The rise of regulation is perhaps one of the most critical transformations of the capitalist system. Not surprisingly, this development has triggered a surge in the interest in regulation in social and political sciences since the 1990s. A contested notion, regulation can denote different meanings and can be understood in different ways. Given this multiplicity of meanings, studying regulatory cooperation requires exploring some fundamental elements to understand the main concepts and approaches used, and to capture its multiple levels and dimensions. The adopted denominations and utilized concepts are many—“regional regulatory cooperation,” “regional regulatory regime,” “regional regulatory integration,” “regulatory regionalism,” and “regional regulatory governance,” among others—and each captures, in its own way, particular dimensions or aspects of the field. In terms of levels, whereas a rich and dense literature has attested to the fact that global governance increasingly proceeds through transnational regulations, studies with a focus on the regional level are scant, especially when compared to the former, and remain scattered under various labels and denominations. However, regulatory cooperation leads to the creation of regulatory spaces that blur the distinction not only between the national and global arenas, but also between the national and the regional. Studies have thus translated these theoretical claims into empirical research showing that there is a growing regulatory cooperation space at the regional level, where various constellations of actors and networks that bridge the state and nonstate, and public and private, distinctions operate across levels and policy sectors. Analyses and scholarship on regulation and regulatory cooperation have made relevant progress, and in so doing, they have opened new avenues for research to explore and understand the place and role of regulatory cooperation and regions in a complex regulatory world.
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Regulatory Cooperation and International Relations
Andrea C. Bianculli
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Reimagining Africa: A Continent in Transition and Its Implications for World Order
Clement Adibe
Africa has made significant progress at home and on the world stage that belies its image as the backwater of the global system. Far from being marginalized, African states have exercised their agency in the international system through an extensive mechanism of institutionalized diplomacy—anchored on the African Union (AU)—that they have forged over several decades of collective action. Changes are taking place in 21st-century Africa as a result of these collective efforts. Socioeconomic data from the African Development Bank, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the United Nations, and the World Bank, indicate the economic, political, and demographic forces that are remaking Africa. Finally, the changes in Africa have implications for the evolving world order. Objective conditions warrant a reimagining of Africa as an agent in the international system, rather than as a passive victim of a predatory, anarchical order. Current challenges facing the post-war liberal international order make such reimagination imperative.
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Relational Theories in International Relations
Emilian Kavalski
Based on the conviction that global life outlines a complex mesh of contingent interactions, the contributions to the relational turns in international relations (IR) draw attention to the ongoing interpenetration between agency, structure, and order among the diversity of agency, form, and matter implicated in, enacting, and enabling global life. Inhabiting a relational universe reveals the interdependence between international actors and also their mutual implication in each other’s interactions and roles, in addition to the overwhelming embeddedness of these relations in the world. The relational research agenda has sought simultaneously to unravel the atomistic individualism dominating the IR mainstream and reimagine the international as a dynamic space for dialogical learning, which promises a world that is less hegemonic, more democratic, and equitable. Two of the dominant trends that have come to define the “relational revolution” in IR are the simultaneous decentering of its Eurocentrism and its anthropocentrism. As such, the relational knowledge production underpinning the study of global life mandates tolerance of at least as much diversity and contradictions as evident in the social relations being narrated.
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Republicanism
Richard Bellamy and Hannah McHugh
Republicanism rests on the insight that justice entails the fair distribution of political and social power. As a result, it emphasizes the importance of civic virtue and political participation and favors a political system involving a mixed constitution and the rule of law. However, whereas a neo-Aristotelian tradition of republicanism, going back to ancient Greece, involves an ethical naturalist theory of positive liberty, which views political participation as necessary for self-mastery, a later, neo-Roman, republican tradition, associated with Cicero, Machiavelli, Harrington, and (more contentiously) Rousseau and Kant, involves a theory of negative liberty as freedom from mastery. The most prominent contemporary republican program, associated with Philip Pettit, develops this latter, neo-Roman, account. It characterizes political liberty as a condition of nondomination or independence from arbitrary power. It distinguishes this conception from both liberal conceptions of negative freedom and neo-Aristotelian conceptions of positive freedom. Accordingly, neo-Roman republicanism focuses on the role of power imbalances in creating domination and explores how a condition may be created, both domestically and internationally, that reduces the capacity for agents and agencies to interfere arbitrarily in the decisions of individuals and the collectivities, notably states, to which they belong. This focus allows republican theorists to offer accounts of domination and nondomination along both a vertical dimension, such as that which arises between the rulers and the ruled, on the one hand, and a horizontal dimension, such as that which arises between rich and poor citizens within a polity, on the other. Republicanism provides a normative language able to engage with and criticize certain features of the international world. This engagement and critique addresses not only the exercise of power by states over the citizens of other states as well as their own but also the influence of corporate actors operating across states and the economic structures and relations they create between the various agents acting within them. As such, republicanism provides a powerful tool for analyzing the current global economic and social order as well as the global political order. Moreover, it can link the two to explore how the maldistribution of political and economic power interact to create injustice. This perspective has informed recent republican-inspired critiques of colonialism and neoliberal processes of globalization.
