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The article discusses Jens Bartelson's book "Becoming International," which explores the conceptualization of the international realm and its emergence as a shift from empires to states. Bartelson challenges existing transitionist accounts and emphasizes the role of non-European peoples in shaping the international realm. The article raises questions about the historical alternative to the international system of states and the definitions of empire and the international. It also critiques the use of the term "empire" in historical analysis and highlights the complexities of studying international relations before the modern era. [Extracted from the article]

From roughly 1988 to 2007, global banks faced strong regulatory incentives to lend to members of the OECD and those of the IMF's General Arrangements to Borrow (GAB), along with disincentives to lend to countries that belonged to neither of these groups. The culprit was the Basel Accord, also known as Basel I, a piece of banking regulation designed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) to regulate global banks' capital levels. Why did the BCBS create a 'club' of riskless sovereign borrowers, and why did it use OECD and GAB membership to do so? Relying on the archives of the BCBS, I first argue that the Basel Committee chose to design a club in response to European Community (EC) policies, which threatened a number of non-EC states on the Committee. Second, I argue that the BCBS chose to define the group through OECD membership because its members embodied a key set of criteria that it associated with creditworthiness. I conclude by outlining the implications of these findings for our understanding of the BCBS, as well as for our models of how central banks construct international hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bounded rationality and practice theory have both become popular theories of action for major strands of work in constructivist and rationalist International Relations (IR). Based on this observation, I make two arguments. The first is that although they underpin what are generally seen as opposed theoretical camps in IR, bounded rationality and practice theory share two fundamental assumptions. They both accept that how agents process information and make decisions depends on where they are situated in social space, and where they stand in historical time. In turn, these shared assumptions imply that they agree on the existence of a common type of change: change in terms of how groups of people process information and make decisions over time. My second argument is that by studying this type of change, it is possible to shed new light on major transformations of international relations, and that one way of engaging in this type of research is to study international practitioners' education over substantial time periods. With these arguments, this article makes a methodological contribution to the study of change in historical international relations and charts a practical course for pluralist dialogue in IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]