This article explores the ambivalent if not hostile responses of mainstream international historians to what is generally characterized as ‘postmodernism’. It attempts to trace the roots of this antagonism in the sub-discipline's culture and historical evolution as a distinctive mode of knowledge creation with very particular links to the real worlds of politics and international relations. It then suggests that maintaining this sceptical attitude towards ‘theory’ incurs costs for international history that are too seldom recognized, and explores the potential of post-structuralist-inspired critical historiography and discourse analysis approaches to reinvigorate practice.

In July 1996, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a controversial Advisory Opinion on the legality of nuclear use (including, threat of use). The ICJ found that ‘nuclear use would generally be contrary to the rules of international law’, but it failed to conclude that nuclear use would be unlawful in all circumstances. The major reason for this was because it recognized nuclear norms (that is, the practice of deterrence) to which many states adhered. Taking the American case, this article examines norms of nuclear non-use and nuclear targeting. It shows where these national norms came from, and how they came to be empowered in US policy and embodied in American practice. It is critical of the ICJ's conclusion because, while the norm of non-use is consistent with international law, it finds American targeting norms to be contrary to humanitarian law.

The voluminous literature on recent transitions to democracy has generally lacked an analysis from the perspective of international law. This article explores four aspects of efforts to promote a normative ‘democratic entitlement’. First, it reviews the ways in which notions of democratic legitimacy have infiltrated virtually every aspect of international legal discourse. Second, it explores how a normative legitimacy standard may alter foundational doctrines of international law, such as non-intervention and the recognition of states and governments. Third, it reviews arguments against the emergence of ‘democratic entitlement’. These arguments both take issue with the sources of law relied upon by the entitlement's proponents, and ask whether the substantive and procedural aspects of democracy implicit in the democratic entitlement thesis are conceptually coherent. Finally, the article explores the ways in which a legal analysis of democratization confronts questions not addressed by the methodologies of other disciplines.

This article examines the forces driving the pursuit of military production capacity in India, including those behind the Indian nuclear and space programmes. We are mainly interested in whether symbolic motivations regularly find expression in the public discourse. We review all articles on the subject of weapons development and production appearing in India Today from May 1977 to April 1999. There are three closely interrelated yet distinguishable concerns in the public discourse that we consider symbolic: that military industrialization is a means of asserting India's autonomy in international affairs, that it is a means of establishing India's international status and prestige, and that it serves to enhance India's self-image. We contend that the symbolic motivations are a prominent force behind the military industrialization process in India. The precise form that symbolic motivations take vary—some statements seem to have more symbolic content than others—but, as a whole, such references are not rare or isolated. Our findings suggest that symbolism can be an important component of the quest for an indigenous arms-production capacity, and perhaps other elements of statebuilding as well.

International Relations theory has recently turned its attention to the study of comparative regionalism in economics and security. As part of this new research agenda, this article explores what we might learn from the Southern Cone's experience with denuclearization that might be applicable to the Middle East. The two regions differ with respect to security dilemmas, military capabilities and doctrines, and the prior availability of a cooperative regional institutional infrastructure. Yet two aspects of the Southern Cone process seem potentially relevant to other regions. The first relates to improving our understanding of the appropriate domestic political conditions that underpin denuclearization. In particular, the nature of domestic coalitions and of their respective approaches to the global economy and political institutions deserve far more serious consideration than they have gained thus far. The second relates to the nature of the regional denuclearization regime initially fashioned in the Southern Cone, which set an international precedent. A regionally-based system of mutual inspections could help remove some of the most intractable barriers to a future Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.

This article argues that conventional understanding of how IR theory conceptualizes the state is in need of revision. By relocating IR theories of the state within the ‘second state’ debate, we find that neorealism underestimates the power of the state in world politics, while neoliberal institutionalism exaggerates its power. Moreover, liberalism, constructivism, Marxism, postmodernism, and ‘second-wave’ Weberian historical sociology, all endow the state with greater degrees of agential power in the international realm than does neorealism. The significance of the second state debate will be not merely to reconfigure our understanding of how IR theory conceptualizes the state, but to turn conventional understanding of IR theory upside-down.

