The end of the Cold War and the transformation of the Yalta security system generated a debate about the survivability of the postwar institutions of security, particularly NATO. This debate is too narrow in its focus. We argue that security has two mutual constitutive elements, the political-military and the economic. The interdependence of these two elements of the future security architecture raises a set of interrelated questions addressed in this article: What are the economic elements of security? How have the changes in the European state system affected the prospects for the institutionalization of security cooperation, broadly defined? Does a stable security architecture require the parallel construction of the economic and military institutions of security?

This article reassesses the preparatory negotiations which launched the Kennedy Trade Round (KTR) of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), in search of a role for Britain. My purpose is to make two challenges, one theoretical, the other empirical. Theoretically, this study questions the predominant focus on the structural power of major states that characterizes the study of international relations in general, and of the GATT in particular. This is a case-study of middle power influence that focuses on the negotiating skills and experience of state-level actors at the KTR. Empirically, I question the generally accepted view that the Anglo-American special relationship was merely a British myth and had no significance to US foreign policy interests in the 1960s.

For Carr, the contrast between utopians and realists was between ‘those who regard politics as a function of ethics and those who regard ethics as a function of politics’. In other words, can we direct society in benevolent directions, perhaps to a utopia, or do we take what we are given and try to rationalize this into some form of moral acceptability? In the context of International Relations, the utopian aspires to a world without war and where power is not the primary determinant of relationships. The realist is more sceptical. Broadly, the realist stresses the constraints in life; the utopian stresses the opportunities. At this level, they are not social theories but temperamental attitudes.

1. Personal and academic background

F.H. It would be very interesting if you could say something about your own personal and academic background. What were the experiences that led you to write Man, the State and War?

Environmental change is a global phenonemon caused by, and increasingly acting as a constraint upon, human activity. Thus analysis of the determinants of human behaviour is necessary to the understanding of global environmental issues. In this respect the salience of gender to global-change issues has frequently been noted. However, attempts to 'put gender on the agenda' of global environmental politics have resulted in, not the incorporation of gender, but the addition of women. This article attempts to explain this apparently unintended outcome through examining ways in which human agency and social structures interact in framing issues and setting agendas.

The end of the Cold War has prompted a good deal of soul-searching in the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). Some results of this process are already apparent; the dominant version of realism, neorealism, is developing in new directions in an attempt to address major areas where the theory has been shown to contain weaknesses (e.g. domestic politics, international cooperation, the analysis of change). Liberal IR-theory is becoming less focused on international institutions and has devoted more attention to the larger issues of democracy and democratization, sovereignty, and change in the context of modernization and globalization. Some bodies of established theory are receiving fresh attention, including the International Society (or English) School, and there is a renewed interest in the field of international political economy.Many thanks to Kenneth Glarbo, Knud Erik J¿rgensen, Michael Nicholson, Steve Smith, and Alexander Wendt for very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

John Baylis and Steve Smith (eds.), The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, Oxford University Press, 1997

Charlotte Bretherton and Geoffrey Ponton (eds.), Global Politics: An Introduction, Cambridge, MA, Blackwell Publishers, 1996

Chris Brown, Understanding International Relations, London, Macmillan, 1997

Ian Clark, Globalization and Fragmentation: International Relations in the 20th Century, Oxford University Press, 1997

Brian White, Richard Little and Michael Smith (eds.), Issues in World Politics, London, Macmillan, and New York, St Martin's Press, 1997

Ngaire Woods (ed.), Explaining International Relations since 1945, Oxford University Press, 1996

The Anglo-Iranian oil crisis of 1950–4 provides an ideal case-study for those interested in the postwar Anglo-American Special Relationship. This article investigates the oil crisis with two purposes in mind: first, to demonstrate how Britain and the United States struggled to adjust their bilateral relations in response to their changing postwar world positions; second, to show just how crucial both countries perceived the Special Relationship to be in the early 1950s. This is done by examining the American decision not to pursue a policy in the Iranian oil crisis that would undermine Britain's position, despite at times severe Anglo-American tension. It is concluded that the problems created by the changing balance of forces within the Special Relationship were mitigated in Iran by a combination of consanguinity and, more important, the US need for British help in its policy of global containment. In short, Anglo-American policy-makers perceived sufficient mutual need to persuade them to actively preserve and develop the Special Relationship.

A.Mc. A common preoccupation of much contemporary writing about world politics concerns the dynamic interrelation between continuity and change. The end of the Cold War, the intensification of globalization and the 'postmodern turn' have delivered powerful challenges to the orthodoxy of realism. Among the most significant of these challenges is the cosmopolitan approach advocated by David Held, Andrew Linklater and others. In contradistinction to realism, which assumes a strict analytical separation between politics within and amongst states, the cosmopolitan approach proffers a more unified conception of political life. In this discussion Barry Buzan, a prominent advocate of realism, and David Held debate the merits of their respective positions and assess the strengths and limits of both realism and cosmopolitanism as frameworks for understanding contemporary global politics and its potential for transformation. I began by asking Barry to explain the fundamentals of contemporary realism. What are its constituent elements?

