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.

Recent scholarship often dismisses entrapment, arguing that there are hardly any identifiable cases; and that powerful states (protectors) can sidestep it by narrowing the treaty conditions under which they have to intervene to defend their weaker allies (protégés). Consequently, alliances and partnerships are nearly always considered risk-free assets. However, this paper argues that several types of entrapment are present. The paper is foremost concerned with classic entrapment, a type referring to a purposeful effort by the protégé to drag the protector into a conflict serving primarily the protégé’s interests. The protégé entraps the protector by placing itself deliberately in danger of defeat and by manipulating the protector’s domestic audience costs. Classic entrapment is likely to succeed under two conditions: (a) when the protégé’s allegiance confers the protector an advantage in a competition against other powerful states; and (b) in informal arrangements, in which there is no clear cut-off point to the protector’s commitment. The paper provides an illustration in the Ottoman Empire’s entrapment of Britain in the crisis preceding the Crimean War. The conclusion considers classic entrapment’s feasibility in present world politics, particularly in the context of Taiwan.

George Orwell is not generally remembered for his views on strategy. Nevertheless a careful reading of his written work reveals a coherent appreciation of war’s strategic dimension. For Orwell, war is a necessary adjunct to politics, and the utility of strategic action should be based on rational considerations of cost and benefit. He rejected pacifism and self-imposed restraints on warfare on the basis that such positions proceeded from unexamined emotional commitments, and were neither instrumentally nor morally sound. He also maintained that the enemy’s political values are an essential input into effective strategic calculations. On this latter basis he criticised the strategic prescriptions of H. G. Wells and B. H. Liddell Hart for limited war with Nazi Germany.

While the gravity of the injustice and inequality experienced by Palestinians is now widely documented, evidenced, and acknowledged, when it comes to action the situation appears ‘impervious’ to international law and norms of global politics, with Israel largely enjoying impunity. This article argues that this state of affairs can be most coherently understood through a critical interdisciplinary emancipatory framework centred on ‘liminality’. Referring to situations and actors ‘betwixt and between’, the framework of liminality offers significant potential for understanding how particular actors and spaces are intentionally marginalised, disempowered, and silenced within global politics and international law. Furthermore, in revealing the root causes of liminality, and the inherent vulnerability of such spaces to contestation and subversion, the framework also opens up potential pathways of transformative emancipation. Applying the lens of liminality to Palestine, it is demonstrated that Palestinians have been deliberately corralled to a liminal space within international law and global politics in order to enable an expansionist Zionist/Israeli settler colonial enterprise. After exploring how Palestinian liminality manifests in global politics and international law, the article turns to a range of efforts to subvert Palestinian liminality and assesses prospects for a teleological emancipation for Palestinians.

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.

Well-being and protection of all children have widely been associated with universal rights. Simultaneously, though, there is growing advocacy for a right of children to work to live. Drawing on cultural relativist premises, such advocacy strongly correlates with an acceptance of poverty as a condition that is inevitable or simply ‘given’. We advance an argument against a right of children to work to live. The fact that only poor children are compelled to work should direct analyses to the causes of poverty. A critical engagement with the politics of development is necessary as it is often constitutive of relations of impoverishment. We critique Eurocentric perspectives that advocate for child labour and substantiate our argument by drawing on the case example of Bolivia, which lowered the legal age for child labour, only to eventually retract this decision. We demonstrate the link between neoliberal development and a rapid increase in the number of children forced to work to live since the 1980s. The case for a right of children to work to live is not justifiable; but there is a case for abolishing child labour and upholding the right of all children and their families to live in dignity. Poverty is not ‘another culture’.

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.

In a recent article, Maria Eriksson Baaz and Swati Parashar1 trace the continued salience of Eurocentrism in critical International Relations (IR), demonstrating how the ‘master’s outlook’ continues to stifle the study of global politics; they ultimately encourage an unsettling and even implosion of the discipline. Starting from this proposed ‘implosion’ of critical IR, this article reflects on our hopes, as two current PhD candidates and one early career researcher in global politics, for teaching and learning in this future world. We begin by reflecting on our own complicity in reproducing the Western-centrism of the discipline and consider how this discomfort can be used productively. The article then considers the radical potential of the classroom and the necessity of empathetic, collaborative inquiry to the future of the discipline of global politics. We advocate for an IR which is imaginative, relational, messy, and vulnerable – and are hopeful about how this may animate a meaningful and sustainable implosion. Embracing our discomfort and the possibility of failure, we hope to contribute to the ongoing ‘unsettling’ of academia from the standpoint of incipient feminist scholars and hopeful early-career teachers.

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.

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.

