The liberal peace project has dominated state-building operations since the end of the Cold War, including in Timor-Leste. However, the attempt to institutionalise the liberal peace faced significant challenges in Timor-Leste's fragmented subsistence-based society. This resulted in the creation of shallowly rooted and poorly-understood liberal state institutions that were disconnected from the majority of Timorese, who continued to follow their local sociopolitical practices. In response, the state has increasingly engaged with these local practices in order to create state institutions that make sense to the people they seek to govern. This engagement has occurred through the formalisation of local sociopolitical institutions, the recognition of local justice systems and the utilisation of local ceremonies and practices. Therefore, this article argues that a liberal-local hybrid peace project has emerged to guide state-building in Timor-Leste, which may indicate how similar projects could develop in the future.

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

Three principal schools of political economy — economic liberalism, economic socialism and economic nationalism — are offered to students of international political economy by the professional literature. Since the end of World War II and in the context of the rivalry between the ‘liberal West’ and the ‘Socialist East’, economic nationalism has been a neglected field of study.Notwithstanding, some excellent studies of economic nationalism have been published. In the field of international relations, see R. Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, 1987), and J. Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge, 1990). In the field of economic development, see D. Seers, The Political Economy of Nationalism (Oxford, 1983), and P. Burnell, Economic Nationalism in the Third World (Brighton, 1986). For a study of the interaction between Communism and nationalism, see R. Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (Oxford, 1988); for the economist's point of view, see H. Johnson (ed.), Economic Nationalism in Old and New States (Chicago, 1967), and A. Breton, ‘The Economics of Nationalism’, Journal of Political Economy, 72 (1964), pp. 376–86. For an excellent review of the origins of the concept, see J. Kofman, ‘How to Define Economic Nationalism?: A Critical Review of some Old and New Standpoints’, in H. Szlajfer (ed.), Economic Nationalism in East-Central Europe and South America, 1918–1939 (Geneva, 1990), pp. 17–54. During the Cold War period and up until after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, economic nationalism attracted more attention among scholars of Africa, Latin America and Asia than among those of us who studied the political economy of the ‘centre’ (e.g., Mayall, Burnell and Seers, to mention just three, are all scholars of economic nationalism who were initially concerned with the study of developing countries). Economic liberalism and economic socialism have vied for scholarly attention, resulting in greater theoretical and analytical sophistication. During the interwar period the situation was different: economic nationalism was well represented in widely read textbooks on international relations and enjoyed attention from both its proponents and its opponents.F. H. Simonds, The Great Powers in World Politics: International Relations and Economic Nationalism (New York, 1939); J. M. Keynes, ‘National Self Sufficiency’, The Yale Review, 22 (1933), pp. 755–69; J. Viner, ‘International Relations between State Controlled National Economies’, American Economic Review, supp., 34 (1944), p. 328; L. Robbins, Economic Planning and International Order (London, 1937), pp. 326–7; T. E. Gregory, ‘Economic Nationalism’, International Affairs, 10 (1931), pp. 289–306; W. E. Rappard, ‘Economic Nationalism’, in Harvard Tercentenary publications, Authority and the Individual (Cambridge, MA, 1937), pp. 74–112. Now, with the collapse of the Communist regimes, the consequent change in world politics, the current economic problems in North America and in Europe and, last but not least, the lessons derived from the miraculous economic success of the mercantilist states of East Asia,On Japan and East Asian states as mercantilist, see Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford, CA, 1982), and Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State (New York and London, 1995); James A. Gregor (with Maria Hsia Chang and Andrew B. Zimmerman), Ideology and Development: Sun Yat-sen and the Economic History of Taiwan (Berkeley, CA, 1981). the time seems to have come to re-examine our perceptions of the discourse of political economy, and redirect scholarly attention toward the theory of economic nationalism.

Kelsen and Schmitt, two leading legal theorists of the twentieth century, constitute a powerful pair that sheds light on the intertwining of politics and law in the phenomenon of sovereignty. Although their conceptions of sovereignty are far apart, they are interconnected as different ways of making sense of the same social phenomenon, or what I call the ‘practice of sovereignty’, whereby an ultimately unauthorised authority continuously authorises itself as the authority and the rest by and large accept this, acquiesce in this, or are made to do so. Having clarified their differences and interconnection, I explore some of the implications of the two writers’ differing conceptions of sovereignty and of the practice of sovereignty that underlie them.

