When confronted with images of war and other forms of human suffering, not looking is not an option, not only because we are permanently exposed to images but also because it would not seem to be a morally tenable position. However, looking at images of human suffering is often said to prolong this very suffering and to fix human subjects as victims. Especially when acts of violence have been committed in order to produce images of these very acts the relationship between viewing the images and participating in the acts of violence qua viewer appears to be uncomfortably close indeed. Thus, looking is not an option, either. This article, in the first part, engages with standard criticisms of photography, especially with accusations according to which photographs aestheticise that which they depict and desensitise their viewers. In the second part it discusses Alfredo Jaar's and Jeff Wall's work in order to show possible ways to circumvent the looking/not looking dilemma.

American foreign policy has been recently dominated by the venture into Iraq. This has not gone well. Most criticism has focused on ‘mistakes’ – there were not enough US troops, or they were of the wrong type, the Iraqi army was mistakenly disbanded after it surrendered, looting was not anticipated, oil expectations were unreal, the US depended too much on Iraqi exile claims, and so forth. Indeed, these were mistakes. 250,000 troops trained also in police roles would have made a difference. So might Iraqi army units converted into security police. So might better planning all round. But the mistakes were only the surface phenomena of a more profound American failure. The Iraq venture was doomed from the outset by the attempt to create what some neo-conservatives styled a ‘New American Empire’. This exaggerated American powers, made facile historical comparisons with previous Empires, mis-identified the enemy, and mis-identified the century we live in. This early twenty-first century attempt at Empire is failing. There will not be others.

A growing body of scholarship connects the participation of women and the inclusion of gender provisions to the sustainability of peace settlements. But how do women's groups navigate gender power structures and gendered forms of violence within complex and fragile political bargaining processes aimed at ending large-scale conflict? The 2016 Colombian peace agreement, internationally applauded for its inclusion of strong gender provisions and women's participation as negotiators and peace advocates, is a significant case for examining these questions. Drawing on original case material, including interviews of key actors on different sides of the conflict – this article analyses the political bargaining dynamics within and among women's movements, the Santos government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC). We argue that the inclusion of women was pivotal in transforming the elite bargaining process and power structures of Colombian society enabling a gender-based approach to the substantive peace agenda addressing transitional gender justice for sexual violence survivors and gender-equal redistribution through land and rural reform programmes. The study suggests that deeply situated political bargaining analysis is essential to navigating gender in elite bargains rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to inclusive peace.

In the field of International Relations (IR), narrative approaches and an alternative way of writing seem to have gained growing attention in recent scholarship. Autoethnography and autobiography can be taken as primary examples. The article aims to advance this growing scholarship by proposing the concept of fictional IR. The idea is concerned with how to use the imagination in IR. I suggest that fiction writing can become a method for dealing with lack of information and contingency surrounding it. Fictional IR is more than reading and using fiction as a reference source or vehicle for analysis. It can incorporate the employment of fiction writing in IR scholarship. One of the benefits could be to articulate sensitive and complicated problems in a more flexible and imaginative way, making the most of the power of story and imagination. It should be stressed that the focal point is to write fiction; it is not to write about fiction. To support this suggestion, the article offers a short fictional-factual story. By using imagination, creating characters, combining data with fictional narrative, or with one's own experience, I believe that more original and empathetic IR writing is possible.

Based on considerable archival research in Switzerland and France, this article considers the creation of specialised institutions and centres for scientific research, discussion and information on international questions after the First World War. It analyses the origins and development of the International Studies Conference from 1928 until 1946, and it pays particular attention to the institutional setting provided by the ISC. With the help of an international questionnaire of the League of Nations from the early 1930s the article also discusses the university teaching of IR in the US, Great Britain and on the European continent in the interwar period, and it looks at some of the institutional settings, especially academic institutions (departments, chairs, schools and so on), that were available at the time.

‘Politics has become a contest of competitive credibility’, argued Nye in Soft Power. Indeed, being perceived as honest and reliable is a necessary condition for obtaining and holding the attention of target audiences, as well as for effective persuasion, which is the objective of strategic communication. This task has become all the more difficult with the explosion of information sources and the discreditation efforts of opponents, but it is an essential element in the conduct of public diplomacy. How, then, do states and other international actors go about establishing their credibility while undermining that of opponents? This article employs rhetorical theory, impression management theory, and account theory to situate contests of credibility within the broader context of the accountability of social conduct. The theoretical part discusses the rhetorical strategies that actors use to credit their accounts and discredit those of their rivals. The empirical part addresses the debate between Israel and human rights groups over the Qana bombing incident of July 2006. The analysis of the blame imposition strategies used by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the accounts offered by Israel, indicates the range and variability of credibility talk and the rules for crediting accounts that underlie it.

