As populists have formed governments all over the world, it becomes imperative to study the consequences of the rise of populism for International Relations. Yet, systematic academic analyses of the international impact of populist government formation are still missing, and political commentators tend to draw conclusions from few cases of right-wing populism in the Global North. But populism – conceptualised as a ‘thin’ ideology based on anti-elitism and anti-pluralism – takes different shapes across world regions as populists combine it with different ‘thick’ ideologies. To reflect such diversity and gain more systematic insights into the global implications of populism, we focus on cases of populist government formation in the Global South. We find that populists in power are not, per se, more belligerent or less willing to engage globally than their non-populist predecessors. Factors like status seeking or a country's embeddedness in international institutions mitigate the impact of populism. Its most immediate effect concerns procedural aspects: foreign policymaking becomes more centralised and personalised – yet, not entirely unpredictable, given the importance of ‘thick’ ideologies espoused by populist parties and leaders. Rather than changing course entirely, populists in power reinforce existing trends, especially a tendency towards diversifying international partnerships.

For realists regionalism remains a difficult phenomenon to explicate. A particular puzzle for realists is why major states should want to pursue regional institutionalisation. Nor are pluralist accounts satisfactory given the empirical evidence of state actor prominence in processes of regional institutionalisation. This article sets out to account for the formative phase of regionalist endeavours, proposing an ideational–institutional realism as the basis for understanding regionalism. On this basis a specific theory of co-operative hegemony is developed. Stressing the importance of the grand strategies of major regional powers and their responses to the balance-of-threat in a region, the author argues that major states may advance their interests through non-coercive means by applying a strategy of co-operative hegemony which implies an active role in regional institutionalisation and the use of, for instance, side payments, power-sharing and differentiation. The article outlines a number of preconditions for regional institutionalisation, stressing what is called the capacity for power-sharing; the power aggregation capacity and the commitment capacity of the biggest power in a region. While regionalising state elites are constrained, they possess a much greater freedom of choice than neo-realism claims.

Over the past decade, health has become an increasingly important international issue and one which has engaged the attention of the foreign and security policy community. This article examines the emerging relationship between foreign and security policy, and global public health. It argues that the agenda has been dominated by two issues – the spread of selected infectious diseases (including HIV/AIDS) and bio-terror. It argues that this is a narrow framing of the agenda which could be broadened to include a wider range of issues. We offer two examples: health and internal instability, including the role of health in failing states and in post-conflict reconstruction; and illicit activities. We also argue that the relationship between global public health, and foreign and security policy has prioritised the concerns of the latter over the former – how selected health issues may create risks for (inter)national security or economic growth. Moreover the interests of the West are prominent on this agenda, focusing (largely though not exclusively) on how health risks in the developing world might impact upon the West. It is less concerned with the promotion of global public health.

The article presents a top-down approach to the study of the empirical legitimacy of international institutions. It starts from the observation that international institutions’ representatives are engaged in various strategies aimed at cultivating generalised support. The article asserts that such strategies should be taken into account to gain deeper insights into the legitimation process of international institutions. To systematise these legitimation efforts and facilitate their empirical analysis, the article introduces the concept of legitimation strategies, which are defined as goal-oriented activities employed to establish and maintain a reliable basis of diffuse support. An analytical differentiation between three types of legitimation strategies is introduced depending on the addressees of legitimation strategies, that is, member state governments, international institutions’ staff, and the wider public. The applicability of the concept and the relevance of legitimation strategies for international institutions’ communication, behaviour, and institutional design is demonstrated by an empirical analysis of the G8’s and the IMF’s reaction to legitimation crises in the recent past of both institutions. In addition, the case studies suggest that a balanced set of legitimation strategies that takes into account the legitimacy concerns of all three constituencies is more likely to be successful in improving legitimacy perceptions.

‘World order’ has become a current catchphrase of political discourse and journalism. ‘Multilateralism’ has become something of a growth sector in academic studies. What current events have brought into prominence, scholarship has an obligation to subject to critical analysis. This article raises some of the questions that should be probed in this analysis.

The work of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci has had a significant impact upon the study of International Relations (IR) over the past fifteen years. Despite the emergence of a distinct 'Italian School' in IR, however, there have been few assessments of the utility of Gramsci's concepts in this area. Our purpose here is to engage with the work of the new Gramscians. We begin by specifying the theoretical attractions of using Gramsci in IR, and then subject the key foundational claims of the new Gramscians to critical analysis. Our principal conclusions are that the Italian school's appropriation of Gramsci is far more conceptually problematic than they acknowledge, and that their use of his framework is difficult to sustain with respect to the scholarship devoted to his ideas. If Gramsci is to be used effectively within IR, closer attention must be paid both to the historical meaning of his work and to the problems raised by it. In short, Gramsci and his ideas must be more thoroughly historicized if his work is to be used to comprehend the multiple dynamics of world order today.

