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21 British J. Pol. & Int'l Rel. 3 (2019)

handle is hein.journals/bhjlplcs21 and id is 1 raw text is: nd Political Studies B J The British Journal of Politics and 'Breakthrough' Works - 2(° 21, Vo.2()3-4 © The Author(s) 2018 Revisiting the Essentials: A Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions Symposium Series in the BJPIR DOI:10.I177/1369148118794889 journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi OSAGE John Peterson and Alan Convery Before the University of Edinburgh became institutional home to the BJPIR, we brain- stormed about how we could expand the journal's audience by commissioning innovative work, especially research that would be widely used in teaching. One of our (proposed, at the time) Consultant Editors - Charlie Jeffery - told us, 'you've got to find a way to get breakthrough work into the BJPIR'. It became a lesson in how, sometimes, one word can fire imaginations and inspire a move that yields essential academic work. The move under our editorship is to commission 'Breakthrough' articles: in any area of political science/international relations, given the BJPIR's commitment to publish cutting edge work in any area of our discipline.1 Breakthrough articles feature top or up-and-coming scholars revisiting and reflecting on seminal works after they have made their mark and generated new debates. Breakthrough articles become the anchor for symposia, as we ask scholars who have been part of those debates to reflect (briefly) on the breakthrough work and how it has changed our understanding of our subject. There seems no one better qualified to contribute our first breakthrough article than G. John Ikenberry (2001). His book After Victory is certainly one of the most impor- tant and essential works to be published in this - or any other - century in the study of international relations (IR). Any student of IR would understand what a colleague means when they argue - as one did in a project one of us worked on - that during the Barack Obama era, we had not reached an 'Ikenberry moment', when there was politi- cal will and an opening to build multilateralism (see Alcaro et al., 2016). Agree with Ikenberry's argument or not, After Victory put down a marker on which all students of IR need to reflect. Ikenberrry's breakthrough IR article - reflecting on how durable his argument was and now is during the tumult of the Donald Trump era - is accompanied by short commentar- ies from a glittering array of IR scholars. We think it would be difficult to assemble a more insightful set of commentators than Orfeo Fioretos, Juliet Kaarbo, Kathleen McNamara, Michael Mastanduno, John Owen, Randall Schweller, and Jack Snyder. It is probably incumbent on all of us who teach IR to explain why Ikenberry's argument mat- ters and to get our students to read his breakthrough article (the commentaries also give them an opportunity to learn a lot about IR with minimum investment of reading time). Corresponding author: John Peterson Email: john.peterson@ed.ac.uk

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