This article demonstrates the significance of human rights for challenging state violence and terrorism. It is intended to enhance understanding of the concept of emancipation. Critical Security Studies has tended to focus on the individual as the agent of her/his own liberation. Yet many victims of oppression are not able to free themselves. Drawing on historical materialism, it is argued that collective agency on behalf of the oppressed has a necessary role to play in emancipatory politics. Emancipation is contingent on the capacity of specific agents, located socially and historically, to identify practices that might bring about change, structures that might be transformed, and appropriate agents that are in the best position to facilitate such change. This article shows how such collective social action has forced a reversal of some of the Bush administration's repressive policies, and has partially succeeded in curtailing the arbitrary use of US state power. This has been achieved through the national and international human rights architecture. Therefore, Marxian claims that human rights should be eschewed are mistaken, since they fail to acknowledge the emancipatory potential of human rights, the opportunities they provide for collective social action, and the role they can play in transformative social change.

Among the school of scholars of international relations, neatly called by Roy Jones the ‘English School’, the work of Martin Wight is placed in particularly high esteem. More perhaps than anyone else, he is regarded as the scholar who did international relations as it ought to be done. I suppose no one would assert that this form is exclusive and needed no complement. The need for the discussion of economic factors in international relations for example would presumably not be denied, nor that such a discussion might not need other methods. What I take to be asserted, however, is that the sort of problem which Wight faced is central to international relations (and given the generality of some of these problems, for some issues, at least, this would not be widely denied) but more importantly that the way he tackled them is the right way.

The persistence and strength of international norms are thought to depend partly on the willingness of actors to punish their violation, but norm enforcement is often inconsistent. This article investigates states’ use of economic sanctions in order to gain insight into the role of metanorms (norms about enforcing norms) in international politics and explain this inconsistency. The quantitative analyses examine patterns of economic sanctions and arms embargo practices across different security norms and reveal two central findings. First, international metanorms may accommodate important interstate relationships. Although severe human rights abuse, conflict, nuclear weapons development, and support for terrorist organisations tend to attract sanctions, they are infrequent in comparison with norm violations. Valued relationships between senders and targets seem to be an accepted limit to the pursuit of costly norm enforcement. Second, norm violations nevertheless remain rare, suggesting that factors other than the prospect of material punishment may encourage compliance. Indeed, by preserving interstate relationships, international metanorms may facilitate the engagement needed for socialisation and social pressures as alternative compliance mechanisms.

In this article I argue that the very meaning of ‘inter-national relations’ is emerging as a focus of debate in International Relations, particularly among the critical traditions in the discipline. No longer seen as a mere study of peace and war, IR is viewed as a component of general pan-disciplinary theories or order and change. The international sphere is perceived, accordingly, no longer as a system in its own right, but rather as a gigantic transmission belt, and a huge communication device transmitting and diffusing ideas, practices, rules, norms and institutions throughout the world. The article examines the implications of such an approach on IR theory. In addition, the article revisits the works of Hegel, Marx and the French School of Regulation to demonstrate how they developed an empirical theory of international diffusion.

This article deploys a historical analysis of the relationship between law and imperialism to highlight questions about the character and role of international law in global politics. The involvement of two British international lawyers in practices of imperialism in Africa during the late nineteenth century is critically examined: the role of Travers Twiss (1809–1897) in the creation of the Congo Free State and John Westlake’s (1828–1913) support for the South African War. The analysis demonstrates the inescapably political character of international law and the dangers that follow from fusing a particular form of liberal moralism with notions of legal hierarchy. The historical cases raise ethico-political questions, the importance of which is only heightened by the character of contemporary world politics and the attention accorded to international law in recent years.

