To date, studies of international politics have little space for time. In this article, I argue that time is constitutive of the international system by offering a genealogical historical sketch of the coeval rise of territorial state sovereignty and Western standard time (consisting of seconds, minutes, and hours). Sovereignty is rightly a foundational concept of both the international system and the field of International Relations (IR), but the emergence of the contemporary method of reckoning time during the Enlightenment also supported the project of political modernity, and is thus critical to IR. The genealogical motive of the sketch is to understand what have become naturalised, global social conventions as historically contingent, cosmopolitical phenomena that resulted from significant socio-political efforts and conflicts. I locate ‘sites’ where modern sovereignty emerged and explicate contemporaneous processes, factors, and events implicated in the rise of modern time at those sites. In doing so, I outline how particular modes of understanding space and time were bred in Western Europe, spread around the world via colonialism, and embedded during the eras of global war and post-colonialism. I conclude by contrasting current challenges to territorial state sovereignty with Western standard time's untrammelled global hegemony.

This article explores the relationality of governance and resistance in the context of the constitution of refugee subjectivities in Malaysia. Whilst recognising their precarity, the article moves away from conceiving of refugees merely as victims subjected to violence and control, and to contribute to an emerging body of literature on migrant resistance. Its contribution lies in examining practices of resistance, and the specific context in which they emerge, without conceptualising power-resistance as a binary, and without conceiving of refugees as preconstituted subjects. Rather, drawing on the thought of Michel Foucault, the article examines how refugee subjectivities come into being through a play of governance-resistance, of practices and strategies that may be simultaneously affirmative, subversive, exclusionary, and oppressive. The relationality and mobility of this play is illustrated through an examination of practices surrounding UNHCR identity cards, community organisations, and education. Secondly, governance-resistance is conceptualised as a play of visibility and invisibility, understood both visually and in terms of knowledge production. What I refer to as the politics of (in)visibility indicates that refugee subjectivities are both constituted and become other than ‘the refugee’ through a continuous play of coming into being, becoming governable, claiming a presence, blending in and remaining invisible.

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.

Concerns over inequalities that have been located between the roles of the core and periphery within the development of the IR discipline have led to questions of whether it is possible to build up theoretical concepts in IR based on national differences. There have not yet been studies however providing an in-depth look at how IR theorising has been developing within a periphery country or region, and exploring both the local and core level factors inhibiting the development of original theoretical paradigms from within that context. By looking at the Turkish experience, the article postulates that homegrown theorising may be the only means for periphery IR to be respectfully acknowledged by the core IR discipline.

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.

To advance the on-going debate on Securitisation Theory (ST), we argue that the important questions of audience and attention can be addressed through careful historical study. In an analysis of the securitising moves concerning the American military base on Diego Garcia, we are able to demonstrate that the Copenhagen and Paris Schools are not methodologically incompatible, and empirically that public attention for security issues has a tendency to dissipate without continual discursive investment.

Prevailing political and ethical approaches that have been used to both critique and propose alternatives to the existing food system are lacking. Although food security, food sovereignty, food justice, and food democracy all offer something important to our reflection on the global food system, none is adequate as an alternative to the status quo. This article analyses each in order to identify the prerequisites for such an alternative approach to food governance. These include a focus on goods like nutrition and health, equitable distribution, supporting livelihoods, environmental sustainability, and social justice. However, other goods, like the interests of non-human animals, are not presently represented. Moreover, incorporating all of these goods is incredibly demanding, and some are in tension. This raises the question of how each can be appropriately accommodated and balanced. The article proposes that this ought to be done through deliberative democratic processes that incorporate the interests of all relevant parties at the local, national, regional, and global levels. In other words, the article calls for a deliberative approach to the democratisation of food. It also proposes that one promising potential for incorporating the interests of all affected parties and addressing power imbalances lies in organising the scope and remit of deliberation around food type.

Ken Booth and Russell Trood (eds.), Strategic Cultures in the Asia-Pacific Region, Basingstoke, Macmillan, forthcoming

Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995

Peter J. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1996

Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, Columbia, NY, Columbia University Press, 1996

Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1997

So stark and swift was the collapse of the Cold War structure of international relations that few yet pretend to have been expecting it. The magnitude of the changes involved has forced practitioners and theorists alike into radical rethinking. For practitioners, the old certainties have gone and it is unclear what political and security structures will replace those of the Cold War: whether it will be a New World Order or a New World Disorder is still very much open to debate. But for international relations theorists the events have focused attention on the nature of international political structures. What kind of structures can international systems represent if they can be changed so fundamentally and so easily? Neo-realists especially have to rethink a dominant discourse which relies heavily on established regularities and on the stability of the bipolar system. What does it say for Waltz's conception of international structure if it can be so easily transcended by unit factors? If structural theories of international relations can say nothing about an event as momentous as the collapse of the Cold War system, what can they say anything about? Neo-realists could ignore the fact that their theories could not account for transformations of international structure precisely because these theories did explain the regularity and stability of bipolarity. Now that is gone, theorists have to look again at what they mean by a structure. Moreover, the nature of agency has to be reexamined; for neo-realists human agency was essentially irrelevant at the structural level of explanation, yet the collapse of the Cold War system seemed to depend very largely on active and calculating agents. Questions concerning the nature of agency and the meaning of structure and the relationship between them are now more relevant than ever in international relations theory.

In the context of the contemporary crisis of neoliberal political economy, the politics of austerity has reasserted the liberal utility of the state as the political authority of market freedom. This article argues that economy has no independent existence, and that instead, economy is a political practice. It examines the political economy of Adam Smith and the German ordoliberal tradition to decipher the character of the political in political economy and its transformation from Smith's liberal theory into neoliberal theology. Ordoliberalism emerged in the late 1920s at a time of a manifest crisis of political economy, and its argument was fundamental for the development of the neoliberal conception that free economy is matter of strong state authority. The conclusion argues with Marx that the state is the concentrated force of free economy.

Contrary to common assumptions that the liberal world order was ‘made in the West’, this article argues that it was produced in interaction with Pan-African ideology and actors. Developing a morphological analysis, it identifies three contending visions of world order within Pan-Africanism: a world of continental unity and transnational solidarity; a world of national sovereignty; and a world of racially defined units. It concludes that Pan-Africanism contains intellectual and political resources for the defence, reinvigoration, and invention of a more just, equal and rule-bound multilateral world, but that this cannot be taken for granted. Pan-Africanism is neither inherently progressive, nor reactionary, and can support multilateralism and sovereigntism in equal measure. Pan-Africanism's nativism also carries particular risks at a time when similar identitarian viewpoints are promoted by Radical Right movements. Understanding the manner in which Pan-Africanism informs and legitimises diverse political agendas is thus of crucial importance for IR, for Pan-Africanists, and for the future of world order.

Can cultural analysis tell us anything significant about strategic outcomes? This question has provided the focus for strategic culture research since it was first introduced as a concept by Jack Snyder in 1977. Nearly 25 years on, we appear no closer to establishing a consensus on what strategic culture is and what it can tell us. In terms of theory and methodology, the concept of strategic culture remains underexplored. As Colin Gray notes, ‘any scholarly work on strategic culture is granted importance because of its rarity’. Hence the recent debate in RIS between Gray and Alastair Iain Johnston should be seen as significant.

Many political theorists defend the view that egalitarian justice should extend from the domestic to the global arena. Despite its intuitive appeal, this ‘global egalitarianism’ has come under attack from different quarters. In this article, we focus on one particular set of challenges to this view: those advanced by domestic egalitarians. We consider seven types of challenges, each pointing to a specific disanalogy between domestic and global arenas which is said to justify the restriction of egalitarian justice to the former, and argue that none of them – both individually and jointly – offers a conclusive refutation of global egalitarianism.

The International Labour Organisation’s Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work of 1998 formalised an approach to global labour issues known as the Core Labour Standards (CLS). The CLS have privileged a specific set of labour standards as possessing the kinds of universalistic qualities associated with ideas of ‘human rights’; the abolition of forced and child labour, equality of opportunity, and trade union rights. But what does this ‘human rights’ approach mean from the point of view of those women workers who dominate employment in some of the most globalised, and insecure, industries in the world? In this article, I make the case for critical feminist engagement with the gender-blind, and neoliberal-compatible, approach to economic rights as set out in the CLS. Not least, this article raises wider concerns about the insufficiency of approaches to economic rights that are designed to work within the (gendered) structures of a neoliberal economic development paradigm. It is suggested that the CLS have endorsed a voluntarist approach to labour standards that views the promotion and regulation of human rights by global corporations as unproblematic. The article challenges this perspective, drawing upon the work of number of feminist scholars working in the area of women’s employment and corporate codes of conduct. These feminist writings have specifically avoided the language of human rights; thus questions need to be asked concerning the possibilities and the limitations that the CLS opens up for women’s human rights activism.

