The Virtues of Anarchy Reconsidered: Workshop hosted by the Centre for Advanced International Studies

The concept of anarchy remains under-theorised in International Relations (IR) despite being central to the discipline for over a century. IR has tended to elaborate or reject realist accounts of anarchy. Debate has therefore tended to polarise around the acceptance of the tragic logic of anarchy, attempts to tame its worst effects or to move beyond it altogether. If anarchy has any virtues, following Bull and Waltz most argue that these lie in the defence of the autonomy of states. This stance generates predictable responses that question the ontological and/or normative virtues of both statism and anarchy. But does a rejection of the former necessarily entail a rejection of the latter? Few have taken up Ken Booths challenge to see anarchy as part of the solution to the problems of world politics, rather than the problem itself, and fewer still see anarchy as the constitutive feature of politics as such. This workshop will draw together scholars conducting research that raises challenging questions regarding the virtues of anarchy, from within IR and without.