A major problem in managing and ultimately resolving many environmental issues, transboundary and global in particular, is how to tackle the fundamental questions of distributive justice and fairness involved. Little systematic reflection and research have been devoted to these issues. The problem of acid rain is a prime example. Strategies to abate acid rain must, among other requirements, be viewed as fair and just if they are to be politically accepted, implemented and honoured in the long term. Research and actual negotiations in this area to date have, by contrast, focused almost exclusively on the generation and analysis of emission reduction strategies which are effective in economic and, more recently, environmental terms.

The British Way in Warfare was the title of a book by Basil Liddell Hart published in 1932. It was an elaboration of ideas first propounded a year earlier in a celebrated lecture on ‘Economic Pressure or Continental Victories’ to the Royal United Services Institute. Like many of his generation, the more Liddell Hart reflected on his own encounter with war (he had been gassed and wounded at the Somme), the more he became convinced that such folly must not be repeated. This required transforming the very conduct of war. With equal conviction he believed that he had hit upon some answers. These appeared as general principles of strategy—the ‘indirect approach’—and a particular policy for his own country— ‘limited liability’. He claimed that he was doing little more than distilling the essence of a long–standing national approach. This was ‘the British Way in Warfare’.

As the Cold War has receded, it has left behind a world system characterized by two divergent trends. On the one hand, as the two superpowers have withdrawn their security umbrellas, a host of ethnic and territorial conflicts have sprouted around the globe. On the other hand, as former rival blocs now create alliances, international mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of contentious issues have proliferated. A central concern of our times, then, is whether, and under what circumstances, these new mechanisms will be successful in dealing with the disorderly aspects of the new world ‘order’.

From the perspective of a particular kind of international theorizing, foundational questions about the nature of international society are a central concern. ‘Does the collectivity of sovereign states constitute a political society or system, or does it not? ’ is, according to Hedley Bull, the first of a series of questions that, taken together, constitute ‘Classical’ international relations theory and distinguish it from the ‘Scientific’ approach to the subject. Similar sentiments could be drawn readily from the work of the other authors whose writings collectively make up the International Theory, or International Society, or ‘English School’ approach to international relations theory. I have argued elsewhere that there are reasons why this emphasis on international society is mistaken. To cut a long story short, the burden of the argument is that an approach that places primary emphasis on the nature of international society is likely to isolate itself from the wider discourses of political and social philosophy in ways that cannot be defended in terms of any alleged sui generis features of international relations. Rather, international relations theory is best understood as an aspect of political theory and not as a discourse with its own rules and subject matter. However, this argument has been cast in ‘meta-theoretical’ terms and does not directly address the actual issue of the nature of international society; critics are entitled to point to the absence here of a clearly articulated, positive point of view. The purpose of this article is to begin to remedy this omission, by sketching the outlines of an examination of international society that would be less tied to traditional categories and in closer contact with broader movements in social thought.

Taken together, these four volumes comprise the Conflict Series, and represent the fruits of work completed by John Burton, with others, in the last years of his formal academic career in the United States, at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, and at the Center for Conflict Resolution at George Mason University in Virginia. Burton has now ‘retired’ (though he still writes vigorously) to his native Australia, and that event, together with the appearance of these works, prompts this synoptic evaluation of them in the context of Burton's life and previous work. What makes this particularly interesting in the case of John Burton is that his career has been less than singular; first a civil servant, then a diplomat, then an academic, he moved from Australia, then to the United Kingdom and thence to the United States, with various stops along the way. Though he has written a great deal—books, articles and conference papers—and was a key participant in the organization of the peace research movement in the 1960s, especially the International Peace Research Association and the Conflict Research Society in the United Kingdom (and is described on the back cover of CRP as ‘the founder of the field of conflict resolution’), he was never a professor during his extended residence i n the United Kingdom at, first, University College, London, and then at the University of Kent, achieving that status only later, at George Mason University.