Alex Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics demonstrates perhaps more long and hard thought about social theory and its implications for international relations theory than most international relations scholars have dared to venture into. He admirably attempts to do in an explicit manner what most scholars in the discipline do only implicitly and often accidentally: suggest a social theory to serve as the foundation for theorizing about international relations. However, there are problems with his approach, a hint of which can be found in the epigraph he has chosen: ‘No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics, which tacitly it presupposes’. Because metaphysics cannot ultimately be proven or disproved, it is inherently insecure. The insecurity and instability of the metaphysical presuppositions present in Social Theory are not difficult to find, and what Wendt ends up demonstrating, despite his objective not to, is the absence of any secure, stable, and unambiguous metaphysical foundation upon which IR theory could be firmly anchored. Indeed, what Social Theory does illustrate is that there is no such ultimate centre within the discipline except the powerful desire to maintain the illusion of first principles and the essential nature of things. If I may paraphrase Wendt, this is a ‘desire all the way down’ in that it permeates his relentless quest for the essence of international relations. Two goals characterize this desire: on the one hand, to take a critical stance toward more conventional international relations theory such as neorealism and neoliberalism; on the other, to maintain unity, stability, and order within the discipline. Social Theory oscillates between these two goals and in doing so deconstructs the very foundations it seeks to lay.

The breakdown of the Soviet Union surprised most scholars of international relations, comparative politics, and Soviet politics. Existing explanations attribute the breakdown of the Soviet Union to the reformist leadership of Gorbachev, and/or to systemic factors. These explanations do not focus on the key contribution of the war in Afghanistan. This is surprising since many scholars view wars as key causal factors in empire breakdown and regime change. We argue that the war in Afghanistan was a key factor, though not the only cause, in the breakdown of the Soviet Union. The war impacted Soviet politics in four reinforcing ways: (1) Perception effects: it changed the perceptions of leaders about the efficacy of using the military to hold the empire together and to intervene in foreign countries; (2) Military effects: it discredited the Red Army, created cleavage between the party and the military, and demonstrated that the Red Army was not invincible, which emboldened the non Russian republics to push for independence; (3) Legitimacy effects: it provided non-Russians with a common cause to demand independence since they viewed this war as a Russian war fought by non Russians against Afghans; and (4) Participation effects: it created new forms of political participation, started to transform the press/media before glasnost, initiated the first shots of glasnost, and created a significant mass of war veterans (Afghansti) who formed new civil organizations weakening the political hegemony of the communist party.

As the concept of human security has become part of the mainstream discourse of international politics it should be no surprise that both realist and critical approaches to international theory have found the agenda wanting. This article seeks to go beyond both the realist and biopolitical critiques by situating all three – political realism, biopolitics and human security – within the history and theory of the modern rise of the social realm from late eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. Human security is the further expansion of social forms of governance under capitalism, more specifically a form of socialpolitik than realpolitik or biopolitics. Drawing on the work of historical sociologist Robert Castel and political theorist Hannah Arendt, the article develops an alternative framework with which to question the extent to which ‘life’ has become the subject of global intervention through the human security agenda.

There are two popular claims about diplomacy in the modern history of international relations. According to the first, World War One constituted a decisive turning point in the modern era, marking the emergence of a new diplomacy, distinct in both essence and style from that which had existed previously. The second maintains that diplomacy is in a state of continuous decline. This study proposes that the distinction between old and new diplomacy is simplistic and inaccurate, and that the argument regarding the decline of diplomacy is not a valid one, Raymond Aron's observation that ‘diplomacy, in the traditional sense of the term, functions up to a certain degree between allies, but hardly any longer among enemies, or even between the blocs and the neutral nations’ is only partially correct, and reflects its time of writing at the height of the cold war.

For anti-cosmopolitan critics, cosmopolitanism is equated with the universalisation of a particular, liberal, account of justice and is therefore problematic for a number of reasons. The liberal principle ‘do no harm’ principle – and the cosmopolitan principle of humanitarianism, can be used to correct the depiction of cosmopolitanism as hostile to ‘pluralism’, to identify the universalism that is latent or undeveloped in much ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’, and to identify further means of reconciling these positions. A cosmopolitan harm principle argues that the absence of a universal conception of justice should not provide an obstacle to the recognition of an obligation to limit transboundary harms.

