It is a characteristic of political theory and international politics that certain wellworn stereotypes are perennially wheeled out for generations of students. Some of these may be useful landmarks for scholarship, others offer only partial insights. This paper addresses one of these stereotypes which does not dissolve with more intensive study. It attaches to the Hegelian concept of the state in relation to international politics. I refer to the view that Hegel's concept of the state, elaborated in the Philosophy of Right, is the final unit of analysis for any theory of international politics; that it is impossible to go beyond the nation state; that it possesses a finality in that international affairs are only to be understood through the relation between nation states. One of the conclusions which is sometimes drawn from this stereotype. is that Hegel's account of international politics is Hobbesian in character; that is to say, the relation between states is rather like that between individuals in Hobbes’ state of nature. The ruling principle would thus be that ‘clubs are trumps’; or, more conveniently, that might is right. For an Hegelian there cannot be a legitimate concept of international order, because order only exists in the individual state. Each state has its own legal system and concept of right, therefore the relationship between states is simply the conflict of rights. To put this in a moral perspective: states are neither right nor wrong; this is simply how things are. This has often led to the paradoxical conclusion that Hegel is a realist as regards international affairs, though perhaps a better term would be ‘idealist-realist’. The aim of this paper is to examine the arguments for and against such a stereotype.

The article examines the roles of NGOs in banning cluster munitions that resulted in the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions and the campaign against landmines in the 1990s. It argues that NGOs have managed to move questions about the use of force from the closed decision-making sphere of military commanders and arms control diplomats into open public debate. Thus NGOs have simultaneously desecuritised the use of force by states, securitised certain weapons technologies, and made human beings the referent object of security. This has marked a shift from state security and strategic disarmament to human security and humanitarian disarmament, without fundamentally challenging the laws of war. However, in contrast to realist views that only militarily useless weapons ever get banned and radical critical perspectives that see new legal regimes as legitimating war and US hegemony, I argue that NGOs have engaged in immanent critique of military arguments and practices based on prevailing principles of international humanitarian law. The resulting weapon ban treaties have both restrained US policy and undermined its legitimacy. The article explores the discursive choices that underpinned the remaking of the security agenda by NGOs and their role as de/securitising actors and emancipatory agents of change.

This Forum has two main aims. First and foremost, it is designed to assess the relevance of American realism in the wake of developments that are considered to have transformed international relations over the past decade. A second aim, but one that is central to my contribution, is to assess whether or not the resurgent English School provides the foundations for an approach that can account more effectively for developments in the post-Cold War world than American realism.

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the US response have been widely described as heralding a new kind of war. For over a decade previous to 11 September, however, a body of literature had developed arguing that during the 1990s a new kind of warfare had begun to emerge for the West. This article examines whether 11 September and its immediate aftermath – the US campaign in Afghanistan – confirmed these trends, or whether it really did constitute a different kind of war. It does so through a four-part framework: that during the 1990s wars were localised; that the enemy was not a state but a regime or individual leader; that civilian deaths should be minimised; and that wars were fought on behalf of the West by professionals, but that the risks to these forces should also be minimised.

The argument advanced here seeks to demonstrate that terms like ‘guerrilla warfare’ and ‘low intensity conflict’ are fundamentally flawed. They do not exist as proper categories of war. Often they constitute inappropriate distinctions that impede intellectual understanding of internal war phenomena, which has in the past had a negative impact upon policymaking. The usage of these terms in strategic studies literature does not facilitate understanding but rather undermines the attempt to comprehend the complexity of warfare as a whole. What we call low intensity conflict can be fully understood – can only be understood – within Clausewitzian parameters, which embrace the entire spectrum of war.

In this article, I suggest what an engagement between post-structuralism and the work of Karl Polanyi might look like. I do this by presenting a reading of Polanyi's concept of ‘double movement’ as a form of problematisation through binary opposition. I suggest that the central opposition that the double movement depicts – between economy and society as reflected in processes of marketisation and social protection – presents itself in such a way that the problems emanating from the opposition can only be solved through its transcendence. On one hand, the terms of transcendence are limited by the terms of the opposition. On the other hand, since transcendence is never reached, the double movement problematisation stabilises the existence of a lacuna between the lived experience of market society and the discursive field of that market society. As such, the form of the problematisation places a double-limit upon the ways in which ‘solutions’ can be presented. I present this thesis in relation to two instances of double movement discussed by Polanyi in his book, The Great Transformation. I then apply the argument to invocations of the economy-society opposition in contemporary political economic discourse, where it remains as ubiquitous as ever.

