Ted Hopf
Biographic Data
| ID | 1176765 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ted Hopf |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ted |
| FAMILY NAME | Hopf |
| SIGNATURE | HOPF T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 588 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Conceptualizing International Practices: Directions for the Practice Turn in International Relations
This book brings together the key scholars in the international practice debate to demonstrate its strengths as an innovative research perspective. The contributions show the benefit of practice theories in the study of phenomena in international security, international political economy and international organisation, by directing attention to concrete and observable everyday practices that shape international outcomes. The chapters exemplify th…
Conceptualizing International Practices: Directions for the Practice Turn in International Relations
Everyday Nationalism and Making Identity Count
The literature on “everyday nationalism” foregrounds constructivist practice theory as well as interpretivist methodologies. Our project—Making Identity Count—does something similar but with an aim to advance the study of International Relations rather than the study of nationalism. Here, we suggest that these two approaches are basically complementary, and that a theoretical and methodological cross-fertilization between them may yield new insig…
The Distribution of Identity and the Future of International Order: China's Hegemonic Prospects
Existing theories predict that the rise of China will trigger a hegemonic transition and the current debate centers on whether or not the transition will be violent or peaceful. This debate largely sidesteps two questions that are central to understanding the future of international order: how strong is the current Western hegemonic order and what is the likelihood that China can or will lead a successful counterhegemonic challenge? We argue that…
The Distribution of Identity and the Future of International Order: China’s Hegemonic Prospects
Existing theories predict that the rise of China will trigger a hegemonic transition and the current debate centers on whether or not the transition will be violent or peaceful. This debate largely sidesteps two questions that are central to understanding the future of international order: how strong is the current Western hegemonic order and what is the likelihood that China can or will lead a successful counter-hegemonic challenge? We argue tha…
Change in international practices
This article builds on the practice turn's welcome move to redirect our attention to the unconscious habitual practices that constitute most of daily social life, including in world politics. Since International Relations practice theorists continue to resort to arguments that include deliberate reflection, I try to clarify the relationship between going on in the world automatically and proceeding with conscious reflection. Beyond providing scop…
Crimea is ours: A discursive history
Russia could have annexed Crimea anytime in the last 25 years. The fact that it did so only in March 2014 is a puzzle. I argue that the predominant discourse of Russian national identity by 2014 made the annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine both thinkable and natural to Moscow. A history of the discursive terrain of Russia from 1992 to 2014 shows how Russia's national identity has evolved over the years, both in respo…
Common-sense Constructivism and Hegemony in World Politics
The IR literature on hegemony rarely combines attention to material power and ideas. Cox's neo-Gramscian work is a rare exception, but it too narrowly construes Gramsci's conceptualization of common sense, reducing it to elite views on political economy. But Gramsci argued that hegemony had to reckon with mass quotidian common sense. If political elites do not take into account the taken-for-granted world of the masses, elite ideological projects…
Reconstructing the Cold WarThe Early Years, 1945-1958: The Early Years, 1945 - 1958
General answers are hard to imagine for the puzzling questions that are raised by Soviet relations with the world in the early years of the Cold War. Why was Moscow more frightened by the Marshall Plan than the Truman Doctrine? Why would the Soviet Union abandon its ally, Yugoslavia, just when the Cold War was starting? How could Khrushchev's de-Stalinized domestic and foreign policies at first cause a warming of relations with China, and then le…
The logic of habit in International Relations
IR theory is dominated by the logics of consequentialism and appropriateness. But Max Weber offered four logics of choice, not just two. Beyond the instrumental rationality of Zweckrationalität and the normative rationality of Wertrationalität are affect and habit. Drawing on Weber, James, Dewey, and Bourdieu, and habit’s microfoundations in neurocognitive psychology, I explore the logic of habit and its consequences for several fundamental puzzl…
Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists
The concept of identity has become increasingly prominent in the social sciences and humanities. Analysis of the development of social identities is an important focus of scholarly research, and scholars using social identities as the building blocks of social, political, and economic life have attempted to account for a number of discrete outcomes by treating identities as causal factors. The dominant implication of the vast literature on identi…
Russia's European Choice
Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn . Edited by Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea. (M.E. Sharpe, 2006)
Identity, legitimacy, and the use of military force: Russia’s Great Power identities and military intervention in Abkhazia
An action is legitimate if the pertinent community deems it so. Most would agree that Russia’s conduct in the 1990s in Georgia was illegitimate. Military intervention in another state, unless the other state is preparing an imminent attack on one’s own territory, or is engaged in the systematic abuse of one’s own citizens, is a violation of the international norm of sovereignty, at a minimum. Some have argued that European politics has gone beyon…
Social construction of international politics: Identities & foreign policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999
