During the last decades ‘causation’ has been a deeply divisive concept in International Relations (IR) theory. While the positivist mainstream has extolled the virtues of causal analysis, many post-positivist theorists have rejected the aims and methods of causal explanation in favour of ‘constitutive’ theorising. It is argued here that the debates on causation in IR have been misleading in that they have been premised on, and have helped to reify, a rather narrow empiricist understanding of causal analysis. It is suggested that in order to move IR theorising forward we need to deepen and broaden our understandings of the concept of cause. Thereby, we can radically reinterpret the causal-constitutive theory divide in IR, as well as redirect the study of world politics towards more constructive multi-causal and complexity-sensitive analyses.

International Relations have increasingly projected an image of the world where territoriality has lost its organising force. The global movements of people, information, capital and pollution are seen as signs of increasing deterritorialisation. Climate change is one of these issues ‘beyond borders’ that due to its global framing has been established within the international. This article is an investigation into the political geography of the carbon cycle. We approach the tension between the representations of climate space as global and deterritorial on the one hand, and political practices that reterritorialise the climate on the other. We trace the political transformation of the global carbon cycle into ‘national sinks’ and argue that the two tendencies of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of climate space mirror the spatial assumptions of IR; the national inside and global outside.

Recent years have seen the growth of approaches critical of traditional state-centred examinations of international relations, arguing instead for analyses that recognise actors and methods previously held largely silent within the mainstream International Relations (IR) discourse. This article argues that children are a group of actors worthy of similar recognition. Despite the fact that ‘childhood studies’ are comparatively well established in a number of academic disciplines, similar recognition has been later in coming to the study of IR. This article aims to address this perceived gap in the literature by first of all outlining the ways in which the discourse surrounding the child in IR has so far developed. This leads into an examination of how the child may potentially best be conceptualised within the mainstream discourse and the implications of the inclusion of children as a ‘site of knowledge’ through which the international system may be more clearly understood.

US foreign policy is hypocritical in various ways, as this article demonstrates in the course of an extensive empirical review. The question is whether such hypocrisy provides grounds for opposing US interventions abroad, in particular those which might yield locally desirable outcomes at an acceptable human cost. This article examines the question from the standpoint of a non-pacifist liberal universalism and concludes (on consequentialist grounds) that the hypocritical character of US foreign policy cannot constitute sufficient grounds for rejecting all US interventions. Nevertheless, the hypocrisy of the US remains noteworthy and deserving of criticism even in such cases because of the wider damage hypocritical behaviour can do. Moreover, US foreign policy hypocrisy sometimes sets in motion reactions that confound the benign purposes of particular interventions and so undermine the case for them. Such an effect is at work in the case of recent US intervention in the Middle East.

From 2001, the Australian government has justified a hard-line approach to asylum-seekers on the basis of the need to preserve its sovereignty. This article critically evaluates this justification, arguing that the conception of sovereignty as the ‘right to exclude’ involves a denial of responsibility to the most vulnerable in global politics. We particularly focus here on the ways in which the Australian government has attempted to create support for this conception of sovereignty and ethical responsibility at the domestic level, through marginalising alternative voices and emphasising the ‘otherness’ of asylum-seekers and refugees. We conclude by suggesting what this might mean for the treatment of asylum-seekers in global politics and for statist approaches to global ethics.

International Relations (IR) textbooks often make reference to an idealist paradigm in interwar IR. This article argues that an idealist paradigm did not exist, and that interwar references to idealism or utopianism are contradictory and have little to do with defining a paradigm. Not only is there no idealist paradigm in IR at this time, but authors from the interwar period that have since been dismissed as idealists rarely share the attributes assigned to idealism or utopianism by later writers. If IR scholars are serious about understanding the history of their discipline then they will have to stop applying misleading and anachronistic terms like idealism.

This article explores the uses of history in contemporary Eurosceptic discourse in Britain. It does so in the knowledge that studying an essentially contested concept such as Euroscepticism poses severe methodological problems, and in the first section I situate my article in the emerging scholarly literature on the subject. Having explained why I limit my research to popular Euroscepticism in the tabloid press, in the second section I critically analyse the rhetorical strategies employed by the Sun and the Daily Mail to garner support for their line on Europe, suggesting that the appeal of their discourse resides in its recourse to national history of the school textbook variety. In the third part I use this finding to argue that the discipline of history has been an unwitting accomplice in making Euroscepticism so popular amongst the British public, press and politicians. This has considerable ramifications both for the theoretical study of Euroscepticism and the political efforts to counter its popularity, and I consider all of these in the conclusion.

In this article, we critique the Eurocentric character of security studies as it has developed since World War II. The taken-for-granted historical geographies that underpin security studies systematically misrepresent the role of the global South in security relations and lead to a distorted view of Europe and the West in world politics. Understanding security relations, past and present, requires acknowledging the mutual constitution of European and non-European worlds and their joint role in making history. The politics of Eurocentric security studies, those of the powerful, prevent adequate understanding of the nature or legitimacy of the armed resistance of the weak. Through analysis of the explanatory and political problems Eurocentrism generates, this article lays the groundwork for the development of a non-Eurocentric security studies.

This article begins by deconstructing the dominant discourse on arms control and disarmament, and argues that it works to dismiss disarmament as an idea whilst simultaneously coopting really existing disarmament into a perspective that imagines a world long on dangers and short on peaceful strategies to confront them. In contrast, it is argued, not only is the traditional distinction between arms control and disarmament problematic but, in certain respects, the world is experiencing quite a lot of disarmament. Partly however, this is because both disarmament and broader arms limitation activities are taking place as part of an asymmetrical arms limitation system underpinned, in particular, by the US in its role as a ‘disarmament Empire’. Nevertheless, there are a number of factors immanent in the contemporary international system that suggest a more radical form of emancipatory disarmament might be both realisable and indeed necessary.