Mission 2026: Binge reviewing all previous Reads, I was too slothful to review back when I read them.
Reading Andrew Linklater’s 'Theories of International Relations' in 2024 felt less like reading a book and more like being slowly inducted into a discipline’s long, unresolved argument with itself. This is not a book that tries to charm the reader, nor does it pretend that international relations theory is a neat toolbox of concepts ready for application.
Instead, Linklater presents IR theory as an ongoing moral, political, and philosophical struggle over how humans imagine community, obligation, violence, and coexistence beyond borders. It is dense, patient, and quietly ambitious — a work that assumes you are willing to think rather than be persuaded.
At first glance, the book appears to be a standard survey text: realism, liberalism, Marxism, critical theory, the English School, post-structuralism, and feminism. But that description undersells both its seriousness and its intent. Linklater is not merely cataloguing theories. He is interrogating the moral horizons that underlie them. The central question threading the book is deceptively simple: who counts, and why, in international politics? From that question unfolds an examination of how states justify exclusion, violence, sovereignty, and inequality — and how alternative traditions have tried to challenge those justifications.
What distinguishes Linklater from many IR theorists is his refusal to treat theory as politically neutral. He insists, often implicitly, sometimes explicitly, that every theory of international relations smuggles in assumptions about human nature, moral obligation, and historical possibility. Realism, for example, is not just a description of power politics; it is a normative stance that normalizes competition, distrust, and the primacy of state survival. Liberalism, likewise, is not simply optimistic; it embeds assumptions about progress, rationality, and institutional cooperation that are historically contingent and morally loaded.
Linklater’s treatment of realism is careful and unsparing. He acknowledges its explanatory power, especially in a world still structured by sovereign states and uneven power. But he also exposes its moral limitations. By treating the international realm as a domain of necessity rather than choice, realism forecloses questions of responsibility. Violence becomes tragic but inevitable. Exclusion becomes natural. The suffering of outsiders becomes regrettable but irrelevant. Linklater does not caricature realism; he lets it speak in its strongest form before showing what it cannot address.
The liberal tradition fares better, but not uncritically. Linklater appreciates liberalism’s emphasis on rights, institutions, and the possibility of moral progress beyond borders. He traces its roots from Kant through contemporary cosmopolitan thought, highlighting its challenge to the idea that moral obligations stop at national boundaries.
Yet he also points out liberalism’s blind spots: its tendency to universalise Western historical experiences, its reliance on state consent, and its difficulty grappling with deep structural inequalities that institutions alone cannot fix.
Marxist and critical approaches receive some of the book’s most interesting treatment. Linklater takes seriously their insistence that international relations cannot be understood apart from global capitalism, class relations, and historical materialism. He is particularly attentive to how these traditions challenge the state-centric focus of mainstream IR, revealing transnational forms of domination that operate beneath the surface of diplomacy and war. At the same time, he notes their occasional reductionism and their struggle to articulate viable political alternatives without collapsing into determinism.
The heart of the book, however, lies in Linklater’s engagement with critical theory and the English School. This is where his own intellectual commitments become most visible. Drawing on thinkers like Habermas and Norbert Elias, Linklater is deeply interested in the long-term evolution of moral boundaries. He asks whether humanity has gradually expanded its circles of inclusion — from tribe to city to nation—and whether international society might one day institutionalise concern for humanity as a whole.
The English School’s concept of international society — a world of states bound not only by power but by shared norms, rules, and institutions — becomes a key site of exploration. Linklater treats it neither as a complacent defence of the status quo nor as a fully emancipatory vision.
Instead, he sees it as an unfinished project, one that contains both solidarist impulses (human rights, humanitarian intervention) and pluralist restraints (sovereignty, non-intervention). The tension between order and justice, so central to the English School, mirrors the book’s broader preoccupations.
One of Linklater’s most persistent concerns is harm. Who suffers in international politics, and whose suffering is considered morally relevant? He introduces the idea of harm conventions: socially constructed limits on what kinds of violence and exclusion are acceptable. Over time, certain practices — slavery, genocide, torture — have become increasingly delegitimised, at least in principle. Linklater is cautious here. He does not claim linear moral progress. Instead, he traces uneven, fragile, and often reversible shifts in moral consciousness.
This emphasis on harm gives the book a quiet ethical gravity. International relations theory, in Linklater’s hands, is not about predicting outcomes but about evaluating forms of coexistence. Theories are judged not only by their explanatory power but also by the worlds they normalise. A theory that explains war while rendering its victims invisible is, for Linklater, morally impoverished.
The chapters on post-structuralism and feminism further complicate the picture. Linklater treats these approaches as necessary disruptions to established ways of thinking. Post-structuralism’s scepticism toward grand narratives and stable identities unsettles the foundations of traditional theory, exposing how concepts like sovereignty, security, and anarchy are discursively constructed. Feminist theory, meanwhile, reveals how international relations has been shaped by masculinist assumptions that privilege aggression, autonomy, and rationality while marginalising care, vulnerability, and interdependence.
Linklater does not fully embrace these perspectives, but he respects their critical force. He recognizes that they expand the moral imagination of the field, even as they sometimes struggle to articulate institutional pathways for change. This tension — between critique and construction — runs throughout the book.
Stylistically, 'Theories of International Relations' is demanding but fair. Linklater writes with clarity, but he does not simplify excessively. He assumes a reader willing to engage with abstraction and patient argument. This is not a book to skim. Its rewards accumulate slowly, through comparison and contrast, through the recognition of recurring dilemmas framed in different vocabularies.
Reading it in 2024, against the backdrop of renewed great-power rivalry, ongoing wars, climate breakdown, and humanitarian crises, the book felt oddly contemporary despite its academic tone. Many of the debates it outlines—sovereignty versus intervention, order versus justice, realism versus moral aspiration—remain unresolved because they reflect genuine contradictions in global life. Linklater does not pretend otherwise.
If there is a limitation to the book, it lies in its cautious optimism. Linklater believes in the possibility of moral learning at the international level, even if he acknowledges its fragility. Some readers may find this hope underdeveloped or insufficiently grounded in political reality. The gap between ethical aspiration and geopolitical practice can feel vast, and the book sometimes lingers more on normative frameworks than on concrete mechanisms of change.
Yet that may be precisely its value. 'Theories of International Relations' refuses the temptation to collapse theory into policy prescription. It insists that how we think about the world shapes what we consider possible. In a field often dominated by strategic calculation and managerial language, Linklater recentres moral reflection without lapsing into utopianism.
Looking back, this book functioned as an intellectual anchor for my 2024 reading. It provided a conceptual map that made sense of other works on power, nationalism, empire, and suffering. It reminded me that international relations is not merely about what happens between states, but about how humanity negotiates the boundaries of concern in an unequal world.
This is not a book that leaves you with answers. It leaves you with better questions, sharper distinctions, and a heightened sensitivity to what is at stake in theoretical choices.
In that sense, it does exactly what serious theory should do. It unsettles comfort, disciplines intuition, and refuses to let power speak without interrogation.
Most recommended.