This study argues that ‘regime complexes’ and ‘policy coherence’ are two faces of the same integrative process. The development of regime complexes co-evolves with the pressures on decision makers to coordinate their policies in various issue-areas. Conceptually, we introduce a typology of policy coherency (erratic, strategic, functionalistic, and systemic) according to its procedural and substantive components. Empirically, by triangulating quantitative and qualitative data, we use this typology for the case of the genetic resources' regime complex to illustrate the links between regime complexes and policy coherency. Our results suggest that a coherent policymaking process favours integrated regime complexes, while greater exposure to a regime complex increases the pressure to have a coherent policymaking. This study fills a gap in the literature on regime complexes by providing a micro-macro model linking structure to agency.

IR scholars have recently paid increasing attention to unequal institutional orders in world politics, arguing that global governance institutions are deeply shaped by power inequalities among states. Yet, the literature still suffers from conceptual limitations and from a shortage of empirical work. The article addresses these shortcomings through a study of the historical evolution of global arms control institutions since 1945. It shows that in this important policy area, the global institutional order has not been marked by a recent trend toward deeper inequality, as many writings on unequal institutions suggest. Instead, the analysis reveals a pattern of institutional mutation whereby specific forms of institutional inequality are recurrently replaced and supplemented by new forms. This process, the article argues, is driven by states' efforts to adapt the regime to a changing material and normative environment within the constraints of past institutional legacies.

The article analyses the involvement of pharmaceutical companies from emerging markets in global health governance. It finds that they play a central role as low-cost suppliers of medicines and vaccines and, increasingly, new technologies. In so doing, pharmaceutical companies from emerging markets have facilitated the implementation of a key goal of global health policy: widening access to pharmaceutical treatment and prevention. Yet, looking closer at the political economy underlying their involvement, the article exposes a tension between this policy goal and the political economy of pharmaceutical development and production. By declaring access to pharmaceuticals a goal of global health policy, governments and global health partnerships have made themselves dependent on pharmaceutical companies to supply them. Moreover, to provide pharmaceutical treatment and prevention at the global level, they depend on companies to supply medicines and vaccines at extremely low prices. Yet, the development and production of pharmaceuticals is organised around commercial incentives that are at odds with the prices required. The increasing involvement of low-cost suppliers from emerging markets mitigates this tension in the short run. In the long run, this tension endangers the sustainability of global access policies and may even undermine some of the successes already achieved.

Robert Owen, the early nineteenth-century social reformer, made a greatly more significant contribution to the theory and practice of International Relations than has hitherto been assumed. This article shows how Owen helped to develop an understudied but distinctive form of internationalist thought focusing on the role of education in the pursuit of peace. Owen's previously neglected contributions to human rights norms and to international organisation are also explored, including his promotion of universal rather than nationally-oriented human rights standards, his role in the nascent movement towards the formation of international non-governmental organisations, and his contribution to international federalist ideas. Following an introduction to Owen's place in the literature, this article discusses each of these contributions of Owen to the theory and practice of International Relations in turn. The analysis reveals that Owen's contributions in each of these aspects are as significant for their limitations as for their insights.

In this article, I explore the place of the just war tradition in US foreign policy by examining the use of just war language in the presidential debates in 2000 (Bush-Gore), 2004 (Bush-Kerry), 2008 (McCain-Obama), and 2012 (Obama-Romney). While critics focus on the use and abuse of just war language as rhetorical gloss to persuade the public an upcoming conflict is morally legitimate while serving the national interest, the debates showcase just war principles as part of a language of critical engagement. Each debate cycle allowed for critical reflection on the foreign policy decisions and just war philosophy of the incumbent president. During the time period I examine, the process of critical engagement identified two moral shortcomings of the past – the failure to act to stop the genocide in Rwanda and the premature use of force in Iraq. These perceived failures catalysed convergence, across party lines, on the way some jus ad bellum principles were understood: Just cause as including the moral obligation to intervene in some way to stop genocide and the renewed salience of the principle of last resort. There remained, however, stark differences in the way legitimate authority was understood.