Despite the development of an increasingly sophisticated literature on comparative regional integration drawing from a variety of cases, the European experience remains the most often used benchmark against which other integrative processes are judged; there is still an often implicit expectation that ‘successful’ processes of regionalism will end up looking something like the European Union. While it is correct to move away from such a ‘Euro-dominance’, the theoretical lessons learned continue to have salience when applied to emerging and competing forms of integrative processes in East Asia. In particular, when economic considerations dominate regional relations – at times of economic crises – then integrative logics and strategies come to the fore. In more ‘normal’ times when geo-strategic considerations reassert themselves, then the consensus over region building and the very nature of the region itself is weakened and cooperation is replaced by competing visions and the over-supply of region.

In this article, I argue that Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution makes a foundational contribution to International Relations (IR), yet has been relatively under appreciated by the broader discipline. Within the Historical Sociology of International Relations, uneven and combined development has recently been postulated as a key trans-historical law that provides a social theory of the ‘international’. Drawing from, but moving beyond these debates, I will argue that passive revolution is a key conditioning factor of capitalist modernity. I will demonstrate how the concept of passive revolution is the element that explains the connection between the universal process of uneven development and the manner in which specific combinations occur within the capitalist era as geopolitical pressures, in tandem with domestic social forces become internalised into geographically specific state forms. It therefore offers a corrective to the frequently aspatial view that is found in much of the literature in IR regarding uneven and combined development. Additionally, passive revolution provides a more politicised understanding of the present as well as an important theoretical lesson in relation to what needs to be done to affect alternative trajectories of development.

Using the case of same-sex marriage in China, this article explores two fundamental questions: What motivates a non-democratic state to promulgate a progressive human rights policy? More importantly, when a non-democratic state adopts such policies, what is the impact on activism? I argue that same-sex marriage legislation could be used strategically to improve China's human rights reputation. While this would extend a pinnacle right to gays and lesbians, the benefits might not outweigh the costs: I show that when imposed from above, a same-sex marriage law would incur opportunity costs on activism; the passage of this progressive policy would eliminate an important issue around which the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans-gender/-sexual (LGBT) community might develop. Moreover, even if such policy is promulgated, the right to marry will do little to challenge the larger social pressures that make life difficult for LGBT Chinese.

No account of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 and popularly known as the Earth Summit, would be complete without coverage of the activity of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). They generated debate with the government and in the media in many, perhaps most, countries. They took part in the preparatory work, wrote special reports, joined governmental delegations to Rio and ran a large forum in parallel to the official conference. UN officials have described the role of NGOs as having been ‘unprecedented‘, and that is the general view. It is less widely known that NGOs have been influential at UN conferences for decades and that they were in danger of having less access than normal to the Earth Summit. Far from the situation being ‘unprecedented’, the NGOs made such an impact at Rio because the weight of precedents made it impossible to restrict their numbers and their activities.

This article seeks to contribute to a transatlantic discussion by examining the theoretical and policy claims for and against NATO expansion that have dominated discussions in the United States. American academics have been almost unanimous in opposing NATO expansion, but the arguments they have put forward have often been contradictory. The proponents of NATO expansion, on the other hand, have not been clear in their arguments, and have tended to stress deterrence over reassurance. It is suggested here that there are indeed good reasons to expand NATO. Central European states have legitimate security concerns and so does Russia. However, an expanded NATO's value rests in its ability to reassure not only its new members but Russia and other countries in the region. If its focus remains primarily to coordinate military plans for deterring attacks on its members alone, its expansion will most likely exacerbate security relations in Europe.

From statistical calculations to psychological knowledge, from profiling to scenario planning, and from biometric data to predictive algorithms, International Relations scholars have shed light on the multiple forms of knowledge deployed in the governing of populations and their political effects. Recent scholarship in critical border and security studies has drawn attention to ‘the other side of knowledge’ and has developed a vibrant conversation with the emergent interdisciplinary field of ignorance studies. This article proposes to advance these conversations on governing through non-knowledge by nuancing the analysis of power/(non-)knowledge/subjectivity relations. Firstly, we expand the analysis of non-knowledge by attending to the problematisation of errors and fakes in controversies at Europe's borders. Errors have emerged in relation to border actors’ practices and technologies, while migrant practices, documentation, and narratives are deemed to be potentially ‘fake’, ‘fraudulent’, or ‘false’. Secondly, we explore how different subjectivities are produced through regimes of error/truth and fake/authenticity. We argue that there are important epistemic differences between ‘fake’ and ‘error’, that they are entangled with different techniques of power and produce highly differentiated subjectivities. Finally, we attend to how these subjectivities are enacted within racialised hierarchies and ask whether non-knowledge can be mobilised to challenge these hierarchies.