The questions with which I began and ended Women and War remain: How might we locate ourselves in order to create space for a less rigid play of individual and civic identities and virtues than those we have thus far known? What alternatives of citizenship can we draw upon? What perspectives within our reach offer hope for sustaining an ethos that extends the prospect of limiting force and the threat of force? In the book, I recommend a form of civic membership that cannot and does not place duty and loyalty to one's particular political body above all else; nevertheless, one that honours and gives ethical and civic weight precisely to that form of membership. I called this civic character a ‘chastened patriot’, one who is critical of the excesses of nationalism and critical, as well, of feminist arguments that express contempt for forms of identity as these are embodied in loyalties to ways of life shared by men and women. At the same time, this civic paragon of mine is also critical of those who defend particular ways of life in a way that generates contempt for the universalistic features of feminist concerns for the dignity and rights of woman. The ‘chastened patriot’ is one who understands and honours both universalistic and particularistic commitments, one for whom neither automatically trumps the other.

One of the most common themes in the vast literature on globalization is that it is gradually undermining the state by making it meaningless if not obsolete. This article is a contribution to the growing body of literature that seeks to challenge that thesis. It does so by arguing that there are two distinct sets of processes at work in contemporary world politics: globalization and interstate interaction. While the former tends to break down territorial boundaries and replace them with new, uniform configurations of power, money and culture, the latter reconfirms territorial boundaries and the structures and processes contained by them. The interaction among states, which is often ignored by globalization theorists, may best be understood by situating it within the traditional international relations concept of an international society, provided that this is redefined to give it a more ‘constructivist’ orientation.

This article assesses the general significance for International Relations theory of the literature on globalization. It argues that globalization is a pervasively unsettling process which needs to be explained not only as an issue in its own right but for the insight which it affords into cognate areas of theory. In short, it advances an analytical model whereby globalization itself can be understood and utilizes this as a theoretical scheme that may be applied more generally. The predominant conceptualization of the globalization issue within International Relations has been the debate between the proponents of state redundancy and the champions of continuing state potency. In turn, these arguments rest upon an image of state capacities being eroded by external forces, or alternatively of external forces being generated by state action. In either case, there is the assumed duality of the state(s) set off from, and ranged against, a seemingly external environment. Instead, this article argues that the state occupies a middle ground between the internal and external and is itself both shaped by and formative of the process of globalization.

Concerns about Third World military industrialization, which animate a broad range of international security debates, often take for granted the South's capacity for sustained military-industrial development. A convergence of favourable conditions spurred rapid defence-sector growth in much of the South beginning in the late 1970s. But the increasingly competitive character of the global arms economy and the turbulent political situations of most would-be military industrializers have derailed this growth. The collapse of Brazil's defence sector in the early 1990s illustrates that the largest barriers to Third World military industrialization are not financial or technological but rather institutional. Simultaneous domestic-political and global-market changes destabilized the institutional foundation of Brazilian military-industrial growth, despite the defence sector's impressive technological, industrial, and political advantages. It has proven impossible to reconcile the military's domestic political needs in post-authoritarian Brazil with the global-market integration on which the sector's financial and technological development depends.

This article reassesses the preparatory negotiations which launched the Kennedy Trade Round (KTR) of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), in search of a role for Britain. My purpose is to make two challenges, one theoretical, the other empirical. Theoretically, this study questions the predominant focus on the structural power of major states that characterizes the study of international relations in general, and of the GATT in particular. This is a case-study of middle power influence that focuses on the negotiating skills and experience of state-level actors at the KTR. Empirically, I question the generally accepted view that the Anglo-American special relationship was merely a British myth and had no significance to US foreign policy interests in the 1960s.

The Anglo-Iranian oil crisis of 1950–4 provides an ideal case-study for those interested in the postwar Anglo-American Special Relationship. This article investigates the oil crisis with two purposes in mind: first, to demonstrate how Britain and the United States struggled to adjust their bilateral relations in response to their changing postwar world positions; second, to show just how crucial both countries perceived the Special Relationship to be in the early 1950s. This is done by examining the American decision not to pursue a policy in the Iranian oil crisis that would undermine Britain's position, despite at times severe Anglo-American tension. It is concluded that the problems created by the changing balance of forces within the Special Relationship were mitigated in Iran by a combination of consanguinity and, more important, the US need for British help in its policy of global containment. In short, Anglo-American policy-makers perceived sufficient mutual need to persuade them to actively preserve and develop the Special Relationship.

The British Labour government under Harold Wilson was involved in several attempts to negotiate an early end to the Vietnam War. Such efforts helped to satisfy critics of the war on the Labour left and in the Commonwealth, to neutralize US pressure to join in the conflict and to emphasize Britain's importance on the world stage. The Davies mission, in which a left-leaning junior minister was sent to Hanoi, was Wilson's most unusual peace bid which ended as a much-criticized fiasco. This story helps to illuminate Wilson's approach to foreign policy-making, the difficulty of pursuing talks without normal diplomatic relations and the obstacles preventing a Vietnam settlement in 1965. The reluctance of both Washington and Hanoi, as well as flaws in the mission's execution, condemned it to failure.

In his 1995 BISA lecture Philip Allott undertakes a ‘[reconciliation of] philosophy and international studies’ arguing that internationalists are the obvious leaders of the fifth historical moral enlightenment. Their role would be to envision worlds that transcend the prevailing ‘naturalistic’ view of international phenomena, which mires humankind in morally unacceptable states of affairs. A ‘naturalistic’ approach misconceives the proper role of academics for whom the sky is the limit. Inspired by Kant's three Critiques, Allott declares ‘The mind of pure reason is the mind in wonderland . . . We are all Mad Hatters conceptualizing together.’

Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question . . . [I]t must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course — but then I was part of his dream . . .

‘International studies’ and ‘international relations’, in all their various -isms and neo-isms, are part of a collusive dream in which academics imagine that they are rationalizing the behaviour of those who imagine that they are doing what academics seem to be rationalizing.

David Mitrany was one of the originators, almost the founding father, of the functional approach to world government, and his pragmatic ideas have proved as relevant at the end of this century as when they were first fully expounded in the early 1940s. At that time Mitrany, with many other political thinkers, was concerned with new approaches in planning for the international organization of peace in the postwar world. His advocacy of functionalism was to be effective, even welcomed, in keeping with public demands for the future; and was to be taken into account by those working on the Charter of the new United Nations, in particular in the establishment of its specialized agencies.