This article aims to show that from the end of the eighteenth century, international order began to be defined in terms of ground rules relating to non-intervention and intervention, with the former being prioritised over the latter. After the Napoleonic wars, within continental Europe there was an attempt to consolidate an intervention ground rule in favour of dynastic legitimacy over the right of self-determination. By contrast, the British and Americans sought to ensure that this ground rule was not extended to the Americas where the ground rule of non-intervention was prioritised. During the nineteenth century, it was the Anglo-American position which came to prevail. Over the same period international order was increasingly bifurcated with the non-intervention ground rule prevailing in the metropolitan core and with the intervention ground rules prevailing in the periphery. This article, however, only focuses on the metropolitan core and draws on two case studies to examine the non-intervention ground rule in very different circumstances. The first examines the British response to the American Civil War in the 1860s during an era of stability in the international order. The second explores the British Response to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s when the international order was very unstable and giving way to a very different international order.

The study of regionalism is often characterised as too fragmented, plagued by disagreements over such fundamental matters as its ontological and epistemological premises, which also hinder efforts at substantive comparison of regionalisation processes. In this article it is argued that to overcome these problems, what is required is a more rigorous incorporation of such studies within relevant work in state theory and political geography. The key insight herein is that regionalism should not be studied separately from the state as these are interrelated phenomena. State-making and regionalisation are both manifestations of contested political projects aimed at shaping the territorial, institutional, and/or functional scope of political rule. Furthermore, the article also distils the lines of a mechanismic methodology for comparative regionalism. Its main advantage is in overcoming the implicit benchmarking of regional development we find in other approaches. The framework's utility is then demonstrated through a comparison of regional governance in Asia and Europe.

In recent years numerous reports of prisoner abuse and other militarised violences by British troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have emerged. Drawing on two such incidents – the abuse of detainees at Camp Breadbasket and the murder of Baha Mousa – this article seeks to locate such violences on a continuum that can be traced back to the ways in which British soldiers are trained. Following on from a burgeoning feminist literature on militarised masculinities, and using Avery Gordon's epistemology of ghosts and hauntings, I suggest a conceptual and methodological intervention into the subject that resists generalised stories and the mapping of ‘hard’ borders. Focusing on the myths of asexuality and discipline that emerge from, and reinforce, the gendered discourses of basic training, I conduct a ‘ghost hunt’ of the haunting spectres that have attempted to be exorcised from these myths. Making visible these ghost(s) and tracing their (violent) materialisations through multiple sites and across a continuum, militarised violences – in all their ranges – begin to be made explicable.

Theorisations of the political in general, and international politics in particular, have been little concerned with the vast variety of other, non-human populations of species and ‘things’. This anthropocentrism limits the possibilities for the discipline to contribute on core issues and prescribes a very limited scope for study. As a response to this narrow focus, this article calls for the development of a posthuman approach to the study of international politics. By posthuman, we mean an analysis that is based on complexity theory, rejects Newtonian social sciences, and decentres the human as the object of study. We argue for a decentring of ‘the human’ in our scholarship as imperative to understanding the complexity of the world. However, this approach also has a political incentive, which we describe as ‘complex ecologism’.

Contemporary peacebuilding operations are often mandated to rebuild ‘collapsed’ or weak states and provide unique opportunities for internationals to exert far reaching influence in their reconstruction. The responsibility to help secure peaceful transformations and longer term stability is profound. This article explores the issue of efficacy and propriety in reconstruction programming and draws from field work in Sierra Leone – a rare example of ‘success’ for international partners in peacebuilding missions. The assertion is made that, despite the euphoria over the mission in Sierra Leone, the peacebuilding operations were more about the mechanics of statebuilding than the local politics of building peace, and that there was a distinct disconnect between the policy rhetoric and the policy practice. The argument is put that the pressing local concern of giving citizens a stake in government was not best served in the reconstruction project because the wider and more influential objectives of the peacebuilding mission were about meeting international goals not local aspirations. This reality has come at the cost of exploiting a unique opportunity for creative thinking about the kind of state structures which can better address the main challenges for sustainable peace facing post-war states like Sierra Leone.

