The representatives of contested states – that is, territories whose claim to sovereign statehood is not, or is not fully, recognised by the international society of states – often make significant efforts to engage in diplomacy. Two literatures have recently begun to explore these diplomatic activities, one focusing on the ‘rebel diplomacy’ of insurgents and secessionist movements, the other on ‘liminal actors’ in global politics. However, these two literatures have defined the phenomenon in very different ways, namely, as either instrumental action or cultural performance, and study it largely without regard to each other's insights. My argument in this article is that contested state diplomacy can be better understood if we appreciate the nature of modern diplomacy as a set of bureaucratic practices. As a routinised process within a bureaucratic organisation, modern diplomacy both gives rise to specific decisions and sustains the reality of the state as the locus of legitimate power. The representatives of contested states therefore have strong reasons to set up more or less rudimentary bureaucracies for their diplomacy. I use the history of Kosovo's foreign policy institutions as a paradigmatic case to demonstrate how everyday bureaucratic practices fuse instrumental action and cultural performance and further theorise the interplay of ‘political’ and ‘technical’ conduct in contested state diplomacy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Richard G. Lipsey and Patricio Meller (eds.), Western Hemisphere Trade Integration: A Canadian-Latin American Dialogue (London: Macmillan, 1997)

Elizabeth Joyce and Carlos Malamud (eds.), Latin America and the Multinational Drug Trade (London: Macmillan, 1998)

Barry Bosworth, Susan M. Collins and Nora Claudia Lustig (eds.), Coming Together? Mexico-United States Relations (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997)

James F. Rochlin, Redefining Mexican ‘Security’: Society, State and Region under NAFTA (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997)

Lawrence E. Harrison, The Pan-American Dream: Do Latin America's Cultural Values Discourage True Partnership with the United States and Canada? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997)

Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres (eds.), The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy, and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)

International studies of the Americas have been dominated for at least the last forty years by an orthodoxy which framed the field of study as constituting the relations of the United States with the governments of something called ‘Latin America and the Caribbean’ (hereafter LAC). Often, as it happens, the Caribbean part of that construction was largely excluded from vision, especially the non-Spanish-speaking parts of that region; Canada was ignored almost as often; and the United States, needless to say, was automatically viewed as central. In power politics terms, this was understandable enough. The US perceived itself as a hegemonic power and associated its credibility in the eyes of both its enemies and allies in all parts of the world with its capacity to maintain and demonstrate control of its own hemispheric community—its ‘backyard’. Yet what we can now see is that the politics of this recent past (defined essentially as the Cold War period) were distinctive, not typical, in the longer history of US interactions with the rest of the Americas.

Over the past quarter-century, Fred Halliday has distinguished himself as a prolific and insightful scholar of international affairs. He has imbibed a generous dose of Marxist theory without being intoxicated by it, and one might say the same for his consumption of other types of theory as well. Not content to be an armchair academic, Halliday is personally acquainted with a number of revolutionary movements and his writings combine an obvious sympathy for their aspirations with a clear-eyed sense of their shortcomings. The result is a combination of intellectual range and personal experience that is nearly unique among contemporary scholars of world politics.

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.

Robert McLaren is to be commended for his stimulating response to my article ‘Re-Reading Mitrany’ (Review of International Studies, 10, 2, 1984). He suggests that my discussion constituted the creation of ‘…an interpretive subset of Mitranian functionalism’. I would like to disclaim the attribution and attempt to demonstrate that the set of propositions derived from my discussion are: (a) genuinely attributable to the thrust of Mitrany's original formulation; and (b) sustainable as a prescription for the reduction of interstate violence in the international political system, I would not suggest that any inevitability may be attached to the possibility of a ‘working peace system’, but McLaren's commitment to the impossibility of functionalism invites a response:

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.

Over the last two decades none has done more than Fritz Fischer to compel major reinterpretation of German ambitions between the 1890s and the end of the Third Reich. In 1959–60 this Hamburg historian published two articles that hinted at the coming storm. It broke dramatically in 1961 with the appearance of his huge Griff nach der Weltmacht This densely documented treatment of Germany's objectives in the First World War was striking enough to become before long the object of official displeasure at Bonn. Nor did Fischer's thesis win any easy support from professional colleagues, who argued bitterly about it during the 1964 German Historical Convention. Its still wider impact was clear from the deliberations of the International Historical Congress held at Vienna in 1965. That same year saw the publication of Fischer's Weltmacht oder Niedergang, a brief volume in rebuttal of criticism, and soon scholars in many countries were swelling the tide of relevant literature. By 1969 this included Kreig der Illusionen in which Fischer greatly amplified his original arguments. All three books are, at last, available in English. The translation of Griff nach der Weltmacht dates from 1967, but only lately have the other two been similarly treated. It seems appropriate to review these alongside recent works by Dr John Moses, on Fischer's revolutionary place in a national historiographical tradition, and by Professor Norman Rich, on the German aims associated with the war that broke out in 1939.

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.

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.

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.

There is a paradox in global environmental governance that policymaking must ‘follow the science’ while environmental change is itself characterised by scientific uncertainty. This paper addresses this paradox by embracing that uncertainty. We bring International Relations (IR) into conversation with animal studies to further develop conceptual debates on integrating non-human actors. We focus on avian cultures to understand the nexus between bird crime, flyways, and global environmental governance. We analyse how bird migrations along flyways disrupt mainstream systems of knowledge production that global conventions rely on. Zooming in on bird crime along flyways, we demonstrate that crime relies on offenders’ understanding of avian cultures. We synthesise those findings with an analysis of the Convention on Migratory Species, as the only global convention that integrates animal cultures to develop more effective responses to wildlife crime. Our analysis demonstrates that international conservation overlooks the exploitation of avian culture for criminal activity, rendering policy responses less effective, particularly in contexts of scientific uncertainty. Integrating animal cultures can address scientific uncertainty and promote multispecies learning, creating more effective forms of global environmental governance. Ultimately, this renders the non-human visible and makes it possible to explore the implications for multispecies entanglements in IR.

The literature on the role of regions in international relations is extensive. A ‘region’ is variably defined in terms of proximity or separateness, homogeneity, interdependence? common political orientations, institutional membership, transaction flows, or other ad hoc issues. Regions are thought to be important to the study of international relations because it is somehow assumed that regions lead to regionalism, i.e. the idea that the region has its own characteristics and logic of interaction and thus should be differentiated from outside.

Anglo-American relations have always been complicated by mythology. On the American side are the legends spawned by the revolt of the thirteen colonies against the tyranny of George III and Lord North and the resulting legacy of anti-imperialism and an enduring suspicion of the British. On the British side, the myth of the 'special relationship' has often led British statesmen to expect more co-operation and gratitude from the Americans than from mere foreigners such as the French or the Germans. It has been the British, on the whole, who have failed to remember that a core of common interests does not necessarily produce a core of common approach.