Torture has been widely practiced by US forces as an officially-sanctioned information gathering strategy in the war on terrorism. At the same time, public attitudes have exhibited a growing tolerance towards the torture of terrorist suspects. This article examines the role of elite political discourse in constructing and sustaining the conditions necessary for the acceptance and normalisation of torture. It argues that a focus on elite discourse is crucial for understanding how torture comes to be practised because discourses set the logic and parameters of policy formulation and create the wider social legitimacy that is required to enact policy, thereby facilitating the construction of a broader torture-sustaining reality. The study’s findings highlight the role of ideational factors in policy analysis and have important normative implications.

I develop a framework to account for torture, which I argue should be understood with reference to international relations. I show that torture is intended as a tool to ensure the security, stability and legitimacy of elites, often transnationally, but there is often a disjuncture between its intended and actual outcomes. Despite dominant claims that torture is used to defeat security threats, most torture is intended to deter political opposition and secure legitimacy for elites. I conclude that torture should be renounced, both on moral grounds, and because it is not necessary for the functions it is intended to serve.

This article analyses the complex interplay between domestic systemic transformations in post-communist Europe and the reintegration of these countries in the global political economy, through a study of the relationship between successive Romanian governments and the international financial institutions in the 1990s. Conceptually, it seeks to overcome the dichotomies of realist and rationalist approaches to international relations by deploying fields, habitus and practices conceptual framework inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The article captures both the symbolic and material-structural dimensions of the interaction between domestic field-creation and the reproduction of global economic and political fields. It suggests that practices aimed at the reproduction of power hierarchies are also modulated by symbolic requirements, to save face and to avoid whenever possible open conflict, related to the logic of honour.

This article critically examines the question of whether poverty has been reduced in recent years, and if so, whether this is a result of neoliberal and/or globalisation friendly policies. The first section problematises at least some claims made for poverty reduction and the second section questions any causal link between ‘pro-globalisation’ policies and poverty reduction. The third and final section considers in detail the nature of the contemporary global economy, and in examining the evidence concerning capital flows shows how, contrary to the claims made by neoliberals and some globalisation theorists, capital is not dispersing throughout the world. Moreover, even when the ‘correct policies’ are adopted, this is unlikely to happen. I then conclude by suggesting why ‘actually existing globalidation’ does not alleviate, and may indeed intensify, global inequalities.

To enhance effective cooperation, the Marrakesh Accords provide a compliance system for the international climate regime. An innovative part of this system is an Enforcement Branch authorised to apply punitive consequences against countries that fail to comply with their Kyoto obligations. While previous research has primarily focused on the ability of this compliance system to deter non-compliance, this article discusses whether the actual use of punitive consequences will induce a non-compliant country to return to compliance. The Marrakesh Accords explicitly emphasise that the punitive consequences shall be aimed at the restoration of compliance. However, we show that the application of punitive consequences will accomplish this in only exceptional circumstances.

Humanitarianism – that is, the political, economic and military interference in the domestic affairs of a state justified by a nascent transnational morality – is one of the defining and most controversial features of the post-Cold War period. This article advances nine theses, arguing that humanitarianism has a simplistic worldview, that coercive humanitarian actions trigger negative consequences, that humanitarianism is quite effective in sheltering Western states from the spillover effects of political crises but is less so in solving the problems it claims to address. These arguments are illustrated with reference to four prominent cases: Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Darfur. The article concludes with a brief outline of an alternative humanitarian approach.

After almost four decades of abandonment, the institution of trusteeship had a revival on the international agenda as the United Nations assumed responsibility of the war-torn territories of Kosovo and East Timor in 1999. This revival was met with severe criticism for jeopardising the values of order and equality in contemporary international society. The present article argues that this criticism is misleading. The essence of a modern trusteeship is not order or equality but the expansion of freedom. Rather than destabilising international society, it is argued that a trusteeship can be a constructive tool in the re-establishment of freedom, stability and peace in post-conflict territories.

Revisiting the nexus of identities and norms, this article argues that actors’ attitude and policies are not the automatic reflection of a salient identity but the articulation of what I call ‘identity norms’, defined as standards of appropriate behaviour for in-group actors vis-à-vis an out-group. Central to my argument is that identities become straw men at times of momentous change, whilst identity norms, crafted and propagated through an intersubjective understanding amongst different actors, emerge as a guiding principle in state-to-state relations. By illustrating the trajectories of reconciliation between North and South Korea, this article examines the anomalies of how antagonistic states forge friendly ties.

Kelsen and Schmitt, two leading legal theorists of the twentieth century, constitute a powerful pair that sheds light on the intertwining of politics and law in the phenomenon of sovereignty. Although their conceptions of sovereignty are far apart, they are interconnected as different ways of making sense of the same social phenomenon, or what I call the ‘practice of sovereignty’, whereby an ultimately unauthorised authority continuously authorises itself as the authority and the rest by and large accept this, acquiesce in this, or are made to do so. Having clarified their differences and interconnection, I explore some of the implications of the two writers’ differing conceptions of sovereignty and of the practice of sovereignty that underlie them.

The author argues that the international context provides an apparent environment for the individual experiencing of the state as a distinctive unitary and cohesive actor with its own intentionality and personhood, social relations and coercive resources, manifested not only by actions and force, but also through symbols, figure of speeches and other allusive forms capable of affecting human identity. As a direct personal observation, individual experiencing of states contains an inner, phenomenological plan, though it is not a solipsistic process and depends on people’s shared meanings. Conventional perception of states as anthropomorphic actors regards relations between states as social or interpersonal relations, thus causal attribution and social expectations affect individual experience of states. Being primarily a common-sense phenomenon, individual experiencing of states has a wide-ranging effect on both ‘conventional’ and ‘conceptual’ understanding of international relations. In perception and explanation of international politics, real political developments are often overshadowed by observable, experiential, common-sense causations.