Jürgen Habermas' thinking gained influence within the German International Relations (IR) community in the early 1990s. At the core of the so-called ‘ZIB-debate’ was the controversy whether rationalist theory can explain interstate cooperation. Constructivists accused rationalists of ignoring communication, language and reason, thereby leaving a logical gap in their analyses of interstate cooperation. This gap exists between the plausible motivation for states to cooperate and their actual achievement of cooperation. Rationalist approaches assume that actors face problematic, interdependent situations, in which they can only optimise their preferences by collaboration. Such situations involve a plausible motivation for actors to cooperate but they are not a sufficient condition to ensure that cooperation will actually happen. What is missing is a theoretical link between a general motivation to cooperate and its realisation, given that rationalist theory, following realism, regularly assumes a dangerous anarchical environment with its daunting security dilemma. These circumstances make cooperation risky and should normally work as a show-stopper for nation-states to collaborate.

Research is all about a person's engagement with an issue. But most approaches to International Relations actively discourage personal involvement by the researcher. We question the adequacy of this norm and the related scholarly conventions. Instead, we explore how the personal experience of the researcher can be used as a legitimate and potentially important source of insight into politics. But we also note that simply telling the story of the researcher is inadequate. We engage the ensuing dilemmas by discussing how to both appreciate and evaluate autoethnographic insights. Rather than relying on pre-determined criteria, we argue that methodological uses of the self should be judged within knowledge communities and according to their ability to open up new perspectives on political dilemmas. We then advance two related suggestions: one advocates conceptualising research around puzzles; the other explores the methodological implications of recognising that producing knowledge is an inherently relational activity.

This article develops a political economy account of global environmental governance to improve upon our understanding of the contemporary conduct of environmental politics and to clarify thinking about the potential for, and barriers to, effective environmental reform. By elaborating the key contours of a political economy account on the one hand and opening up to critical enquiry prevailing understandings of what is meant by ‘global’ ‘environmental’ and ‘governance’ on the other, such an approach is able to enhance our understanding of the practice of environmental governance by emphasising historical, material and political elements of its (re) constitution and evolution.

At present, International Relations scholars use the metaphor of ‘state socialization’ in mutually incompatible ways, embarking from very different starting points and arriving at a bewildering variety of destinations. There is no consensus on what state socialization is, who it affects, or how it operates. This article seeks to chart this relatively unmapped concept by defining state socialization, differentiating it from similar concepts, and exploring what the study of state socialization can contribute to important and longstanding theoretical debates in the field of international relations.

This paper explores the relationship between statehood and the international system, with particular reference to the states of sub-Saharan Africa. It suggests, as the title implies, that statehood should be regarded as a relative concept; and that rather than distinguish sharply between entities that are, and are not, states, we should regard different entities as meeting the criteria for international statehood to a greater or lesser degree. Entities which we have been accustomed to regard as states, at least for the purposes of studying them in international relations, sometimes fail to exercise even the minimal responsibilities associated with state power, while those who control them do not behave in the way that is normally ascribed to the ‘rulers’ of states. Entities that are not accorded the status of states, such as guerrilla insurgencies or even voluntary organizations, may take on attributes that have customarily been associated with sovereign statehood. This conclusion carries at least a salutary warning against too readily ascribing the supposedly universal characteristics of states to peripheral areas of the modern global system, in which the categories in which we are accustomed to regard international politics have become blurred. More broadly, given the peculiar and privileged position of states in the conventional analysis of international relations, it may carry significant implications for the idea of international relations itself.

There is virtually no systematic debate on the fundamentals of comparative research in the study of international regionalism. The field of research is very fragmented and there is a lack of interaction between EU studies and regionalism in the rest of the world. There is also a lack of communication between scholars from various theoretical standpoints and research traditions. Related to these two divides is the tension between idiographic and nomothetic methodologies. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the largely neglected debate on how to conduct and address three interrelated problems: a conceptual, a theoretical and a methodological one. Our claim is that the future of comparative regionalism should be one where old divides are bridged. This requires a combination of conceptual rigor, theoretical eclecticism, and sounder empirical research methods.

This article further conceptualises and empirically tests the concept of ontological security. This concept, which refers to an actor's need to have a secure identity, has been used in International Relations (IR) mainly to study situations in which states face a threat to one of their identities. However, my focus here is on situations in which states are facing threats to a number of identities they hold, situations that result in what I term ontological dissonance. In such cases, not only are various distinct identities threatened, but the solutions to ease these threats are contradictory, forcing the state to choose between different cherished values. I contend that in such situations avoidance can become an attractive option for states in dealing with the difficulties arising from this dilemma. This theoretical framework is used to explain Israel's unilateral steps toward the Palestinians in recent years. I argue that the terror attacks of the Second Intifada (2000–2005) represented more than a physical security threat to Israel. The attacks and Israel's initial response to them aggravated threats to a number of Israel's identities and, more importantly, emphasised existing and potential future clashes among these identities. As a result, Israeli policy makers advanced unilateral steps to reduce these threats and to ease the accompanying ontological dissonance. These unilateral measures can thus be understood as measures of avoidance, and as such they complicated further cooperation between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

