Following growing academic interest and activism targeting gender bias in university curricula, we present the first analysis of female exclusion in a complete IR curriculum, across degree levels and disciplinary subfields. Previous empirical research on gender bias in the teaching materials of IR has been limited in scope, i.e. restricted to PhD curricula, non-random sampling, small sample sizes, or predominately US-focused. By contrast, this study uses an original dataset of 43 recent syllabi comprising the entire IR curriculum at the London School of Economics to investigate the gender gap in the discipline's teaching materials. We find evidence of bias that reproduces patterns of female exclusion: 79.2% of texts on reading lists are authored exclusively by men, reflecting neither the representation of women in the professional discipline nor in the published discipline. We find that level of study, subfield, and course convener gender and seniority matter. First, female author inclusion improves as the level of study progresses from undergraduate to PhD. This suggests the rigid persistence of a "traditional IR canon" at the earliest disciplinary stage. Second, the International Organisations/Law subfield is more gender-inclusive than Security or Regional Studies, while contributions from Gender/Feminist Studies are dominated by female authorship. These patterns are suggestive of gender-stereotyping within subfields. Third, female-authored readings are assigned less frequently by male and/or more senior course conveners. Tackling gender bias in the taught discipline must therefore involve a careful consideration of the linkages between knowledge production and dissemination, institutional hiring and promotion, and pedagogical practices.

This introduction presents the special issue’s conceptual and empirical starting points and situates the special issue’s intended contributions. It does so by reviewing extant scholarship on electoral rhetoric and foreign policy and by teasing out several possible linkages between elections, rhetoric and foreign policy. It also discusses how each contribution to the special issue seeks to illuminate causal mechanisms at work in these linkages. Finally, it posits that these linkages are crucial to examining the changes brought about by Trump’s election and his foreign policy rhetoric.

This article conceptualises the production of foreign policy bullshit in electoral contexts as a result of contending incentives towards ambiguity and specificity. Candidates must speak to widely divergent, even contradictory, policy ideas to maximise voter share in primaries and elections. At the same time, overly broad rhetoric or evasion risks signalling incompetence and unsuitability for office. Candidates are thus incentivized to hide the compromise character of their suggestions behind hyper-specific rhetoric. Following literature from philosophy and linguistics, this is a form of deception best captured by ‘bullshit’, that is, when the candidate simply does not care too much whether what they are saying matches with objective reality but does care that this inattention to truth is not known to the audience. This dynamic is illustrated in a case study on the 2015/2016 elections. Specifically, bipartisan support for a US-enforced no-fly zone in Syria cannot be explained by the tool’s likely utility and effectiveness. Instead, the tool’s value for many candidates lay in its effective communication of contradictory policy ideas. The tool allowed presidential hopefuls to appear resolute yet responsible, purposive yet pragmatic, idealist, and realist, while also signalling specificity and thus foreign policy expertise.

Ideational variables have frequently been employed in positivist-minded and materialist analyses of state behaviour. Almost inevitably, because of these commitments, such studies run into theoretical challenges relating to the use of ideas. In this article, I suggest that integrating ideational factors in positivist and materialist approaches to state behaviour requires: (1) distinguishing conceptually between interests and ideation as well as between individual beliefs and social ideas; and (2) addressing challenges of operationalisation and measurability. To that end, I employ neoclassical realism as a case study. I argue that a re-conceptualisation of ideas as externalised individual beliefs employed in political deliberation allows neoclassical realists to focus on how ideas and ideational competition intervene in the transmission belt from materially given interests to foreign policy choice. At the same time, it more clearly operationalises ideas as identifiable in language and communication. I suggest this reconceptualisation, while consistent with realist paradigmatic assumptions, need not be limited to neoclassical realism. Instead, transposed to different paradigms, it would similarly allow positivist-minded constructivists and institutionalists to avoid a conceptually and methodologically awkward equation of different ideational factors.

Buffer zones as a concept have a long history. Despite their frequent occurrence in international relations past and present, however, they have been treated in passing by scholars and policymakers alike, and then usually from a purely historical perspective. Their importance in conflict management, third-party intervention and power politics are not adequately mirrored in scholarly research. This article seeks to remedy this lapse by reintroducing the buffer zone as a tool of international conflict management in a new and systematic fashion. In this article, we survey buffer zones, their conceptual roots and characteristics, and illustrate our theoretical findings with an array of different examples-predominantly from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In so doing, we make three fundamental arguments about buffer zones.