The commonplace view that the intellectual roots of Hans J. Morgenthau’s Realist theory lie in conservative central European political traditions (such as Bismarckian Realpolitik) requires modification. The young Morgenthau was a protégé of one of Weimar Germany’s most prominent left-wing legal thinkers and barristers, Hugo Sinzheimer, a committed Social Democrat who influenced many young jurists who hoped to pursue a peaceful, legally-based transition to democratic socialism. Although Morgenthau’s biographers have acknowledged his close personal ties to Sinzheimer, they have ignored the ways in which his early work was directly influenced by Sinzheimer’s left-wing legal sociology. Morgenthau’s initial rendition of Realism took the form of a critical-minded sociology of law, inspired by Sinzheimer, which aimed to bring about fundamental reforms to the international system. Only after the demise of the democratic Left did Morgenthau begin to shed his reformist faith in the possibility of legally based global reform. His mature version of Realism can be interpreted as a response to his disillusionment with the politically progressive and socially reformist vision of law championed by the interwar democratic Left.

This article is an attempt to rescue revolution, both as concept and practice, from the triumphalism of the contemporary world. To that end, the article uses three transformations from authoritarian rule – the end of apartheid in South Africa, the collapse of communism in the Czech Republic and the transition from military dictatorship to market democracy in post-Pinochet Chile – in order to test the ways in which these contemporary manifestations of radical change compare and contrast with past examples of revolution. Although these cases share some core similarities with revolutions of the modern era, they also differ from them in five crucial ways: the particular role played by the ‘international’ and the state, the nature of violence, the use of ideology, and the process of negotiation itself. As such, they signify a novel process in world politics, that of negotiated revolution.

This article discusses how and under what conditions ideas coming from International Relations (IR) scholarship are used in foreign policy. We argue that the focus on policy relevance, which dominates the IR literature on the research-policy interface, is limited. Focusing instead on political utilisation highlights types and mechanisms of political impact, which are overlooked in studies on policy relevance. The fruitfulness of this change in focus is showed in an analysis of how Samuel Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ notion and Joseph Nye's ‘soft power’ concept have been used in US foreign policy. George W. Bush's explicit critique and reframing of ‘the clash’ thesis should not be interpreted as absence of impact, but as a significant symbolic utilisation, which has helped legitimate US foreign policy. Likewise, in the few instances in which the notion of ‘soft power’ has been used explicitly, it has played a conceptual and symbolical rather than instrumental role. More generally, this article argues that accessible framing and paradigm compatibility are essential for political utilisation of ideas.

To analyse an academic field of study in a particular era assumes two things: (1) that a particular era has properties that distinguish it clearly from predecessors and successors, and (2) that a field of study necessarily reflects or takes on a colouration of actual social conditions. Both assumptions are arguable, but the first is less contentious than the second. The Cold War was in many ways a distinct era, an era of anxiety caused by nuclear weapons, and an era in which diplomatic and military ideas, practices, and norms differed in significant ways from those prior to 1945 and after 1989. There were significant continuities, of course, but one would have little difficulty drawing compelling contrasts between the major characteristics of international politics in the 1920s and those of the 1950s.

What is international legitimacy and whence does it stem? What entities seek it and why, and who grants or withholds it? How might the different meanings of the concept be reconciled? This article argues that Family Resemblance Concept (FRC) methods are particularly well-suited to explicating the complex meanings associated with this multidimensional concept. We start with a basic level definition based on subjective perceptions and beliefs, the normative quality of oughtness, and the idea of consent. We then expand this definition by developing several secondary-level dimensions: shared values, constitutionalism (consisting of two forms of process legitimacy), and outcome legitimacy. At the indicator level, we examine 14 different survey questions asked in international public opinion polls to provide a tentative empirical glimpse of how our FRC version of legitimacy could be operationalised and tested. The paper concludes with a discussion of the usefulness of the FRC scheme in imposing some order on the legitimacy concept and in illuminating the recent legitimacy problems afflicting the United States.

although the proximate cause of africa’s aids crisis is hiv, the underlining societal causes are much broader and familiar. across the continent, poverty structures not only the contours of the pandemic but also the outcome once an individual is infected with hiv. thus, until poverty is reduced there will be little progress with either reducing transmission of the virus or creating an enhanced capacity to cope with its socioeconomic consequences. it follows that sustained human development is an essential precondition for any effective response to the pandemic in africa.

This article offers a discursive analysis of UK Parliamentary debate on the proscription of terrorist organisations between 2002 and 2014. It argues that these debates play an important constitutive role in the (re)production of national Self and terrorist Other that remains largely overlooked in existing work on this counter-terrorism mechanism. The article begins with an overview of this literature, arguing it is overwhelmingly oriented around questions of efficacy and ethics. While important, this focus has concentrated academic attention on the causal question of what proscription does, rather than the constitutive question of what is made possible by proscription. The article’s second section situates our analysis within discursive work in International Relations, upon which we investigate three pervasive themes in Parliamentary debate: (i) Constructions of terrorism and its threat; (ii) Constructions of specific groups being proscribed; and, (iii) Constructions of the UK Self. We argue that these debates (re)produce an antagonistic relationship between a liberal, open, and responsible UK mindful of cultural and religious difference, on the one hand. And, on the other, its illiberal, irrational terrorist Others conducting immoral violences on behalf of particularistic identity claims. This analysis, we conclude, has significance for contemporary debate on security politics, as well as for studies of counter-terrorism and international politics more generally.

