The democratic peace literature has convincingly shown that democracies do not fight other democracies. Theoretical explanations of this empirical phenomenon often claim that the citizenry in democracies prefers peaceful resolution of interstate conflicts. Still, there is a dearth of studies exploring the public’s preferences and values directly. We seek to rectify this by investigating, in a novel way, the relationship between regime type and citizens’ bellicosity. A comprehensive multilevel research design is employed, with data spanning 72 countries over the period of 1981–2008. This enables us to test one of the theoretical mainstays of the democratic peace thesis, viz., that regime type helps shape individuals’ attitudes toward war-fighting. Our results lend special support to normative democratic peace theory: Citizens of democracies are significantly more pacifistic than citizens of non-democracies. This result upholds when we rigorously control for other relevant factors, including specific characteristics of individuals and rival theoretical explanations.

Since Martin Wight's famous LSE lectures in the late 1950s, the English School scholars have brought China into the conception of international society. As the English School scholars have been ‘inventing’ an international society, China's status in the conception, or conceptions of international society has also been invented and reinvented. The Chinese case vividly demonstrates how a non-European (or non-Western) country, as one of ‘the others’, has been dealt with and brought into the conceptualisation of international society by the English School. China's status in the conception of international society, to a great extent, has been invented by some of the English School scholars with Eurocentric bias.

Despite sustained theoretical and empirical criticism of ‘statism’, a recognisable model of political structure other of hierarchy and anarchy (the models that underpin the state system-model) has long been lacking. Even many proponents of radical transformation of the international system often remain ‘post-international’, describing world politics essentially in terms of complications to the international system. This article agrees that a new point of departure is needed but offers a different model of political structure by redefining the term ‘polity’ – a term which is increasingly used to capture non-territorial political entities neither constituted by hierarchy nor by the lack of it. With the new definition building on Waltz's theory of theory as a ‘picture, mentally formed’ in order to simplify a domain, a  polity is deemed to exist when a set of subjects are oriented towards a common ‘governance-object’. The new polity model is applied illustratively to the idea of a global polity and a new polity research agenda of international relations is suggested.

Myth-making has historically been an essential component of the modern state's quest for territorial control and legitimacy. As a sui generis post-national political entity in search for identity and recognition, the European Union (EU) seems to mimicking its more established national counterpart. By formulating and reproducing a narrative that hails Europe's border control regime (‘Schengen’) as a success story of European integration and by deploying evocative imagery at Europe's common borders, the EU is in fact trying to establish itself as an integral part of the European political landscape. This article argues that what we are witnessing today in Europe is indeed the emergence of the ‘myth of Schengen’; however, the regime's mythopoiesis goes beyond the EU's official narrative and symbolic representations. To capture the full range of actors, locations and activities involved in the establishment and reproduction of this post-national myth, it is necessary to shift the attention to the performative dimension of this process. To support this argument, the article relies on the insights of anthropological and sociological works that have emphasised the role of rituality and performativity in constituting social structures and identities. These insights are then applied to examine the rituals and performances characterising four cases of ‘unofficial’ Schengen myth-making beyond Europe: a hotel in Beijing, street kids in Kinshasa, a British music band, and a group of Eastern European artists.

In a 2004 forum, Alexander Wendt, Patrick Jackson, Colin Wight and Iver Neumann asked two questions about state personhood: Are states real, or merely as-if? Are they people? I question the terms of their debate, which relies upon a problematic distinction between ‘real’ and ‘as if’. Drawing largely upon Foucault, I challenge that distinction. This challenge has important theoretical and normative implications. Theoretically, a discourse of state personhood is completely unnecessary to understand world politics. Normatively, by tightly linking personhood and responsibility, some of the authors obscure important dimensions of responsibility to and respect for the non-human world.

Antonio Gramsci's thought has strongly influenced the fields of IR and IPE through the work of Robert Cox, Stephen Gill, Kees van der Pijl and others, engagements often gathered (not uncontroversially) under the rubric of an ostensibly unified ‘neo-Gramscian’ position or ‘the Italian School’. The emergence of such interventions into IR/IPE has sparked controversy regarding whether Gramsci's work can be legitimately applied to ‘the international’, both from within IR and in other fields. This article examines the validity of such critiques of ‘neo-Gramscian IPE’, which we argue rely on problematic characterisations and little evidence from Gramsci's writings. More substantively, we provide an exegesis of the role of the international dimension in the construction of central categories of Gramsci's thought and his approach to nation-state formation and international organisations such as the Catholic Church and the Rotary Club, which have been regrettably neglected by all facets of these discussions. We demonstrate that Gramsci can indeed be understood as a theorist of the international, whose approach is particularly salient for the present historical conjuncture.

This article argues that 1945 constitutes an historical inflection point from a period of state expansion to state contraction and that this transformation is primarily the result of changes at the international level. Just as security and economic pressures drove lead states to expand in earlier times, changing conditions in the post-1945 period led to a contraction in state size. The change from multipolarity, the development of the territorial integrity norm, the shift to nuclear deterrence, and the burgeoning global economy contributed to the milieu in which states evaluate the costs and benefits of holding territory, and this has enabled states to permit secession more frequently. The result has been an increase in the rate of peaceful secession and a corresponding proliferation in the number of sovereign states. I test this argument both qualitatively and quantitatively using original data on secessionist movements and internal administrative regions between 1816 and 2005.

