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.

This article analyses global civil society advocacy in the field of child labour through the lens of theories on political representation in global governance. The article is sympathetic to newer theories on political representation which, fundamentally, understand representation as a dialectic of performative practices between representatives and their real or imagined constituencies. However, the article argues that the contemporary literature on political representation turns a blind eye on two aspects that are central to understanding this dialectic of representation in the child labour case: first, representation as power and second, the contested nature of citizenship. The article thus proposes an approach to political representation that allows highlighting the power-dimension inherent to the interrelation between formal and performative aspects of representation, that is, between civil society actors’ power to represent and their power over representation. Using such an approach, the article presents empirical insights on CSO representation in global policymaking on child labour – a field in which conflicts over legitimate representation, citizenship, and grassroots participation continue to be exceptionally fierce.

This article addresses how entry into international society has been conceptualised, suggests a reconceptualisation that will make the concept more relational, and illustrates with a case study. Part one attempts a summary of relevant debates without the English School, and directs attention to the importance of how entrants draw on memories of its subject position in the suzerain system that it left as it entered international society. Part two discuses the experiences of Russia's predecessor polities, with the focus being on the place of Russian principalities within the suzerain system of the Golden Horde (ca. 1240–1500). I argue that Russia's basic stance towards European polities in the 16th and early 17th centuries is readily understandable in terms of a key memory, namely the one of being dominated by this polity, which was itself an outgrowth of the Mongol empire. Part three demonstrates how the resulting understanding of politics was confirmed by Russian experiences in the 16th and 17th centuries. I suggest that Russia never really let go of its memories of being part of a suzerain system, and that it is therefore still suspended somewhere in the outer tier of international society.

This article contributes to the growing subfield of research on religion and International Relations (IR) by discussing ways to take substantial and sui generis aspects of religion into account. It is argued that IR scholars need more critical methodological and conceptual reflection on how to integrate religion in order to navigate between two typical analytical positions: either focusing on the instrumental relevance of religion only or treating religion as an unchangeable meta-category and delinking it from its practitioners or context. The article first discusses why there is a need to be attentive to distinctive aspects of religion and then moves on to scrutinise three IR-relevant pathways to include these aspects of religion in analysis, namely religion as belief community, religion as power, and religion as speech act. It appears that future research along these lines can contribute significantly to the way IR scholars habitually think about key issues such as parameters of behaviour, standards of legitimacy, and the dynamics of conflicts.

This article responds to issues raised about global governmentality studies by Jan Selby, Jonathan Joseph, and David Chandler, especially regarding the implications of ‘scaling up’ a concept originally designed to describe the politics of advanced liberal societies to the international realm. In response to these charges, I argue that critics have failed to take full stock of Foucault's contribution to the study of global liberalism, which owes more to economic than political liberalism. Taking Foucault's economic liberalism seriously, that is, shifting the focus from questions of natural rights, legitimate rule, and territorial security to matters of government, population management, and human betterment reveals how liberalism operates as a universal, albeit not yet global, measure of truth, best illustrated by the workings of global capital. While a lot more translation work (both empirical and conceptual) is needed before governmentality can be convincingly extended to global politics, Foucauldian approaches promise to add a historically rich and empirically grounded dimension to IR scholarship that should not be hampered by disciplinary admonitions.

All critical theories lay claim to some kind of account not only of the present of international politics and its relation to possible futures, but also of the role of critical theory in the present and future in international politics. This article argues that if critical international theory is to have a future that lives up to its revolutionary ambition, then it needs to listen more carefully to the voices of postcolonial and feminist critics and take on board the heterotemporality of international politics.

The attempts by Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and other members of the 'Copenhagen School' to provide a theoretical foundation for a broader understanding of security and security studies involves a sustained effort to rethink the processes through which issues become 'security' issues. Security is no longer viewed as referring naturally or unproblematically to the military security of the state. Rather, the goal becomes to understand how different 'referent objects' - from the economy, to the environment, to military relations - can become subject to the processes of 'securitization' in which the socially and politically successful 'speech act' of labelling an issue a 'security issue' removes it from the realm of normal day-to-day politics, casting it as an 'existential threat' calling for and justifying extreme measures.Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO, 1998); Ole Wæver, 'Securitization and Desecuritization', in Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New York, 1995), pp. 46-86.

