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Sir Herbert Butterfield, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge (1955-68), Regius Professor of History (1963-68), and author of The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), was one of the leading historians of the twentieth century. A diplomatic historian and student of modern historiography, Butterfield was deeply concerned too with contemporary international relations, wrote much on the subject and, in 1958, created the 'British Committee on the Theory of International Politics'. Drawing upon published and unpublished material, this article seeks to sketch an outline of Butterfield's career and thought, to examine his approach to international relations, and to reconsider his reputation in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper specifies the conditions for conflict in Central Asia. Given Russian preponderance this should be an easy case for neorealism. But we demonstrate that the consequences of Russia's superior power will depend on the nature of its regime and domestic stability in Central Asia. The type of nationalism, the robustness of political institutions, and the success or failure of economic reform will be critical conditions for Central Asian stability. The paper also evaluates the prospects for conflict resolution and prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the legacy of British scholar, historian and political theorist David Mitrany and his functional approach to world government. It considers Mitrany's pragmatic ideas about international organizations and the functionalism of social work in the early 1940s. A brief history of his career as an assistant European editor of a series of publications on the economic and social history of war in 1922 is discussed. The article also highlights some of his academic accomplishments in terms of European political affairs and his contributions on the academics of international politics.

The rise of China is seen by some observers as a precursor of inevitable hegemonic competition in East Asia. At the very least, it seems likely that China's influence in East Asia will grow at the expense of the United States. Whether this will eventually amount to a form of hegemonic transition is far less clear. It is, therefore, an opportune moment to consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of China and the US in East Asia. This paper suggests that the nature of hegemonic competition and transition is more uncertain and complex than some of the most influential theoretical understandings of hegemony would have us believe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, the English School of International Relations (IR) has made a remarkable resurgence. Countless articles and papers have been written on the School. Some of these works have been critical, but most have applauded the School's efforts to provide a fruitful ‘middle way’ for IR theory, one that avoids the extremes of either an unnecessarily pessimistic realism or a naively optimistic idealism. At the heart of this via media is the idea that, in many periods of history, states exist within an international society of shared rules and norms that conditions their behaviour in ways that could not be predicted by looking at material power structures alone. I f the English School (ES) is correct that states often follow these rules and norms even when their power positions and security interests dictate alternative policies, then American realist theory – a theory that focuses on power and security drives as primary causal forces in global politics – has been dealt a potentially serious blow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, International Relations (IR) theorists are drawing inspiration from a broad range of theorists outside the discipline. One thinks of the introduction of Antonio Gramsci's writings to IR theorists by Robert Cox, for example, and the 'school' that has developed in its wake. Similarly, the works of Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas are all relatively familiar to most IR theorists not because of their writings on world politics per se, but because they were imported into the field by roving theorists. Many others of varying success could be cited as well. Such cross-disciplinary excursions are important because they inject vitality into a field that--in the opinion of some at least--is in need of rejuvenation in the face of contemporary changes. In this paper, I elaborate on the work of the Canadian communications theorist Harold Innis, situating his work within contemporary IR theory while underlining his historicism, holism, and attention to time-space biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between statehood and the international system, with particular reference to the states of sub-Saharan Africa. It suggests, as the title implies, that statehood should be regarded as a relative concept; and that rather than distinguish sharply between entities that are, and are not, states, we should regard different entities as meeting the criteria for international statehood to a greater or lesser degree. Entities which we have been accustomed to regard as states, at least for the purposes of studying them in international relations, sometimes fail to exercise even the minimal responsibilities associated with state power, while those who control them do not behave in the way that is normally ascribed to the 'rulers' of states. Entities that are not accorded the status of states, such as guerrilla insurgencies or even voluntary organizations, may take on attributes that have customarily been associated with sovereign statehood. This conclusion carries at least a salutary warning against too readily ascribing the supposedly universal characteristics of states to peripheral areas of the modern global system,; in which the categories in which we are accustomed to regard international politics have become blurred. More broadly, given the peculiar and privileged position of states in the conventional analysis of international relations, it may carry significant implications for the idea of international relations itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Martin Wight's famous LSE lectures in the late 1950s, the English School scholars have brought China into the conception of international society. As the English School scholars have been ‘inventing’ an international society, China's status in the conception, or conceptions of international society has also been invented and reinvented. The Chinese case vividly demonstrates how a non-European (or non-Western) country, as one of ‘the others’, has been dealt with and brought into the conceptualisation of international society by the English School. China's status in the conception of international society, to a great extent, has been invented by some of the English School scholars with Eurocentric bias. