Constructivism in the study of world politics is little more than a decade old, yet in that short time it has risen to challenge realism and liberalism as a leading approach in international relations. Its ascent has been dramatic. One prominent theorist recently suggested that constructivism has now replaced Marxism as the main paradigmatic rival to realism and liberalism. While this particular judgment might be debated—other scholars may wish to defend the continued relevance of a revived Marxist or socialist approach, for example—the fact remains that constructivism has reshaped many core debates in international relations theory.

Renewed interest in international institutions makes clear the need for a better theory of institutional possibilities. Friedrich Hayek held that institutions are either designed, though badly, or emerge spontaneously, and providently, as an unintended consequence of agents' self-interested choices. Hayek's historical sketch misses a third set of possibilities reflecting the claim that agents make institutions in keeping with nature's design or, as we say today, make them on some occasions to suit large social purposes. The English School treats institutions as spontaneous developments. Liberal scholars in the US start with the rationalist position that agents design institutions as they see fit, but end up closer to the view that institutions constitute a purposive whole.

Recent years have seen the growth of approaches critical of traditional state-centred examinations of international relations, arguing instead for analyses that recognise actors and methods previously held largely silent within the mainstream International Relations (IR) discourse. This article argues that children are a group of actors worthy of similar recognition. Despite the fact that ‘childhood studies’ are comparatively well established in a number of academic disciplines, similar recognition has been later in coming to the study of IR. This article aims to address this perceived gap in the literature by first of all outlining the ways in which the discourse surrounding the child in IR has so far developed. This leads into an examination of how the child may potentially best be conceptualised within the mainstream discourse and the implications of the inclusion of children as a ‘site of knowledge’ through which the international system may be more clearly understood.

International Relations (IR) textbooks often make reference to an idealist paradigm in interwar IR. This article argues that an idealist paradigm did not exist, and that interwar references to idealism or utopianism are contradictory and have little to do with defining a paradigm. Not only is there no idealist paradigm in IR at this time, but authors from the interwar period that have since been dismissed as idealists rarely share the attributes assigned to idealism or utopianism by later writers. If IR scholars are serious about understanding the history of their discipline then they will have to stop applying misleading and anachronistic terms like idealism.

Infectious disease outbreaks primarily affect communities of individuals with little reference to the political borders which contain them; yet, the state is still the primary provider of public health capacity. This duality has profound effects for the way disease is framed as a security issue, and how international organisations, such as the World Health Organization, assist affected countries. The article seeks to explore the role that domestic political relationships play in mediating the treatment of diseases as security issues. Drawing upon an analysis of the securitisation of avian influenza in Vietnam and Indonesia, the article discusses the effect that legitimacy, competing referents and audiences have on the external and internal policy reactions of states to infectious diseases, specifically in their interpretation of disease as a security threat. In doing so, we extend upon existing debates on the Copenhagen School's securitisation framework, particularly on the impact of domestic political structures on securitisation processes in non-Western, non-democratic and transitional states.

This article develops a twofold critique: on the one hand it addresses those accounts commonly associated with the Varieties of Capitalism literature and their associated understanding of neo-liberalism to argue that there is a dominant tendency to collapse into a binary analysis that asserts either we are witnessing convergence or we are experiencing path dependency. On the other hand it addresses ‘neo-Gramscian’ accounts which tend to overemphasise processes of transnational convergence and the emergence of a transnational capitalist class at the expense of the embeddedness of capital in national-domestic contexts. On this basis, it is argued that several contributions within political geography pose meaningful questions about the premise that neo-liberalism is inherently variegated. Principally, this involves developing the notion of variegated neo-liberalism to analyse the dynamics of a contingent neo-liberal consensus between transnationally-oriented fractions that both drives EU reform in a neo-liberal direction and reinforces domestic linkages organic to the national context. As a result, the article suggests we therefore reject the notion of a transnational capitalist class somehow detached from the national.

