Conventional understandings of security cooperation are rooted in the state-centric and materialist assumptions dominant in the Cold War and subscribe to the dictum of the Reagan years, ‘trust but verify’. In today's more complex setting, however, governance arrangements with the most potential to address constantly mutating security threats, such as the concern over nuclear terrorism, may not be those solely designed to ensure compliance, but rather those that are better equipped to identify and solve new problems. This article draws on a burgeoning literature on ‘new’ or ‘experimental’ governance and advances an analytical framework to consider the extent to which states and other actors might be turning toward an alternative set of mechanisms that rely more heavily on non-binding standards and recommendations, peer review, increased participation, and experimentation to generate new knowledge about the challenges they face, even in the ‘hard’ case of security cooperation. It then explores this potential reorientation in two separate, but complementary cases that have emerged as key tools in preventing illicit nuclear proliferation: the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF), which seeks to bolster states' counter-financing of terrorism systems, and the UNSC Resolution 1540 Committee, which guides efforts to fill the governance gaps in the nuclear non-proliferation regime. Although both cases on paper contain more traditional enforcement components, in practice they rely increasingly on experimental governance. The article concludes with an evaluation of the promise and limits of an experimentalist framework in understanding the evolution of governance arrangements in response to a more complex security environment and suggests potential avenues for future research.

Political cosmopolitanism comes in many different shapes and sizes. Despite its intellectual diversity, cosmopolitanism typically agrees on one crucial matter: any prospective global democracy is best envisioned not in terms of a hierarchical world state, but instead as a multilayered system of global governance resting on an unprecedented dispersion of decision-making authority. In discarding traditional ideas of world government, cosmopolitans typically succumb to a series of mistakes. First, they presuppose unfairly dismissive accounts of world government. Second, they misleadingly contrast their own multilayered and (allegedly) institutionally novel vision to early modern (for example, Hobbesian) ideas of sovereignty, or to Max Weber's influential definition of the modern state. They thus obscure the fact that the modern state's diverse manifestations can only be partly grasped by ideal-types drawn from either Hobbes or Weber. Consequently, they depend on straw person accounts of the modern state. Third, envisioning their proposals as building on the familiar ideal of institutional checks and balances, they misconstrue the contribution that checks and balances can make to global-level democracy. Their hostility to statist ideas about global democracy notwithstanding, their proposals sometimes mimic core attributes of traditional statehood, and they tend inadvertently to ‘bring the state back in’ to global democracy.

In this article, I argue that much of the discourse observable within the UN constitutes neither unnecessary and unproductive ‘talk’ nor efforts to convince outside audiences of its legitimacy, but actually a form of institutional self-legitimation that is key to its ability to function. Using the case of the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), I show that because the organisation has a multifaceted organisational identity, it faces situations where it is forced to choose between multiple but equally appropriate courses of action, and it uses self-legitimation alongside other mechanisms to overcome these tensions. I specify three sets of circumstances in which this occurs, showing how DPKO uses discourse that simplifies and exceptionalises in a bid to reconcile or downplay these contradictions and reassert a cohesive and legitimate organisational identity internally. This simplification and exceptionalisation in turn serve an enabling function, allowing DPKO to continue operating in conditions of complexity by decreasing risk aversion and instilling a deep sense of professional loyalty in staff. At the same time, such discursive processes are costly and may entrench inefficient practices, rendering the effects of self-legitimising discourse paradoxical: they may enable action, but they reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of that action.

This article addresses the issue of the information revolution and international affairs. It makes three arguments. First, the evolution of a global digital information network is likely to diminish state capacity and autonomy, but the specific nature of the effects of new information technologies are indeterminate because the technology and the politics are inextricably intertwined and the technology itself is not yet ‘complete’. Second, the effects of a mature digital information infrastructure are best understood as the outcome of a three-way political struggle between centralized political authorities (states), centralized economic entities (firms) and individuals as both consumers and citizens. Third, in spite of the indeterminacy of technological change, a matrix of possible outcomes can be constructed. The globalization argument is partially correct: state capacities will drop, relatively speaking, and firm capacities will increase unless states and people can reconceptualize their relationship and guide technological development to suit their interests. The article analyses three representative pieces of a mature global digital information network—the physical network media, cryptography, and digital money—to show how the new information technologies are deeply political and their effects therefore indeterminate.

Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict and the International System, Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner, 1995

This article argues that hierarchy plays an important role in shaping the practice of intervention, and that the changing nature of international hierarchy is a crucial part of the story of how the modern practice of intervention emerged. It describes the early modern order of precedence, and contends that it was ill-suited to encouraging people to recognise intervention as a distinctive kind of practice. However, over the course of the eighteenth century the structure of international hierarchy changed, with the emergence of a new kind of grading of powers, which provided the context for the development of a practice of intervention after 1815.

