This article examines the human rights claims made by the George W. Bush Administrations of their post 9/11 foreign and security policy. Two common scholastic explanations of this narrative are evaluated: (i) that human rights constitute, at least in part, independent foreign policy goals and; (ii) that the human rights claims of policymakers can be dismissed as hypocritical rhetoric. The article informs and progresses this debate by revisiting the works of the early twentieth century political culture theorists Gabriel Almond, Graham Wallas and Edward Bernays. The article details the consistent use of a human rights narrative by administration officials as a technique of political discipline. The article identifies five linguistic mechanisms through which this technique of discipline was made manifest in practice. The article thereby explains how a human rights narrative was employed as an instrument to inculcate, rather than describe, reality.

In this article I pose two questions to traditional International Relations (IR) theory: why does it not use the concept of violence more often, and why does it not discuss the meaning of violence? I aim to highlight the way in which violence is hidden in the way we talk about IR, and that the way IR talks about violence without naming it functions to legitimise state violence. I do this by analysing the way the concept of violence is used in traditional IR literature, and then looking at how violence has been defined. I argue that a narrow definition is most useful for the study of IR, and that it should not be used merely to refer to anything we do not like. But this must not preclude challenging the normative uses of violence that suggest that it is only state violence that is legitimate, and that hides personal violence from the scope of IR.

This article considers the status of genealogy among research methods currently taught, learned and used in International Relations (IR). The article makes two claims. The first is that genealogy is a unique research tool, but not radically different from the rest of the qualitative-interpretative arsenal more commonly found in the discipline. The second is that genealogy can be used in the pursuit of epistemologically varied truth-claims, including those regarding causal connections.

Expanding on the works of Beck and others on the growing business of risk, this article examines the role of the private security industry in the creation, management and perpetuation of the world risk society. It observes that the replacement of the concept of security with risk over the past decades has permitted private firms to identify a growing range of unknown and unknown-unknown dangers which cannot be eliminated, but require permanent risk management. Using the discourse of risk and its strategies of commercialised, individualised and reactive risk management, the private risk industry thus has contributed to the rise of a world risk society in which the demand for security can never be satisfied and guarantees continuous profits.

British reactions to China's increasing engagement with Africa in recent years have been manifested in particularly negative and reductive ways tending to depict China's presence in Africa as destructive and self-serving, in contrast to Britain's more enlightened, supportive approach. However, more recently official discourse has begun to stress the shared outlook between British and Chinese objectives, emphasising Chinese moves towards a more constructive, development-focused approach in Africa. This article discusses the ways in which China in Africa is viewed in British political circles and assesses the degree to which such views resonate with the British sense of its own idealised identity. It suggests that the two narratives represent two sides of a dual ‘liberal’ approach to the problem of ‘non-liberal’ actors in international politics: first the tendency to reject and see them as outside the international order; and second the attempt to rehabilitate them and bring them within it. The article concludes by exploring a number of reasons for the particular ways in which Britain, China and Africa are configured, arguing that this dual conception represents a sense of ambiguity about the potential universality of liberalism.

This article aims to understand the phenomenon of international terrorism by wedding a constructivist understanding of terrorism with an overview of the historical evolution of the state. The Westphalian state has replaced three types of authority: religious, personal and local. Political challenges to the modern international system inevitably derive their claim to legitimacy from one of these other forms of authority. I argue that there is a correlation between the kind of legitimacy claim a ‘terrorist’ cause is based on and how threatening we find the activities based on that claim. The less the distance between the unrecognised legitimacy claim on the one hand and the principles conferring legitimacy in the modern states system on the other, the less ontologically threatening we find the claimants to be. All historical variants of modern ‘terrorism’ fall into one of two categories of disruptive activity. They are either based in claims to local authority and target only particular states, or in claims to personal and/or religious authority and reject the modern states system altogether. Groups labelled as terrorist can therefore be classified as system-affirming or system-threatening. The former is a contained problem, but the latter has followed geographically broadening spread pattern throughout the international system.

Gramscian theory has had a profound influence on critical and Marxist thought within International Relations (IR), particularly in bringing an alternative understanding to the realist concept of hegemony. Despite these developments much Gramscian theory remains developed within the often narrow sub-discipline of International Political Economy (IPE), with Gramscian scholars such as Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and Ernesto Laclau from diverse disciplines outside of IR largely ignored. This article argues that Gramscian theory needs to be re-thought so that it moves away from the Coxian dominated ontology that it is currently situated within, towards one which both provides a more open theory of global hegemony and engages more with civil societal areas that have often been ignored by those within IPE.

