Our present understanding of British intelligence and its relationship to Anglo-American cooperation in the postwar period leaves much to be desired. Indeed while it has often been remarked that the twin pillars of Anglo-American security cooperation were atomic weapons and intelligence exchange, there remains an alarming disparity in our understanding of these two areas. The importance of intelligence is often commented on, but rarely subjected to sustained analysis. This article seeks to fill that gap by looking in turn at the nature of the Western ‘intelligence community’, the impact of alliance politics upon intelligence common to national estimates and the significance of strategic intelligence cooperation.

After the ‘CNN effect’ concept was coined two decades ago, it quickly became a popular shorthand to understand media-conflict interactions. Although the connection has probably always been more complex than what was captured in the concept, research needs to be updated in order to better understand the multifaceted contemporary environments of both media and conflict. There are growing numbers and types of media sources, and multiple interactions between media and conflict actors, policymakers and engaged publics from the local to the global and back. We argue that understanding the impact of media reporting on conflict requires a new framework that captures the multilevel and hybrid media environments of contemporary conflicts. This study provides a roadmap of how to systematically unpack this environment. It describes and explains how different levels, interactions, and forms of news reporting shape conflicts and peacebuilding in local, national and regional contexts, and how international responses interact with multiple media narratives. With these tools, comprehensive understandings of contemporary local to global media interactions can be incorporated into new research on media and conflict.

How to theorise religion in International Relations (IR)? Does the concept of post-secularity advance the debate on religion beyond the ‘return of religion’ and the crisis of secular reason? This article argues that the post-secular remains trapped in the logic of secularism. First, a new account is provided of the ‘secularist bias’ that characterises mainstream IR theory: (a) defining religion in either essentialist or epiphenomenal terms; (b) positing a series of ‘antagonistic binary opposites’ such as the secular versus the religious; and (c) de-sacralising and re-sacralising the public square. The article then analyses post-secularity, showing that it subordinates faith under secular reason and sacralises the ‘other’ by elevating difference into the sole transcendental term. Theorists of the post-secular such as Jürgen Habermas or William Connolly also equate secular modernity with metaphysical universalism, which they seek to replace with post-metaphysical pluralism. In contrast, the alternative that this article outlines is an international theory that develops the Christian realism of the English School in the direction of a metaphysical-political realism. Such a realism binds together reason with faith and envisions a ‘corporate’ association of peoples and nations beyond the secularist settlement of Westphalia that is centred on national states and transnational markets. By linking immanent values to transcendent principles, this approach can rethink religion in international affairs and help revive grand theory in IR.

It is often argued that multilateralism is no longer an effective mechanism to respond to global priorities and that more deliberative and multisectoral governance is needed. To explore this, the purpose of this article is to examine the practice of mutlisectoral deliberation within the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and to determine whether it has resulted in providing a more deliberative response to global health priorities. To do so, this article will apply various theoretical arguments for deliberative democracy to the results of a four year study on the multisectoral organisation the Global Fund. By making links between theory and practice, the article will argue that the multisectoralism practiced by the Global Fund continues to suffer from a deliberative deficit and that it has not safeguarded equal stakeholder participation, equal deliberation between stakeholders or alleviate the asymmetric power relationships which are representative of current forms of multilateral governance. Nevertheless, by locating these gaps between theory and practice, it is possible to outline deliberative safeguards that might, if constitutionally enhanced, pull the Global Fund closer to its own normative values of multisectoral deliberative decision-making.

