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.

In recent years, satellite imagery, previously restricted to the defence and intelligence communities, has been made available to a range of non-state actors as well. Non-governmental organisations, journalists, and celebrities such as George Clooney now use remote sensing data like digital Sherlock Holmeses to investigate and reveal human rights abuses, political violence, environmental destruction, and eco-crimes from a distance. It is often said that the increasing availability and applicability of remote sensing technologies has contributed to the rise of what can be called ‘satellite-based activism’ empowering non-state groups to challenge state practices of seeing and showing. In this article we argue that NGO activism is not challenging the sovereign gaze of the state but, on the contrary, actually reinforcing it. We will bolster our arguments in this regard in two prominent fields of non-governmental remote sensing: human rights and environmental governance.

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.

Theorisations of the political in general, and international politics in particular, have been little concerned with the vast variety of other, non-human populations of species and ‘things’. This anthropocentrism limits the possibilities for the discipline to contribute on core issues and prescribes a very limited scope for study. As a response to this narrow focus, this article calls for the development of a posthuman approach to the study of international politics. By posthuman, we mean an analysis that is based on complexity theory, rejects Newtonian social sciences, and decentres the human as the object of study. We argue for a decentring of ‘the human’ in our scholarship as imperative to understanding the complexity of the world. However, this approach also has a political incentive, which we describe as ‘complex ecologism’.

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.

The empirical and theoretical study of the effect of foreign intervention in the electoral processes of states is exceedingly weak. Using insights from the nationalism literature, this article provides a theoretical argument on domestic reactions to foreign interference in a state's internal politics. It then tests the predictions generated by the argument using mass survey data in Ukraine. The article analyses the Ukrainian people's reaction to Western and Russian intervention in the 2004 presidential elections – the Orange Revolution. We find that efforts by Western governments, international organisations, and non-governmental organisations to shape Ukraine's electoral landscape appear to be unwelcome to average Ukrainians while electoral interference by a non-democratic state, Russia, is seen as less alienating. Our theoretical framework accounts for these potentially surprising results.

The article provides a critical analysis of the concept of irony and how it relates to global justice. Taking Richard Rorty as a lead, it is suggested that irony can foreground a sense of doubt over our own most heartfelt beliefs regarding justice. This provides at least one ideal sense in which irony can impact the discussion of global ethics by pitching less as a discourse of grand universals and more as a set of hopeful narratives about how to reduce suffering. The article then extends this notion via the particular – and particularly – ethnocentric case of British Irony. Accepting certain difficulties with any definition of British Irony the article reads the interventions of three protagonists on the subject of global justice – Chris Brown, Banksy and Ricky Gervais. It is argued that their considerations bring to light important nuances in irony relating to the importance of playfulness, tragedy, pain, self-criticism and paradox. The position is then qualified against the (opposing) critiques that irony is either too radical, or, too conservative a quality to make a meaningful impact on the discussion of global justice. Ultimately, irony is defended as a critical and imaginative form, which can (but does not necessarily) foster a greater awareness of the possibilities and limits for thinking/doing global justice.

%‘‘The comic frame, in making a man the student of himself, makes it possible for him to ‘transcend’ occasions when he has been tricked or cheated, since he can readily put such discouragements into his ‘assets’ column, under the heading of ‘experience’. . . . In sum, the comic frame should enable people to be observers of themselves, while acting.

Blackadder: Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?

Baldrick: Yes, it’s like goldy and bronzy only it’s made out of iron.’’

In 1909, Arnold van Gennep wrote a book on the rites of passage where he discussed what he called the liminal phase (from Lat. limes, border, pl. limites) through which boys in a number of cultures had to pass in order to become men. With his Dutch name, his German birth, his move to France with his divorced mother at the ripe age of six, and his interest in the Arab world, he was nothing if not a man in transition between different life worlds. His scholarly life, too, was a life of transit; from haute école to haute école, from France to Switzerland. To top it all, when the institutionalisation of the social sciences in France was finally hitting its stride with the emergence of Durkheim's année-school, van Gennep was marginalised. There was no closure to his scholarly travels. Van Gennep remained liminal, remained in becoming. In his own terms, his rite de passage never ended. He went from pre-liminality to liminality – a condition that his greatest follower, the symbolic interactionalist anthropologist Victor Turner characterised as existing betwixt and between socially recognised positions – without entering the post-liminal phase of having been fully incorporated into one of those already existing positions. Van Gennep made it his life to deal with the uncertainties and the danger that any social order ascribes to those who are between categories. With this Forum, liminality arrives within the discipline of International Relations (IR) in earnest. The rest of this Introduction will give some historical background that situates the Forum's three post-structural protagonists, note how their undertaking is part of a wider thrust towards process-oriented and relation-oriented work within the social sciences and introduce the pieces.

Critical work in international political economy (IPE) has sought to theorise US financial power through the concept of structural power, intended as a means to go beyond state-centric conceptions of political power and to trace the state’s interaction with socio-economic forces. But due to the tendency to ontologise the distinction between state and market, IPE has not been fully successful in articulating the linkages between structural power and state power. The article then examines literature in the field of cultural political economy (CPE), which emphasises the constitutive importance of the cultural norms and practices situated at the level of everyday life. The CPE literature fails to challenge established IPE accounts in some key respects, and the article relates this to its conception of political power. The article develops an institution-based perspective that is more suitable to theorising the linkages between structural power and state power, and then proceeds to develop an interpretation of the construction of American financial power over the course of the 20th century. It reinterprets some of the key moments in the history of US and global finance and re-examines notions of American financial decline.

