In January 1981, an article by Professor Roy E. Jones, entitled The English school of international relations: a case for closure', appeared in this Review.1 Immediately after its publications the late Professor Northedge asked a seminar of research students at the London School of Economics for their views on the article. To his. obvious chagrin, no one, including myself, responded. On several occasions during the next years Professor Northedge drew attention to the challenge laid down by Professor Jones. Did this persistent questioning indicate a concern that Professor Jones should be answered—and, in which case, why did he not take this task upon himself? If he had, and if, as has been suggested, Professor Northedge believed that there was an ‘English school’, but that he was not part of it, then he would have had to show both that the gap between himself and the rest of the ‘school’ was greater than the differences between other members, and, at the same time, that all the scholars under review, himself included, belonged to a common discipline. This analysis would go beyond description; it would require not only a clear demarcation of the several different ways in which his colleagues had understood international politics, but also an attempt to distinguish between ‘school’ and ‘discipline’ and their relationship to the field of International Relations. Such an exercise would be philosophical in nature, and Professor Northedge's well-known empiricism would not, I submit, have been helpful. To demonstrate, as this paper attempts to do, that the scholars in question can be characterized by their differing philosophical approaches would refute Professor Jones' major thesis that there is an English school of international relations. It also seriously undermines his substantive criticisms, for obviously the non-existence of the ‘English school’ makes the question of its wrong-headedness irrelevant.

The ability of International Relations theory to ‘travel well’ to other parts of the world has become one of the central questions within the discipline. This article argues that a Foucauldian-derived ‘analytics of government’ framework has particular advantages in overcoming some of the difficulties IR theory has faced abroad. These advantages include a methodological focus on specific practices of power at their point of application; attention to similarities between practices of power that cut across perceived binaries such as the domestic and international, and public and private; and an illumination of the ways in which practices of freedom are combined and interrelate with forms of coercion and violence. This argument is illustrated in the context of debates about the applicability of Foucauldian theory to African politics, through examples drawn from Bayart's work on globalisation, the power of development partnerships, and violence and civil war. It argues that deploying governmentality as an analytical framework, rather than seeing it as a specifically neoliberal form of power relation, can not only facilitate the application of IR theory outside Europe and North America but can also help develop a broader perspective on genuinely world politics.

Recent debates about Habermas's conception of dialogic politics have focused on whether its commitment to ethical universalism has an emancipatory potential or threatens the assimilation of non-liberal forms of life within exclusionary Western cultural frameworks. One way of contributing to this unfinished debate is to ask whether discourse ethics contributes to the modern ‘civilising process’, as Norbert Elias defined that term. All societies, according to Elias, have civilising processes or ways of trying to solve the problem of how persons can satisfy basic needs without ‘destroying, frustrating, demeaning or in other ways harming each other time and time again in their search for this satisfaction’. This formulation invites the question of whether or not the discourse theory of morality is the best available means of extending the civilising process in global politics.

Three different types of arguments were used to justify the 2003 Iraq War. The first was based on the requirements of national security. Iraq was believed to be developing deadly weapons which it might use against neighbouring states or hand over to terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. A second argument was based on international security. Iraq was supposed to comply with a series of UN Security Council Resolutions and was failing to do so, thereby undermining the credibility of the leading international institutions. The third argument was based on human security. The Iraqi people had suffered too long under a tyrannical regime and this was an opportunity to overthrow it and replace it with something much better.

An action is legitimate if the pertinent community deems it so. Most would agree that Russia’s conduct in the 1990s in Georgia was illegitimate. Military intervention in another state, unless the other state is preparing an imminent attack on one’s own territory, or is engaged in the systematic abuse of one’s own citizens, is a violation of the international norm of sovereignty, at a minimum. Some have argued that European politics has gone beyond this ‘territorial integrity norm’ to something more expansive, to a consensual renunciation of any and all territorial claims on other states. This was first codified in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975.

