This article theorises the simultaneous enaction of securitising and desecuritising moves. It argues that the frequent simultaneity of these two processes, which are normally considered mutually exclusive within Securitisation Theory (ST), has previously gone unnoticed given a set of methodological, temporal, and ontological biases that have developed within ST. Demonstrating how these biases can be overcome – and even reconciled with the seminal texts of ST – by drawing on work from within social theory and elsewhere, we argue that the frequent simultaneity of (de)securitising moves most urgently requires us to reconsider the normative status of desecuritisation within ST. Although desecuritisation has traditionally been viewed as normatively positive, we argue that its temporally immanent enaction alongside securitising moves might introduce more violence into security politics and, in fact, exacerbate protracted conflicts. Ultimately, we make the normative ambitions of some within ST more opaque. Desecuritisation is not a shortcut to the ethical-political good within ST.

In a recent article in the Review of International Studies, Kai Alderson subjected the concept of state socialisation to considerable scrutiny. This kind of conceptual clarification is fundamental to both theory building and empirical work in the study of international relations. Alderson should be commended for his work on the concept, since there are only a handful of previous studies that explicitly explore state socialisation in any detail. However, his attempt to produce a ‘consensus definition’ of the concept to bring clarity to an emerging research programme has left me with more questions than answers. This essay is designed to raise questions about Alderson's conceptualisation of state socialisation based on a comparison with the literature on socialisation from other disciplines. The overarching goal is to stimulate healthy debate about a concept that should be central to our understanding of the social aspects of international politics.

The books which are the subject of this article1 lie squarely (if a little uneasily on the part of Northedge) in the so-called ‘classical‘ tradition of scholarship in International Relations. This tradition eschews both the attempt to explain international politics by aping the methodology of the natural sciences and any interest in saying something of general import about the process of foreign policy formulation. Rather, it finds its “less ephemeral centre” in the rules and institutions which are shared by states and approaches the study of these rules and institutions in a manner at once philosophical and historical. Furthermore, against the cardboard lances of the ‘transnationalists’ it clutches a sturdy shield to the state, insisting that the state has been in the recent past and will remain for the foreseeable future, the principal “centre of initiative” in world politics. In short, this tradition consists in an overriding concern with the political theory and institutional history of the ‘states-system’.

This article examines the changing status of ‘sovereignty’ in the context of some of the world's poorest countries. An examination of the relationship between the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and these countries suggests that the norm of sovereignty is increasingly being ‘trumped’ by the IFIs' commitment to the achievement of good political and social arrangements and economic development within these countries. The article explores the historical roots of this development by tracing the way sovereignty became bound up with the idea of self-determination, the achievement of the ideals of the Enlightenment, and the pursuit of a ‘national economic project’.

‘The limits of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think. It is our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that shrink them.’

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Book II, Chapter 12.2

[cited from John Rawls The Law of Peoples, p. 7]

After presenting a brief sketch of John Rawls's theory of justice, his international political theory is outlined and evaluated. Rawls develops a classification of ‘peoples’ based on whether or not they are ‘well-ordered’. The Law of Peoples covers ‘liberal’ and ‘decent’ peoples who adhere to minimum standards of human rights and are not aggressive in their international relations. This is in the realm of ‘ideal’ theory; ‘non-ideal’ theory must cope also with societies that are not well-ordered, such as outlaw states and burdened societies. The long-term aim is that all should be part of a confederation of decent peoples. Rawls's theory has been criticized by cosmopolitan liberals for its communitarian tendencies, but has much to offer scholars of international relations, including a systematic basis for classifying states, a helpful discussion of the distinction between reasonableness and rationality, and a powerful restatement of the importance of utopian thinking in international relations.

At the height of the influence of the secularisation thesis religion was understood to be absent from affairs of state and the law, including international politics and international law. As the critique of secularisation gained momentum this master narrative fell apart, and a new consensus began to take shape. The notion that religion had been ignored and should be ‘brought back in’ to International Relations took centre stage among many academics and practitioners. The assumption is that restoring religion in the right way will help address the problems associated with having ignored religion in IR, paving the way for the marginalisation of violent religion and globalisation of religious freedom. This article undertakes a critical analysis of this restorative narrative and the religious and political world it is creating. It then proposes a different approach to the intersection of religion and world politics after secularism. This approach draws attention to the authority of transnational actors such as the United States, United Nations, and European Union to shape the public administration of religious affairs globally. Channels through which this is accomplished include the promotion of religious freedom, humanitarian intervention, foreign aid, nation building and democratisation, counterterrorism and peace-building efforts, and the pronouncements of supra-national courts.

This article examines recent attempts by International Relations (IR) scholars to flesh out a reflexive approach inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The French sociologist pioneered the idea of turning the tools of sociology onto oneself in order to apply the same grid of social analysis to the object and subject of scholarship. This represents the culmination of a long tradition of seeking to understand from where one speaks and grasp our subjective biases through reflexive means. But as I argue Bourdieu – like most reflexive scholars – largely overestimated his ability to grasp his own subject position. For he assumed he could be objective about the very thing he had the least reasons to be objective about: himself. Instead of bending over backwards in this way and directly take the subject into account, I then propose to rearticulate the problematic of reflexivity by going back to a more classic concern with the question of alienation. Through a detailed critique of Bourdieu’s reflexive approach and the ways in which it was received in IR, I set out a series of principles to reconfigure the agenda of reflexivity and offer a platform for a proper methodological alternative to positivism.

