My aim in this article is to improve the methodology of the modernist constructivist approach and to provide a more coherent, rigid, and systematic constructivist framework for research. I do this by combining the methods of process tracing, discourse analysis, and counterfactuals. In addition, I aim to provide clearer methodological criteria for the evaluation of constructivist research by modifying some of the positivist criteria and adding the criterion of contextual validity. I assert that a more coherent methodology will strengthen and improve constructivist study and may contribute to better communication between constructivist and positivist scholars.

The central thesis of this article is that when faced with state collapse, rising violence, and a complex stabilisation effort, the US, UN, and NATO in Afghanistan and the US and Britain in Iraq, deployed the dominant, if not only, international approach available, Liberal Peacebuilding. The article traces the rise of Liberal Peacebuilding across the 1990s. It argues that four units of analysis within neoliberal ideology, the individual, the market, the role of the state and democracy, played a key role within Liberal Peacebuilding, allowing it to identify problems and propose solutions to stabilise post-conflict societies. It was these four units of analysis that were taken from the Liberal Peacebuilding approach and applied in Afghanistan and Iraq. The application of a universal template to two very different countries led directly to the fierce but weak states that exist today.

In this article I theorise the concept of misrecognition that we aim to bring to the study of international politics with this Special Issue. I draw upon three sources to do so: recognition theory, Hegel, and Jacques Lacan. I show that, while the seeds of an interest in misrecognition were laid in that interdisciplinary Hegelian scholarship known as recognition theory, it remains underdeveloped. To develop it into a concept I chart a path through recognition theory back to Hegel’s original dialectic of the master and servant in the Phenomenology of Spirit. What the dialectic captures, I argue, are the actual dynamics of misrecognition in social life, not an idealised form of recognition. This foundational, constitutive misrecognition is what Lacan also theorises by way of his concept of ‘fantasy’. Both Hegel and Lacan foreground a misrecognised, desiring subject that challenges the ways in which agency has been understood in international politics. Lastly, I show the purchase of a Hegelian-Lacanian analysis for IR by considering the relations between sovereignty and nuclear weapons under the lens of fantasy.

Since the end of the Cold War, the number of books and articles on intervention in world politics has grown dramatically. Yet curiously little of this work subjects the concept of intervention itself to critical scrutiny. Scholars often preface their analyses with definitional discussions about what intervention is, but these definitions take a common form, conceiving intervention within a ‘sovereignty frame’. This article questions this conception of intervention, arguing that it distorts our understanding of interventionary practices and forms of reasoning that occurred in non-sovereign international orders. After exploring the sovereignty framing of intervention in greater detail, I advance an alternative conception. International orders are systemic configurations of political authority: they comprise multiple units of such authority, each with its own realm of jurisdiction, organised according to some principle of differentiation. Importantly, this principle need not be territorial: it could be functional, for example. International intervention is the transgression of a unit's realm of jurisdiction, conducted by other units in the system. Unlike the sovereign framing of intervention, this conception is equally applicable to the interventionary ideas and practices of diverse international orders, and provides a better basis on which to understand how thinkers in different historical contexts have reasoned about intervention.

After the ‘CNN effect’ concept was coined two decades ago, it quickly became a popular shorthand to understand media-conflict interactions. Although the connection has probably always been more complex than what was captured in the concept, research needs to be updated in order to better understand the multifaceted contemporary environments of both media and conflict. There are growing numbers and types of media sources, and multiple interactions between media and conflict actors, policymakers and engaged publics from the local to the global and back. We argue that understanding the impact of media reporting on conflict requires a new framework that captures the multilevel and hybrid media environments of contemporary conflicts. This study provides a roadmap of how to systematically unpack this environment. It describes and explains how different levels, interactions, and forms of news reporting shape conflicts and peacebuilding in local, national and regional contexts, and how international responses interact with multiple media narratives. With these tools, comprehensive understandings of contemporary local to global media interactions can be incorporated into new research on media and conflict.

This article theorises the simultaneous enaction of securitising and desecuritising moves. It argues that the frequent simultaneity of these two processes, which are normally considered mutually exclusive within Securitisation Theory (ST), has previously gone unnoticed given a set of methodological, temporal, and ontological biases that have developed within ST. Demonstrating how these biases can be overcome – and even reconciled with the seminal texts of ST – by drawing on work from within social theory and elsewhere, we argue that the frequent simultaneity of (de)securitising moves most urgently requires us to reconsider the normative status of desecuritisation within ST. Although desecuritisation has traditionally been viewed as normatively positive, we argue that its temporally immanent enaction alongside securitising moves might introduce more violence into security politics and, in fact, exacerbate protracted conflicts. Ultimately, we make the normative ambitions of some within ST more opaque. Desecuritisation is not a shortcut to the ethical-political good within ST.