. . . it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past. Hannah Arendt

It is almost two decades ago that the Review published Roy Jones' famous ‘case for closure’ against what he christened the English school of international relations. While that case was couched in an anxious foreboding that the school was ‘still in its prime’, that its bonds ‘are proving much too strong’, and that ‘young recruits are constantly coming forward’, it arguably registered a growing sense at the time that its target was a safe one, a spent force — one whose attraction defied explanation. For the work of the English school was a ‘sterile regime’. It lacked intellectual coherence, rigour, passion, and acquaintance with such important social-scientific fields as economics. Whether Jones had cast his polemical net too widely over a heterodox group, or missed the mark with his criticisms, the absence of any spirited, sustained reply along these lines seems, in retrospect, to reinforce the impression that the approach identified most closely with Martin Wight and Hedley Bull had run out of steam. It had made little impression in the United States. In British circles it had become the faintly embarrassing traditionalism which scholars were obliged to overcome, a synonym for scholarly provincialism, one that engaged the world from such insular vantage points as the common room of the London School of Economics. It stood accused of inhibiting access to the fruits of American social science while inclining, at bottom, to the same political realism that had predominated in the U.S. The mostly unspoken accusation of anachronism has never gone away.

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.

In 1919 when the first tentative steps were taken to establish the study of international relations as an independent discipline, liberals in the United States and Europe believed that the First World War had been caused by European statesmen who had been pursuing policies designed to promote a balance of power. It was gloomily predicted, moreover, that the continuing influence of balance of power thinking would precipitate another world war. One of the major objectives of the nascent discipline was to identify alternative ways of organizing international relations so that the pernicious influence of the balance of power could be permanently eliminated.

Sir Herbert Butterfield, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge (1955–68), Regius Professor of History (1963–68), and author of The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), was one of the leading historians of the twentieth century. A diplomatic historian and student of modern historiography, Butterfield was deeply concerned too with contemporary international relations, wrote much on the subject and, in 1958, created the ‘British Committee on the Theory of International Politics’. Drawing upon published and unpublished material, this article seeks to sketch an outline of Butterfield's career and thought, to examine his approach to international relations, and to reconsider his reputation in the field.

Borrowing from Norbert Elias, we introduce the habitus of restraint to the study of security communities. This habitus constitutes a key dimension of the glue that holds security communities together. The perceived compatibility of practices emanating from the habitus that members hold fosters the collective identity upon which a security community is built. The violation of a member’s habitus by the practices of another member, however, disrupts the reproduction of collective identity and triggers a crisis of the security community. Our analysis of Germany’s reaction to Washington’s case for war against Iraq provides empirical evidence for the salience of the habitus for the internal dynamics of security communities.

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.

This article examines why states ask for forgiveness from other states or peoples that they have harmed. Asking for forgiveness has significant political, legal, and moral implications. But beyond these, the subject concerns how states confront their history and their collective responsibility for wrongdoing. My focus on the reasons states have for asking forgiveness could also improve our understanding of conflict resolution. The article introduces an innovative typology of requests for forgiveness by presenting important conceptual distinctions in the terminology currently employed in the field. Apologies, regrets, and expressions of sorrow are conceptualised as distinct avenues of asking forgiveness with varying degrees of significance and meaningfulness. I assert that the type of request for forgiveness is influenced by the degree of severity attributed to a wrongdoing and by the extent to which a state perceives its image as threatened by its wrongful act. The article analyses the important 1951 statement of West Germany's Chancellor Adenauer regarding the Jewish Holocaust as an example of a type of request for forgiveness.

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.

Our present understanding of British intelligence and its relationship to Anglo-American cooperation in the postwar period leaves much to be desired. Indeed while it has often been remarked that the twin pillars of Anglo-American security cooperation were atomic weapons and intelligence exchange, there remains an alarming disparity in our understanding of these two areas. The importance of intelligence is often commented on, but rarely subjected to sustained analysis. This article seeks to fill that gap by looking in turn at the nature of the Western ‘intelligence community’, the impact of alliance politics upon intelligence common to national estimates and the significance of strategic intelligence cooperation.

How to theorise religion in International Relations (IR)? Does the concept of post-secularity advance the debate on religion beyond the ‘return of religion’ and the crisis of secular reason? This article argues that the post-secular remains trapped in the logic of secularism. First, a new account is provided of the ‘secularist bias’ that characterises mainstream IR theory: (a) defining religion in either essentialist or epiphenomenal terms; (b) positing a series of ‘antagonistic binary opposites’ such as the secular versus the religious; and (c) de-sacralising and re-sacralising the public square. The article then analyses post-secularity, showing that it subordinates faith under secular reason and sacralises the ‘other’ by elevating difference into the sole transcendental term. Theorists of the post-secular such as Jürgen Habermas or William Connolly also equate secular modernity with metaphysical universalism, which they seek to replace with post-metaphysical pluralism. In contrast, the alternative that this article outlines is an international theory that develops the Christian realism of the English School in the direction of a metaphysical-political realism. Such a realism binds together reason with faith and envisions a ‘corporate’ association of peoples and nations beyond the secularist settlement of Westphalia that is centred on national states and transnational markets. By linking immanent values to transcendent principles, this approach can rethink religion in international affairs and help revive grand theory in IR.

