Despite the wide repository of knowledge about conflict-related sexual violence that now exists, there remains a lack of understanding about how victims/survivors of such violence themselves make sense of and frame their experiences in conversation with global and local discourses and with the categorisations that underpin support programmes. Such sense-making is important not only because the ways in which violence is categorised shape a victim/survivor's ability to access particular forms of recognition and support, but also because it is central in how shattered selves and worlds are remade in the aftermath of violence. Drawing on individual and group interviews conducted with refugees living in Kampala, Uganda, this article charts how framings of ‘torture’ and ‘sexual violence’ become meaningful in participants’ accounts in the (re)formation of themselves as subjects after violent victimisation. We trace how participants navigate the heteronormative societal and legal norms that shape their subjectivity and the effects of the violence they experienced through the deeply gendered and political work that these terms do in their narratives. Our analysis thus highlights and reminds us to pay attention to the political stakes involved in fluid processes of categorising injury.

This article aims at enhancing our understanding of how collective interpretations of threats, stabilised and temporarily fixed in names, travel across different local discourse communities. I contend that globally accepted names result from gradual cross-cultural processes of localisation. Specifically, I argue that the discursive dynamics of elusiveness, compatibility and adaptation suggest a framework of analysis for how collective interpretations or names travel.

The economic crises in 1997–9 in Asia, Brazil and elsewhere represent collectively the first post-Cold War ‘crisis of globalization’, and a significant set-back for the process of international economic liberalization. Contrary to some arguments, the crises do not represent the final ideological triumph of liberalism in a post-Cold War era. Rather they must be seen as a further spur to rethinking significant aspects of the neoliberal project. A comparative analysis of Asia and Latin America in this context demonstrates that while trade liberalization and a broad neoliberal economic strategy are unlikely to be abandoned, there is strong evidence that the tide of capital account liberalization has turned, and that emerging ‘sites of resistance’ are becoming salient factors in the political equation in the relationships of both regions to the wider global economy. Asian and Latin American responses to the crisis of globalization refute notions of convergence, on which many recent conceptions of the global political economy have rested, and point to the emergence of a genuine contestation of policy ideas that will have significant implications for the future management of the global economic order.

This article examines the concepts and practices of global governance as a definitively liberal project. It provides an analysis of how TFCAs intersect with wider neoliberal debates about the efficacy of global environmental governance, and explores the power and limitations of that governance. In particular, this article investigates the complex local contexts which global environmental governance schemes such as TFCAs encounter; in so doing it highlights the ways that local activities subvert and challenge global-level conservation schemes. Through an analysis of transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) in Central America, it contends that specific forms of global environmental governance require some rethinking to accommodate their potentially fragile and uneven nature, and that it is more open, opaque or uneven than many theorists suggest.

In his 1996 review essay William Wallace, ‘Truth and Power, Monks and Technocrats: Theory and Practice in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 22:3 (July 1996), pp. 301-21. William Wallace makes a powerful case for the discipline of International Relations adopting a ‘semi-detached’ relationship to the policy arena. Although Ken Booth has already written a response to that article,Ken Booth, ‘Discussion: A Reply to Wallace’, Review of International Studies, 23:3 (July 1997), pp. 371-7. I want to add my voice to the debate about the appropriate relationship between theory and practice.

The article illuminates the International Relations (IR) enigma of how states with relative low power succeed in gaining privileges reserved for great powers. Many IR studies on status stress the importance of social recognition as a precondition for enjoying the status of a great power. However, very few focus on the factors that affect such recognition. This article tries to fill this gap by looking at systemic wars. Systemic wars are special circumstances wherein a new world order is built and privileges are redistributed among states. In these situations, states may use their symbolic, moral, and circumstantial assets to grant themselves a paramount role in the new order. A state's previous status as a great power, its contribution to victory in a war, and the utilitarian considerations of other countries are all assets that help it to win the privileges reserved for great powers – and that in the long run could gain it recognition as a great power, despite its lack of the requisite capabilities. By using this conceptual framework in the case of France during and after the Second World War, this article tries to explain how a relatively weak power can gain a leading role in a postwar order.