This article explores the way in which Russian and Chinese governments have rearticulated global trends towards active citizenship and participatory governance, and integrated them into pre-existing illiberal political traditions. The concept of ‘participatory authoritarianism’ is proposed in order to capture the resulting practices of local governance that, on the one hand enable citizens to engage directly with local officials in the policy process, but limit, direct, and control civic participation on the other. The article explores the emergence of discourses of active citizenship at the national level and the accompanying legislative development of government-organised participatory mechanisms, demonstrating how the twin logics of openness and control, pluralism and monism, are built into their rationale and implementation. It argues that as state bureaucracies have integrated into international financial markets, so new participatory mechanisms have become more important for local governance as government agencies have lost the monopoly of information for effective policymaking. Practices of participatory authoritarianism enable governments to implement public sector reform while directing increased civic agency into non-threatening channels.

The notion of humanitarian government has been increasingly employed to describe the simultaneous and conflicting deployment of humanitarianism and security in the government of ‘precarious lives’ such as refugees. This article argues that humanitarian government should also be understood as the biopolitical government of host populations through the humanitarian government of refugees. In particular, it explores how the biopolitical governmentality of the UK decision to suspend search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean in 2014, and the British rejection and German welcoming of Syrian refugees primarily concern the biological and emotional care of the British and German populations. To this end, the article analyses how dynamics of inclusion/exclusion of refugees have been informed by a biopolitical racism that redraws the boundary between ‘valuable’ (to be included) and ‘not valuable’ (to be excluded) lives according to the refugees’ capacity to enhance the biological and emotional well-being of host populations. This discussion aims to contribute to three interrelated fields of research – namely, humanitarian government, biopolitical governmentality, and responses to the European refugee crisis – by exploring how biopolitics has shaped the British and German responses to the crisis and how it encompasses more meanings and rationalities than currently recognised by existing scholarship on humanitarian government.

Over the last two decades, there has been a ‘democratic turn’ in peace and conflict research, that is, the peculiar impact of democratic politics on a wide range of security issues has attracted more and more attention. Many of these studies are inspired by Immanuel Kant's famous essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’. In this article, we present a critical discussion of the ‘democratic distinctiveness programme’ that emerged from the Democratic Peace debate and soon spread to cover a wider range of foreign policy issues. The bulk of this research has to date been based on an overly optimistic reading of a ‘Kantian peace’. In particular, the manifold forms of violence that democracies have exerted, have been treated either as a challenge to the Democratic Peace proposition or as an undemocratic contaminant and pre-democratic relict. In contrast, we argue that forms of ‘democratic violence’ should no longer be kept at arm's length from the democratic distinctiveness programme but instead should be elevated to a main field of study. While we acknowledge the benefits of this expanding research programme, we also address a number of normative pitfalls implied in this scholarship such as lending legitimacy to highly questionable foreign policy practices by Western democracies. We conclude with suggestions for a more self-reflexive and ‘critical’ research agenda of a ‘democratically turned’ peace and conflict studies, inspired by the Frankfurt school tradition.

In this article I argue that the demands of irregular migrants to belong to political communities constitute key contemporary sites of ‘the political’. I also argue that geographies associated with neoliberal globalisation (transnational production circuits, special economic zones and global cities) are implicated in irregular migration flows and in new conceptions of political belonging. In relation to these claims, I reflect upon recent mobilisations in the US context, in which hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants and their supporters asserted the right to belong. I suggest that similar claims to belong are likely to proliferate and that neoliberal geographies may provide some clues as to where and how these contemporary frontiers of the political might proceed. I conclude by suggesting that a multidimensional approach to political belonging provides a sound conceptual starting point for the analytical and normative challenges raised by both the claims of non-status migrants and the sovereign practices of contemporary states.

