The prevailing scholarly orthodoxy regarding recent diplomatic initiatives in the Asia-Pacific assumes that East Asia is evolving into a distinctive regional community. The orthodoxy attributes this development to the growing influence of the diplomatic practices espoused by the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN) and its related institutions. However, a paradox remains, namely: despite the failure of ASEAN’s distinctive practice to fulfil its rhetorical promise in Southeast Asia both immediately prior to and in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, it is nevertheless considered sufficient to validate the projection of ASEAN defined norms onto a wider Pacific canvas. This study analyses how an academic preference for constructivism has misinterpreted the growth in official rhetoric extolling East Asian regionalism since 1997 in a way that has helped produce and reinforce this paradox. By contrast, we contend that government declarations of a developing East Asian identity actually serve to obscure the continuation of traditional interstate relations and do not herald any wider, let alone inexorable, movement towards an integrated regional community.

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:

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.

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’.

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.

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.

The activity of workers' organizations and labour issues is once again on the international relations agenda in fields ranging from labour standards at the WTO, to the terms of regional integration, to corporate codes of conduct, to civil society coalition building. This article argues that the role of the international union movement is transforming from a supporter of US capitalism to a brake on neoliberal industrial relations, to potentially advocating a different form of political economy in alliance with other groups. This transformation has taken place partially because unions have has been expelled from the corridors of power in key states and partially because of their encounter with a series of social movements. The cases of the ICFTU's activity in engaging international organizations and MNCs are used as examples to illustrate this trend. The implications for activity in, and the theory of, the global political economy are potentially significant.

This article argues for a concept of hegemony that goes beyond current usages in IR to examine its more structural aspect. First, it looks at this more structural aspect in relation to some of Gramsci’s own arguments. Then it adds hegemony to the structure-agency debate. It develops the concept of hegemony in two ways – first as a mediating moment between structure and agency, second as a factor in securing the unity of structural combinations. These arguments are in turn dependent upon a scientific realist ontology that sees structure as more than just intersubjective relations. Finally, the article tries to show how this reworked concept of hegemony allows for a social theory of international relations, while respecting the specificity of the international.

Social Theory of International Politics is in my view a major work in our field, fully deserving of this symposium in the Review of International Studies. Indeed, I think that Alexander Wendt's book is virtually certain to become a classic work on international relations theory, standard on graduate reading lists. Wendt's distinctive combination of scientific realism, holism, and what he calls ‘idealism’, will certainly spark much conversation and, it is to be hoped, a great deal of thought.

Recent literature on the disciplinary history of IR has furthered our understanding of aspects of the discipline without specifying its own methods clearly enough. ‘Critical’ or ‘internal discursive’ disciplinary historians have rejected Quentin Skinner's contextual approach to the history of ideas in ways that suggest they have misunderstood it, and have failed to appreciate its potential. Furthermore, ‘critical IR’ itself can and should be subjected to intellectual-historical examination. The article suggests that ‘critical IR’ has been a form of anglophone academic radicalism specific to the late Cold War and early post-Cold War periods, and advocates further comparative work on the history of non-anglophone IR communities.

The following article refers to the current debate about state personhood opened by Wendt's claim for a treatment of states as real persons in order to prevent the reductionist argument that states only are treated ‘as if’ they were persons. By understanding phenomena like states consistently as structures – as ‘structures of corporate practice’ – we argue that there is a possibility to escape from the situation dually framed by Wendt. This alternative is constituted by a tripartite pragmatist ontological model that consists of actors, structures of corporate practice, and processes. After having presented our view of the debate and its central problems in a first step, we will set forth our model and its implications for the study of international relations in a second and third step.

There is a perceived legitimacy deficit in contemporary international society. A symptom of this is the political contestation surrounding the 2011 Libyan crisis and its influence on the 2011–13 Syrian crisis. This involved criticism being levelled at the coalition led by the so-called Permanent-3 for the way they implemented the protection of civilians mandate, as well as for the referral of the Libyan situation to the International Criminal Court. How the P3 respond to these developments will be driven in part by how this ‘legitimacy fault line’ is interpreted. The purpose of this article is to first give an interpretation that is informed by the work of contemporary English School scholars and the political theorists they draw on; and second to provide the context in which specific policy recommendations may guide the response of the P3 states. We argue that because the new legitimacy fault line divides on the procedural question of who decides how international society should meet its responsibilities rather than substantive disagreements about what those responsibilities are (that is, human protection and justice) the challenge to the liberal agenda of the P3 is not radical. However, we also argue that ignoring the procedural concerns of the African and BRICS states is not outcome neutral and could in fact do harm to both the ICC and the wider implementation of R2P. We consider two proposals for procedural reform and examine how the P3 response would impact on their claim to be good international citizens.

