Repertoires of statecraft: instruments and logics of power politics
| Author | Daniel H Nexon,Stacie E Goddard,Paul K MacDonald |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117819834625 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Part Two: Norms and Process |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117819834625
International Relations
2019, Vol. 33(2) 304 –321
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117819834625
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Repertoires of statecraft:
instruments and logics of
power politics
Stacie E Goddard
Wellesley College
Paul K MacDonald
Wellesley College
Daniel H Nexon
Georgetown University
Abstract
Issues involving ‘statecraft’ lie at the heart of most major debates about world politics, yet scholars
do not go far enough in analyzing how the processes of statecraft themselves can reshape the
international system. We draw on the growing relational-processual literature in international
relations theory to explore how different modes of statecraft can help create and refashion the
structure of world politics. In particular, we argue that scholars should reconceive statecraft in
terms of repertoires. An emphasis on repertoires sheds light on a number of issues, including how
statecraft influences patterns of technological innovation, the construction of institutional and
normative orders, and the pathways through which states mobilize power in world politics.
Keywords
international order, international structure, networks, power politics, relationalism, repertoires,
statecraft, technological change
What is statecraft? Kalevi Holsti defines statecraft, in the context of international poli-
tics, ‘as the organized actions governments take to change the external environment in
general or the policies and actions of others states in particular to achieve the objectives
set by policymakers’.1 As Lauro Martines argues, there is a ‘stress on technique, on the
way matters of state are handled’.2 The tools of statecraft, then, combine instruments of
Corresponding author:
Daniel H Nexon, Georgetown University, Mortara Center for International Studies, 3600 N Street NW,
36th St NW, Washington, DC 20007 USA.
Email: dhn2@georgetown.edu
834625IRE0010.1177/0047117819834625International RelationsGoddard et al.
research-article2019
Article
Goddard et al. 305
power – such as various kinds of military, diplomatic, and economic capital – with the
strategic logics of their employment. Matters of statecraft concern the overall toolkit
available to states, the choice among those tools, and the effects of their use.3
The year 1919 marked an important moment for the study and practice of statecraft.
The Covenant of the League of Nations, negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference, repre-
sented an ambitious attempt to channel and regulate statecraft. In the eyes of many, the
catastrophe of the First World War discredited many existing tools of statecraft – from
secret alliances to war itself, which Clausewitz influentially brought within the fold of
statecraft by characterizing it as ‘politics by other means’.4 The League of Nations not
only actively sought to delimit forms of acceptable statecraft, but it also itself became a
site, and object, for statecraft.
The League of Nation’s failure to prevent another catastrophic great-power war did not
end efforts to control the toolkits of statecraft. The United Nations (UN) and the Bretton
Woods System – the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the development banks that would eventually form the
World Bank – aimed to shape how states pursued power and wealth, often to the benefit
of the leading powers. The expansion of international organizations and institutions,
including the creation of bureaucratized multilateral alliances accelerated and produced
– whether deliberately and inadvertently – mutations in statecraft. But the Cold War also
witnessed the development of ‘nuclear statecraft’,5 as well as the scaling up of covert tools
of statecraft. These included efforts by intelligence services to mount coup d’états and the
use of clandestine military intervention designed to conceal the role of great powers, such
as in the US-led overthrow in 1954 of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.6
Despite such darker sides of the post-war order, many observers and policymakers now
fret about the unraveling of the ‘liberal international order’ – that is, a reversion to an
environment characterized more by coarser, less rules-based forms of statecraft.7
Thus, issues involving ‘statecraft’ lie at the heart of most major debates about interna-
tional relations and world politics. Today, there is no dearth of work that deals with
statecraft – that studies how states wield military, economic, diplomatic, and even cul-
tural tools in order to expand their influence in international politics. Much of this litera-
ture explains variation in statecraft over time in terms of structural alterations in
international politics, changes within states, or both. These include growing political and
economic interdependence, the rise of international institutions, changes in norms gov-
erning appropriate state behavior, technological innovation, and shifts in underlying
capabilities enjoyed by specific states. At the same time, the concept of ‘statecraft’ enjoys
significantly less purchase than one might expect.8 It sometimes seems slightly musty, if
not downright anachronistic, in part because the field has expanded its focus beyond the
behavior of states.9 Yet even the scholarship that focuses on state action – whether coer-
cion, diplomacy, sanctions, propaganda, economic inducements, or alliances – does not
make much use of the term. There is currently no robust ‘statecraft’ research program in
the field. Put differently, we study statecraft all the time, but usually in fragmented and
partial ways.10
We argue that scholars of statecraft usefully center their focus on the tools of for-
eign policy, yet they do not go far enough in analyzing how the processes of statecraft
shape the international system. They should take a cue from the growing
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