What can models of interest group behaviour from American politics tell us about the existence, activities, and influence of international non-governmental advocacy organisations (advocacy INGOs) in International Relations? In this article I detail an analogy between traditional American interest groups and advocacy INGOs in order to suggest a new approach to theorising INGOs. American politics theories of interest groups provide insights to questions which International Relations has been unable to answer satisfactorily, including where INGOs are likely to be found; how INGOs will grow in the future; the organisational structure of INGOs; the impact of competing groups on the quality and content of foreign policy and international agreements; and the roles of INGOs in different stages of the policy process. Viewing INGOs as interest groups provides a curative to the tendency to view them as self-sacrificing knights in shining armour. Competing INGOs representing narrow interests can nevertheless contribute to the common good in the form of effective, efficient policy.

This article makes the case for a new field in International Relations (IR): the Global Politics of Medicine. It argues that significant avenues of research can be opened up by focusing on medicine and the life sciences, in order to both challenge current IR theories, and develop new theoretical and empirical insights in IR. In particular, the article challenges the validity of securitisation theory, and specifically the argument that health has been securitised. Showing instead that medicine and warfare have been imbricated from the nineteenth century as strategies of population, it challenges securitisation theory's ahistoricism and its assumption that social security and international security (and the norm/exception) are analytically divisible. Bringing this into the present through the examples of triage, psychological resilience, and genetic intelligence in counterinsurgency, it traces how warfare and medicine now ambitiously seek to treat populations as sets of individual bodies. Arguing that we cannot retreat to some mythical state of politics ‘prior’ to securitisation, it draws out how the fields of war, health, and medicine are nonetheless highly contested. The article concludes by challenging the fields of Global Health, war, and security studies, but also suggests novel routes for pursuing the study of the Global Politics of Medicine.

This article provides a conceptual lens for and a thick interpretation of the emergent regional constellation in the Middle East in the first decade of the 21st century. It starts out by challenging two prevalent claims about regional politics in the context of the 2006 Lebanon and 2008–09 Gaza Wars: Firstly, that regional politics is marked by a fundamental break from the ‘old Middle East’ and secondly, that it has become ‘post-Arab’ in the sense that Arab politics has ceased being distinctly Arab. Against this background, the article develops the understanding of a New Arab Cold War which accentuates the still important, but widely neglected Arab dimension in regional politics. By rediscovering the Arab Cold War of the 1950–60s and by drawing attention to the transformation of Arab nationalism and the importance of new trans-Arab media, the New Arab Cold War perspective aims at supplementing rather that supplanting the prominent moderate-radical, sectarian and Realist-Westphalian narratives. By highlighting dimensions of both continuity and change it does moreover provide some critical nuances to the frequent claims about the ‘newness’ of the ‘New Middle East’. In addition to this more Middle East-specific contribution, the article carries lessons for a number of more general debates in International Relations theory concerning the importance of (Arab-Islamist) non-state actors and competing identities in regional politics as well as the interplay between different forms of sovereignty.

This article contributes to the communities of practice (CoP) literature by focusing on the neglected role of the boundary in constructing community. It takes issue with advocates of International Relations’ (IR) most recent ‘practice turn’ who have overrated inclusive practices of linking to the detriment of taking account of exclusive practices of demarcation. A conceptual turn to the boundary, understood as a ‘site of difference’, highlights how the two sets of practices operate simultaneously in creating shared senses of belonging to a community. The article empirically probes this turn to the boundary by studying how the postmodern community of the European Union (EU) is (re)constructed by EU diplomats in its neighbouring state Ukraine. As a borderland, it symbolises an interstitial zone of high connectivity where the EU’s otherwise latent order is unearthed. A reconstructive analysis of interviews with members of this ‘community of practice’ reveals that they function as ‘boundary workers’ who engage in both boundary-spanning and boundary-drawing practices on an everyday basis. Zooming in on the ‘boundary work’ by EU diplomats exposes the complex process of community-building and thereby helps grasp community as an emergent structure of possibilities whose meaning is contextually mediated by its members’ social experience of the boundary.

Torture has been widely practiced by US forces as an officially-sanctioned information gathering strategy in the war on terrorism. At the same time, public attitudes have exhibited a growing tolerance towards the torture of terrorist suspects. This article examines the role of elite political discourse in constructing and sustaining the conditions necessary for the acceptance and normalisation of torture. It argues that a focus on elite discourse is crucial for understanding how torture comes to be practised because discourses set the logic and parameters of policy formulation and create the wider social legitimacy that is required to enact policy, thereby facilitating the construction of a broader torture-sustaining reality. The study’s findings highlight the role of ideational factors in policy analysis and have important normative implications.

The creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998 marked a substantial advance in the effort to ensure all perpetrators of mass atrocities can be brought to justice. Yet significant resistance to the anti-impunity norm, and the ICC as the implementing institution, has arisen in Africa. The ICC has primarily operated in Africa, and since it sought to indict the sitting Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in 2008 resistance from both individual African states and the African Union has increased substantially. We draw on the concept of ‘norm antipreneurs’, and the broader norm dynamics literature, to analyse how resistance has developed and manifested itself, as well as the potential effects of this resistance on the anti-impunity norm. We conclude that the antipreneur concept helped us structure and organise analysis of the case – suggesting it could be usefully deployed in other similar cases – but that this case also suggests that antipreneurs do not always enjoy substantial defensive advantages. We also conclude that African resistance to the ICC has substantially stalled the advance of the anti-impunity norm, a finding that has significant implications for the wider effort to reduce mass atrocity crimes in the contemporary era.

Alexander Wendt's book, Social Theory of International Politics, is published twenty years after Kenneth Waltz's enormously influential Theory of International Politics. The similarity in their titles is no coincidence, since Wendt wants to build on the insights of Waltz's realism and construct an idealist and holist account of international politics (not, note, international relations). In my view, Wendt's book is likely to be as influential as Waltz's. It is a superbly written and sophisticated book, one that has clearly been drafted and redrafted so as to refine the argument and anticipate many of the likely objections. I think that although I can anticipate the objections of both his rationalist and his reflectivist critics. I am also aware that he makes life difficult for them by defining his ground very precisely, and by trying to define the terms of any debate in which he might be engaged. Criticism of the book is not an easy task. The book is likely to become the standard account for those working within the social constructivist literature of International Politics. It is a book that has been eagerly awaited, and it will not disappoint those who have been waiting for Wendt to publish his definitive statement on constructivism.

This is an attempt at analysing the political philosophy of international relations in a very short span of time, so I do not propose to discuss questions of method. Indeed I may sound dogmatic, but that is merely because I shall not have the time to exhibit my diffidence.

Students of international politics do not need to be told of the unsatisfactory state of balance of power theory. The problems are well known: the ambiguous nature of the concept and the numerous ways it has been defined, the various distinct and partly contradictory meanings given to it in practice and the divergent purposes it serves (description, analysis, prescription, and propaganda); and the apparent failure of attempts clearly to define balance of power as a system and specify its operating rules. Not surprisingly, some scholars have become sceptical about the balance of power ‘system’ and a few have even denied that balance of power politics prevailed in the nineteenth century. None of the methods generally used seems to promise much help. These have included studying the views and theories of balance of power held by individual publicists, theorists, and statesmen, making case studies of the balance of power in certain limited periods, analysing events and policies within an assumed balance of power framework, or constructing theoretical analyses comparing the supposed system of balance of power to other systems. Undoubtedly a method for operationalizing the study of the balance of power would be very valuable, and efforts to do this have yielded useful information. But the obstacles to establishing reliable indices of power and status and the problems of quantifying alignments and co-operation-conflict ratios in international affairs are formidable indeed.

Why do interstate relations deteriorate and become conflictual, even under conditions where one might expect improved ties? The article seeks an answer to this question through a case study of the deterioration in Sino-Japanese relations in the twenty-first century, which took place despite the existence of several factors that might be thought likely to have led to an improvement. Existing theoretical approaches cannot fully explain this puzzle. The article argues that such deteriorations can result from disruptions to states’ reciprocally performed routinised recognition, and identifies three mechanisms through which these can occur. To facilitate this argument, the article draws on scholarship on relational identity, recognition, and ontological security to develop a theory of identity construction that takes account of how self and other routinise the ways in which they recognise each other and how they react to the other’s representational practices.

‘Regardless of how you define or measure it, globalization is real and its impact on state power is significant’, says the globalist. ‘But how do you know?’ replies the sceptic. In this opening interchange one sees the origin of a controversy that after almost a decade shows few signs of abating. Globalists continue to maintain that there are big, fin-de-siècle transformations under way in the world at large, which can be laid at the door of something called globalization. This new era—popularized as a ‘world without borders’ and symbolized by the dismantling of the Berlin Wall—ostensibly came into its own where the Cold War left off. Globalists of all shades see a new world order in the making, marked by the de-territorialization of economic and political affairs, the ascendance of highly mobile, transnational forms of capital, and the growth of global forms of governance. By the same token, globalization sceptics, scrutinizing very similar empirical terrain, continue to pose the same insistent question. The dispute between globalists and sceptics is not about the reality of change; it is about the nature and significance of the changes under way as well as the driving forces behind them. ‘There is something out there’, agree the sceptics, but it is not necessarily, or even primarily, responsible for what is going on ‘in here’. The changes that fundamentally interest globalists are usually less economic than political. That is to say that their efforts to analyse or demonstrate economic change—the extent to which national economies have become more interconnected through trade, production, finance, and the growing web of international rules and institutions—are often a prelude to the political project.

This article is a response to calls from a number of theorists in International Relations and related disciplines for the need to develop alternative ways of thinking ‘the border’ in contemporary political life. These calls stem from an apparent tension between the increasing complexity of the nature and location of bordering practices on the one hand and yet the relative simplicity with which borders often continue to be treated on the other. One of the intellectual challenges, however, is that many of the resources in political thought to which we might turn for new border vocabularies already rely on unproblematised conceptions of what and where borders are. It is argued that some promise can be found in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose diagnosis of the operation of sovereign power in terms of the production of bare life offers significant, yet largely untapped, implications for analysing borders and the politics of space across a global bio-political terrain.