The article responds to a recent call for a more systematic interrogation of the persistence of the dichotomous relation between ethics and International Relations. The addition of ethics into International Relations, it has recently been claimed, has left unquestioned the ethical assumptions encompassed in the ‘agenda’ of International Relations itself. Thus, the article examines the ethics implicit in the ‘agenda of IR’ and, in so doing, considers the condition of possibility for a movement beyond the dichotomy ‘ethics and IR’ and towards ‘an ethical International Relations’. To achieve this task the article calls for an understanding of ethics as ethos. It further illustrates how the ‘dangerous ontology’ of realist IR is discursively created through an exposition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. In this anarchical ontology of danger an ‘ethos of survival’ has come to be the relational framework through which the other is conceptually encountered as an enemy. Subsequently, the article considers what repercussions this ethos has for the reception of ethics into IR.

The world of intelligence has grown exponentially over the last decade. This article suggests that prevailing explanation of this expansion – the spectre of ‘new terrorism’ – reflects serious misunderstandings. Much of the emergency legislation which has extended the power of the state so remarkably was already sitting in the pending trays of officials in the late 1990s. Instead, the rise of both the ‘new terrorism’ and its supposed nemesis – the secret state – both owe more to long-term structural factors. Globalisation has accelerated a wide range of sub-military transnational threats, of which the ‘new terrorism’ is but one example. Meanwhile the long-promised engines of global governance are nowhere in sight. In their absence, the underside of a globalising world is increasingly policed by ‘vigilant states’ that resort to a mixture of military power and intelligence power in an attempt to address these problems. Yet the intelligence services cannot meet the improbable demands for omniscience made by governments, nor can they square their new enforcer role with vocal demands by global civil society for improved ethical practice.

The theory (or rather the notion) that the international economy functioned more or less effectively for roughly a century down to 1914 because Great Britain provided the ‘public goods’ required for the smooth operation of the ‘liberal international order’ has become a textbook generalization. That notion emerged quite recently and can be traced to Kindleberger's attempt to explain the pronounced cyclical fluctuations experienced by the world economy during the interwar years 1919–39, as well as the severity and duration of the Great Depression from 1929–33 in terms of the American failure to sustain conditions necessary for the financial stability of an interdependent global economy. In Kindleberger's view, Britain, which had acted as a hegemonic power before 1914, lacked the resources to continue with its historic role after the Great War, while the United States (which by 1918 enjoyed a position in the world economy of arguably greater weight and significance than the United Kingdom had ever possessed during the long nineteenth century) commanded neither the knowledge nor the political will to replace Britain as the responsible hegemonic power until after the Second World War.

The centrality of the national interest to Morgenthau's political realism is well known yet often lamented for its lack of clarity. This article offers a grammatical reading in order to highlight the Platonic and Aristotelian roots of the metaphysical assumptions that inform the national interest in Morgenthau's work and to show that, despite his continuous injunctions against the dangers of utopianism, he fails to escape them himself. Ultimately, his attempts to insulate us against the possibility of totalitarianism leads us back into its violent embrace via a ‘mysticism’ that defines a role for the nation-state as the embodiment of eternal moral truths and values.

This article defends the case for a global extension of democracy by deploying a cosmo-federalist theory. As a response to the current state of international exclusion, the radical project of stretching the paradigm of democratic inclusion to the extreme limits encompassing the whole of mankind, is here presented. The article begins by taking position for a choice-based version of consequentialism that generates a principle of political justice centred on political participation. From this, a political project is developed that envisages a cosmopolitan system where all world citizens are included within a scheme of a direct representative participation under an overarching authority governing the process of democratising world affairs. Crucial in this is the establishment of an all-inclusive authority to legitimately delineate jurisdictional boundaries and a multilayered system of political interaction.

At the zenith of British power at the beginning of the twentieth century there was a widespread recognition that Britain's position in the emerging global industrial inter-state system was increasingly precarious and that widespread adjustments would be needed. One solution, the ‘imperial federalism’ of Seeley and Mackinder, proposed the political integration of the scattered British settler colonies into a ‘Greater Britain’. Alternatively, Wells predicted that Britain would become integated into an Anglo-American ‘greater synthesis’, and that Europe would be unified on ‘Swiss confederal’ rather than German authoritarian lines. These proposals and prophesies were based upon interpretations of the changing material context composed of technology interacting with geography, and were seriously flawed. Extensive debates on these schemes indicate that the range of grand strategic choice was broader than that conceptualized by contemporary realism. The failure of British national integration due to geographic factors and the endurance of the Anglo-American special relationship casts the roles of the nation-state and the Western liberal order in a new perspective.