This article begins from the observation that while communication is a widely used catch-phrase in current IR theorising, the very concept of ‘communication’ is still mainly treated in terms of simple sender-receiver models which do not sufficiently elaborate how the insights of the ‘communicative turn’ can be made fruitful for IR theorising. The argument is developed in three steps. First – particularly drawing on the work of Karl W. Deutsch – we identify those pockets in IR theory, namely conflict studies and theories of ‘communicative action’, in which ‘communication’ plays a considerable theoretical role. Second, it is claimed that placing ‘communication’ at the centre of any theory of IR requires taking full account of the theoretical consequences of the ‘linguistic turn’. To develop this argument requires an examination of the often implicit notion of ‘communication’ in contemporary uses of speech act theory and symbolic interactionism in current IR theory. Such a move necessarily leads to the diagnosis that all social systems and orders of exchange, including international relations, are communicatively constituted. Finally, such a view enables a reconfiguration of the central problems of ‘order’ and ‘conflict’ in IR theory in an innovative fashion: while the problem of order can be restated not as the problem of establishing regularities and patterns but as a problem of disconnecting communications, the problem of conflict can be restated not as a problem of a disruption of communication but as a problem of continuing conflict communication.

Prompted by the integration of Europe, Derrida recently posed the following questions. ‘Indeed, to what concept, to what real individual, to what singular entity should this name be assigned today? Who will draw up its borders?’ While this question speaks of the political entity called Europe, it has much broader resonance. It echoes concerns about identity, boundaries, and the relationship between the inside and the outside of political entities, concerns that have not escaped the attention of critical International Relations scholars. Nor are these necessarily new concerns. The situation in post–World War II Britain prompted the same questions Derrida raises about Europe in 1992. To what real individuals, to what singular entity the terms ‘British’ and ‘Britain’ should be assigned was a question that prompted debate, political violence, and a series of increasingly restrictive and, some would suggest, racist immigration policies. The transformation of Britain from an empire to a nation–state was accompanied by a crisis of identity whereby early postwar proclamations that Britain ‘imposed no colour bar restrictions making it difficult for them when they come here’ and that ‘there must be freedom of movement within the British Empire and the Commonwealth’ were, rather quickly, to give way to exclusionary practices and a retreat to ‘little England’.

Hannah Arendt's characterisation of the refugee as rightless and stateless has become a touchstone for scholars grappling with the nature of forced migration and exile. While aspects of Arendt's depiction continue to resonate, the notion of refugees as stateless, rightless ‘scum of the earth’ is now in many cases anachronistic, and no longer clearly reflects the challenges now faced by the majority of the world's refugees. This is attributable to structural changes in the refugee regime, particularly the increased focus on repatriation and the reconstitution of the relationship between refugees and their states of origin, a possibility largely unforeseen by Arendt. Drawing on the example of the Guatemalan repatriation movement, this article contends that indiscriminately portraying refugees as stateless represents a potential disservice to the displaced, as it may inadvertently undermine refugees' claims against their states of origin for the redress of their rights as citizens. There is a need to expand theorising on refugees from a narrow focus on the refugee as rightless and stateless to a broader conception of the refugee as a bearer of claims for the renegotiation of her relationship with her state.

The end of the Cold War has seen Western internationalism migrate from the margins to the centre of International Relations theory and practice. As a consequence the modest ambitions of what we might now call ‘classical internationalism’ have come under challenge from more thoroughly cosmopolitan varieties from both the right and left of the mainstream Western political spectrum whose commonalities, moreover, are arguably becoming as prominent as their differences. This article attempts to recover the classical internationalist project and, more specifically, the understanding of statehood that underpins it. Some observations on the distinctions and tensions between varieties of contemporary internationalist and cosmopolitan thinking about international politics are followed by a critique of a pervasive scholarly disinterest in the varieties of Western internationalist states. These two exercises form the backdrop to advocacy of the idea of ‘the Good State’ as a response to dominant forms of contemporary Western cosmopolitanism and their critics.