Recent trends in Democratic Peace theory have called into question the orthodox ‘separate democratic peace’ position that liberal states are peace-prone only in relations with other liberal states. This article seeks to recast the bases and scope (or parameters) of the relationship between liberalism – primarily left-liberalism – in domestic politics and peace-proneness in foreign affairs, to the effect that whilst this is manifest more broadly than conventionally understood, it is far from universal or undifferentiated. Whilst liberal ‘norms’ – as indicators of the legitimacy of force – are an important factor in determining when liberals will and will not support the use of force, liberals are also shown to have a higher threshold for the use of force than other groups on the mainstream domestic political spectrum (usually to the Right), indicating greater unwillingness to use force. The cases examined are reasonably neutral, not cherry-picked, in that they are drawn from the three major conflicts of the twentieth century and, as a starting point for the examination of liberal imperialism, Gladstone's Second Ministry (1880–1885).

Whilst the above findings are presented as highly significant for understanding the character of liberal peace-proneness and an advance on the separate democratic peace position, the argument is necessarily qualified in an effort to reflect the political complexities of the phenomenon and the limitations of liberal norms as an explanatory factor. It is, however, these very qualifications that put the politics back into the research agenda and connect the knowledge claims to a wider body of academic scrutiny which, ultimately, should lead to a fuller understanding of the relationship between liberalism, democracy and peace.

With undue and perhaps false modesty, E. H. Carr described his brilliant contribution to what he called ‘the infant science of international polities’, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, as ‘already a period piece’ in 1946 when a second edition appeared.1 Teachers of the subject have not accepted Carr's ‘period piece’ characterization. For more than forty years it has been prescribed reading for many of their students and has had to be reprinted many times.

Qualifying a realist interpretation, this essay argues that the dialectical involvement of the state as an individual with its external relations exposes international politics as a matter of both anarchy and war, and mutual recognition and practical morality among states in Hegel's theory of international relations. With the absolute distinction between internal community and external anarchy removed, Hegel's account of civil society becomes relevant to his theory of international relations. Both as an analogy and concretely, it provides indications for a partial transcendence of sovereign statehood and international anarchy by institutionalised co-operation and political (self-)regulation in a transnationalising civil society.

In policy domains characterised by complexity, international organizations (IOs) with overlapping mandates and governance functions regularly interact in ways that have important implications for global governance. Yet the dynamics of IO interactions remain understudied. This article breaks new ground by building on the theoretical insights of organizational ecology to examine IO competition, cooperation, and adaptation in the domain of energy. Drawing on original empirical data, I consider three related hypotheses: (1) competition between IOs in the same population is likely to centre on material resources; (2) IOs are more likely to cooperate when they have a shared governance goal; and (3) individual IOs can adapt by changing their goals and boundaries. In considering these hypotheses, this article highlights the limits of the organizational ecology approach and the need to broaden it to account for the possibility that IOs do cooperate, and that individual IOs, such as the International Energy Agency, have the capacity to adapt to changes in their environment.

By paying attention to love, this article offers a grammatical reading of International Relations’ founding grammar of inside/outside as an ethics of encounter. The decision to focus on love is, I suggest, to contend with the possibility that IR may express a lethal politics and ethics. I seek to substantiate this claim through an unsettling reading of neo-Jamesian contributions to the emotional turn. I conclude that the discipline’s founding grammar is an ‘avoidance of love’ and offer a reminder that an alternative way of loving is possible.

