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 ‘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.

There is increasing recognition that Indigenous knowledges have considerable potential to enhance collective understandings of and improve responses to complex ecological threats, such as those to cultural heritage from climate change. At the same time, it appears that Indigenous peoples face structural barriers to participation in international organisations that advance knowledge about those problems. Using the conceptual framework of boundary organisations (BOs) theory and case studies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and UNESCO, I argue that the lack of meaningful Indigenous engagement in international knowledge institutions is not just an ethical problem; it also undermines the effectiveness of their assessments. The future success of their boundary work partly depends on further engagement with Indigenous stakeholders. At least at the heritage–climate change nexus, the salience, legitimacy, and credibility of IPCC and UNESCO assessments require substantive Indigenous representation alongside other state/non-state parties. Successful experiences in biodiversity governance indicate that incorporating the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) would enhance Indigenous engagement in UNESCO and the IPCC.

Transitional justice (TJ) is undergoing a legitimacy crisis. While recent critical TJ scholarship has touted the transformative potential of locally rooted mechanisms as a possible means to emancipate TJ, this burgeoning literature rests on shaky assumptions about the purported benefits of local TJ and provides inadequate attention to local-national power dynamics. By taking these factors into consideration, this article contends that local TJ efforts can be used to deflect justice in manners that paradoxically allow ruling parties to avoid human rights accountability and to conceal the truth about wartime violations. It further argues that the principal method by which justice is subverted is not through overt manipulation by abusive governments, but rather, through subtle and indirect ‘distortional framing’ practices, which ruling parties use to set discursive limits around discussions of conflict-related events and to obfuscate their own serious crimes. After developing this argument theoretically, the case study of Cambodia is considered in detail to reveal and to trace the processes by which distortional framing has been used as a technique to deflect justice.

In limited degree, of course, industry and warfare have been connected from the earliest times. Weapons are what make human muscles formidable; and from the dawn of civilization it took specialized craftsmen to make weapons out of metal In the course of time the amount of metal used by warriors tended to increase; and the size of armies may also have grown greater—though with such ups and downs that no very definite growth pattern here emerges before the wars of the French Revolution.

This article explores post-Soviet power hierarchies which constitute a unique system of vertical stratification in world politics. It does so by analysing relations between two former Soviet states, Tajikistan and Russia, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. The article investigates the underlying reasons for power asymmetries between the two countries, the ways hierarchies are sustained and enforced, as well as perceived and navigated at political and social levels. It is argued that Tajikistan’s relations with Russia are explicitly postcolonial without clear-cut colonial precedents in Soviet times. Postcolonialism did not automatically result from the Soviet breakdown. Rather, it has gradually emerged because of the two countries’ very different paths of integration into the global capitalist economy, which subordinated Tajikistan to Russia. In this way, new economic asymmetries exacerbated Soviet-era legacies and reinvented them in a new, hierarchical manner. Overall, the article contributes to the debate on the nature of post-Soviet legacies and what it means to be post-Soviet.

The Anthropocene rupture refers to the beginning of our current geological epoch in which humans constitute a collective geological force that alters the trajectory of the Earth system. An increased engagement with this notion of a rupture has prompted a lively debate on the inherent anthropocentrism of International Relations (IR), and whether it is possible to transform it into something new that embraces diverse forms of existence, human as well as non-human. This article challenges that possibility. It shows how much of the current debate rests on the idea fulfilling future desirable ideals, which are pushed perpetually beyond a horizon of human thought, making them unreachable. As an alternative, the article turns to Jacques Derrida's understanding of the future to come (l'avenir), highlighting the significance of unpredictability and unexpected events. This understanding of the future shows how life within and of the international rests on encounters with the future as something radically other. On this basis, it is argued that responding to our current predicament should proceed not by seeking to fulfil future ideals but by encountering the future as incalculable and other, whose arrival represents an opportunity as much as a threat to established forms of international life.

If critical thought is to contribute to liberatory struggle, it arguably requires a general, even structural, theorisation of the nature and sources of power and oppression. This appears to be at odds with the critical project of questioning the immanence of truth to power, as famously framed by Michel Foucault. Yet Foucault’s philosophical project in fact hinged upon his own attempts to grapple with this tension. What is more, his ultimate failure to resolve it led to ambiguities that might be considered generative (especially in light of increased rapprochement between Foucauldian, Marxian, and decolonial International Relations [IR]). Reading Indigenous and decolonial movement intellectuals in tandem with Foucault, alongside the philosophy of science of one of his major influences – Gaston Bachelard – we advocate attentiveness to the ‘experimental’ way in which struggles against capitalist extraction and (neo)colonialism hold together dissonant theoretical – and ontological – commitments when putting forward structural accounts of power. This leads us to an ethos of inquiry that starts from lived thought, as well as to a non-linear approach to the relations between method, theory, and associated ontological commitments, from which scholars are traditionally trained away in social science.

in an excellent and thoughtful piece in the april 2005 issue of review of international studies, david dunn draws our attention to seven myths about american isolationism. his points are well made and generally unexceptionable. however, since david dunn takes an article i wrote in 1999 as the starting point for several of his criticisms, i thought i would take the opportunity to offer a response. i have three main points to make.