In the April 2010 Review of International Studies, Roland Paris argued that liberal peacebuilding is the only viable solution for rebuilding war-torn societies, and supported this by assailing critics of the liberal peace. In this article we challenge four key claims made by Paris: imposed and consensual peacebuilding are different experiences; there are no echoes of imperialism in modern peacebuilding; there is no alternative to the capitalist free market; and critics of the liberal peace are ‘closet liberals’. We argue that Paris ignores the extent to which all peacebuilding strategies have had a core of common prescriptions: neoliberal policies of open markets, privatisation and fiscal restraint, and governance policies focused on enhancing instruments of state coercion and ‘capacity building’ – policies that have proved remarkably resilient even while the democracy and human rights components of the liberal peace have been substantially downgraded. There is little space to (formally) dissent from these policy prescriptions – whether international peacebuilders were originally invited in or not. Furthermore, the deterministic assumption by Paris that ‘there is no alternative’ is unjustifiable. Rather than trying to imagine competing meta-alternatives to liberalism, it is more constructive to acknowledge and investigate the variety of political economies in post-conflict societies rather than measuring them against a liberal norm.

Since twentieth century society has been so badly scarred by wars between the major industrial powers it is difficult to understand how it was that capitalist industry was once held to be the great material and moral force which would bring peace to the world. The idea was, nonetheless, firmly implanted in the minds of many men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Richard Cobden, the English radical politician, was one of these and the eradication of international conflict became the central concern of his life.

Expanding on the works of Beck and others on the growing business of risk, this article examines the role of the private security industry in the creation, management and perpetuation of the world risk society. It observes that the replacement of the concept of security with risk over the past decades has permitted private firms to identify a growing range of unknown and unknown-unknown dangers which cannot be eliminated, but require permanent risk management. Using the discourse of risk and its strategies of commercialised, individualised and reactive risk management, the private risk industry thus has contributed to the rise of a world risk society in which the demand for security can never be satisfied and guarantees continuous profits.

This article develops emerging critical approaches to global environmental politics by starting with the question, posed by Julian Saurin: ‘If degrading practices occur as a matter of routine, how do we account for this?’. Through an analysis of the global political economy of the car, it shows that widespread social practices which systemically produce global environmental change are simultaneously deeply embedded in the reproduction of global power structures. It focuses on three interconnected aspects of this global political economy—the role of the car industry in processes of globalization, its role in reproducing capital accumulation in the twentieth century, and the promotion of the car over its alternatives by states.

This article proposes the methodological framework of visual narrative analysis through the study of images and narratives. We are interested in the appeal of political storytelling. In applying an approach of layered interpretation, we study images and slogans to consider the more complex underlying narratives in their political and cultural context. Our exploratory case studies draw on material from right-wing populist parties, namely election campaign posters from Germany and the UK as material for the analysis. We find that narratives operate with a ‘fantasmatic logic’, which adds fantasy to politics, to depoliticise and camouflage their radical intent and gain approval by making consent desirable. We identify two exemplary narratives (honest men under threat; proud mothers) that entrench traditional gender roles in accordance with patriarchy and nationalism. Theoretically, our approach contributes to debates in IR on cultural underpinnings in international politics and the construction of collective identities through shared/divided narratives. Visual narrative analysis provides a promising methodological tool for analysing visual representations in their productive relationship with text. This perspective foregrounds the power of political storytelling through fantasmatic appeal and fosters a better understanding of the global rise of populism.

Recently, theorists have sought to justify transnational democracy by means of the all-affected principle, which claims that people have a right to participate in political decision-making that affects them. I argue that this principle is neither logically valid nor feasible as a way of determining the boundaries of democratic communities. First, specifying what it means to be affected is itself a highly political issue, since it must rest on some disputable theory of interests; and the principle does not solve the problem of how to legitimately constitute the demos, since such acts, too, are decisions which affect people. Furthermore, applying the principle comes at too high a cost: either political boundaries must be redrawn for each issue at stake or we must ensure that democratic politics only has consequences within an enclosed community and that it affects its members equally. Secondly, I discuss three possible replacements for the all-affected principle: (a) applying the all-affected principle to second-order rules, not to decisions; (b) drawing boundaries so as to maximise everyone's autonomy; (c) including everyone who is subject to the law. I conclude by exploring whether (c) would support transnational democracy to the extent that a global legal order is emerging.