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that current discourses on Turkish corruption are marked by a disproportionate emphasis on culture and can thus be understood as part of a broader relationship with Europe's perennial 'other'. Having traced elements of this within European political elites' response to Turkey's prospective accession to the Union, the article goes on to suggest that the association of corruption with a different cultural orientation represents a useful means of legitimising the extraneous guidance of administrative and economic change. The ultimate aim of such reforms are, the article concludes, to extend the penetrative capacity of European capital, to reduce the transaction costs involved in acquiring Turkish assets and to disable domestic resistance to further marketisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, health has become an increasingly important international issue and one which has engaged the attention of the foreign and security policy community. This article examines the emerging relationship between foreign and security policy, and global public health. It argues that the agenda has been dominated by two issues – the spread of selected infectious diseases (including HIV/AIDS) and bio-terror. It argues that this is a narrow framing of the agenda which could be broadened to include a wider range of issues. We offer two examples: health and internal instability, including the role of health in failing states and in post-conflict reconstruction; and illicit activities. We also argue that the relationship between global public health, and foreign and security policy has prioritised the concerns of the latter over the former – how selected health issues may create risks for (inter)national security or economic growth. Moreover the interests of the West are prominent on this agenda, focusing (largely though not exclusively) on how health risks in the developing world might impact upon the West. It is less concerned with the promotion of global public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

C. A. W. Manning, Professor of International Relations at the LSE (1930-1962), was a key contributor to the formation of the discipline in Britain. He wrote on Jurisprudence, which was his main strength; on the League of Nations, of which he was a keen supporter; on South Africa, concerning which he gained notoriety as the defender of Apartheid; on International Relations as an independent academic discipline, which, to him, was due to the sui generis character of international society as a formally anarchical but substantively orderly social environment. He was a Rationalist in Martin Wight's sense, and early constructivist, who saw that the society of states as a social construct was subject to interpretation, reinterpretation, and reshaping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent release of previously classified Foreign Office files has helped illuminate the early history of the secret propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD). Although launched in 1948 by the Attlee government with the avowed intention of promoting Britain as a socialist 'Third Force' in world politics, IRD tended in practice to devote its earliest efforts to attacking the Soviet Union and Communism, not only abroad but also at home, where leaders of the Labour movement deployed its materials against the far left. By 1950 the Third Force mission had been abandoned altogether as British foreign policy shifted decisively towards support for an American-led coalition of Atlantic powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors comment on a paper by Adam Jones on the connection between feminism and international relations. The authors discuss three assertions concerning this connection. The first is that feminism is restricted by its standard equation of gender. The second is that the classical tradition is the standard by which feminist contributions to international relations should be judged. The third is that feminism is defective in its treatment of gender. The authors draw first on feminism generally and use writers in feminist international relations. Finally, the authors review the literature on men and masculinity, both specifically feminist and otherwise.

In this article, the author responds to a commentary by Terrell Carver, Molly Cochran and Judith Squires about his paper on the connection between feminism and international relations. According to the author, what he did was to set the feminist literature against the historically dominant framing of the international relations discipline. He claims that Carver, Cochran and Squires reject this as "holding feminists up for evaluation" against "the very paradigm they are criticizing." The author believes the attempt to position him along the positivist/post-positivist continuum says more about the authors' strategies and proclivities than his own.

The article introduces a section of papers that examine autoethnography including one by Morgan Brigg and Roland Bleiker that outlines a legitimate method for conducting autoethnography and ones by Oded Löwenheim and Elizabeth Dauphinee that apply autoethnography to international relations.