Understanding the origins of capitalism in terms of feudal crisis, agrarian class structures and economic development in Europe has been an enduring concern of a growing body of scholarship focusing on changes in social property relations. This work has been distinctive in highlighting long-term patterns of social property relations central to shaping late medieval and early modern Europe, variegated patterns of serfdom within feudalism, class conflicts intrinsic to the emergence of agrarian capitalism, and thus capitalist ‘transition’ through different paths of development. Most recently, the implications of a focus on social property relations have been drawn out in its relevance for International Relations (IR), expressly in terms of tracing specificities within the age of absolutism that shaped the expansion of the states-system and its relation to modernity. This article outlines and engages with past and present debates linked to the social property relations approach. It raises several problematics through an engagement with the theorising of political modernity by Antonio Gramsci and on this basis offers pointers towards future lines of enquiry from which further reflection on the conditions of historical and contemporary state formation and restructuring may proceed.

It has become common to speak of health security, but the meaning of the latter is often taken for granted. Existing engagements with this notion have been constrained by an excessive focus on national security and on the securitising efforts of elites. This has led to an increasingly sceptical outlook on the potentialities of security for making sense of, and helping to tackle, health problems. Inspired by the idea of security as emancipation, this article reconsiders the notion of health security. It takes as its starting point the concrete insecurities experienced by individuals, and engages with them by way of an analytical framework centred on the notion of domination. Domination deepens analysis by connecting individual experiences of insecurity, the social interactions through which these are given meaning, and the structures that make them possible. Domination also broadens the remit of analysis, shedding light on the multifaceted nature of insecurity. The analytical benefits of this framework are demonstrated by two examples: HIV/AIDS; and water and sanitation. The lens of domination is also shown to bring benefits for the political engagement with global health problems.

IF the policy of “Appeasement” is inextricably associated in the historical consciousness with the efforts of Neville Chamberlain's government to preserve peace with the dictators in the 1930s, its origins have been recognized by numerous writers as going back many years before the immediate crises concerning the Sudetenland, Prague and the Polish Corridor. Some have traced its roots to the failure to prevent Japanese aggression in 1931 or Italy's attack upon Abyssinia in 1935; others, with more sense of the positive side of “Appeasement", have focused upon the attitude of the British government and public towards Germany during and after the Versailles settlement; while Mr Gilbert, going a little further back in time, has argued that “appeasement was born” at the moment of the British declaration of war in 1914. Few, if any, commentators have suggested that one should seek the beginnings of “Appeasement” before that event, however.

In this article I enquire into the conceptualisation and construction of the event, a topic much neglected in International Relations, but one which has become increasingly central to recent debates in continental philosophy. I juxtapose the fictional event depicted in Don DeLillo's brilliant novel, White Noise, with the non-fictional event of September 11. I suggest that apprehending any kind of socially or politically significant event, depends on narrative. To take the argument further, I argue that narrative is a crucial device by which we moderns (and postmoderns) actually experience such events and social reality.

The name of Adam Smith is most commonly associated with the notion of a natural ‘harmony of interests’ between individuals in the market, whereby the ‘invisible hand’ of competition turns self-regarding behaviour into aggregate social benefits. Joseph Cropsey echoes this view in suggesting that ‘Smith is of interest for his share i n the deflection of political philosophy toward economics and for his famous elaboration of the principles of free enterprise liberal capitalism’. Smith is often seen as standing in a long line of British political philosophers stretching back to Hobbes and Locke and on to Bentham and ultimately John Stuart Mill, his principal contribution to the liberal tradition being his role as the great spokesman of laissez-faire and the minimalist state.

Despite the wide repository of knowledge about conflict-related sexual violence that now exists, there remains a lack of understanding about how victims/survivors of such violence themselves make sense of and frame their experiences in conversation with global and local discourses and with the categorisations that underpin support programmes. Such sense-making is important not only because the ways in which violence is categorised shape a victim/survivor's ability to access particular forms of recognition and support, but also because it is central in how shattered selves and worlds are remade in the aftermath of violence. Drawing on individual and group interviews conducted with refugees living in Kampala, Uganda, this article charts how framings of ‘torture’ and ‘sexual violence’ become meaningful in participants’ accounts in the (re)formation of themselves as subjects after violent victimisation. We trace how participants navigate the heteronormative societal and legal norms that shape their subjectivity and the effects of the violence they experienced through the deeply gendered and political work that these terms do in their narratives. Our analysis thus highlights and reminds us to pay attention to the political stakes involved in fluid processes of categorising injury.

The Asian Pacific region is highly unstable, but not for the reasons usually assumed. Contrary to the assertions of Realists, who argue multipolarity makes Asia ‘ripe for rivalry’, overwhelming US strategic preponderance should make the balance of power quite stable. Likewise, while much is made by more liberal International Relations theorists of the relative absence of strong international institutions and democracy in Asia, recent trends seem to point in a more positive direction. The real source of instability lies in the beliefs and values held by regional actors. Contested sovereignty on the Korean peninsula and in the Taiwan straits makes military conflict seem a real possibility. Latent isolationism in the US and Japan may lead to a mishandling of a crisis were one to emerge. This Constructivist line of analysis suggests that more attention should be paid to these intangible potential sources of conflict and miscalculation.