In this article I utilise the editors' conceptual frame of sovereignty/intervention/transnational social forces to argue that the relationship that ensues between these phenomena has to be understood in colonial-modern – rather than modern – terms. I thereby argue that intervention is a distinctive technology of colonial-modern rule, specifically, one that erects and polices the difference between sovereign and quasi-sovereign entities via a standard of civilisation. Additionally, I argue that transnational social forces struggle – cognitively, socially, and politically – over the upholding or refuting of this standard; and in this struggle, some might even defend particular sovereign entities against colonial interventions. I demonstrate my argument by explicating the global colonial context of the Italy/Ethiopia conflict in 1935–6, the nadir of the interwar crisis. I ‘decolonise’ received interpretations of the conflict through the heuristic of two differing catechisms of Psalms 68:31 proffered at the time: one, invoking a civilising mission of Africans; the other, invoking a project of self-liberation by Africans.

This article aims to cast a critical light on the concept of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, which lies at the heart of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP). It argues that there are two distinct strands of theorising about sovereignty, de facto and de jure, which are not often clearly distinguished in the literature. After establishing the concept of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ as a de jure theory of sovereignty, the article goes on to contrast the de facto theory, based upon the sovereignty theories of Hobbes, Schmitt, and Morgenthau. I argue that the de facto theories of sovereignty, concerned as they are with unlimited power and decision as the essence of sovereign authority, can be used to highlight the lack of appreciation of power in the literature surrounding the Responsibility to Protect. This is particularly the case in relation to the just war principles of ‘right authority’ and ‘reasonable prospects of success’, both of which lie at the heart of the RtoP criteria for assessing when military interventions for human protection purposes may take place. In conclusion, it is argued that any attempt to advance the RtoP norm must engage with the problem of unlimited power in a more sustained manner.

Through the War on Terror the United States developed a seemingly enlightened understanding of Muslim women. In contrast to Orientalised representations of Muslim women's passivity and victimisation within brutal Islamic cultures these emerging representations posit Muslim women in terms of their modernity and liberation. The emergence of this new Muslim woman illuminates an attempt to secure an Occidental self through the negotiation of conflicting impulses towards Islam. Islam is recognised as the repository from which the US enemy other emerges yet the WoT also reflects a particular desire for a cosmopolitan inclusivity. The presence of the Muslim woman acts to assuage these tensions. Her oppression confirms the barbarity of the enemy yet the combination of her intrinsic agency and religiosity posits her as an acceptable Islamic other whose presence confirms the pluralistic tolerance of the US and the universal validity of its project.

China's increasing capabilities are a central focus of modern day US security concerns. The International Relations literature is a key forum for analyses of the so-called ‘China threat’ and yet it remains relatively quiet on the role of ideas in the construction and perpetuation of the dangers that country is understood to present. This article reveals that throughout history ‘threats’ from China towards the United States, rather than objectively verifiable phenomena, have always been social constructions of American design and thus more than calculations of material forces. Specifically, it argues that powerful and pervasive American representations of China have been repeatedly and purposefully responsible for creating a threatening identity. It also demonstrates that these representations have enabled and justified US China policies which themselves have reaffirmed the identities of both China and the United States, protecting the latter when seemingly threatened by the former. Three case studies from across the full duration of Sino-American relations expose the centrality of ideas to historical and contemporary understandings of China ‘threats’, and to the American foreign policies formulated in response.

Social theory almost invariably equates modernity with the sovereign state. This equation must be nuanced because the modern era and modern strategies of international stability have contained non-sovereign units. In the nineteenth century, the Great Powers tried to create international stability by engineering forms of rule in Europe. These strategies built on distinctively modern ideas: the possibility of radically breaking with the past, redesigning political organisations, and actively controlling political events through rational planning. Throughout the century the Great Powers alternated between creating non-sovereign units and creating sovereign units as instruments in these stabilising strategies. The degree of trust between the Great Powers accounts for the shift between the two strategies: they tended to create non-sovereign units when mutual trust was high and sovereign ones when trust was low. This article analyses Great Power strategies of designing forms of rule in the Balkans between 1820 and 1878. Like in previous centuries, nineteenth-century Europe actually consisted of two parallel but connected systems: the egalitarian system of sovereign states and a system of non-sovereign entities. Non-sovereign units disappeared only late in the century and this process was affected by the increasing rivalry and mistrust between the sovereign states.