At the outset of the twenty-first century, the world is facing a range of problems, including environmental, economic, and security risks, that increasingly challenge the logic of nation-state governance. While American and European models of International Relations and global governance, such as the Westphalian system of states and the Washington Consensus, have come under attack from poststructuralist thinkers, political philosophers from China and Taiwan have tried to reconceptualise the world of the twenty-first century from their own perspectives. This article examines current streams of Chinese International Relations theorising and confronts them with the case of territorial disputes in the East China Sea. The article analyses the arguments by Chinese realists, ‘worldists’, and procedural constructivists, showing how Chinese scholars creatively revive pre-modern Chinese political theory in attempts to provide new ways in which International Relations scholars might view the world, or: ‘all-under-heaven’. I argue that these contributions will progressively challenge conventional theories of International Relations, while at the same time contending that so-called non-Western theorising, if it is to contribute to IRT, will require additional rigorous empirical grounding, a critical perspective on its entanglement with nationalist political discourses in East Asian societies, and the willingness to incorporate existing theories.

My current interest in silence, gender, and power owes much to discussions with Marysia Zalewski over the years. Much of my work has focused on masculinity, gender relations, and gender hierarchies with a focus on security and development in conflict zones. More recently, I have begun to explore silence not as a sign of disempowerment, but as a powerful force that can be used in many ways. This approach enables a more multi-levelled understanding of silence and voice and their many interactions. It has much to tell the Global North, where we prize voice and often underestimate the power of silence.

E. H. Carr is a thinker on international affairs who defies easy classification. His best-known work on the subject, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, delivered a powerful realist critique, still resonant today, of the idealist approach to international relations and helped bring about a renewed emphasis on the role of power in international affairs. Less familiar to students of international relations are Carr's more optimistic works. In Conditions of Peace and Nationalism and After, written during World War II, he was sanguine about the prospects for a peaceful postwar order and outlined the steps required to bring about that happy state of affairs. The same hopeful themes were sounded in the years after the war in The Soviet Impact on the Western World, The New Society and other shorter essays.

This article examines power implications of digital diasporas and the identity negotiation processes they afford. Members of diasporas are potentially socially and psychologically disempowered by two sources: the majority society into which they are dispersed; and the traditional social structures and culture from which they emerged. This potential disempowerment highlights the important role of power in facilitating (or not) migrant integration into new societies, and the integration of values and norms that are increasingly considered universal. The diaspora experience and Internet discussion forums provide enabling normative structures and discourses for individuals to define and pursue their own interests and ideals. Following a review of the literatures on diaspora identity hybridity and power, the case of TibetBoard illustrates how information technology enables diaspora members to explore, negotiate, and validate their self-determined identity and political perspectives, moving beyond passive adoption of traditional perspectives rooted in the Tibetan community of the homeland and in exile.

The non-use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 has emerged as a major puzzle in international politics. Traditional International Relations scholarship views this largely as a function of the deterrent relationship that emerged between the nuclear powers, especially during the Cold War era. The fact that nuclear weapons have not been used against non-nuclear states, despite temptations to use them, remains a challenge to the deterrence-only explanation. More normatively oriented scholars have argued that a taboo has emerged against the non-use of nuclear weapons. Nina Tannenwald's book, The Nuclear Taboo is the most comprehensive study on this subject which relies on constructivist logic of inter-subjective taboo-like prohibition in accounting for the puzzle. While I see much merit in Tannenwald's empirical case studies, it is far-fetched to call the non-use largely a function of a taboo-like prohibition. For, taboos by their very nature forbid discussions of their breaking, whereas nuclear states have national military strategies that call for nuclear use under certain circumstances. They have also in many crises situations considered the use of nuclear weapons. I have argued in my book, The Tradition of Non-use of Nuclear Weapons (Stanford University Press, 2009), that a more modest tradition can be given partial credit for the absence of nuclear attacks on non-nuclear states. The tradition emerged because of a realisation of the horrendous effects of nuclear attack (a material fact) which generated reputation costs for a potential user. These reputation costs in turn generated self-deterrence which has helped to create a tradition which is partially restraining nuclear states from using their weapons for anything other than existential deterrence. Unlike Tannenwald, I contend that the tradition is not a strict taboo and hence it can be altered if material and political circumstances compel nuclear states to do so. The recent policy changes that have taken place in nuclear powers such as the US, Russia, UK, and France do not augur well for the tradition as the conditions for atomic use have been expanded to include prevention, pre-emption and other non-proliferation objectives involving rogue states and terrorist groups.