As for the philosophers, they make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light, because they are so high.

Francis Bacon

The article argues that Doyle's interpretation of Kant's first definitive article in Perpetual Peace is mistaken. I distinguish between Kant's pragmatic argument (his democratic peace proposition) and his a priori, or transcendental claim. Both are distinct from Doyle's approach which emphasizes institutional restraint and shared cultural norms. Doyle must be criticized for taking Kant's transcendental claims as statements that can be verified empirically. I propose that we drop Doyle's juxtaposition of liberal and illiberal as a fallacy of essentialism. Kant's distinction between republican and despotic is a methodological abstraction belonging to ideal theory (the system of rights). Kantian non-ideal theory (his political philosophy) sees the distinction among states as a matter of degree rather than kind. Kant favours an inclusive global federation encompassing liberal as well as non-liberal states, rather than an exclusive federation and ‘separate peace’ of liberal states.

Immanuel Kant is today often invoked as an emblematic figure for Europe. In works by thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, among others, Kant’s work stands as a core reference for discussions of the European Modern and the legacy of the Enlightenment, even if this appropriation is not uncritical. The spectre of Kant also haunts Europe in more pedestrian understandings of the ideal. Prominent politicians such as Gerhard Schroeder, Joschka Fischer, Dominique de Villepin and Romano Prodi have all paid tribute to his influence, while in a variety of popular-academic texts Kant’s ‘cosmopolitical’ dream has been invoked as a paradigm for Europe – if not a shorthand for the European social model tout court.

The discipline of International Relations has been slow to assess the ICC and American opposition to it. This article uses the English School approach to assess the impact of the ICC on international society. The Rome Statute's definition of core crimes and its provision of an independent prosecutor help to legally constitute world society which transcends the society of states. The US opposes this development by arguing that international criminal justice should remain within the framework of international society. This is because the society of states accommodates a strong exceptionalist discourse and furthers America's particular interests in a way world society does not.

The confessions of a neoclassical realist

In 1972, Hedley Bull wrote that ‘the sources of facile optimism and narrow moralism never dry up, and the lessons of the “realists” have to be learnt afresh by every new generation.‘ He proceeded to claim, with undue emphasis, that ‘in terms of the academic study of international relations, the stream of thinking and writing that began with Niebuhr and Carr has long run its course.’ The scholarly problems with classical realist theory are indeed severe. However, it would be a most grievous error to consign such theory to the bin marked ‘yesterday's solutions for yesterday's problems.’ If the academic study of international relations can find little save period-piece interest in the ideas of the classical realists, that is more a comment upon the competence of scholarship today than upon any change in world conditions.

How do we understand the relationship between ‘national security’ and a global capitalist economy? I argue in this article that liberal constructivist scholars have tended to ignore the constitutive effects of the global economy in the process of distancing themselves from ‘materialist ontologies’ and ‘rationalist epistemologies’. I contend that an important aspect of state identities is that they are dynamic and are historically constituted in and through a relationship to global capital. Only by paying close attention to this fluctuating terrain, can one make sense of the security practices of nation-states. In the latter half of the article, I illustrate my argument with an analysis of the Indian nuclear tests of 1998.

E. H. Carr is a thinker on international affairs who defies easy classification. His best-known work on the subject, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, delivered a powerful realist critique, still resonant today, of the idealist approach to international relations and helped bring about a renewed emphasis on the role of power in international affairs. Less familiar to students of international relations are Carr's more optimistic works. In Conditions of Peace and Nationalism and After, written during World War II, he was sanguine about the prospects for a peaceful postwar order and outlined the steps required to bring about that happy state of affairs. The same hopeful themes were sounded in the years after the war in The Soviet Impact on the Western World, The New Society and other shorter essays.

Strategic narratives are increasingly considered important for domestic and international support for foreign policy. However, debate continues about why some strategic narratives successfully shape policy outcomes, while others are rejected. How states construct strategic narratives is well established. We know less about how states appropriate the strategic narratives of others, and the role this plays in policy adoption. Addressing this, we introduce a theoretical framework to trace the relationship between strategic narratives and policy adoption. Its central premise is that a state is more likely to adopt a new policy if it can strategically narrate about it in a way that promises material gain but without undermining its ontological security. We test our framework using states’ responses to China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Examining the Second Belt and Road Forum in 2019, we trace how far China's strategic narratives are appropriated by multiple states – Kazakhstan, Italy, United Kingdom, Netherlands, United States, India, and Mexico. Countries appropriate China's narrative emphasis on connectivity, trade, and prosperity. However, they contest that China's intentions are benign, based on its human rights record, assertive foreign policy, and fears of indebtedness. Finally, we discuss our framework's utility in explaining what makes strategic narratives persuasive in International Relations.