The aims of this paper are (a) to construct probability models for peacetime and wartime alliance formation, (b) to provide international political interpretations of the probability models, and (c) to obtain some policy implications from these models.

Since Horvath and Foster published their seminal work in 1963 on probability models of wartime alliance sizes, no further research has been undertaken to elaborate their ideas (except for Yamamoto, 1974; and Yamamoto and Bremer, 1980), even though varied probability models have been applied to the analysis of war occurrences (see Richardson; Singer and Small, 1972; and Wilkinson) and of peacetime alliance formation (see McGowan and Rood, and Siverson and Duncan). Horvath and Foster found that the frequency distribution of wartime alliance sizes is accounted for by a Yule distribution which has a long tail (meaning that large alliances are likely to form in war) and that a Yule distribution can be derived from a process in which a war alliance will acquire new members with.a probability directly proportional to its current size (i.e., the number of participating nations in the alliance) and in which the members of alliances are not allowed to leave until war ends.

THERE are several reasons why we understand so much less about social processes and conditions at the global level than we do about comparable processes and conditions at lower levels of aggregation. One is, of course, that we are dealing with a larger empirical domain and one that is apparently more heterogeneous and complex. Another might be that the behaviour of nations – the key actors at this level of aggregation – has been shrouded more in mystery and taboo than the behaviour of other classes of social entity. By keeping diplomacy and military strategy in the category of the arcane, elites have inhibited serious inquiry, even if there were those unpatriotic enough to ask. A third and related factor may be the extent to which the national state has been the major source of material and psychic sustenance for the world's people over the past century or so and thus not an agency whose external behaviour will be questioned or examined closely. Others might be added to our list, but one that surely merits closer attention may be the way in which we conceptualize world affairs.

News media are primary sources of information about international affairs. The rise of the mass circulation press and the expansion of foreign news coverage have brought the public at home and abroad closer to international affairs. The British Empire and two world wars strengthened the British citizen's interest and concern regarding foreign policy. The growth of radio and television added to this proximity. Portable electronic cameras and satellites enable the television viewer to become a participant in an event as he or she watches it unfold. Within the foreign policy-making process the media are sources of information to ministers and officials, contribute to the formation of public attitudes, are channels through which governments signal to, and manoeuvre, one another, and are key means for generating public support for foreign policy at home and abroad.

It is only fair to readers that I declare my unusually personal interest in the book that is the principal subject of this review essay. I was a (overall favourable) reviewer of an early version of Plowshares into Swords—albeit for a university press other than the one finally chosen by Grant Hammond—as the author attests in a generous acknowledgement. In addition, and rather more to the point, Hammond suggests strongly that the conceptual provenance of his study owes some debt to a 1971 article of mine. In Hammond's words:

For anyone interested in tracing the development of the comparative study of foreign policy behaviour the work of James Rosenau is central. His work in the 1960s was a major impetus in the formation of an identifiable research community in the United States; and the problems which he has addressed since that time have been the problems of comparative foreign policy analysis writ large. Above all, his work, exactly because it has attracted such sustained and widespread attention, has served as a focal point for a critique of the very possibility of the comparative analysis of foreign policy behaviour. Like it or loathe it, Rosenau's work represents the clearest and most extensive example of the comparative foreign policy school of thought.

In the short space allotted mes I, shall address the major issues raised by Brace Bueno de Mesquita's response to my review of The War Trap. His five most important points are as follows:

‘I feel like a monster’, typed Chelsea Manning, referring partly to her gender identity but mostly to her job in the US military. Morally conflicted by what she saw and read while serving in Iraq, extremely isolated from her unit and experiencing emotional distress in relation to her gender identity, Manning would act on these stressors by leaking hundreds of documents to Wikileaks, and coming out as a (trans) woman. While she was quick to be classified as either a hero or a traitor, her case evades such dichotomisation and calls for more sophisticated readings. While a lot has been written on Manning in queer and transgender studies, surprisingly little has been published on this case in International Relations, not even in the quickly growing field of Queer IR. Yet Manning’s case helps highlight many of its core concerns in relation to issues of power, security, and sovereignty. In fact, what is often lost when reading the Manning case are the queer and trans logics of protection that were disrupted by Manning’s disclosures and that made such disruption possible. These dominant logics rely upon a culture of secrecy that must be preserved for performances of national security to hold true.