After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 Ulrich Beck placed terrorism alongside other potentially catastrophic events such as global warming, nuclear disaster, and influenza as one of the ‘dimensions’ of risk society. In risk society, executive governments take ‘precautionary measures’ and parliaments pass ‘preventative laws’ allowing them to accumulate information, detain terrorism suspects, freeze funds and prohibit various groups, in order to stop catastrophic risks from eventuating. International Relations and legal scholars have used risk society theory or the ideas of Michel Foucault to criticise such excesses of the executive and parliamentary branches of government. Most studies either ignore the judiciary or argue that it stands in opposition to the other branches of governments, that it imposes checks and balances in order to uphold the rule of law and protect individual rights. The article argues that this view is naïve and does not acknowledge a long history of judicial deference to the will of the executive and parliament. Through an analysis of case law from Australia and Canada the article explores parallels between early 21st century judicial reasoning and previous periods of crisis, including the Cold War, while identifying some new ‘precautionary approach’ aspects. The judiciary defers to the executive, asserts that the executive is more accountable than it, and seeks to avoid responsibility for engaging in this ‘precautionary justice’. Furthermore, seized by the same fear of terrorism as executive governments, the judiciary shows an ability to adapt existing legal concepts to the exigencies of risk society. The article concludes that as the memory of the 9/11 attacks fades some of the most draconian preventative measures may be scaled back but the judiciary cannot be relied on to keep the executive or parliament in check. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The global justice debate has largely ignored law. But that debate presupposes a legal order within which principles of justice could be implemented. Paying attention to law alters our understanding of global justice by requiring us to distinguish principles that are properly prescribed and enforced within a legal order from those that are not. Given that theories of global governance depreciate law and that cosmopolitan and confederal theories are utopian, the most promising context for a realistic global justice discourse is one that is focused on strengthening, not transcending, the international legal order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the argument that international law is already beginning to reflect cosmopolitanism. It does so by briefly reviewing the history of the ways in which concepts of justice have been represented in international law and then considering the case that cosmopolitanism is present in various forms in contemporary international law. While dismissing some of the stronger cosmopolitan claims it argues that the fuller picture has complexities that International Relations Realists and legal Positivists tend to ignore. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within this special issue on subjects related to global justice, international law, and international relations.

The international relations literature on regionalism, both in economic and security issues, has grown dramatically over the last 15 years. One of the ongoing issues discussed in most articles and books is the conceptualisation of ‘region’. Instead of thinking about regions using notions of interdependence and interaction we take a social constructivist approach, whereby states themselves define regions via the construction of regional economic institutions (REI). We explore how a conceptualisation of region based on REIs contrasts with various related concepts such as regional system, and regional IGO. Empirically, we show that most all countries belong to at least one important regional economic institution, REI, (for example, EU, Mercosur, ASEAN, etc). In short, the world is dividing itself into regions by the creation of regional economic institutions. We contrast our economic-institutional approach to regions with Buzan and Wæver's ‘regional security complexes’ which is based on security dependence. There are interesting agreements and disagreements between their approach and our economic-institutional approach to defining regions. It is perhaps not surprising that many REIs have taken on security roles, which we briefly show by looking at military alliances embedded in REIs. This suggests that policymakers are creating regions through institutional innovations that link economic and security issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

‘Legitimacy’ is commonly cited as one of three fundamental mechanisms of social control within both domestic politics and international society. However, despite growing attention to the legitimacy of global governance, little consideration has been given to the identity of the political communities that must grant legitimacy to an international organisation or to the conditions under which legitimacy is valuable for the functioning of that organisation. In raising and responding to these questions, this article rejects the argument that actors must gain legitimacy among all subject social constituencies within their political realm of action. Instead, the importance of legitimacy within a particular constituency is a variable. The article labels this variable a ‘legitimacy nexus’ and outlines five factors that are hypothesised to contribute to calibrating a legitimacy nexus. The plausibility of the proposed schema is explored through discussion of the role of legitimacy in the trade regime and analysis of the origins of the International Labour Organization's anomalous tripartite representative structure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article posits that in global politics, and in the scholarly subfield of