Mary Shelley mined the ideas of international thought to help develop three new subgenres of modern political science fiction (‘poliscifi’): post-apocalyptic, existential, and dystopian. Her two great works of poliscifi, Frankenstein (1818), and The Last Man (1826) – confront the social problems that arise from humanity's technological and cultural interventions in the wider environment. This article recovers The Last Man not only as the first modern post-apocalyptic pandemic novel, but also as an important source for the existentialist tradition, dystopian literature, and their intersections with what I call ‘Literary IR’. Comparing The Last Man with its probable sources and influences – from Thucydides and Vattel to Orwell and Camus – reveals Shelley's ethical and political concerns with the overlapping problems of interpersonal and international conflict. The Last Man dramatises how interpersonal conflict, if left unchecked, can spiral into the wider sociopolitical injustices of violence, war, and other human-made disasters such as species extinction, pandemics, and more metaphorical ‘existential’ plagues like loneliness and despair. Despite these dark themes and legacies, Shelley's authorship of the great plague novel of the nineteenth century also inspired a truly hopeful post-apocalyptic existential response to crisis and conflict in feminist poliscifi by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and Emily St. John Mandel.

This article aims to show that from the end of the eighteenth century, international order began to be defined in terms of ground rules relating to non-intervention and intervention, with the former being prioritised over the latter. After the Napoleonic wars, within continental Europe there was an attempt to consolidate an intervention ground rule in favour of dynastic legitimacy over the right of self-determination. By contrast, the British and Americans sought to ensure that this ground rule was not extended to the Americas where the ground rule of non-intervention was prioritised. During the nineteenth century, it was the Anglo-American position which came to prevail. Over the same period international order was increasingly bifurcated with the non-intervention ground rule prevailing in the metropolitan core and with the intervention ground rules prevailing in the periphery. This article, however, only focuses on the metropolitan core and draws on two case studies to examine the non-intervention ground rule in very different circumstances. The first examines the British response to the American Civil War in the 1860s during an era of stability in the international order. The second explores the British Response to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s when the international order was very unstable and giving way to a very different international order.

The social sciences and humanities in general and International Relations (IR) specifically are organised around what has been called ‘analytic bifurcation’. Analytic bifurcations artificially structure and divide analytic spaces into, for example, Europe/non-Europe, inside/outside, state/empire, and metropole/colony. Recently, these bifurcations have been problematised within IR and adjacent fields. Our article contributes to and extends these discussions by foregrounding two interrelated aspects that have not received sufficient attention: first, connections between colonies rather than between metropole and colony and, second, the construction and reproduction of the bifurcation of Europe/non-Europe. We explore how technologies of power, in our case mapping and the use of ‘blank spaces’, were used to create imaginaries of colonisable land. To do so, we trace two episodes from nineteenth-century German colonial discourse. The first episode analyses imaginaries of exploration in the Humboldtian tradition and how these imaginaries depict spaces outside of Europe, namely in Africa, as blank spaces. The second episode reconstructs the cartographic work of Paul Langhans, who focused on mapping ‘Germandom’ (Deutschtum) in Central and Eastern Europe. Juxtaposing these two episodes shows the interconnectedness between these spaces (Africa and the European East) and how techniques such as blank spaces were applied to create colonisable land.

The Imperfect Is Our Paradise

Wallace Stevens

1. Introduction

One significant consequence of the subsidence of positivism as the dominant methodology of the social sciences has been the strong emergence of an emancipatory conception of international relations. Reisisting pedestrian calls 'to define one's terms', let us rather try to be more useful and characterize the general idea behind it in terms of its aim. The aim of any emancipatory international relations is to reveal to subjects who continue to suffer economically, politically, socially, psychologically, etc., not only that their condition is based on false beliefs but that in learning why such conditions came about, they will acquire the motivation and other instruments to eliminate them. Let us call any such conception, with some considerable trepidation of misunderstanding, 'an emancipatory conception of international relations'. Since we can, under the same rubric, further distinguish classical Marxism, critical theory, post-structuralism and feminist international relations, we evidently must acknowledge that an emancipatory conception of international relations is not all of a piece. The subjects who are picked out by the emancipatory theory may be working class, or women or society's marginal people, but, whomever the subject, the theories addressed to them share the liberatory idea that there is something drastically wrong with the way human life is lived on this planet, and that, more importantly, people live in certain ways because they have an erroneous understanding of what their individual and collective existence ought to consist of which can, and should, be changed.

In a recent issue of this journal Campbell Craig put forward an amended version of Power Preponderance theory seeking to explain why US unipolar predominance has turned out to be not simply a ‘moment’ and as such represents ‘a serious anomaly for neorealist theory’. In using Waltz's own work on how nuclear weapons affect state behaviour, Craig appears to further bolster the case for Power Preponderance theory. Craig exploits what at first sight seems to be a contradiction in Waltz's work. However, Craig's error is that he treats security qua territorial security rather than considering a more encompassing view of state security. In the arena of ‘secondary’ security issues the usual logic of counter-balancing with conventional military forces still holds sway. This reply argues that a balance of power will return to the international system, it is just that at this moment no country or coalition of countries is quite up to the task.

In ‘The Politics of Bandwidth‘, Geoffrey Herrera examines the relationship between the information revolution and international affairs. His main point is that the evolution and ultimate shape of a mature digital information network will be decided by a three-way political struggle between states, firms and individuals. This short essay intends to expand and refine some of Herrera's assumptions. More importantly, however, the essay draws attention to the factor that Herrera neglects, namely the difference that being a democracy makes when determining the outcome of the three-way struggle.

