Hannah Arendt's approach to politics focuses on action and conduct, rather than institutions, constitutions, and states. Thus, Arendt's work offers a novel and interesting alternative to the ways in which agency and structure are understood in international relations. In light of Arendtian conceptions of politics, essays in this book challenge conventional IR theories. The contributions on agency explore concepts and categories of political action that enable individuals to act politically and to re-make the world in new, unpredictable ways. The contributions on structure explore how Arendt provides new critical purchase upon often reified structures and categories.

"Lots of us in the field of International Relations know something about Hannah Arendt - her inquiries into the pathologies of the 20th century, her bracing affirmation of public life, her own life as emigre and intellectual, her remarkable personal and intellectual affiliations. Yet few of us have seen the relevance of Arendt's work to our own. The great virtue of this book is to show that Arendt's construction of the world, and especially her effort to fit classical republican premises to contemporary circumstances, points up the pathologies of the field - its uncritical realism, liberal yearnings and moral myopia - in more ways than we might have imagined possible." - Nicholas Onuf, Florida International University