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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Recent years have witnessed growing attention to popular culture’s role in the reproduction, negotiation, and contestation of global political life. This article extends this work by focusing on games targeted at young children as a neglected, yet rich site in which global politics is constituted. Drawing specifically on the Heroes of History card game in the Top Trumps franchise, I offer three original contributions. First, I demonstrate how children’s games contribute to the everyday (re)production of international relations through the contingent storying of global politics. Heroes of History’s narrative, visual organisation, and gameplay mechanics, I argue, construct world politics as an unchanging realm of conflict through their shared reproduction of a valorised, masculinised figure of the warrior hero. This construction, moreover, does important political work in insulating young players from the realities and generative structures of violence. Second, the polysemy of children’s games means they also provide opportunity for counter-hegemonic ‘readings’ of the world even in seemingly straightforward examples of the genre such as this. Third, engaging with such games as meaningful objects of analysis opens important new space for dialogue across International Relations literatures on children, popular culture, gender, the everyday, and heroism in world politics.

Within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, millions of people had fled to neighbouring countries and across Europe. People throughout Europe were mobilised into action, and from the outset, the response to the unfolding humanitarian emergency in Ukraine was a complex and often messy web of private and public initiatives. In this article, we focus on the unique British humanitarian response to the greatest movement of refugees in Europe since the Second World War, known as ‘Homes for Ukraine’ (HfU). We develop our argument in three steps. First, we situate HfU within existing scholarship on ‘everyday humanitarianism’ and private refugee hosting in Europe, locating these within longer histories of private humanitarian action. Secondly, we show how HfU shifts the humanitarian space into the private and domestic sphere, a move reliant on particular conceptions of the ‘home’ as a space of sanctuary and safety. Finally, we unpack the gendered and racialised conceptions of the home and humanitarian hospitality more broadly, and how HfU sits within and outside of the broader bordering practices of the United Kingdom’s refugee response.

This article reads Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages series (1863–1905) through a worldmaking lens. It argues that, rather than simply reflecting 19th-century ideologies of progress, Verne was engaged in creative global ordering. The article argues that Verne constructed global order as technocratic, anti-political, and necessarily violent. This space was ambiguously but persistently appropriated by white, male engineers and scientists. This generates two important insights for International Relations (IR). First, Verne’s global order was not about states, sovereignty, or political community: it was about an elite vanguard of technocratic adventurers roaming the globe. At a time when colonial incursions frequently emerged out of interventions by explorers and engineers and other ‘people with projects’, this understanding resonated deeply. It is also worth recovering as a current of technocratic thought not centred on bureaucracy and strong government but on private enterprise. Second, Verne’s fiction constituted a powerful conception of global order, and contemporaries drew upon this as an inspiration for real-world interventions. At the French Société de Géographie, of which Verne was a long-time member, as well as among imperialists across Europe, the Voyages became a casual frame of reference in justification of colonial expansion. Better understanding this typically downplayed aspect of the modern international imagination not only promises to enrich IR’s understanding of the role of speculative fiction in global ordering but also puts the current revival of techno-colonial projects – from Seasteading to the colonisation of Mars – into needed perspective.

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.

This article argues that current discourses on Turkish corruption are marked by a disproportionate emphasis on culture and can thus be understood as part of a broader relationship with Europe's perennial ‘other’. Having traced elements of this within European political elites' response to Turkey's prospective accession to the Union, the article goes on to suggest that the association of corruption with a different cultural orientation represents a useful means of legitimising the extraneous guidance of administrative and economic change. The ultimate aim of such reforms are, the article concludes, to extend the penetrative capacity of European capital, to reduce the transaction costs involved in acquiring Turkish assets and to disable domestic resistance to further marketisation.

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.