Traditionally, the central problematic of the Westphalian states system has been how to counteract the so-called ‘security dilemma’, the tendency for states in a context of uncertainty to defect from cooperative arrangements if they perceive other states' security preparations as threatening (misperception; arms racing). As the states system became more centralized and the number of major players declined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the nondivisibility of benefits—the dangers of potential defection (world wars; nuclear annihilation)—grew while states' incentives to defect increasingly necessitated control from the centre. The end of the Cold War, however, has reflected not a further centralization (nondivisibility) of benefits in the international system but (1) an increasing divisibility of benefits in a globalizing world economy and (2) the declining effectiveness of interstate mechanisms at preventing defection not only by states (‘defection from above’) but also by non-state, sub-state and trans-state actors (‘defection from below’). In this ‘new security dilemma’, the range of incentives grows for the latter to defect from the states system itself—unless coopted through the increased availability of divisible benefits. Furthermore, attempts to impose security from above (intervention) can create backlashes which interact with complex globalization processes to create new sources of uncertainty: overlapping and competing cross-border networks of power, shifting loyalties and identities, and new sources of endemic low-level conflict. In this context, emerging mechanisms of stabilization will be uneven, characterized by structural tensions and suboptimal performance.

This article examines levels of compliance with the counter-terrorism regime in Africa, where weak states might have been expected to conform. Instead, even under American pressure, some governments have seized the anti-terrorism rhetoric while others have been more reluctant. A comparative analysis of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda demonstrates that domestic political factors largely explain this variation; compliance is highest in countries with the least democratic institutions and minimal mobilisation of domestic constituencies. Aid dependence and the perception of a terrorist threat also play a role. To the extent that popular pressures in transitional democracies reduce compliance, the article raises questions about the legitimacy and effectiveness of the counter-terrorism regime.

1. Personal and academic background

F.H. It would be very interesting if you could say something about your own personal and academic background. What were the experiences that led you to write Man, the State and War?

Post World War I, Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African movement managed to coalesce, however briefly and imperfectly, an extra-territorial sovereign authority in the form of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Through the recollection of this project the article seeks to disturb the predominant uni-linear narrative in IR debates of the transformation of sovereignty that posit a recent shift from territorial exclusivity to multi-level governance encapsulated in the emergence of the European Union. By narrating a string of transformations of sovereignty that led to Garvey’s UNIA the case is made that such transformations have not directly followed one universal logic but have been multi-linear in character, and further, extra-territoriality has been a defining principle of sovereignty in the modern epoch and by no means peculiar to the contemporary European milieu. Through exploring the generative relationship between capitalist, nationalist and racialist forms of sovereignty the article contributes theoretically and empirically to a historical sociology adequate to capture the multiple, yet related, transformations of sovereignty in the modern epoch.

A significant set of epistemic and political transformations are taking place as states and societies begin to understand themselves and their problems through the paradigm of deep neural network algorithms. A machine learning political order does not merely change the political technologies of governance, but is itself a reordering of politics, of what the political can be. When algorithmic systems reduce the pluridimensionality of politics to the output of a model, they simultaneously foreclose the potential for other political claims to be made and alternative political projects to be built. More than this foreclosure, a machine learning political order actively profits and learns from the fracturing of communities and the destabilising of democratic rights. The transformation from rules-based algorithms to deep learning models has paralleled the undoing of rules-based social and international orders – from the use of machine learning in the campaigns of the UK EU referendum, to the trialling of algorithmic immigration and welfare systems, and the use of deep learning in the COVID-19 pandemic – with political problems becoming reconfigured as machine learning problems. Machine learning political orders decouple their attributes, features and clusters from underlying social values, no longer tethered to notions of good governance or a good society, but searching instead for the optimal function of abstract representations of data.

This article reflects on the implications of the Trump presidency for global anthropogenic climate change and efforts to address it. Existing commentary, predicated on liberal institutionalist reasoning, has argued that neither Trump’s promised rollback of domestic climate-related funding and regulations, nor withdrawal from the Paris framework, will be as impactful as often feared. While broadly concurring, I nonetheless also in this article take a wider view, to argue that the Trump administration is likely to exacerbate several existing patterns and trends. I discuss four in particular: the general inadequacy of global greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and implementation efforts; the inadequacy of contemporary climate financing; the embrace between populist conservatism and opposition to action on climate change; and not least, the current global oil and gas boom which, crucially, is being led by the US. I submit that these patterns and trends, and the Trump administration’s likely contributions to them, do not augur well for climate change mitigation, let alone for an orderly transition to a low-carbon global economy. Given current directions of travel, I suggest, this coming transition is likely to be deeply conflict-laden – probably violently so – and to have consequences that will reverberate right across mid-twentieth-century international order.

