Did Britain reinvade the Falklands because of its ‘identity’? Or was reinvasion instead required by its ‘role’ in international politics? In this article I show that a complete constructivist explanation of Britain's response must consider both its identity affirmation, which constructivist International Relations (IR) theory would certainly draw attention to, but also the role it played on the world stage at the beginning of the 1980s, which would very likely be overlooked. I show that a solely identity-based explanation is incomplete and ultimately unpersuasive since identities are affirmed by playing social roles, which give identity meaning. In 1982, a number of roles could have fulfilled this function for Britain; it is important then that Britain chose and was able to play the role of a status quo oriented power rather than that of a colonial power. Beyond offering a more complete interpretation of the events, the article clarifies the links between roles, identity, and action in international politics, and the type of theory appropriate to such analysis.

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.

china’s situation lends itself to hyperbole. the people’s republic of china (prc) has the largest population in the world, the fastest growing economy in the world, the largest army in the world, the largest middle class in the world, a permanent seat on the united nations security council, a manned space programme, a nuclear arsenal, and so on. but analysts, commentators and policymakers have yet to decide just how to understand china.

Current discourses about the everyday in relation to international peace interventions focus on two main aspects. First, the perceived quality or qualities of everyday life tend to be attributed to ‘local’ organisations or actors and assessed positively. Second, the control of life (including bio-political control and governance) tends to be associated with ‘international’ actors and viewed negatively. This article challenges these key assumptions by contextualising them in social and political theories of the everyday and in two key examples: ‘affective’ peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and ‘threatworks’ in Northern Ireland. It also calls for an approach to the ‘everyday’ in international interventions which moves beyond local/international power dynamics and is attentive to the pluralities of power and practice that emerge in these settings.

Burke did not count himself a theorist. Metaphysics, abstraction, was stuff for professor So If the speculation of the classroom was brought too close to the life of politics the result was unsettling, dangerous, revolutionary. Politicians should be people of practice not theory, attending to circumstance before principle, working within a tradition not innovating, reforming before countenancing revolution. They should be concerned with the whole of human nature and not just with human reason, with feeling as well as with thought.

Review of International Studies has seen a debate over the value of security. At its heart this is a debate about ethics: concerning the extent to which security is a ‘good’ and whether or not security politics produces the kind of world we want. More recent contributions focus on the extent to which security is ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. However, this article argues that the existing debate is limited and confusing: key authors use the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in different, and, at times, contradictory ways. The article clarifies the roots of the existing debate, and then draws out two different uses of the terms positive and negative: an analytic frame and a normative frame. In response, it proposes a pragmatist frame that synthesises the existing uses, drawing on pragmatism and practice-centred approaches to analyse the value of security in context. The contribution of the article is thus twofold: it both clarifies the existing debate and suggests a solution. This is key because the debate over the value of security is crucial to thinking about how we want to live.

This article examines how affective narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media reinforce and challenge established scripts of national identity, political legitimacy, and international geopolitical imaginary. Taking theoretical insights from the scholarship on trauma, disaster nationalism, and politics of emotions, I structure the analysis of social media posts from state media and private accounts around three emotional registers: grief as a crucial site of control and contestation during the initial stage of the outbreak; gandong (being moved in a positive way) associated with stories of heroic sacrifices, national unity, and mundane ‘heart-warming’ moments; and enmity in narratives of power struggles and ideological competition between China and ‘the West’, especially the United States. While state media has sought to transform the crisis into resources for strengthening national belonging and regime legitimacy through a digital reworking of the long-standing repertoire of disaster nationalism, alternative articulations of grief, rage, and vernacular memory that refuse to be incorporated into the ‘correct collective memory’ of a nationalised tragedy have persisted in digital space. Furthermore, the article explicates the ways in which popular narratives affectively reinscribe dominant ideas about the (inter)national community: such as the historical imagination of a continuous nationhood rising from disasters and humiliation, positive energy, and a dichotomous view of the international order characterised by Western hegemony and Chinese victimhood. The geopolitical narratives of the pandemic build on and exacerbate binary oppositions between China and ‘the West’ in the global imaginary, which are co-constructed through discursive practices on both sides in mutually reinforcing ways. The lens of emotion allows us to attend to the resonances and dissonances between official and popular narrativisations of the disaster without assuming a one-way determinate relationship between the two.