The end of the Cold War is a story that will no doubt be written and rewritten as historians discover evidence that casts light on presently unknown facts, and provide new ‘spins’ on those already known. Indeed, it is quite likely that, like its origins, the end of the Cold War will have its equivalents of orthodoxy and revisionism. Of all the players in this story it is Mikhail Gorbachev who will take the leading role; for some the hero and for others the villain. The story of the Gorbachev era is a controversial one, with the answers to many questions in dispute. Did the West win due to ‘peace through strength’? Was new thinking primarily driven by the need for economic recovery? Was the West too hesitant in its response to Soviet initiatives? For some, the end of the Cold War brought to a conclusion a tragedy in which the two superpowers had embarked upon defensive measures which had led each to believe that the other harboured malign intent; hence Robert Jervis’s assertion that the ‘Cold War may . . . have been an unavoidable tragedy rather than the result of an evil Soviet Union, as the orthodox school has it, or an evil United States, as most revisionists argue’.Robert Jervis, 'The End of the Cold War?', Diplomatic History, 17 (Fall 1993), p. 659. On this interpretation the Cold War was a security dilemma in which ‘each side, in pursuing its own clearly indicated and deeply cherished principles, was only confirming the fear of the other that it was bent on aggression’.Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, 'Origins of the Cold War', Foreign Affairs, 46 (Oct. 1967), p. 45. In this article the story of how this tragedy was ended will be told from the perspective of graduated reciprocation in tension reduction (GRIT). It will focus on whether Gorbachev employed such a strategy and whether it had a role in ending over forty years of hostility.

The power to raise taxes is a sine qua non for the functioning of the modern state. Governments frequently defend the independence of their fiscal policy as a matter of sovereignty. This article challenges this defence by demonstrating that it relies on an antiquated conception of sovereignty. Instead of the Westphalian sovereignty centred on non-intervention that has long dominated relations between states, today's fiscal interdependence calls for a conception of sovereignty that assigns duties as well as rights to states. While such a circumscribed conception of sovereignty has emerged in other areas of international law in recent years, it has yet to be extended to fiscal questions. Here, these duties arguably include obligations of transparency, of respect for the fiscal choices of other countries, and of distributive justice. The resulting conception of sovereignty is one that emphasises its instrumental as well as its conditional character. Neither state sovereignty nor self-determination is an end in itself, but a means to promoting individual well-being. It is conditional in the sense that if states do not live up to their fiscal obligations towards other states, their claims to autonomy are void.

Critical theory in the Frankfurt School mould has made various inroads into IR theorising, and provided many a stimulus to attempts at redressing the ‘positivist’ imbalance in the discipline. Many of the conceptual offerings of the Frankfurt School perspective have received critical attention in IR theory debates, and while these are still ongoing, the purpose of this discussion is not to attempt to contribute by furthering either methodological interests, or politico-philosophical inquiry. Instead, I focus on the near omission of the social-theoretic aspect of the work especially of Juergen Habermas. I argue that a more in-depth exploration of critical social theory has considerable potential in the context of the ‘social turn’ in IR theory. The lack of attention to this potential is arguably due in part to the importance of Habermas' contribution to cosmopolitan normative theory, and the status held by the cosmopolitan-communitarian debate as a key site of critical IR debate for many years throughout the 1990s. The productivity of the Habermasian conception of the discourse theory of morality within this set of concerns has been obvious, and continues.

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in how International Relations theory can contribute to our understanding of the impact of technology on global politics, underpinned mainly by an engagement with Science and Technology Studies (STS). However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which international society shapes technology. Building on sociological and historical studies of science and technology, this article outlines one way through which international society has constituted technology by developing a synthetic account of the emergence of technological advancement as a ‘standard of civilisation’ in the nineteenth century that differentiated the ‘society of civilised states’ from non-European societies, with a particular focus on China and India. In doing so, this article also highlights how this process has had a powerful and enduring influence on Chinese and Indian conceptions about science and technology. Thus, by shifting the focus from how technology shapes global politics to how international society shapes technology, this article provides new insights into the relationship between technology, power, and modernity in an interdisciplinary context. It also offers a new way of thinking about the complex dynamics of today's global politics of technology.

A concern with ensuring minimum standards of dignity for all and a doctrine based on the need to secure for everyone basic levels of rights have traditionally shaped the way in which international human rights law addresses poverty. Whether this minimalist, non-relational approach befits international law objectives in the area of world poverty begs consideration. This article offers three justifications as to why global material inequality – and not just poverty – should matter to international human rights law. The article then situates requirements regarding the improvement of living conditions, a system of equitable distribution in the case of hunger, and in particular obligations of international cooperation, within the post-1945 international effort at people-centred development. The contextual consideration of relevant tenets serves to demonstrate that positive international human rights law can be applied beyond efforts at poverty alleviation to accommodate a doctrine of fair global distribution.