This article considers the status of genealogy among research methods currently taught, learned and used in International Relations (IR). The article makes two claims. The first is that genealogy is a unique research tool, but not radically different from the rest of the qualitative-interpretative arsenal more commonly found in the discipline. The second is that genealogy can be used in the pursuit of epistemologically varied truth-claims, including those regarding causal connections.

un arms embargoes have been increasingly applied to civil wars, yet these embargoes have tended to be either irrelevant or malevolent in their effects. arms embargoes are rarely enforced in a civil war; they undermine the credibility of the un; they are unlikely to change the political positions of civil war participants; they criminalise target societies; and they benefit arms suppliers willing to break the rules. this article argues for the reform of partial arms embargoes, which target select groups in a civil war. it also argues for the restriction in use of impartial embargoes, which apply to all sides in a civil war. enforcing impartial embargoes can actually make the situation worse, by shaping the course of the civil war in unpredictable and immoral ways.

The critique of state-centrism is a crucial aspect of the restructuring of International Relations theory, widely seen as a precondition for the conceptualisation of international transformation. In this article, I argue that the terms on which this critique is framed lead to claims which are both too sweeping in their implications for a transformation to a post-Westphalian system, and not radical enough with respect to the Westphalian period itself. The critique of state-centrism is premised on the assumption that modernity was a territorial order in which states contained ‘their’ societies. But modern social relations always included global dimensions. If the modern social sciences discounted these global aspects of modernity, the way forward for the social sciences, and IR in particular, cannot be in embracing the notion of a contemporary shift from the national to the global, but in a reconsideration of modernity itself. Just as the new globalism is inadequate as a basis for understanding our supposedly postmodern times, so nation-statism was always defective as a basis for understanding modernity. I argue that the notion of a national/global dialectic provides a better basis for understanding the current socio-spatial transformation.

The United States is today a global superpower without historical precedent. It stands at the centre of an expanding democratic-capitalist world order that is itself, fifty years after its creation, the dominant reality in world politics. Despite expectations that American hegemony would disappear and trigger the emergence of a new and unstable multipolar post-Cold War order, the opposite has in fact happened. American power has grown even greater in the decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although American power is not uniformly welcome around the world, serious ideological challengers or geopolitical balancers are not to be found. Scholars who a decade ago were debating the prospect of co-operation and conflict in a post-hegemonic world are now debating the character and future of world politics within an American unipolar order.

This article argues that while the linguistic turn in mainstream IR is important in broadening how IR approaches global communications, the linguistic turn has its limitations because mainstream IR tends to, in Mattelart’s terms, ‘ex-communicate’ the visual from the linguistic. This is highly problematic, considering, firstly, that popular visual language is increasingly the language that amateurs and experts rely upon in order to claim contemporary literacy and, secondly, that much politics is conducted through popular visual language. If the challenge of this Special Issue is to think about how to bring the discipline of IR to meaningful, political life, then a very good place to start is by asking mainstream IR (again) to take popular visual language seriously as an important aspect of contemporary global communication. This article makes this demand of the discipline of IR. It does so by presenting a case-study – the official US remediation of United Airlines Flight 93 – as an illustration of how contemporary global communications move from the textual to the visual and of what is lost in not taking this move seriously. In particular, it claims that by failing to analyse popular visual language as integral to global communications, mainstream IR risks misunderstanding contemporary subjectivity, spatiality, and temporality.

There is a multifaceted relational revolution afoot in International Relations (IR) and in the social sciences more widely. This article suggests, via engagement with varied forms of relational thought and practice in IR, but in particular via engagement with ‘relational cosmology’ associated with the ‘natural’ as well as the ‘social’ sciences, that there are important reasons for relational thought and practice in IR and around it to be more attentive to dialogues on relationality across natural and social sciences. If relational thought in IR has challenged the colonial and bifurcated ontologies of the field, relational cosmology too assists in shifting ‘modern’ understandings of science and the cosmos by facilitating engagement with situated knowledges and deep-going relationalities across ‘nature’ and ‘society’, ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ communities. Relational cosmology may be productive in joining, and perhaps even in facilitating, conversations across multiple relationalities emerging from different parts of the world and in different fields of inquiry, and yet – reflecting its relational and pluriversal orientations – it is not proposed here as a new ‘meta-‘ or ‘grand-’ narrative for relational theorising or IR.