Although it is natural to consider the development of the comparative approach known as Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) as the most obvious source of theories of foreign policy behaviour, it is important to remember that all perspectives on the subject of international relations contain statements about foreign policy. Historically this has been the case because virtually all approaches to the study of international relations took the state to be the central actor. Thus, approaches as diverse as those concentrating on political economy, international society and Marxism have all included a notion of what the state is and how its foreign policy results, regardless of the way in which policy might be defined. Theories of foreign policy are therefore intrinsic to theories of international relations, even for those who deny the centrality of the state as an actor in international society.

This article provides a critique of the discourse of ‘failed states’, and outlines an alternative approach. It is argued that by taking the model of the modern state for granted, and by analysing all states in terms of their degree of correspondence with or deviation from this ideal, this discourse does not help us understand the nature of the states in question, or the processes that lead to strong or weak states. Instead, the idea of the state should be treated as a category of practice and not as a category of analysis. Post-colonial state formation could then be analysed by focusing on the inter-relationship between the idea of the state and actual state practices, and on the ways that states have become linked to domestic society on the one hand and their relations with the external world on the other.

Legitimacy is currently a salient topic in the International Relations (IR) literature. In an era of globalisation, discrepancies have emerged between political ideals and the realities of the global distribution of power. One significant aspect of this debate concerns the role and influence of transnational non-governmental organisations (NGOs). This article examines the issue of transnational NGOs’ legitimacy in international society. It is suggested that accusations of NGOs’ ‘illegitimacy’ often rest on a comparison between ‘legitimate’ state power sanctioned by liberal democratic norms, and ‘illegitimate’ non-state power. More pressing than the fact of non-governmental sector’s ‘non-state’ character, however, is the question of how to put effective limits on power per se in international society.

The United States dominates the world as no state has. It emerged from the Cold War the world's only superpower, and no geopolitical or ideological contenders are in sight. Europe is drawn inward and Japan is stagnant. A half-century after their occupation, the United States still provides security and garrisons troops in Japan and Germany – the world's second and third largest economies. US military bases and carrier battle groups ring the world. Russia is in a quasi-formal security partnership with the United States, and China has accommodated itself to US dominance, at least for the moment. For the first time in the modern era, the world's most powerful state can operate on the global stage without the counterbalancing constraints of other great powers. We have entered the American unipolar age.

The article inquires into the conditions of effective leadership of states in international politics, and develops a framework for the study of so-called (new) regional powers such as Brazil, China, India, and South Africa in processes of regional institution-building. Various theoretical strands will be discussed as to the requirements of effective leadership in international affairs. Most importantly, the relationship between power, leadership and hegemony will be outlined. It is argued that the connection between leadership and hegemony is one of co-constitution. Leadership is necessarily based on hegemony, while hegemony can only be sustained through leadership. Furthermore, it will be shown that both leadership and hegemony are essentially political in character, whereas power has no such insinuation but has to be translated into leadership and hegemony through discursive means. Finally, the analysis asks for the preconditions of leadership in East Asia, using China's and Japan's roles in East Asian regionalism as an illustration.

The government’s targeting of homosexuality in May 2001, following years of ‘turning a blind eye’ to Cairo’s gay scene, is studied here in terms of the links between the sphere of interpersonal relations and notions of national security within international relations. The persecution of men for alleged same-sex relations not only filled newspaper columns and created a spectacle to divert people’s attention away from the government’s failings. More importantly, the event represented an opportunity for government officials, the media and other civil society activists – both within Egypt and abroad – to ‘perform’ a discourse of national security through which national sovereignty was (re)produced and political order was maintained. However, this national security threat was not only posed by the external threat of Western governments, international NGOs and other transnational actors concerned with respect for human rights within Egypt. More importantly, this threat was constructed as originating with those people failing to conform to the ‘norm’ of heterosexual relationships.

Global benchmarks have grown exponentially over the last two decades, having been both applied to and developed by states, international organisations, corporations, and non-governmental organisations. As a consequence, global benchmarking is now firmly established as a distinct mode of transnational governance. Benchmarking chiefly involves the development of comparative metrics of performance, which typically take the form of highly stylised comparisons which are generated by translating complex phenomena into numerical values via simplification and extrapolation, commensuration, reification, and symbolic judgements. This process of translation takes what might otherwise be highly contentious normative agendas and converts them into formats that gain credibility through rhetorical claims to neutral and technocratic assessment. This politics of numbers has far-reaching ramifications for transnational governance, including the dimensions and effects of indirect power, expertise and agenda-setting, coordination, regulation and certification, and norm contestation and activism. This Special Issue draws upon an emerging literature to explore how and why benchmarks both align with and expand upon established models of International Relations theory and scholarship. It does so by critically examining the role of global benchmarks in key areas such as state ‘failure’, global supply chains, disaster management, economic governance, corporate social responsibility, and human development.