D. S. L. Jarvis has led a spirited and well-considered polemic against post-structuralist and post-modernist theories of International Relations, arguing that they still leave much to be desired if they are to succeed in establishing a viable alternative to the traditional theoretical approaches of the field. While Jarvis and his cohorts have clearly delivered a great many important criticisms to this end, the question nonetheless remains as to how adroitly the foundational literature of post-structuralist and post-modernist thought has been deployed by the dissident school of International Relations theory. As this article argues, a return to the foundations of anti-foundationalist thought thus becomes a vital necessity if the footing of the ‘third debate’ is to be secured with some greater degree of perspicuity and, indeed, in a manner more fruitful for the study of International Relations. In so doing, it concludes that the ‘power-knowledge’ problématique has been poorly construed and must be revisited with much greater care and attention to some clear object of study if the post-structuralist and post-modernist ventures are ultimately to be fulfilled.

Using the case of same-sex marriage in China, this article explores two fundamental questions: What motivates a non-democratic state to promulgate a progressive human rights policy? More importantly, when a non-democratic state adopts such policies, what is the impact on activism? I argue that same-sex marriage legislation could be used strategically to improve China's human rights reputation. While this would extend a pinnacle right to gays and lesbians, the benefits might not outweigh the costs: I show that when imposed from above, a same-sex marriage law would incur opportunity costs on activism; the passage of this progressive policy would eliminate an important issue around which the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans-gender/-sexual (LGBT) community might develop. Moreover, even if such policy is promulgated, the right to marry will do little to challenge the larger social pressures that make life difficult for LGBT Chinese.

Trauma, the silenced aftermath of violence, has been largely neglected by international security studies, which perceives trauma as having little relevance to global politics. However, this article contends that trauma profoundly influences global security. Unless traumatic events are worked through, they can heighten insecurity not only in the immediate aftermath of violence but decades and even generations later. The article is divided into three parts. The first section examines trauma in general terms, noting its individual, social and political dimensions. The second section examines acting out in response to trauma, with a particular focus on the meaning-making narratives adopted in order to make sense of traumatic experiences: the heroic soldier, good and evil, and redemptive violence. These narratives serve to secure the state by shutting down questioning and showing strength and decisiveness in the wake of traumatic shocks. Section three examines the notion of working through trauma. Working through involves a process of mourning, in which past atrocities are acknowledged, reflected on, and more fully understood in all their historically situated complexity. It is a deeply political process that struggles to understand and challenge those structures and practices that facilitate traumatic loss.

This article explains how foreign assistance to one or both sides in a civil war influences the dynamics of the conflict. It submits that external assistance has the potential of affecting the military capabilities available to the belligerents. It then argues that the balance of those capabilities impacts significantly on whether the warfare in a civil war assumes a conventional, guerrilla or irregular form. These theoretical assertions are tested against the case of the Angolan Civil War. It is shown that during that war, variations in the form of warfare correlated closely to the type, degree, and direction of foreign intervention given to each of the belligerents.

The rich literature on the problematic aspects of EU-Israel relations focuses on historical, structural, politico-economic, legal, institutional, geo-political and strategic causes. An attempt will be made in this article to contribute to the existing scholarship by focusing on a novel angle, namely the negative role of the lack of adequate and informed European-Israeli dialogue in constituting European-Israeli relations. Against the backdrop of the theoretical analysis of the role of dialogue in International Relations, this article examines the lack of adequate European-Israeli dialogue, analysing its causes and the negative role that it plays in constituting European-Israeli relations. The article demonstrates that such lack of dialogue is caused not only by mutual ignorance, prejudice, misinformation, mistrust and antagonism, but also causes these same factors to characterise European-Israeli relations.

Why has English School theory, even as it has been re-imagined as critical international society theory, ignored the workings of gender in international politics? This article stages an encounter between the English School and feminists in International Relations (IR), first demonstrating the broad compatibility of the two approaches. I argue that to conduct a conversation between English School and IR feminist approaches, it is necessary to reconstruct the English School's three traditions – Realist, Rationalist, and Revolutionist – so as to allow a greater role for gender as a category of analysis. I then review the work of two key English School scholars, Hedley Bull and Barry Buzan with this reconstruction in mind. Finally, I argue that IR theorists who have participated in the recent English School revival should consider integrating gender into its theoretical and research agenda, and show several examples of how a hybrid approach can be brought to bear on the expansion of international society, diplomacy, and human rights.

While a superb scholarship on Morgenthau as a political theorist has literally exploded over the past ten years, his analysis of foreign policy has been generally neglected, overlooking the intimate relationship between theory and policy in his practical philosophy. This article presents Morgenthau's public opposition to the Vietnam War by placing it in the broader framework of his theoretical work. In doing so, I illustrate and clarify the meaning of three theses that are at the very centre of his political reflection: the critique to any type of universalistic understanding of world politics; his claim about the intangible roots and social bases of political order; and, finally, the dangers of the ‘military displacement of politics’. Writing about Morgenthau's critique of American intervention in Vietnam today is neither a purely academic exercise, nor a mere historical reconstruction of a great scholar's position on one of the most important military conflicts of the twentieth century. In fact, this article aims to shed light on some intellectual categories which seem to be useful in order to understand current political phenomena, and to criticise philosophies and faulty modes of thought that still enjoy a predominant but unjustified political status.