What do Al-Qaeda, Human Rights Watch, and NATO have in common? They can all be understood as emotional communities. Emotional communities are ‘groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions’. This article develops a conceptual framework for a particular type of emotional community in world politics: a security community. It is argued that emotion norms – the expression of appropriate emotions in a given situation – stabilise a security community during inter-allied conflict. The argument is illustrated by an empirical case study of NATO's military intervention in Libya in 2011. The article shows how the conceptualisation of security communities as emotional communities has significant implications for the study of regional peace and security.

Hannah Arendt's characterisation of the refugee as rightless and stateless has become a touchstone for scholars grappling with the nature of forced migration and exile. While aspects of Arendt's depiction continue to resonate, the notion of refugees as stateless, rightless ‘scum of the earth’ is now in many cases anachronistic, and no longer clearly reflects the challenges now faced by the majority of the world's refugees. This is attributable to structural changes in the refugee regime, particularly the increased focus on repatriation and the reconstitution of the relationship between refugees and their states of origin, a possibility largely unforeseen by Arendt. Drawing on the example of the Guatemalan repatriation movement, this article contends that indiscriminately portraying refugees as stateless represents a potential disservice to the displaced, as it may inadvertently undermine refugees' claims against their states of origin for the redress of their rights as citizens. There is a need to expand theorising on refugees from a narrow focus on the refugee as rightless and stateless to a broader conception of the refugee as a bearer of claims for the renegotiation of her relationship with her state.

Pharmaceuticals are now critical to the security of populations. Antivirals, antibiotics, next-generation vaccines, and antitoxins are just some of the new ‘medical countermeasures’ that governments are stockpiling in order to defend their populations against the threat of pandemics and bioterrorism. How has security policy come to be so deeply imbricated with pharmaceutical logics and solutions? This article captures, maps, and analyses the ‘pharmaceuticalisation’ of security. Through an in-depth analysis of the prominent antiviral medication Tamiflu, it shows that this pharmaceutical turn in security policy is intimately bound up with the rise of a molecular vision of life promulgated by the biomedical sciences. Caught in the crosshairs of powerful commercial, political, and regulatory pressures, governments are embracing a molecular biomedicine promising to secure populations pharmaceutically in the twenty-first century. If that is true, then the established disciplinary view of health as a predominantly secondary matter of ‘low’ international politics is mistaken. On the contrary, the social forces of health and biomedicine are powerful enough to influence the core practices of international politics – even those of security. For a discipline long accustomed to studying macrolevel processes and systemic structures, it is in the end also our knowledge of the minute morass of molecules that shapes international relations.

The history of capitalism's origins is unmistakably Eurocentric, placing sixteenth-century developments in politics, economy, culture, and ideology squarely within the unique context of Europe. And while the disciplinary remit of International Relations (IR) should offer a way out of such European provincialism, it too has been built on largely Eurocentric assumptions. In Eurocentric approaches, the Ottoman Empire has been absent, passive, or merely a comparative foil against which the specificity and superiority of Europe has been defined. And yet, the Ottoman Empire was arguably the most powerful actor in the Early Modern period. In this article, I argue that any history of capitalism's origins must therefore account for the historical importance of the Ottomans. In doing so, this article seeks to address the non-European blind-spot, both in theorisations of capitalism's origins and in IR theory, by reincorporating the material significance of the Ottoman Empire in historical processes, which led to the transition to capitalism. I do so by utilising the theory of Uneven and Combined Development, and in the process seek to defend its credentials as a non-Eurocentric social theory on the one hand and as a sociologically and historically sensitive theory of international relations on the other.