Both relationality and separateness are aspects of our everyday lives. How we engage these phenomena hinges on the particular existential assumptions that we take for granted. Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), both relationality and separateness have informed how global politics is studied and practiced. How states and their relations are conceived has, for instance, varied by the distinct degrees of privilege given to separation and interconnection: from notions of completely autonomous units like billiard balls to always emergent phenomena co-constituted through relations. The plurality of trajectories that inform this Special Issue illustrate how much broader the spectrum of relational engagement can be when we are cognisant of the impact of these existential assumptions on forms of life, knowing, and knowledge production in International Relations. By highlighting a spectrum of relational engagement, we raise important questions about the way the various knowledge frames in IR are acknowledged, legitimised, limited, and reproduced.

When confronted with images of war and other forms of human suffering, not looking is not an option, not only because we are permanently exposed to images but also because it would not seem to be a morally tenable position. However, looking at images of human suffering is often said to prolong this very suffering and to fix human subjects as victims. Especially when acts of violence have been committed in order to produce images of these very acts the relationship between viewing the images and participating in the acts of violence qua viewer appears to be uncomfortably close indeed. Thus, looking is not an option, either. This article, in the first part, engages with standard criticisms of photography, especially with accusations according to which photographs aestheticise that which they depict and desensitise their viewers. In the second part it discusses Alfredo Jaar's and Jeff Wall's work in order to show possible ways to circumvent the looking/not looking dilemma.

American foreign policy has been recently dominated by the venture into Iraq. This has not gone well. Most criticism has focused on ‘mistakes’ – there were not enough US troops, or they were of the wrong type, the Iraqi army was mistakenly disbanded after it surrendered, looting was not anticipated, oil expectations were unreal, the US depended too much on Iraqi exile claims, and so forth. Indeed, these were mistakes. 250,000 troops trained also in police roles would have made a difference. So might Iraqi army units converted into security police. So might better planning all round. But the mistakes were only the surface phenomena of a more profound American failure. The Iraq venture was doomed from the outset by the attempt to create what some neo-conservatives styled a ‘New American Empire’. This exaggerated American powers, made facile historical comparisons with previous Empires, mis-identified the enemy, and mis-identified the century we live in. This early twenty-first century attempt at Empire is failing. There will not be others.

US foreign policy is hypocritical in various ways, as this article demonstrates in the course of an extensive empirical review. The question is whether such hypocrisy provides grounds for opposing US interventions abroad, in particular those which might yield locally desirable outcomes at an acceptable human cost. This article examines the question from the standpoint of a non-pacifist liberal universalism and concludes (on consequentialist grounds) that the hypocritical character of US foreign policy cannot constitute sufficient grounds for rejecting all US interventions. Nevertheless, the hypocrisy of the US remains noteworthy and deserving of criticism even in such cases because of the wider damage hypocritical behaviour can do. Moreover, US foreign policy hypocrisy sometimes sets in motion reactions that confound the benign purposes of particular interventions and so undermine the case for them. Such an effect is at work in the case of recent US intervention in the Middle East.

