Christian Reus-Smit

Reus-Smit was educated in Australia and the United States, receiving his B.A. and M.A. from La Trobe University in Melbourne. His M.A. dissertation concerned Australian foreign and security policy under during the Malcolm Fraser (1975–83) era. After completing his M.A. in the mid-1980s, he taught at La Trobe University. During the early-1990s, Reus-Smit undertook his PhD at Cornell University, along with other emerging constructivist scholars such as Audie Klotz and Richard Price. His doctoral dissertation was co-chaired by Peter J. Katzenstein and Henry Shue, and was later published as The Moral Purpose of the State in 1999 by Princeton University Press.

Reus-Smit returned to teach in Australia in 1995 and held positions as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at Monash University before taking up a position as Senior Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) in 2001, and was promoted to Professor in 2004. Reus-Smit served as Head of the Department of International Relations at the ANU from 2001 until 2010, and as Deputy Director of the ANU Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS) from 2006 to 2008. In September 2010 Reus-Smit moved to Florence to take up the Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute, and in 2013 was appointed to a Chair in International Relations at the University of Queensland, Australia. Reus-Smit is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Reus-Smit’s most significant contribution to the field is reflected in his answer to the question of the 'enigma of fundamental institutions,' laid out in 'The Moral Purpose of the State.' Here he analysed the different practices and norms of very different international societies, including ancient Greece, the Renaissance city-states and the modern states system. He argued that underpinning each is an assemblage of three elements that he refers to as 'constitutional structures.'

“Constitutional structures are coherent ensembles of intersubjective beliefs, principles and norms that perform two functions in ordering international societies: they define what constitutes a legitimate actor entitled to all the rights and privileges of statehood: and they define the basic parameters of rightful state action.”[1]

These three intersubjective, normative elements are:

1. A hegemonic belief about the moral purpose of the state [centralised, autonomous political organisation]
2. An organising principle of sovereignty
3. A norm of pure procedural justice

This hegemonic belief about the moral purpose of the state is arguably the most important, because it provides the normative basis on which the other two develop. As Reus-Smit puts it: ‘historically different international societies, in which different ideals of legitimate statehood prevailed, have developed different institutional orders, with multilateral diplomacy and contractual international law only emerging in a world where liberal states, and their principles of governance, have been ascendent’.[2]

Other early work explored the relationship between critical international theory and constructivism. One of the key arguments he presented in an early article he co-authored with Richard Price, "Dangerous liaisons? Critical international theory and constructivism", is that constructivism, in spite of its engagement with the mainstream 'on issues of interpretation and evidence, generalisations, alternative explanations and variation and comparability', remains compatible with critical international theory.[3]

Since this early work Reus-Smit has published on a range of issues, most notably on the individual rights and the expansion of the modern international system, the nature and role of special responsibilities in world politics, international crises of legitimacy, the nature and limits of American power, and most recently, on the relationship between cultural diversity and international order.

• United States-Australia relations

• Interview with Reus-Smit by Theory Talks