The international organisation of the democratic peace matters. Interdemocratic institutions are particularly suited to block escalation pathways between states and to prevent conflicts from resulting in war. This article builds on findings from three fields of research: (a) the liberal analysis of the democratic peace; (b) systemic approaches to international institutions, and (c) new quantitative studies of armed conflicts. Three pivotal contributions of international institutions to peaceful conflict management are identified: international institutions can be used to overcome the security dilemma among states and to tame power competitions. They sustain international cooperation and forestall the recourse of governments to unilateral self-help strategies. Finally, international institutions increase the autonomy of issue areas, which decreases the risk of destabilising spillover effects from other issue areas. The article holds that these three functions are extraordinarily well performed by international institutions composed of democracies and illustrates this allegation by presenting three case studies of interdemocratic management of former rivalries. Therefore, the distinctive features of interdemocratic institutions merit more attention as a supplement to the explanation of the democratic peace.

With this issue The Review of International Studies passes from the Exeter team, who have edited it for the last few years, to the new team here at St Andrews. We would first of all like to thank those in the team at Exeter – David Armstrong, Maggie Armstrong, Theo Farrell and Bice Maiguascha – for their excellent custodianship of the Review, and especially (from our parochial perspective) for all their help with the inevitably complicated process of transition over the last few months. They have set an enviably high standard for contributions and intellectual content and are a hard act to follow. But we will do our best.

During the last decades ‘causation’ has been a deeply divisive concept in International Relations (IR) theory. While the positivist mainstream has extolled the virtues of causal analysis, many post-positivist theorists have rejected the aims and methods of causal explanation in favour of ‘constitutive’ theorising. It is argued here that the debates on causation in IR have been misleading in that they have been premised on, and have helped to reify, a rather narrow empiricist understanding of causal analysis. It is suggested that in order to move IR theorising forward we need to deepen and broaden our understandings of the concept of cause. Thereby, we can radically reinterpret the causal-constitutive theory divide in IR, as well as redirect the study of world politics towards more constructive multi-causal and complexity-sensitive analyses.

Post World War I, Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African movement managed to coalesce, however briefly and imperfectly, an extra-territorial sovereign authority in the form of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Through the recollection of this project the article seeks to disturb the predominant uni-linear narrative in IR debates of the transformation of sovereignty that posit a recent shift from territorial exclusivity to multi-level governance encapsulated in the emergence of the European Union. By narrating a string of transformations of sovereignty that led to Garvey’s UNIA the case is made that such transformations have not directly followed one universal logic but have been multi-linear in character, and further, extra-territoriality has been a defining principle of sovereignty in the modern epoch and by no means peculiar to the contemporary European milieu. Through exploring the generative relationship between capitalist, nationalist and racialist forms of sovereignty the article contributes theoretically and empirically to a historical sociology adequate to capture the multiple, yet related, transformations of sovereignty in the modern epoch.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) is located in a fortified compound in central Freetown. Inside its militarised space a project of global significance is unfolding. Together with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the International Criminal Court, the SCSL is an experiment in bringing the rule of international law and governance to regions recently destabilised by war and conflict.

International Relations have increasingly projected an image of the world where territoriality has lost its organising force. The global movements of people, information, capital and pollution are seen as signs of increasing deterritorialisation. Climate change is one of these issues ‘beyond borders’ that due to its global framing has been established within the international. This article is an investigation into the political geography of the carbon cycle. We approach the tension between the representations of climate space as global and deterritorial on the one hand, and political practices that reterritorialise the climate on the other. We trace the political transformation of the global carbon cycle into ‘national sinks’ and argue that the two tendencies of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of climate space mirror the spatial assumptions of IR; the national inside and global outside.

This article examines the cultural basis of European opposition to Turkish accession to the European Union (EU). Most observers depict the cultural and religious dimensions of the European debate over Turkish accession as a disagreement between those who see Europe as a Christian ‘club’ and those open to a more religiously pluralistic European identity. However, polls suggest that cultural and religiously based doubts about Turkish accession resonate with a much larger proportion of the European population than those who publicly defend the idea of an exclusivist ‘Christian’ Europe. Both secularists and Christian exclusivists (‘traditionalists’) express hesitations about Turkish membership:

Over the past decade, health has become an increasingly important international issue and one which has engaged the attention of the foreign and security policy community. This article examines the emerging relationship between foreign and security policy, and global public health. It argues that the agenda has been dominated by two issues – the spread of selected infectious diseases (including HIV/AIDS) and bio-terror. It argues that this is a narrow framing of the agenda which could be broadened to include a wider range of issues. We offer two examples: health and internal instability, including the role of health in failing states and in post-conflict reconstruction; and illicit activities. We also argue that the relationship between global public health, and foreign and security policy has prioritised the concerns of the latter over the former – how selected health issues may create risks for (inter)national security or economic growth. Moreover the interests of the West are prominent on this agenda, focusing (largely though not exclusively) on how health risks in the developing world might impact upon the West. It is less concerned with the promotion of global public health.

This article considers the rise and fall of the first institution of international academic cooperation on international relations, the International Studies Conference (ISC), which was established in 1928 and continued activities into the 1950s. Its formation preceded by decades the present ISA as well as the international organisation of political scientists. The demise of the ISC was a result of the failings of the ISC itself, the influence of UNESCO especially its Department of Social Sciences, and the challenge posed to the ISC by the formation of the International Political Science Association.

This article examines the nature of the destruction of built environments. Such destruction should be seen as a distinct form of violence: urbicide. This violence comprises the destruction of shared spatiality which is the condition of possibility of heterogeneous communities. Urbicide, insofar as it is a destruction of heterogeneity in general, is thus a manifestation of a ‘politics of exclusion’. However, this account of the destruction of the built environment is not only an insight into a distinct form of political violence. Rather, an account of urbicide also offers a metatheoretical argument regarding the scholarly study of political violence: namely that destruction of built environments contests the anthropocentric frame that usually dominates the study of violence.