The aim of this article is to draw attention to the work of a conflict analyst whose theory of ‘protracted social conflict’ – developed in a sustained series of publications over a twenty-year period from the early-1970s – has been neglected in mainstream international relations, strategic studies and security studies circles. The first section offers a conceptual context for assessing the originality and significance of Azar's approach. The second section outlines his theory of protracted social conflict. The third section evaluates his theory in the light of developments in conflict analysis in the 13 years since his death. The conclusion is that Azar's work does not merit such neglect and that it still offers useful pointers for an understanding of the sources of major armed conflict in the turbulent and contested arena of post-Cold War politics.

Over the last decade, critical historiographers have established that the story of a First Debate, which tells of a struggle between idealism/utopianism and realism between the 1920s and 1940s, is a misleading characterisation of the history of academic international thought. This article adds to this critical literature by exploring how the story of a First Debate became a part of disciplinary orthodoxy between the 1950s and 1990s. Our analysis reveals that scholars produced the myth of a First Debate by detaching the concept of a struggle between idealism and realism from the unique historical milieu in which it was conceived, and employing this dichotomy for a new set of rhetorical purposes. We use these findings to suggest refinements for the historiographical methods employed to understand past international thought, and to illuminate the historical contingency of contemporary notions of scholarly purpose in international relations.

First generation Frankfurt School critical theorists argued that global solidarity was possible because human beings have similar vulnerabilities to mental and physical suffering. This approach to solidarity remains significant for any discussion of the ethical aspirations of critical theory. It also has ramifications for efforts to develop a sociological approach to global moral codes which is influenced by the idea of an emancipatory social theory. Informed by certain themes which were developed by Simone Weil, this article draws on the writings of Fromm, Horkheimer, Adorno and Elias to consider how a sociology of international moral codes can be developed. One of the aims of this project is to consider how far global moralities have developed forms of solidarity around the recognition of shared vulnerabilities to mental and physical suffering which are part of the species’ biological legacy.

As the old blues song goes, ‘if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all’. Same goes for scholarly attention. So I am grateful to Professor Gray for his article.

Despite his frequent use of adjectives about my work which suggest a desperation to inoculate future generations of scholars against it, we actually agree on a great deal. We share a basic ontological understanding of international relations and security studies in particular. We agree that strategic cultures—which admittedly we do define very differently—are none the less critical explanations for the way different groups of people think and act when it comes to the use of force. We also agree that these strategic cultures are not epiphenomena of unitary states acting under anarchy and constrained by material power structures, but are independent of these structures, influenced perhaps by both domestic and international normative structures (though I am not sure Professor Gray accepts this latter possibility for reasons I will return to in a moment). I think we also agree that rigour is better than confusion. Indeed, Professor Gray notes that ‘from the perspective of methodological rigour, it is hard to fault’ my work.

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.

In January 2002, images of the detention of prisoners held at US Naval Station Guantanamo Bay as part of the Global War on Terrorism were released by the US Department of Defense, a public relations move that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld later referred to as ‘probably unfortunate’. These images, widely reproduced in the media, quickly came to symbolise the facility and the practices at work there. Nine years on, the images of orange-clad ‘detainees’ – the ‘orange series’ – remain a powerful symbol of US military practices and play a significant role in the resistance to the site. However, as the site has evolved, so too has its visual representation. Official images of these new facilities not only document this evolution but work to constitute, through a careful (re)framing (literal and figurative), a new (re)presentation of the site, and therefore the identities of those involved. The new series of images not only (re)inscribes the identities of detainees as dangerous but, more importantly, work to constitute the US State as humane and modern. These images are part of a broader effort by the US administration to resituate its image, and remind us, as IR scholars, to look at the diverse set of practices (beyond simply spoken language) to understand the complexity of international politics.

While the last few decades of political economic history give the impression that the logic of neoliberalism is inexorable, this article argues that once we look further backwards and dig into recently declassified archives documenting the early days of neoliberal theory and practice, we find a messier picture. Economic policymakers in Thatcher and Reagan's administrations in the early 1980s did not set out to ‘fail forwards’ by generating a crisis that would enable a statist kind of neoliberalism. The key ideas that they drew on and the policies that they used to put them into practice sought to transform the economy indirectly, through a set of performative policy devices that they believed would generate a dramatic shift in people's inflationary expectations, lowering inflation without provoking a major recession. Archival records make it clear that these efforts were not only a failure, but also one that policymakers were acutely aware of at the time. By examining these quiet failures in economic policy, we can better understand how these governments simultaneously failed in their early efforts to introduce neoliberal economics and yet ultimately succeeded in transforming their economies in important respects – and in legitimising those transformations by narrating failure as a kind of inevitable success.

The American-led Iraq war that began in 2003 has generated intense discussion about when it is legitimate to use force and what force can accomplish. Often this debate is portrayed as a breakdown in consensus, with the US charting a new unilateralist course that undermines existing multilateral understandings of how force should be used. Often, too, the debate is portrayed as a transatlantic one in which Europeans (notably France, supported by Germany) are leading the multilateralist defence against growing US unilateralism.