What are the prospects for conflict and cooperation (and ultimately for war and peace) now that the Cold War has ended? The various theoretical perspectives come up with rather different answers. Waltzian Neorealism diagnoses business as usual: anarchy prevails; states will continue to have to fend for themselves. With the current transition from bipolarity toward multipolarity we must even expect more, not less, international conflict. Liberals are much more optimistic: international institutions and liberal democracy can pave the way for significant progress toward a peaceful world. Constructivists are also optimistic: states can develop cooperative relationships; anarchy is not a given systemic constraint. Cooperative anarchies are thus a possibility. In this article, I argue that there is an important element missing from the current debate about prospects for international conflict and cooperation. That element concerns the nature of contemporary statehood. Internation relations theory has tended to treat states as fixed, ‘like units’.This is the well-known formulation by Kenneth Waltz: ‘so long as anarchy endures, states remain like units’. ‘To call states “like units” is to say that each state is like all other states in being an autonomous political unit’. ‘We abstract from every attribute of states except their capabilities.’ Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA, 1979), pp. 93, 95, 99. They are not, of course, and the difference between the main types of statehood amounts to much more than the variation in capabilities noted by Realists and the absence or presence of liberal democracy as analyzed by liberals. There are three different main types of state in the present international system, and an identification of them is necessary in order to appreciate current and future patterns of cooperation and conflict.

Introduction

The Idea of national security is pervasive because it lies at the heart of the condition of statehood and the nature of the international system. But although the idea of national security is universally on the political agenda, it is difficult to find an unambiguous or uncontested usage of the concept.

Working definitions exist, of course:

a nation is secure to the extent which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values, if it wishes to avoid war, and is able if challenged, to maintain them by victory in such a war.

The best proof that E. H. Carr has written a true ‘classic’ is that The Twenty Years' Crisis provides much food for thought even now when some of its alleged foundational verities have become problematic. Rather than being limited to a ‘realist’ understanding of politics pure and simple, the reader encounters an analysis that is much more subtle though much less scientific than later realist interpretations would suggest. True, the first chapter is entitled ‘The science of international politics’ but the discussion about ‘purpose’, Carr's invocation of Marx, and the intellectual history he paints with a broad brush, make it clear that it is not a conception of natural science that informs his inquiry. Besides, as with every classic, different readings are possible.

This article aims to revisit the enterprise of the Chinese School (CS) of IR and discuss how it should be viewed and handled in the discipline, specifically from within the analytical framework of the power/resistance nexus put forward by Foucault, Bhabha, and Spivak. The argument of this article is twofold. Firstly, the CS attempts to reinvigorate traditional Chinese concepts (that is, humane authority, the Tianxia system, and relationality), which mimick Western mainstream IR. These concepts channel the CS into a realist notion of power, a liberal logic of cosmopolitanism, and a constructivist idea of relationality. Thus, the CS uses against the West concepts and themes that the West currently use against the non-Western world. Nevertheless, as the second part of the argument will demonstrate, the enterprise of the CS can still be justified because it can be regarded as a reverse discourse; mimicking yet altering the original meanings of the taken-for-granted concepts, ideas, and principles used by mainstream IR scholars. Moreover, with the judicious use of strategic essentialism, the CS can potentially be one local group in a wider effort to contest diffused and decentred forms of Western domination through linking various struggles to form a unified ‘counter-hegemonic bloc’ of post-Western IR in the discipline.

Recent decades have seen a heightened interest in the ethics of foreign policymaking. This literature has overwhelmingly explored the ethical dilemmas faced by policymakers in terms of situations and the structures – either political/economic, normative and/or linguistic – that shape actions. The subjective experience of ethical decisionmaking in this arena and the character of the individuals making policy choices have been largely neglected. However, the apparently greater scope for moral action in the post-Cold War era, combined with the growth in global institutions designed to enforce individual accountability – such as the International Criminal Court – suggest that more effort should be placed on understanding ethics in terms of the individual. This article seeks to combine the work of political and social psychologists with the philosophical literature on virtue theory to see what new insights these might offer into the ethics of foreign policy. It argues that virtue ethics provide an effective means to critique the morality of foreign policy decisions. This is evinced by an exploration of Tony Blair's decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003.

The quest for perpetual peace is a modern phenomenon, associated with a progressive view of history which emerged only in the Enlightenment. In addition, boredom – a feeling of ennui associated with a loss of the ability to act – is a fundamental mood of the modern age. Modern societies are thus, simultaneously, becoming more peaceful and their inhabitants are becoming more bored. As a means of overcoming our boredom, we are increasingly fascinated by violence, and war is glorified as a means of restoring our ability to act. Empirical illustrations of this thesis are drawn from World War I and from the Bush administration's ‘global War on Terror’.