Recent years have seen the growth of approaches critical of traditional state-centred examinations of international relations, arguing instead for analyses that recognise actors and methods previously held largely silent within the mainstream International Relations (IR) discourse. This article argues that children are a group of actors worthy of similar recognition. Despite the fact that ‘childhood studies’ are comparatively well established in a number of academic disciplines, similar recognition has been later in coming to the study of IR. This article aims to address this perceived gap in the literature by first of all outlining the ways in which the discourse surrounding the child in IR has so far developed. This leads into an examination of how the child may potentially best be conceptualised within the mainstream discourse and the implications of the inclusion of children as a ‘site of knowledge’ through which the international system may be more clearly understood.

Recent research on the Internet and terrorism confirms the Internet’s enabling features for terrorist activities, including its ease of access, anonymity, and international character. While the Internet can serve as a tool for nefarious purposes, little research has focused on whether and how the Internet can be used to prevent conflict and, ultimately, terrorist activities. This research focuses on one group that might be considered a resource base for violent action: diasporas from failed states. Research shows a strong correlation between marginalisation and violence. On the other hand, fostering a shared identity, inclusive of liberal values, and promoting carefully framed discussion and debate may reduce psychological incentives to engage in violent activities. This article examines the case of one digital diaspora – a diaspora organised on the Internet – to explore these hypotheses. Specifically, the case of Somalinet suggests potential for the Internet to promote liberal values, channel frustration into verbal debates thus diffusing tension, and create communities that counter the marginalisation conducive to violence.

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.

US foreign policy is hypocritical in various ways, as this article demonstrates in the course of an extensive empirical review. The question is whether such hypocrisy provides grounds for opposing US interventions abroad, in particular those which might yield locally desirable outcomes at an acceptable human cost. This article examines the question from the standpoint of a non-pacifist liberal universalism and concludes (on consequentialist grounds) that the hypocritical character of US foreign policy cannot constitute sufficient grounds for rejecting all US interventions. Nevertheless, the hypocrisy of the US remains noteworthy and deserving of criticism even in such cases because of the wider damage hypocritical behaviour can do. Moreover, US foreign policy hypocrisy sometimes sets in motion reactions that confound the benign purposes of particular interventions and so undermine the case for them. Such an effect is at work in the case of recent US intervention in the Middle East.

Immanuel Kant is today often invoked as an emblematic figure for Europe. In works by thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, among others, Kant’s work stands as a core reference for discussions of the European Modern and the legacy of the Enlightenment, even if this appropriation is not uncritical. The spectre of Kant also haunts Europe in more pedestrian understandings of the ideal. Prominent politicians such as Gerhard Schroeder, Joschka Fischer, Dominique de Villepin and Romano Prodi have all paid tribute to his influence, while in a variety of popular-academic texts Kant’s ‘cosmopolitical’ dream has been invoked as a paradigm for Europe – if not a shorthand for the European social model tout court.

This essay critically assesses the Bush Administration’s strategic and nuclear weapons policy initiatives in historical context. The assessment first delineates the genuinely original elements of the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review. The analysis then considers the potential impact of tactical nuclear weapons planning on prospects for deterring WMD attacks by both ‘rogue’ states and non-state (terrorist) groups, and explores how this planning risks creating ‘commitment traps’ increasing pressures to follow through on nuclear threats. The essay concludes that Bush Administration strategic policy initiatives are less explicable by ‘realist’ criteria than by a more ‘idealist’ strategy premising a militantly active US global role.

This article analyses the way in which international administrations exercising governmental power in post-conflict territories justify their political authority in the absence of democratic legitimacy. Looking at the administrations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor, the article focuses on their establishment, their mandates, and their government practices and identifies five different sources of authority: consent, delegation, the maintenance of peace and security, the promotion of human rights and democracy, and the provision of government. However, all of these sources are contested. In particular the practices of international administrations, their lack of accountability and their limited effectiveness in providing government, undermine their authority. The article concludes by highlighting some possible avenues for enhancing the authority of international administrations.

This article examines cross-national variation in the diffusion and adoption of military technologies and ideas. The history of warfare has been marked by periods of innovation in which the institutions and practices of war-making adapted in response to technological opportunities, and social and political developments. As information about new practices spreads, through the demonstration effects of innovating states or transnational social networks, military innovations have diffused throughout the international system. Diffusion can restructure power relations as states leverage new capabilities to increase their military power and enhance their international influence.

From 2001, the Australian government has justified a hard-line approach to asylum-seekers on the basis of the need to preserve its sovereignty. This article critically evaluates this justification, arguing that the conception of sovereignty as the ‘right to exclude’ involves a denial of responsibility to the most vulnerable in global politics. We particularly focus here on the ways in which the Australian government has attempted to create support for this conception of sovereignty and ethical responsibility at the domestic level, through marginalising alternative voices and emphasising the ‘otherness’ of asylum-seekers and refugees. We conclude by suggesting what this might mean for the treatment of asylum-seekers in global politics and for statist approaches to global ethics.

David Campbell has been at the forefront of showing how deconstruction, and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, can help us to think international relations differently. Like Derrida himself, Campbell has eschewed the goal of an ethical theory in favour of an ‘ethos of political criticism’ concerned to question and go beyond our assumptions and limits. In order to continue such an ethos of criticism, to push our understanding of ethics in international relations further still, it is surely important to question the assumptions and limits Campbell himself imposes. It is with this in mind that I wish to take a particular political intervention by Derrida in 1993 and read it against Campbell’s Derridean analysis of the Bosnian conflict which began in 1992.