Cosmopolitan thought and practice bring into sharp focus the question of solidarity, its articulations, and implications in relation to how the political is understood in the sphere of the international. Where liberal cosmopolitanism aims its remit at a transcendent sphere of humanity, seeking to place humanity as the constitutive feature of a redesigned political community, a cosmopolitanism that is distinctly political in its orientation takes the postcolonial critique seriously, unravels the complicities of liberal cosmopolitan articulations of solidarity in global structures of domination, and locates its self-definition in an imminent critique of modernity. The political cosmopolitanism defined in the article presents a conception of solidarity without community, a conception that at once both recognises modernity’s legacy in the perpetuation of inequality and enables a conception of the universal that is not complicit in such relations.

Securitisations permit the breaking of rules: but which rules? This article argues that any given security situation could be handled by a variety of different ‘rule breaking’ procedures, and that securitisations themselves, whilst permitting rule breaking in general, do not necessarily specify in advance which rules in particular have to be broken. This begs the question: how do specific threats result in specific rule breaking measures? This article explores this question through reference to ‘control orders’, an unusual legal procedure developed in the UK during the course of the war on terrorism. Once applied to an individual, a control order gives the government a meticulous control over every aspect of their life, up to and including deciding on which educational qualifications they can take. Despite this control, individuals under the regime remain technically ‘free’: and have frequently used this freedom to abscond from the police who are supposed to be watching them. How did a security policy which controls a suspect's educational future, but not their physical movements, develop? This article aims to answer this question, and in so doing present a reevaluation of the mechanisms through which the effects of securitisation manifest themselves.

The peacebuilding and academic communities are divided over the issue of local ownership between problem-solvers who believe that local ownership can ‘save liberal peacebuilding’ and critical voices claiming that local ownership is purely a rhetorical device to hide the same dynamics of intervention used in more ‘assertive’ interventions. The article challenges these two sets of assumptions to suggest that one has to combine an analysis of the material and normative components of ownership to understand the complex ways in which societies relate to the peace that is being created. Building on the recent scholarship on ‘attachment’, we claim that different modalities of peacebuilding lead to different types of social ‘attachment’ – social-normative and social-material – to the peace being created on the part of its subjects.

In recent years, some scholars have argued that there has been a convergence of the immigration control policies of the industrial democracies. This article demonstrates that, in fact, there has been an extraordinary similarity among the immigration control policies of the major receiving countries for over a century. It examines six alternative explanations for these similarities in immigration control policies: (1) a global hegemon that forces or persuades various countries to act in unison; (2) global or regional migration regimes and organizations; (3) interdependence between the immigration control policies of various countries; (4) emulation of immigration control policies of one country by other countries; (5) the world system approach; and (6) interdependence between the socioeconomic and foreign policy factors that lead to immigration control policies. The article argues that it is the last factor that explains most of the similarity among the immigration control policies. It demonstrates how global economic cycles, shared migratory pressures, alliances that produce common foreign policy considerations, wars that receiving countries are involved in and global ideological cycles produce the convergence of immigration control policies in various receiving countries.

Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny's valuable 'Engaging Gramsci: International Theory and the New Gramscians'Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 3-21. alerts Anglophone IR scholars to broader debates about Gramsci's theories that are rarely highlighted by scholars in the (somewhat misnamed) 'Italian School'. Just as Germain and Kenny have offered one way to contextualize Gramsci's contributions within the intellectual and social world that was the immediate object of his analysis, it is equally important to put the work of Anglophone 'Gramscian' scholars in its own immediate context in order to clarify why the 'Gramsci' that so many of us have found helpful was the historicist and 'idealist' who, as Germain and Kenny's article suggests, is only one of the many Gramscis that can be identified through historically grounded close readings of the Sardinian's words and deeds.

This article challenges existing accounts of the development of the Euromarkets by arguing that their emergence constituted the foundational moment in the advent of a postwar Anglo-American developmental field. The account contends the notion of a postwar order shaped predominantly by the outward expansion of American financial power, by deprivileging the exclusivity of American power and arguing that co-constitutive Anglo-American developmental processes were the generative force that produced the Euromarkets. Drawing upon new archival material, the article suggests that an Anglo-American developmental sphere, in which Britain continued to play a crucial but subordinate role, was key to the unfolding of postwar financial globalisation. The Anglo-American developmental processes occasioned by the Euromarkets gave rise to a ‘transatlantic regulatory feedback loop’ that stimulated deregulation on both sides of the Atlantic and placed Anglo-American capitalist interdependence at the centre of the politics of globalisation. The deeper origins of financial deregulation lie in the transformation of Anglo-American finance during the 1960s.

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.

