinese thinking about the international order and the position of China vis-à-vis Western powers. Drawing on the work of three leaders of that intellectual transformation – Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, and Liang Qichao – we analyse issues such as the struggle for existence and survival, national and racial competition, and statism. We demonstrate how the three aforementioned thinkers modified the original Darwinist thought, enriching it with voluntarism and radical collectivism, all in order for the emerging set of ideas to suit China’s historically determined needs. Overall, our analysis contributes to both the history of International Relations thought in China and the broader debate on the globalisation of IR theory and IR knowledge production.

Kenneth Waltz once stated, unequivocally, that, ‘I consider myself to be a Kantian, not a positivist’. I explain what Waltz might have meant by this, and how deep this professed Kantianism ran. Such is the depth of the engagement, I argue, that it is no exaggeration to claim that Waltz's political philosophy, his philosophy of history, his philosophy of science, his methodology, and his normative theory of anarchy are all broadly Kantian. Crucially, what Waltz meant by the ‘virtues of anarchy’, is best understood as an attempt to develop a regulative ideal, or an ‘organising principle’ of ‘practical reason’ that would guide diplomats in the nuclear age. Indeed, in his most contentious intervention in global public policy, Waltz deploys Kant to argue that horizontal nuclear spread, rather than the spread of democracy, would ensure the peaceful development of states. This anarchic nuclear peace would, he thought, be the means to achieve ‘perpetual pacification’. This revisionist reconstruction is the primary contribution of the paper. But through unsettling paradigmatic readings of ‘Waltzian IR theory’, the paper also presents an immanent critique of ‘the virtues of anarchy’ that contributes to a wider research project on the concept of anarchy and its emancipatory potential.

Throughout the 20th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20th century, are almost completely missing in IR's intellectual and disciplinary histories, including histories of its main theoretical traditions. In this forum, leading historians and theorists of IR respond to the recent findings of the Leverhulme project on Women and the History of International Thought (WHIT), particularly its first two book-length publications on the centrality of women to early IR discourses and subsequent erasure from its history and conceptualization. The forum is introduced by members of the WHIT project. Collectively, the essays suggest the implications of the erasure and recovery of women's international thought are significant and wide-ranging.

Throughout the 20th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20th century, are almost completely missing in IR's intellectual and disciplinary histories, including histories of its main theoretical traditions. In this forum, leading historians and theorists of IR respond to the recent findings of the Leverhulme project on Women and the History of International Thought (WHIT), particularly its first two book-length publications on the centrality of women to early IR discourses and subsequent erasure from its history and conceptualization. The forum is introduced by members of the WHIT project. Collectively, the essays suggest the implications of the erasure and recovery of women's international thought are significant and wide-ranging.

How did Kenneth Waltz read canonical theoretical texts? Waltz understood himself first as a political theorist and remained committed to interpreting political thought throughout his career. This paper briefly delineates Waltz's method for reading political theory. I identify four elements of Waltz's approach: it was purposive, explanatory, textualist, and anti-esoteric. First, he thought texts could best be linked to one another and compared purposively, by aligning the questions they asked. Second, he understood the primary purpose of theoretical texts to be explanatory: normativity was a secondary concern. Third, he was a relatively strict textualist, taking little interest in historical context. Fourth, he took no account of esoteric writing. I then track his intellectual influences, through his graduate training and early academic career. I show this set of methodological tenets was, taken together, largely his own invention. I argue Waltz's reading method shaped his own theoretical work, providing concepts and informing his structural and parsimonious style of theory. I track these effects in his later theory-building project in Theory of International Politics. By extension, I suggest, his approach influenced much of postwar International Relations theory, both in terms of its specific conceptual toolkit and its approach to theory as such.

As the so-called liberal international order has come under duress, the problem of ‘peaceful change’ has reappeared on the agenda of International Relations (IR), mainly in a realist guise drawing upon E.H. Carr and Robert Gilpin's renditions of the problem. Making a conceptual archaeological intervention, this paper recovers long-neglected multidisciplinary debates on ‘peaceful change’ taking place in the tumultuous interwar period. It concurs that peaceful change is an IR problem par excellence, central to academic debates in the burgeoning interwar discipline, but also a more complex conceptual figure than posterity portrays it. The paper explores the debates between negative and positive conceptions of peaceful change, between political, legal-institutional and communitarian mechanisms of peaceful change, and different policies of peaceful change, particularly its troubled relationship to appeasement. The paper concludes that the interwar debate on peaceful change, while highly embedded in its context, does offer IR an alternative and more aspirational perspective on the problem of power and order transitions.