How can trusting relationships be identified in international politics? The recent wave of scholarship on trust in International Relations answers this question by looking for one or the combination of three indicators – the incidence of cooperation; discourses expressing trust; or the calculated acceptance of vulnerability. These methods are inadequate both theoretically and empirically. Distinguishing between the concepts of trust and confidence, we instead propose an approach that focuses on the actors' hedging strategies. We argue that actors either declining to adopt or removing hedging strategies is a better indicator of a trusting relationship than the alternatives. We demonstrate the strength of our approach by showing how the existing approaches would suggest the US-Soviet relationship to be trusting when it was not so. In contrast, the US-Japanese alliance relationship allows us to show how we can identify a developing trusting relationship.

This article argues that 1945 constitutes an historical inflection point from a period of state expansion to state contraction and that this transformation is primarily the result of changes at the international level. Just as security and economic pressures drove lead states to expand in earlier times, changing conditions in the post-1945 period led to a contraction in state size. The change from multipolarity, the development of the territorial integrity norm, the shift to nuclear deterrence, and the burgeoning global economy contributed to the milieu in which states evaluate the costs and benefits of holding territory, and this has enabled states to permit secession more frequently. The result has been an increase in the rate of peaceful secession and a corresponding proliferation in the number of sovereign states. I test this argument both qualitatively and quantitatively using original data on secessionist movements and internal administrative regions between 1816 and 2005.

Cosmopolitanism has been argued to be a crucial component of peacebuilding, both with regard to its aims as well as its staff. In a universalist-liberal understanding of the concept, cosmopolitanism is the optimal mind frame for peacebuilders to rebuild post-war societies, due to the tolerance, justice-orientation, and neutrality regarding local cleavages that the concept entails in theory. This article argues, however, that cosmopolitanism cannot be understood outside of its social context, therefore requiring sociological empirical analyses. Drawing on three such sociological concepts, namely elite, glocal, and localisable cosmopolitanism, the article analyses empirically through interviews with peacebuilders in Kosovo whether and in which form these international civil servants display cosmopolitan worldviews. The study concludes that while in theory the localisable variant would be best suited to contribute to locally sensitive, emancipatory peacebuilding, this form of cosmopolitanism is absent in practice. Given the novel, exploratory character of this analysis of hitherto uncharted terrain, the article also discusses in detail how the findings were obtained and in how far they are generalisable.

This article investigates the role of status considerations in the response of dominant powers to the rise of emergent states. Accordingly, the hypothesis explored is that dominant actors are prone to fear that they will lose their upper rank, and, due to this status anxiety, resist the efforts of emergent powers to match or surpass them. The article begins by explaining why political actors deem status important and puts forward a theory of status anxiety in world politics. The more pronounced is this anxiety across status dimensions (economic and military capabilities as well as prestige), the higher the likelihood of conflict. This argument is then tested against competing theories of dominant power behaviour in two cases: the relations between France and Britain from the 1740s to Napoleon and those between Britain and Germany from the 1880s to World War One.

It has become common to speak of health security, but the meaning of the latter is often taken for granted. Existing engagements with this notion have been constrained by an excessive focus on national security and on the securitising efforts of elites. This has led to an increasingly sceptical outlook on the potentialities of security for making sense of, and helping to tackle, health problems. Inspired by the idea of security as emancipation, this article reconsiders the notion of health security. It takes as its starting point the concrete insecurities experienced by individuals, and engages with them by way of an analytical framework centred on the notion of domination. Domination deepens analysis by connecting individual experiences of insecurity, the social interactions through which these are given meaning, and the structures that make them possible. Domination also broadens the remit of analysis, shedding light on the multifaceted nature of insecurity. The analytical benefits of this framework are demonstrated by two examples: HIV/AIDS; and water and sanitation. The lens of domination is also shown to bring benefits for the political engagement with global health problems.

Hans Morgenthau's concept of power is widely debated among scholars of International Relations. Superficial accounts present Morgenthau's concept of power in the Hobbesian tradition as a means of self-preservation; however, more thorough investigations demonstrate Morgenthau's psychogenic and praxeological understanding. By referring to Sigmund Freud and Max Weber, such accounts identify Morgenthauian power as the ability to dominate others. This article contributes to this discourse by demonstrating that Morgenthau separated power into two dualistic conceptualisations. Although analytically Morgenthau worked with a concept of power understood as domination, normatively – in reference to Friedrich Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt – he promoted a concept of power that focused on the will and ability to act together. Elaborating this dualistic concept has wider implications for current International Relations because it reminds scholars to be self-reflexive. In addition, it is argued that a Morgenthauian scholarship helps scholars to gain a more profound understanding of depoliticising tendencies in Western democracies.