This article examines the complex relations between a violent non-state actor, the Al Qaeda network, and order in the international system. Al Qaeda poses a challenge to the sovereignty of specific states but it also challenges the international society as a whole. This way, the challenge that Al Qaeda represents is putting the survival of the system under risk. Consequently it requires that the international society will collectively respond to meet the threat. But challenges to both the practical sovereignty of states and to the international society do not have to weaken the system. Instead, such challenges if handled effectively may lead to the strengthening of the society of states: a robust international society is dynamic and responsive to threats. Its members could cooperate to adapt the principles and the institutions on which the system is founded to new circumstances. Through its focus on the preservation qualities of the international society this article also reinforces the significance of the English School to the study of international relations. It raises important questions that could be answered in the framework of the English School.

We seek to reinvigorate and clarify the Copenhagen School's insight that ‘security’ is not ‘a sign that refers to something more real; the utterance [‘security’] itself is the act’. We conceptualise the utterances of securitising actors as consisting not in arguments so much as in repetitive spouting of ambiguous phrases (WMD, rogue states, ethnic cleansing). We further propose that audience acceptance consists not in persuasion so much as in joining the securitising actors in a ritualised chanting of the securitising phrase. Rather than being performed to, the audience participates in the performance in the manner in which a crowd at a rock concert sings along with the artists. We illustrate our argument with a discussion of how the ritualised chanting of the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ during the run-up to the Iraq War ultimately produced the grave Iraqi threat that it purportedly described.

The emergence of a new urban form, the global city, has attracted little attention from International Relations (IR) scholars, despite the fact that much progress has been made in conceptualising and mapping global cities and their networks in other fields. This article argues that global cities pose fundamental questions for IR theorists about the nature of their subject matter, and shows how consideration of the historical relationship between cities and states can illuminate the changing nature of the international system. It highlights how global cities are essential to processes of globalisation, providing a material and infrastructural backbone for global flows, and a set of physical sites that facilitate command and control functions for a decentralised global economy. It goes on to argue that the rise of the global city challenges IR scholars to consider how many of the assumptions that the discipline makes about the modern international system are being destabilised, as important processes deterritorialise at the national level and are reconstituted at different scales.

How can trusting relationships be identified in international politics? The recent wave of scholarship on trust in International Relations answers this question by looking for one or the combination of three indicators – the incidence of cooperation; discourses expressing trust; or the calculated acceptance of vulnerability. These methods are inadequate both theoretically and empirically. Distinguishing between the concepts of trust and confidence, we instead propose an approach that focuses on the actors' hedging strategies. We argue that actors either declining to adopt or removing hedging strategies is a better indicator of a trusting relationship than the alternatives. We demonstrate the strength of our approach by showing how the existing approaches would suggest the US-Soviet relationship to be trusting when it was not so. In contrast, the US-Japanese alliance relationship allows us to show how we can identify a developing trusting relationship.

‘Legitimacy’ is commonly cited as one of three fundamental mechanisms of social control within both domestic politics and international society. However, despite growing attention to the legitimacy of global governance, little consideration has been given to the identity of the political communities that must grant legitimacy to an international organisation or to the conditions under which legitimacy is valuable for the functioning of that organisation. In raising and responding to these questions, this article rejects the argument that actors must gain legitimacy among all subject social constituencies within their political realm of action. Instead, the importance of legitimacy within a particular constituency is a variable. The article labels this variable a ‘legitimacy nexus’ and outlines five factors that are hypothesised to contribute to calibrating a legitimacy nexus. The plausibility of the proposed schema is explored through discussion of the role of legitimacy in the trade regime and analysis of the origins of the International Labour Organization's anomalous tripartite representative structure.

European security depends on the effective collaboration of the five major powers; it will be undermined by the extension of NATO, a policy driven by US domestic politics. The main threats to security are: the breakdown of political and economic stability; unintended nuclear proliferation and/or failure of the START process; Russia's evolving political and territorial aspirations. All three will remain marginal as long as Russia is constructively engaged with the West. NATO expansion threatens that engagement. It is seen by all strands of Russian opinion as violating the bargain struck in 1990 and will likely lead to the withdrawal of cooperation. Invitations to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic cannot be rescinded, but the consequences can be mitigated by refraining from integrating them into NATO's military structure, by ceasing to insist that NATO membership is open to all, and by perpetuating the de facto nuclear-weapons-free zone that presently exists in Central and Eastern Europe. Britain's stance could be pivotal.