Relations of sovereign inequality permeate international politics, and a growing body of literature grapples with the question of how states establish and sustain hierarchy amidst anarchy. I argue that existing literature on hierarchy, for all its diverse insights, misses what makes hierarchy unique in world politics. Hierarchy is not simply the presence of inequality or stratification among actors, but rather an authority relationship in which a dominant actor exercises some modicum of control over a subordinate one. This authority relationship, moreover, is dramatically different than ones found in domestic hierarchies. It is shaped less by written laws or formal procedures, than by subtle forms of manipulation and the development of informal practices. For this reason, hierarchy cannot simply be reduced the to the dynamics of anarchy, and must be viewed as a relational phenomenon. Ties between actors create positions that permit dominant actors to appropriate and orchestrate the sharing of authority with subordinate intermediaries. This article develops this relational network approach, highlighting how concepts such as access, brokerage, and yoking can illuminate the processes by which authority is enlisted and appropriated in world politics.

In recent years there has been a ‘turn’ to thinking about war through the experiences of those touched by it. While this scholarship has generated numerous important insights, its focus has tended to remain on wars’ violences, those responsible for enacting them, and the effects of such violence. In this article, the experiences of pleasure and joy in war that simultaneously take place are placed centre stage. Drawing on three war novels, the article tracks three recurring themes of pleasurable and joyful experiences related to war: bodily pleasures, the ‘togetherness’ of war, and moments of joy that escape war’s reach. Through this focus, war is shown to work across a range of affective registers and as never totalising or universalising in its experience. The article argues that paying attention to joy and pleasure can work to displace war as a focus of analysis, directing attention instead to the experiences of those who live through war and how they survive, sustain, and resist it.

In the last two decades, the classical tradition in international relations has come under sustained attack on a number of fronts, and from a diverse range of critics. Most recently, feminist thinkers, following in the footsteps of neo-Marxists and critical theorists, have denounced IR as ‘one of the most gender-blind, indeed crudely patriarchal, of all the institutionalized forms of contemporary social and political analysis’. Feminists have sought to subvert some of the most basic elements of the classical paradigm: the assumption of the state as a given; conceptions of power and ‘international security’; and the model of a rational human individual standing apart from the realm of lived experience, manipulating it to maximize his own self-interest. Denouncing standard epistemological assumptions and theoretical approaches as inherently ‘masculinist’, feminists, particularly those from the radical band of the spectrum, have advanced an alternative vision of international relations: one that redefines power as ‘mutual enablement’ rather than domination, and offers normative values of cooperation, care giving, and compromise in place of patriarchal norms of competition, exploitation, and self-aggrandizement.

After a decade of financial crises, international economic leaders have begun to talk about the need for reform. Yet, while they speak in dramatic terms of a ‘new financial architecture’, in practice, they seem more interested in more limited renovations to the international monetary system. Arguing that ‘A lack of reliable data . . . was critical to [recent] crises’, the International Monetary Fund has, for example, emphasised the importance of better data-gathering systems and greater surveillance. By defining the cause of the crises as informational rather than systemic, Fund leaders thus justify a limited solution: in Michel Camdessus' words, what is needed is ‘no new machinery, no new heavy public intervention’, but rather a series of limited technical fixes. This is not the first time that international financial leaders have succumbed to the seduction of technique. Four decades ago, as the Bretton Woods system struggled through an escalating series of monetary crises, state and global policymakers chose a similar path of technical expediency, opting for limited reforms. As we now know, those strategies ultimately proved to be inadequate to the task of rescuing the postwar monetary order. In this article, I revisit that regime and its collapse, examining the roots of the contemporary search for technical fixes.

It is an empire without a consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any the less of an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears ‘the ark of liberties of the world.

If all history according to Marx has been the history of class struggle, then all international history, it could just as well be argued, has been the struggle between different kinds of Empire vying for hegemony in a world where the only measure was success and the only means of achieving this was through war. Indeed, so obvious is this fact to historians – but so fixated has the profession of International Relations been with the Westphalian settlement – that it too readily forgets that imperial conquest, rather than mere state survival, has been the principle dynamic shaping the contours of the world system from the sixteenth century onwards. Empires, however, were not just mere agents existing in static structures. They were living entities that thought, planned, and then tried to draw the appropriate lessons from the study of what had happened to others in the past.