What can critical geopolitics contribute to an understanding of the political dynamics of humanitarianism within International Relations? This article demands a reconsideration of the concept of humanitarianism by examining the spatial ordering of international society and the geopolitics of international law that condition our understanding of humanitarian agency and conduct within IR. The focus on critical geopolitics seeks to identify the normative structure of humanitarianism and how humanitarian claims – which are seemingly universal – are constituted through specific geopolitical discourses that structure agency and conduct within international life. Considering how humanitarianism is discursively structured as a geopolitical concept involves taking humanitarianism beyond its methodological privileging of impartiality, neutrality, and universality in making sense of humanitarianism. Critical humanitarianism does not accept the grounding of humanitarianism within an intuitive moral framework but instead locates humanitarian agency and conduct within a spatialised understanding of the international system. Such a spatialised ordering of humanitarianism takes the analytical focus away from ‘saving strangers’ (Wheeler) and ‘global conscience’ (Linklater) towards a consideration of the ways in which international law is the product of historical particulars that reflect a complex political sociology of the state (Schmitt).

This article explores how sovereignty and (non-)intervention are implicated in the (re)production of specific social orders. Sovereignty and the non-interference principle circumscribe ‘domestic’ politics from ‘the international’, defining who is legitimately included or excluded from the struggles that determine political and social orders. State managers seek to admit forces and resources favourable to the order they are seeking to create, whilst excluding those deleterious to it. In revolutionary periods, however, these attempts to ‘cage’ social relations often crumble as transnational forces engage in fierce, multifaceted conflicts overlapping territorial borders. In such circumstances, both norms of non-interference and practices of intervention may be used by dominant forces to help contain the spread of sociopolitical conflict and to strengthen their hand in the struggle to (re)define social order. Sovereignty regimes are thus shaped by the strategies and ideologies of the various social groups locked in conflict at a particular historical moment. This argument is illustrated through the case of Cold War Southeast Asia, where sovereignty and intervention were both used to stabilise capitalist social order and curtail transnational, radical threats from below.

The concept of epistemic communities – professional networks with authoritative and policy-relevant expertise – is well-known thanks to a 1992 special issue of International Organization. Over the past twenty years, the idea has gained some traction in International Relations scholarship, but has not evolved much beyond its original conceptualisation. Much of the research on epistemic communities has been limited to single case studies in articles, rather than broader comparative works, and has focused narrowly on groups of scientists. As a result, it is often assumed, erroneously, that epistemic communities are only comprised of scientists, and that the utility of the concept for understanding International Relations is quite narrow. Consequently, an otherwise promising approach to transnational networks has become somewhat marginalised over the years. This article revisits the concept of epistemic communities twenty years later and proposes specific innovations to the framework. In an increasingly globalising world, transnational actors are becoming progressively more numerous and influential. Epistemic communities are certainly at the forefront of these trends, and a better understanding of how they form and operate can give us a clear demonstration of how knowledge translates into power.

The last decade has witnessed an attempt to solidify debate on war around the dichotomy of just war and holy war. In this dichotomy, the just war has increasingly been depicted as the progressive secularised opposite to holy war's antiquated religious fundamentalism. While wars argued for under the just war banner have been extensively critiqued and protested against, the rights based language of just war theory has largely escaped critical evaluation. Michael Walzer has emerged as a pivotal figure in just war theory's modern, secular rebirth within the discipline of International Relations. Walzer's theory argues the language of just war theory provides an effective means for us to engage with the moral reality of war. Drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida this article investigates the construction of Walzer's moral language and its ethical implications. The first section focuses on Walzer's moral language; its structure, inconsistencies, and theological underpinnings. The second section addresses how Walzer employs this language to justify the sacrifice of combatants in defence of non-combatants. The central arguments presented in this article are that Walzer's theory is inconsistent in itself, and that the sacrifices initiated by this language constitute the unjustified sacrifice of just war theory's own ethical principles.