The case of the French Revolution supports the proposition that principles of political legitimacy which shape state identities are linked to domestic social structures, and help determine the resources states mobilize in international competition. To the degree that they are shared across states, legitimacy principles also shape international society. The enactment of a deviant principle of legitimacy by a major power will have systemic consequences because it undermines the existing rules of the game; it may have transformative effects if the efficacy of the new principle is demonstrated in competition. Closer attention should be paid to the complex manner in which new principles interact with existing rules of international society.

Such is its pervasiveness that human rights discourse is used to legitimise humanitarian and military intervention in the affairs of other states, provide a rationale for ‘ethical’ foreign policy, justify the punishment of war crimes, and validate the formation of international coalitions mandated to eradicate terrorism wherever its is found. At grass-roots level, human rights talk is deployed to lobby governments and to press for socioeconomic and legal change, to combat the dehumanising treatment of specific populations, to ground educational initiatives and spawn local, national, international, and sometimes global networks oriented to its advancement, and to induce the patient and meticulous documentation of its violations. In terms of women, human rights activism has been instrumental in problematising violence against women, prompting the recognition by the UN Human Rights Commission in 1992 of rape during war as a form of torture, and as a war crime or crime against humanity in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (which came into force in 2001). It also led to the appointment in 1994 by the UN Human Rights Commission of Radhika Coomaraswamy as the first Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and its Causes and Consequences. Activities centring on human rights produced the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 18 December 1979 and became operational as an international treaty on 3 September 1981 when it was ratified by its twentieth signatory.

Cosmopolitanism claims to be the most just and inclusive of mainstream approaches to the ethics and practice of world order, given its commitment to human interconnection, peace, equality, diversity, and rights, and its concern with the many globalised pathologies that entrench injustice and vulnerability across borders. Yet it has largely remained oblivious to the agency, power, and value of non-human life on a turbulent and active Earth. Without rejecting its commitments to justice for human beings, the article challenges its humanism as both morally and politically inadequate to the situation of the Anthropocene, exemplified by the simultaneous crises of climate change, mass extinction, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In answer, the article develops new grounds and principles for an interspecies cosmopolitanism, exploring how we can reimagine its ontological foundations by creating new grounding images of subjectivity, existential unity, institutional organisation, and ordering purpose. These, in turn, can support political and institutional projects to secure the rights of ecosystems and people to flourish and persist through an increasingly chaotic epoch of human dominance and multispecies vulnerability across the Anthropocene Earth.

This article argues that risk is central in (re)producing the unaccountable commercial military/security markets that are a normal part of our political reality. The argument is twofold: first it is suggested that risk rationalities and the associated ‘preventive imperative’ has a depoliticising effect – accentuated by the impersonal spread of risk rationalities and the strategies of risk professionals – which lowers the eagerness to seek accountability. However, and second, depoliticisation is significant above all as a serious obstacle to the innovative thinking that is the sine qua non of effective accountability. The enmeshed, ‘hybrid’, nature of the market places it in the ‘blind spot’ of law and is as such fundamental to the current lack of accountability. Consequently, moving beyond established regulatory frameworks and technical understandings of accountability (that is, politicising the market) is a precondition for more effective accountability. Failing to do so, will leave the current rapid legal innovation impotent while reinforcing impunity as the focus on and confidence in established regulatory frameworks grows. The failure to politicise creates an ‘accountability paradox’ where the pursuit of accountability diminishes it. The article develops this argument with reference to Blackwater's (now Xe) role in the so called CIA ‘Killing Program’.

Many studies of world politics fail to take evidence seriously or consider basic moral truisms (for example, that the standards we apply to others we must apply to ourselves). This commentary illustrates these assessments in relation to two subjects which have attracted much interest in the West recently – terrorism and just war to combat terrorism. The evidence shows that the United States has engaged extensively in terrorism and that application of just war principles would entitle the victims of that terrorism to use force against the United States to defend themselves if the United States is accorded that right.

Over the past two decades, monetary crises have played a key role in spurring increased monetary cooperation. From one, materialist, vantage, such crises appear as exogenous shocks, which matter primarily as they alter the material incentives to cooperation. However, such frameworks obscure the importance of debates over the meaning of crises, monetary understandings, and state interests themselves. I therefore offer a constructivist theory of crises, and trace the post-1980s evolution from New Classical interpretations of crises, which stressed domestic policy errors and obscured interests in cooperation, to subsequent New Keynesian interpretations, which have stressed market instabilities and legitimated greater cooperation.