At present, International Relations scholars use the metaphor of ‘state socialization’ in mutually incompatible ways, embarking from very different starting points and arriving at a bewildering variety of destinations. There is no consensus on what state socialization is, who it affects, or how it operates. This article seeks to chart this relatively unmapped concept by defining state socialization, differentiating it from similar concepts, and exploring what the study of state socialization can contribute to important and longstanding theoretical debates in the field of international relations.

In his article Aid and Sovereignty: Quasi-States and the International Financial Institutions, David Williams, ‘Aid and Sovereignty: Quasi-states and the International Financial Institutions’, Review of International Studies, 26:4 (2000), pp. 557–73.David Williams claims that ‘(t)he activities of the IFIs [international financial institutions, RL] in their relations with many developing countries certainly suggest that the substance of state sovereignty does not amount to very much more than a show’ (p. 573). In my reply, I beg to differ with respect to the causes of the changing state sovereignty in developing countries and the role of international financial institutions, and of the World Bank in particular, in this process.However, as Stephen Krasner has sophistically shown, the violation, compromise and truncation of sovereignty has been a central feature of international relations since the very inception of the ‘Westphalian system’ in 1648. See Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).By offering a comparison concerning the structure of the interactions developing countries have with the IFIs and private capital markets, respectively, I conclude that the relationship between developing countries and private capital markets has more substantial effects on the changing nature of state sovereignty in the developing world.

The environment is now an established area of theoretical and empirical work in the field of International Relations, but the central question remains whether existing institutional structures, intellectual and political, are being in some respect transformed by this development. This review article examines the concept of environmental security as a reflection of the centrality of the environmental challenge. This relatively novel perspective on a defining feature of the field tests the domain of discourse and inquiry, and thus has implications for the study of international relations, perhaps to the extent of justifying the enclosure of its key concepts within the environmental perspective.

Rudolf Kjellén was an important political scientist during the first half of this century. He is perhaps the most influential Scandinavian political scientist ever. Together with the political geographer Fredrich Ratzel, Kjellén was the founder of the German geopolitical school. All his major works were translated into German, but they were, to my knowledge, never translated into English. They were important sources of inspiration for the leading geopolitical theorist and military general, Karl Haushofer.Karl Haushofer, Grenzen in ihrer geographischen und politischen Bedeutung (Berlin Grünewald: Kurt Vowinckel Verlag, 1927); Dan Diner, ‘Grundbuch des Planeten’—Zur Geopolitik Karl Haushofer, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte,32: 1 (1984), pp. 1–28; Barbro Lewin, Johan Skytte och de skytteanska professorerna[Johan Skytte and the Skyttean Professors]. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis (Skrifter utgivna av Statsvetenskapliga föreningen i Uppsala, 100), (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1985); Rainer Sprengel, ‘Land und Meer—Eine diskursanalytische Betrachtung’, WeltTrends (1994), pp. 61–84. By the time of his visit to Sweden in 1935, Haushofer was about to publish the 25th German edition of Kjellén's Die Grossmächte [The Great Powers].Edward Thermænius, ‘Geopolitik och politisk geografi’ [Geopolitics and Political Geography], Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, 19 (1937), pp. 213–328. The idea that states were not fixed juridicial entities but dynamic organisms competing on the international scene, was something that appealed to Haushofer. He was to fuse this thought with Ratzel's concept of Lebensraum, that was later to reach Hitler.

Over the course of its twenty-five year history, the Review of International Studies has been an important outlet for articles that sought to define an English School.As have other European-based journals, particularly Millennium, Cooperation and Conflict, and more recently the European Journal of International Relations. At the time of the first volume of the British Journal of International Relations—as it was then called—in 1975, there was a growing sense of a divided discipline. Alienation from the agenda being put forward in the US was compounded by greater introspection about what, if anything, unified the International Relations community in Britain. Early attempts to advance a different agenda were published in the BJIR by (among others) writers such as Hedley Bull, Alan James and R.J. Vincent.

I was greatly encouraged by the present proposal to relaunch the concentrated dialogue of the British Committee for the Theory of International Politics, and by the positive response of the many leading scholars listed in Barry Buzan's article ‘The English School: an Underexploited Resource in IR’.

