This article presents an empirical case study of a type of nonstate actor largely overlooked in the IR literature on transnationalism: the diaspora or transnational ethnic actor. Building upon findings from contentious politics or social movements scholarship, I highlight the nexus of domestic and transnational politics by demonstrating how actors form ethnic networks and utilise transnational opportunities to pursue political goals in various states. Specifically, I argue that the formation of ethnic networks in the Tamil diaspora has enabled the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) or ‘Tigers’ to engage in protracted insurgency against the Sri Lankan government army. Whereas traditional contentious politics scholarship is unable to explain the longevity and intensity of that conflict, a consideration of the transnational dimension provides new insight into how ethnic conflicts may be sustained. The combination of greater political freedom, community organising and access to advanced communications and financial resources in receiving states has allowed Tamil separatists in the diaspora to maintain ‘transnational ethnic networks’ which are in turn used to mobilise funds that have prolonged the secessionist campaign in Sri Lanka.

The concept of desecuritisation – the move of an issue out of the sphere of security – has been the subject of heated international political theory debate and adopted in case studies across a range of sectors and settings. What unites the political theory and the applied literature is a concern with the normative-political potential of desecuritisation. This article documents the political status and content of desecuritisation through four readings: one which shows how desecuritisation is a Derridarian supplement to the political concept of securitisation; one which traces the understanding of the public sphere's ability to rework the friend-enemy distinction; one which emphasises the role of choice, responsibility, and decisions; and one which uncovers the significance of the historical context of Cold War détente. The last part of the article provides a reading of the varied use of desecuritisation in applied analysis and shows how these can be seen as falling into four forms of desecuritisation. Each of the latter identifies a distinct ontological position as well as a set of more specific political and normative questions.

Norm dynamics studies typically accord a special status to norm entrepreneurs, actors who promote new global norms. But conceptually privileging these agents of change has meant the norm dynamics literature has become unbalanced and marred by case selection bias. Accordingly, an oppositional role – the ‘norm antipreneur’ – should be recognised to correct these problems. When the normative status quo in an issue-area is entrenched, a clear distinction can be drawn between the entrepreneurs and antipreneurs, because in these contexts the antipreneurs enjoy significant but under-appreciated tactical and strategic advantages. Recognising this enables the construction of a norm dynamics role-spectrum – a sort of ‘typology of roles’ – including ‘competitor entrepreneur’ and ‘creative resister’ in addition to the entrepreneur and antipreneur roles which actors might play in particular norm contestation contexts. Understanding these roles promises to improve analyses of the dynamic interactions between actors in particular norm contestation processes, thereby bringing greater overall balance to the norm dynamics literature.1

Why did Great Britain remain neutral during the American Civil War? Although several historical arguments have been put forth, few studies have explicitly used International Relations (IR) theories to understand this decision. Synthesising a discursive approach with an ontological security interpretation, I propose an alternative framework for understanding security-seeking behaviour and threats to identity. I assess the impact Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had upon the interventionist debates in Great Britain. I argue that the Proclamation reframed interventionist debates, thus (re)engendering the British anxiety over slavery and removing intervention as a viable policy. I conclude by proposing several issues relevant to using an ontological security interpretation in future IR studies.

The dominant role of the realist paradigm in international relations theory has left little room for the study of the role of cultural variables in world politics. The two central tenets of the realist theoretical game-plan—the primacy of the sovereign state system, and the autonomy of that system, from domestic political, social and moral considerations—focus our attention on the vertical division of the world into sovereign states, rather than on the horizontal forces and ties that cut across state frontiers. The result is the metaphor for the interaction of states as the mechanical one of the billiard table, with power politics as the primary dynamic.

Benchmarking practices have rapidly diffused throughout the globe in recent years. This can be traced to their popularity amongst non-state actors, such as civil society organisations and corporate actors, as well as states and international organisations (IOs). Benchmarks serve to both ‘neutralise’ and ‘universalise’ a range of overlapping normative values and agendas, including freedom of speech, democracy, human development, environmental protection, poverty alleviation, ‘modern’ statehood, and ‘free’ markets. The proliferation of global benchmarks in these key areas amounts to a comprehensive normative vision regarding what various types of transnational actors should look like, what they should value, and how they should behave. While individual benchmarks routinely differ in terms of scope and application, they all share a common foundation, with normative values and agendas being translated into numerical representations through simplification and extrapolation, commensuration, reification, and symbolic judgements. We argue that the power of benchmarks chiefly stems from their capacity to create the appearance of authoritative expertise on the basis of forms of quantification and numerical representation. This politics of numbers paves the way for the exercise of various forms of indirect power, or ‘governance at a distance’, for the purposes of either status quo legitimation or political reform.