Between 1919 and July 1921 British Crown forces and the Irish Republican Army fought a sporadic and brutal conflict, usually referred to as the ‘troubles’, or, more formally, as the ‘Anglo-Irish war’. At 2.30 a.m., on 6 December, 1921, British and Irish plenipotentiaries signed ‘Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland’; the document which they signed was to dominate Anglo-Irish relations for thirty years, and certain parts of it are live issues still. Aspects of the relationship between Britain and Ireland have been explored in recently published monographs, but there is no general survey of the period, and little attempt to examine the significance of the ‘Ulster question’ in this context. A general treatment of some of the main themes in the Anglo-Irish relationship between 1921 and 1950 will therefore be of interest, not only for its own sake, but also because it throws light on a small but significant aspect of international relations in the second quarter of this century.

This article interrogates United Nations (UN) calls that ‘making peace with nature’ should become the crucial mission of the 21st century. It ponders the kind of diplomacy envisioned for such a reconciliation ecology to be credible. Drawing on one of the most promising and less known programmes of the UN system – namely, Harmony with Nature (HwN), which pioneers Earth-based jurisprudence and rights of nature – it conceptualises this diplomatic shift and assesses the conditions under which ecological diplomacy can be productively operationalised in the 21st century vis-à-vis a mere rhetorical appropriation and co-optation by intergovernmental agendas. Building on Indigenous thought and animist epistemologies, programmes such as HwN espouse a new relationship with Planet Earth and make it possible to explore ‘nature’ as diplomatic interlocutor. We argue that existing paradigms of peacebuilding fail to sufficiently capture the diplomatic aspects and complex local dynamics of the human–nature relationship and suggest a reconceptualisation based on an ecological diplomacy that is both expansive and transformative and views this relationship as one of troubled coexistence.

Much of the post-Cold War discourse about contemporary warfare posits a binary opposition between a ‘democratic peace’ in the North and the prevalence of virulent ‘new wars’ in the South. This article seeks to qualify these accounts by bringing out the deeper historical and sociological legacies of state formation critical for understanding the emergence of an internal peace amongst developed countries and the continuing insecurity and multiple civil wars in many poorer developing regions. It is argued that two features of Southern state formation – the external imposition of states and the enforced norm against territorial aggrandisement – have significantly constrained the development of many developing states, making it more difficult for them to forge strong, synergistic states whose security concerns are externally- rather than internally-oriented. The article argues that there is, though, much variation in how Southern states have responded to these historical legacies of state formation. The article concludes with a four-fold taxonomy to replace the simple North-South bifurcation, differentiating between developed, globalising, praetorian and failed states and identifying the differing potential for, and incidence of, violent conflict, insecurity, and war within these four types of state.

While proponents of Chinese IR pursue a national school based on the identification of Chineseness with the Chinese national culture, its critics find a limited value in the ‘Chinese’ school as a mere temporary site for non-Western agencies. In contrast, I argue a distinctive and enduring Chinese IR is possible if it adopts a non-national and non-essentialised transcultural conception of Chineseness. This transcultural Chinese IR is based first on the contested and transcultural conception of Chineseness and second on the ontology of Chineseness as immanent humanity. Chineseness has been a fiction of a privileged descent from antiquity, which various contestants claimed by redefining the meaning of Chineseness. The shi elites, in particular, developed Chineseness as an aspirational ethos that propelled it to transcend its cultural boundary by incorporating foreign influences and thereby rendered Chineseness transcultural. Also, drawing on the ontological turn and Roy Wagner's work in anthropology, I show how Chineseness as immanent humanity transcends the category of culture, transforming the division of innate nature and constructed culture. The transcultural Chinese IR, with its own complexity and universal aspiration, uses its history and ontology to complexify both its tradition internally and other IR traditions externally, promoting the pluralisation of IR.

This article addresses the relationship between history and the international. Starting from the ‘history controversy’ in IR in the 1980s and 1990s, it shows that that debate hinged on the political import of history as a form of knowledge. This political meaning, to which agency and freedom were central, was challenged through the theorisation in IR of the problematic relationship of the international, as a fragmented political form, to historical time: the spatial inside–outside division was understood as carrying a corresponding temporal and historical division, between progress and repetition. To explain why history carried this political significance, the article explores the connection of historical consciousness to sovereignty and political subjectivity. It shows that history as a distinctively modern form of relation to ‘the past’ is inseparable from the rise of modern sovereign authority and its accompanying political subject and idea of freedom: sovereignty’s reformulation of political space went along with a refashioning of the character of historical time. However, history’s conceptual attachment to sovereignty also ties it to the fragmented form of the international. History thus finds its limits in the international and IR becomes a site for the critique of the relationship between history, political form, and subjectivity.

