This article seeks to develop a concept of ‘security governance’ in the context of post-Cold War Europe. The validity of a governance approach lies in its ability to locate some of the distinctive ways in which European security has been coordinated, managed and regulated. Based on an examination of the way governance is utilised in other political fields of political analysis, the article identifies the concept of security governance as involving the coordinated management and regulation of issues by multiple and separate authorities, the interventions of both public and private actors (depending upon the issue), formal and informal arrangements, in turn structured by discourse and norms, and purposefully directed toward particular policy outcomes. Three issues are examined to demonstrate the utility of the concept of security governance for understanding security in post-Cold War Europe: the transformation of NATO, the Europeanisation of security accomplished through EU-led initiatives and, finally, the resultant dynamic relationship between forms of exclusion and inclusion in governance.

The case of the EU points to the need to re-conceptualise the relationship between self and other in the IR literature. I argue that the literature forces us into an artificial choice between the liberal constructivist approach of disregarding the constitutive role of difference in identity formation and the critical constructivist approach of assuming a behavioural relationship between self and other, and therefore cannot account for the diversity in the EU's interactions with various states on its periphery. I identify three constitutive dimensions along which self/other relationships vary to produce or not produce relationships of Othering: nature of difference, social distance, and response of other. I analyse how the EU's interactions with Morocco, Turkey, and Central and Eastern European states are situated differently on these dimensions, and evaluate the question of whether the EU is a postmodern collectivity based on these analyses.

Every social revolution has elicited some form of counter-revolutionary response from the international system. The impulse to reverse revolutionary transformation has much to tell us about the dynamics of social revolution as well as the nature of international order. The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between counter-revolution and international order. First it establishes a basic conceptual framework of international counter-revolution and argues that counter-revolution should be understood as more than just an active opposition to revolution and also examines the motives of counter-revolutionaries. Second, using two interpretations of the international system – those of Henry Kissinger and Raymond Aron – the article draws several conclusions about the international tendency to attempt to overturn revolution and concludes that there exist international systemic pressures, of a non-neorealist kind, which provide the basis for international order. These pressures not only produce order but, at certain times, impel states to counter radical transformations in parts of the world which seem, at first glance, to have little consequence for the functioning of international order.

The United States has in recent years come under considerable criticism for its apparently cynical attitude towards international law. While the US administration refers often to the importance of the international rule of law it appears unwilling to itself be bound by that law. While the US took the lead in the post World War II years in establishing international law and institutions it has in recent years appeared unwilling to give those same institutions its full support. This article begins by examining a range of explanations for the seemingly undesirable US attitude towards international law. Dismissing each as inadequate on its own, the article demonstrates how what often appear to be contradictory aspects of the United States' relationship with international law can in fact be reconciled through the application to United States' behaviour of the basic tenets of classic modern realism as it pertains to the conduct of foreign policy. This is surprising since international law and realpolitik are more often contrasted. The United States' ‘attitude’ towards international law is better explained not as a post-Cold War anomaly but as having been an integral aspect of the rise of the United States to sole superpower status.

The concept of an emergent global civil society (GCS), an identifiable public sphere of voluntary association distinct from the architecture of states and markets, has become voguish in some approaches to international relations and international political economy, and in the practices of global governance. This article seeks to reveal the limitations of the prevailing commonsense framing of GCS. Challenging the idea that we can isolate an unambiguous GCS sphere, we focus instead on the particular uses of GCS – on the practices that are shaped in its name. We make a number of interventions to emphasise the conceptual and political ambiguity of GCS. First, we shift the emphasis from GCS as a bounded ‘non-governmental’; space to GCS as precisely a means of making global politics governable in particular ways. Second, we question the assumption of GCS as ‘voluntary association’, asking what it means for GCS to embody or represent the interests of social groups. Finally, we raise questions of the image of empowerment through GCS, highlighting the power relations, tensions and contradictions at the heart of a transformative politics.

The trans-Atlantic dispute over application of the European Union's Data Directive (1995) is discussed as a case study of an emerging geographic incongruity between the reach and domain of the territorially-defined Westphalian state and the deep and dense network of economic relations. The article reviews significant EU-US differences about the meaning of privacy and the means to protect it, the history of attempts to apply its provisions to information transferred to the US, and the less than satisfactory attempt at resolution – the Safe Harbor agreement. It then argues that attempting to apply the Directive to transactions on the Internet raises fundamental questions about the meaning of borders, territorial sovereignty and political space and explores the implications for territorial jurisdiction and global governance at some length.

This review article explores several latest endeavours that theorise the state and globalisation. The aim is to reflect further on some of the wider follies that lie within the ambition of debates on the state and globalisation. By uniting common themes throughout the review – revolving around issues of state capacity in the post-colonial world, the relationship between globalisation and international relations, and the very meaning of globality – the review raises a series of questions for further research on the state and globalisation. Most significantly, it seeks to question the future of critical theorising on the state and globalisation within international studies. It does so by arguing that there remain serious question-begging assumptions about capitalism that lie at the core of present general theories of the state and globalisation that, if overlooked, might also blunt the precepts of critical international theorising.

Hans-Martin Jaeger argues in this Journal that Hegel endorses a ‘reluctant realism’, whereby Hegel's theory of international politics institutionalises a transnationalising civil society of states. In Jaeger's view, Hegel's conception of individuals in civil society is analogous to states in international politics. On the contrary, I argue Hegel's conception of abstract right is far more commensurable with his theory of international politics. The mutual recognition existing in civil society – which helps to produce legal relationships – does not exist beyond the state where there are no legal relationships. Thus, Hegel is a realist of a more familiar sort, without any ‘reluctance’.

I would like to thank Martin Weber for his interesting and thoughtful response to my article ‘Waltz, Kant and Systemic Approaches To International Relations’. I am aware of the intrinsically controversial nature of any comparison of Waltz and Kant, and am therefore grateful for the opportunity to respond formally to the criticisms that Weber makes. Weber raises doubts about interpreting Kant as a systems theorist, interpreting Kant as advocating a scientific approach, and my understanding of the role of world society in Kant's account of international relations respectively. I will respond to these criticisms in the order that the original article dealt with these three issues, dealing with Kant as a social scientist first before discussing international systems and the role of world society in Kant's theory.