international ethics, we should begin moving away from intentions and intentionality when considering accountability. Intentionality is problematic in at least three respects – analytically it is hard to determine; normatively it is difficult because we must invest our trust in authority; and it comes coupled with the problematic relationship between means and ends. This article explores these issues through three sections. First, it engages some of the purposes but also overall problems with ‘intentions’ in world politics (and especially the debate as it has progressed in the field of international ethics). The second section reviews recent theses on accountability, before moving towards an alternative aspect of accountability which already exists in world politics, termed in this article ‘the accountability of the scar’. This last form of accountability refers to the physical damage produced by violence, with reference to three domains – the anthrobiological, the architectural, and the agentic sphere. Two examples of the scar come to us from the different context of the Emmett Till case of 1955 and the more fluid, and recent case of Iranian protestor Neda Agha-Soltan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using a simple economic model, this article illustrates the greatly diverging interests and preferences of developed and developing countries with regards to capital mobility. Theoretically, developed countries' gain from free capital mobility likely comes at the expense of risk and loss for developing countries due to the latter's financial vulnerability. It is also found that it does not pay for a developed country to push its developing counterparts into prematurely liberalising their capital markets because this type of impatience reduces the developed country's own first-mover advantage in strategic bargaining for capital mobility benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

British reactions to China's increasing engagement with Africa in recent years have been manifested in particularly negative and reductive ways tending to depict China's presence in Africa as destructive and self-serving, in contrast to Britain's more enlightened, supportive approach. However, more recently official discourse has begun to stress the shared outlook between British and Chinese objectives, emphasising Chinese moves towards a more constructive, development-focused approach in Africa. This article discusses the ways in which China in Africa is viewed in British political circles and assesses the degree to which such views resonate with the British sense of its own idealised identity. It suggests that the two narratives represent two sides of a dual ‘liberal’ approach to the problem of ‘non-liberal’ actors in international politics: first the tendency to reject and see them as outside the international order; and second the attempt to rehabilitate them and bring them within it. The article concludes by exploring a number of reasons for the particular ways in which Britain, China and Africa are configured, arguing that this dual conception represents a sense of ambiguity about the potential universality of liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores conceptions of post-war world order promoted in appeals to ‘filmic internationalism’ – an Anglo-American movement of filmmakers, artists, and cultural bureaucrats who became committed to social-realist documentary films throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Examining this movement, I argue, allows us to reflect on the cultural consititution of embedded liberalsim, a vision of post-war order pursued not only in political-economic but also in cultural terms. Moreover, retelling the story of filmic internationalism also unsettles our accounts of embedded liberalism by foregrounding the lingering importance of imperial governmentality to interwar conversations regarding post-war world order. Traces of imperial governmentality are visible in both the ways in which filmmakers conveived the cultural agency of ‘other’ populations as well as the universal conceit with which they promoted a form of social governance. Recovering these ‘other’ stories, I argue, is a critical gesture which provincialises embedded liberalism by situating it in a more diverse set of contexts than is often acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 21st century, it is a great event in the field of international politics that both China and Africa are marching towards revival and more cooperation among each other. The old international order which centered on the West can no longer meet the demand of the changes of African geopolitical pattern. Therefore, it is high time to establish a multilateral cooperation mechanism concerning Africa's peace and development. The authors argue that there are differences in historical experience, diplomatic ideas and principles as well as extensive common grounds of diplomatic strategy and national interests between China and the West in respect of their relations with Africa. Both China and the West should promote talks which are more open, more cooperative and more conducive to a win-win end. In doing this, they can achieve a win-for-all result for all the parties involved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Democratic Peace research programme remains a prominent and influential strand of International Relations theory. It occupies a central place in the discipline, both as a dominant version of liberal internationalism, and as a supposedly paradigmatic case demonstrating the strengths of positivist scholarship. Nonetheless, Democratic Peace scholarship has been challenged by recent real world events, notably the belligerent behaviour of democratic states during the so-called ‘War on Terror’, and the use of its findings to justify the US led invasion of Iraq. In this regard, Democratic Peace research has struggled to deal with the ethical and practical consequences of its work, as the focus has been on empirically observable and testable problems that fit within the remit of positivist social scientific practice. Responding to this state of affairs, it is argued here that there is a pressing need to further extend and pluralise existing scholarship by incorporating approaches which commence from different ontological, epistemological and methodological starting points. While there are multiple possibilities, Frankfurt School Critical Theory has great potential to contribute to an expanded research agenda. The article outlines what a Critical Theory approach to the study of Democratic Peace would entail, highlighting the substantial contribution it can make. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I investigate the processes of the discursive construction of the identity of Kazakhstan as a sovereign and non-nuclear state, and show how the construction and performance of these identities are both productive and the product of Nuclear Weapons Technology (NWT) as a threat to the national security of Kazakhstan. I argue that both practices – the production of the state identity and the abolition of the ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal from the territory of Kazakhstan – are instrumental ways to secure the values of Kazakhstan, in this case the existence of Kazakhstan as a sovereign state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Norman Angell's The Great Illusion, which ran through six versions in London between November 1909 and December 1938, has some claim to have launched International Relations as a self-consciously independent yet sub-consciously liberal discipline. Understood to argue primarily that the interlocking fragility of the international financial system stopped modern states profiting from aggression, its ideas were promoted by a specially created foundation as ‘the science of international politics’ or ‘international polity’. Since the 1970s, moreover, the book has been credited by scholars with pioneering the concepts of interdependence and globalisation. Now, therefore, it is less its seminal qualities than its fundamental flaws that require emphasis. Its celebrated claim about the irenic implications of financial interdependence was widely misunderstood as implying the impossibility, in addition to the disutility, of aggression. And a little-noticed second argument – that political control over territory brought no substantive benefits – was not only implausible but inconsistent with Angell's declared opposition to cuts in arms spending. The Great Illusion's policy recommendations were thus ambiguous, and altered from edition to edition as its author grappled first with the contradiction between pacifist and pro-defence strands in his thinking and then with the changing international situation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article inquires into the effects of public apologies. It argues that the focus of most scholars of public diplomacy or conflict resolution on the conflict solving capacity of public apologies is limited and prevents an open and responsive analysis of empirical apology processes. Drawing on speech act theory as developed by John L. Austin and some of his critics it suggests that existing apology theory should broaden its perspective and also take the perlocutionary, that is, the unintended social effects of public apologies into account. The article illustrates its theoretical argument with the example of the Czech-German apology process. The apologies issued between these countries since 1989 suggest that the conflict solving performance of the apologies was exceeded by the unintended social consequences in both, the apologising country as well as the country receiving the apology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I pose two questions to traditional International Relations (IR) theory: why does it not use the concept of violence more often, and why does it not discuss the meaning of violence? I aim to highlight the way in which violence is hidden in the way we talk about IR, and that the way IR talks about violence without naming it functions to legitimise state violence. I do this by analysing the way the concept of violence is used in traditional IR literature, and then looking at how violence has been defined. I argue that a narrow definition is most useful for the study of IR, and that it should not be used merely to refer to anything we do not like. But this must not preclude challenging the normative uses of violence that suggest that it is only state violence that is legitimate, and that hides personal violence from the scope of IR. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the origins of American neo-conservatism by assessing the contributions of one of its less known inspirations, James Burnham. In charting Burnham's political philosophies and various contemporary reactions to them, this article examines his legacy as it relates to the movement, specifically in his approach to foreign affairs and institutions. It argues that he was more a pioneer than is often acknowledged. In so doing this article also corrects misunderstandings that have arisen in critiques of neo-conservatism, suggesting that Burnham's oeuvre may offer more instructive guidance than some of his contemporaries in understanding the neo-conservative revolution in American foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rich literature on the problematic aspects of EU-Israel relations focuses on historical, structural, politico-economic, legal, institutional, geo-political and strategic causes. An attempt will be made in this article to contribute to the existing scholarship by focusing on a novel angle, namely the negative role of the lack of adequate and informed European-Israeli dialogue in constituting European-Israeli relations. Against the backdrop of the theoretical analysis of the role of dialogue in International Relations, this article examines the lack of adequate