The word ‘civilization’—in the singular but also in the plural—has become common of late in the mouths of politicians and in the writings of international relations academics. Samuel Huntington stirred up a storm in political studies by his vision of the future world as a ‘clash’ of civilizations (in the plural);Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, 72:3, 1993; the article was expanded into a book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). and the war in Yugoslavia generated an increased frequency in political rhetoric of the word ‘civilization’ (in the singular). Indeed, as I shall argue later, conflict in the Balkans revealed more clearly than before the meaning of civilizations and of civilization (in both plural and singular) for our time.

The support that businessmen and business organisations displayed for the peace processes in Israel and Northern Ireland was open and vocal, underscoring the supposed linkage between globalisation, peace and economic growth, and the supposed leadership role of business. The purpose of this study is to examine the motivations of the business communities in Israel and Northern Ireland in becoming involved in the peace processes, their organisation to promote peace, decision-making processes at critical junctures, and their actual impact on the political outcomes. Study of the business communities demonstrates that their empowerment enabled them to exert political influence but fell short of hegemony that would enable them to set the wider political agenda. The impact of both business communities, for different reasons, was therefore limited.

Ironically, since 11 September 2001, world politics seems to have taken a turn towards certainty. This article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the sovereign state in an insecure and anarchic international system is sustained and how it might be challenged. It does so through a Derridean analysis of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society. The article examines how International Relations (IR) thinking works; it teases out the implications of our reading of Bull's work and proposes that what we call generalising the international could lead to an alternative analysis of world politics, one that retains an openness to the future and to politics.

For decades, the world's smallest states – the structurally weakest members of the multilateral system – have been considered incapable of influencing international organisations (IOs). So, why has the label small state risen to prominence over the last two decades and become institutionalised as a formal grouping in multiple IOs? Drawing on more than eighty in-depth interviews, we explain the rise of Small Island Developing States in the United Nations system, the expansion of their agenda to the Small and Vulnerable Economies group at the World Trade Organization, and then to other IOs. The adoption of the labels is evidence of small state norm diffusion. We identify the competent performance of vulnerability within multilateral settings as the key to explaining this norm emergence and diffusion. The lesson is that diffusion ‘from below’ is not always driven by a desire to increase rank. In this case small states have gained benefits by maintaining a lowly position in a hierarchy in which large is stronger than small.

Feminist International Relations (IR) theory is haunted by a radical feminist ghost. From Enloe's suggestion that the personal is both political and international, often seen as the foundation of feminist IR, feminist IR scholarship has been built on the intellectual contributions of a body of theory it has long left for dead. Though Enloe's sentiment directly references the Hanisch's radical feminist rallying call, there is little direct engagement with the radical feminist thinkers who popularised the sentiment in IR. Rather, since its inception, the field has been built on radical feminist thought it has left for dead. This has left feminist IR troubled by its radical feminist roots and the conceptual baggage that feminist IR has unreflectively carried from second-wave feminism into its contemporary scholarship. By returning to the roots of radical feminism we believe IR can gain valuable insights regarding the system of sex-class oppression, the central role of heterosexuality in maintaining this system, and the feminist case for revolutionary political action in order to dismantle it.

This article theorises the nexus between mnemonical status anxiety and militant memory laws. Extending the understanding of status-seeking in international relations to the realm of historical memory, I argue that the quest for mnemonical recognition is a status struggle in an international social hierarchy of remembering constitutive events of the past. A typology of mnemopolitical status-seeking is presented on the example of Russia (mnemonical positionalism), Poland (mnemonical revisionism), and Ukraine (mnemonical self-emancipation). Memory laws provide a common instance of securing and/or improving a state's mnemonical standing in the relevant memory order. Drawing on the conceptual analogy of militant democracy, the article develops the notion militant memocracy, or the governance of historical memory through a dense network of prescribing and proscribing memory laws and policies. Similar to its militant democracy counterpart, militant memocracy is in danger of self-inflicted harm to the object of defence in the very effort to defend it: its precautionary and punitive measures resound rather than fix the state's mnemonical anxiety problem.

The purpose of this article is to review major theoretical arguments with regard to the causes of civil war and identify problems associated with the conceptual juxtaposition of opportunity versus grievance that predominates in the field. While they are critical aspects of conflict processes, perception of opportunity and grievance as two mutually competing explanations or separate categories ultimately can limit, rather than facilitate, our understanding of civil conflicts. For example, we show that not all motives can be designated easily as deriving from one or the other. In addition, the existing dichotomous framework masks other important questions about the way that collective action is achieved in some circumstances and not others or the way that some factors seem to generate grievances at one stage, perhaps, but then an opportunity at another or vice versa. Thus the priority should be to develop an integrated, comprehensive approach that can account for fundamental aspects of complex conflict processes. We conclude by providing suggestions for future research on civil conflict.