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Responding to Refugee and Humanitarian Crises
Daniel Warner and Georg von Kalckreuth
The term “refugee crisis” is used throughout the literature to refer to situations where large numbers of refugees or displaced persons more generally are present, whereas “humanitarian crisis” refers to situations where the lives, health, safety or well-being of a large number of people are at substantial risk. The term “complex emergency” is defined as “a humanitarian crisis typically characterized by extensive violence and loss of life, massive displacements of people, widespread damage to societies and economies, and hindrance of humanitarian assistance by security risks and political and military constraints.” A typical complex emergency consists of one or more humanitarian and refugee crises, regardless of their actual causes, and necessitates an international and United Nations system-wide response because of its complexity. Humanitarian and refugee crises have often generated international response efforts that were intended to help affected individuals, alleviate their suffering, and restore their situation from the plight of crisis to some level of normality. In addition to the UN and its specialized agencies, international responses bring together a large and diverse set of actors such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and its national societies, national and international nongovernmental organizations, and the governments of third states. Their responses have drawn scholarly interest, especially after World War II. However, the literature on international responses to humanitarian and refugee crises does not offer a comprehensive and exhaustive scholarly treatment of the issue. This is an obvious gap that needs to be addressed in future research.
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Risk Preferences and War
Christopher Schwarz and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Despite a long legacy within the study of international politics, risk preference remains an understudied source of behavioral variation. This is most apparent within the study of violent conflict, which, being inherently risky, might be naturally explained by variation in the preferences of the actors involved. Rather than taking this seemingly obvious route, much of the formal theoretic literature continues to assume that the actors under consideration are either risk neutral or risk adverse. This blind spot is troubling since the effects of variables on outcomes generally reverse when risk preferences move from adverse to seeking, a generally unrecognized scope condition for many theoretical results. There are three central reasons why risk preferences have been neglected within the recent literature despite their theoretical and empirical importance. First, there is a sociological pathology within the field where the seeming obviousness of risk preference as an explanation for war has led to its lack of attention. Second, many formal applications of risk preference become quickly intractable, indicating a deficiency in the formal architecture available to modelers. Third, until recently, risk preferences have generally been assumed rather than explained, with this theoretical underdevelopment leading to intellectual discomfort in the use of the concept. Under the shadow of these problems, the study of risk preference as an explanation for war has gone through three intellectual periods. Starting in the late 1970s, the concept of risk preference was introduced to the field and applied widely to the phenomenon of war. This cumulative development abruptly ended in the early 1990s with the wide adoption of prospect theory and the undue dismissal of risk preference as a nonrationalist explanation for war. Under these conditions, the field bifurcated into two more or less isolated groups of scholars: political psychologists using nonformal versions of prospect theory and heuristic definitions of risk preference, on the one side, and rationalistic formal modelers universally assuming risk-neutral or risk-averse preferences, on the other. By the early 2000s, the wave of informal applications of prospect theory began to subside, carrying with it the use of risk preference as an explanation for war. By 2010, the concept had all but disappeared from the literature. Following this decade of silence, the concept of risk preference was reintroduced to the field in the early 2020s and has been demonstrated to explain some of the major empirical findings from 1990 to 2020. This reintroduction holds the potential for providing unified theoretical foundations for increasingly wide swaths of the conflict literature and may provide a rich basis for the derivation of novel empirical implications.