The working methods of the original Committee are well summarized in Buzan's article, and those methods and the scope of its enquiries are described more fully in Tim Dunne's most useful history of the English School of IR, Inventing International Society.Tim Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School (London: Macmillan, 1998). There is thus no need to look back over them here.

The English School is an underutilized research resource and deserves a larger role in IR than it currently has. Its distinctive elements are its methodological pluralism, its historicism, and its interlinking of three key concepts: international system, international society and world society. International society is the main focus, and the via media, between the other two, but more work needs to be done to develop the School's theoretical position, particularly in understanding the relationship between international and world society. In order to realize its potential, the English School needs both to construct a more coherent research agenda and to recover some of the working method of the British Committee. It is potentially a way of challenging the theoretical fragmentation that afflicts IR, and of setting up the foundations for a return to grand theory.

I support Buzan's call for a reconsideration of the English School as an important approach to International Relations. The challenge is to avoid introspection and scholasticism (is it a school? who belongs? what are the core articles of faith?) and instead to use the intellectual apparatus provided by English School ideas to raise interesting questions, identify intellectually important puzzles, and to help structure answers to real moral and political dilemmas. In this comment I would like to raise five issues.

The Forum should not be too cosy, said the editors. But in many regards, Barry Buzan's invitation to put to better use the resources of the English School makes criticism difficult. Who is going to oppose, in principle, a more concentrated effort in international theorizing, methodological pluralism, substantial openness to sister fields and disciplines, linked to a general endeavour for giving some coherence to the diverging theoretical interests? Moreover, who can criticize the very fact that somebody wants to pool existing resources for pursuing research, before seeing the outcome?

Hence, the following remarks can hardly be against the open project as such, which I wish much success. It will be directed against some particular ways to fill it out, ways which are often, I think, not intended by Buzan himself. In other words, the discussion is as much about analysing Buzan's paper as about pre-empting particular ways to read it. To caricature the position: if the project becomes understood as too English and US-targeted, too encompassing and too traditional, the English School might well remain an underexploited resource.

For someone who (albeit temporarily) left his partner and country to go to school in England with the English School, it is easy to agree with Barry Buzan: the English School remains an underexploited framework in IR. Buzan highlights one major reason for this. The methodological and epistemological pluralism of the English School makes it possible to reach out to adjacent literatures in and out of IR in such a manner that holism is secured and scientific certainty postponed. Andrew Linklater's relation to the English School over the last twenty years may serve as a sociological illustration of this. He has gone from being the official dissident of the School to becoming the principal advocate of its Kantian wing. Comparisons with American IR, where scholars of similar persuasion have been exiled to the margins of the discipline, testify to the relative pluralism and openness of the English School.

Barry Buzan's essay provides a welcome forum for discussion about the virtues and future direction of the English School as a resource for IR research. Like many American With apologies to my Canadian colleagues, I use the term American to mean US. I am uncomfortable ascribing the concerns outlined here to scholars in Canada who have intellectual traditions of their own and may well have a different perspective on these matters. constructivists, I am an admirer of English School scholarship and have found it extremely helpful in my own work. I am less optimistic than Buzan, however, about the prospects that the English School will become either a grand theory or the focus of new trans-Atlantic IR debates. It is not clear to me that grand theory status is necessary for the English School; it may not even be particularly desirable. Buzan does not define what he means by a grand theory, but, from the context of his remarks and the Wallerstein example, it would seem that grand theory requires a degree of cohesion and discipline that is antithetical to the methodological pluralism which has characterized English School work and which Buzan views as one of its strongest virtues. Giving the English School more salience in American IR debates, by contrast, would be a real improvement. Even if it does not become the focus of debate, American scholarship would be enriched by incorporation of the historical and normative orientations the English School brings. As the growing strength of constructivist scholarship in the US indicates, there is an eager audience for theoretical frameworks that provide traction on such issues. In what follows I sketch some reasons why the English School has had only limited impact on US scholarship. Specifically, I will argue that the School's lack of clarity about both method and theoretical claims has made it difficult for American scholars to incorporate it into their research. Addressing these issues might make the English School more useful to more US researchers. It might also have the converse effect of sharpening work within the School and assisting its advocates in constructing the research focus Buzan seeks.