Making the Future Inevitable: Legitimizing, Naturalizing and Stabilizing. The Transition in Estonia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan
In discussions of post-communist transitional politics, it is common-place to find arguments that attribute regime stability to a government's capacity to legitimize its policies. And the most robust source of such legitimacy is often adduced to economic achievements appreciated by the public. But many political theorists have developed an important distinction between regime stability that comes about through legitimacy and that which derives fr…
Constructivism All the Way Down
The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory
A challenger to the continuing dominance of neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism in the study of international relations in the United States, constructivism is regarded with a great deal of skepticism by mainstream scholars.1 While the reasons for this reception are many, three central ones are the mainstream's miscasting of constructivism as necessarily postmodern and antipositivist; constructivism's own ambivalence about whether it can b…
Peripheral Visions: Deterrence Theory and American Foreign Policy in the Third World, 1965-1990
Managing the Post-Soviet Security Space: A Continuing Demand for Behavioral Regimes
(1994). Managing the Post-Soviet Security Space: A Continuing Demand for Behavioral Regimes. Security Studies: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 242-280
Getting the End of the Cold War Wrong
Gaddis has done the field of international relations theory a great service by pointing out that its practitioners were unable to predict the peaceful end of the Cold War. However, I believe that Gaddis has misdiagnosed the problem, and that therefore he has suggested solutions that are unlikely to produce better predictions for theories of international relations in the future. Gaddis argues that the stock of theories available to scholars was l…
Polarity and International Stability
In his article in the June 1991 issue of thisReview, Ted Hopf challenged the argument that bipolar systems are inherently more stable than multipolar configurations of power. He reported that the international situation in sixteenth century Europe became only marginally more stable with a shift from a multipolar to a bipolar system. He argued for attention to the offensive-defensive balance, rather than systemic polarity. Manus Midlarsky accounts…
Managing Soviet Disintegration: A Demand for Behavioral Regimes
Polarity, the Offense-Defense Balance, and War
Bipolar systems are inherently more stable than multipolar configurations of power, Kenneth Waltz argues. His empirical justification for this conclusion relies on the multipolar systems that preceded the two world wars and the bipolar Cold War. The weakness of Waltz's argument is the small number of cases and the failure to consider alternative explanations for different levels of war in the three periods. In another historical period of both mu…
The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory
A challenger to the continuing dominance of neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism in the study of international relations in the United States, constructivism is regarded with a great deal of skepticism by mainstream scholars.1 While the reasons for this reception are many, three central ones are the mainstream's miscasting of constructivism as necessarily postmodern and antipositivist; constructivism's own ambivalence about whether it can b…
Social construction of international politics: Identities & foreign policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999
The logic of habit in International Relations
IR theory is dominated by the logics of consequentialism and appropriateness. But Max Weber offered four logics of choice, not just two. Beyond the instrumental rationality of Zweckrationalität and the normative rationality of Wertrationalität are affect and habit. Drawing on Weber, James, Dewey, and Bourdieu, and habit’s microfoundations in neurocognitive psychology, I explore the logic of habit and its consequences for several fundamental puzzl…
Change in international practices
This article builds on the practice turn's welcome move to redirect our attention to the unconscious habitual practices that constitute most of daily social life, including in world politics. Since International Relations practice theorists continue to resort to arguments that include deliberate reflection, I try to clarify the relationship between going on in the world automatically and proceeding with conscious reflection. Beyond providing scop…
Common-sense Constructivism and Hegemony in World Politics
The IR literature on hegemony rarely combines attention to material power and ideas. Cox's neo-Gramscian work is a rare exception, but it too narrowly construes Gramsci's conceptualization of common sense, reducing it to elite views on political economy. But Gramsci argued that hegemony had to reckon with mass quotidian common sense. If political elites do not take into account the taken-for-granted world of the masses, elite ideological projects…
The Distribution of Identity and the Future of International Order: China's Hegemonic Prospects
Existing theories predict that the rise of China will trigger a hegemonic transition and the current debate centers on whether or not the transition will be violent or peaceful. This debate largely sidesteps two questions that are central to understanding the future of international order: how strong is the current Western hegemonic order and what is the likelihood that China can or will lead a successful counterhegemonic challenge? We argue that…
Polarity, the Offense-Defense Balance, and War
Bipolar systems are inherently more stable than multipolar configurations of power, Kenneth Waltz argues. His empirical justification for this conclusion relies on the multipolar systems that preceded the two world wars and the bipolar Cold War. The weakness of Waltz's argument is the small number of cases and the failure to consider alternative explanations for different levels of war in the three periods. In another historical period of both mu…
Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn . Edited by Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea. (M.E. Sharpe, 2006)
Crimea is ours: A discursive history