The Gulf crisis of 1990–1991 was, by any standards, one of the more significant international crises of the post-1945 epoch. It involved the mobilization of around one million armed men, the diplomatic involvement of much of the international community, and a war that, for all its limited character, was a significant case of inter-state conflict. In what follows I do not want to dwell on the actual course of this war or to examine in detail specific aspects of the history, not least because the broad outline of what happened is already well known. I do, however, want to look at this conflict in broader perspective, and from two vantage points in particular, each pertinent to the study of international relations (IR).

Benchmarking has long been a central component of the global development industry, with the most prominent recent initiative being the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) framework. However, within existing scholarship, the agent-level interactions surrounding the MDG framework remain under-explored. Here, on the back of an analysis of interactions that took place within and around key MDG review summits, I develop a typology to clarify the intersection of benchmarking and blame games. Overall, I demonstrate that despite the efforts of the MDG architects to insulate the initiative, blame games have permeated policymakers’ engagements with the framework. Moreover, the content of these blame games have been carried over into the recently outlined Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A pattern of strategic clarification has seen the emergence within this follow-on SDG framework of more precise responsibilities on higher-income states to meet aid targets, and on lower-income states to meet governance reform targets. Given the deeply-embedded cleavages that were evident in UN review summits, similar blame games seem likely to follow the periodic evaluations within the SDGs’ lifespan.

The article develops a critical analysis of gendered narratives of global finance. The post-subprime crisis equation of unfettered global finance with the excessive masculinity of individual bankers is read in line with a wider gender narrative. We discuss how hetero-normative relations between men and women underpin financial representations through three historical examples: war bond advertising, Hollywood films about bankers, and contemporary aesthetic representations of female politicians who advocate for austerity. A politics emerges whereby gender is used to encompass a/the spectrum between embedded and disembedded finance, approximate to the divide between oikonomia and chrematistics. The apparently desirable ‘marriage’ between the state and finance that ensues carries several ambiguities – precisely along gender lines – that point to a pervasive limit: the myth of embedded liberalism in the imagination of global finance.

According to Professor Northedge,

It is well known that the expression ‘international’ came into use through the famous mistake made by Jeremy Bentham when he coined it to describe the system of law between sovereign states as a translation of the term ius gentium, which the Romans used to refer to the corpus of rules, controlled, of course, by Rome itself, between themselves and the tribes of Italy and later the various parts of the Roman Empire.

At the heart of the notion of the postsecular is an implied and largely under-theorised idea of resistance against the pathologies of modern secular formations. This is most notably exemplified by Jürgen Habermas's highly influential approach which argues that these pathologies can be resisted through a cooperative cognitive effort of secular and religious consciousnesses. This article contends that this understanding overlooks more embodied forms of resistance to the effect that it curtails our capacity to conceptualise postsecular resistance in international relations. Following a contextualisation of Habermas's approach in the broader Kantian tradition to which it belongs, the article develops a contending Foucauldian reading of the body as a locus of resistance and uses this framework to analyse some of the events leading to the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The focus is on the publication of images and videos of police abuses by Egyptian bloggers and independent media as a practice of resistance to the widespread and systematic use of torture. The emotional response to these images, it will be argued, contributed to unite Egyptians despite longstanding fractures, most notably that between secularists and Islamists, thus turning the body from an ‘inscribed surface of events’ into a postsecular locus of resistance. The article concludes by highlighting the main implications of this analysis for future research agendas on the postsecular in international relations.

In a period when international relations theory has painfully awakened from its dreams of a decontextualized account of international reality, some theorists of international relations are likely to do what some political scientists already have done: turn to disciplinary history in search of remedies against what they take to be a threatening disciplinary anarchy:

Globalisation is not what it used to be. Earlier debates over how to read the indicators of economic liberalisation and the impact of technological expansion have now been joined by the increasingly pressing need to explore the social, environmental and political aspects of global change. Earlier discussions emphasised a number of dichotomies within the international political economy – open/closed, state/market and so on. These have proved limited in their ability to inform explanations of change under conditions of globalisation. To these we must now add what we might call the ‘governance from above’, ‘resistance from below’ dichotomy as a popular metaphor for understanding order and change in international relations under conditions of globalisation. But this new binary axis is in many ways as unsatisfactory as those that went before. It too can obscure as much as it reveals in terms of understanding the normative possibilities of reforming globalisation. In this article we wish to suggest that there is perhaps a more useful way of thinking about politics and the changing contours of political life in the contemporary global order. This approach blurs the distinction between governance and resistance by emphasising an ethical take on globalisation.