Many regard Thucydides as the first genuine International Relations theorist and a writer of continuing, even timeless importance. His history of the Peloponnesian War is certainly a remarkable work that obviously has had an enormous influence on the development of the field. Its influence, however, is largely pernicious. This article explores why.

Norman Angell is a theorist of whom everyone has heard and few take seriously. In the years before the First World War, he had published The Great Illusion, the famous argument which outlined the disutility of war and which appeared to imply that governments would henceforth be restrained in the use of force. It was widely acclaimed and promoted with fervour by proponents of the peace movement. A few months before the outbreak of the First War, Angell had published another major tract predicting that future wars would be less ferocious than past wars. When these predictions proved less than accurate, the luckless theorist became a target for the realist criticism of ‘idealism’; indeed, he became a constant reference point in their defence of the realist position. The label was sufficient to assure that, while frequently referred to, his own ideas should receive scarcely any critical attention.

‘Architecture’ has emerged as the new catchphrase in Asian security politics. Despite its growing centrality, insufficient attention has thus far been given to defining the term, often leading to its imprecise usage. This article seeks to redress that shortcoming. It reviews the ways in which various scholars and practitioners have employed the term ‘security architecture’ and highlights the anomalies that their often differing employment has created. The article proposes a set of guidelines to aid conceptualisation and application of the term. In so doing it establishes criteria to ascertain what ‘security architecture’ actually exists in the Asian region, and must ultimately exist to assure regional security.

This article examines the cultural basis of European opposition to Turkish accession to the European Union (EU). Most observers depict the cultural and religious dimensions of the European debate over Turkish accession as a disagreement between those who see Europe as a Christian ‘club’ and those open to a more religiously pluralistic European identity. However, polls suggest that cultural and religiously based doubts about Turkish accession resonate with a much larger proportion of the European population than those who publicly defend the idea of an exclusivist ‘Christian’ Europe. Both secularists and Christian exclusivists (‘traditionalists’) express hesitations about Turkish membership:

The choice of name given to or adopted by a collectivity is often immaterial. It probably does not matter much whether a new football team, for example, is called the Braves or the Valiants. All that is needed is some distinctive terminology, by whch the group in question can easily be identified. Sometimes, however, a name may be meant to reflect some substantive qualities, aspirations, or associations which are already connected with or claimed by the collectivity. The names adopted in 1947 by the two successor states to Britain's empire on the Indian sub-continent, for instance, were seen to be significant. Both India and Pakistan had their own reasons for wishing to be so called. Burma's 1989 translation into Myanmar was perhaps indicative of the same kind of consideration.

In this article, the introduction to this Special Issue, we underline the importance of the dynamics of misrecognition for the study of world politics. We make the case for shifting the focus from ‘recognition’, where it has long been cast in social, political and, more recently, International Relations theory, to misrecognition. We do so by returning to the original theorisation of misrecognition, Hegel’s dialectic of the master and servant. Our point of departure is not only that the desire for recognition is key social dynamic, but that the failure to obtain this recognition is built into this very desire. It is a crucial factor for understanding how international actors behave, including, but not only, states.

Thus understood, the desire for recognition is not simply a desire for social goods, for status or for statehood, but for more agency – more capacity to act. We explore the logic of misrecognition and show how the international system is a symbolic structure that is ordained by an unrealisable ideal of what we call ‘sovereign agency’.

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 article investigates Morgenthau’s views on the ethics of scholarship and argues that all his works should be read in the light of his central goal: speaking truth to power. Doing so demonstrates that for Morgenthau, a realist theory of international politics includes two dimensions: it is supposed to explain international relations, but it is also, fundamentally, a critical project which questions the existing status quo. While the explanatory dimension of realism is debated at great length, its critical dimension is consistently overlooked by the more recent, self-named ‘critical’ approaches which tend to present the two adjectives ‘realist’ and ‘critical’ as mutually exclusive. This amounts to an insidious high-jacking of the very adjective critical, which in most cases merely signals one does not espouse a realist perspective. This is highly problematic as it obscures the fact that for Morgenthau, the founding father of realism, political science is by definition a subversive and revolutionary force critical of the existing order. Highlighting the critical dimension that lies at the core of the realist project as formulated by Morgenthau therefore challenges the current narrow use of the adjective ‘critical’ in the discipline and leads to reclaim it for the realist tradition.