Power is one of the most commonly used concepts in the social sciences and in ordinary political discourse. It would seem to be central to the study of international relations. Before we consider the role of power in international relations in the short twentieth century, it is necessary to clear up some preliminaries about the concept in general. This is because power is a frustrating concept; its use seldom lives up to our expectations. To begin with there is a fundamental ambiguity; is power a phenomenon to be explained or an explanatory tool, a dependent or an independent variable? On closer inspection, the explanatory power of the concept of power is low. It is difficult to explain social relations and their outcomes, at either the national or the international level, in terms of power as it is normally conceived in the social sciences. Yet, however theoretically sophisticated we try to be, we are driven to use some such concept for want of an alternative.

Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny's valuable 'Engaging Gramsci: International Theory and the New Gramscians'Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 3-21. alerts Anglophone IR scholars to broader debates about Gramsci's theories that are rarely highlighted by scholars in the (somewhat misnamed) 'Italian School'. Just as Germain and Kenny have offered one way to contextualize Gramsci's contributions within the intellectual and social world that was the immediate object of his analysis, it is equally important to put the work of Anglophone 'Gramscian' scholars in its own immediate context in order to clarify why the 'Gramsci' that so many of us have found helpful was the historicist and 'idealist' who, as Germain and Kenny's article suggests, is only one of the many Gramscis that can be identified through historically grounded close readings of the Sardinian's words and deeds.

Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question . . . [I]t must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course — but then I was part of his dream . . .

‘International studies’ and ‘international relations’, in all their various -isms and neo-isms, are part of a collusive dream in which academics imagine that they are rationalizing the behaviour of those who imagine that they are doing what academics seem to be rationalizing.

Rather than attempt to respond to the many points of detail raised in the discussion piece by Buzan and Wæver in the April 1997 issue of the Review, I shall address what I consider three central areas of dispute, and leave readers to judge whether the conclusion of my original paper, that Buzan's authorship in Wæver et al. subverts the thesis of his People, States and Fear, still holds.Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, ‘Slippery? Contradictory? Sociologically Untenable? The Copenhagen School Replies’, Review of International Studies, 23 (1997), pp. 241–50; Bill McSweeny, ‘Identity and Security: Buzan and the Copenhagen School’, Review of International Studies, 22 (1996), pp. 81–93; Ole Wæver, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup and Pierre Lemaitre with David Carlton et al., Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (London, 1993); Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, 2nd edn (Hemel Hempstead, 1991). The three questions which are central, in my view, are the objectivism of the concept of identity; the misunderstanding of methodological individualism and its place in directing their line of analysis; and the impact of their ‘identity’ theses on Buzan's distinctions between strong and weak states and mature and immature anarchies. The first two points overlap with Buzan and Wæver's characterization of the dispute; the third is given minor attention by them, but it critically relates to the question of Buzan's inconsistency.Buzan and Wæver, ‘Slippery?’, pp. 241, 249.

Introduction

In 'Does "Gender" Make the World Go Round? Feminist Critiques of International Relations',Review of International Studies, 22:4 (1996), pp. 405-29. Adam Jones claims that 'the most important ... contribution of feminist critiques has been to add a gender dimension to [IR]', but that their success will remain 'mixed' until their 'frameworks are expanded and to some extent reworked'. While Jones's piece is excpetionally wide-ranging, our view is that overall he presents three assertions. The first is that feminism is restricted by its 'standard equation of gender ... with women/femininity'; the second is that the 'classical tradition' is the standard by which feminist contributions to IR should be judged; and the third is that feminism is defective in its treatment of gender, because it does not adequately conceptualize and study men and masculinity.Ibid., pp. 420-1, 407, 405. In this article we take issue with each of these assertions in turn, drawing first on 'feminisms' generally, then using writers in feminist IR, and finally reviewing the literature on men and masculinity, both specifically feminist and otherwise.

I had no higher ambition for my articleA. Jones, 'Does "Gender" Make the World Go Round? Feminist Critiques of International Relations', Review of International Studies, 22:4 (1996), pp. 405-29. All subsequent page references are to this source, unless otherwise noted. than to encourage the exchange now beginning with Carver, Cochran and Squires' response. Unfortunately, although it was nice to see my dull name in the title, I cannot say I feel any more or less gendered than when I started their piece.

David Mitrany was one of the originators, almost the founding father, of the functional approach to world government, and his pragmatic ideas have proved as relevant at the end of this century as when they were first fully expounded in the early 1940s. At that time Mitrany, with many other political thinkers, was concerned with new approaches in planning for the international organization of peace in the postwar world. His advocacy of functionalism was to be effective, even welcomed, in keeping with public demands for the future; and was to be taken into account by those working on the Charter of the new United Nations, in particular in the establishment of its specialized agencies.

