In chapter 1 of this volume, Stephen Gill characterises current transformations as ‘a reordering and redefinition of the basic components of social reality … involving] changes in consciousness and processes of objectification’. Having noted the sense of uncertainty attending these mutations, he suggests that ‘the contemporary configuration of world order is in structural crisis’.

I endorse Gill's sense of the profundity (depth, extent, scope, significance) of today's transformations and, implicitly, the challenges they pose to conventional theory/practice. What I would additionally emphasise is the inseparability of empirical, conceptual and ‘socio-psychological’ developments: how changes/events in the world ‘out there’ produce and are produced by changes in how we conceptualise and who we think we are; how external objective social change and internal subjective self change are interactive (Bologh, 1987: 147); how ways of being, ways of thinking and ways of identifying refer to different yet reciprocally constituted dimensions of social relations.

I stress these points because International Relations scholars so frequently appear to resist and/or deny them. Yet I am persuaded that we cannot begin to adequately comprehend, much less address, the current ‘crisis’ until we abandon positivist binaries and take relational thinking seriously (e.g., Peterson, 1992a). This involves understanding the world ‘out there’ (practices, institutions, structures of social re/production), how we think (meaning systems, ideologies, paradigms) and who we are (subjectivity, agency, self and collective identities) as interacting dimensions of social reality.