For NATO's first four decades the overwhelming threat to its members' security arose from the enormous military strength of the Soviet Union … the allies were unable to match the numerical levels of the Warsaw Pact's conventional armaments and manpower. This … underlined the key role of nuclear weapons in deterrence, ensuring that the cost of aggression was plainly too high for any attacker to contemplate.

‘The constant intrusion, or potential intrusion, of power renders meaningless any conception of equality between members of the international community.’

According to opponents of ‘neoliberal globalisation’ located in the postcolonial realm, multinational corporations are central agents in a structure of global hegemonic rule that leaves little or no space for the postcolonial subject to determine his/her own fate. This argument is contested by a number of scholars, who point out that presupposing a lack of agency on the side of subaltern is yet another way of silencing him/her. But how can his/her ‘true’ voice be recognised without at the same time disguising existing domination? In this article, it will be argued that one possibility is the development of a different theoretical framework that challenges the taken-for-granted assumption on which the dilemma is based: the existence of the subject and its conscious voice. For this purpose, the article will use Gilles Deleuze's theory of the various expressions and struggles of life. With the help of the analysis of a particular case, Monsanto's introduction of genetically modified cotton into India in 2002, the article will suggest that the multinational company (Monsanto) should not be regarded as yet another neo-colonial oppressor. Instead, it is a war machine that unleashes flows enabling nomadic life assemblages to counter-attack.

Post-war budgeting for defence in Britain and the United States has become highly complex and politically contentious both for successive administrations and for Congress and Parliament. In the 1950s and 1960s new methods of budgeting were introduced by the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) which held out the prospect both of more efficient management of defence programmes and of greater accountability for defence spending to the respective legislatures. Paradoxically, these same methods presented problems to Congress and Parliament and to their defence and financial committees, which were unable to comprehend the new budget techniques. This and other problems produced pressure in the 1970s, in both countries, for the creation of new committees for the scrutiny of defence and other public spending matters. This paper will examine briefly the developments in defence budgeting in Britain and America and assess the advantages they were purported to offer, especially those that relate to defence accountability. It will then examine the responses of Congress and Parliament to them and assess the extent to which new committees, created in the 1970s, were able to draw upon those budget techniques in a way that provided greater accountability of defence.

No assessment of new or recently re-established democracies in Latin America can overlook the threat to these regimes posed by debt service obligations that are often heavier and more durable than the reparations imposed on Weimar Germany. No discussion of the weakening of the liberal international economic order (the trend towards trade protection, chronic instability in currency and financial markets) can disregard the extreme pressures to export, to compress imports, and to conserve foreign exchange that shape the economic policies of the heavily indebted LDC nations. No analysis of the scope and limitations of monetary policy in the developed countries (and especially in the United States) will be complete unless it takes into account the consequences for the major banks of a sovereign debt exposure which remains even now very large in relation to shareholders' equity, and which still frequently appears in bank accounts at an unrealistically optimistic valuation.

Evan Luard, a prolific author of works on international relations, died on 8 February 1991 at the age of 64. He had contracted throat cancer in the mid-1980s, and in the Spring of 1990 it has been confirmed that he had lung cancer. His reaction to the grim news was typical of him. Not a religious man, he could realistically and calmly accept death. His major concern was that his written work should survive him. This was a true reflection of the extraordinary part that his writing had in his life.

Italy's invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 prompted a major European crisis. This article applies the main theories of foreign policy analysis to the British Government's handling of this crisis. It argues that bureaucratic politics existed, but had little impact on outcomes. Domestic politics had more influence, but did not provide detailed instructions on how to act. The perceptions of key actors, informed by reasoned judgement, determined this. Fears of the threat posed by rival states coalesced with concerns about Britain's own military weakness, leading decision-makers to emphasise the need to act in tandem with France. British policy was therefore motivated by the tension between the public's desire to see action against Italy and the Government's wish to minimise any breach with her allies. These findings highlight the weaknesses of the bureaucratic politics model and show how domestic politics can affect foreign policy outcomes. They also demonstrate the interaction between rational analysis defined in terms of reasoned judgement, and actors' perceptions. It is thus argued that benefits are to be gleaned from combining these theories.