This article addresses the issue of disciplinary variety in French International Relations (IR) from the perspective of Bourdieu's scientific field theory. The tug of war between ‘dominants’ and ‘pretenders’ for the control of IR as ‘their’ discipline in French academia originates from the difficulty of (only) one discipline, that is, political science, monopolising IR. Compared to other subfields of political science, IR is the field of research that borrows most from other scholarly disciplines. These difficulties strengthened the imperviousness of French IR to the works of IR scholars from the Anglo-American world; until very recently, insularity and particularism could not proceed much further. This period matches roughly to one in which IR was dominated, in France, by law and history. Today there is still a very strong influence of this period when scholars from disciplines other than political science distrusted IR theories. Other reasons related to the issue of the disciplinary variety of IR, for instance the absence of a general acknowledgment of the peer-review system, may contribute to the complexity, if not confusion, which characterises the identify of French IR.

What drives East Asian regionalism? The rise of China and the perceived decline in the influence of the United States have sparked debates about the future of the regional order, including the yet-unresolved question of whose leadership is likely to be more stable and accepted as legitimate by other regional actors. What is puzzling, however, is that persistent demands for the formation of a coherent and uniquely East Asian regional institution have come not from China or the US, as is the focus of existing studies, but rather Japan and South Korea. In this article, we propose an alternative framework that conceptualises the varieties of East Asian regionalism, emphasising the multiple pivots and variegated levels of politics involved in efforts toward regional cooperation. We find that competing proposals for East Asian regionalism since the 1990s are not determined by structural pressures or the convergence of interests but rather result from domestic legitimacy politics. Japanese and Korean leaders have, at different time periods, proposed their own alternative region-making initiatives appealing to domestically contested views on how best to seek autonomy from the region's Great Powers as a way to enhance their political standing domestically and regionally.

This article looks at prospects for a mechanism-based research strategy in the study of International Relations. Over the past three decades, the notions of mechanism and microfoundation have taken a central place in discussions of explanation and ‘micro-macro’ problems in social science. The upshot of much of this discussion has been a call for mechanism-based explanations – explanations of macro-level phenomena in terms of micro-level mechanisms. Some work of this kind can already be found in IR theory, including in systemic research. However, a number of IR theorists, including Kenneth Waltz and Alexander Wendt, have argued that micro-oriented strategies like this will not work, pointing to incongruities between system- and unit-level phenomena. This article argues that these pose less hindrance to a fully-developed model of mechanism-based explanation, and that the field has much to gain from further exploration of this strategy. In particular, mechanism-based explanations could help bring structure back to the centre of discussion in IR theory, and might even give us a way out of the field's own micro-macro problems.

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 addresses the problématique of the subject and the subject-object dichotomy from a post-objectivist, reflexivist perspective informed by a ‘strong’ version of reflexivity. It clarifies the rationale and epistemic-ontological requirements of strong reflexivity comparatively, through a discussion of autoethnography and autobiography, taken as representatives of other variants of reflexive scholarship. By deconstructing the ontological, epistemic, and reflexive statuses of the subject in the auto-ethnographic and auto-biographical variants, the article shows that the move from objectivism to post-objectivism can entail different reconfigurations of the subject-object relation, some of which can lead to subjectivism or an implicit positivist view of the subject. Strong reflexivity provides a coherent and empowering critique of objectivism because it consistently turns the ontological fact of the social situatedness of knowledge into an epistemic principle of social-scientific research, thereby providing reflexivist scholars with a critique of objectivism from within that allows them to reclaim the philosophical, social, and ethical dimensions of objectivity rather than surrender them to the dominant neopositivist tradition.