This article examines how the various bodies of Christ, such as the Catholic Church, the Holy See and the Pope, use their spiritual power to define, assign and confine woman as wom(b)an, or woman defined in relation to her body, specifically her reproductive capacities. In particular, it explores how this power was deployed at the UN-sponsored International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD in 1994). It was here that attempts were made by the bodies of Christ to advance the particular - the Catholic articulation of woman, reproductive options and sexuality - as the universal, in the international. The article begins by examining the spiritual sovereignty and the power of the Pope, which is followed with an inquiry into a particular power performance, namely, the Catholic articulation of woman, reproductive option and sexuality. The following section examines the politics of the spiritual as they pertain to the Holy See's words and deeds both before and during the ICPD. The paper concludes by offering some insights into the power relations that mediate the relations among the bodies of Christ, woman and the ICPD.

Michael Elliott, The Day before Yesterday, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996

John Gerard Ruggie, Winning the Peace, New York, Columbia University Press, 1996

Monteagle Stearns, Talking to Strangers, Princeton University Press, 1996

Warren Zimmermann, The Origins of a Catastrophe, New York, Random House, 1996

The British Labour government under Harold Wilson was involved in several attempts to negotiate an early end to the Vietnam War. Such efforts helped to satisfy critics of the war on the Labour left and in the Commonwealth, to neutralize US pressure to join in the conflict and to emphasize Britain's importance on the world stage. The Davies mission, in which a left-leaning junior minister was sent to Hanoi, was Wilson's most unusual peace bid which ended as a much-criticized fiasco. This story helps to illuminate Wilson's approach to foreign policy-making, the difficulty of pursuing talks without normal diplomatic relations and the obstacles preventing a Vietnam settlement in 1965. The reluctance of both Washington and Hanoi, as well as flaws in the mission's execution, condemned it to failure.

John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN 0 19 878070 2

Within the community of academic students of international politics today there is a deep epistemological rift over the extent to and ways in which we can know our subject. Speaking very broadly, on one side stand what have become known as 'positivists', who think we can get closer to the truth about international politics, but only if we follow the methods which have proven so successful in the natural sciences. And on the other side stand ‘post-positivists’, who think we do not have privileged access to the truth about international politics, and least of all through the methods of natural science. Although it can seem far removed, this epistemological disagreement actually matters quite a lot to our collective efforts to make sense of the real world, since we cannot avoid taking some position on it, and those positions affect the questions we ask, the methods we use to answer those questions, and ultimately the kinds of knowledge that we produce. Perhaps for this reason what may seem more a dispute for philosophers than political scientists has become one of the ‘Great Debates’ (the Third) in the discipline of International Relations (IR), and, indeed, it arguably underlay the ‘Second’ Debate between behaviouralists and traditionalists in the 1960s as well.

Benjamin Frankel (ed.), Realism: Restatements and Renewal, Ilford, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1996

Benjamin Frankel (ed.), Roots of Realism, Ilford, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1996

Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse, London, Hurst and Co., 1995

Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia's Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transition, 2nd edn, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1995

Mihailo Crnobrnja, The Yugoslav Drama, 2nd edn, London, I. B. Tauris, 1996

Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia, revised edn, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Paul Mojzes, Yugoslavian Inferno, New York, Continuum, 1994

Edgar O'Ballance, Civil War in Bosnia, London, Macmillan, 1995

Sabrina Petra Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to Ethnic War, 2nd edn, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1996

Laura Silber abd Alan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia, revised edn, London, Penguin Books, 1996

Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Washington, DC, Brookings, 1995

John Zametica, The Yugoslav Conflict, London, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1992

Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict and the International System, Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner, 1995

In his 1995 BISA lecture Philip Allott undertakes a ‘[reconciliation of] philosophy and international studies’ arguing that internationalists are the obvious leaders of the fifth historical moral enlightenment. Their role would be to envision worlds that transcend the prevailing ‘naturalistic’ view of international phenomena, which mires humankind in morally unacceptable states of affairs. A ‘naturalistic’ approach misconceives the proper role of academics for whom the sky is the limit. Inspired by Kant's three Critiques, Allott declares ‘The mind of pure reason is the mind in wonderland . . . We are all Mad Hatters conceptualizing together.’

Ken Booth and Russell Trood (eds.), Strategic Cultures in the Asia-Pacific Region, Basingstoke, Macmillan, forthcoming

Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995

Peter J. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1996

Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, Columbia, NY, Columbia University Press, 1996

Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1997

In everyday life we often engage in ethical argument about what ought to be done in international affairs; in a rough and ready fashion we engage in normative theory. It is odd then to find that for most of its history, scholars in the discipline of International Relations (IR) have seldom explicitly engaged in this kind of theorizing. The reasons for their avoiding it are now well known. Certain developments in the discipline over the past few decades, however, suggest that the discipline might now have taken the normative turn. But has it?