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Rogue State Behavior
Nikolaos Lampas
“Outcasts,” “pariah states,” “outlaw states,” “rogue states,” “terrorist sponsor states,” “states of concern,” “axis of evil”. … Throughout the history of the discipline of international relations, these terms have been used to describe a small group of states that have been marginalized by the international community due to their aggressive behavior. The concept of rogue states is by no means new. Historically, rogue entities included countries like Russia, during the Bolshevik era, and South Africa during the Cold War. Since the end of the Cold War, the international community has become much more concerned about the threat of rogue states. The reason for that relates to the combined effect of transnational terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
In their simplest form, “rogue states” can be defined as aggressive states that seek to upset the balance of power of the international system either by acquiring weapons of mass destruction or by sponsoring international terrorism. However, this definition is problematic because the international community has consistently misapplied the criteria designating a rogue state and, in many cases, has effectively elevated the threat originating from these countries. Therefore, the existing literature has devoted significant attention to answering the following questions: How is a “rogue state” defined? How did the concept of “rogue states” evolve over time? How can the threat of “rogue states” be dealt with? The related literature focuses on a broad range of issues, from the objectivity of the designation to the efficacy of countermeasures against these states. It includes authors who write from realist, liberalist, critical, rationalist, culturalist, structuralist, and postcolonial perspectives, among others.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the concept of “rogue states” relates to the fact that the United States labeled them as one of the most important threats to the stability of the international system. For the United States, “rogue states” replaced the threat of the Soviet Union, as evidenced by the transformation of U.S. national security policy following the demise of its former rival. However, unlike the Soviet Union, in the perception of the United States, “rogue states” were undeterrable and difficult to bargain with. Moreover, the United States argued that “rogue states” held a fundamentally different vision of the international community. Countries like Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Libya became the epicenter of the U.S. national security strategy. However, the United States continues to define “rogue states” based on their external characteristics, and this has contributed to the adoption of largely inconsistent policies that exacerbated their threat. Therefore, the contemporary use of the “rogue state” label is essentially an American creation, a way for the United States to reassess the post–Cold War security environment and structure its foreign and national security policies. Most of the international community has avoided adopting this narrative and the policies that it justified.
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Russian Theory of International Relations
Andrei P. Tsygankov and Pavel A. Tsygankov
Unique features of Russia’s perspectives on international politics as practice can be obtained quite clearly through the investigation of the debates on Russian foreign policy orientations. Russian foreign policy has been framed out of identity politics among different political factions under highly politicized conditions. Structural changes in international politics in the 1990s complicated internal reforms in Russia and the aggravation of socio-economic conditions due to the rapid reforms which intensified conflicts between conservatives and progressives in Russian domestic politics. Unfortunately, the aspirations of Russian reformist elites to make Russia strong could not reconcile with the conservative tendency the nation showed during the worsened economy in that period. This led to conflicting evaluations of Russian identity, which caused a fundamental shift in domestic sources for foreign policies. This transformed Russia’s perspectives on international politics, which brought about changes in its foreign policy orientation. Pro-Western Liberalism played a major role in defining Russian foreign policy under the A. Kozyrev doctrine, which defines Russia’s identity as one of the agents in the West-/US-centered system of liberal democracy and the market economy. Significant challenges to this pro-Western foreign policy came not only from outside, but also from internal changes that brought more fundamental changes to Russian foreign policy. This change should be understood within the cultural and institutional context of Russian society, since this framework determines the conceptualization of “national interest” and/or the formulation of diplomatic and security policies.
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Sea Power
Eric Grove
“Sea power” refers to the power exerted by a state through its capacity to use the sea for both military and civilian purposes. The ability to use the seas for transport and other civilian purposes such as fishing and, more recently, exploitation of resources on or under the sea bed has generated considerable debate. This has resulted in the notion that military power deployed at or from the sea is the key component of a state’s sea power. It was Alfred Thayer Mahan who first coined the term “sea power.” In his 1980 book “Influence,” Mahan outlined six “principal conditions affecting the sea power of nations”: geographical position, physical conformation, extent of territory, number of population, national character, and character of government. After Mahan, other writers advanced a variety of ideas regarding the concept of sea power, including Philip Colomb, who emphasized the importance of “command of the sea”; Sir Julian Corbett, who discussed the importance of maritime “lines of passage and communication” as “the preoccupation of naval strategy,” and control of such lines as the essence of “command of the sea”; and Sir Herbert Richmond, whose definition of sea power can be summed up as the “power to control movements at sea.” Others who have contributed to the scholarly literature on sea power include Raoul Castex, Bernard Brodie, Stephen Roskill, Sir Peter Gretton, Sir James Cable, Sergei G. Gorshkov, Paul Kennedy, Ken Booth, Richard Hill, and Geoffrey Till.