It is now more than twenty years since Jürgen Habermas's work was first referred to in International Relations (IR) theory. Along with many other continental philosophers and social theorists, Habermas was initially mobilised in the critique of positivism, and in particular neorealism, in IR theory. As such, the interest in Habermas and IR must be located in the first instance within the context of the fourth debate. This Forum section of the Review provides us with the opportunity to take stock and ask whether the dialogue between Habermas and IR has, thus far, been useful in providing new conceptual and methodological tools to analyse international politics and in inspiring new research agendas in IR. We also ask whether the role that dialogue plays within Habermas's work has been useful in formulating a critical theory of international relations.

Belief that images have become the critical ‘weapon’ in contemporary warfare has enjoyed great currency in the past decade. This belief rests upon certain understandings about the impact visual footage of terrorist attacks or still images of the abuse of prisoners have had on public opinion in different parts of the world. These understandings, in turn, reflect simplistic models of representation and mediation in which citizens are assumed to know little of the ‘true’ situation of war but are easily and primarily shocked by unexpected graphic images. To explore these relationships, this article presents analysis of original research from a three-year study of military practitioners, media coverage of security events, and collaborative audience ethnography across towns and cities in the UK. While military practitioners feel frustration that communicating with publics is ‘like talking to a brick wall’, analysis of audience interpretations of Abu Ghraib and other events suggests varied and negotiated understandings in which audiences account for processes of mediation as well as reflect on the event being represented. Images cannot necessarily be considered primary to explaining how an individual interprets a news story, and, to the extent and manner in which images do matter, this often depends on what longer historical narratives such images are situated within – by media or audiences themselves. No image is intrinsically shocking. For policymakers concerned with public diplomacy, for journalists and for audiences themselves there is a need for further research into the role images – Weber's ‘visual language’ – play amid today’s conditions of diffused war.

The article uncovers the intellectual link between Morgenthau’s theory of power politics and the German thinkers Max Weber and Carl Schmitt. Through this it sheds light on the forceful claims to objectivity contained in Morgenthau’s theory of power politics. The author reveals how, by combining Schmitt’s ideas of ‘the Political’ with Weber’s ideas on the objectivity of social science, Morgenthau finds an elegant way to overcome the value-determinacy of social science. This enables him to assert the objectivity of (international) political science. The same arguments allow Morgenthau also to formulate a moral defence of the state.

Although deterrence theory was a central focus in the study of International Relations during the Cold War, attention has shifted away from deterrence since the end of that conflict. Nonetheless, deterrence is a general phenomenon that is not limited to any particular time or space. Moving beyond a simple focus on the US-Soviet relationship, scholars have recently begun further explorations of deterrence, through development of theory, analysis of policy alternatives, and empirical analysis. This article seeks to evaluate where deterrence theory stands today through: (1) a consideration of distinctions between different strands of theory; (2) a discussion of the assumption of rationality in deterrence theory; (3) an examination of three important distinctions in deterrence; (4) an evaluation of the difficult task of testing deterrence theory, and (5) an overview of recent theoretical developments. The primary conclusion is that perfect deterrence theory provides a logically consistent alternative to classical deterrence theory and therefore provides the most appropriate basis for further theoretical development, empirical testing, and application to policy.

Despite initial fanfare surrounding its launch in the White House Rose Garden, the War on Terrorist Finances (WOTF) has thus far languished as a sideshow, in the shadows of military campaigns against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. This neglect is unfortunate, for the WOTF reflects the other multilateral cooperative dimension of the US-led ‘war on terror’, quite contrary to conventional sweeping accusations of American unilateralism. Yet the existing academic literature has been confined mostly to niche specialist journals dedicated to technical, legalistic and financial regulatory aspects of the WOTF. Using the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) as a case study, this article seeks to steer discussions on the WOTF onto a broader theoretical IR perspective. Building upon emerging academic works that extend Foucauldian ideas of governmentality to the global level, we examine the interwoven overlapping national, regional and global regulatory practices emerging against terrorist financing, and the implications for notions of government, regulation and sovereignty.

