ZIB Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen

International organizations (IOs) are currently facing multiple pressures. On the one hand, they are increasingly subjected to intense challenges from states and societal groups. On the other, IOs are more and more frequently confronted with...

International organizations (IOs) agree that those directly affected by global governance should be given a greater voice in international policy processes. When it comes to implementing this new participatory norm, it is mostly IO staff that steers...

In their main article, Diez and Hasenclever argue in favour of a heterologue between multiple theories of International Relations (IR) to comprehensively explain the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. In this forum article, I argue that a...

The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has also challenged the field of International Relations (IR). Core IR concepts such as conflict maturity, escalation dominance, or balance of power have gained popularity. The war has also implications...

Since the Russian war in Ukraine and with the widespread presence of IR scholars in the media, complaints about the presumed „irrelevance“ of the discipline have been resolved. Yet the need for reflecting about IR‘s position as a scholarly...

How can peace and conflict research, security studies and social science research on Eastern Europe be better linked in order to satisfy the demands and complexity of the current global (in)security phenomena? How can these research areas be...

On the surface, the reference text deals with the critique of both strategic studies and so-called critical peace research. In its deeper structure, however, it is about a disciplinary reorientation favouring the peace and security research...

This article comments on the main article by Thomas Diez and Andreas Hasenclever in this special issue. I am making three arguments. First, in times of severe international crises – like Russia’s current war against Ukraine – theory debates in...

This article addresses the argument of the main article that science should explain and categorise, but not draw conclusions or take positions; and that researchers should place more emphasis on the justification of their research contributions in...

This essay presents a Ukrainian point of view on the ongoing public and scholarly discourse in Ukraine regarding Russia’s war of aggression against the country, while also responding to the German discourse. The essay presents the state of the...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has caught not only politics but also the discipline of International Relations (IR) off guard. The IR debate has been characterised either by inter-theoretical speechlessness or know-it-all attitudes....

This article first looks back at past German debates on the relationship between the theory and practice of international relations (IR). In a three-step process, it then critically examines the self-image of academia in the context of media work,...

The relationship between peace research and security studies has changed. The conceptual distinction is blurred. Peace research can be divided into critical peace research and peace and conflict research, while security studies can be divided into...

The war on Ukraine and the bifurcated discourses (political and academic) around it across different geographies are just one of the myriad manifestations of hierarchies, postcolonial continuities and contestations guiding global politics. The...

Has peace become obsolete as a guiding concept in the discipline of International Relations (IR)? This is the guiding question of this introduction: While research into the causes of war and, above all, Strategic Studies continue to flourish in the...

Social media have both negative (escalating, conflict-stabilizing) and positive (transformative, de-escalating) effects with regard to peacebuilding, an argument that has been widely established in IR and Peace and Conflict Studies. However, the...

In peace and conflict research, processual understandings function as alternatives to too narrow and too broad concepts of peace. Instead of understanding peace as a substantial condition, for example defined by the absence of violence or the...

This contribution shows that peace is a critical concept in parallel to the concept of emancipation in critical theory. Such concepts work as regulative ideals and cannot offer solutions to practical problems. Alas, these principles of critical...