The works of Jürgen Habermas have amounted to an inspiration to many within IR. His writings on communicative rationality and communicative action are widely regarded as a useful counterpoint to the emphasis on instrumental rationality and strategic action. Also, Habermas has greatly influenced the development of Critical International Theory. However, as other contributions in this Forum demonstrate, IR scholars have at times found it difficult to apply Habermas to service their specific social scientific inquiries. In particular, it has been difficult to unequivocally locate communicative action in diplomatic exchanges or international negotiations. It is partly for this reason that the contributions of the so-called ‘Third Generation’ of Frankfurt School scholars have attracted increasing interest. Axel Honneth's attempts to reconstruct insights in relation to the struggle for recognition into a social theory (with critical intent) have to date been of particular importance in this context. Indeed, given the perceived difficulties in ‘applying’ Habermas, there appears to be an emerging trend to end the honeymoon with Habermas in favour of a reorientation toward Honneth.

The purpose of this article is to offer a feminist critique of populism, not as a distinct mode of politics, but as an analytical and political concept. As such, it seeks to redirect our attention away from populism, understood as a politics ‘out there’, towards the academic theoretical debates that have given this analytical term a new lease of life and propelled it beyond academic circles into the wider public discourse. In this context, the article develops two broad arguments. The first is that the two prevailing conceptions of populism are marred by anaemic conceptions of power, collective agency and subjectivity and, as such, are unable to present us with a convincing account of why this form of radical politics emerges in the first place, who its protagonists are, and how they come together in collective struggle. The second is that our current frenetic deployment of the term as a blanket descriptor for radical politics of all persuasions does not bode well for feminism politically. For both reasons, I conclude that feminists need to resist the current ‘populist hype’.

Bringing ontological questions back into IR has been key to opening discussions about plurality and difference in terms of the coexistence of related and plural worlds and realities, for example through notions such as relationality and pluriversality. The problem is that in trying to develop relational approaches as an alternative to the ‘Western/modern’ – atomistic – ontology, relationality, relations, and their meanings can become fixed, translating them into ‘things’. The article maintains that cosmopraxis – as a complex pluriversal, multidimensional set of experiences – not only illustrates how relations relate without fixing their meaning, but also provides us with relevant insights to contribute to think of a pluriversal and more plural IR.

What does it mean to think like a Realist? The question is important in the study of international politics. According to a recent survey of the field, more than 90 per cent of the hypotheses tested by behaviourists in international politics were Realist in conception. A wider survey of the field taken in 1972 (which included those more historically inclined) identified the American Realist Hans Morgenthau as the leading scholar of international relations and his Politics Among Nations as the leading book. The overwhelming majority of other prominent postwar general theorists have worked inside the Realist tradition.

C. A. W. Manning, Professor of International Relations at the LSE (1930–1962), was a key contributor to the formation of the discipline in Britain. He wrote on Jurisprudence, which was his main strength; on the League of Nations, of which he was a keen supporter; on South Africa, concerning which he gained notoriety as the defender of Apartheid; on International Relations as an independent academic discipline, which, to him, was due to the sui generis character of international society as a formally anarchical but substantively orderly social environment. He was a Rationalist in Martin Wight's sense, and early constructivist, who saw that the society of states as a social construct was subject to interpretation, reinterpretation, and reshaping.

Examination of Woodrow Wilson's concept of national self-determination in light of both Wilson's own intellectual development and the evolution of wartime strategy and diplomacy establishes that there was no prior consideration of ethnic or collective versus liberal or civic nationalism in Wilson's idea of ‘national’ self-determination and that the actual enunciation and application of the principle was deeply affected by considerations of wartime strategy and diplomacy, above all to counter defeatist tendencies following Russia's withdrawal from the war as well as to induce a separate Austrian peace. Wilson thus understood that the idea could not be applied in an unqualified way, that considerations of national self-determination might in specific instances have to yield to compelling questions of security, diplomacy and economics. At the same time, Wilson was not well informed about many key aspects of nation and state in East-Central Europe. In the end, Wilson accepted many unsatisfactory compromises at the peace table based on the promise that the League and its version of collective security held for international security and justice. Ignorance, liberal myopia, and political incompetence thus have to be weighed against Wilson's considerable tactical pragmatism in prosecuting the war when arriving at a final judgement on Wilson and the legacy of national self-determination.