This essay attempts to apply concepts of hegemony to the case of contemporary North American—Western European—Japanese (‘Trilateral’) relations and, more specifically, to analyse the role and importance of a unique international organization the Trilateral Commission (TC), within Trilateral relations. The essay comprises: (i) a comparison of the Realist and Gramscian concepts of hegemony and relates them to aspects of the post-war international order; (ii) a more extended discussion of the Gramscian concept of hegemony and related concepts; (iii) an exposition of aspects of the ‘Trilateral’ approach, a discussion of the TC and an interpretation of the TC using Gramscian analysis; and (iv) a discussion of the long-term structural pressures on the Trilateral relationship in the context of a reconstituted hegemony.

There have been calls for policymakers to draw ‘lessons’ from Britain's experience of Empire and Northern Ireland to inform a new generation of post-Cold War interventions by the international community. This article emphasises the role that domestic public opinion, galvanized by the impact of casualties and the plight of military relatives, has played in shaping Britain's experience of ‘military intervention’ in the ‘civil wars’ of Palestine, Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. Three principal arguments are put forward.

Donald Trump assumed office in January 2017, committed to revamping US foreign policy and putting ‘America First’. The clear implication was that long-held international commitments would be sidelined where, in Trump’s view, the American interest was not being served. NATO, in the crosshairs of this approach, has managed to ride out much of the criticism Trump has levelled against it. Written off as ‘obsolete’ by the American president, it has fared better in the Trump era than many commentators had predicted. NATO exemplifies a tendency in US foreign policy, which pre-dates Trump, where open criticism stops short of abandonment. This pattern has continued since 2017 and indicates a preference for voice over exit. As such, it suggests that Trump’s foreign policy is not always as illogical as many have assumed. Logic is borne of institutional context: Trump has chosen to articulate voice where institutionalisation makes exit unviable. Institutional resilience in general and NATO’s case specifically has a wider relevance, both for transatlantic relations and international order.

This article explores Jim George's claim that Hans Morgenthau's notion of political realism is founded upon a spectator theory of knowledge and that it discloses no meaningful distinction between theory and practice. An investigation of Morgenthau's understanding of scientific inquiry, the relation of theory and practice, and his views on American foreign policy suggests that both of these claims may be misplaced. Rather Morgenthau's realism is an authentic moral voice in the discourse of world politics which emphasizes the importance of judgment and the need to locate statecraft in historical, social, and political context. It is a realism that is representative of a rich moral tradition, one which orders, arranges, and prioritizes fundamental human values and which is concerned with how these values might be realized. This conclusion not only emancipates a valuable tradition of scholarship, it also raises important question about how we engage and organize the discipline of international relations and it suggests that some critical thinking spaces may provide a rather limited refuge for those wishing to go beyond Morgenthau and realism.

The central thesis of this article is that when faced with state collapse, rising violence, and a complex stabilisation effort, the US, UN, and NATO in Afghanistan and the US and Britain in Iraq, deployed the dominant, if not only, international approach available, Liberal Peacebuilding. The article traces the rise of Liberal Peacebuilding across the 1990s. It argues that four units of analysis within neoliberal ideology, the individual, the market, the role of the state and democracy, played a key role within Liberal Peacebuilding, allowing it to identify problems and propose solutions to stabilise post-conflict societies. It was these four units of analysis that were taken from the Liberal Peacebuilding approach and applied in Afghanistan and Iraq. The application of a universal template to two very different countries led directly to the fierce but weak states that exist today.

Since the end of the Cold War, the number of books and articles on intervention in world politics has grown dramatically. Yet curiously little of this work subjects the concept of intervention itself to critical scrutiny. Scholars often preface their analyses with definitional discussions about what intervention is, but these definitions take a common form, conceiving intervention within a ‘sovereignty frame’. This article questions this conception of intervention, arguing that it distorts our understanding of interventionary practices and forms of reasoning that occurred in non-sovereign international orders. After exploring the sovereignty framing of intervention in greater detail, I advance an alternative conception. International orders are systemic configurations of political authority: they comprise multiple units of such authority, each with its own realm of jurisdiction, organised according to some principle of differentiation. Importantly, this principle need not be territorial: it could be functional, for example. International intervention is the transgression of a unit's realm of jurisdiction, conducted by other units in the system. Unlike the sovereign framing of intervention, this conception is equally applicable to the interventionary ideas and practices of diverse international orders, and provides a better basis on which to understand how thinkers in different historical contexts have reasoned about intervention.