Barry Buzan's essay provides a welcome forum for discussion about the virtues and future direction of the English School as a resource for IR research. Like many American With apologies to my Canadian colleagues, I use the term American to mean US. I am uncomfortable ascribing the concerns outlined here to scholars in Canada who have intellectual traditions of their own and may well have a different perspective on these matters. constructivists, I am an admirer of English School scholarship and have found it extremely helpful in my own work. I am less optimistic than Buzan, however, about the prospects that the English School will become either a grand theory or the focus of new trans-Atlantic IR debates. It is not clear to me that grand theory status is necessary for the English School; it may not even be particularly desirable. Buzan does not define what he means by a grand theory, but, from the context of his remarks and the Wallerstein example, it would seem that grand theory requires a degree of cohesion and discipline that is antithetical to the methodological pluralism which has characterized English School work and which Buzan views as one of its strongest virtues. Giving the English School more salience in American IR debates, by contrast, would be a real improvement. Even if it does not become the focus of debate, American scholarship would be enriched by incorporation of the historical and normative orientations the English School brings. As the growing strength of constructivist scholarship in the US indicates, there is an eager audience for theoretical frameworks that provide traction on such issues. In what follows I sketch some reasons why the English School has had only limited impact on US scholarship. Specifically, I will argue that the School's lack of clarity about both method and theoretical claims has made it difficult for American scholars to incorporate it into their research. Addressing these issues might make the English School more useful to more US researchers. It might also have the converse effect of sharpening work within the School and assisting its advocates in constructing the research focus Buzan seeks.

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.

Largely ignored by scholars of world politics, the global punk rock scene provides a fruitful basis for exploring the multiple circuits of exchange and circulation of goods, people, and messages that moves beyond the limitations of IR. Punk can also offer new ways of thinking about international relations and communication from the lived experiences of people’s daily lives. At its core, this essay has two arguments. First, punk offers the possibility for counter-hegemonic expression within systems of global communication. Punk has simultaneously worked within and against the hegemony of capitalist telecommunication networks, navigating an increasingly interconnected and mediated world. Second, punk is a subversive message in its own right. Focusing on punk’s Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos and the resource it offers for resisting the multiple forms of alienation in modern society, the story I construct here is one of agency and empowerment often overlooked by traditional IR.

This article examines the politics and explanatory plausibility of performative accounts of state action through a critical analysis of the themes of continuity and change in the work of David Campbell. As political interventions, performative models reproduce a number of taken-for-granted conceptual distinctions. As explanations, performative models are undermined by an account of the social that privileges representation. Drawing on materialist feminist critiques of performativity, I argue for the necessity of locating accounts of subject formation and state action in the multiple logics that constitute the social.

There is increasing acceptance among International Relations scholars that there is a group of writers which should be recognized as constituting a distinct school of thought. More often than not this school is called, following Roy E. Jones, the ‘English school’. However, acceptance of such a school is often accompanied by disagreement and confusion as to its definitive or unifying characteristics. In the January 1988 issue of this Review, Dr Sheila Grader directly confronted this disagreement and confusion by rejecting wholesale the assertion that there is an English school. However, her own assertions and arguments fail to convince. Indeed they serve to cast the matter into deeper obfuscation.

The international relations literature on regionalism, both in economic and security issues, has grown dramatically over the last 15 years. One of the ongoing issues discussed in most articles and books is the conceptualisation of ‘region’. Instead of thinking about regions using notions of interdependence and interaction we take a social constructivist approach, whereby states themselves define regions via the construction of regional economic institutions (REI). We explore how a conceptualisation of region based on REIs contrasts with various related concepts such as regional system, and regional IGO. Empirically, we show that most all countries belong to at least one important regional economic institution, REI, (for example, EU, Mercosur, ASEAN, etc). In short, the world is dividing itself into regions by the creation of regional economic institutions. We contrast our economic-institutional approach to regions with Buzan and Wæver's ‘regional security complexes’ which is based on security dependence. There are interesting agreements and disagreements between their approach and our economic-institutional approach to defining regions. It is perhaps not surprising that many REIs have taken on security roles, which we briefly show by looking at military alliances embedded in REIs. This suggests that policymakers are creating regions through institutional innovations that link economic and security issues.