Until recently, International Relations (IR) paid remarkably little attention to identities, including its own. IR called up the nation-state, while displaying very little interest in either nation or state, or the meaning(s) of the hyphen in between. Assuming state-nations removed from view the contested politics of identity and boundary making within the state. This article seeks to make these politics visible. It considers, first, why IR might have missed nationalism, and then reviews different conceptions of nation. It analyses the gendered and global politics of nationalism, and concludes with the prospect and possibility of the nation in new transnational times.

In a recent issue of the Review, Randall Germain and Michael Kenny issued a serious challenge to neo-Gramscian scholarship in international studies,Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny, 'Engaging Gramsci: International Relations Theory and the New Gramscians', Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 3-21. claiming that 'the Italian school's appropriation of Gramsci is far more conceptually problematic than they [neo-Gramscians] acknowledge, and that their use of his framework is difficult to sustain with respect to the scholarship devoted to his ideas'.Ibid., p. 3. In their critical probing of the neo-Gramscian IR literature, Germain and Kenny focus most closely upon two issues: Gramsci's ambiguous and contested legacy and the difficulty of establishing any 'definitive interpretation' of his work; and the appropriateness of attempting to understand transnational social relations in terms of a broadly Gramscian concept of 'civil society'. I will discuss each in turn.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, the time for peace has come.’ The late Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel

The conditions in which peace can exist are now just what they have always been (even if time and place make them appear different): a higher expected utility from peace than from war; a ‘civic culture’; a commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes; strong institutions; an ethical code; mutual legitimization; peacemakers (because peace is socially constructed); a social-communicative process; material and normative resources; social learning (to take us from here to there); shared trust; and, most important, a collective purpose and social identity. As I will explain below, these are not ‘necessary’ conditions in any formal sense. Nor are there really sufficient conditions of peace, other, perhaps, than lobotomy and the total elimination of weapons, including fingernails.

The attempts by Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and other members of the 'Copenhagen School' to provide a theoretical foundation for a broader understanding of security and security studies involves a sustained effort to rethink the processes through which issues become 'security' issues. Security is no longer viewed as referring naturally or unproblematically to the military security of the state. Rather, the goal becomes to understand how different 'referent objects' - from the economy, to the environment, to military relations - can become subject to the processes of 'securitization' in which the socially and politically successful 'speech act' of labelling an issue a 'security issue' removes it from the realm of normal day-to-day politics, casting it as an 'existential threat' calling for and justifying extreme measures.Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO, 1998); Ole Wæver, 'Securitization and Desecuritization', in Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New York, 1995), pp. 46-86.

This is a much-delayed and partial reply in what might ordinarily seem a small, even local, quarrel. However, it has become a more and more plausible view that international relations theory can only make progress if it grapples with embedded and assumed notions of objectivity, and makes room for more subtle and complex views of subjectivity. There is agreement, therefore, with Hollis and Smith that an engagement with the question how epistemology and ontology are related is important for International Relations.Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, 'A Response: Why Epistemology Matters in International Theory', Review of International Studies, 22:1 (1996), pp. 111-16. This reply to their position is, however, partial in that Vivienne Jabri would seek to establish a more complex view of Giddens than a discussion piece would allow. She has already begun to do this in her recent book, Vivienne Jabri, Discourses on Violence (Manchester, 1996). but for now she would say that Hollis and Smith have deformed Giddens in their reading of him. Leaving that largely but not totally aside, this reply is to do with other deformations. There is, firstly, a deformation of our view of cultural argument, labelling it an argument for relativism. Secondly, Hollis and Smith risk misplacing International Relations not only by a restricted reading of philosophy, but in relation to developments in other internationally concerned disciplines. We hope that Smith's self-images of a disciplineSteve Smith, 'The Self-images of a Discipline', in Ken Booth and Steve Smith (eds.), International Relations Theory Today (Cambridge, 1995). do not imply it is hermetically sealed, although I have noted elsewhere how 'Western' all these self-images seem to be,Stephen Chan, 'Seven Types of Ambiguity in Western IR Theory and Painful Steps towards Right Ethics', Theoria, 89 (1997). and that is precisely part of the point I am trying to make here.

The best proof that E. H. Carr has written a true ‘classic’ is that The Twenty Years' Crisis provides much food for thought even now when some of its alleged foundational verities have become problematic. Rather than being limited to a ‘realist’ understanding of politics pure and simple, the reader encounters an analysis that is much more subtle though much less scientific than later realist interpretations would suggest. True, the first chapter is entitled ‘The science of international politics’ but the discussion about ‘purpose’, Carr's invocation of Marx, and the intellectual history he paints with a broad brush, make it clear that it is not a conception of natural science that informs his inquiry. Besides, as with every classic, different readings are possible.

In reflecting upon the prospects for world order, in the concluding chapter of The Twenty Years' Crisis, E. H. Carr advised that ‘few things are permanent in history; and it would be rash to assume that the territorial unit of power is one of them’. Based upon his observation that world order was being reshaped by the contradictory imperatives of progressive economic integration and a ‘recrudescence of disintegrating tendencies’, Carr concluded with a confident prediction that ‘the concept of sovereignty is likely to become in the future even more blurred and indistinct than it is at present’.