It is often argued that multilateralism is no longer an effective mechanism to respond to global priorities and that more deliberative and multisectoral governance is needed. To explore this, the purpose of this article is to examine the practice of mutlisectoral deliberation within the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and to determine whether it has resulted in providing a more deliberative response to global health priorities. To do so, this article will apply various theoretical arguments for deliberative democracy to the results of a four year study on the multisectoral organisation the Global Fund. By making links between theory and practice, the article will argue that the multisectoralism practiced by the Global Fund continues to suffer from a deliberative deficit and that it has not safeguarded equal stakeholder participation, equal deliberation between stakeholders or alleviate the asymmetric power relationships which are representative of current forms of multilateral governance. Nevertheless, by locating these gaps between theory and practice, it is possible to outline deliberative safeguards that might, if constitutionally enhanced, pull the Global Fund closer to its own normative values of multisectoral deliberative decision-making.

If students of world politics can be reasonably accused of ignoring the Troubles in Northern Ireland—in part because they seemed to have little to do with the larger East-West confrontation and partly because they were so obviously about something distinctly national in character—then by the same token specialists on Northern Ireland can justly be accused of a certain intellectual parochialism and of failing to situate the long war within a broader global perspective. The quite unexpected outbreak of peace however only emphasizes the need for a wider understanding of the rise and fall of the Northern Irish conflict. This article explores the relationship between the partial resolution of the Irish Question—as expressed in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998—and the changing character of the European landscape. Its central thesis is that while there were many reasons for the outbreak of peace in the 1990s, including war weariness, it is difficult to understand what happened without situating it in a larger European framework and the new definition of sovereignty to which the EU has given birth.

The breakdown of the Soviet Union surprised most scholars of international relations, comparative politics, and Soviet politics. Existing explanations attribute the breakdown of the Soviet Union to the reformist leadership of Gorbachev, and/or to systemic factors. These explanations do not focus on the key contribution of the war in Afghanistan. This is surprising since many scholars view wars as key causal factors in empire breakdown and regime change. We argue that the war in Afghanistan was a key factor, though not the only cause, in the breakdown of the Soviet Union. The war impacted Soviet politics in four reinforcing ways: (1) Perception effects: it changed the perceptions of leaders about the efficacy of using the military to hold the empire together and to intervene in foreign countries; (2) Military effects: it discredited the Red Army, created cleavage between the party and the military, and demonstrated that the Red Army was not invincible, which emboldened the non Russian republics to push for independence; (3) Legitimacy effects: it provided non-Russians with a common cause to demand independence since they viewed this war as a Russian war fought by non Russians against Afghans; and (4) Participation effects: it created new forms of political participation, started to transform the press/media before glasnost, initiated the first shots of glasnost, and created a significant mass of war veterans (Afghansti) who formed new civil organizations weakening the political hegemony of the communist party.

The books which are the subject of this article1 lie squarely (if a little uneasily on the part of Northedge) in the so-called ‘classical‘ tradition of scholarship in International Relations. This tradition eschews both the attempt to explain international politics by aping the methodology of the natural sciences and any interest in saying something of general import about the process of foreign policy formulation. Rather, it finds its “less ephemeral centre” in the rules and institutions which are shared by states and approaches the study of these rules and institutions in a manner at once philosophical and historical. Furthermore, against the cardboard lances of the ‘transnationalists’ it clutches a sturdy shield to the state, insisting that the state has been in the recent past and will remain for the foreseeable future, the principal “centre of initiative” in world politics. In short, this tradition consists in an overriding concern with the political theory and institutional history of the ‘states-system’.

‘The limits of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think. It is our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that shrink them.’

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Book II, Chapter 12.2

[cited from John Rawls The Law of Peoples, p. 7]

After presenting a brief sketch of John Rawls's theory of justice, his international political theory is outlined and evaluated. Rawls develops a classification of ‘peoples’ based on whether or not they are ‘well-ordered’. The Law of Peoples covers ‘liberal’ and ‘decent’ peoples who adhere to minimum standards of human rights and are not aggressive in their international relations. This is in the realm of ‘ideal’ theory; ‘non-ideal’ theory must cope also with societies that are not well-ordered, such as outlaw states and burdened societies. The long-term aim is that all should be part of a confederation of decent peoples. Rawls's theory has been criticized by cosmopolitan liberals for its communitarian tendencies, but has much to offer scholars of international relations, including a systematic basis for classifying states, a helpful discussion of the distinction between reasonableness and rationality, and a powerful restatement of the importance of utopian thinking in international relations.

C. A. W. Manning, Professor of International Relations at the LSE (1930–1962), was a key contributor to the formation of the discipline in Britain. He wrote on Jurisprudence, which was his main strength; on the League of Nations, of which he was a keen supporter; on South Africa, concerning which he gained notoriety as the defender of Apartheid; on International Relations as an independent academic discipline, which, to him, was due to the sui generis character of international society as a formally anarchical but substantively orderly social environment. He was a Rationalist in Martin Wight's sense, and early constructivist, who saw that the society of states as a social construct was subject to interpretation, reinterpretation, and reshaping.