Throughout the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s the academic discipline of international relations has witnessed a prolonged period of intense intellectual ferment about the contemporary identity of the field. The significance of this academic controversy is evidenced by the designation that it most fundamentally represents the discipline's third ‘Great Debate’. The importance of the third debate to a field characteristically immune from meta-theoretical self-reflection has been aptly acknowledged by those who recognize the changed nature of philosophical and theoretical inquiry in the post-positivist age. The variety of contending classifications that have been put forth to elucidate the overall character of the third debate is but another indication of the considerable importance that scholars have attached to the outcome of this dispute as we approach the next millennium.

This article explores the uses of history in contemporary Eurosceptic discourse in Britain. It does so in the knowledge that studying an essentially contested concept such as Euroscepticism poses severe methodological problems, and in the first section I situate my article in the emerging scholarly literature on the subject. Having explained why I limit my research to popular Euroscepticism in the tabloid press, in the second section I critically analyse the rhetorical strategies employed by the Sun and the Daily Mail to garner support for their line on Europe, suggesting that the appeal of their discourse resides in its recourse to national history of the school textbook variety. In the third part I use this finding to argue that the discipline of history has been an unwitting accomplice in making Euroscepticism so popular amongst the British public, press and politicians. This has considerable ramifications both for the theoretical study of Euroscepticism and the political efforts to counter its popularity, and I consider all of these in the conclusion.

Understanding the origins of capitalism in terms of feudal crisis, agrarian class structures and economic development in Europe has been an enduring concern of a growing body of scholarship focusing on changes in social property relations. This work has been distinctive in highlighting long-term patterns of social property relations central to shaping late medieval and early modern Europe, variegated patterns of serfdom within feudalism, class conflicts intrinsic to the emergence of agrarian capitalism, and thus capitalist ‘transition’ through different paths of development. Most recently, the implications of a focus on social property relations have been drawn out in its relevance for International Relations (IR), expressly in terms of tracing specificities within the age of absolutism that shaped the expansion of the states-system and its relation to modernity. This article outlines and engages with past and present debates linked to the social property relations approach. It raises several problematics through an engagement with the theorising of political modernity by Antonio Gramsci and on this basis offers pointers towards future lines of enquiry from which further reflection on the conditions of historical and contemporary state formation and restructuring may proceed.

Critics of global democracy have often claimed that the social and political conditions necessary for democracy to function are not met at the global level, and are unlikely to be in the foreseeable future. Such claims are usually developed with reference to national democratic institutions, and the social conditions within national democratic societies that have proved important in sustaining them. Although advocates of global democracy have contested such sceptical conclusions, they have tended to accept the method of reasoning from national to global contexts on which they are based. This article critiques this method of argument, showing that it is both highly idealised in its characterisation of national democratic practice, and overly state-centric in its assumptions about possible institutional forms that global democracy might take. We suggest that if aspiring global democrats – and their critics – are to derive useful lessons from social struggles to create and sustain democracy within nation states, a less idealised and institutionally prescriptive approach to drawing global lessons from national experience is required. We illustrate one possible such approach with reference to cases from both national and global levels, in which imperfect yet meaningful democratic practices have survived under highly inhospitable – and widely varying – conditions.

It has become common to speak of health security, but the meaning of the latter is often taken for granted. Existing engagements with this notion have been constrained by an excessive focus on national security and on the securitising efforts of elites. This has led to an increasingly sceptical outlook on the potentialities of security for making sense of, and helping to tackle, health problems. Inspired by the idea of security as emancipation, this article reconsiders the notion of health security. It takes as its starting point the concrete insecurities experienced by individuals, and engages with them by way of an analytical framework centred on the notion of domination. Domination deepens analysis by connecting individual experiences of insecurity, the social interactions through which these are given meaning, and the structures that make them possible. Domination also broadens the remit of analysis, shedding light on the multifaceted nature of insecurity. The analytical benefits of this framework are demonstrated by two examples: HIV/AIDS; and water and sanitation. The lens of domination is also shown to bring benefits for the political engagement with global health problems.