2011 Catalytic Workshop:
Language and the Politics of Grand Strategy

Workshop Chair: Ronald Krebs, University of Minnesota
Location: Hemon, Sheraton
Time: 8:30 AM - 6:00 PM, Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Workshop Summary

The proposed workshop would make a significant contribution to the study of rhetoric in international relations and foreign policy. First, there is currently no systematic study of rhetoric and grand strategy in the scholarly IR literature. Thus the workshop will fill an important substantive gap, especially because grand strategy has often been seen as a “hard case” for such “soft” factors as culture and language. Second, because the proposed workshop is tightly focused around both grand strategy and linguistic practices, it promises to facilitate greater theoretical and empirical engagement. Third, by bringing together a wide range of scholars—realists and liberals, rationalists and constructivists, positivists and post-positivists—we hope to promote a broad and rich disciplinary conversation about the relationship between material and social (including linguistic) structures and resources in international politics and foreign policy.

Workshop Participants (tentative)

  • Thierry Balzacq, University of Namur
  • Janice Bially Mattern, National University of Singapore
  • Charlotte Epstein, University of Sydney Australia
  • Stacie Goddard, Wellesley College
  • Markus Kornprobst, Vienna School of International Studies
  • Ronald Krebs, University of Minnesota
  • Christopher Layne, Texas A&M University
  • John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago
  • Jennifer Mitzen, Ohio State University
  • Jack Snyder, Columbia University
  • Vibeke Schou Tjalve, University of Copenhagen
  • Michael Williams, University of Ottawa
  • William Wohlforth, Dartmouth College