International peacebuilding operations seek to stabilise countries that have recently experienced civil wars. In pursuing this goal, however, international peacebuilders have promulgated a particular vision of how states should organise themselves internally, based on the principles of liberal democracy and market-oriented economics. By reconstructing war-shattered states in accordance with this vision, peacebuilders have effectively ‘transmitted’ standards of appropriate behaviour from the Western-liberal core of the international system to the failed states of the periphery. From this perspective, peacebuilding resembles an updated (and more benign) version of the mission civilisatrice, or the colonial-era belief that the European imperial powers had a duty to ‘civilise’ dependent populations and territories.

To be explained are the Great Power versus Great Power wars, 1816–1989. Familiar strands of ‘realist’ thinking are twisted into a good simple balances of power theory to explain peace, war and the extent of war. The evidence, quantitative and qualitative, is that non-separated approximate equals in power capabilities formed dangerous balances. Generally, would-be-combatant great powers used alliances to restrain stronger third parties and to add the capabilities of weaker states to their own. The critical importance of political geography, a state's political capacity, and alliance commitments to the balance of power are made plain.

For realists regionalism remains a difficult phenomenon to explicate. A particular puzzle for realists is why major states should want to pursue regional institutionalisation. Nor are pluralist accounts satisfactory given the empirical evidence of state actor prominence in processes of regional institutionalisation. This article sets out to account for the formative phase of regionalist endeavours, proposing an ideational–institutional realism as the basis for understanding regionalism. On this basis a specific theory of co-operative hegemony is developed. Stressing the importance of the grand strategies of major regional powers and their responses to the balance-of-threat in a region, the author argues that major states may advance their interests through non-coercive means by applying a strategy of co-operative hegemony which implies an active role in regional institutionalisation and the use of, for instance, side payments, power-sharing and differentiation. The article outlines a number of preconditions for regional institutionalisation, stressing what is called the capacity for power-sharing; the power aggregation capacity and the commitment capacity of the biggest power in a region. While regionalising state elites are constrained, they possess a much greater freedom of choice than neo-realism claims.

Realist international relations scholars have approached the connection between economics and security in two ways. Cold War-era realists derived the national interest from the international balance of power, and assessed the utility of both military and economic instruments of statecraft. A second realist approach, advanced by E. H. Carr in his 1939 The Twenty Years' Crisis, places interstate competition in the context of another struggle over wealth and power in which no-one's primary concern is the national interest. That is the realm of capitalism (and resistance to capitalism). That deeper set of connections between economics and security was overlooked in Cold War IR literature, at considerable cost to our understanding of world politics. Understanding why Carr's ‘historical realism’ was bypassed can help pave the way for a more fruitful realist approach to comprehending a new era in world politics.

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.

This article offers an assessment of the ethical status of territorial borders, arguing for a partial defence of their role in international relations. Utilising the English School as one way such a defence has been developed, it assesses pluralist and solidarist arguments, suggesting both are flawed. The article develops a notion of territorial borders as contributing to the value of tolerating difference in international relations, and that this is an ethically desirable thing to do. It doing so it utilises the political theory of Hannah Arendt as an alternative to more common, if usually implicit, liberal understandings.

The article is a critical assessment of three explanations in relation to the question of which types of entities actually enjoy sovereign rights. Concluding that two of these—constitutional independence and legal criteria of statehood—are empirically untenable, it then focuses on a third, more plausible, answer: recognition as a state. Pointing out the almost consensual attitude toward the issue adopted by political scientists and finding the two doctrines of recognition formulated by international lawyers to be imbued with logical inconsistencies, the article concludes by remarking on the impossibility of discovering any clear pattern of state behaviour in this respect.

In the initial section of his article, Ersun Kurtulus criticises the approach to sovereignty which I advanced in my Sovereign Statehood (1986). There I argued that the characteristic which distinguishes a sovereign from a non-sovereign state is constitutional independence—that is to say, a territorial entity's possession of a constitution which is not subordinate to that of another territorial entity. The most obvious and graphic way of identifying this distinction is to compare the position of a sovereign state with that of a territory which is part of a federal state. Thus Iceland is a sovereign state; Texas is not. It is her constitutional independence which, in international practice, is deemed to confer sovereignty on Iceland, and so make her eligible for full international actorhood. By contrast, non-sovereign territorial entities do not enjoy such actorhood, and most have none whatsoever.

To scholars researching the connections between international relations and globalisation, such as those in the five books reviewed here, ‘foreign policy’ is becoming functionally and descriptively rivalled in a globalising context. Foreign policy, once the theoretically exclusive prerogative of the nation-state, is violated daily by new developments in non-state actorness arising from transnational technical and welfare issues such as trade, finance, labour standards and environmentalism. These books under review introduce the displacement lexicon of transnational politics, global civil society, non-state resistance and complexity into policymaking consciousness; in short, the post-international era. The conclusion proposes to tease out the preliminary outlines of the post-international challenge to foreign policy on the basis of ‘plus non-state’ actor-interest considerations.