The importance of technological innovation to economic growth and state power is generally acknowledged in international relations. Less attention has been paid to the state's precise role in fostering innovation. This article argues that, contrary to realism, a centralized state is ill-suited to fostering innovation, particularly for technological leaders. Centralized states are more likely to make errors in crafting policy, and those errors cannot be reversed at the regional or local level. Decentralized states are better suited for the required tasks in fostering innovation. These hypotheses are tested against the Anglo–German rivalry for technological leadership in the late nineteenth century, and the US–Japanese rivalry of the last twenty years. In both cases the more centralized regime—Great Britain and Japan—faltered after initial successes. This suggests a tension within great powers. Policymakers prefer a strong, centralized state to facilitate policymaking. However, the evidence suggests that a decentralized state structure is a necessary condition for states to sustain themselves at the technological frontier.

Thucydides is generally regarded as the founder of Realism in IR because of his vivid descriptions of war and power politics. A strong Realist account rests on sharp dichotomies between domestic and international politics, power and justice, nature and convention. Reading Thucydides through these dichotomies is not limited to IR; in fact, most classical and philosophical scholarship on the historian is informed by this vocabulary. I argue that such readings cannot hold under close scrutiny because they turn Thucydides too much into a sophist. As closer attention to how nature and convention, power and justice, domestic and international are deployed in the History reveals, Thucydides is deeply concerned with moving beyond standard sophistic oppositions. He does this by articulating a conception of how nature and convention are intimately connected to each other through proper use in the practice of excellence in a way that foreshadows Aristotle. Repositioning Thucydides in the tradition of classical political thought as a predecessor of Aristotle rather than a follower of the sophists has important implications for both theorists and practitioners of world politics. Well aware of the importance of both nature and convention for the practice of excellence, Thucydides recognizes the importance of power politics as well as institutions in human affairs, and yet endorses neither uncritically. He develops a distinctively normative theory of world politics by placing proper use and moral judgement at the centre of his account. As such, the primary message Thucydides gives, to theorists and practitioners alike, is to deplore human suffering and to struggle towards moderation and practical wisdom in politics, making the best use of tendencies in human nature as well as available institutions to that end.

The Greek intellectual Thucydides has been widely identified by scholars of international relations as prefiguring twentieth century Realist thought. This appropriation fails to locate particular aspects of Thucydides' writing within the overall narrative structure of The Peloponnesian War. The narrative structure is in the form of a tragedy. Thucydides was critical of the excessive and unrestrained nature of Athenian and Hellenic conduct during the war. By taking up specific themes including the dominance of reason by the passions, the eclipse of logos by ergon, and the decline of nomos, he expressed this critique in a tragic form. In the end, an unrestrained Athens reached for Sicily and suffered Nemesian retribution in the form of ignominious defeat. To claim Thucydides as a precursor to Realist thought, therefore, is peculiar, and has the character of enlisting a critique of excess and immoderation on behalf of an intellectual discourse altogether lacking in reasoned moderation.

This article applies a three-dimensional framework for the analysis of the role of motivation in foreign policy decision-making to the foreign policy decisions of individuals and cities in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. First, the authors briefly introduce their framework for analysis. Using the speeches in Thucydides to explicate the motives and goals of individuals and cities, the authors then trace the relationships between the motivational dispositions of foreign policy actors and their foreign policy behaviour. In so doing, they demonstrate both the relevance of a concern with individual motivation for foreign policy analysis and the usefulness of their analytical framework for studying the impact of the relevant motives. The authors also show how ideological statements can be analysed to determine the relative salience of individual motives and collective goals, suggesting a relationship between ideological reasoning and motivational imbalance which can adversely affect the policymaking process. In conclusion, they briefly assess the theoretical and normative as well as practical policy implications of their observations.

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.

The capacity of the Kurds—a scattered, divided and stateless people—to make headline news never ceases to astonish. Perhaps most sensational were the extraordinary events early in 1999 which accompanied the seizure in Kenya and subsequent extradition to Turkey of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish Workers Party, with its now familiar acronym, the PKK. Ocalan's arrest, and his sentencing to death by a Turkish court in June 1999, are only the most recent in a series of Kurdish-related events that have captured the imagination of the international public. The post-Cold War period alone has witnessed the massacre, by chemical weapons, of Kurdish villagers in Iraq after the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88) and a failed Kurdish uprising and massive refugee crisis after the Gulf War (1991), to be followed by the creation of a Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. In 1992, far away in Berlin, which saw some particularly ugly scenes at the time of Ocalan's capture, three Iranian Kurdish opposition leaders were murdered. So significant has been the Kurdish imprint on the contemporary International Relations agenda, that some have suggested that the Kurdish issue today can be likened in some respects to that of Palestine.

William Wohlforth has provided a clear, concise response to the final section of my article on ‘Ideology and the Cold War’. Because Wohlforth's own research on the end of the Cold War has been so stimulating and valuable, I had to devote special attention to his work. I welcome the opportunity to reply to his latest comments. Although I agree with him on some points, I disagree on others. In what follows, I will explain why.