In this paper, I argue that there is an emerging consensus among realists that the US should abandon its hegemonic strategy and adopt an offshore balancing strategy. Here, Iraq and the so called war on terrorism (or ‘long war’, or ‘global counter-insurgency’, as some American officials sometimes refer to it) have been the catalysts. Increasingly, it is recognised that US aims in the Persian Gulf/Middle East – and the American military presence in the region – have fuelled terrorism, and caused Iran to self-defensively seek to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. A number of leading realists now argue that the best strategy for the US is to extricate itself from Iraq, reduce its regional footprint, and adopt an offshore balancing strategy.

The Copenhagen school's theory of securitisation has mainly focused on the middle level of world politics in which collective political units, often but not always states, construct relationships of amity or enmity with each other. Its argument has been that this middle level would be the most active both because of the facility with which collective political units can construct each other as threats, and the difficulty of finding audiences for the kinds of securitisations and referent objects that are available at the individual and system levels. This article focuses on the gap between the middle and system levels, and asks whether there is not more of substance there than the existing Copenhagen school analyses suggests. It revisits the under-discussed concept of security constellations in Copenhagen school theory, and adds to it the idea of macrosecuritisations as ways of getting an analytical grip on what happens above the middle level. It then suggests how applying these concepts adds not just a missing sense of scale, but also a useful insight into underlying political logics, to how one understands the patterns of securitisation historical, and contemporary.

Many political theorists defend the view that egalitarian justice should extend from the domestic to the global arena. Despite its intuitive appeal, this ‘global egalitarianism’ has come under attack from different quarters. In this article, we focus on one particular set of challenges to this view: those advanced by domestic egalitarians. We consider seven types of challenges, each pointing to a specific disanalogy between domestic and global arenas which is said to justify the restriction of egalitarian justice to the former, and argue that none of them – both individually and jointly – offers a conclusive refutation of global egalitarianism.

Long a focal point in the study of Geography, regions have become a major concern of International Relations, and for some even its essence. Principle definitions and approaches, however, remain contested, as do the contexts in which and how they matter, from economic to security. This article examines contested views on what constitutes a region and on the nature and functioning of regional architecture, drawing from thematic and case-specific literature to indicate the expanse of analytical enquiry. These include the roles and interpretations of geography, identity, culture, institutionalisation, and the role of actors, including a hegemon, major regional powers and others actors from within a region, both state and societal. A final section indicates additional areas for future research.

This article is a response to calls from a number of theorists in International Relations and related disciplines for the need to develop alternative ways of thinking ‘the border’ in contemporary political life. These calls stem from an apparent tension between the increasing complexity of the nature and location of bordering practices on the one hand and yet the relative simplicity with which borders often continue to be treated on the other. One of the intellectual challenges, however, is that many of the resources in political thought to which we might turn for new border vocabularies already rely on unproblematised conceptions of what and where borders are. It is argued that some promise can be found in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose diagnosis of the operation of sovereign power in terms of the production of bare life offers significant, yet largely untapped, implications for analysing borders and the politics of space across a global bio-political terrain.

A regional security complex (RSC) is a set of states continuously affected by one or more security externalities that emanate from a distinct geographic area. In such a complex, the members are so interrelated in terms of their security that actions by any one member, and significant security-related developments inside any member, have a major impact on others. Regional orders describe how states within an RSC manage their security relations and range from balances of power, to regional power concerts, collective security organisations, pluralistic security communities, and integration. As regional states move ‘up’ this continuum of regional orders, relations generally become more peaceful and interactions less coloured by actual or threatened violence.

This article provides a critique of the securitisation framework around its ability to provide a comprehensive security analysis when applied in a developing socio-political context. It argues that the framework's conditionalities around who can securitise and how, and its assumptions around the nature of the state restrict its ability to consider the role of non-state actors in raising existential threats to societal security. Through a case study of newspapers in Bangladesh raising ‘misgovernance’ as a security threat to its citizens, it explores how the securitisation framework can become more perceptive to security dynamics in contexts which differ from the one within which the framework has evolved.

Walzer has recently updated his just war theory to take account of terrorism, humanitarian military intervention and new interpretations of the doctrine of self-defence, pre-emptive and preventative warfare The ethical considerations that underwrite Walzer's most recent work invite us beyond the routine citation of his work to a proper consideration of the moral parameters of international politics. Beyond Just and Unjust Wars Walzer has a wealth of insight into the key questions of international theory. His work on toleration, the nature of universality or on the role of social criticism has always been the basis of his insight in to the hard questions of international ethics. Despite being heavily criticised for being communitarian or conservative (both charges that need serious re-evaluation) Walzer's ideas offer a real alternative to the dominant neo-Kantian cosmopolitan tradition and a workable ethical framework for thinking about the challenges of contemporary international politics and international law. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final essay of Arguing About War. The essay, entitled ‘Governing the Globe’ offers a radical vision of a reformed international society inspired by the principles that underpin Walzer's development of his just war theory and it is vital that we take notice.