This essay introduces Max Weber’s sociology of modern culture to International Relations. Previous treatments of Weber in the discipline have focused on Morgenthau’s use of Weberian ideas rather than on the differences between their positions. In appropriating Weber’s ‘ethic of responsibility’ for his theory of power politics, Morgenthau neglected Weber’s sociology of ‘rationalization’ and analysis of the displacement of cultural values in modern policy-making. In Morgenthau’s theory foreign policy is judged in terms of consequences for state power, while for Weber policy is judged in terms of consequences for cultural values. This crucial difference in their understanding of the political ethics of realism is anatomized. Using Weber’s sociology of modern culture and often misunderstood view of the relation between science and values, the article then traces the repercussions of Morgenthau’s influential understanding of realism in strategic policy science.

The ‘separation fence’ ‘constructed by Israel to isolate itself from the Palestinians’ raises many questions. Why was the construction of a fence perceived by the Israelis as a solution and as the only solution? What determined the specific, serpentine path of the fence and what impact does it have on both Palestinian and Israeli societies? A resulting reconfiguration of the power structure within Palestinian society is clearly unfolding and deserves analysis.

This study explores the relationship between principles of distributive justice (DJ) and the durability of negotiated agreements. Sixteen peace agreements negotiated during the early 1990s were coded for the centrality of each of four principles of DJ – equality, proportionality, compensation, and need – to the core terms of the agreement. The agreements were also assessed on scales of implementation and durability over a five-year period. Another variable included in the analysis was the difficulty of the conflict environment. These data were used to evaluate three sets of hypotheses: the relationship between DJ and durability, the role of the conflict environment, and types of DJ principles. The results obtained from both statistical and focused-comparison analyses indicate that DJ moderates the relationship between conflict environments and outcomes: when principles of justice are central to an agreement, the negative effects of difficult conflict environments are reduced; when principles are not central, the negative effects of difficulty are heightened. These relationships are accounted for primarily by one of the four DJ principles – equality. Implications of these findings are discussed along with a number of ideas for further research.

when gerry segal asked ‘does china matter?’ in 1999, his answer was an unequivocal ‘no’:

the country that is home to a fifth of humankind is overrated as a market, a power, and a source of ideas. at best, china is a second-rank middle power that has mastered the art of diplomatic theater: it has us willingly suspending our disbelief in its strength. in fact, china is better understood as a theoretical power – a country that has promised to deliver for much of the last 150 years but has consistently disappointed. after 50 years of mao’s revolution and 20 years of reform, it is time to leave the theater and see china for what it is. only when we finally understand how little china matters will we be able to craft a sensible policy toward it.

Traditionally, the central problematic of the Westphalian states system has been how to counteract the so-called ‘security dilemma’, the tendency for states in a context of uncertainty to defect from cooperative arrangements if they perceive other states' security preparations as threatening (misperception; arms racing). As the states system became more centralized and the number of major players declined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the nondivisibility of benefits—the dangers of potential defection (world wars; nuclear annihilation)—grew while states' incentives to defect increasingly necessitated control from the centre. The end of the Cold War, however, has reflected not a further centralization (nondivisibility) of benefits in the international system but (1) an increasing divisibility of benefits in a globalizing world economy and (2) the declining effectiveness of interstate mechanisms at preventing defection not only by states (‘defection from above’) but also by non-state, sub-state and trans-state actors (‘defection from below’). In this ‘new security dilemma’, the range of incentives grows for the latter to defect from the states system itself—unless coopted through the increased availability of divisible benefits. Furthermore, attempts to impose security from above (intervention) can create backlashes which interact with complex globalization processes to create new sources of uncertainty: overlapping and competing cross-border networks of power, shifting loyalties and identities, and new sources of endemic low-level conflict. In this context, emerging mechanisms of stabilization will be uneven, characterized by structural tensions and suboptimal performance.

The concept of societal security as developed by the Copenhagen school has three underlying weaknesses: a tendency to reify societies as independent social agents, a use of too vague a definition of ‘identity’, and a failure to demonstrate sufficiently that social security matters to individuals. This article shows that applying social identity theory to the societal security concept helps remedy these weaknesses and closes the theoretical gaps that the Copenhagen school has left open. It enables us to treat ‘society’ as an independent variable without reifying it as an independent agent. It also suggests a much sharper definition of identity, and a rationale for the Copenhagen school's claim that individuals have a psychological need to achieve societal security by protecting their group boundaries. Social identity theory thus supports the societal security concept in its central assumptions while giving it stronger theoretical foundations and greater analytical clout.

1. Personal and academic background

F.H. It would be very interesting if you could say something about your own personal and academic background. What were the experiences that led you to write Man, the State and War?