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Small States
Yee-Kuang Heng
Scholarship in international studies has usually tended to focus on the great powers. Yet, studying small state behavior can in fact reveal deep-seated structural changes in the international system and provide significant insights into the management of power asymmetries. Overcoming the methodological limitations of gigantism in scholarship and case study selection is another epistemological benefit. Rather than conventional assumptions of weaknesses and vulnerabilities, research on small states has moved in fascinating directions toward exploring the various strategies and power capabilities that small states must use to manage their relationships with great powers. This means, even in some cases, attempts to forcibly shape their external environments through military instruments not usually associated with the category of small states. Clearly, small states are not necessarily hapless or passive. Even in terms of power capabilities that often define their weaknesses, some small states have in fact adroitly deployed niche hard power military capabilities and soft power assets as part of their playbook. These small states have projected influence in ways that belie their size constraints. Shared philosophies and mutual learning processes tend to underpin small state strategies seeking to maximize whatever influence and power they have. These include forming coalitions, principled support for international institutions, and harnessing globalization to promote their development and security interests. As globalization has supercharged the rapid economic development of some small states, the vicissitudes that come with interdependence have also injected a new understanding of vulnerability beyond that of simply military conflict. To further complicate the security environment, strategic competition between the major powers inevitably impacts on small states. The return of conventional interstate war to Europe with Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in 2022 serves up a stark reminder of small states’ perennial concerns that “might makes right” in international relations. How small states boost their “relevance” vis-à-vis the great powers has broader implications for questions that have animated the academy, such as power transitions and the Thucydides Trap in the international system. While exogenous systemic variables no doubt remain the focus of analysis, emerging research shows how endogenous variables such as elite perceptions, geostrategic locations, and availability of military and economic resources can play a key role in determining the choices small states make.
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The Sources of International Disorder
Aaron McKeil
Debates on the decline and future of the “liberal” international order have produced increasing interest in the concept and sources of disorder in world politics. While the sources of disorder in world politics remain debated and pluralistic, the concept is increasingly used with more analytical clarity and theoretical interest. This growing research on the intended and unintended sources of disorder in world politics contributes to advancing thinking about the problem and future of international order in world politics.
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Sovereignty as a Problematic Conceptual Core
Rosemary E. Shinko
The concept of sovereignty has been the subject of vigorous debate among scholars. Sovereignty presents the discipline of international law with a host of theoretical and material problems regarding what it, as a concept, signifies; how it relates to the power of the state; questions about its origins; and whether sovereignty is declining, being strengthened, or being reconfigured. The troublesome aspects of sovereignty can be analyzed in relation to constructivist, feminist, critical theory, and postmodern approaches to the concept. The most problematic aspects of sovereignty have to do with its relationship to the rise and power of the modern state, and how to link the state’s material reality to philosophical discussions about the concept of sovereignty. The paradoxical quandary located at the heart of sovereignty arises from the question of what establishes law as constitutive of sovereign authority absent the presumption or exercise of sovereign power. Philosophical debates over sovereignty have attempted to account for the evolving structures of the state while also attempting to legitimate these emergent forms of rule as represented in the writings of Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. These writers document attempts to grapple with the problem of legitimacy and the so-called “structural and ideological contradictions of the modern state.” International law finds itself grappling with ever more nuanced and contradictory views of sovereignty’s continued conceptual relevance, which are partially reflective and partially constitutive of an ever more complex and paradoxical world.