Recently, some commentators have argued that the word ‘terrorist’ should be abandoned as it has become overloaded with undesirable ‘rhetorical’ connotations. This view is premised on the assumption that an adequate distinction may be drawn between principled, ‘logical’ usages and merely ‘rhetorical’ ones. This article argues that the use of the word ‘terrorist’ normally has a ‘rhetorical’ aspect and that theorists must therefore find ways to distinguish between principled and unprincipled rhetorical deployments. I distinguish three rhetorical possibilities for using the word ‘terrorist’: the first invokes interlocutors' established background commitments to moral and descriptive norms, seeking agreement on the application of the word to a particular case; the second seeks to innovate, challenging either moral norms, descriptive criteria or, less often, the illocutionary force of the term; the third resists innovation but deploys the term in metaphorical ways for moral-rhetorical emphasis. Based on this taxonomy, the article reviews both polemical and scholary debates about definition and then proposes pragmatic, rhetorical considerations for adjudicating between competing definitional arguments. Finally, I review the implications of these considerations for the contentious issue of whether or not the term ‘terrorist’ properly applies to states.

The theory of Power Preponderance put forward by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth is poised to replace structural balance-of-power theory as the leading American Realist interpretation of international politics. Power Preponderance argues that would-be rivals to the US are not balancing against it because they are dissuaded from doing so by geopolitical and structural factors, rather than because they love the US or are cowed by it. This article shows why the central analytical claim of Power Preponderance would be substantially enhanced by incorporating the logic of the nuclear revolution, but that its main policy recommendation – indefinite and magnanimous American preponderance – is undermined by the spectre of nuclear war. In the nuclear age, normative solutions to the problem of anarchy invariably gravitate toward the logic of a world state.

This article examines why states ask for forgiveness from other states or peoples that they have harmed. Asking for forgiveness has significant political, legal, and moral implications. But beyond these, the subject concerns how states confront their history and their collective responsibility for wrongdoing. My focus on the reasons states have for asking forgiveness could also improve our understanding of conflict resolution. The article introduces an innovative typology of requests for forgiveness by presenting important conceptual distinctions in the terminology currently employed in the field. Apologies, regrets, and expressions of sorrow are conceptualised as distinct avenues of asking forgiveness with varying degrees of significance and meaningfulness. I assert that the type of request for forgiveness is influenced by the degree of severity attributed to a wrongdoing and by the extent to which a state perceives its image as threatened by its wrongful act. The article analyses the important 1951 statement of West Germany's Chancellor Adenauer regarding the Jewish Holocaust as an example of a type of request for forgiveness.

How do we know when we are dealing with security issue? This is a cardinal question in Security Studies, and securitisation theory provides and authoritative yet incomplete answer, mainly because it rules out that the meaning of security can vary contextually. To overcome this limitation, we need a hermeneutical perspective centred on the liminality of security as a category in-between theory and policy, which produces a more precise algorithm for empirical research. A contextual hermeneutics of security signals that normative awareness is necessary even in the absence of a unifying normative manifesto, also confronts the spectre of the “death of security” invoked by those who object to the potentially endless broadening of its meaning.

By now arguments about the varieties of international order abound in International Relations. These disputes include arguments about the security mechanisms, institutions, and practices that sustain international orders, including balance of power and alliances, hegemony, security regimes based on regional or global institutions, public, private, and hybrid security networks, as well as different kinds of security communities. The way these orders coexist across time and space, however, has not been adequately theorised. In this article we seek to show (A) that, while analytically and normatively distinct, radically different orders, and in particular the security systems of governance on which they are based (such as balance of power and security community), often coexist or overlap in political discourse and practice. (B) We will attempt to demonstrate that the overlap of security governance systems may have important theoretical and empirical consequences: First, theoretically our argument sees ‘balance of power’ and ‘security community’ not only as analytically distinct structures of security orders, but focuses on them specifically as mechanisms based on a distinct mixture of practices. Second, this move opens up the possibility of a complex (perhaps, as John Ruggie called it, a ‘multiperspectival’) vision of regional security governance. Third, our argument may be able to inform new empirical research on the overlap of several security governance systems and the practices on which they are based. Finally, our argument can affect how we think about the boundaries of regions: Beyond the traditional geographical/geopolitical notion of regional boundaries and the social or cognitive notion of boundaries defined with reference to identity, our focus on overlapping mechanisms conceives of a ‘practical’ notion of boundaries according to which regions’ boundaries are determined by the practices that constitute regions.

A growing number of scholars, commentators, and pundits describe the contemporary US as an empire. This article argues that these authors have not paid sufficient attention to the historiography of empire and imperialism. Indeed, the historiography of the British and American empires offers important lessons for current debates including what is the appropriate definition of the American empire, what are the social and political foundations of the American Empire, and what are the consequences of the American Empire for the US and the wider world.