Building on studies of historical non-Westphalian world orders, this article challenges desires to identify a ‘first’ international. The question ‘when was the first international?’ is fundamental to defining disciplinary boundaries and the ontologies that shape them. Such quests are substantialist rather than relational, limiting our understanding of the relations and diversity of agents involved in world ordering. Existing approaches to the ‘first’ international are caught in a ‘Mesopotamian trap’: a combination of social evolution conceptual models grounded in colonial epistemologies, analytical presentism, and the surviving propaganda of ancient urban rulers. This article proposes ‘dynamic multiplicity’ as a new framework to account for the diversity, complexity, dynamism, and relationality of world orders in past and present. Dynamic multiplicity emphasizes: a quantitative and qualitative multiplicity of actors; never-ending and always unfolding relations; the instability and permeability of social actors; the diachronic nature of social action; hierarchical and heterarchical power relations; the multi-scalar spatiality of the social; and sustained and critical interdisciplinarity. It applies dynamic multiplicity to the case of Sumer and ancient West Asia, a so-called ‘first’ international, to reveal a diversity of durable relational actors and contradict assumptions that international relations necessarily lead to world orders of homogenous unit-types.

How do governing actors in international politics become legitimised? Current approaches to the study of legitimation do not fully account for the complexities of governance in contemporary international and global politics because they pre-specify ‘sources’ of legitimacy and treat change in audience expectations towards rightful rule as exogenous to legitimation processes. Instead, this article synthesises existing models of legitimation with relational theory to argue that constellations of institutional complexities necessitate an analytical focus on audiences and their expectations as embedded in governance networks. It then provides a relational theory of legitimation, emphasising the mechanisms undergirding legitimation: legitimation should be conceptualised as a process of congruence-finding between actors’ normative expectations. A governance relation might be influenced towards greater or lesser congruence via several mechanisms working at the level of the relation and the wider network, with more congruence giving rise to stabler governance practices. In this way, the theory builds upon legitimation scholarship by developing pathways to investigate legitimation across the varied contexts of international politics: it avoids a normative background theory of legitimacy sources and provides an improved framework for understanding change in the legitimacy of institutions over time by considering endogenous mechanisms of legitimation.

Recent years have witnessed the theorizing of international order from a global, rather than purely Western, perspective. We contribute to this approach by reviewing recent book-length theorizations by four prominent contemporary Chinese scholars. We outline how these conceptions of international order converge and diverge, identify their contributions and limitations, and compare them with Western paradigms of international order, such as realism and liberalism. We then demonstrate how insights from these Chinese approaches enrich existing international relations debates and shed light on contemporary Chinese foreign policy.

Global IR is an encompassing term for a range of work that has set out to globalize the discipline in terms of its core concepts, assumptions, and substantive areas of study. Our symposium supports Global IR's goals but also offers some friendly critiques of the project with the aim of increasing its impact and durability. In this Introduction to the symposium, we posit that Global IR is vulnerable to a dynamic that limits its capacity to upend the status quo, which we term the ‘essentialism trap’. Essentialism captures a range of commitments oriented around the notion that the world is constituted by pre-formed, fixed, internally coherent, and bounded social forms. The trap involves the overuse of essentialist categories by radical projects, a process that can result in the reinforcement of status quo categories and assumptions. With reference to previous openings in IR that have succumbed to this trap, we identify the dynamics that lead to this trap and suggest ways in which Global IR can avoid it by leaning more into relationalism and global history, and, thereby, fulfil the promise contained in the range of movements it speaks with and for.

In his response, Manjeet S. Pardesi argues that global international relations and relational scholarship rooted in global history can learn much from each other and must work together to overcome Eurocentrism while avoiding other forms of ‘centrisms’. The second contribution by Zeynep Gülşah Çapan aims to underline three interrelated dynamics: space (global), time (history), and knowledge. In the third and final response, Musab Younis draws on Edward Said's critique of ‘counter-conversion’ to suggest how anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers sought to create oppositional forms of knowledge while remaining alert, in ways not always replicated in recent writing, to the dangers of nativism.

Global international relations (IR) generates space for theoretical expressions drawn from outside the experiences of the modern West. Alongside these demands for theoretical pluralism can be found a concern for widening IR's historical frames of reference. Yet, to date, the relationship between global IR and history is the least developed part of the project's agenda. This article suggests two ways in which this relationship can be strengthened. One draws from global history, shows how transboundary connections and relational dynamics forge the units used by advocates of global IR in their analysis: West and non-West, core and periphery, metropole and colony. The other draws from global historical sociology as it advances the role of power asymmetries for understanding the patterns and entanglements in transboundary connections. Connecting global IR to global history and global historical sociology can help produce a fuller understanding of the interactive connections and asymmetrical entanglements between peoples, places, ideas, and institutions that drive historical development. We illustrate this potential through a brief analysis of the rise of the West. This, in turn, demonstrates the ways in which three visions of the global – global IR, global history, and global historical sociology – can be mutually beneficial.