In recent years a new group of ‘virtual states’—analogous to the virtual corporation—has emerged in world politics and economics. In order to concentrate upon high level services (research, development, product design, financing, marketing and transport), these countries have transferred much of their manufacturing production elsewhere. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Switzerland, Holland, and others have earned large returns from producing abroad as home labour costs escalate. To some degree every major industrial nation has moved in a virtual direction as manufacturing declines to 20 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and services rise to 65, 70 per cent or more. This evolution conflicts with traditional security assumptions about the necessity of a powerful and compact economic base. Now countries' economic potential is frequently divided between home and host nations, and security may depend upon reliable access to the economies of other states. Virtual states and nations moving in a ‘virtual direction’ may improve their position through economic growth in normal times, but may become vulnerable when security threats arise. In war they have to co-ordinate supply from a range of allied nations to carry on the struggle against opponents. It might be thought that their pattern of peacetime interdependence undermines their long-term security.

Traditional approaches to questions about nomos in IR typically focus upon either its establishment and the formal structures that emerge through interaction within a clearly delineated spatial area, or an exploration of US hegemony in the post-2003 world. In this article I posit a different approach, building on the ideas of Giorgio Agamben, which grounds nomos as a spatialisation of the exception within conditions of neoliberal modernity. I suggest that within the global nomos are more localised nomoi. These localised nomoi are a consequence of the spatialisation of the exception and a fundamental tension between localisation and ordering. I argue that while sovereign power has been a source of contemporary scholarship, such explorations have paid scant attention to the regulatory power of normative values and their capacity to create order within space. Such norms allow for a greater awareness of how sovereign power can be mobilised in and of itself as a form of contestation. Locating such debates in the Middle East, I explore the concept of nomos to understand how struggle over the localisation and ordering of space helps us to better understand contemporary political life.

International Relations theory has recently turned its attention to the study of comparative regionalism in economics and security. As part of this new research agenda, this article explores what we might learn from the Southern Cone's experience with denuclearization that might be applicable to the Middle East. The two regions differ with respect to security dilemmas, military capabilities and doctrines, and the prior availability of a cooperative regional institutional infrastructure. Yet two aspects of the Southern Cone process seem potentially relevant to other regions. The first relates to improving our understanding of the appropriate domestic political conditions that underpin denuclearization. In particular, the nature of domestic coalitions and of their respective approaches to the global economy and political institutions deserve far more serious consideration than they have gained thus far. The second relates to the nature of the regional denuclearization regime initially fashioned in the Southern Cone, which set an international precedent. A regionally-based system of mutual inspections could help remove some of the most intractable barriers to a future Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.

Andrew Williams, Failed Imagination? New World Orders of the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998)

International relations (IR) has had an opportunistic relationship with history. IR scholars have used the past, as Conal Condren has written of political theorists, as ‘a quarry ... [as a] ... source of useable facts; of entries to, and illustrations of, theoretical issues’. The result was an IR canon, of the ‘Plato to Nato’ variety, which was substantially anachronistic. Its dismantling over the last twenty years has much to do with efforts in the area of conceptual history. Despite this, and the keenness of post-positivist IR theorists to display an historical consciousness, IR and history maintain an uneasy association. Where the past is approached in contemporary IR writings, there is a tendency to build out of historical materials, or more worryingly commentaries on them, conceptual superstructures which are then accorded a determining force. Notions like the Enlightenment Project are the result of such acts of reification and are no less anachronistic than were the pantomime Machiavellis which used to pop up in IR text books. (It is doubtful that such a Project ever existed. Robert Wokler observes that the expression is of ‘more recent pedigree than “the Manhattan Project“‘.) What is purported to be historical explanation may seem more like a ghostly ballet in which structures, processes and agencies execute precisely choreographed routines.

Republicanism is getting increasing attention in International Relations. Engaging Daniel Deudney's Republican Security Theory, it is argued that republicanism should be interpreted in ideological terms, that it is a polysemous tradition of political thought, and that it matters because it is socially embodied in world political practice. Special attention is given to republicanism's relationship to the question of technology. A short case study of the Cold War illustrates the central claims of the argument.

Explanations for the lack of war between democracies are many, various and contested. The main thrust of research is quantitative but there is also a growing literature of case studies. Such studies can throw light on the issues by showing in particular contexts the complex interaction of different factors, those both consistent and inconsistent with democratic peace theory. The détente in the 1920s between France and Germany offers an interesting example for several reasons. Both were democracies but one (Germany) was still undergoing democratisation. In addition, neither was content with the status quo, the distribution of power between them was unstable and that instability was not resolved by an over-arching alliance system (such as NATO) or strong international institutions. A complex interaction resulted between France's security dilemma, the German Republic's need for foreign policy success and the democratic values of political leaders on both sides.