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.

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

The current economic crisis challenges the constitutive rules of global finance. Despite its various roots, dynamics, and consequences, the current reform debate is surprisingly limited in scope: it focuses on possible changes of Basle II and thus banking regulation only. This article suggests that the reason for this ‘gap’ can be found in the idea of asymmetric information. The idea that the asymmetric dispersion of information is the ‘real’ cause of the crisis is reiterated constantly in public documents. However, the argument rests upon two assumptions: that crises are exogenous to otherwise efficient and stable markets, and that finance is an autonomous field where the primary focus of the current reform can then concentrate on its laws. It is thought that it is enough to reform financial markets to stabilise the global economy. This article suggests that this belief is utterly misguided and argues that a more comprehensive picture of the current turmoil needs to abandon exactly these two assumptions. To pursue such an avenue, this article provids an interpretation of Hayek's social theory.

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.

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.

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.

In recent years numerous reports of prisoner abuse and other militarised violences by British troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have emerged. Drawing on two such incidents – the abuse of detainees at Camp Breadbasket and the murder of Baha Mousa – this article seeks to locate such violences on a continuum that can be traced back to the ways in which British soldiers are trained. Following on from a burgeoning feminist literature on militarised masculinities, and using Avery Gordon's epistemology of ghosts and hauntings, I suggest a conceptual and methodological intervention into the subject that resists generalised stories and the mapping of ‘hard’ borders. Focusing on the myths of asexuality and discipline that emerge from, and reinforce, the gendered discourses of basic training, I conduct a ‘ghost hunt’ of the haunting spectres that have attempted to be exorcised from these myths. Making visible these ghost(s) and tracing their (violent) materialisations through multiple sites and across a continuum, militarised violences – in all their ranges – begin to be made explicable.

This article focuses on the production and dissemination of photographic images by serving US soldiers in Iraq who are photographing their experiences and posting them on the Internet. This form of visual communication – in real time and communal – is new in the representation of warfare; in earlier wars soldiers took photographs, but these were not immediately shared in the way websites can disseminate images globally. This digital generation of soldiers exist in a new relationship to their experience of war; they are now potential witnesses and sources within the documentation of events, not just the imaged actors – a blurring of roles that reflects the correlations of revolutions in military and media affairs. This photography documents the everyday experiences of the soldiers and its historical significance may reside less in the controversial or revelatory images but in more mundane documentation of the environments, activities and feelings of American soldiery at war.

From the perspective of a particular kind of international theorizing, foundational questions about the nature of international society are a central concern. ‘Does the collectivity of sovereign states constitute a political society or system, or does it not? ’ is, according to Hedley Bull, the first of a series of questions that, taken together, constitute ‘Classical’ international relations theory and distinguish it from the ‘Scientific’ approach to the subject. Similar sentiments could be drawn readily from the work of the other authors whose writings collectively make up the International Theory, or International Society, or ‘English School’ approach to international relations theory. I have argued elsewhere that there are reasons why this emphasis on international society is mistaken. To cut a long story short, the burden of the argument is that an approach that places primary emphasis on the nature of international society is likely to isolate itself from the wider discourses of political and social philosophy in ways that cannot be defended in terms of any alleged sui generis features of international relations. Rather, international relations theory is best understood as an aspect of political theory and not as a discourse with its own rules and subject matter. However, this argument has been cast in ‘meta-theoretical’ terms and does not directly address the actual issue of the nature of international society; critics are entitled to point to the absence here of a clearly articulated, positive point of view. The purpose of this article is to begin to remedy this omission, by sketching the outlines of an examination of international society that would be less tied to traditional categories and in closer contact with broader movements in social thought.

Martin Wight once compared ‘the increasing number of small states which are the debris of colonial empires’ to ‘the increasing number of small principalities’ of an earlier period in international history which were ‘the debris of feudalism’. The citystates, monarchies, republics, confederations and various other emergent states of Europe eventually found an alternative to the mediaeval societas Christiana on which their independence and intercourse could be legitimately based. This was, of course, the practice of dynastic legitimacy or what Burke glorified as ‘prescription’: the right of inherited and established states to international recognition which sufficed as the constitution of European international society until the French revolution. Burke invoked it to condemn the revolution and justify foreign intervention not only to destroy the Jacobins and restore the monarchy but also to defend ‘the college of the ancient states of Europe’.3 It was a lost cause.

American grand strategy has undergone repeated changes in recent years. This essay clarifies the nature of those changes and offers an explanation for them. US foreign policymakers have had four basic strategic alternatives: a strategy of disengagement; a strategy of balance of power; a strategy of primacy; and a strategy of liberal internationalism. The Bush administration experimented with two of these strategies, and initiated two major strategic adjustments after coming into power: the first, early in 2001, by moving from Clinton's liberal internationalist approach towards a strategy of realism; the second, after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, by moving from a realist approach towards a strategy of American primacy. International structural pressures cannot explain why either of these changes occurred. The real explanation lies in the influence of distinctive policy ideas, as promoted by leading state officials. The irony of this twofold strategic adjustment is that the realists of the Bush administration have returned to many of the Wilsonian assumptions that characterised the Clinton years.

A study of ethics must be regarded as incomplete if it does not offer tools for analysing moral problems arising in the international context, particularly in an age of growing interdependence between the peoples of the world. Similarly, a study of international relations must be thought to be imperfect if it leaves out normative questions.

To this it may be objected that International Relations is an empirical discipline, and that it can legitimately leave normative considerations to moral philosophers. However, such a division of labour is unfortunately more likely to result in mere division rather than efficient co-operation. Moreover, international relations, the subject-matter, is logically, as well as historically, prior to International Relations, the academic discipline. Therefore, a study of international relations, undertaken by International Relations experts, cannot be claimed to be complete if it neglects those aspects of the subject-matter which have occupied the minds of many thinkers who do not consider themselves as IR specialists.