Ontological parochialism persists in International Relations (IR) scholarship among gestures towards relational ontological reinvention. Meanwhile, the inter-polity relations of many Indigenous peoples pre-date contemporary IR and tend to be substantively relational. This situation invites rethinking of IR's understandings of political order and inter-polity relations. We take up this task by laying out necessary methodological innovations to engage with Aboriginal Australia and then showing how conventional and much recent heterodox IR seek to create forms of ‘escape’ from lived political relations by asserting the powerful yet problematic social science mechanism of observer's distance. This demonstrates a need to take Aboriginal Australia as a system on its own terms to speak back to IR. We next explain how Aboriginal Australian people produce political order on the Australian continent through a ‘relational-ecological’ disposition that contrasts with IR's predominant ‘survivalist’ disposition. The accompanying capacity to manage survivalism through relationalism provides an avenue for engaging with and recasting some of mainstream IR's survivalist assumptions, including by considering an Aboriginal approach to multipolarity, without attempting ‘pure escape’ through alternative ontologies. We thus argue that while it is necessary to critique and recast dominant IR, doing so requires putting dominant IR and Indigenous understandings into relational exchange.

Spheres of influence remain one of the most pervasive phenomena in the practice and history of international relations, yet only rarely have they been taken up analytically. To bring conceptual and discursive clarity, this article advances two arguments. First, it argues that spheres of influence are not a distinct form of hierarchy in international relations, but rather practices of control and exclusion that can be found within any ideal-type hierarchy. Second, these hierarchical practices are generally underspecified by those invoking the term. Different theoretical perspectives on international relations offer highly divergent ways of understanding control and exclusion, and all do so with plausible empirical mooring. Spheres of influence do not themselves denote a form of governance even if it does a form of order construction and maintenance. Any given empire, hegemonic order, or alliance may also be a sphere of influence depending on the practices that occur; the key is not to identify whether particular hierarchical traits are dispositive of one of these relational structures, but rather whether, and the extent to which, assertions of control and exclusion define the hierarchy.

The present paper aims to unearth the rudiments of an alternative theory of action in Weber. Centring on salient descriptions of scientific practice found in Weber, I argue that one finds so-called “relational” impulses in these instances, which are at odds with the Kantian, subject-centred and dualist perspectives pervading much of Weber’s thought.

The paper consists of two parts. In the first—critical—part, after a short sketch of my relational approach, I cite some well-known “Kantian” passages in Weber’s work and demonstrate their undesirable theoretical and empirical consequences. I investigate Weber’s “official” theory of action and understanding, his concepts of rationality and psychology, and his understanding of technological mediation. In the second—positive—part, I delve into Weber’s understanding of creativity, investigating relational traits in Weber’s descriptions of scientific practice and experience. I then demonstrate how Weber’s late concept of personality is based on relational and object-oriented attitudes. Further, I investigate how the two dimensions of creativity and personality merge in his concept of Sachlichkeit. Finally, I provide certain biographical observations and discuss the conflict between existentialist and relational interpretations of Weber. At the very end of the paper, I discuss some general implications of the relational perspective.

Taking the phenomenon of empire as its starting point, this article seeks to provide a framework for addressing the question of how and why international systems change over time. Synthesising elements from network-relational analysis and practice theory, I argue that international systems are best thought of as being composed of multiple partially overlapping and interrelated hierarchical networks. These networks are made up of social ties – as in classic network analysis – but also of specific repertoires of practice. Systemic transformations happen through the reconfiguration of networks, both through shifts in social ties and through changes in their practices. Empire provides a particularly illuminating window into the topic of systemic change, in part because a major driver of historical transformations has been the expansion of empires and their encounters with other heterogeneous polities across the globe, and in part because a focus on imperial interactions highlights the limitations of existing unit-centric perspectives. Drawing on examples from the nineteenth century, I illustrate the usefulness of the framework by showing how different regionally anchored systems came into contact with the expanding spheres of Western empires and how such points of interaction contributed to the development of an increasingly global international system.

This article examines the historical sociology that informs Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems. On the sociological side, it critically assesses Linklater’s use of Elias and Wight, arguing that his ‘higher level synthesis’ is internally incompatible. On the historical side, the article argues that the occlusion of the transnational interactions that, in great measure, drive historical development means that Linklater’s analysis is inadequate for its stated purpose: to chart the development of civilising processes within the Western state-systems.

Relations of sovereign inequality permeate international politics, and a growing body of literature grapples with the question of how states establish and sustain hierarchy amidst anarchy. I argue that existing literature on hierarchy, for all its diverse insights, misses what makes hierarchy unique in world politics. Hierarchy is not simply the presence of inequality or stratification among actors, but rather an authority relationship in which a dominant actor exercises some modicum of control over a subordinate one. This authority relationship, moreover, is dramatically different than ones found in domestic hierarchies. It is shaped less by written laws or formal procedures, than by subtle forms of manipulation and the development of informal practices. For this reason, hierarchy cannot simply be reduced the to the dynamics of anarchy, and must be viewed as a relational phenomenon. Ties between actors create positions that permit dominant actors to appropriate and orchestrate the sharing of authority with subordinate intermediaries. This article develops this relational network approach, highlighting how concepts such as access, brokerage, and yoking can illuminate the processes by which authority is enlisted and appropriated in world politics.

There is a tension at the heart of Lucy Allais’s new account of Kant’s transcendental idealism. The problem arises from her use of two incompatible theories in contemporary philosophy – relationalism about perception, or naïve realism, and relationalism about colour, or more generally relationalism about any such perceptual property. The problem is that the former requires a more robust form of realism about the properties of the objects of perception than can be accommodated in the partially idealistic framework of the latter. On Allais’s interpretation, Kant’s notorious attempt to balance realism and idealism remains unstable.