European-Israeli dialogue, analysing its causes and the negative role that it plays in constituting European-Israeli relations. The article demonstrates that such lack of dialogue is caused not only by mutual ignorance, prejudice, misinformation, mistrust and antagonism, but also causes these same factors to characterise European-Israeli relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Anarchism does not feature in contemporary international relations (IR) as a discreet approach to world politics because until very recently it was antithetical to the traditional use-value of a discipline largely structured around the needs and intellectual demands of providing for the world's Foreign Offices and State Departments. This article tells part of the story of how this came to be so by revisiting the historiography of the discipline and an early debate between Harold Laski and Hans Morgenthau. What I will show here is that Morgenthau's Schmittian-informed theory of the nation state was diametrically opposed to Laski's Proudhon-informed pluralist state theory. Morgenthau's success and the triumph of Realism structured the subsequent evolution of the discipline. What was to characterise the early stages of this evolution was IR's professional and intellectual statism. The subsequent historiography of the discipline has also played a part in retrospectively keeping anarchism out. This article demonstrates how a return to this early debate and the historiography of the discipline opens up a little more room for anarchism in contemporary IR and suggests further avenues for research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last two decades, there has been a ‘democratic turn’ in peace and conflict research, that is, the peculiar impact of democratic politics on a wide range of security issues has attracted more and more attention. Many of these studies are inspired by Immanuel Kant's famous essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’. In this article, we present a critical discussion of the ‘democratic distinctiveness programme’ that emerged from the Democratic Peace debate and soon spread to cover a wider range of foreign policy issues. The bulk of this research has to date been based on an overly optimistic reading of a ‘Kantian peace’. In particular, the manifold forms of violence that democracies have exerted, have been treated either as a challenge to the Democratic Peace proposition or as an undemocratic contaminant and pre-democratic relict. In contrast, we argue that forms of ‘democratic violence’ should no longer be kept at arm's length from the democratic distinctiveness programme but instead should be elevated to a main field of study. While we acknowledge the benefits of this expanding research programme, we also address a number of normative pitfalls implied in this scholarship such as lending legitimacy to highly questionable foreign policy practices by Western democracies. We conclude with suggestions for a more self-reflexive and ‘critical’ research agenda of a ‘democratically turned’ peace and conflict studies, inspired by the Frankfurt school tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates how modern neo-liberal states are ‘securing by design’ – harnessing design to new technologies in order to produce security, safety, and protection. We take a critical view toward ‘securing by design’ and the policy agendas it produces of ‘designing out insecurity’ and ‘designing in protection’ because securing by design strategies rely upon inadequate conceptualisations of security, technology, and design and inadequate understandings of their relationships to produce inadequate ‘security solutions’ to ready-made ‘security problems’. This critique leads us to propose a new research agenda we call Redesigning Security. A Redesigning Security Approach begins from a recognition that the achievement of security is more often than not illusive, which means that the desire for security is itself problematic. Rather than encouraging the design of ‘security solutions’ – a securing by design – a Redesigning Security Approach explores how we might insecure securing by design. By acknowledging and then moving beyond the new security studies insight that security often produces insecurity, our approach uses design as a vehicle through which to raise questions about security problems and security solutions by collaborating with political and critical design practitioners to design concrete material objects that themselves embody questions about traditional security and about traditional design practices that use technology to depoliticise how technology is deployed by states and corporations to make us ‘safe’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Italy's invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 prompted a major European crisis. This article applies the main theories of foreign policy analysis to the British Government's handling of this crisis. It argues that bureaucratic politics existed, but had little impact on outcomes. Domestic politics had more influence, but did not provide detailed instructions on how to act. The perceptions of key actors, informed by reasoned judgement, determined this. Fears of the threat posed by rival states coalesced with concerns about Britain's own military weakness, leading decision-makers to emphasise the need to act in tandem with France. British policy was therefore motivated by the tension between the public's desire to see action against Italy and the Government's wish to minimise any breach with her allies. These findings highlight the weaknesses of the bureaucratic politics model and show how domestic politics can affect foreign policy outcomes. They also demonstrate the interaction between rational analysis defined in terms of reasoned judgement, and actors' perceptions. It is thus argued that benefits are to be gleaned from combining these theories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the process by which