By all accounts Quincy Wright was a ‘great man’. He has been called the ‘founding father’ of the academic field of International Relations, a ‘teacher par excellence,’ and a ’painstaking and indefatigable scholar’. Wright's students and colleagues have extolled him as ‘exceptionally learned’, the ‘father of “peace research”’, and the ‘prophet of a new world order’. Such praise is scarcely hyperbolic. Indeed, during his eighty years (1890–1970), Quincy Wright followed a ‘continuous and omnivorous regime … in assimilating vast bodies of human knowledge’. Combining broad theoretical interests with a concern for policy and problem-oriented inquiry, he ‘explored the boundaries, asked the questions, pointed the directions, and set the standards for the [International Relations] profession not only in the United States, but in the world at large’. In his ambitious quest to ascertain the causes of war and peace, Wright drew liberally from the insights of many disciplines, and in so doing produced a formidable corpus of scholarly writing virtually unrivalled in its scope and breadth.

Over the years, a number of scholars have noted that ethnic groups in violent conflict act much like states in the international system; James O'Connell describes the dynamics as ‘international relations without safeguards’. Brief observations aside, however, few works actually apply International Relations theory to explain large-scale ethnic violence. While the oversight ought to be surprising, it is easily explained in terms of what International Relations theory calls the ‘level of analysis problem’.

In response to South Africa's increasingly institutionalized racial discrimination during the postwar years, transnational anti-apartheid activists advocated a vast array of global sanctions. With the formal abolition of apartheid in 1991, sanctions advocates celebrated the apparent success of the international community's efforts in promoting a global norm of racial equality in South Africa. Since similar sanctions are an increasingly popular policy in the post-Cold War world, the South African case offers a useful starting-point for re-evaluating the utility of sanctions as a non-military policy. However, despite the prominent role of a norm of racial equality in anti-apartheid sanctions, both advocates and critics of international sanctions still generally ignore norms analytically. Expanding our conceptual framework beyond the realist assumptions implicit in most sanctions analyses enables us o t understand better why international actors adopt sanctions and how these measures affect target states.

This essay notes that the relationship of political values to social theory is an important but unresolved question for all social theory, but notes that in the discipline of International Relations the discussion is particularly undeveloped. Contemporary trends in IR theorizing are evaluated in order to contexualize the increasingly assertive forms of historical materialist thinking, derived from Marxian social theory, which are being given serious attention in the discipline. I argue that Marxian theory is at one and the same time empirical, normative and emancipatory, and conclude that while much of the new historical materialist thinking in IR advances our understanding of international relations empirically and theoretically, and offers a significantly ‘better’ explanation of the ‘international’ than Realism or other theories can, it is deficient because of its inattention to the centrality of normative and emancipatory questions at the heart of Marxian historical materialism. I further argue that because historical materialism necessitates, within the logic of its own theoretical construction, specific political values, a revisionist historical materialism that ignores these values, calls into question the theoretical integrity of the latter approach.

For some students of world politics, Clio has always been their primary muse. Nestling between the rival peaks of philosophy and poetry, she has always seemed a secure shelter for those who think of their concern as ‘what human beings do and suffer'. With recent doctrinal storms still howling around the increasingly windblown scholarly communities that constitute international studies, it is hardly surprising that the heavenly sister is more popular than ever. During the course of the twentieth century, moreover, Clio has claimed many of the best-known scholars of world politics (if not always the most influential academically), and many historians have left their mark on political science and international studies.