Comparisons of peacebuilding with historic practices of imperialism are common, but these comparisons have sustained a hegemonic antagonism between humanitarian and imperialist interpretations of international peace intervention. This article argues that this common framing externalises the problem of intervention, romanticises local resistance, and forecloses to investigation the articulation between militarised peace practices and transnational capitalist relations. To do so, the article analyses the case of Francophone Africa, thus providing a context that has been left unexplored in peacebuilding debates. By bringing back in the historicity of particular Franco-African imperial experiences into peacebuilding research, the article reveals the militarisation of politics, transnational elite networks, and the dominant intellectual predispositions that work to reproduce the legitimacy of hegemonic practices of ‘peace’ interventionism. In the last section, the article analyses the debates over the UN-French 2011 intervention in Côte d'Ivoire to reveal the connections between the ethics of humanitarian interventions and the political economy of imperialism. The article concludes that the imperial legacy of peacebuilding is found in old capabilities, new organising logics, and specific practices and power relations and that to focus on the humanitarian-imperialist antagonism caricatures the relationships between ‘local’ and ‘international’ actors.

This article addresses the problématique of the subject and the subject-object dichotomy from a post-objectivist, reflexivist perspective informed by a ‘strong’ version of reflexivity. It clarifies the rationale and epistemic-ontological requirements of strong reflexivity comparatively, through a discussion of autoethnography and autobiography, taken as representatives of other variants of reflexive scholarship. By deconstructing the ontological, epistemic, and reflexive statuses of the subject in the auto-ethnographic and auto-biographical variants, the article shows that the move from objectivism to post-objectivism can entail different reconfigurations of the subject-object relation, some of which can lead to subjectivism or an implicit positivist view of the subject. Strong reflexivity provides a coherent and empowering critique of objectivism because it consistently turns the ontological fact of the social situatedness of knowledge into an epistemic principle of social-scientific research, thereby providing reflexivist scholars with a critique of objectivism from within that allows them to reclaim the philosophical, social, and ethical dimensions of objectivity rather than surrender them to the dominant neopositivist tradition.

The liberal peace project has dominated state-building operations since the end of the Cold War, including in Timor-Leste. However, the attempt to institutionalise the liberal peace faced significant challenges in Timor-Leste's fragmented subsistence-based society. This resulted in the creation of shallowly rooted and poorly-understood liberal state institutions that were disconnected from the majority of Timorese, who continued to follow their local sociopolitical practices. In response, the state has increasingly engaged with these local practices in order to create state institutions that make sense to the people they seek to govern. This engagement has occurred through the formalisation of local sociopolitical institutions, the recognition of local justice systems and the utilisation of local ceremonies and practices. Therefore, this article argues that a liberal-local hybrid peace project has emerged to guide state-building in Timor-Leste, which may indicate how similar projects could develop in the future.

Kelsen and Schmitt, two leading legal theorists of the twentieth century, constitute a powerful pair that sheds light on the intertwining of politics and law in the phenomenon of sovereignty. Although their conceptions of sovereignty are far apart, they are interconnected as different ways of making sense of the same social phenomenon, or what I call the ‘practice of sovereignty’, whereby an ultimately unauthorised authority continuously authorises itself as the authority and the rest by and large accept this, acquiesce in this, or are made to do so. Having clarified their differences and interconnection, I explore some of the implications of the two writers’ differing conceptions of sovereignty and of the practice of sovereignty that underlie them.