This article introduces international icons to the field of International Relations. International icons are freestanding images that are widely circulated, recognised, and emotionally responded to. International icons come in the form of foreign policy icons familiar to a specific domestic audience, regional icons, and global icons. Icons do not speak foreign policy in and of themselves rather their meaning is constituted in discourse. Images rise to the status of international icons in part through images that appropriate the icon itself, either in full or through inserting parts of the icon into new images. Appropriations might be used and read as critical interventions into foreign policy debates, but such readings should themselves be subjected to analysis. A three-tier analytical and methodological framework for studying international icons is presented and applied in a case study of the hooded prisoner widely claimed to be emblematic of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

By now arguments about the varieties of international order abound in International Relations. These disputes include arguments about the security mechanisms, institutions, and practices that sustain international orders, including balance of power and alliances, hegemony, security regimes based on regional or global institutions, public, private, and hybrid security networks, as well as different kinds of security communities. The way these orders coexist across time and space, however, has not been adequately theorised. In this article we seek to show (A) that, while analytically and normatively distinct, radically different orders, and in particular the security systems of governance on which they are based (such as balance of power and security community), often coexist or overlap in political discourse and practice. (B) We will attempt to demonstrate that the overlap of security governance systems may have important theoretical and empirical consequences: First, theoretically our argument sees ‘balance of power’ and ‘security community’ not only as analytically distinct structures of security orders, but focuses on them specifically as mechanisms based on a distinct mixture of practices. Second, this move opens up the possibility of a complex (perhaps, as John Ruggie called it, a ‘multiperspectival’) vision of regional security governance. Third, our argument may be able to inform new empirical research on the overlap of several security governance systems and the practices on which they are based. Finally, our argument can affect how we think about the boundaries of regions: Beyond the traditional geographical/geopolitical notion of regional boundaries and the social or cognitive notion of boundaries defined with reference to identity, our focus on overlapping mechanisms conceives of a ‘practical’ notion of boundaries according to which regions’ boundaries are determined by the practices that constitute regions.

Social legitimacy is central to the effectiveness of international organisations (IOs). Yet, so far, we have little systematic knowledge about what drives citizens to support or oppose IOs. In this article, we isolate and assess three alternative explanations of social legitimacy in global governance, privileging interest representation, institutional performance, and confidence extrapolation. We test these theories in a multilevel analysis of citizen confidence in the United Nations (UN) using World Values Survey and European Values Study data, supplemented by contextual measures. The results grant support to the arguments that institutional performance and confidence extrapolation shape popular confidence in the UN, while offering little support for the explanation of interest representation. These findings challenge the predominant understanding that more democratic procedures lead to greater social legitimacy for IOs. Instead, the UN case suggests that the social legitimacy of IOs is based primarily on the organisations' capacity to deliver, as well as on citizens' general confidence in political institutions, which IOs may have little to do with and can do little to change.

Debates about the future of relations among the advanced industrial countries after the Cold War hinge on theories about the sources of international political order. Realism advances the most defined—and pessimistic—answers drawing on theories of anarchy, balance, and hegemony. But these theories are not able to explain the origins and continuing stability of relations among the United States and its European and Asian partners. This article develops a theory of liberal international order that captures its major structures, institutions, and practices. Distinctive features mark postwar liberal order—co-binding security institutions, penetrated American hegemony, semi-sovereign great powers, economic openness, and civic identity. It is these multifaceted and interlocking features of Western liberal order that give it a durability and significance.

Regional powers are often conceived of as ‘regional leading powers’, states which adopt a cooperative and benevolent attitude in their international relations with their neighbours. The article argues that regional powers can follow a much wider range of foreign policy strategies in their region. Three ideal-typical regional strategies are identified: empire, hegemony, and leadership. The article is devoted to a theory-led distinction and clarification of these three terms, which are often used interchangeably in the field of International Relations. According to the goals pursued, to the means employed, and to other discriminating features such as the degree of legitimation and the type of self-representation by the dominant state, the article outlines the essential traits of imperial, hegemonic, and leading strategies and identifies sub-types for better classifying hegemony and leadership.

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.

Despite a growing awareness about the importance of emotions to global politics, the discipline of International Relations is still working towards adequate theorisations and investigations of their role. This is particularly noticeable in the fact that there has been little sustained, scholarly examination of the effects of various emotions on the shape and orientation of the US foreign policy reaction to 9/11. This essay seeks to begin to address both of these gaps by examining the role that dynamics of humiliation and counter-humiliation have played in contemporary global politics. In particular, it develops a theoretical understanding of humiliation and then applies this framework to explain how dynamics of humiliation have impacted post 9/11 American global policy. It concludes that we cannot fully understand the sources, and the effects, of post 9/11 contemporary politics (especially US global policy) without taking into account the dynamics of humiliation.