This article seeks to advance our understanding of how intimate relations and racial logics are co-constituted and matter – subjectively, culturally, materially, and politically – in our colonial present of economic inequalities, nationalist populisms, anti-migrant discourses and xenophobic hostilities. Addressing these crisis conditions is urgent, yet critical interventions indicate that prevailing accounts inadequately address the scale, complexity, and fluidity of racisms operating today. This article proposes to think racial logics ‘otherwise’ by drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and intersectional analytics to produce a genealogy of state/nation formation processes, imperial encounters, and legitimating ideologies that illuminates how ‘intimacy builds worlds’.1 A deep history of political centralisation reveals that regulation of intimate, familial relations is a constitutive feature of successful state-making and crucial for understanding how modernity's ‘race difference’ is produced and how the racialisation of ‘Other’ (‘non-European’, undesirable) sexual/familial practices figures in contemporary crises. Locating intimate relations – ‘family’ – in (birthright) citizenship, immigration regimes, and political-economic frames helps clarify the amplification of global inequalities and the power of stigmatisations to fuel nationalist attachments and anti-migrant hostilities. Foregrounding intimacy and integrating typically disparate lines of inquiry advances our analyses of today's often opaque yet intense racisms and their globally problematic effects.

This article challenges the idea that IR theory is in the midst of a ‘third debate’ between ‘positivistic’ and ‘post-positivistic’ approaches, by showing that neither the ‘first’ nor the ‘second’ debates have lost any of their relevance, and by arguing that the ‘third debate’ and the allegedly new paradigms it generated do not constitute a challenging innovation. While the ‘first debate’ is a debate between two visions of human nature, the ‘second debate’ is a debate between two visions of knowledge. A critical stance vis-à-vis rationalism does not imply a rejection of political realism, nor an endorsement of postmodernism or constructivism.

This article contends that the ‘G’ system struggles to play a legitimate and effective role in global governance and argues that the G20 could play a important role if the forum was more publically accountable. This article argues that because of increasing forms of public contestation, the broadening agenda of the G8 and G20 and the uncertain status of global cooperation, that the legitimacy of the ‘G’ system is being questioned. As such, it is appropriate to consider deliberative avenues whereby public views could be considered by the G20 in a systematic way to foster forms of accountability. This consideration is animated by deliberative democracy theory and republican theory which advance a normative agenda which seeks to transform governance structures by enhancing the role of deliberation and public reasoning in political life. The article outlines the development of the ‘G’ system's legitimacy, considers possible modes of accountability and public involvement with respect to the G20 and examines the implications of more formalised public deliberation with respect to the G20.

The persistence and strength of international norms are thought to depend partly on the willingness of actors to punish their violation, but norm enforcement is often inconsistent. This article investigates states’ use of economic sanctions in order to gain insight into the role of metanorms (norms about enforcing norms) in international politics and explain this inconsistency. The quantitative analyses examine patterns of economic sanctions and arms embargo practices across different security norms and reveal two central findings. First, international metanorms may accommodate important interstate relationships. Although severe human rights abuse, conflict, nuclear weapons development, and support for terrorist organisations tend to attract sanctions, they are infrequent in comparison with norm violations. Valued relationships between senders and targets seem to be an accepted limit to the pursuit of costly norm enforcement. Second, norm violations nevertheless remain rare, suggesting that factors other than the prospect of material punishment may encourage compliance. Indeed, by preserving interstate relationships, international metanorms may facilitate the engagement needed for socialisation and social pressures as alternative compliance mechanisms.

In 2004 the French National Assembly and Senate passed legislation which makes it illegal for Muslim women to wear headscarves (the hijab) within French public schools. To be precise the legislation refers to the banning of ostentatious religious symbols within the secular domain of the public school system, but is clearly aimed primarily at Muslim women, following a long-running dispute over this issue. Similar debates are taking place in other European countries such as Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain. A bill modelled on the recent French legislation has been tabled in the Belgian senate, whilst various court cases have been brought in other European countries by Muslim women who have been banned from wearing headscarves by employers or schools. Following a ruling of the German Supreme Court that a Muslim teacher should be allowed to wear a headscarf, as this did not contravene current legislation, the state of Baden-Wuerttenberg acted to introduce legislation to ban headscarves, and this legislation is likely to be copied by six other German states.

This article offers a new conceptualisation of the meaning of norms in world politics. It starts from the observation that existing norm scholarship in International Relations has underestimated the role of ambiguity in the constitution of norm meaning. To address this shortcoming, we advance a conceptualisation that sees norm polysemy – the empirically observable plurality of norm meanings-in-use – as resulting from the enactment of inherently ambiguous norms in different contexts. By foregrounding norm ambiguity, this view offers a radically non-essentialist understanding of norm meaning, one that eschews any attempt to salvage final or ‘true’ meanings behind the polysemy of norms. Using empirical illustrations from different fields of contemporary global governance, we identify four mechanisms through which actors practically cope with the multiplicity of norm meanings that arises from norm ambiguity (deliberation, adjudication, uni- or multilateral fixation attempts, and ad hoc enactment) and outline their varying effects on the legitimacy and effectiveness of global governance. Based on this discussion, the article points to the normative implications of a radically non-essentialist conception of norms and suggests harnessing the positive potential of norm ambiguity as an ethically desirable condition that promotes human diversity and the plurality of global life.