The article deals with NATO's intervention in Kosovo. Instead of focusing on the military and diplomatic interventions, the article looks at how NATO developed a humanitarian interest in providing assistance and protection to the Kosovo Albanian refugees. In the name of the refugees—and to a lesser extent, of internally displaced persons—NATO entered a humanitarian field and was partly transfigured into a humanitarian agency during the crisis in Kosovo. The political significance of NATO's humanitarianism was that its reputation for competence and its image of respectability and honour depended to an extent on how well it supported the international assistance to the Kosovo Albanians. The stakes were not limited to the immediate Kosovo context, however. The symbolic struggle for reputation and honour resonated directly in the political struggle for the conservation and transformation of the European security complex. The success of the humanitarian operation became an additional element of demonstrating the value of military capital for acquiring political authority in the definition and management of security problems in post-Cold War Europe.

What are we to make of the neoconservative challenge to traditional international thought? Should we content ourselves, as many have done, to return to classical realism in response? Rather than offer another realist assessment of neoconservative foreign policy this article turns to Hannah Arendt. In a very different language, Arendt articulated a critique of the dangers of moralism in the political realm that avoids realist cynicism. She is also better placed to challenge the neoconservative vision of international affairs, ideological conviction, and their relationship to democratic society. Reading Arendt against Leo Strauss suggests that the fundamental problem with neoconservative ideology concerns its understanding of the place of philosophy in the public realm, the relationship between political thought and practice, ideas and action. She suggests why neoconservatives may be experts at selling wars but seem less adept at winning them.

Recent trends in international law scholarship recycle objections to international law advanced by an earlier generation of political and legal realists. Such objections fail to understand the place of international law in the global order. To understand that place, we must distinguish the idea of the rule of law from other understandings of law. That idea is an inherently moral one. Theories of international law that ignore the moral element in law cannot distinguish law as a constraint on power from law as an instrument of power. A Kantian theory of international law can help to recover that moral element.

Environmental change is a global phenonemon caused by, and increasingly acting as a constraint upon, human activity. Thus analysis of the determinants of human behaviour is necessary to the understanding of global environmental issues. In this respect the salience of gender to global-change issues has frequently been noted. However, attempts to 'put gender on the agenda' of global environmental politics have resulted in, not the incorporation of gender, but the addition of women. This article attempts to explain this apparently unintended outcome through examining ways in which human agency and social structures interact in framing issues and setting agendas.

The title of this article brings together two terms, the latter, ‘international ethics’, is instantly recognizable as referring to a distinct aspect of the academic study of international relations with its own canonic tradition and debates. The former term, ‘feminist’, is much less familiar, and for many normative theorists in international relations refers to a political movement and set of ideological positions whose relevance to international ethics is far from clear. It is therefore necessary to engage in some preliminary explanation of the term ‘feminism’ and how it has come to be linked to ‘international ethics’ in recent scholarship in order to set out the argument of this article. It is only in the last fifteen years that theoretical perspectives under the label of feminism have come to be applied to international relations, although they have a rather longer history within other social sciences and, significantly, within ethical theory. Feminism as a political movement comes in a variety of ideological forms and the same is true of feminism within the academy. The common theme which connects diverse theoretical positions under the label of ‘feminism’ is the claim that paying attention to the ways in which social reality is ‘gendered’ has a productive impact on how it is to be understood, judged and may be changed. What counts as ‘productive’ is related not simply to the goal of enriching understanding and judgment as such (by drawing attention to its gendered dimension), but to the explicitly political goal of exposing and addressing the multiple ways in which both women and men are oppressed by gendered relations of power. It is clear, from the first, therefore, that there is a powerfully normative agenda inherent in any perspective labelled as ‘feminist’.

Regionalism, and more generally multilateralism, is commanding considerable attention in the policy and intellectual communities. In the security domain, this interest can be traced to a number of developments. One is the regionalization of international security brought about by the dramatic change in the dynamics of the international political system. In the absence of a new overarching and overriding global-level security dynamic, domestic, bilateral and regional dynamics have become more salient and have to be addressed in their own terms. It is now much more necessary and possible, for example, to discuss security in Asia, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East in regional and sub-regional contexts, quite independent of a global dynamic or developments in other regions. While the interests and linkages arising from the involvement of external powers must still be taken into account, the context is qualitatively different from the Cold War era, when the dynamics of the superpower conflict permeated and in many cases subsumed the local dynamics of conflicts.

This article starts from the premise that empathy is an inherent part of social and political life but that this is not sufficiently theorised in International Relations (IR). Building on the burgeoning debates on emotions in world politics, it argues that the study of empathy should be developed more rigorously by establishing an interdisciplinary and critical framework for understanding the experiences and processes of empathy in IR. The central contribution of the article is twofold: firstly, it highlights limitations of the dominant perspective on empathy in IR, and secondly, it argues that a range of meanings may be attributed to empathy when examined within the sociopolitical conditions of particular contexts. Drawing on research on the conflict in Israel and Palestine, the article identifies and articulates two such alternative interpretations: empathy as non-violent resistance and as a strategy of normalisation.