This article develops the concept of ‘frontline diplomacy’ – what practitioners referring to work in embassies, consulates, and permanent representation as ‘the field’ –, defined here as all diplomats’ activities taking place away from headquarters. IR scholarship tends to focus on Ministries of Foreign Affairs located in capitals. On the contrary, building on the practice turn in IR, we first show that international politics emerge from frontline practices. Adding to criticism against the practice turn, we then explain that it has missed important transformations occurring in frontline diplomacy because it tends to privilege stability over change. We finally discuss two innovations in frontline practices: the action of Sherpas in G20 summits following the 2008 crisis and the use of Twitter by US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul (2012–14). For each we answer three questions: How do these activities transform traditional modes of operation? How are non-state actors involved in them? What do they tell about transformation of global politics? Because diplomatic practices at the frontlines epitomise international politics, these new directions for inquiry contribute substantively to IR scholarship. At the theoretical level, they enrich the continuing encounter between IR and diplomatic studies through practice theory and help to understand change in practice.

In 2006, the European Union launched its new free trade strategy Global Europe with the explicit goal of increasing European competitiveness. This article explores the positions of trade unions and other social movements on Global Europe. Importantly, while Northern social movements and trade unions from the Global South reject Global Europe due to its impact of deindustrialisation on developing countries, European trade unions support it in so far as it opens up new markets for the export of European manufactured goods. It will be argued that this has to be understood against the background of the dynamics underlying the global economy and here in particular uneven and combined development. Due to the uneven integration of different parts of the world into the global economy, workers in developed countries may actually benefit from free trade, while workers in the Global South are more likely to lose out. It will, however, also be argued that while these different positions within the social relations of production are shaping the position of trade unions, they do not determine them. Over time, through direct engagement, trade unions in the North and South may be able to establish relations of transnational solidarity.

In this article I utilise the editors' conceptual frame of sovereignty/intervention/transnational social forces to argue that the relationship that ensues between these phenomena has to be understood in colonial-modern – rather than modern – terms. I thereby argue that intervention is a distinctive technology of colonial-modern rule, specifically, one that erects and polices the difference between sovereign and quasi-sovereign entities via a standard of civilisation. Additionally, I argue that transnational social forces struggle – cognitively, socially, and politically – over the upholding or refuting of this standard; and in this struggle, some might even defend particular sovereign entities against colonial interventions. I demonstrate my argument by explicating the global colonial context of the Italy/Ethiopia conflict in 1935–6, the nadir of the interwar crisis. I ‘decolonise’ received interpretations of the conflict through the heuristic of two differing catechisms of Psalms 68:31 proffered at the time: one, invoking a civilising mission of Africans; the other, invoking a project of self-liberation by Africans.

Cosmopolitan thought and practice bring into sharp focus the question of solidarity, its articulations, and implications in relation to how the political is understood in the sphere of the international. Where liberal cosmopolitanism aims its remit at a transcendent sphere of humanity, seeking to place humanity as the constitutive feature of a redesigned political community, a cosmopolitanism that is distinctly political in its orientation takes the postcolonial critique seriously, unravels the complicities of liberal cosmopolitan articulations of solidarity in global structures of domination, and locates its self-definition in an imminent critique of modernity. The political cosmopolitanism defined in the article presents a conception of solidarity without community, a conception that at once both recognises modernity’s legacy in the perpetuation of inequality and enables a conception of the universal that is not complicit in such relations.

Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny's valuable 'Engaging Gramsci: International Theory and the New Gramscians'Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 3-21. alerts Anglophone IR scholars to broader debates about Gramsci's theories that are rarely highlighted by scholars in the (somewhat misnamed) 'Italian School'. Just as Germain and Kenny have offered one way to contextualize Gramsci's contributions within the intellectual and social world that was the immediate object of his analysis, it is equally important to put the work of Anglophone 'Gramscian' scholars in its own immediate context in order to clarify why the 'Gramsci' that so many of us have found helpful was the historicist and 'idealist' who, as Germain and Kenny's article suggests, is only one of the many Gramscis that can be identified through historically grounded close readings of the Sardinian's words and deeds.