Bringing ontological questions back into IR has been key to opening discussions about plurality and difference in terms of the coexistence of related and plural worlds and realities, for example through notions such as relationality and pluriversality. The problem is that in trying to develop relational approaches as an alternative to the ‘Western/modern’ – atomistic – ontology, relationality, relations, and their meanings can become fixed, translating them into ‘things’. The article maintains that cosmopraxis – as a complex pluriversal, multidimensional set of experiences – not only illustrates how relations relate without fixing their meaning, but also provides us with relevant insights to contribute to think of a pluriversal and more plural IR.

This article examines the changing status of ‘sovereignty’ in the context of some of the world's poorest countries. An examination of the relationship between the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and these countries suggests that the norm of sovereignty is increasingly being ‘trumped’ by the IFIs' commitment to the achievement of good political and social arrangements and economic development within these countries. The article explores the historical roots of this development by tracing the way sovereignty became bound up with the idea of self-determination, the achievement of the ideals of the Enlightenment, and the pursuit of a ‘national economic project’.

This article examines recent attempts by International Relations (IR) scholars to flesh out a reflexive approach inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The French sociologist pioneered the idea of turning the tools of sociology onto oneself in order to apply the same grid of social analysis to the object and subject of scholarship. This represents the culmination of a long tradition of seeking to understand from where one speaks and grasp our subjective biases through reflexive means. But as I argue Bourdieu – like most reflexive scholars – largely overestimated his ability to grasp his own subject position. For he assumed he could be objective about the very thing he had the least reasons to be objective about: himself. Instead of bending over backwards in this way and directly take the subject into account, I then propose to rearticulate the problematic of reflexivity by going back to a more classic concern with the question of alienation. Through a detailed critique of Bourdieu’s reflexive approach and the ways in which it was received in IR, I set out a series of principles to reconfigure the agenda of reflexivity and offer a platform for a proper methodological alternative to positivism.

Examination of Woodrow Wilson's concept of national self-determination in light of both Wilson's own intellectual development and the evolution of wartime strategy and diplomacy establishes that there was no prior consideration of ethnic or collective versus liberal or civic nationalism in Wilson's idea of ‘national’ self-determination and that the actual enunciation and application of the principle was deeply affected by considerations of wartime strategy and diplomacy, above all to counter defeatist tendencies following Russia's withdrawal from the war as well as to induce a separate Austrian peace. Wilson thus understood that the idea could not be applied in an unqualified way, that considerations of national self-determination might in specific instances have to yield to compelling questions of security, diplomacy and economics. At the same time, Wilson was not well informed about many key aspects of nation and state in East-Central Europe. In the end, Wilson accepted many unsatisfactory compromises at the peace table based on the promise that the League and its version of collective security held for international security and justice. Ignorance, liberal myopia, and political incompetence thus have to be weighed against Wilson's considerable tactical pragmatism in prosecuting the war when arriving at a final judgement on Wilson and the legacy of national self-determination.

This essay attempts to apply concepts of hegemony to the case of contemporary North American—Western European—Japanese (‘Trilateral’) relations and, more specifically, to analyse the role and importance of a unique international organization the Trilateral Commission (TC), within Trilateral relations. The essay comprises: (i) a comparison of the Realist and Gramscian concepts of hegemony and relates them to aspects of the post-war international order; (ii) a more extended discussion of the Gramscian concept of hegemony and related concepts; (iii) an exposition of aspects of the ‘Trilateral’ approach, a discussion of the TC and an interpretation of the TC using Gramscian analysis; and (iv) a discussion of the long-term structural pressures on the Trilateral relationship in the context of a reconstituted hegemony.

This article develops the concept of ‘frontline diplomacy’ – what practitioners referring to work in embassies, consulates, and permanent representation as ‘the field’ –, defined here as all diplomats’ activities taking place away from headquarters. IR scholarship tends to focus on Ministries of Foreign Affairs located in capitals. On the contrary, building on the practice turn in IR, we first show that international politics emerge from frontline practices. Adding to criticism against the practice turn, we then explain that it has missed important transformations occurring in frontline diplomacy because it tends to privilege stability over change. We finally discuss two innovations in frontline practices: the action of Sherpas in G20 summits following the 2008 crisis and the use of Twitter by US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul (2012–14). For each we answer three questions: How do these activities transform traditional modes of operation? How are non-state actors involved in them? What do they tell about transformation of global politics? Because diplomatic practices at the frontlines epitomise international politics, these new directions for inquiry contribute substantively to IR scholarship. At the theoretical level, they enrich the continuing encounter between IR and diplomatic studies through practice theory and help to understand change in practice.

There have been calls for policymakers to draw ‘lessons’ from Britain's experience of Empire and Northern Ireland to inform a new generation of post-Cold War interventions by the international community. This article emphasises the role that domestic public opinion, galvanized by the impact of casualties and the plight of military relatives, has played in shaping Britain's experience of ‘military intervention’ in the ‘civil wars’ of Palestine, Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. Three principal arguments are put forward.