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Spatial and Temporal Interdependence
Michael Colaresi and Jude C. Hays
Time and space are two dimensions that are likely to provide the paths—either singly or in tandem—by which international policy decisions are interdependent. There are several reasons to expect international relations processes to be interdependent across space, time, or both dimensions. Theoretical approaches such as rational expectations models, bureaucratic models of decision-making, and psychological explanations of international phenomena at least implicitly assume—and in many cases explicitly predict—dependence structures within data. One approach that researchers can use to test whether their international processes of interest are marked by dependence across time, space, or both time and space, is to explicitly model and interpret the hypothesized underlying dependence structures. There are two areas of spatial modeling at the research frontier: spatial models with qualitative and limited dependent variables, an co-evolution models of structure and behavior. These models have theoretical implications that are likely to be useful for international relations research. However, a gap remains between the kinds of empirical models demanded by international relations data and theory and the supply of time series and spatial econometric models that are available to those doing applied research. There is a need to develop appropriate models of temporal and spatial interdependence for qualitative and limited dependent variables, and for better models in which outcomes and structures of interdependence are jointly endogenous.
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Spatiality and World Politics
Duncan Weaver
Space has always animated world politics, but three spatial orientations are striking. First, the Westphalian orientation deems space a sovereign power container. Second, the scalar takes recourse to the local, regional, national, and global spaces in which world politics is played out. Third, the relational deems space a (re)produced, sociohistorically contingent phenomenon that changes according to the humans occupying it and the thought, power, and resources flowing through it. Under this latter orientation, space is lived, lived in and lived through. Whilst relationality, to a degree, calls into question the received wisdoms of International Relations (IR), the fixity of sovereignty and territory remain. The orientations coexist concomitantly, reflecting the “many worlds” humankind occupies.
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Sports Diplomacy: History, Theory, and Practice
Stuart Murray
Sports diplomacy is a new term that describes an old practice: the unique power of sport to bring people, nations, and communities closer together via a shared love of physical pursuits. This “power”—to bring strangers closer together, advance foreign policy goals or augment sport for development initiatives—remains elusive because of a lack of a robust theoretical framework. Four distinct theoretical frameworks are, however, beginning to emerge: traditional sports diplomacy, new sports diplomacy, sport-as-diplomacy, and sports antidiplomacy. As a result of these new frameworks, the complex landscape where sport, politics, and diplomacy overlap become clearer, as do the pitfalls of using sport as a tool for overcoming and mediating separation between people, nonstate actors, and states.
The power of sport has never been more important. So far, the 21st century has been dominated by disintegration, introspection, and the retreat of the nation-state from the globalization agenda. In such an environment, scholars, students, and practitioners of international relations are beginning to rethink how sport might be used to tackle climate change, gender inequality, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, for example. To boost these integrative, positive efforts is to focus on the means as well as the ends, that is, the diplomacy, plural networks, and processes involved in the role sport can play in tackling the monumental traditional and human security challenges of our time.
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Statistical Analysis of International Interdependencies
Michael D. Ward
The origin of the statistical analysis of international relations can be traced back to 1920s with the work of Quincy Wright, who founded the University of Chicago’s Committee on International Relations. He led an interdisciplinary study of war that provided a first compendium of what was then known about the causes of war. Wright's studies and those that came after them were based on the assumption that systematic data were required to advance our knowledge about the causes of violent conflicts, and that an analysis of the dynamics of strategic decision making were essential; in short, systematic data coupled with a theoretical framework that focused on the decision-making calculus. However, debates soon raged over whether this scientific approach was better than the classical approach, which was based on philosophy, history, and law, and did not conform to strict standards of verification and proof. Since then, the literature has evolved into studies with a strong theoretical motivation, often expressed via game theoretical analytics, examined empirically with statistical frameworks that are specifically sculpted to probe those strategic dependencies. As such, existing models have resolved the levels of analysis problem that appeared daunting to earlier generations by actually focusing on the modeling of aspects of world politics that enjoin many different levels simultaneously.
