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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article examines how affective narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media reinforce and challenge established scripts of national identity, political legitimacy, and international geopolitical imaginary. Taking theoretical insights from the scholarship on trauma, disaster nationalism, and politics of emotions, I structure the analysis of social media posts from state media and private accounts around three emotional registers: grief as a crucial site of control and contestation during the initial stage of the outbreak; gandong (being moved in a positive way) associated with stories of heroic sacrifices, national unity, and mundane ‘heart-warming’ moments; and enmity in narratives of power struggles and ideological competition between China and ‘the West’, especially the United States. While state media has sought to transform the crisis into resources for strengthening national belonging and regime legitimacy through a digital reworking of the long-standing repertoire of disaster nationalism, alternative articulations of grief, rage, and vernacular memory that refuse to be incorporated into the ‘correct collective memory’ of a nationalised tragedy have persisted in digital space. Furthermore, the article explicates the ways in which popular narratives affectively reinscribe dominant ideas about the (inter)national community: such as the historical imagination of a continuous nationhood rising from disasters and humiliation, positive energy, and a dichotomous view of the international order characterised by Western hegemony and Chinese victimhood. The geopolitical narratives of the pandemic build on and exacerbate binary oppositions between China and ‘the West’ in the global imaginary, which are co-constructed through discursive practices on both sides in mutually reinforcing ways. The lens of emotion allows us to attend to the resonances and dissonances between official and popular narrativisations of the disaster without assuming a one-way determinate relationship between the two.

Over the past two decades, constructivist International Relations (IR) scholars have produced substantial knowledge on the diffusion and adoption of global norms, emphasising the role of Western norm entrepreneurs in constructing and promoting new norms to passive, generally non-Western, norm takers. An emergent literature on norm dynamics unsettles this narrative of linear progress, highlighting the agency of diverse actors, including the agency of non-Western norm entrepreneurs, in normative change. This article contributes to this recent norm research by exploring the normative agency of local actors in the Turkish context, who have actively engaged in normative contestation over the meaning of gender equality. More specifically, the article reveals the crucial role of a pro-government, conservative women's organisation in subverting global gender equality norms and in promoting a local norm of ‘gender justice’ as an alternative. The article furthers research on norm contestation by analysing the discursive strategies and justifications local norm makers have adopted in the Turkish context upon encountering norms that challenged their normative beliefs and practices. Finally, the article critically engages with postsecular feminism, highlighting the agency of a religiously informed, conservative women's organisation as a non-Western norm entrepreneur.

Conflict-generated diasporas are considered likely to maintain radical behaviours. This article seeks to explain why and how they nevertheless adopt moderate claims, especially when advocating highly sensitive issues such as state sovereignty. Focusing on groups in the US I investigate the Lebanese diaspora linked to the pro-sovereignty movement in Lebanon (2000–2005) and the Albanian diaspora linked to Kosovo's independence movement (1999–2008). The contentious episodes take place during the original homeland's post-conflict reconstruction. Embedded in the literatures on diasporas, conflicts, and transnational social movements, this article argues that instrumental approach towards the achievement of sovereignty explains why conflict-generated diasporas adopt moderate behaviours. Diasporas hope that by linking their claims to a global political opportunity structure of ‘liberalism’ they ‘play the game’ of the international community interested in promoting the liberal paradigm, and thus expect to obtain its support for the legitimisation of their pro-sovereignty goals. Diaspora entrepreneurs advance their claims in a two-step process. Initially they use frame bridging and frame extension to formulate their existing grievances. Then, an increased responsiveness from their host-state emerges to sustain their initial moderation. While individuals or groups in diaspora circles occasionally issue threats during the contentious episodes, the majority in the diaspora consider moderate politics as their dominant behaviour.

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.

The US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq coupled with the increased militarisation of international relations as part of the ‘war on terror’ has led to the development of a ‘blood for oil’ thesis that posits the centrality of oil and the economic interests of US oil corporations to American intervention in the Third World. This article argues that this thesis, whilst correct in identifying the importance of energy to US intervention, is not sufficiently attentive to the dual nature of American resource interventions whereby the American state seeks not only to ensure US oil supplies but also to maintain sufficient oil supplies for the global economy as a whole. American intervention is thus driven by oil to a large extent, but in different ways to those commonly suggested by ‘blood for oil’ theorists. In contrast to this thesis I argue that recent energy security moves to diversify oil acquisition away from the Middle East towards new areas such as South America, the Caspian region and Africa continue to be subject to this dual logic. Moreover, counter-insurgency warfare is increasingly being deployed to insulate oil-rich states from internal pressures which is in turn having a profound effect on human rights, social justice and state formation in the global South.