This study argues that ‘regime complexes’ and ‘policy coherence’ are two faces of the same integrative process. The development of regime complexes co-evolves with the pressures on decision makers to coordinate their policies in various issue-areas. Conceptually, we introduce a typology of policy coherency (erratic, strategic, functionalistic, and systemic) according to its procedural and substantive components. Empirically, by triangulating quantitative and qualitative data, we use this typology for the case of the genetic resources' regime complex to illustrate the links between regime complexes and policy coherency. Our results suggest that a coherent policymaking process favours integrated regime complexes, while greater exposure to a regime complex increases the pressure to have a coherent policymaking. This study fills a gap in the literature on regime complexes by providing a micro-macro model linking structure to agency.

Determining when states can use force legitimately is the central normative problematic in world politics. Domestically, constraining the state’s use of force with social and legal norms that confine state-sanctioned violence to a limited and clearly defined set of purposes and circumstances is essential to the maintenance of civil society and the protection of basic human rights. Internationally, circumscribing the conditions under which states may use force legitimately is critical to the maintenance of peace and stability in international society. And the degree to which legitimate force may be used internationally to constrain illegitimate force domestically lies at the heart of the problematic relationship between order and justice in world politics.

Post-truth politics poses a specific problem for critical theories. The problem is that the relativisation of facts – the claim that knowledge is merely a product of power, history, and perspective – is a core aspect of present-day ideological thinking. Critical theories have been unable to respond to this challenge, because their critique has been directed against the opposite claim, namely the naturalisation of facts. While acknowledging this problem, this article argues that post-truth discourse actually combines relativisation and naturalisation. It does not simply relativise truth, but also naturalises the belief in specific ‘facts’ – notably the belief that ‘conspiracies are behind it all’. Once we recognise the twin character of post-truth, we must reject the view of Bruno Latour and others who have made critique responsible for the crisis. Instead, it then becomes apparent that there are deep and disconcerting similarities between post-truth politics and the totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies of the twentieth century. The task of critique is to confront and counter this resurgent ideology, thereby providing direction and orientation in the struggle for emancipation.

Over the years, a number of scholars have noted that ethnic groups in violent conflict act much like states in the international system; James O'Connell describes the dynamics as ‘international relations without safeguards’. Brief observations aside, however, few works actually apply International Relations theory to explain large-scale ethnic violence. While the oversight ought to be surprising, it is easily explained in terms of what International Relations theory calls the ‘level of analysis problem’.

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.

This paper is an effort to overcome a major obstacle to a creative system orientation in international relations—a dearth of knowledge about system-level change. To accomplish this goal two tasks are necessary. First, building upon earlier contributions, a new definition of international system is offered and its essential properties—structure, process, equilibrium, stability—are discussed. The second requirement is to create a new approach to crisis and to forge links between its unit and system levels, the focus of the rest of the paper. This, in turn, will facilitate the analysis of crises as catalysts to system change, that is, as international earthquakes.

One aspect of international relations which interested Martin Wight particularly was the functioning of what are called systems of states. That has also been an area of my especial interest since the late 50s. It was the focus of the discussions of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics. The committee was organized in the late fifties to bring, together people from different disciplines, practitioners as well as scholars. Herbert Butterfield and Martin were the founders and guiding spirits of the early years of the committee, and I was one of the original members. It was a collective enterprise: members submitted papers which left as questions those points on which the author did not feel certain of the answers. Martin told me that the most stimulating and interesting work he did during the 60s was writing papers for the committee and taking part in its discussions.

This article is interested in the hegemony which neo-realism accomplished during the second half of the 20th century in both the academic field and policy making of I/international R/relations. Our examination posits the argument that neo-realism can be seen as an ideology rather than a theory of international politics. While this view can connect to individual voices from the 1960s as well as to an emerging body of critical literature since the 1990s, we propose an ideology critique to explore this argument. To unfold this approach we will elaborate some neo-realist misreadings which we think manipulate intellectual history (among others, the writings of Hans J. Morgenthau) and represent an ideological impact intrinsic in the development of IR. An ideology critical approach – which is inherent in Morgenthau's thoughts on international theory themselves and thus helps to reveal profound discrepancies at the heart of an ostensible ‘realist’-neo-realist ‘unity’ – has, firstly, to problematise those discrepancies and, secondly, to focus on hegemonic strategies applied to ideologise and mainstream the academic field. The first part of such an agenda is what we present here; the second part is what we outline methodologically and suggest for further studies in, and of, IR.