The editors of the Review of International Studies have posed a timely challenge to what they term American realism. In broad terms, their editorial makes two points: first, realism has lost its relevance to current international policy; and second, realism does a poor job of explaining the behaviour of the world's major powers. In this brief essay I argue that both of these points are greatly overstated, if not simply wrong. At the same time, I accept that realism provides less leverage in addressing the full spectrum of issues facing the major powers in the post-Soviet and now the post-9/11 world than it did during the Cold War. However, this is neither surprising nor a serious problem, because scholars who use a realist lens to understand international politics can, and have, without inconsistency or contradiction also employed other theories to understand issues that fall outside realism's central focus.

David Campbell has been at the forefront of showing how deconstruction, and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, can help us to think international relations differently. Like Derrida himself, Campbell has eschewed the goal of an ethical theory in favour of an ‘ethos of political criticism’ concerned to question and go beyond our assumptions and limits. In order to continue such an ethos of criticism, to push our understanding of ethics in international relations further still, it is surely important to question the assumptions and limits Campbell himself imposes. It is with this in mind that I wish to take a particular political intervention by Derrida in 1993 and read it against Campbell’s Derridean analysis of the Bosnian conflict which began in 1992.

Contemporary peacebuilding operations are often mandated to rebuild ‘collapsed’ or weak states and provide unique opportunities for internationals to exert far reaching influence in their reconstruction. The responsibility to help secure peaceful transformations and longer term stability is profound. This article explores the issue of efficacy and propriety in reconstruction programming and draws from field work in Sierra Leone – a rare example of ‘success’ for international partners in peacebuilding missions. The assertion is made that, despite the euphoria over the mission in Sierra Leone, the peacebuilding operations were more about the mechanics of statebuilding than the local politics of building peace, and that there was a distinct disconnect between the policy rhetoric and the policy practice. The argument is put that the pressing local concern of giving citizens a stake in government was not best served in the reconstruction project because the wider and more influential objectives of the peacebuilding mission were about meeting international goals not local aspirations. This reality has come at the cost of exploiting a unique opportunity for creative thinking about the kind of state structures which can better address the main challenges for sustainable peace facing post-war states like Sierra Leone.

Until recently, International Relations (IR) paid remarkably little attention to identities, including its own. IR called up the nation-state, while displaying very little interest in either nation or state, or the meaning(s) of the hyphen in between. Assuming state-nations removed from view the contested politics of identity and boundary making within the state. This article seeks to make these politics visible. It considers, first, why IR might have missed nationalism, and then reviews different conceptions of nation. It analyses the gendered and global politics of nationalism, and concludes with the prospect and possibility of the nation in new transnational times.

This article examines under what conditions benchmarking and associated measurement initiatives produced by UN human rights actors could, and should, play a role in promoting compliance with international human rights norms. It is organised around a comparative analysis of UN benchmarking initiatives for states and corporations. With regard to states, the article argues that ideological misgivings and technical limitations have so far triumphed over aspirations that indicators and benchmarks might play a significant role in increasing compliance with international human rights norms. With regard to corporations, we find that measuring human rights performance has been framed by the recent UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights using a much more expansive and less quantitative set of benchmarks. These latter benchmarks do not appear to be creating conditions under which the human rights performance of corporations is effectively interrogated, and as a result there is a danger of superficial legitimation. Comparative analysis of these two initiatives reveals some of the tensions inherent in utilising benchmarking in transnational efforts to achieve human rights compliance. It also allows us to contribute to broader debates about the quantification of performance and its potential and limitations as a tool of global governance.