Recent decades have seen a heightened interest in the ethics of foreign policymaking. This literature has overwhelmingly explored the ethical dilemmas faced by policymakers in terms of situations and the structures – either political/economic, normative and/or linguistic – that shape actions. The subjective experience of ethical decisionmaking in this arena and the character of the individuals making policy choices have been largely neglected. However, the apparently greater scope for moral action in the post-Cold War era, combined with the growth in global institutions designed to enforce individual accountability – such as the International Criminal Court – suggest that more effort should be placed on understanding ethics in terms of the individual. This article seeks to combine the work of political and social psychologists with the philosophical literature on virtue theory to see what new insights these might offer into the ethics of foreign policy. It argues that virtue ethics provide an effective means to critique the morality of foreign policy decisions. This is evinced by an exploration of Tony Blair's decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003.

Cosmopolitanism is frequently criticised for overlooking the situatedness of morality and the importance of solidarity in their aspiration to global justice. A number of thinkers take these criticisms seriously and pursue ‘a communitarian path to cosmopolitanism’. Four such approaches are considered. All four view morality and justice as grounded in a specific social setting and hold that justice is more likely to result if there is some ‘we-feeling’ among people, but are simultaneously committed to expanding the realm of justice and moral concern to beyond national boundaries. To enable the theorisation of an expanded realm of situated justice and moral concern, community is conceived as not necessarily corresponding to political boundaries and the moral the self is seen as able and eager to loosen some of its traditional moral connections and to form new ones. Unfortunately, these approaches are likely to exclude significant segments of the world's population from the expanded realm of moral concern they theorise, most notably, a large proportion of the world's poor. It is suggested that the thought of Emmanuel Levinas might offer a way of reducing the gap between solidarity and moral universalism.

When former US ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlin, said of the US, ‘We are a player in the Pakistani political system’, she was pointing out how challenging it is to achieve US policy goals under the kinds of volatile political conditions engulfing that country. In late 2007, the Bush administration was banking on the political future of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who had recently returned to Pakistan, and was still providing President Pervez Musharraf with the substantial aid and support it had been giving him since 9/11. And yet by early 2008, Benazir Bhutto was dead, assassinated as she rose from her car to greet crowds of supporters, and Pervez Musharraf was a political liability, since his party had suffered a resounding defeat in the February 2008 election. These events demonstrated that even the foreign policies of a country as powerful as the US can be scuttled by the flux and flow of local power politics.

Gilbert Murray was one of the towering figures of 20th century cultural and intellectual life, and the foremost Hellenist of his generation. He was also a tireless campaigner for peace and international reconciliation, and a pioneer in the development of international intellectual cooperation, not least in the field of International Relations (IR). Yet in IR today he is largely forgotten. This article seeks to put Murray back on the historiographical map. It argues that while in many ways consistent with the image of the inter-war ‘utopian’, Murray's thinking in certain significant ways defies this image. It examines the twin foundations of his international thought – liberalism and Hellenism – and their manifestation in a version of international intellectual cooperation that while aristocratic and outmoded in some respects, nonetheless contains certain enduring insights.

This article discusses how and under what conditions ideas coming from International Relations (IR) scholarship are used in foreign policy. We argue that the focus on policy relevance, which dominates the IR literature on the research-policy interface, is limited. Focusing instead on political utilisation highlights types and mechanisms of political impact, which are overlooked in studies on policy relevance. The fruitfulness of this change in focus is showed in an analysis of how Samuel Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ notion and Joseph Nye's ‘soft power’ concept have been used in US foreign policy. George W. Bush's explicit critique and reframing of ‘the clash’ thesis should not be interpreted as absence of impact, but as a significant symbolic utilisation, which has helped legitimate US foreign policy. Likewise, in the few instances in which the notion of ‘soft power’ has been used explicitly, it has played a conceptual and symbolical rather than instrumental role. More generally, this article argues that accessible framing and paradigm compatibility are essential for political utilisation of ideas.

This article examines the origins of American neo-conservatism by assessing the contributions of one of its less known inspirations, James Burnham. In charting Burnham's political philosophies and various contemporary reactions to them, this article examines his legacy as it relates to the movement, specifically in his approach to foreign affairs and institutions. It argues that he was more a pioneer than is often acknowledged. In so doing this article also corrects misunderstandings that have arisen in critiques of neo-conservatism, suggesting that Burnham's oeuvre may offer more instructive guidance than some of his contemporaries in understanding the neo-conservative revolution in American foreign policy.