Within the academy we are taught to look for silence – as a noun. We are counselled to find gaps in the literature or empirical case studies that have yet to be researched in order to bring our own voice to the issues that they raise. But, there is a tension with the other face of silence, when it assumes the form of a verb. Silence and silencing have therefore been integral motivators for the entire spectrum of ‘critical’ literature within international studies, not only to show what cannot be spoken or thought about within international studies but also, at times, how this can be a deliberate political practice. But there remains a hope. The hope is that the catalyst for transformation – not merely change – is within that which we already know and that which we already have the ability to articulate or to speak. But should we take these assumptions for granted? It is at this precise point where the concerns of Richard K. Ashley with dissidence can combine with the conceptual provocations of the case of the Pirahã people of western Amazonia to generate some uncertainty about the revelations that ‘critical’ scholarship often wants to provide.

Novice Lee (‘Frank’) seeks world peace and thinks he has found it in the Liberal world order. He informs the Learned One, head of the monastery. Through their discussions, Frank discovers that the Liberal world order, despite its promises, offers neither ‘democracy’ nor ‘peace’. Turning to the Confucian world order of ‘all-under-heaven’ (tianxia), they find it similarly top-down and one-way. Finally, Frank and the Learned One, now joined by their brother monks and sister nuns, consider the life of the 7th century monk, Xuanzang. He inspires Frank to imagine a ‘worldly world order’ where humility and learning drive one's engagements with others, rather than what we have today: hegemony and imperialism.

This article queries the place of autoethnography in the study of International Relations as it relates to questions of truth, power, and ethics. The traditional denial of the authorial presence of the self in IR scholarship has been increasingly challenged in recent years, and autoethnography is perhaps the most obvious example of this. This article utilises autoethnography to explore some of the pitfalls and dilemmas associated with the approach – particularly the dangers surrounding ‘standpoint’ epistemologies, and the need to continue to distinguish between scholarship and storytelling. The article does not dismiss these concerns, but seeks to illustrate the ways in which the discipline is already engaged in storytelling as it narrates its own history and development. At the same time, the article seeks to ‘guard against a generation of novelists’ whose training would inevitably devolve into a question of crafting the ‘prettiest sentence.’ Mindful of these concerns, the article nevertheless seeks to demonstrate the ethical value of autoethnography in its exploration of the limitations of academic voice and its impact on those we write, the truths we are able to recognise and transcribe, and the ways in which the academic voice silences the self, who is forced to hide or minimise the often very personal motivations for engaging in IR scholarship. It argues that purposeful autoethnography should have a place among the diverse approaches to IR.

Recent concern with the institutional underpinning of the international financial architecture has intersected with broader debates concerning the possibility of achieving an adequate deliberative context for decisions involving transnational economic governance. Scholars working within traditions associated with international political economy, deliberative democracy, cosmopolitanism and critical theory have informed this broader debate. This article uses this debate to ask whether the structure of financial governance at the global level exhibits the necessary conditions to support deliberative democracy. In particular, it considers the extent to which publicness and a public sphere have become part of the broader structure of financial governance. Although in some ways financial governance is a hard case for this debate, an argument can be made that a public sphere has emerged as an important element of the international financial architecture. At the same time, the analysis of the role of the public sphere in financial governance reveals important lessons which public sphere theorists and deliberative democracy advocates need to consider in order to extend their analysis into the realm of global political economy.

It is often argued that multilateralism is no longer an effective mechanism to respond to global priorities and that more deliberative and multisectoral governance is needed. To explore this, the purpose of this article is to examine the practice of mutlisectoral deliberation within the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and to determine whether it has resulted in providing a more deliberative response to global health priorities. To do so, this article will apply various theoretical arguments for deliberative democracy to the results of a four year study on the multisectoral organisation the Global Fund. By making links between theory and practice, the article will argue that the multisectoralism practiced by the Global Fund continues to suffer from a deliberative deficit and that it has not safeguarded equal stakeholder participation, equal deliberation between stakeholders or alleviate the asymmetric power relationships which are representative of current forms of multilateral governance. Nevertheless, by locating these gaps between theory and practice, it is possible to outline deliberative safeguards that might, if constitutionally enhanced, pull the Global Fund closer to its own normative values of multisectoral deliberative decision-making.

Autoethnography is a way and method to reflect on the mutual constitution of the self and the social. It allows one to consider how her/his personal and professional subjectivity was constructed and how her/his actions in the world reproduce or change this world. Autoethnography enables one to acquire an agentive role in the world by highlighting one's uniqueness and voice. It also aims to create mutual empowerment among people, ordinary individuals, by means of identification, connectivity, and empathy. In this article I explore some conceptual issues relating to autoethnography and then present my personal account of why I study International Relations (IR) and how I decided to bring myself more openly into my texts and lectures. I conclude by arguing that autoethnography made me more confident in sounding my voice in print and in class, and that, consequently, I became much more aware of the human capacity to make a difference.

The following article refers to the current debate about state personhood opened by Wendt's claim for a treatment of states as real persons in order to prevent the reductionist argument that states only are treated ‘as if’ they were persons. By understanding phenomena like states consistently as structures – as ‘structures of corporate practice’ – we argue that there is a possibility to escape from the situation dually framed by Wendt. This alternative is constituted by a tripartite pragmatist ontological model that consists of actors, structures of corporate practice, and processes. After having presented our view of the debate and its central problems in a first step, we will set forth our model and its implications for the study of international relations in a second and third step.

This article addresses the notion of reflexivity in international theory through an attempt to transcend the dichotomy between knowledge and judgement. It intends to demonstrate that neither ‘philosophical’ nor ‘scientific’ approaches to world politics can reconcile cognitive and evaluative claims, but that such an endeavour may be envisaged within a certain conception of knowledge, science and facts. A comparison of Morton Kaplan's approach with Hans Morgenthau's and Kenneth Waltz's suggests what kind of theoretical alternatives can bring together these two seemingly incommensurable orders of discourse under a unified, foundationally reflexive epistemology.

The concept of hegemonic overreach proposes a revision of Kennedy's notion of imperial overstretch that puts more emphasis on policy choices of hegemonic states. Previous long-cycle theories of hegemonic breakdown have focused on the contradiction between the hegemon's growing military-political commitments and its slipping economic capability relative to rising challenger states. Another key contradiction in US foreign policy is between the imperatives of hegemony and the ideology of messianic mission developed long before the US stepped up to its current global role. Hegemonic overreach, driven by this sense of messianic mission, is a major cause of failure in US foreign policy.

After the Cold War, US strategists have suggested four strategies for the hegemon: hegemonic dominion, selective engagement, offshore balancing, and multilateralism. Rather than debating which strategy is the best for the US at all times, this article focuses on examining which policy is more likely to be chosen by the hegemon – the US – under different strategic conditions. Through a neoclassical realist argument – the power-perception hegemonic model, I argue that US foreign policy depends on how US policymakers perceive US hegemonic status in the international system. Under rising and stable hegemony, selective engagement and hegemonic dominion are two possible power-maximisation strategies given the weak security constraints from the system. Under declining hegemony, offshore balancing and multilateralism are more likely to be chosen by US policymakers to pursue security because of a resumed security imperative from anarchy. US policy toward Asia after the Cold War is a case study to test the validity of the power-perception hegemonic model. I conclude that US policymakers should prepare for life after Pax-Americana, and early implementation of offshore balancing and multilateralism may facilitate the soft-landing of declining US hegemony.