The purpose of this article is to offer a feminist critique of populism, not as a distinct mode of politics, but as an analytical and political concept. As such, it seeks to redirect our attention away from populism, understood as a politics ‘out there’, towards the academic theoretical debates that have given this analytical term a new lease of life and propelled it beyond academic circles into the wider public discourse. In this context, the article develops two broad arguments. The first is that the two prevailing conceptions of populism are marred by anaemic conceptions of power, collective agency and subjectivity and, as such, are unable to present us with a convincing account of why this form of radical politics emerges in the first place, who its protagonists are, and how they come together in collective struggle. The second is that our current frenetic deployment of the term as a blanket descriptor for radical politics of all persuasions does not bode well for feminism politically. For both reasons, I conclude that feminists need to resist the current ‘populist hype’.

The works of Jürgen Habermas have amounted to an inspiration to many within IR. His writings on communicative rationality and communicative action are widely regarded as a useful counterpoint to the emphasis on instrumental rationality and strategic action. Also, Habermas has greatly influenced the development of Critical International Theory. However, as other contributions in this Forum demonstrate, IR scholars have at times found it difficult to apply Habermas to service their specific social scientific inquiries. In particular, it has been difficult to unequivocally locate communicative action in diplomatic exchanges or international negotiations. It is partly for this reason that the contributions of the so-called ‘Third Generation’ of Frankfurt School scholars have attracted increasing interest. Axel Honneth's attempts to reconstruct insights in relation to the struggle for recognition into a social theory (with critical intent) have to date been of particular importance in this context. Indeed, given the perceived difficulties in ‘applying’ Habermas, there appears to be an emerging trend to end the honeymoon with Habermas in favour of a reorientation toward Honneth.

For anti-cosmopolitan critics, cosmopolitanism is equated with the universalisation of a particular, liberal, account of justice and is therefore problematic for a number of reasons. The liberal principle ‘do no harm’ principle – and the cosmopolitan principle of humanitarianism, can be used to correct the depiction of cosmopolitanism as hostile to ‘pluralism’, to identify the universalism that is latent or undeveloped in much ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’, and to identify further means of reconciling these positions. A cosmopolitan harm principle argues that the absence of a universal conception of justice should not provide an obstacle to the recognition of an obligation to limit transboundary harms.

What does it mean to think like a Realist? The question is important in the study of international politics. According to a recent survey of the field, more than 90 per cent of the hypotheses tested by behaviourists in international politics were Realist in conception. A wider survey of the field taken in 1972 (which included those more historically inclined) identified the American Realist Hans Morgenthau as the leading scholar of international relations and his Politics Among Nations as the leading book. The overwhelming majority of other prominent postwar general theorists have worked inside the Realist tradition.

In 2006, the European Union launched its new free trade strategy Global Europe with the explicit goal of increasing European competitiveness. This article explores the positions of trade unions and other social movements on Global Europe. Importantly, while Northern social movements and trade unions from the Global South reject Global Europe due to its impact of deindustrialisation on developing countries, European trade unions support it in so far as it opens up new markets for the export of European manufactured goods. It will be argued that this has to be understood against the background of the dynamics underlying the global economy and here in particular uneven and combined development. Due to the uneven integration of different parts of the world into the global economy, workers in developed countries may actually benefit from free trade, while workers in the Global South are more likely to lose out. It will, however, also be argued that while these different positions within the social relations of production are shaping the position of trade unions, they do not determine them. Over time, through direct engagement, trade unions in the North and South may be able to establish relations of transnational solidarity.

In this article I utilise the editors' conceptual frame of sovereignty/intervention/transnational social forces to argue that the relationship that ensues between these phenomena has to be understood in colonial-modern – rather than modern – terms. I thereby argue that intervention is a distinctive technology of colonial-modern rule, specifically, one that erects and polices the difference between sovereign and quasi-sovereign entities via a standard of civilisation. Additionally, I argue that transnational social forces struggle – cognitively, socially, and politically – over the upholding or refuting of this standard; and in this struggle, some might even defend particular sovereign entities against colonial interventions. I demonstrate my argument by explicating the global colonial context of the Italy/Ethiopia conflict in 1935–6, the nadir of the interwar crisis. I ‘decolonise’ received interpretations of the conflict through the heuristic of two differing catechisms of Psalms 68:31 proffered at the time: one, invoking a civilising mission of Africans; the other, invoking a project of self-liberation by Africans.