Three principal schools of political economy — economic liberalism, economic socialism and economic nationalism — are offered to students of international political economy by the professional literature. Since the end of World War II and in the context of the rivalry between the ‘liberal West’ and the ‘Socialist East’, economic nationalism has been a neglected field of study.Notwithstanding, some excellent studies of economic nationalism have been published. In the field of international relations, see R. Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, 1987), and J. Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge, 1990). In the field of economic development, see D. Seers, The Political Economy of Nationalism (Oxford, 1983), and P. Burnell, Economic Nationalism in the Third World (Brighton, 1986). For a study of the interaction between Communism and nationalism, see R. Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (Oxford, 1988); for the economist's point of view, see H. Johnson (ed.), Economic Nationalism in Old and New States (Chicago, 1967), and A. Breton, ‘The Economics of Nationalism’, Journal of Political Economy, 72 (1964), pp. 376–86. For an excellent review of the origins of the concept, see J. Kofman, ‘How to Define Economic Nationalism?: A Critical Review of some Old and New Standpoints’, in H. Szlajfer (ed.), Economic Nationalism in East-Central Europe and South America, 1918–1939 (Geneva, 1990), pp. 17–54. During the Cold War period and up until after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, economic nationalism attracted more attention among scholars of Africa, Latin America and Asia than among those of us who studied the political economy of the ‘centre’ (e.g., Mayall, Burnell and Seers, to mention just three, are all scholars of economic nationalism who were initially concerned with the study of developing countries). Economic liberalism and economic socialism have vied for scholarly attention, resulting in greater theoretical and analytical sophistication. During the interwar period the situation was different: economic nationalism was well represented in widely read textbooks on international relations and enjoyed attention from both its proponents and its opponents.F. H. Simonds, The Great Powers in World Politics: International Relations and Economic Nationalism (New York, 1939); J. M. Keynes, ‘National Self Sufficiency’, The Yale Review, 22 (1933), pp. 755–69; J. Viner, ‘International Relations between State Controlled National Economies’, American Economic Review, supp., 34 (1944), p. 328; L. Robbins, Economic Planning and International Order (London, 1937), pp. 326–7; T. E. Gregory, ‘Economic Nationalism’, International Affairs, 10 (1931), pp. 289–306; W. E. Rappard, ‘Economic Nationalism’, in Harvard Tercentenary publications, Authority and the Individual (Cambridge, MA, 1937), pp. 74–112. Now, with the collapse of the Communist regimes, the consequent change in world politics, the current economic problems in North America and in Europe and, last but not least, the lessons derived from the miraculous economic success of the mercantilist states of East Asia,On Japan and East Asian states as mercantilist, see Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford, CA, 1982), and Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State (New York and London, 1995); James A. Gregor (with Maria Hsia Chang and Andrew B. Zimmerman), Ideology and Development: Sun Yat-sen and the Economic History of Taiwan (Berkeley, CA, 1981). the time seems to have come to re-examine our perceptions of the discourse of political economy, and redirect scholarly attention toward the theory of economic nationalism.

. . . it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past. Hannah Arendt

It is almost two decades ago that the Review published Roy Jones' famous ‘case for closure’ against what he christened the English school of international relations. While that case was couched in an anxious foreboding that the school was ‘still in its prime’, that its bonds ‘are proving much too strong’, and that ‘young recruits are constantly coming forward’, it arguably registered a growing sense at the time that its target was a safe one, a spent force — one whose attraction defied explanation. For the work of the English school was a ‘sterile regime’. It lacked intellectual coherence, rigour, passion, and acquaintance with such important social-scientific fields as economics. Whether Jones had cast his polemical net too widely over a heterodox group, or missed the mark with his criticisms, the absence of any spirited, sustained reply along these lines seems, in retrospect, to reinforce the impression that the approach identified most closely with Martin Wight and Hedley Bull had run out of steam. It had made little impression in the United States. In British circles it had become the faintly embarrassing traditionalism which scholars were obliged to overcome, a synonym for scholarly provincialism, one that engaged the world from such insular vantage points as the common room of the London School of Economics. It stood accused of inhibiting access to the fruits of American social science while inclining, at bottom, to the same political realism that had predominated in the U.S. The mostly unspoken accusation of anachronism has never gone away.

How China assumes its position of superpower is one of the most important questions regarding global order in the twenty-first century. While considerable and sustained attention has been paid to China’s growing economic and military might, work examining how China is attempting, if at all, to influence the ecosystem of global norms is in its earlier stages. In this article we examine China’s actions in an important venue for the development of global norms, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Using a unique dataset that captures how other countries move into or out of alignment with China on UNGA resolutions that are repeated over time, we find statistical evidence that China used diplomatic and economic means in an attempt to subtly alter international norms. We further illustrate these findings by examining four states that made substantive moves toward China on resolutions concerning national sovereignty, democracy, international order, non-interference, and human rights.

Securitisations permit the breaking of rules: but which rules? This article argues that any given security situation could be handled by a variety of different ‘rule breaking’ procedures, and that securitisations themselves, whilst permitting rule breaking in general, do not necessarily specify in advance which rules in particular have to be broken. This begs the question: how do specific threats result in specific rule breaking measures? This article explores this question through reference to ‘control orders’, an unusual legal procedure developed in the UK during the course of the war on terrorism. Once applied to an individual, a control order gives the government a meticulous control over every aspect of their life, up to and including deciding on which educational qualifications they can take. Despite this control, individuals under the regime remain technically ‘free’: and have frequently used this freedom to abscond from the police who are supposed to be watching them. How did a security policy which controls a suspect's educational future, but not their physical movements, develop? This article aims to answer this question, and in so doing present a reevaluation of the mechanisms through which the effects of securitisation manifest themselves.