From a critical security studies perspective – and non-traditional security studies more broadly – is the concept of human security something which should be taken seriously? Does human security have anything significant to offer security studies? Both human security and critical security studies challenge the state-centric orthodoxy of conventional international security, based upon military defence of territory against ‘external’ threats. Both also challenge neorealist scholarship, and involve broadening and deepening the security agenda. Yet critical security studies have not engaged substantively with human security as a distinct approach to non-traditional security. This article explores the relationship between human security and critical security studies and considers why human security arguments – which privilege the individual as the referent of security analysis and seek to directly influence policy in this regard – have not made a significant impact in critical security studies. The article suggests a number of ways in which critical and human security studies might engage. In particular, it suggests that human security scholarship must go beyond its (mostly) uncritical conceptual underpinnings if it is to make a lasting impact upon security studies, and this might be envisioned as Critical Human Security Studies (CHSS).

There now exists a substantial body of publications on international relations which may be fairly described as the output of a distinct school. Though its seminal thinkers, Charles Manning and Martin Wight, are no longer with us, the core of its extant membership (Hedley Bull, Michael Donelan, F. S. Northedge, Robert Purnell and others) is still in its prime and young recruits are constantly coming forward. Though delighted by this human prospect, its literary possibilities find me something less than enthusiastic. For it seems to me that repetition has set in and is likely to get worse as the years pass.

Scholars in international relations have long known that ideas matter in matters of international politics, yet theories of the discipline have failed to capture their impact either in the making of foreign policy or the nature of the international system. Recent reengagement with the insights of classical realists has pointed to the possibility of a neoclassical realist approach that can take into account the impact of ideas. This article will suggest that the study of grand strategy can enlighten the intervening ideational variables between the distribution of power in the international system and the foreign policy behaviour of states, and thus constitute the key element in a neoclassical realist research agenda.

This article argues the case for a new approach to the analysis of regions. It highlights how a region is constantly being denned and redefined by its members in a permanent discourse with each member attempting to identify itself at the core of the region. The core is defined in both territorial and functional terms and this definition necessarily involves a manipulation of knowledge and power. This region building approach utilizes the literature on nation-building and the genealogical writings of anti-foundationalists. It does not, however, attempt to place the study of regions in international relations on a new footing or replace what are arguably the two dominant approaches in the existing literature: an ‘inside-out’ approach focusing on cultural integration and an ‘outside-in’ approach focusing on geopolitics. Rather, it aims to extend the ongoing debate by asking questions about how and why the existence of a given region was postulated in the first place, who perpetuates its existence and with what intentions, and how students of regions, by including or excluding certain areas and peoples, help to perpetuate or transform a given region. After sketching the divergent approaches used to analyze regions, the second part of the article identifies how the two dominant approaches have comprehended Northern Europe, and it then uses the region-building approach to criticize and supplement their findings.

Sovereignty and human rights are generally considered separate, mutually contradictory regimes in international society. This article takes issue with this conventional assumption, and argues that only by treating sovereignty and human rights as two normative elements of a single, inherently contradictory modern discourse about legitimate statehood and rightful state action can we explain key moments in the expansion of the international system during the twentieth century. After developing a constructivist argument about communicative action, norm formation and sovereignty, the article focuses on post-1945 decolonization, showing how ‘first wave’ post-colonial states played a crucial role in constructing the ‘international bill of rights’, how they invoked those rights to justify the norm of self-determination, and how this norm in turn licensed the proliferation of new sovereign states in Asia and elsewhere.

We develop scholarship on status in international politics by focusing on the social dimension of small and middle power status politics. This vantage opens a new window on the widely-discussed strategies social actors may use to maintain and enhance their status, showing how social creativity, mobility, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably questions concerning when, if ever, status is a good in itself; whether it must be a positional good; and how states measure it.

Western Europe's status and impact within the contemporary international arena is a matter of contention and debate, reflecting its often elusive and intangible nature. On the one hand, enthusiasm for the notion of a ‘European foreign policy’ and for the idea that Western Europe can play a constructive role in the world is evident both in academic analysis and in the pronouncements of West European political leaders. On the other, there is often a yawning gap between the promise or the prescription and the reality of European disunity and pluralism. One possible reason for this gap between enthusiasm and reality is that concepts fail us when the discussion turns to Western Europe's international role: the notion of ‘Europe’ or ‘Western Europe’ is often taken to be consubstantial with the European Community, and the notion of a European ‘foreign policy’ carries with it a conceptual framework which is inseparable from the state-centric view of world politics. Thus, the idea of ‘Western Europe’ as an international actor of the conventional state-like kind based on the EC leads inevitably into the analysis of European Political Co-operation as a pro to-foreign policy; it can extend into evaluation of the ‘external relations’ encompassed by the Treaty of Rome; and it may entail a consideration of the potential for further development in the security field by the European members of NATO. At its most ambitious, it might lead to the proposal that these three areas could be combined to produce an integrated, state-like policy mechanism. Although there are few who would explicitly argue that the EC is on the verge of emerging as a ‘European state’, it is the ideal type of a state-based foreign policy which lies behind much contemporary analysis of Western Europe's international status.