This article critically examines the question of whether poverty has been reduced in recent years, and if so, whether this is a result of neoliberal and/or globalisation friendly policies. The first section problematises at least some claims made for poverty reduction and the second section questions any causal link between ‘pro-globalisation’ policies and poverty reduction. The third and final section considers in detail the nature of the contemporary global economy, and in examining the evidence concerning capital flows shows how, contrary to the claims made by neoliberals and some globalisation theorists, capital is not dispersing throughout the world. Moreover, even when the ‘correct policies’ are adopted, this is unlikely to happen. I then conclude by suggesting why ‘actually existing globalidation’ does not alleviate, and may indeed intensify, global inequalities.

In this paper, I argue that there is an emerging consensus among realists that the US should abandon its hegemonic strategy and adopt an offshore balancing strategy. Here, Iraq and the so called war on terrorism (or ‘long war’, or ‘global counter-insurgency’, as some American officials sometimes refer to it) have been the catalysts. Increasingly, it is recognised that US aims in the Persian Gulf/Middle East – and the American military presence in the region – have fuelled terrorism, and caused Iran to self-defensively seek to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. A number of leading realists now argue that the best strategy for the US is to extricate itself from Iraq, reduce its regional footprint, and adopt an offshore balancing strategy.

The debate on the reform of the Security Council can be conceptualised as the most recent episode in the evolution of World Governing Councils (WGCs), that is, the highest-level intergovernmental bodies charged with regulating the international use of violence. Building on a historical comparison of key formative and transformative moments – 1815, 1919, 1945, and post-Cold War – we argue that the modern evolution of WGCs is characterised by increasing inclusiveness. More specifically, we show that the number of participants involved in deliberations has constantly risen; that legitimating principles have gradually tilted in favour of ‘input legitimacy’; that the constitutive rules and procedures have steadily gained in transparency; and that the WGCs themselves have comprised an expanding membership with a decreasing number of veto points. At the theoretical level, these converging trends can be explained by the existence of a ‘ratchet effect’ whereby new norms and practices of inclusion accumulate over time. However concrete and long lasting, the democratic gains registered in the process must be cast in terms of historically specific politics and struggles rather than in terms of lofty ideals promoted by altruistic norm entrepreneurs.

Aside from the more mundane purpose of telling us where to eat, sleep and sightsee in foreign lands, guidebooks communicate an ethical vision that sees travel as the key to reducing cultural differences and inequalities. This article argues that Lonely Planet guidebooks in particular encourage a form of ‘responsible independent travel’ that both reflects and produces a powerful discourse of humanitarianism. By examining the controversy over Lonely Planet’s publication of guidebooks to Burma, this article uncovers the problematic colonial logic embedded in that ethical vision.

Ideational variables have frequently been employed in positivist-minded and materialist analyses of state behaviour. Almost inevitably, because of these commitments, such studies run into theoretical challenges relating to the use of ideas. In this article, I suggest that integrating ideational factors in positivist and materialist approaches to state behaviour requires: (1) distinguishing conceptually between interests and ideation as well as between individual beliefs and social ideas; and (2) addressing challenges of operationalisation and measurability. To that end, I employ neoclassical realism as a case study. I argue that a re-conceptualisation of ideas as externalised individual beliefs employed in political deliberation allows neoclassical realists to focus on how ideas and ideational competition intervene in the transmission belt from materially given interests to foreign policy choice. At the same time, it more clearly operationalises ideas as identifiable in language and communication. I suggest this reconceptualisation, while consistent with realist paradigmatic assumptions, need not be limited to neoclassical realism. Instead, transposed to different paradigms, it would similarly allow positivist-minded constructivists and institutionalists to avoid a conceptually and methodologically awkward equation of different ideational factors.

R. B. J. Walker recently noted that far from its largely accepted status as an ‘essentially contested’ concept, state sovereignty is instead an essentially uncontested concept. This is a seemingly paradoxical comment for an international relations theorist to make in light of the recent revival of academic scrutiny concerning sovereign statehood. Rather than marking an inattention to recent trends in the sovereignty literature, Walker's statement is a commentary on the way sovereign statehood has been studied. Walker writes of sovereign statehood:

Chairs have a significant potential effect on the bargaining structure and conduct of multilateral negotiations, addressing collective action problems that arise in decentralised bargaining. We examine the role of the Chair as a policy entrepreneur in multilateral negotiations, identifying the parameters that increase the Chair's entrepreneurship potential and condition the outcome of the Chair's entrepreneurial activities. We cluster the identified parameters in three groups of organisational attributes, comprising the Chair's mandate, available resources and (formal) constraints, in particular decision-making rules. We use this typology to analyse four important case studies within the UN setting.