‘Breakthrough’ Works – Revisiting the Essentials: A Symposium Series in the BJPIR

Before the University of Edinburgh became institutional home to the BJPIR, we brainstormed about how we could expand the journal’s audience by commissioning innovative work, especially research that would be widely used in teaching. One of our (proposed, at the time) Consultant Editors – Charlie Jeffery – told us, ‘you’ve got to find a way to get breakthrough work into the BJPIR’. It became a lesson in how, sometimes, one word can fire imaginations and inspire a move that yields essential academic work.

The move under our editorship is to commission ‘Breakthrough’ articles: in any area of political science/international relations, given the BJPIR’s commitment to publish cutting edge work in any area of our discipline. ¹ Breakthrough articles feature top or up-and-coming scholars revisiting and reflecting on seminal works after they have made their mark and generated new debates. Breakthrough articles become the anchor for symposia, as we ask scholars who have been part of those debates to reflect (briefly) on the breakthrough work and how it has changed our understanding of our subject.

There seems no one better qualified to contribute our first breakthrough article than G. John Ikenberry (2001). His book After Victory is certainly one of the most important and essential works to be published in this – or any other – century in the study of international relations (IR). Any student of IR would understand what a colleague means when they argue – as one did in a project one of us worked on – that during the Barack Obama era, we had not reached an ‘Ikenberry moment’, when there was political will and an opening to build multilateralism (see Alcaro et al., 2016). Agree with Ikenberry’s argument or not, After Victory put down a marker on which all students of IR need to reflect.

Ikenberrry’s breakthrough IR article – reflecting on how durable his argument was and now is during the tumult of the Donald Trump era – is accompanied by short commentaries from a glittering array of IR scholars. We think it would be difficult to assemble a more insightful set of commentators than Orfeo Fioretos, Juliet Kaarbo, Kathleen McNamara, Michael Mastanduno, John Owen, Randall Schweller, and Jack Snyder. It is probably incumbent on all of us who teach IR to explain why Ikenberry’s argument matters and to get our students to read his breakthrough article (the commentaries also give them an opportunity to learn a lot about IR with minimum investment of reading time).

That’s not all. We look forward to future breakthrough symposia to appear in these pages based on Henry Shue’s (2014) seminal work on climate justice, B. Guy Peters’ (2018) The Politics of Bureaucracy (now out in its 7th edition), and Liesbet Hooghe’s and Gary Marks (1996) landmark work on multi-level governance. All will feature top scholars offering commentaries on debates to which these works have given rise.

Many of us will know about the German tradition of Festschrift: an edited book honouring a top scholar, with their disciples offering chapters that reflect on their major work(s). We hope we have taken this tradition forward and one better: the BJPIR is one of the leading Political Science/IR journals edited in the United Kingdom. It can be difficult these days to get publishers to commit to edited books. So, if you have an idea for someone we should honour with a breakthrough/article symposium, please let us know.

Meanwhile, here is one of the most influential scholars we have in the study of IR at a critical time when it seems that no one knows what is going to happen next (see Deudney and Ikenberry, 2018). It is followed by commentaries by some of our (other) best brains about the contribution of After Victory, about where we are, and what might happen next. Enjoy. And stay tuned.