norms of international climate governance have diffused and evolved over time. The author develops a constructivist explanation for observed normative shifts in international climate governance. This explanation highlights the importance of building and maintaining congruence between domestic conditions and international norms. Due to the inherently fluid nature of both domestic conditions and international norms, it is argued that normative congruence building should be understood as an integral and iterative aspect of the norm diffusion process. This argument is substantiated through an analysis of the norm diffusion process in the context of India: a state commonly identified as an important player in international climate change politics, but one that has received surprisingly little scholarly attention in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how various aspects of the ‘global War on Terror’ may be affecting the future development of international law on the use of force. I examine these effects within three areas of international law – the law of anticipatory self-defence, the law of self-defence against non-state actors, and the applicability of international humanitarian law to non-state armed groups. Only in the latter two areas do I find evidence that international law is evolving to accommodate the new realities of global terror. While such developments in the law reflect the supposed need by states to use military means to combat terrorism, they also seem to confer at least a limited international legal personality upon terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda. This not only indicates a shift in the basis for legal personality, but also potentially undermines the legitimacy of international law and frustrates states' efforts at combating terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The academic and policy debate on state failure reaches back to the early 1990s. Since then, its empirical and analytical sophistication has grown, yet the fact that state failure is a regional phenomenon, that is, that it occurs in clusters of geographically contiguous states, has largely been overlooked. This article first considers the academic and policy debates on state failure in the Political Science/International Relations and Development Studies literatures, and offers a definition of state failure that is derived from the means of the state, rather than its ends. Subsequently engaging with existing scholarship on the concept of ‘region’ in international security, the article develops a definition of ‘state failure regions’. Further empirical observation of such regions and additional conceptual reflections lead to establishing an analytical model for the study of state failure regions and allow indentifying a number of concrete gains in knowledge and understanding that can result from its application. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the status of genealogy among research methods currently taught, learned and used in International Relations (IR). The article makes two claims. The first is that genealogy is a unique research tool, but not radically different from the rest of the qualitative-interpretative arsenal more commonly found in the discipline. The second is that genealogy can be used in the pursuit of epistemologically varied truth-claims, including those regarding causal connections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Within the current configuration of Critical Security Studies (CSS) the concept of ‘emancipation’ is upheld as the keystone of a commitment to transformative change in world politics, but comparatively little is said on the status of violence and resistance within that commitment. As a means of highlighting this relative silence, this article examines the nature of the connection between CSS and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. In particular it disinters the reflections of Herbert Marcuse on the connections between emancipatory change, violence and resistance as a means of interrogating and challenging the definition of ‘security as emancipation’. Doing so, it is argued, points towards some of the potential limitations of equating security and emancipation, and provides a provocation of contemporary CSS from within its own cited intellectual and normative foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at the significance of Barry Buzan's 2004 reformulation of the English School from the perspective of the normative dimension of English School theory. Picking up a challenge that Buzan set, but which has largely gone unanswered, for those who see normative theory as a key aspect of the English School's contribution, the article assesses three possible responses. It rejects a stance denying the relevance of Buzan's approach to normative theory and is dissatisfied with a second line that distinguishes methodologically between Buzan's social structural theorising and an approach to normative theory that draws principally on political theory. Instead, it argues for the inherent normativity of Buzan's position because of its reliance on values, arguing that many of the analytical benefits of Buzan's approach can also be deployed normatively because of the way he highlights contested and competing dynamics in play at different times and at different levels. The article suggests that this has the potential to revive pluralism as a normative position in the English School in a way that retains and extends the enhanced analytical power that Buzan's reformulation offers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article ventures a critique of the logic of ‘temporal othering’ in contemporary International Relations (IR) theory. Originally articulated in the field of European integration, this logic presupposes a possibility for a political community to constitute its identity without any spatial delimitation by means of casting as Other its own past, whose repetition in the future it seeks