Economic corridors are under construction across the planet. Trillions of dollars are being spent and they will have significant implications for international politics and, ultimately, world order. However, there has been limited conceptual work on them to date, especially in International Relations. This article contributes to that gap by explaining the dominant rationale before offering a conceptualisation of economic corridors as an essentially extractivist paradigm. This counter-hegemonic proposition revolves around four relational theses: (1) economic corridors are a ‘fix’ for crises of capitalism; (2) economic corridors exacerbate class struggle; (3) economic corridors are tools for exploitation; (4) economic corridors facilitate financial extraction. In so doing it unmasks the dominant rationale as ideological cover for valorisation and accumulation based on extractive and exploitative relations with human and extra-human nature. Rather than contributing to inclusive and sustainable development as proponents claim, the article contends economic corridors reinforce power asymmetries between states, countries, and classes, thereby extending and entrenching processes of uneven and combined development. The argument is substantiated with empirical reference to mainland Southeast Asia but aims to advance understanding of extractive dynamics integral to the concept of economic corridors and hence operative worldwide.

The collapse of the British Empire in south-east Asia in the early months of 1942 brought to the fore in Anglo-American relations the different attitudes of the two countries towards colonialism. Surprisingly, their long standing disagreement about the merits of colonialism was not pushed to one side by the need to defeat Japan. On the contrary, Britain's humiliating setbacks in Malaya and Burma reinforced doubts and confirmed prejudices in the United States about the probity of the British Empire – doubts and prejudices that were powerfully articulated throughout 1942 and succeeding years in the American press as well as in private exchanges between members of the Administration and their British counterparts.

Bernard Bosanquet spent the First World War at his cottage in Oxshott, in Surrey, and from here he measured the implications of the conflict for his philosophy of the state. The result of this reflection is available to us in the letters which he wrote during the war, and a variety of lectures and papers. His ideas, therefore, have a general interest to students of international theory.

In the early hours of 18 September 1939, before crossing the Roumanian frontier, the Polish foreign minister sent the following instructions to Poland's ambassadors in London and Paris.

The military situation in Poland in the current conflict is such as to necessitate the transfer abroad of the seat of the President of the Republic and of the Government. The Polish Government has the honour to inform the Government of His Britannic majesty that it is today contacting the Government of the French Republic concerning the extraterritorial exercise of its powers on French soil.

In 1973 the United Nations published an influential study x of the emergence of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and their impact on the world economy in general and less developed countries (LDCs) in particular. The Report was based on a painstaking collection of statistical data and other information on TNCs broadly covering the 1950s and 1960s, The Report's significance, apart from being one of the very few documents containing a large amount of information on the subject, lay in the fact that for the first time an official and authoritative body explicitly recognised that the operations of TNCs can be a source of conflict and in particular that the pursuit of corporate objectives may well be incompatible with the goals of national development in the LDCs. In fact, both the Report and much of the debate that it generated exhibited a sense of urgency reflecting the discovery of existing or impending conflict. Thus, the Group of Eminent Persons, set up to consider certain problems in greater depth and provide recommendations for national and international action, noted.

I would like to thank Daniel Nexon for taking the time to read, reflect, and comment on the article ‘Theorising the International System: Perspectives from Historical Sociology’. His comments are astute, pertinent and challenging. I would also like to thank the editors of the Review of International Studies for offering me space to reply to Nexon's comments. Nexon clearly wishes that I had written a different article. However, although I think that the article he has in mind is one that should be written, I had different intentions in mind. Nexon is clearly doing a big service to International Relations scholars by introducing them to relational sociology, but this was not what I set out to do. I will start therefore with some comments on my intentions in writing the article. I will then offer some points of clarification. Finally I will address Nexon's major criticisms of the article: my failure to acknowledge relational sociology and my critique of the analysis of international systems in the works of Tilly and Mann. My overall argument will be that the dichotomy that Nexon offers between neofunctionalism and relational sociology is not as straightforward as he suggests. He acknowledges this in his final footnote, and it is a point also conceded by Emirbayer in the article that Nexon primarily draws upon. Furthermore, on this point, I think that we share more common ground than Nexon would wish to acknowledge. However our positions on structures are radically different. On this point our differences are, I believe, irreconcilable. What I will attempt to argue is that there are fundamental differences between material and ideational structures which makes it difficult to analyse them cumulatively.

This article aims to reassert the relevance of the international society approach by highlighting the value it could bring to the project of understanding the effects of unipolarity. Bull's approach to war and international law as ‘institutions of international society’ could help to frame our understanding of the way in which preponderance has impacted on war and law. Examining the phenomenon of bilateralism suggests that there is also value in a more general attempt to trace the effects of unipolarity on international society.

In recent years, the use of systems terminology has become widespread in international relations literature. This development has precipitated both confusion and controversy – confusion about what exactly is meant by a systems approach and controversy about whether the approach provides any new insights for the international relations specialist. The confusion and controversy spreads across the methodological divide which exists in the discipline; both traditionalists and behaviouralists are in disagreement about the nature of a systems approach and its potential utility.

China and western Europe share a common concern—their powerful neighbour the Soviet Union. Yet it is only in the past three years that Chinese and west European attitudes towards the Soviet Union have begun to converge. The absence of any previous Sino-European agreement on the role of, and reaction to, the Soviet Union has primarily been due to the vagaries of Chinese policy. Despite Chinese assertions and west European self-flagellation, in the past 35 years the west has been stable and largely secure, whereas China has been changeable and largely insecure. Yet despite recent converging trends in Sino-west European views of the Soviet Union, there are important reasons why both China and western Europe will continue to differ in how they meet the Soviet challenge.