Besides stating that global or cosmopolitan citizenship is an incoherent concept in the absence of a global state, some critics assert that it represents a form of Western-centric moral neoimperialism. This article develops some responses to such objections through examining the efforts of Indian activists who have undertaken intensive international engagement in their struggles against caste discrimination. The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights has sought to close domestic rights-implementation gaps for Dalits (formerly called untouchables) in part through vertical outreach to United Nations human rights bodies. This mode of outreach is shown to represent an important practice of global citizenship, and to challenge a view of South agent as primarily passive recipients of moral goods within a global citizenship frame. Further, the Dalit activists’ global citizenship practice is shown to be significantly ‘institutionally developmental’, in that it highlights implementation gaps in the global human rights regime and can contribute to pressures for suprastate institutional transformation and development to address them. NCDHR actions are, for example, highly salient to the recently renewed dialogue on creating a World Court of Human Rights.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report: Five Volumes, Basingstoke and Oxford, Macmillan, 1999

On 29 October 1998 Archbishop Desmond Tutu presented the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to President Nelson Mandela. This massive report has now been published by Macmillan in a handsome, extensively illustrated five-volume set. The fine quality of the production would seem appropriate to what has been hailed as a document of lasting importance for South Africa. Indeed, it is evident that many foreign commentators see it as important not just for South Africa but for the whole world. That has been reflected in the interest shown in the TRC by commentators, such as Timothy Garton Ash and Michael Ignatieff, who have not previously written about South Africa. The report was the culmination of nearly three years of work by the TRC. President Mandela announced the names of the 17 commissioners (designating Desmond Tutu as chairperson and Alex Boraine as deputy chairperson) in November 1995. It began to function in December that year, while the first public hearings were held on 15 April 1996. However, while the report has been the most significant product of the TRC's endeavours, it is not the end of its work. In particular, the Committee on Amnesty will continue to function until it has reached decisions on all the outstanding applications for amnesty received by the deadline of 30 September 1997. When it has completed this task a further volume of the final report will be published.

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.

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.

Much has been written about the deep fear of aerial bombardment in inter-war Britain. Particular attention has been paid to the Government awareness of that danger during the late 1930s, when the threat of war advanced from the realm of military and academic speculation to the sphere of an immediate political concern. “Air power” and the concomitant possibility of aerial bombardment, to quote Correlli Barnett, then became an “obsession”; it pervaded Cabinet debates and dominated all discussions of rearmament at every level of the British decision-making process.2 Why this should have been so, is not always made clear. The Government's sensitivity to the air danger is more often assumed than explained, and comparatively few attempts have been made to analyse the root causes which were responsible for this fear in official circles. Particularly neglected, in this context, is the impact of public opinion. Broadly speaking, public opinion is considered to have played a generally negative role, retarding the process of rearmament when not obstructing it altogether. The interplay between the public's view of the “air peril” and that of the Government is thereby minimized. This article is designed to redress that balance. It aims to examine the degree to which the British public was itself sensitive to the air danger and the extent to which its fears were communicated to the men who formulated the country's defence policy. In so doing, it will argue that public opinion acted as a catalyst, affecting official views on defence policy and — in general terms — influencing the choice of the form which rearmament was to take.

Despite the proliferation in recent years of scholarly journals, university and college departments and research institutes dealing with peace studies, it would be difficult to conclude that this area of academic enquiry is as yet firmly established in the wider field of International Relations. It may well be, as one sympathetic writer noted recently, that peace research is ‘alive, vigorous, rapidly maturing and producing a good deal of work conforming to the tenets of social science’. At the same time it remains a fairly new field and one which, over the years, has suffered, and continues to suffer, from internal disputes, particularly about substance and values. In some respects these debates and controversies are a sign of intellectual vigour. It must also be said, however, that in the past the ‘lack of agreed focus and definition ideological divisions, competing disciplinary biasses, ambiguities of priorities and purposes’, have led to ‘an unhealthy confusion and mystification of issues’ which has helped to prevent its wider acceptance within the academic field.

The process of education, for all its centrality to the civilized mode of living, is but imperfectly understood. Yet if teaching is to be efficient, the preconditions for and means of learning must assuredly be appreciated; and to this end educationists have started to unravel the awesome complexities of how learning takes place – philosophers identifying the different forms of knowledge, the psychologists the different mental activities involved and the sociologists the different contexts in which learning can take place. As a consequence revolutionary changes have been effected in the syllabus-content and teaching methods of, for example, mathematics and the sciences. However, the amount of research effort that has been deployed on the various traditional school subjects varies considerably. But even the task of surveying an established school subject most patchily investigated would be more straightforward than an examination of the work carried out in the field of international studies.

During the last ten years the Department of International Politics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, has been using the technique of crisis gaming as a supplementary part of its undergraduate programme. After being the first university in Britain to introduce crisis gaming as a teaching technique in 1966, the Department's initiative has been fairly widely followed at other British universities and polytechnics, most notably by Edinburgh with the GONEX series of games in 1967, Dr. Michael Nicholson's games at Lancaster1 and more recently by the University of London.

This article does not purport to be a critique of a stimulating review of four recent textbooks on British foreign policy. A review article, however, does present an opportunity to speculate beyond the confines of the immediate text(s) to make some assessment of the ‘state of the discipline’. The writer believes that such an assessment is long overdue and that an important opportunity in this journal was inadequately grasped. What follows, then, are some initial comments on the status of British foreign policy studies in the context of contemporary foreign policy analysis.

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.