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.

The obsolescence of war in the relations between the leading industrial powers, and the declining significance of national sovereignty in the context of globalization are frequently cited as key indicators of the steady decline of the Westphalian era.For an insightful overview, see J. Richardson, ‘The End of Geopolitics?’, in R. Leaver and J. Richardson (eds.), Charting the Post-Cold War (Boulder, CO, 1993). The transformation of world politics has encouraged the formations of new linkages between the study of change in international relations and the normative consideration of alternative principles of world politics. Imagining new forms of political community has emerged as a major enterprise in the contemporary theory of the state and international relations.W. Connolly, ‘Democracy and Territoriality’, in M. Ringrose and A. J. Lerner (eds.), Reimagining the Nation (Buckingham, 1993); D. Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Global Governance(Cambridge, 1995); W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and the Culture (Oxford, 1989); A. Linklater, ‘Community’, in A. Danchev (ed.), Fin de Siècle: The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (London, 1995); and R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, 1993). In this context, E. H. Carr’s writings on the crisis of world politics in the first part of the twentieth century acquire a relevance for contemporary debates which his reputation for Realism has served to distort. His writings contain a striking analysis of the changing nature of the modern state and the possibility of new forms of political association. Carr’s observations about these subjects are as profound as they are inspiring, and they are rich in their significance for the contemporary theory and practice of international relations. They make significant contributions in three areas: the empirical analysis of the transformation of the modern state, especially but not only in Europe; the embryonic but increasingly sophisticated normative analysis of how the nation-state ought to evolve, and what it ought to become; and the evolving discussion of how the study of internation relations might be reformed to tackle the dominant moral and political questions of the epoch. These questions are concerned above all else with the metamorphosis of political community.

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.

Noam Chomsky argues that, while the US news media are adversarial towards the US government on foreign policy, institutional filters operate to ensure that the criticisms made generally stay within narrow bounds set by the US political elite. Chomsky's research in this area is largely ignored even by academics who agree with this conclusion. The institutional tendency to filter out anti-elite perspectives applies not only to the news media but also to academia. Consequently, Chomsky's work is marginalised due to its emphasis on corporate power, principled opposition to US foreign policy and the role of academia in buttressing elite power.

Despite its newness, the concept of the responsibility to protect (R2P) looks back at a stellar career. It has been the subject of numerous conferences and academic publications and has been affirmed by the major UN bodies. Indeed, if one were to assess the development of an international norm by the amount of academic attention and general rhetorical support it enjoys, one could be inclined to believe that the responsibility to protect is rapidly evolving into a norm of customary international law.

This article subjects the R2P hype to critical scrutiny and asks probing questions about R2P's viability as a norm. Beneath the thin veneer of rhetorical acceptance of R2P lies a range of hotly disputed issues – in particular but not exclusively regarding the concept's implications for the use of force – which are unlikely to be resolved in the near future. In this article I examine R2P's potential to ‘ripen’ into an international norm. I argue that in the absence of an intersubjective consensus about what R2P actually means, the concept's chances to ‘harden’ into a norm of customary international law are remote. I posit that R2P cannot be considered a ‘new norm’ or an ‘emerging norm’ as it is frequently called, because the vast majority of states simply does not want to be legally bound to save strangers in remote regions of the world.

Over the past decade, the English School of International Relations (IR) has made a remarkable resurgence. Countless articles and papers have been written on the School. Some of these works have been critical, but most have applauded the School's efforts to provide a fruitful ‘middle way’ for IR theory, one that avoids the extremes of either an unnecessarily pessimistic realism or a naively optimistic idealism. At the heart of this via media is the idea that, in many periods of history, states exist within an international society of shared rules and norms that conditions their behaviour in ways that could not be predicted by looking at material power structures alone. I f the English School (ES) is correct that states often follow these rules and norms even when their power positions and security interests dictate alternative policies, then American realist theory – a theory that focuses on power and security drives as primary causal forces in global politics – has been dealt a potentially serious blow.

Why have President Bush and his administration consistently, and publicly, stated their commitment to fully comply with the laws of war protecting civilians while, simultaneously, refusing to fully comply with the laws of war protecting prisoners of war? How do we understand President Bush and his administration’s unquestioning acceptance of the protection of civilians, but the rejection of the same for prisoners of war? Are the strategic and normative costs of each so dissimilar as to justify this difference? Considering the recent exposé of abuses and torture of prisoners of war held in both Iraq and Cuba, the answers to these questions are not merely academic.