Dark times require that we peer deeply into the darkness, and we seem to live in times where the will and ability to peer into the darkness is increasingly vital. Much that has been taken as progress in politics both domestic and international seems at risk of unravelling. Most strikingly, across the globe radical conservative and avowedly ‘neo-reactionary’ movements are challenging the principles, practices, and institutions of the liberal world order that (for better or worse) for at least a quarter of a century seemed firmly ‘embedded’ as the dominant international order – with often worrying success. Autocracy, illiberal democracy, racial exclusion, and extreme nationalism – to name but a few – are today powerful forces in world politics. Democracy, human rights, toleration, and even civility are on the back foot in many places, and in rapid retreat in others.

Despite these pressing challenges, the main traditions of thought in IR and international political theory (IPT) seem largely ill-equipped to respond to them. Most liberal-rationalist theories have lost their ability to understand the ideas, interests, and emotions associated with today’s right wing and other ‘populist’ movements, never mind to address them. Conventional constructivists and postmodernists might well be able to trace and record the contours of reactionary ‘populisms’, but it is far from clear that they have the tools for assessing their claims, not to mention confronting them. In the face of radically reactionary strategies that take as their foundation the claim that ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’, the unspoken optimism that has often accompanied these views looks suspiciously thin. Realism, with its focus on the gloomier prospects of politics, its stress on nations and their clashes of interest and power, seems on the surface better attuned to the shifting geopolitical landscape – but, at least in its ‘structural’ forms, it has (and can have) little to say about the deeper political questions involved and the challenges they raise, including their extreme nationalism and alternative visions of international order. And while ‘classical’ realism may be more well equipped to provide a basis for such an engagement, few of its recent proponents have shown much inclination to do so.