The peacebuilding and academic communities are divided over the issue of local ownership between problem-solvers who believe that local ownership can ‘save liberal peacebuilding’ and critical voices claiming that local ownership is purely a rhetorical device to hide the same dynamics of intervention used in more ‘assertive’ interventions. The article challenges these two sets of assumptions to suggest that one has to combine an analysis of the material and normative components of ownership to understand the complex ways in which societies relate to the peace that is being created. Building on the recent scholarship on ‘attachment’, we claim that different modalities of peacebuilding lead to different types of social ‘attachment’ – social-normative and social-material – to the peace being created on the part of its subjects.

In recent years, some scholars have argued that there has been a convergence of the immigration control policies of the industrial democracies. This article demonstrates that, in fact, there has been an extraordinary similarity among the immigration control policies of the major receiving countries for over a century. It examines six alternative explanations for these similarities in immigration control policies: (1) a global hegemon that forces or persuades various countries to act in unison; (2) global or regional migration regimes and organizations; (3) interdependence between the immigration control policies of various countries; (4) emulation of immigration control policies of one country by other countries; (5) the world system approach; and (6) interdependence between the socioeconomic and foreign policy factors that lead to immigration control policies. The article argues that it is the last factor that explains most of the similarity among the immigration control policies. It demonstrates how global economic cycles, shared migratory pressures, alliances that produce common foreign policy considerations, wars that receiving countries are involved in and global ideological cycles produce the convergence of immigration control policies in various receiving countries.

My aim in this article is to improve the methodology of the modernist constructivist approach and to provide a more coherent, rigid, and systematic constructivist framework for research. I do this by combining the methods of process tracing, discourse analysis, and counterfactuals. In addition, I aim to provide clearer methodological criteria for the evaluation of constructivist research by modifying some of the positivist criteria and adding the criterion of contextual validity. I assert that a more coherent methodology will strengthen and improve constructivist study and may contribute to better communication between constructivist and positivist scholars.

Tackling germs, negotiating norms, and securing access to medicines are persistent challenges that disproportionally affect developing countries' participation in global health governance. Furthermore, over the last two decades, the excessive focus on global pandemics and security in global health diplomacy, rendered peripheral diseases that usually strike the poor and vulnerable, creating situations of marginalisation and inequality across societies. However, as the importance of regions and regionalism increases in global politics, and integration ambitions and initiatives extend beyond trade and investment to embrace welfare policy, there are new opportunities to explore whether and how regional commitments affect health equity and access to medicine in developing nations. What, if any, are the possibilities for meso-level institutions to provide leadership and direction in support of alternative practices of global (health) governance? Can regional polities become international advocacy actors in support of global justice goals? This article addresses these questions by analysing regional health diplomacy in South America. The article argues that regional organisations can become sites for collective action and pivotal actors in the advocacy of rights (to health) enabling diplomatic and strategic options to member state and nonstate actors, and playing a role as deal-broker in international organisations by engaging in new forms of regional health diplomacy.

If students of world politics can be reasonably accused of ignoring the Troubles in Northern Ireland—in part because they seemed to have little to do with the larger East-West confrontation and partly because they were so obviously about something distinctly national in character—then by the same token specialists on Northern Ireland can justly be accused of a certain intellectual parochialism and of failing to situate the long war within a broader global perspective. The quite unexpected outbreak of peace however only emphasizes the need for a wider understanding of the rise and fall of the Northern Irish conflict. This article explores the relationship between the partial resolution of the Irish Question—as expressed in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998—and the changing character of the European landscape. Its central thesis is that while there were many reasons for the outbreak of peace in the 1990s, including war weariness, it is difficult to understand what happened without situating it in a larger European framework and the new definition of sovereignty to which the EU has given birth.