Trauma, the silenced aftermath of violence, has been largely neglected by international security studies, which perceives trauma as having little relevance to global politics. However, this article contends that trauma profoundly influences global security. Unless traumatic events are worked through, they can heighten insecurity not only in the immediate aftermath of violence but decades and even generations later. The article is divided into three parts. The first section examines trauma in general terms, noting its individual, social and political dimensions. The second section examines acting out in response to trauma, with a particular focus on the meaning-making narratives adopted in order to make sense of traumatic experiences: the heroic soldier, good and evil, and redemptive violence. These narratives serve to secure the state by shutting down questioning and showing strength and decisiveness in the wake of traumatic shocks. Section three examines the notion of working through trauma. Working through involves a process of mourning, in which past atrocities are acknowledged, reflected on, and more fully understood in all their historically situated complexity. It is a deeply political process that struggles to understand and challenge those structures and practices that facilitate traumatic loss.

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.

International state-building has become central to international policy concerns and has marked a clear neo-Wilsonian shift in international thinking, spurred by the leadership of the United States and the European Union. Today’s approaches insist on the regulatory role of international institutions and downplay the importance of locally-derived political solutions. This privileging of ‘governance’ over ‘government’ is based on the assumption that the political process can be externally influenced through the promotion of institutional changes introduced at the state level and pays less attention to how societal pressures and demands are constitutive of stable and legitimate institutional mechanisms. This article questions this approach and analyses the transformation in the assessment of the importance of the societal sphere. It considers how this shift has been shaped by current understandings of war and conflict, and how the prioritisation of governance has fitted with critical and post-positivist trends in academic thinking in international relations and security studies. The discussion is illustrated with examples drawn largely from the Balkans and the international regime in Bosnia–Herzegovina in particular.

Ethical cosmopolitanism is conventionally taken to be a stance that requires an ‘impartialist’ point of view—a perspective above and beyond all particular ties and loyalties. Taking seriously the claims of those critics who counter that morality must have a ‘particularist’ starting-point, this article examines the viability of an alternative understanding of cosmopolitanism: ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’. Using moral justifications for patriotism as points of contrast, it presents embedded cosmopolitanism as a position that recognises community membership as being morally constitutive, but challenges the common assumption that communities are necessarily bounded and territorially determinate.

This article aims to show the added value of studying transnational advocacy networks through a discursive approach in order to better understand the outcomes of norm diffusion in postconflict contexts. I argue that constructivist approaches to norm diffusion fall short as an explanation of norm adoption because they assume an automatic process of norm propagation through socialisation mechanisms. The first goal of the article is then to discuss how the internal dynamics of discourse negotiation in transnational advocacy networks impact the diffusion and implementation of international norms. The second goal is to propose the concept of the rebound effect and to explore the conditions under which it takes place. Through data collected during extended fieldwork, the article examines a prominent case, namely the transnational campaign for the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security in Burundi and Liberia. I ask why and how the campaign was understood as a success in Liberia and as a failure in Burundi. I argue that there is another way of looking at these cases in less dichotomised ways. Crucially, my findings demonstrate how in both cases a very particular discourse on gender security is (re)produced through power relations between local and transnational activists limiting the type of policies that are advocated for and depoliticising the grassroots.

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.

With the increasing influence of theocrats and other religious actors on policymakers and masses, recognising the agency of the clergy is crucial. This article uses the ‘epistemic communities’ framework to place the religious ‘agents’ in contemporary politics and it shows how hermeneutics can be treated as a form of ‘episteme’. Until recently, this framework has been used to explain how scientific communities affect policymaking. Using the cases of South Africa and Northern Ireland, this article claims that religious actors, especially with their shared set of normative and principled beliefs as well as shared norms of validity, also meet the requirements of the epistemic community category. The employment of this established IR framework in theorising religious politics has the potential to shed light not only on peacebuilding and mediation, but also violent movements and terrorist organisations that use religion as justification.

A multi-levelled hegemonic encounter has developed in Central Asia, in which a global hegemon, the USA; a regional hegemon, the Russian Federation; an aspirant sub-regional hegemon, Uzbekistan; and an emergent regional and global hegemon, China, co-exist within the framework of Central Asian security politics. Where these hegemons’ interests do not conflict this can be characterised as a matrioshka model of hegemony: the different level hegemons can accommodate one another peacefully and where their interests coincide they can form alliances. The model of multi-levelled hegemony developed here highlights the simultaneous presence of competition and cooperation. This article explores the way in which the various bilateral hegemonic relations in the region also indicate that actual and emergent hegemonic states at different levels can cooperate as hegemons in order to challenge, or to respond to challenge, by hegemonic states at other levels. This helps to clarify the question of whether the increasingly competitive interaction between these states is likely to lead to conflict.