Russia could have annexed Crimea anytime in the last 25 years. The fact that it did so only in March 2014 is a puzzle. I argue that the predominant discourse of Russian national identity by 2014 made the annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine both thinkable and natural to Moscow. A history of the discursive terrain of Russia from 1992 to 2014 shows how Russia's national identity has evolved over the years, both in respo…
Identity, legitimacy, and the use of military force: Russia’s Great Power identities and military intervention in Abkhazia
An action is legitimate if the pertinent community deems it so. Most would agree that Russia’s conduct in the 1990s in Georgia was illegitimate. Military intervention in another state, unless the other state is preparing an imminent attack on one’s own territory, or is engaged in the systematic abuse of one’s own citizens, is a violation of the international norm of sovereignty, at a minimum. Some have argued that European politics has gone beyon…
Making the Future Inevitable: Legitimizing, Naturalizing and Stabilizing. The Transition in Estonia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan
In discussions of post-communist transitional politics, it is common-place to find arguments that attribute regime stability to a government's capacity to legitimize its policies. And the most robust source of such legitimacy is often adduced to economic achievements appreciated by the public. But many political theorists have developed an important distinction between regime stability that comes about through legitimacy and that which derives fr…
Everyday Nationalism and Making Identity Count
The literature on “everyday nationalism” foregrounds constructivist practice theory as well as interpretivist methodologies. Our project—Making Identity Count—does something similar but with an aim to advance the study of International Relations rather than the study of nationalism. Here, we suggest that these two approaches are basically complementary, and that a theoretical and methodological cross-fertilization between them may yield new insig…
Getting the End of the Cold War Wrong
Gaddis has done the field of international relations theory a great service by pointing out that its practitioners were unable to predict the peaceful end of the Cold War. However, I believe that Gaddis has misdiagnosed the problem, and that therefore he has suggested solutions that are unlikely to produce better predictions for theories of international relations in the future. Gaddis argues that the stock of theories available to scholars was l…
Polarity and International Stability
In his article in the June 1991 issue of thisReview, Ted Hopf challenged the argument that bipolar systems are inherently more stable than multipolar configurations of power. He reported that the international situation in sixteenth century Europe became only marginally more stable with a shift from a multipolar to a bipolar system. He argued for attention to the offensive-defensive balance, rather than systemic polarity. Manus Midlarsky accounts…
Constructivism All the Way Down
Managing Soviet Disintegration: A Demand for Behavioral Regimes
Peripheral Visions: Deterrence Theory and American Foreign Policy in the Third World, 1965-1990
Managing the Post-Soviet Security Space: A Continuing Demand for Behavioral Regimes
(1994). Managing the Post-Soviet Security Space: A Continuing Demand for Behavioral Regimes. Security Studies: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 242-280
Polarity, the Offense-Defense Balance, and War
Bipolar systems are inherently more stable than multipolar configurations of power, Kenneth Waltz argues. His empirical justification for this conclusion relies on the multipolar systems that preceded the two world wars and the bipolar Cold War. The weakness of Waltz's argument is the small number of cases and the failure to consider alternative explanations for different levels of war in the three periods. In another historical period of both mu…
Managing Soviet Disintegration: A Demand for Behavioral Regimes
Getting the End of the Cold War Wrong
Gaddis has done the field of international relations theory a great service by pointing out that its practitioners were unable to predict the peaceful end of the Cold War. However, I believe that Gaddis has misdiagnosed the problem, and that therefore he has suggested solutions that are unlikely to produce better predictions for theories of international relations in the future. Gaddis argues that the stock of theories available to scholars was l…
Polarity and International Stability
In his article in the June 1991 issue of thisReview, Ted Hopf challenged the argument that bipolar systems are inherently more stable than multipolar configurations of power. He reported that the international situation in sixteenth century Europe became only marginally more stable with a shift from a multipolar to a bipolar system. He argued for attention to the offensive-defensive balance, rather than systemic polarity. Manus Midlarsky accounts…
Managing the Post-Soviet Security Space: A Continuing Demand for Behavioral Regimes
(1994). Managing the Post-Soviet Security Space: A Continuing Demand for Behavioral Regimes. Security Studies: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 242-280
Peripheral Visions: Deterrence Theory and American Foreign Policy in the Third World, 1965-1990
The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory
A challenger to the continuing dominance of neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism in the study of international relations in the United States, constructivism is regarded with a great deal of skepticism by mainstream scholars.1 While the reasons for this reception are many, three central ones are the mainstream's miscasting of constructivism as necessarily postmodern and antipositivist; constructivism's own ambivalence about whether it can b…
Constructivism All the Way Down
Social construction of international politics: Identities & foreign policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999
Making the Future Inevitable: Legitimizing, Naturalizing and Stabilizing. The Transition in Estonia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan
In discussions of post-communist transitional politics, it is common-place to find arguments that attribute regime stability to a government's capacity to legitimize its policies. And the most robust source of such legitimacy is often adduced to economic achievements appreciated by the public. But many political theorists have developed an important distinction between regime stability that comes about through legitimacy and that which derives fr…
Identity, legitimacy, and the use of military force: Russia’s Great Power identities and military intervention in Abkhazia
An action is legitimate if the pertinent community deems it so. Most would agree that Russia’s conduct in the 1990s in Georgia was illegitimate. Military intervention in another state, unless the other state is preparing an imminent attack on one’s own territory, or is engaged in the systematic abuse of one’s own citizens, is a violation of the international norm of sovereignty, at a minimum. Some have argued that European politics has gone beyon…
Russia's European Choice
Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn . Edited by Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea. (M.E. Sharpe, 2006)
Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists
The concept of identity has become increasingly prominent in the social sciences and humanities. Analysis of the development of social identities is an important focus of scholarly research, and scholars using social identities as the building blocks of social, political, and economic life have attempted to account for a number of discrete outcomes by treating identities as causal factors. The dominant implication of the vast literature on identi…
The logic of habit in International Relations
IR theory is dominated by the logics of consequentialism and appropriateness. But Max Weber offered four logics of choice, not just two. Beyond the instrumental rationality of Zweckrationalität and the normative rationality of Wertrationalität are affect and habit. Drawing on Weber, James, Dewey, and Bourdieu, and habit’s microfoundations in neurocognitive psychology, I explore the logic of habit and its consequences for several fundamental puzzl…
Reconstructing the Cold WarThe Early Years, 1945-1958: The Early Years, 1945 - 1958
General answers are hard to imagine for the puzzling questions that are raised by Soviet relations with the world in the early years of the Cold War. Why was Moscow more frightened by the Marshall Plan than the Truman Doctrine? Why would the Soviet Union abandon its ally, Yugoslavia, just when the Cold War was starting? How could Khrushchev's de-Stalinized domestic and foreign policies at first cause a warming of relations with China, and then le…
Common-sense Constructivism and Hegemony in World Politics
The IR literature on hegemony rarely combines attention to material power and ideas. Cox's neo-Gramscian work is a rare exception, but it too narrowly construes Gramsci's conceptualization of common sense, reducing it to elite views on political economy. But Gramsci argued that hegemony had to reckon with mass quotidian common sense. If political elites do not take into account the taken-for-granted world of the masses, elite ideological projects…
Crimea is ours: A discursive history
Russia could have annexed Crimea anytime in the last 25 years. The fact that it did so only in March 2014 is a puzzle. I argue that the predominant discourse of Russian national identity by 2014 made the annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine both thinkable and natural to Moscow. A history of the discursive terrain of Russia from 1992 to 2014 shows how Russia's national identity has evolved over the years, both in respo…
The Distribution of Identity and the Future of International Order: China’s Hegemonic Prospects
Existing theories predict that the rise of China will trigger a hegemonic transition and the current debate centers on whether or not the transition will be violent or peaceful. This debate largely sidesteps two questions that are central to understanding the future of international order: how strong is the current Western hegemonic order and what is the likelihood that China can or will lead a successful counter-hegemonic challenge? We argue tha…
Change in international practices
This article builds on the practice turn's welcome move to redirect our attention to the unconscious habitual practices that constitute most of daily social life, including in world politics. Since International Relations practice theorists continue to resort to arguments that include deliberate reflection, I try to clarify the relationship between going on in the world automatically and proceeding with conscious reflection. Beyond providing scop…
The Distribution of Identity and the Future of International Order: China's Hegemonic Prospects
Existing theories predict that the rise of China will trigger a hegemonic transition and the current debate centers on whether or not the transition will be violent or peaceful. This debate largely sidesteps two questions that are central to understanding the future of international order: how strong is the current Western hegemonic order and what is the likelihood that China can or will lead a successful counterhegemonic challenge? We argue that…
Everyday Nationalism and Making Identity Count
The literature on “everyday nationalism” foregrounds constructivist practice theory as well as interpretivist methodologies. Our project—Making Identity Count—does something similar but with an aim to advance the study of International Relations rather than the study of nationalism. Here, we suggest that these two approaches are basically complementary, and that a theoretical and methodological cross-fertilization between them may yield new insig…
Conceptualizing International Practices: Directions for the Practice Turn in International Relations
This book brings together the key scholars in the international practice debate to demonstrate its strengths as an innovative research perspective. The contributions show the benefit of practice theories in the study of phenomena in international security, international political economy and international organisation, by directing attention to concrete and observable everyday practices that shape international outcomes. The chapters exemplify th…
Conceptualizing International Practices: Directions for the Practice Turn in International Relations
Political science (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (18 works) · Sociology (14 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)