This article critically examines recent works on resilience. In so doing, it argues that rather than representing some radical rupture with current practices heralding the dawn of a new era, as David Chandler claims, the emphasis on individuals as resilient subjects simply represents a new phase in the neoliberal shift from the state as provider to state as enabler and promoter of self-reliance. Indeed, our present preoccupation with complexity, uncertainty, and resilience can best be understood as reflecting the consequences of neoliberal policies Moreover, the article further argues that there is an attendant danger that resilience thinking may further promote neoliberal forms of governmentality and encourage a degree of political passivity. The emphasis on resilience is in danger of depoliticising highly political choices, shifting attention toward ex-post policies of survival and recovery rather than challenging the current economic order and resisting the further imposition of neoliberal policies on already beleaguered populations. This article therefore argues for shifting our emphasis towards a Foucauldian analysis of power and resistance.

At the height of the influence of the secularisation thesis religion was understood to be absent from affairs of state and the law, including international politics and international law. As the critique of secularisation gained momentum this master narrative fell apart, and a new consensus began to take shape. The notion that religion had been ignored and should be ‘brought back in’ to International Relations took centre stage among many academics and practitioners. The assumption is that restoring religion in the right way will help address the problems associated with having ignored religion in IR, paving the way for the marginalisation of violent religion and globalisation of religious freedom. This article undertakes a critical analysis of this restorative narrative and the religious and political world it is creating. It then proposes a different approach to the intersection of religion and world politics after secularism. This approach draws attention to the authority of transnational actors such as the United States, United Nations, and European Union to shape the public administration of religious affairs globally. Channels through which this is accomplished include the promotion of religious freedom, humanitarian intervention, foreign aid, nation building and democratisation, counterterrorism and peace-building efforts, and the pronouncements of supra-national courts.

China's increasing capabilities are a central focus of modern day US security concerns. The International Relations literature is a key forum for analyses of the so-called ‘China threat’ and yet it remains relatively quiet on the role of ideas in the construction and perpetuation of the dangers that country is understood to present. This article reveals that throughout history ‘threats’ from China towards the United States, rather than objectively verifiable phenomena, have always been social constructions of American design and thus more than calculations of material forces. Specifically, it argues that powerful and pervasive American representations of China have been repeatedly and purposefully responsible for creating a threatening identity. It also demonstrates that these representations have enabled and justified US China policies which themselves have reaffirmed the identities of both China and the United States, protecting the latter when seemingly threatened by the former. Three case studies from across the full duration of Sino-American relations expose the centrality of ideas to historical and contemporary understandings of China ‘threats’, and to the American foreign policies formulated in response.

In a recent article in the Review of International Studies, Kai Alderson subjected the concept of state socialisation to considerable scrutiny. This kind of conceptual clarification is fundamental to both theory building and empirical work in the study of international relations. Alderson should be commended for his work on the concept, since there are only a handful of previous studies that explicitly explore state socialisation in any detail. However, his attempt to produce a ‘consensus definition’ of the concept to bring clarity to an emerging research programme has left me with more questions than answers. This essay is designed to raise questions about Alderson's conceptualisation of state socialisation based on a comparison with the literature on socialisation from other disciplines. The overarching goal is to stimulate healthy debate about a concept that should be central to our understanding of the social aspects of international politics.

Alexander Wendt has drawn on an exceptional range of theoretical literature in his effort to reconceptualize the nature of the international system. His discussion of scientific realism ought to be required reading for any student of international relations, or political science for that matter. He puts to rest the notion that constructivism is necessarily postmodern, devoid of an objective referent. In John Searle's felicitous formulation it is possible to have a subjective ontology but an objective epistemology. In emphasizing that all knowledge is theory laden, Wendt underscores the point that facts never simply speak for themselves. In both the social and natural sciences brute empiricism is never an adequate research strategy. Our theories shape the way we see the world but they cannot remake the world in their own image.

This article examines the subtle and not so subtle shifts in Canadian political culture that have taken place in, through and alongside the so-called ‘return’ of the Canadian warrior. It begins from the contention that while the racialised dimensions of the post 9/11 Canadian security state have been well analysed elsewhere, the gendered dimensions have not been fully explored. This article explores the re-emergence of a sacrificial imaginary in Canadian culture through an examination of seemingly irreconcilable accounts that have emerged of the Canadian security state – one that reads ‘Canada’ through the story of the torture and repatriation of Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, and one that tells the story of ‘Canada at War’ through the warrior's return. It examines both in terms of the tensions and instabilities they reveal in the Western liberal imaginary and in terms of the ways in which they collectively operate to redefine the aesthetic borders of the Canadian political community. The article argues that the sacralisation of violence which has refound this political community has been enabled by a remasculinised aesthetic that delimits the ‘progressive liberalism’ which animated the Canada of Old – ostensibly in order to protect it.