Borrowing from Norbert Elias, we introduce the habitus of restraint to the study of security communities. This habitus constitutes a key dimension of the glue that holds security communities together. The perceived compatibility of practices emanating from the habitus that members hold fosters the collective identity upon which a security community is built. The violation of a member’s habitus by the practices of another member, however, disrupts the reproduction of collective identity and triggers a crisis of the security community. Our analysis of Germany’s reaction to Washington’s case for war against Iraq provides empirical evidence for the salience of the habitus for the internal dynamics of security communities.

This article challenges existing accounts of the development of the Euromarkets by arguing that their emergence constituted the foundational moment in the advent of a postwar Anglo-American developmental field. The account contends the notion of a postwar order shaped predominantly by the outward expansion of American financial power, by deprivileging the exclusivity of American power and arguing that co-constitutive Anglo-American developmental processes were the generative force that produced the Euromarkets. Drawing upon new archival material, the article suggests that an Anglo-American developmental sphere, in which Britain continued to play a crucial but subordinate role, was key to the unfolding of postwar financial globalisation. The Anglo-American developmental processes occasioned by the Euromarkets gave rise to a ‘transatlantic regulatory feedback loop’ that stimulated deregulation on both sides of the Atlantic and placed Anglo-American capitalist interdependence at the centre of the politics of globalisation. The deeper origins of financial deregulation lie in the transformation of Anglo-American finance during the 1960s.

This article examines why states ask for forgiveness from other states or peoples that they have harmed. Asking for forgiveness has significant political, legal, and moral implications. But beyond these, the subject concerns how states confront their history and their collective responsibility for wrongdoing. My focus on the reasons states have for asking forgiveness could also improve our understanding of conflict resolution. The article introduces an innovative typology of requests for forgiveness by presenting important conceptual distinctions in the terminology currently employed in the field. Apologies, regrets, and expressions of sorrow are conceptualised as distinct avenues of asking forgiveness with varying degrees of significance and meaningfulness. I assert that the type of request for forgiveness is influenced by the degree of severity attributed to a wrongdoing and by the extent to which a state perceives its image as threatened by its wrongful act. The article analyses the important 1951 statement of West Germany's Chancellor Adenauer regarding the Jewish Holocaust as an example of a type of request for forgiveness.

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.

In 1919 when the first tentative steps were taken to establish the study of international relations as an independent discipline, liberals in the United States and Europe believed that the First World War had been caused by European statesmen who had been pursuing policies designed to promote a balance of power. It was gloomily predicted, moreover, that the continuing influence of balance of power thinking would precipitate another world war. One of the major objectives of the nascent discipline was to identify alternative ways of organizing international relations so that the pernicious influence of the balance of power could be permanently eliminated.

The past decades have seen a significant expansion in the scope and authority of international organisations (IOs), raising questions about who participates and is represented in the public contestation of IOs. An important precondition for citizens to become critically involved in the public debate about an IO is that they are aware of the politics of that IO. This article sheds light on this largely unexplored issue, asking why some citizens are more aware of IOs than others. This question is examined in the context of a powerful international organisation, the United Nations Security Council. Using a multilevel analysis of citizens in 17 Asian and European countries, this article argues that citizen knowledge about the Council is shaped by economic conditions and cosmopolitan identity. Higher levels of knowledge are found among the wealthier, and there is some evidence that income inequality depresses knowledge among poorer citizens. Furthermore, citizens identifying with groups or individuals across nation-state borders are more likely to know more about the Council. The article sketches broader implications for the study of the politicisation of IOs and citizen representation in the public contestation of IOs.

In this article I theorise the concept of misrecognition that we aim to bring to the study of international politics with this Special Issue. I draw upon three sources to do so: recognition theory, Hegel, and Jacques Lacan. I show that, while the seeds of an interest in misrecognition were laid in that interdisciplinary Hegelian scholarship known as recognition theory, it remains underdeveloped. To develop it into a concept I chart a path through recognition theory back to Hegel’s original dialectic of the master and servant in the Phenomenology of Spirit. What the dialectic captures, I argue, are the actual dynamics of misrecognition in social life, not an idealised form of recognition. This foundational, constitutive misrecognition is what Lacan also theorises by way of his concept of ‘fantasy’. Both Hegel and Lacan foreground a misrecognised, desiring subject that challenges the ways in which agency has been understood in international politics. Lastly, I show the purchase of a Hegelian-Lacanian analysis for IR by considering the relations between sovereignty and nuclear weapons under the lens of fantasy.