With this issue The Review of International Studies passes from the Exeter team, who have edited it for the last few years, to the new team here at St Andrews. We would first of all like to thank those in the team at Exeter – David Armstrong, Maggie Armstrong, Theo Farrell and Bice Maiguascha – for their excellent custodianship of the Review, and especially (from our parochial perspective) for all their help with the inevitably complicated process of transition over the last few months. They have set an enviably high standard for contributions and intellectual content and are a hard act to follow. But we will do our best.

Over the past decade, health has become an increasingly important international issue and one which has engaged the attention of the foreign and security policy community. This article examines the emerging relationship between foreign and security policy, and global public health. It argues that the agenda has been dominated by two issues – the spread of selected infectious diseases (including HIV/AIDS) and bio-terror. It argues that this is a narrow framing of the agenda which could be broadened to include a wider range of issues. We offer two examples: health and internal instability, including the role of health in failing states and in post-conflict reconstruction; and illicit activities. We also argue that the relationship between global public health, and foreign and security policy has prioritised the concerns of the latter over the former – how selected health issues may create risks for (inter)national security or economic growth. Moreover the interests of the West are prominent on this agenda, focusing (largely though not exclusively) on how health risks in the developing world might impact upon the West. It is less concerned with the promotion of global public health.

Recent research on the Internet and terrorism confirms the Internet’s enabling features for terrorist activities, including its ease of access, anonymity, and international character. While the Internet can serve as a tool for nefarious purposes, little research has focused on whether and how the Internet can be used to prevent conflict and, ultimately, terrorist activities. This research focuses on one group that might be considered a resource base for violent action: diasporas from failed states. Research shows a strong correlation between marginalisation and violence. On the other hand, fostering a shared identity, inclusive of liberal values, and promoting carefully framed discussion and debate may reduce psychological incentives to engage in violent activities. This article examines the case of one digital diaspora – a diaspora organised on the Internet – to explore these hypotheses. Specifically, the case of Somalinet suggests potential for the Internet to promote liberal values, channel frustration into verbal debates thus diffusing tension, and create communities that counter the marginalisation conducive to violence.

This essay critically assesses the Bush Administration’s strategic and nuclear weapons policy initiatives in historical context. The assessment first delineates the genuinely original elements of the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review. The analysis then considers the potential impact of tactical nuclear weapons planning on prospects for deterring WMD attacks by both ‘rogue’ states and non-state (terrorist) groups, and explores how this planning risks creating ‘commitment traps’ increasing pressures to follow through on nuclear threats. The essay concludes that Bush Administration strategic policy initiatives are less explicable by ‘realist’ criteria than by a more ‘idealist’ strategy premising a militantly active US global role.

This article examines cross-national variation in the diffusion and adoption of military technologies and ideas. The history of warfare has been marked by periods of innovation in which the institutions and practices of war-making adapted in response to technological opportunities, and social and political developments. As information about new practices spreads, through the demonstration effects of innovating states or transnational social networks, military innovations have diffused throughout the international system. Diffusion can restructure power relations as states leverage new capabilities to increase their military power and enhance their international influence.

This article reconstructs Hannah Arendt’s theory of political freedom in the context of her analysis of globality. In a first step it is shown that Arendt builds her theory of political freedom around the core concepts of plurality, action, sovereignty and judgment. This theory arises out of Arendt’s experience and understanding of totalitarianism. This experience also underpins Arendt’s analysis of the ‘global condition’. Having argued in her analysis of totalitarianism that the modern state in the form of the nation-state had become compromised as the space of political freedom since its development in the early nineteenth century, Arendt asks in which alternative space, in the post-totalitarian global age, freedom can be located. In her tentative answer, Arendt develops a political and philosophical understanding of federalism. Going back to Thomas Jefferson’s discussion of ‘elementary republics’, Arendt attempts to combine her notion of participatory citizenship with the idea of confederal structures of ward republics. Reflections upon the conditions of the possibility of the interrelationships between such confederations lead Arendt back to Karl Jasper’s notion of ‘limitless communication’. This notion opens her analysis up to contemporary ‘intercultural’ arguments.

It has become rather commonplace to read that, what is referred to as ‘traditional, western IR theory’, is problematic when taken to the African continent. At best, we are told, IR theory misrepresents or misunderstands African reality, at worst it participates in an exercise of neo-colonial theoretical hegemony. In this article I will seek both to assess this ‘Africanist critique’ and to mount something of a qualified defence of IR theory. However, I argue that in exploring the relevance of IR theory to Africa we need to distinguish between neorealism – the real target of the critics’ fire – and other strands of IR theory. Once we do this we can see that other theoretical standpoints within IR are relevant. Moreover, I argue that while trying to question neorealism, the critics in fact maintain neorealism’s conceptualisations of the state and anarchy, simply inverting the picture. I argue that this represents a theoretical step backwards. Problematic issues in IR theory do not simply appear when one moves one’s focus to Africa, they are there to begin with.

Relatively early in the attempts to gender the discipline of International Relations (IR), it was argued by some feminist scholars that it was easier to raise feminist concerns in International Political Economy (IPE) than in IR. However, it has subsequently proved very difficult to articulate these concerns within mainstream IPE, as ‘the neo-realist and neo-liberal frameworks, with their common focus on state-centric issues of co-operation and conflict and their positivist and rationalistic methodologies, do not lend themselves to investigating gendered structures of inequality …’. In contrast, more overlap has been discerned between feminist perspectives and methodologies and the less influential ‘globalist’ (also known as critical/transdisciplinary or heterodox) approaches to IPE than with the dominant statist approaches. This article takes this position as its starting point and will focus on the relationship between gendered analyses and critical IPE (as it will be known here). It therefore does not engage with the undoubtedly important question of how far it is possible or desirable to have a gendered analysis that is not linked to feminism, as within both feminist and critical approaches to IPE an emancipatory agenda is entirely legitimate and even an integral part of those approaches.

This article seeks to contribute to opening up a space of possibility for the state to become something other than a competitive entity in and through a critical (re)problematisation of ‘international competitiveness’ as a governmental problem. In more specific terms, it inquires into how international competitiveness was constituted as such a problem in the first place; how both the meaning of international competitiveness and the terms of the ‘competitiveness problem’ have been transformed by globalisation talk and multilateral efforts at neoliberal global governance; and how the discourse of international competitiveness works to (re)produce the state as a competitive entity on a continuous basis.