This paper considers the postmodern concept of agonism and its relationship to the concept of peace. Connolly's concept of `agonistic respect' is seminal in this regard because it can be argued that such a formulation gestures towards an iteration of postmodern peace. However, this paper will reread Connolly's version of agonism through Foucault's analytic of war and peace to draw attention not only to Connolly's own deeply entrenched indebtedness to `liberal peace' but to indicate why Foucault's more expansive analytic of agonism is better suited to interrogating international relations' most intractable sources of conflict. I seek to reposition the discussion of agonism in such a way that it opens up a critical research agenda with the potential to resist the trap wherein peace emerges as just another tactic for reinscribing hegemonic structures of domination, exclusion, and marginalisation. The implications of such an approach are significant because it ultimately requires that we problematise considerations of respect and recognition when we approach the study of conflicts and that we self-reflexively question our own moral analytical frameworks embedded in the structural components of the peace we strive to create.

This collection of essays seeks to theorize the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic in international relations (IR). The contributions are driven by questions such as: How can theorizing help us understand these unsettled times? What kind of crisis is this? What shapes its politics? What remains the same and what has been unsettled or unsettling? In addressing such questions, each of the participants considers what we may already know about the pandemic as well as what might be ignored or missed. Collectively, the forum pushes at the interdisciplinary boundaries of IR theorizing itself and, in so doing, the participants hope to engender meaningful understandings of a world in crisis and encourage expansive ways of thinking about the times that lie beyond.

This article is about the analytical divide that separates realism and postmodernism in International Relations. Written by a realist (Sterling-Folker), and a postmodernist (Shinko), it seeks to traverse the divide between them through a discussion of how the perspective of each represents and makes sense of power. It does so within the context of an empirical case study: the China-Taiwan relationship. Comparing and contrasting how each perspective conceptualises power in its empirical practice and application forces both to grapple with the possibility of a simultaneity of stasis and change, and thus forces both to confront the relationship of constitutive structure and history in their own representations of the world. If our goal is to understand power and the discursive frames we choose to describe it, then the philosophical avenues obscured by the standard realist-postmodern divide are worth traversing.

This article describes an experientially based approach to the teaching/ learning of international relations (IR) theory. The course is designed with the pedagogical goal of decentering the classroom, which implies taking the focus off of the instructor and creating a more collaboratively oriented learning environment. Students actively engage in peer editing, and review of one another's written work, they work in small discussion/interpretive circles, they utilize the class website to create an international issues forum, they design, format, and participate in a mock conference at the end of the semester, and their capstone project involves the creation of their own IR theory writing portfolio. The theoretical perspectives of realism, liberalism, globalism, constructivism, feminism, and postmodernism are introduced as a series of ''lenses'' through which students will view various international issues, problems, and events. Our operative premise is that all international events are given meaning by their interpreters; therefore, the lens through which we view the world is crucial. This course is designed to introduce students to the work of the IR theorist in a collaborative and actively engaged educational setting.

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