Introduction: Background ideas in international relations

Distinguishes five contending International Relations perspectives on background ideas Calls for more cross-fertilisation across perspectives to deal with conceptual challenges pertaining to backgrounds, agency, as well as change and persistence Summarises contributions to forum The actors we study do not reflect upon their background ideas. They simply take them for granted. Precisely because of this taken-for-grantedness, these ideas are very powerful. They shape world politics in profound ways. The discipline of International Relations has neglected background ideas for a long time. In the last two decades, however, a heterogeneous cluster of research has developed that inquires into what constitutes background ideas, how backgrounds affect politics, and how they come to change. The purpose of this special forum is to take stock of the current state of research, to make authors embracing different perspectives on background ideas engage with one another’s arguments, and thus to improve our explanatory and normative understandings of backgrounds in world politics.