In this article I argue that Chomsky's political writings, widely ignored in the discipline, are a significant resource for thinking about contemporary world politics, how we should analyse it, and to what ends. This claim is defended through an analysis of recent efforts by IR scholars to interpret the post-Cold War order. When viewed through the analytic perspective articulated by Chomsky, disciplinary accounts of the post-Cold War world as liberal and peaceful are shown to be insufficiently attentive to the empirical record. Chomsky's political writings are also shown to be compatible with standard accounts of critical social science.

Refinements in reception and application of philosophemes in International Relations theory are always welcome, and particularly in cases where distortions abound as the result of selective importation. One such case is, without doubt, the philosophy of I. Kant. Until rather recently, few attempts were made in IR theory to interface the reception of his writings in ‘anthropology, philosophy of history, politics and pedagogy’ with some more holistic appreciation of the philosophical project to which they belong. This tendency alone produces some distortions, which are only amplified by a baffling reluctance to engage the question of the plausibility of this project in the very form given to it by Kant himself. Hardly anything has been written in IR about what problems twentieth century Kant scholarship may raise for a reception practice which proceeds by ‘lifting’ Kant's political writings over into analyses of contemporary international politics.This echoes the familiar criticisms of M. Doyle's reading of the perpetual peace (for a recent critical reading of Doyle's thesis, see G. Cavallar ‘Kantian Perspectives on Perpetual Peace’, in Review of International Studies, 27:2 (2001), pp. 229–48), but should also be understood as a plea for greater sensitivity towards discourses in political philosophy more generally. This could include work on the conditions of transcendental-philosophical approaches, as they inform the critical philosophy developed by K. O. Apel and J. Habermas, and, by extension, the work on cosmopolitan democracy by Held et al. The result is that a plurality of ‘Kantian legacies’ exist in IR theory, and that their respective proponents appear to be talking past each other in addressing different constituencies.

The impoverishment of mainstream International Relations (IR) scholarship, especially as it is practised in the bastions of academic power and respectability in the United States, can be registered in terms of its wilful and continuing conceptual blindness to mutually constitutive relations of governance/resistance at work in the production of global politics. This has been underscored in recent years by the rise of powerful transnational social movements seeking to reform or transform global capitalism, a coalition of coalitions recently reincarnated in the form of a global peace movement opposing the blatantly neo-imperial turn in US foreign policy. As the essays in this Special Issue attest, critical scholars of world politics have developed conceptual vocabularies with which to (re-)construct, from various analytical-political perspectives, aspects of these governance/resistance relations. My task in this article is to argue that – under historical circumstances of capitalist modernity – a dialectical understanding of class-based powers is necessary, if by no means sufficient, for understanding social powers more generally, and issues of global governance and resistance which implicate those powers. Although it is not without its tensions and limitations, I have found re-envisionings of Marxian political theory inspired by Western Marxism – and in particular by interpretations of Antonio Gramsci – to be enabling for such a project. Marxian theory provides critical leverage for understanding the structures and dynamics of capitalism, its integral if complex relationship to the modern form of state, the class-based powers it enables and the resistances these engender; and Gramsci's rich if eternally inchoate legacy suggests a conceptual vocabulary for a transformative politics in which a variety of anti-capitalist movements might coalesce in order to produce any number of future possible worlds whose very possibility is occluded by capitalism. In the present context of globalising capitalism and neo-imperialism, such resistance has taken the form of a transnational confluence of movements for global justice and peace.

Over the past decade, the English School of International Relations (IR) has made a remarkable resurgence. Countless articles and papers have been written on the School. Some of these works have been critical, but most have applauded the School's efforts to provide a fruitful ‘middle way’ for IR theory, one that avoids the extremes of either an unnecessarily pessimistic realism or a naively optimistic idealism. At the heart of this via media is the idea that, in many periods of history, states exist within an international society of shared rules and norms that conditions their behaviour in ways that could not be predicted by looking at material power structures alone. I f the English School (ES) is correct that states often follow these rules and norms even when their power positions and security interests dictate alternative policies, then American realist theory – a theory that focuses on power and security drives as primary causal forces in global politics – has been dealt a potentially serious blow.

We find ourselves amidst an explosion of literature about how our worlds are being fundamentally changed (or not) through processes that have come to be clumped under the vague title of ‘globalisation’. As we wander our way through this literature, we might find ourselves – with others – feeling perplexed and anxious about the loss of a clear sense of what politics is, where it happens, what it is about, and what we need to know to understand and engage in it. This in turn leads many of us to contribute to a slightly smaller literature, such as this Special Issue, seeking to theorise how the space and character of politics might be changing, and how we might adapt our research strategies to accommodate these changes and maintain the confidence that we, and the disciplines we contribute to, still have relevant things to say about international politics. While this is not a difficult thing to claim, and it is not difficult to find others to reassure us that it is true, I want to suggest here that it is worth lingering a little longer in our anxiety than might be comfortable. I suggest this because it seems to me that there is, or at least should be, more on the table than we're yet grappling with. In particular, I argue here that any attempt to theorise the political today needs to take into account not only that the character and space of politics are changing, but that the way we study or theorise it – not only the subjects of our study but the very kind of knowledge we produce, and for whom – may need to change as well. As many others have argued, the project of progressive politics these days is not especially clear. It no longer seems safe to assume, for example, that the capture of the state or the establishment of benign forms of global governance should be our primary object. However, just as the project of progressive politics is in question, so is the role of knowledge, and knowledge production, under contemporary circumstances. I think there are possibilities embedded in explicitly engaging these questions together that are far from realisation. There are also serious dangers in trying to separate them, or assume the one while engaging the other, however ‘obvious’ the answers to one or the other may appear to be. Simultaneous with theorising the political ‘out there’ in the international must be an engagement with the politics of theorising ‘in here,’ in academic contexts. My project here is to explore how this challenge might be taken up in the contemporary study of politics, particularly in relation to emerging forms of political practice, such as those developed by activists in a variety of contexts. My argument is for an approach to theorising the political that shifts the disciplinary assumptions about for what purpose and for whom we should we produce knowledge in contemporary times, through an emphasis on the strategic knowledges produced through political practice. Such an approach would potentially provide us with understandings of contemporary political institutions and practices that are both more incisive and more enabling than can be produced through more familiarly disciplined approaches.

This Forum has two main aims. First and foremost, it is designed to assess the relevance of American realism in the wake of developments that are considered to have transformed international relations over the past decade. A second aim, but one that is central to my contribution, is to assess whether or not the resurgent English School provides the foundations for an approach that can account more effectively for developments in the post-Cold War world than American realism.

Words may, through the devotion, the skill, the passion, and the luck of writers prove to be the most powerful thing in the world.William Golding, Nobel Lecture, http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1983/golding-lecture.html

Many studies of world politics fail to take evidence seriously or consider basic moral truisms (for example, that the standards we apply to others we must apply to ourselves). This commentary illustrates these assessments in relation to two subjects which have attracted much interest in the West recently – terrorism and just war to combat terrorism. The evidence shows that the United States has engaged extensively in terrorism and that application of just war principles would entitle the victims of that terrorism to use force against the United States to defend themselves if the United States is accorded that right.