In a recent issue of the Review, Randall Germain and Michael Kenny issued a serious challenge to neo-Gramscian scholarship in international studies,Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny, 'Engaging Gramsci: International Relations Theory and the New Gramscians', Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 3-21. claiming that 'the Italian school's appropriation of Gramsci is far more conceptually problematic than they [neo-Gramscians] acknowledge, and that their use of his framework is difficult to sustain with respect to the scholarship devoted to his ideas'.Ibid., p. 3. In their critical probing of the neo-Gramscian IR literature, Germain and Kenny focus most closely upon two issues: Gramsci's ambiguous and contested legacy and the difficulty of establishing any 'definitive interpretation' of his work; and the appropriateness of attempting to understand transnational social relations in terms of a broadly Gramscian concept of 'civil society'. I will discuss each in turn.

The role of Eurocentrism in International Relations (IR) has become a focal point for critical scholarship. However, anti-Eurocentric scholars tend to overlook the extent to which Eurocentrism is a tempo-spatial phenomenon whose roots and development need to be analysed in a way that takes its internal differences into account. This article rejects a single notion of Eurocentrism, proposing instead to understand Eurocentrism through its three forms: historical-contextual, ideological, and residual. This differentiation can provide a means for dealing with the challenges of Eurocentrism in a more self-reflexive manner without seeing it as omnipresent and unchanging. It also offers to approach Eurocentric IR from a perspective that considers the role of historiographical differences in understanding the rise of European powers. This means that IR cannot base its explanatory frameworks on a single (the) historical record. Understanding the limits of Eurocentrism and of anti-Eurocentrism provides a better means for dealing with the formerʼs problematic impact on IR scholarship.

There can be no enterprise more important to the student of International Relations than to understand the bearing on his subject of the tradition that asserts the existence of natural law. Natural law played a vital historical role in the emergence of the European states-system: in the period during which the positive law of Christendom was ceasing to command attention, but that of modern international society had not yet taken shape, the idea that princes and peoples were bound by rules in their relations with one another rested substantially, even if by no means exclusively, upon natural law doctrine. The natural law tradition is also central to the critical investigation of normative issues in world politics: for any inquiry into e.g. the justification of force, the obligation of treaties, the rights of sovereignty or the legitimacy of intervention, it provides a rich source of argument.

A growing number of scholars, commentators, and pundits describe the contemporary US as an empire. This article argues that these authors have not paid sufficient attention to the historiography of empire and imperialism. Indeed, the historiography of the British and American empires offers important lessons for current debates including what is the appropriate definition of the American empire, what are the social and political foundations of the American Empire, and what are the consequences of the American Empire for the US and the wider world.

This article makes the case for rethinking the relation between poststructuralism and postcolonialism, by building on the claims advanced by Robert Young, Azzedine Haddour and Pal Ahluwalia that the history of deconstruction coincides with the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria, and with the violent anti-colonial struggle that ensued. I choose to examine narratives of theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Cixous because not only they provide the link between colonial violence, the poststructuralist project that ensued, and postcolonialism, but also because the problems I identify with their projects are replicated by much poststructuralist work in International Relations (IR). I signal that one of the most significant consequences of conducting poststructuralist research without attention to postcolonial horizons lies in the idealisation of the marginalised, the oppressed or the native without attending to the complexity of her position, voice or agency. Bringing these theories together aims to highlight the need for a dialogue, within IR, between poststructuralism's desire to disrupt the disciplinarity of the field, and postcolonialism's potential to transcend the self-referential frame of IR by introducing perspectives, (hi)stories, and voices from elsewhere.

In his review article in the July 1996 issue of this journal (‘Truth and power, monks and technocrats: theory and practice in international relations’) William Wallace wasted the opportunity to say some interesting things about an important issue. Because he has been seen by some to be making some necessary points about the state of International Relations in Britain in recent years, I wish to point out seven major problems in his argument. If I am correct about this then readers might wonder about the validity of his conclusions about the relationship between truth and power and theory and practice, but I will leave it to others to comment upon these.

This article aims to reinvigorate the utopian imagination as a vital and necessary component in IR theory. Since the First Great Debate between the Realists and the Utopianists (or more accurately, the Liberal-Internationalists) the utopian tradition has been viewed as being both subjective and arbitrary, leading to its dismissal as vain idealism in world politics. This article re-interrogates the arguments of Carr and Morgenthau and finds that they have relevance today only as against closed systems of utopia and have little bearing against the open-dialectical utopianism which is advocated here as a viable alternative to the sterility of realism. The article also examines the historical nexus between realism's dismissal of utopianism and the wider movements in political philosophy via a critical engagement with the works of Popper, Berlin and Arendt. Finally, after exploring the limitations of Booth's idea of ‘Utopian Realism’, the article argues that utopianism should no longer be assumed to be a blueprint for a future, perfect society, a tradition fraught with the danger of proto-totalisation, but as a critical imaginary that acts as a heuristic device to reveal the fissures in existing reality and as an ideational motivating force for progressive change in world politics.