How China assumes its position of superpower is one of the most important questions regarding global order in the twenty-first century. While considerable and sustained attention has been paid to China’s growing economic and military might, work examining how China is attempting, if at all, to influence the ecosystem of global norms is in its earlier stages. In this article we examine China’s actions in an important venue for the development of global norms, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Using a unique dataset that captures how other countries move into or out of alignment with China on UNGA resolutions that are repeated over time, we find statistical evidence that China used diplomatic and economic means in an attempt to subtly alter international norms. We further illustrate these findings by examining four states that made substantive moves toward China on resolutions concerning national sovereignty, democracy, international order, non-interference, and human rights.

That states are sovereign units interacting under conditions of anarchy has long been the core assumption of the discipline of International Relations. Operating largely with an anthropomorphic conceptualization of the state, 'statists' create a stunted ontology of the international system dominated by the concepts of state survival and an assumed state survival interest. By constituting sharp lines of demarcation between being and non-being, between 'life' and 'death', statists ignore a host of more subtle changes in the ontological status of states which are ill-treated by reference to 'survival'. This Westphalian ontology leads ultimately to a dead end, for such a definition rejects from the outset an ontology of overlapping political authorities in a single territory but at distinct scales which is characteristic not only of the present international system but of the so-called Westphalian era as well.

Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse, London, Hurst and Co., 1995

Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia's Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transition, 2nd edn, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1995

Mihailo Crnobrnja, The Yugoslav Drama, 2nd edn, London, I. B. Tauris, 1996

Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia, revised edn, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Paul Mojzes, Yugoslavian Inferno, New York, Continuum, 1994

Edgar O'Ballance, Civil War in Bosnia, London, Macmillan, 1995

Sabrina Petra Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to Ethnic War, 2nd edn, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1996

Laura Silber abd Alan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia, revised edn, London, Penguin Books, 1996

Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Washington, DC, Brookings, 1995

John Zametica, The Yugoslav Conflict, London, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1992

This article explores Jim George's claim that Hans Morgenthau's notion of political realism is founded upon a spectator theory of knowledge and that it discloses no meaningful distinction between theory and practice. An investigation of Morgenthau's understanding of scientific inquiry, the relation of theory and practice, and his views on American foreign policy suggests that both of these claims may be misplaced. Rather Morgenthau's realism is an authentic moral voice in the discourse of world politics which emphasizes the importance of judgment and the need to locate statecraft in historical, social, and political context. It is a realism that is representative of a rich moral tradition, one which orders, arranges, and prioritizes fundamental human values and which is concerned with how these values might be realized. This conclusion not only emancipates a valuable tradition of scholarship, it also raises important question about how we engage and organize the discipline of international relations and it suggests that some critical thinking spaces may provide a rather limited refuge for those wishing to go beyond Morgenthau and realism.

Global public goods (GPGs) are vital to human welfare and security worldwide. Yet often they suffer from under-provision and free-riding, and are not accessible or beneficial to everyone. They illustrate starkly problems of collective action. This article examines multilateral negotiations in which countries seek agreement on the terms for collaboration in providing GPGs. It argues that common obstacles to an effective agreement concern justice and fairness issues, which arise from the earliest phase when the agenda is set to the final stage of securing implementation and compliance. Drawing on recent negotiation practice, it proposes a framework and a set of strategies for how such issues could be tackled.

This article analyses the way in which international administrations exercising governmental power in post-conflict territories justify their political authority in the absence of democratic legitimacy. Looking at the administrations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor, the article focuses on their establishment, their mandates, and their government practices and identifies five different sources of authority: consent, delegation, the maintenance of peace and security, the promotion of human rights and democracy, and the provision of government. However, all of these sources are contested. In particular the practices of international administrations, their lack of accountability and their limited effectiveness in providing government, undermine their authority. The article concludes by highlighting some possible avenues for enhancing the authority of international administrations.

Tackling germs, negotiating norms, and securing access to medicines are persistent challenges that disproportionally affect developing countries' participation in global health governance. Furthermore, over the last two decades, the excessive focus on global pandemics and security in global health diplomacy, rendered peripheral diseases that usually strike the poor and vulnerable, creating situations of marginalisation and inequality across societies. However, as the importance of regions and regionalism increases in global politics, and integration ambitions and initiatives extend beyond trade and investment to embrace welfare policy, there are new opportunities to explore whether and how regional commitments affect health equity and access to medicine in developing nations. What, if any, are the possibilities for meso-level institutions to provide leadership and direction in support of alternative practices of global (health) governance? Can regional polities become international advocacy actors in support of global justice goals? This article addresses these questions by analysing regional health diplomacy in South America. The article argues that regional organisations can become sites for collective action and pivotal actors in the advocacy of rights (to health) enabling diplomatic and strategic options to member state and nonstate actors, and playing a role as deal-broker in international organisations by engaging in new forms of regional health diplomacy.

International law, traditional scholars of international politics tell us, is a useless fiction. Statesmen either do not follow legal stipulations or they do so only when it is in their interest to do it. International law plays no independent role in world politics since it can always be reduced to the more fundamental considerations of power politics. National interests simply do not bow to legal requirements.