Since 2008, the leaders of industrialised and emerging economies have engaged in steering the global economy through the G20. Divergent national positions were to be expected based upon the different stages of economic development and according to previously existing international groups. The actual controversies in the G20 did not reflect these patterns, however, but showed divergence both between industrialised countries and between emerging economies. In explaining this puzzle, I argue that the driving forces for global economic governance have ceased to be industrialised or emerging countries' alliances and levels of development. Rather, the causes for the positions of G20 members can be found in economic interests and ideas dominant in the domestic politics of countries. These societal influences shape governmental preference formation in both industrialised and emerging countries and consequently influence their behaviour in global governance. The resulting divergences weaken previously existing groups such as the G7 and the BRICs, and create a new pattern in world politics. This societal approach to explaining governmental positions in global economic governance is exemplified on the core G20 issues of stimulus/public debt and global imbalances/exchange rates.

This article explores political agency in the interstices of the bodily politics of asylum. It shows how its practices make bodily surfaces and how alternative forms of political authority emanate from bodies. Relying on Jean-Luc Nancy's ontology of the body, it examines forms of political agency that are enacted by people often considered as abjective subjectivities in the spaces of the international. Deriving from interviews conducted with failed asylum seekers, the article sheds light on agencies and resistances embedded in and extant despite the governmental efforts to solve the problem of the moving body. Ethnographic data and interviews with the failed asylum seekers show how they take control over their lives, not as separate, sovereign subjects, but in relation to their political surroundings and others. In a way, the failed asylum seekers produce and practice their own politics that both takes part in and exceeds the limits set by sovereign politics. By exploring political agency from underneath and beyond sovereign power and governmentality, the article presents a reading of the intertwining of the international, political, and bodily.

Great Power intervention in the Balkans since the late nineteenth century shows a striking continuity in motivations, methods, and consequences. The article proposes that current intervention practices are largely a response to the Balkan theatre in the 1990s and thus institutionalise this continuity more than arguments about normative and institutional change since 1990 suggest. Three continuities are emphasised: the concept of a ‘turbulent frontier’ to explain an unintended dynamic of nearly continuous intervention, the importance of local actors' interests (the pull of intervention) alongside those of major power interests (the push), and the primary influence on domestic orders and cause of the ‘turbulence’ of economic relations.

Ex-combatant reintegration programmes are buttressed by a number of problematic assumptions about ex-combatants themselves; namely, that ex-combatants should not receive long-term support because such assistance would amplify the threat they pose to security and exacerbate community resentment towards them. The article uses data collected from Liberia to demonstrate that such thinking stigmatises ex-combatants and works against the objective of reintegration: it disrupts integration into the everyday social, economic, and political life of the post-conflict state and aims instead to render ex-combatants separate from communities. Integration will remain elusive unless assumptions about ex-combatants as programme beneficiaries are challenged.

In this article, I challenge the prevailing concept of the UK-US ‘special relationship’ with a view to improving the concept as an analytic tool for researchers. As it stands, the special relationship draws attention to an uncommonly close bond between two state actors in the post-Second World War period, especially in terms of military cooperation. This conception imposes analytic costs – namely, an elision of imperialism as a feature of Anglo-American relations and a concomitant marginalisation of subaltern social actors. In response, I propose a reconception that posits the subaltern – third parties – as integral to the relationship, thus better capturing the empirical reality of Anglo-American relations past and present. Theoretically, I draw upon postcolonial International Relations scholarship and recent theories of friendship in international politics. Empirically, I present a case study of the US military base on Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands.

In 2006, the European Union launched its new free trade strategy Global Europe with the explicit goal of increasing European competitiveness. This article explores the positions of trade unions and other social movements on Global Europe. Importantly, while Northern social movements and trade unions from the Global South reject Global Europe due to its impact of deindustrialisation on developing countries, European trade unions support it in so far as it opens up new markets for the export of European manufactured goods. It will be argued that this has to be understood against the background of the dynamics underlying the global economy and here in particular uneven and combined development. Due to the uneven integration of different parts of the world into the global economy, workers in developed countries may actually benefit from free trade, while workers in the Global South are more likely to lose out. It will, however, also be argued that while these different positions within the social relations of production are shaping the position of trade unions, they do not determine them. Over time, through direct engagement, trade unions in the North and South may be able to establish relations of transnational solidarity.