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Structural Realism/Offensive and Defensive Realism
Steven E. Lobell
Structural realism, or neorealism, is a theory of international relations that says power is the most important factor in international relations. First outlined by Kenneth Waltz in his 1979 book Theory of International Politics, structural realism is subdivided into two factions: offensive realism and defensive realism. Structural realism holds that the nature of the international structure is defined by its ordering principle, anarchy, and by the distribution of capabilities (measured by the number of great powers within the international system). The anarchic ordering principle of the international structure is decentralized, meaning there is no formal central authority. On the one hand, offensive realism seeks power and influence to achieve security through domination and hegemony. On the other hand, defensive realism argues that the anarchical structure of the international system encourages states to maintain moderate and reserved policies to attain security. Defensive realism asserts that aggressive expansion as promoted by offensive realists upsets the tendency of states to conform to the balance of power theory, thereby decreasing the primary objective of the state, which they argue is ensuring its security. While defensive realism does not deny the reality of interstate conflict, nor that incentives for state expansion do exist, it contends that these incentives are sporadic rather than endemic. Defensive realism points towards “structural modifiers” such as the security dilemma and geography, and elite beliefs and perceptions to explain the outbreak of conflict.
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The Study of International Relations in Chile
Lorena Oyarzún-Serrano and Claudia Fuentes-Julio
The fragmentation that characterizes International Relations (IR) at the global and Latin American levels is also present in Chile. When analyzing the development and state of the art of IR in Chile, it is clear that it has theoretical and methodological origins and influences from various other disciplines, generating different ways of understanding and practicing IR. This heterogeneity is one of IR’s main characteristics, and one of the consequences of this tendency toward fragmentation has been a limited dialogue between internationalists working in different study centers and universities as well as a lack of clear criteria for the minimum necessary requirements needed to create a community of Chilean internationalists. However, in the past decade, changes have occurred in Chile that can help to strengthen the discipline, such as the creation of new undergraduate and graduate programs, the incorporation of a new generation of academics who are questioning the role of the discipline and who are expressing openness in incorporating new topics to investigate, and various theoretical orientations and methodologies. Therefore, despite difficulties, it seems a recovery process has begun in strengthening IR as a discipline in Chile.
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Teaching International Relations Theory
Craig Douglas Albert
International relations (IR) theory is favorably described in almost every syllabus since 1930. The most important questions asked were: “What is theory?” and “Is there a reason for IR theory?” The most widely used texts all focus on the first question and suggest, among others, that IR theory is “a way of making the world or some part of it more intelligible or better understood.” We can gauge where the teaching of IR theory is today by analyzing a sample of syllabi from IR scholars serving on the Advisory Board of the International Studies Association’s (ISA) Compendium Project. These syllabi reveal some trends. Within the eight undergraduate syllabi, for example, a general introduction to IR theory is taught in four separate classes. Among the theories discussed in different classes are realism, classical realism, neo-realism, Marxism and neo-Marxism, world-systems theory, imperialism, constructivism, and international political economy. Novel methods for teaching IR theory include the use of films, active learning, and experiential learning. The diversity of treatments of IR theory implied by the ISA syllabi provides evidence that, with the exception of the proliferation of perspectives, relatively little has changed since the debates of the late 1930s. The discipline lacks much semblance of unity regarding whether, and how, to offer IR theory to students. Nevertheless, there have been improvements that are likely to continue in terms of the ways in which theories may be presented.
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Teaching International Relations Theory in Introductory Global Politics Courses
Jamie Frueh and Jeremy Youde
Theory can be a controversial element of an Introduction to International Relations (IR) course. Many undergraduate students have not been trained to think theoretically, and as a result many instructors find the abstract elements of IR theory difficult to teach, especially to students who lack the motivation provided by plans to major in political science or IR. But learning to think theoretically and to understand IR theory specifically is a valuable exercise for undergraduate students, particularly for nonmajors. Whether or not one believes IR theory to be good in and of itself, studying theory is a critical component of a complete liberal education, one that prepares students to be engaged global citizens. In addition to exploring effective ways to teach particular theories, instructors should work on making sense of the purpose of studying IR theory in ways that resonate with students. Learning IR theory requires students to think theoretically, something familiar to all who have survived the gauntlet of a doctoral program. Teaching students to think theoretically requires instructors, first, to empathize with the limited experience most undergraduate students have with academic theory, and second, to build learning environments that engage and authorize students as theoreticians. Utilizing active learning techniques and thoughtful assessment exercises, instructors can create environments more conducive to learning IR theory while engaging students in areas and media to which they are already connected. This approach to teaching requires adventurousness in the classroom and broader discussions about how to teach IR in general.