This article critically investigates the growing power and effectiveness of the ‘ethical’ compliance audit regime. Over the last decade, audits have evolved from a tool for companies to track internal organisational performance into a transnational governing mechanism to measure and strengthen corporate accountability globally and shape corporate responsibility norms. Drawing on original interviews, we assess the effectiveness of supply chain benchmarks and audits in promoting environmental and social improvements in global retail supply chains. Two principal arguments emerge from our analysis. First, that audits can be best understood as a productive form of power, which codifies and legitimates retail corporations’ poor social and environmental records, and shapes state approaches to supply chain governance. Second, that growing public and government trust in audit metrics ends up concealing real problems in global supply chains. Retailers are, in fact, auditing only small portions of supply chains, omitting the portions of supply chains where labour and environmental abuse are most likely to take place. Furthermore, the audit regime tends to address labour and environmental issues very unevenly, since ‘people’ are more difficult to classify and verify through numbers than capital and product quality.

During the 1980s the proliferation of new technologies transformed the potential of the news media to provide a constant flow of global real-time news. Tiananmen Square and the collapse of communism symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall became major media events communicated to Western audiences instantaneously via TV news media. By the end of the decade the question was being asked as to what extent this ‘media pervasiveness’ had impacted upon government – particularly the process of foreign policy making. The new technologies appeared to reduce the scope for calm deliberation over policy, forcing policy-makers to respond to whatever issue journalists focused on. This perception was in turn reinforced by the end of the bipolar order and what many viewed as the collapse of the old anti-communist consensus which – it was argued – had led to the creation of an ideological bond uniting policy makers and journalists. Released from the ‘prism of the Cold War’ journalists were, it was presumed, freer not just to cover the stories they wanted but to criticise US foreign policy as well. The phrase ‘CNN effect’ encapsulated the idea that real-time communications technology could provoke major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to global events.

With the Treaty on European Union, or the Maastricht Treaty, into force in November 1993, the member-states of the European Community (EC) appeared to be embarking on a far-reaching enterprise to enhance the authority of Community institutions. Continuing a process that had begun with the Single European Act (SEA), into force in 1987, Maastricht increased the powers of the European Parliament. It established mechanisms whereby EC countries were to seek to improve policy coordination in such diverse areas as social affairs, high technology, border controls, immigration, and anti-crime efforts. It committed the EC members to work toward the establishment of a common foreign and security policy. Most importantly, it laid out a path and timetable for qualified EC members to achieve Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) by the end of the 1990s.

In appraising critical IR theory after twenty-five years, this article begins by asking whether critical theory implicitly reinforces the ‘superiority’ of Western civilisation and naturalises Western imperialism. In revealing the Eurocentrism of much of critical IR theory the article proceeds to reconstruct it by steering it in fresh non-Eurocentric directions. This is not to say that extant critical theory is moribund since it undoubtedly has much to offer. But it is to say that until the problem of Eurocentrism is exorcised from its body theoretique, critical theory inadvertently lies in danger of joining the ranks of problem-solving theories. The first two sections deconstruct the leading schools of critical IR theory – Gramscianism, postmodernism and feminism – to reveal their frequent lapsing into Eurocentrism, while the final section seeks to decolonise ‘Westphilian’ critical IR by reconstructing a ‘post-racist IR’. And this in turn leads on to the conclusion, which sketches out a post-racist emancipatory political project that can help begin the urgent task of effecting global reconciliation between East and West.

The author argues that we have obligations to our fellow citizens as well as to those outside our community. Since these obligations can conflict and since neither automatically trumps the other, the author provides the general principles needed to resolve the conflict. While rejecting the notion of global citizenship, he argues for a globally oriented national citizenship and spells out its political and institutional implications.

Hegemonic stability theory, which argues that international economic openness and stability is most likely when there is a single dominant state, is the most prominent approach among American political scientists for explaining patterns of economic relations among the advanced capitalist countries since 1945. It has provided a research programme for scholars, both as a positive guide and as a foil against which to test alternative theoretical explanations.

How do we know when we are dealing with security issue? This is a cardinal question in Security Studies, and securitisation theory provides and authoritative yet incomplete answer, mainly because it rules out that the meaning of security can vary contextually. To overcome this limitation, we need a hermeneutical perspective centred on the liminality of security as a category in-between theory and policy, which produces a more precise algorithm for empirical research. A contextual hermeneutics of security signals that normative awareness is necessary even in the absence of a unifying normative manifesto, also confronts the spectre of the “death of security” invoked by those who object to the potentially endless broadening of its meaning.