This book explores some implications of studying international relations from a systemic perspective. This chapter takes on the preliminary tasks of defining systems, identifying distinctive characteristics of systemic explanations, and situating systems approaches in a broader context of relational framings. A system is a bounded set of components of particular types, arranged in definite ways, operating in a specific fashion to produce characteristic outcomes, some of which are emergent. The arrangement and operation of the components produce “emergent” “systems effects;” properties and outcomes that cannot be fully understood through knowledge of the parts considered separately. I emphasize the relational character of systemic explanations and their reliance on mechanisms and processes, in order to foster developing a relational processual systemic perspective within a pluralistic IR.

The remaining chapters of this book begin to sketch a new systemic/relational perspective and illustrate some of its implications and attractions. Like systems approaches, relational approaches in contemporary IR, which employ frames such as networks, fields, practices, and assemblages, stress the arrangement of parts of wholes. A systems perspective, however, highlights a tendency among relationalists to overemphasize relations and underemphasize processes. (The frame “relationalism” draw attention away from processes and usually leaves obscure how relations and processes are related.) I argue for a systemic/relational perspective that understands social systems as configuring configurations that configure. And I argue that these hierarchically layered assemblages can best be understood through relational processual explanations.

We outline the core concepts of network analysis, issues of research design, and data collection for different structural questions.

Analogy is a core cognitive capacity encompassing basic similarity (“this is like that”), relational similarity (proportional analogies of the form A:B::C:x), and complex system mappings, in which the elements of one situation are structurally aligned with the elements of another. The latter permits complex inferences from a known source situation to a less familiar target situation. Because of its centrality in human thinking, analogy has been the subject of numerous computational modeling efforts. Models of similarity come from multiple traditions in cognitive science, including associationist approaches (such as connectionist models), “traditional” symbolic approaches (such as graph matching and production systems), and hybrid symbolic/connectionist approaches. This chapter reviews and evaluates several models from these various approaches in terms of their ability to simulate basic similarity, relational similarity, and system mapping.

We unpack the role of sense of place in relation to urban experimentation. We conceptualise urban experimentation as a governance approach to foster and activate innovation capacities of communities and places for climate adaptation and institutional trialling of novel approaches. We focus on an urban living laboratory (ULL) as one specific type of urban experiment that has received increasing attention in European cities recently, and use experimentation in ULL as an example to reconsider a dynamic and pluralistic understanding of place. We find that our case study, BlueCity Lab in Rotterdam, NL provides a space where new place-related narratives of change, novel practices and relations emerge, while being embedded within wider, translocal networks of practice. Backed by these insights, we contend that a translocal, pluralised and dynamic concept of place promises to be a valuable lens in order to understand the impacts, manifestations and appropriate responses to global challenges in everyday life.

In this concluding chapter, I explore the implications of contractual theories’ failures to satisfactorily justify the robust moral status of PSID. Social contract theory can justify a robust moral status and meaningful social integration for many people with cognitive impairments. However, (1) not all PSID can fit within a contractual framework and (2) in many cases, there are salient facts about PSID that ought to guide their treatment and social integration. I suggest that relational or role-based accounts of morality offer a promising way to reconcile our seemingly conflicting intuitions about the grounds for the robust moral status of all human beings. I argue that we should not discard social contract theories, but rather give them their due place, which involves limiting them to the relations or circumstances to which they apply. I am not yet making the case for integrating theories of care ethics, concern, empathy, or fiduciary relations in a theory of justice, or in a parallel theory complementing it, but I deal with a few objections that social contract theorists may raise against such an endeavor.

As noted by Bauer, real dvandva compounds – that is, coordinative compounds that properly express the aggregation of two different entities, not the intersection of properties in one entity – are extremely rare in English and Spanish. This article explores the empirical domain of dvandva compounding in Spanish, and notes that they are productive when not used as heads within their phrases. We propose that the explanation for this is that Spanish can only productively build dvandva compounds using flat structures without internal hierarchy. This causes the compound to look externally for a head noun that defines the interpretation of the relation established between the two members of the dvandva. The proposal also explains why proper names are preferred in dvandva compounding, given that they do not denote properties.

This chapter discusses the central question why Aristotle, in spite of having everything required to conceptualize a complex measure of speed in terms of time and space, did in the end not explicitly develop such a measure. It is first investigated whether contemporaries of Aristotle may have worked with such a complex measure of speed, and concluded that it cannot be found in either of the two thinkers most likely to have done so, namely Eudoxus and Autolycus. The second part of the chapter investigates what made Aristotle cling to a simple measure and suggests that there are mathematical and metaphysical reasons: metaphysically, Aristotle cannot explicitly accommodate a relation as a measure of motion, since relations are derivative and problematic for him; mathematically, the principle of homogeneity which derives from the realm of Greek mathematics makes it impossible to combine of different dimensions in a single measure in the way needed for measuring speed in a mathematically informed physics such as Aristotle’s.

Chapter 2 conceptualizes constitutional properties in both domestic and international settings. Drawing on domestic experiences, it defines constitutions, whether written or unwritten, as a special category of institutions that provide fundamental rules (of recognition and change) as well as rules that regulate a community of members, their relations, and their rights and duties (rules of conduct). It then identifies corresponding constitutional properties in the international setting, acknowledging the limits of this analogy. While still embryonic, international rules with constitutional relevance are especially apparent in those binding treaties of public international law that are universal in intended participation, global in scope, and of substantive importance. These rules are underpinned by the principle of sovereignty, which provides for their stability and superiority. International constitutional rules define states as the prime members, organize inter–state relations in an anarchical environment by concentrating authority in circumscribed domains, and lay out rights and duties that enable collective action and set standards of appropriate behavior.

The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, we recall a collection of basic mathematical notions that are needed for the discussions of the following chapters. Second, we have a first, still purely mathematical, look at the central topics of the book: languages, relations and functions between strings, as well as important operations on languages, relations and functions. We also introduce monoids, a class of algebraic structures that gives an abstract view on strings, languages, and relations.