The impoverishment of mainstream International Relations (IR) scholarship, especially as it is practised in the bastions of academic power and respectability in the United States, can be registered in terms of its wilful and continuing conceptual blindness to mutually constitutive relations of governance/resistance at work in the production of global politics. This has been underscored in recent years by the rise of powerful transnational social movements seeking to reform or transform global capitalism, a coalition of coalitions recently reincarnated in the form of a global peace movement opposing the blatantly neo-imperial turn in US foreign policy. As the essays in this Special Issue attest, critical scholars of world politics have developed conceptual vocabularies with which to (re-)construct, from various analytical-political perspectives, aspects of these governance/resistance relations. My task in this article is to argue that – under historical circumstances of capitalist modernity – a dialectical understanding of class-based powers is necessary, if by no means sufficient, for understanding social powers more generally, and issues of global governance and resistance which implicate those powers. Although it is not without its tensions and limitations, I have found re-envisionings of Marxian political theory inspired by Western Marxism – and in particular by interpretations of Antonio Gramsci – to be enabling for such a project. Marxian theory provides critical leverage for understanding the structures and dynamics of capitalism, its integral if complex relationship to the modern form of state, the class-based powers it enables and the resistances these engender; and Gramsci's rich if eternally inchoate legacy suggests a conceptual vocabulary for a transformative politics in which a variety of anti-capitalist movements might coalesce in order to produce any number of future possible worlds whose very possibility is occluded by capitalism. In the present context of globalising capitalism and neo-imperialism, such resistance has taken the form of a transnational confluence of movements for global justice and peace.

Can the study of ideas in international politics be made scientifically respectable? The question is central to the Third Debate, yet the dominant voices in the ‘debate’ seem oddly to agree. ‘Positivists’ are sceptical because ideas seem ephemeral, difficult to measure, and generally resistant to hard science. As a result, positivist theories of international politics tend to favour seemingly more objective material factors like military and economic capabilities, and only bring in ideas as a last resort. In this way positivist epistemology shapes international ontology. Against this tendency, ‘post-positivists’ argue that it is simply a mistake to think that ideas can or should be studied in the same way we study physical objects. Ontology should determine epistemology, not vice versa. However, in developing this important insight many post-positivists have gone further, to efface any connection between their subsequent work and science—Understanding versus Explanation. The ironic result is to echo the positivist feeling that the study of ideas cannot be made scientifically respectable.

Best practices are increasingly used to govern a range of global issues. Yet, the rise of global governance through best practices has received scant attention in the International Relations literature. How do best practices differ from other modes of governance? How are they constructed? And to what end? We offer a novel conceptualisation of best practices as a unique mode of global governance principally distinguished by basing claims of political authority on existing practices. Belying their apolitical terminology, best practices in global governance are purposively constructed by political actors to steer targeted actors toward desired ends. We illustrate the characteristics of governance through best practices with reference to state and non-state global governance initiatives in a wide range of issue areas, ranging from finance and development to human rights and the environment, and through an in-depth case study of the ISEAL Alliance, a disseminator of best practices for transnational sustainability standard-setters. We find that governance through best practices has both positive and negative consequences. While it offers a pragmatic approach to global governance under conditions of fragmentation and polycentricity, it can also mask underlying power dynamics and political agendas and therefore requires ongoing critical scrutiny.

The article ventures a critique of the logic of ‘temporal othering’ in contemporary International Relations (IR) theory. Originally articulated in the field of European integration, this logic presupposes a possibility for a political community to constitute its identity without any spatial delimitation by means of casting as Other its own past, whose repetition in the future it seeks to avoid. While the image of contemporary Europe as ‘othering’ its own past has been subjected to empirical criticism, this article makes a conceptual argument for the indissociability of temporal and spatial aspects in any act of othering. Drawing on Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel, I argue that any historical action is necessarily spatiotemporal, combining the abstraction of temporal negation with the concrete actuality of a negated spatial being. Alternatives to the logic of sovereign territoriality are therefore not to be sought in the temporal aspect of othering, but rather by pursuing the possibility of self-constitution in the absence of any negating action whatsoever. The article concludes with an outline of such an alternative ethos, developed on the basis of Giorgio Agamben's reconstruction of the Hegelian-Kojèvian problematic of the end of history and his theory of the subject.