This article aims to understand the phenomenon of international terrorism by wedding a constructivist understanding of terrorism with an overview of the historical evolution of the state. The Westphalian state has replaced three types of authority: religious, personal and local. Political challenges to the modern international system inevitably derive their claim to legitimacy from one of these other forms of authority. I argue that there is a correlation between the kind of legitimacy claim a ‘terrorist’ cause is based on and how threatening we find the activities based on that claim. The less the distance between the unrecognised legitimacy claim on the one hand and the principles conferring legitimacy in the modern states system on the other, the less ontologically threatening we find the claimants to be. All historical variants of modern ‘terrorism’ fall into one of two categories of disruptive activity. They are either based in claims to local authority and target only particular states, or in claims to personal and/or religious authority and reject the modern states system altogether. Groups labelled as terrorist can therefore be classified as system-affirming or system-threatening. The former is a contained problem, but the latter has followed geographically broadening spread pattern throughout the international system.

This article contributes to current debates about Just War by analysing an insufficiently recognised problem with the way Just War theorists have responded to the two principal challenges surrounding the ethics of violence in international relations since the end of the Cold War – humanitarian intervention and the ‘global war on terror’. The problem focuses on strongly embedded assumptions that exist in contemporary Just War debates about the nature and meaning of territory. The article argues that Just War needs to engage more systematically with challenges to dominant ‘Westphalian’ framings of territory, space and scale in order to contribute more effectively to important ethical debates about the use of violence in international relations.

Rudolf Kjellén was an important political scientist during the first half of this century. He is perhaps the most influential Scandinavian political scientist ever. Together with the political geographer Fredrich Ratzel, Kjellén was the founder of the German geopolitical school. All his major works were translated into German, but they were, to my knowledge, never translated into English. They were important sources of inspiration for the leading geopolitical theorist and military general, Karl Haushofer.Karl Haushofer, Grenzen in ihrer geographischen und politischen Bedeutung (Berlin Grünewald: Kurt Vowinckel Verlag, 1927); Dan Diner, ‘Grundbuch des Planeten’—Zur Geopolitik Karl Haushofer, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte,32: 1 (1984), pp. 1–28; Barbro Lewin, Johan Skytte och de skytteanska professorerna[Johan Skytte and the Skyttean Professors]. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis (Skrifter utgivna av Statsvetenskapliga föreningen i Uppsala, 100), (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1985); Rainer Sprengel, ‘Land und Meer—Eine diskursanalytische Betrachtung’, WeltTrends (1994), pp. 61–84. By the time of his visit to Sweden in 1935, Haushofer was about to publish the 25th German edition of Kjellén's Die Grossmächte [The Great Powers].Edward Thermænius, ‘Geopolitik och politisk geografi’ [Geopolitics and Political Geography], Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, 19 (1937), pp. 213–328. The idea that states were not fixed juridicial entities but dynamic organisms competing on the international scene, was something that appealed to Haushofer. He was to fuse this thought with Ratzel's concept of Lebensraum, that was later to reach Hitler.

This article considers the rise and fall of the first institution of international academic cooperation on international relations, the International Studies Conference (ISC), which was established in 1928 and continued activities into the 1950s. Its formation preceded by decades the present ISA as well as the international organisation of political scientists. The demise of the ISC was a result of the failings of the ISC itself, the influence of UNESCO especially its Department of Social Sciences, and the challenge posed to the ISC by the formation of the International Political Science Association.

Gramscian theory has had a profound influence on critical and Marxist thought within International Relations (IR), particularly in bringing an alternative understanding to the realist concept of hegemony. Despite these developments much Gramscian theory remains developed within the often narrow sub-discipline of International Political Economy (IPE), with Gramscian scholars such as Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and Ernesto Laclau from diverse disciplines outside of IR largely ignored. This article argues that Gramscian theory needs to be re-thought so that it moves away from the Coxian dominated ontology that it is currently situated within, towards one which both provides a more open theory of global hegemony and engages more with civil societal areas that have often been ignored by those within IPE.

Even though a vibrant literature on gender in international relations has developed over the last decade, students of international sanctions have not explored sanctions from a gendered perspective: analyses tend to have been either gender-neutral or gender-blind. By the same token, however, feminist scholars of international politics have not included sanctions in their empirical investigations. This article examines sanctions from a gendered perspective. Using conclusions suggested by the feminist IR literature, we examine the case-study of the sanctions against Iraq, and demonstrate the degree to which these measures had deeply gender-specific impacts, ranging from differential deprivations to declines in dowry wealth. We conclude from the Iraqi experience that the gendered effects of sanctions have considerable implications for sanctions theory.

This article challenges conventional narratives that suggest that the travails in the Doha Round, the shift to bilateral free trade agreements, and the broader unfolding of the global crisis collectively presage the decline of either the WTO or the broader institution of multilateral trade. We question the extent to which recent trends can indeed be said to constitute a genuine crisis of trade multilateralism by reflecting upon the contradictory and ambiguous nature of the multilateralism of the past, and also upon how contemporary multilateralism has been framed with reference to it. Our main finding is that, in contrast to the many short and medium-term symptoms which tend to appear in the conventional story of multilateral decline, there is actually a far more worrying long-term trend which underpins the varied conflicts that characterise contemporary trade politics: the fundamental lack of a shared social purpose between the developed countries and the more powerful emerging countries on which a stable, equitable, and legitimate edifice of multilateral trade rules can be erected, institutionalised, and enhanced.