to avoid. While the image of contemporary Europe as ‘othering’ its own past has been subjected to empirical criticism, this article makes a conceptual argument for the indissociability of temporal and spatial aspects in any act of othering. Drawing on Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel, I argue that any historical action is necessarily spatiotemporal, combining the abstraction of temporal negation with the concrete actuality of a negated spatial being. Alternatives to the logic of sovereign territoriality are therefore not to be sought in the temporal aspect of othering, but rather by pursuing the possibility of self-constitution in the absence of any negating action whatsoever. The article concludes with an outline of such an alternative ethos, developed on the basis of Giorgio Agamben's reconstruction of the Hegelian-Kojèvian problematic of the end of history and his theory of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article applies rational institutionalism, to the case of the British-Irish relationship. Hypotheses are drawn about the role of institutions in advancing cooperation. In section two an overview and analysis of British-Irish agreements and policymaking processes are provided. In section three, the role of institution-building in causing British-Irish cooperation is highlighted. In conclusion, the enduring relevance of rational institutionalism to the British-Irish case is highlighted and its potential to understand conflict in the 21st century is stressed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have been pursuing new cooperative security agendas – namely, confidence-building measures (CBMs), preventive diplomacy (PD), conflict resolution and a set of agendas associated with security communities. The ASEAN members' pursuit of these agendas should be seen as a set of instances of their mimetic adoption of external norms for the sake of legitimacy. They have mimetically been adopting a set of norms associated with the collective management of conflicts, which have been practiced by the participant states of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). They have been doing so, with the intention of securing their identities as legitimate members of the community of modern states, and of enhancing the status of ASEAN and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) as legitimate cooperative security institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Myth-making has historically been an essential component of the modern state's quest for territorial control and legitimacy. As a sui generis post-national political entity in search for identity and recognition, the European Union (EU) seems to mimicking its more established national counterpart. By formulating and reproducing a narrative that hails Europe's border control regime (‘Schengen’) as a success story of European integration and by deploying evocative imagery at Europe's common borders, the EU is in fact trying to establish itself as an integral part of the European political landscape. This article argues that what we are witnessing today in Europe is indeed the emergence of the ‘myth of Schengen’; however, the regime's mythopoiesis goes beyond the EU's official narrative and symbolic representations. To capture the full range of actors, locations and activities involved in the establishment and reproduction of this post-national myth, it is necessary to shift the attention to the performative dimension of this process. To support this argument, the article relies on the insights of anthropological and sociological works that have emphasised the role of rituality and performativity in constituting social structures and identities. These insights are then applied to examine the rituals and performances characterising four cases of ‘unofficial’ Schengen myth-making beyond Europe: a hotel in Beijing, street kids in Kinshasa, a British music band, and a group of Eastern European artists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gilbert Murray was one of the towering figures of 20th century cultural and intellectual life, and the foremost Hellenist of his generation. He was also a tireless campaigner for peace and international reconciliation, and a pioneer in the development of international intellectual cooperation, not least in the field of International Relations (IR). Yet in IR today he is largely forgotten. This article seeks to put Murray back on the historiographical map. It argues that while in many ways consistent with the image of the inter-war ‘utopian’, Murray's thinking in certain significant ways defies this image. It examines the twin foundations of his international thought – liberalism and Hellenism – and their manifestation in a version of international intellectual cooperation that while aristocratic and outmoded in some respects, nonetheless contains certain enduring insights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I critically examine the existing literature on the security dilemma in ethnic conflict, thus laying part of the foundation for constructing a dynamic and integrative theory of ethnic conflict. I show that many attempts to apply the security dilemma to the understanding of ethnic conflict have been based on an imprecise and often mistaken understanding of the concept. I then emphasise that the security dilemma theory and the broader spiral model constitute a dynamic, versatile and powerful theory of strategic interaction that captures some general dynamics leading to the outbreak of war. As such, the security dilemma theory and the broader spiral model, when properly understood, can serve as part of the foundation of a dynamic and integrative theory of ethnic conflict, and such a theory will be able to integrate many diverse understandings of ethnic conflict from different schools of International Relations (IR) theory. I show the feasibility and the utility of such a theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]