This article argues that communities of practice (CoPs) provide IR with a unique way to understand how a small group of committed people can make a difference to international politics. The point is addressed in three steps. First, the article advances our understanding of how CoPs work. While at its core a CoP is a group of people brought together by a practice they enjoy, a CoP also shares a sense of timing, placing, and humour. These aspects help the group anchor, refine, and innovate their practice in the face of challenges and uncertainty. Second, the article contrasts the analysis of CoPs with other IR approaches, especially institutional analysis, network analysis, and epistemic communities, to show how CoPs supplement them. Third, the article illustrates the argument with the example of the EU foreign policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It concludes by suggesting that a CoP's perspective not only helps IR better understand informal politics, but also opens up conversations across disciplines.

This article critically examines recent works on resilience. In so doing, it argues that rather than representing some radical rupture with current practices heralding the dawn of a new era, as David Chandler claims, the emphasis on individuals as resilient subjects simply represents a new phase in the neoliberal shift from the state as provider to state as enabler and promoter of self-reliance. Indeed, our present preoccupation with complexity, uncertainty, and resilience can best be understood as reflecting the consequences of neoliberal policies Moreover, the article further argues that there is an attendant danger that resilience thinking may further promote neoliberal forms of governmentality and encourage a degree of political passivity. The emphasis on resilience is in danger of depoliticising highly political choices, shifting attention toward ex-post policies of survival and recovery rather than challenging the current economic order and resisting the further imposition of neoliberal policies on already beleaguered populations. This article therefore argues for shifting our emphasis towards a Foucauldian analysis of power and resistance.

Alexander Wendt has drawn on an exceptional range of theoretical literature in his effort to reconceptualize the nature of the international system. His discussion of scientific realism ought to be required reading for any student of international relations, or political science for that matter. He puts to rest the notion that constructivism is necessarily postmodern, devoid of an objective referent. In John Searle's felicitous formulation it is possible to have a subjective ontology but an objective epistemology. In emphasizing that all knowledge is theory laden, Wendt underscores the point that facts never simply speak for themselves. In both the social and natural sciences brute empiricism is never an adequate research strategy. Our theories shape the way we see the world but they cannot remake the world in their own image.

International relations, as an academic discipline, is not known for its strength in the area of theory. It has no immediate equivalent to the rich contrasts of perspective generated in sociology by the legacy of Max Weber, Marx and Durkheim—a lack so felt that Martin Wight once wrote a paper called ‘Why is there no International Theory?’ His own answer was, in part, that there is nothing further to theorize after the discovery of the repetitive mechanisms of the balance of power. This was a sad conclusion for such an acute and creative mind to reach. But it does illustrate a central feature of IR theory. For the balance of power, it can be argued, is the limit of any Realist theory of international relations. And Wight's conclusion was perhaps more an index of the dominance of a Realist orthodoxy than a relection of the inherent properties of ‘the international’.

Living in the shadow of the United Nations and paralysed by the superpowers for much of the post-World War II period, few regional organizations have lived a celebrated life. Few issues proved as divisive and contentious at the drafting of the United Nations Charter as the UN's future relationship to regional organizations. If some at San Francisco believed that the future global organization might be assisted by several regional pillars, the ‘Wilsonian tendency to identify regionalism with war-breeding competitive alliances survived’, and most who were present at the creation were determined to ensure that the future global organization had seniority and superiority over any present or future regional organization. Although Chapter VIII of the UN Charter did stake out a potential role for regional organizations, including the possibility that they might prevent conflicts from being referred to the Security Council, the language adopted reflected the contentious and unresolved nature of the proceedings: ‘The Security Council shall encourage the development of pacific settlements of local disputes through such regional arrangements or by such regional agencies either on the initiative of the states concerned or by reference from the Security Council.’ The subsequent forty-five years suggests that the UN found only limited use for regional organizations.

China's increasing capabilities are a central focus of modern day US security concerns. The International Relations literature is a key forum for analyses of the so-called ‘China threat’ and yet it remains relatively quiet on the role of ideas in the construction and perpetuation of the dangers that country is understood to present. This article reveals that throughout history ‘threats’ from China towards the United States, rather than objectively verifiable phenomena, have always been social constructions of American design and thus more than calculations of material forces. Specifically, it argues that powerful and pervasive American representations of China have been repeatedly and purposefully responsible for creating a threatening identity. It also demonstrates that these representations have enabled and justified US China policies which themselves have reaffirmed the identities of both China and the United States, protecting the latter when seemingly threatened by the former. Three case studies from across the full duration of Sino-American relations expose the centrality of ideas to historical and contemporary understandings of China ‘threats’, and to the American foreign policies formulated in response.

In this article I pose two questions to traditional International Relations (IR) theory: why does it not use the concept of violence more often, and why does it not discuss the meaning of violence? I aim to highlight the way in which violence is hidden in the way we talk about IR, and that the way IR talks about violence without naming it functions to legitimise state violence. I do this by analysing the way the concept of violence is used in traditional IR literature, and then looking at how violence has been defined. I argue that a narrow definition is most useful for the study of IR, and that it should not be used merely to refer to anything we do not like. But this must not preclude challenging the normative uses of violence that suggest that it is only state violence that is legitimate, and that hides personal violence from the scope of IR.