The theory of Power Preponderance put forward by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth is poised to replace structural balance-of-power theory as the leading American Realist interpretation of international politics. Power Preponderance argues that would-be rivals to the US are not balancing against it because they are dissuaded from doing so by geopolitical and structural factors, rather than because they love the US or are cowed by it. This article shows why the central analytical claim of Power Preponderance would be substantially enhanced by incorporating the logic of the nuclear revolution, but that its main policy recommendation – indefinite and magnanimous American preponderance – is undermined by the spectre of nuclear war. In the nuclear age, normative solutions to the problem of anarchy invariably gravitate toward the logic of a world state.

The academic study of International Relations (IR) emerged in the context of transnational networks of scholars, diplomats, politicians, and activists. Contrary to conventional wisdom, women belonged to these networks in various capacities and, crucially, contributed to the intellectual formation of the discipline. Whether as members of pressure groups, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), as independent authors or academics, they discussed all major issues of IR. Drawing on a range of international authors – including Anna B. Eckstein, Agnes Headlam-Morley, Lucy Mair, Margery Perham, Helena Swanwick, and Louise Weiss – this article recovers the intellectual substance of their work, arguing that it constitutes a genuinely feminist approach to IR. Early feminist IR authors emphasised the interests of women, children, and other marginalised groups, they demanded female representation in government and diplomacy, they condemned imperialism and racism, opposed military capitalism, employed religious, emotional, and universalist rhetoric, and advocated the role of education. Despite widespread male domination, women taught at universities, published in academic journals, spoke at conferences, and organised international summer schools. This article explores the origins of feminist IR scholarship and contextualises this body of thought within the revisionist history of IR.

This article explores our experiences of conducting feminist interpretive research on the British Army Reserves. The project, which examined the everyday work-Army-life balance challenges that reservists face, and the roles of their partners/spouses in enabling them to fulfil their military commitments, is an example of a potential contribution to the so-called ‘knowledge economy’, where publicly funded research has come to be seen as ‘functional’ for political, military, economic, and social advancement. As feminist interpretive researchers examining an institution that prizes masculinist and functionalist methodologies, instrumentalised knowledge production, and highly formalised ethics approval processes, we faced multiple challenges to how we were able to conduct our research, who we were able to access, and what we were able to say. We show how military assumptions about what constitutes proper ‘research’, bolstered by knowledge economy logics, reinforces gendered power relationships that keep hidden the significant roles women (in our case, the partners/spouses of reservists) play in state security. Accordingly, we argue that the functionalist and masculinist logics interpretive researchers face in the age of the knowledge economy help more in sustaining orthodox modes of knowledge production about militaries and security, and in reinforcing gendered power relations, than they do in advancing knowledge.

This article redirects extant critiques of the modern problem of war at this problem's underlying logic of deviance. According to this logic, war constitutes a kind of international conduct that contravenes behavioural norms and that can be corrected through diagnostic and didactic means. Thereby, war is rendered into a problem falling within the scope of human agency. However, this agency rests on and reproduces this logic's constitutive blind spots. Therefore, it seems imperative to develop ways of problematising war otherwise. The article provides two starting points for (critical) IR scholarship seeking to undertake such a project. Firstly, it combines two Foucaultian tools, the concept of problematisation and the method of genealogy, to direct critique at the logics underlying our evaluative – analytical, ethical, and political – judgements. Secondly, it uses these tools to trace the contingent emergence of the logic of deviance in a crucial example within the wider genealogy of the problem of war: the Carnegie Endowment's commission of inquiry into the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Based on original archival research, I highlight different elements of this inquiry's problematisation of war – its frames, assumptions, ways of knowing, and subjects of knowledge – to make them available for reconstruction.

According to the late Professor Hedley Bull, the ‘domestic analogy’ is:

the argument from the experience of individual men in domestic society to the experience of states, according to which the need of individual men to stand in awe of a common power in order to live in peace is a ground for holding that states must do the same. The conditions of an orderly social life, on this view, are the same among states as they are within them: they require that the institutions of domestic society be reproduced on a universal scale.

The idea that our world is not just a mixture of unrelated incidents but shows some intelligible characteristics is probably the starting point of every analysis in International Relations (IR). We assume that what happens shows structure and significant connections of processes and flows. Unfortunately, opinions diverge soon thereafter: how does that assumed structure relate to our minds? Is it independent of our theories, cultural presuppositions, or opinions? What kind of objectivity can we hope for? Critical realists and radical constructivists seem to entertain different ideas about what the ‘ontological status of reality’ is and whether and how we can know about it. An intellectual encounter between Colin Wight and Friedrich Kratochwil has shown to what extent related questions about intersubjectivity, reference, and meaning touch upon questions about the logos. Interestingly enough, both agree that the ‘classic’ bivalent logic provides only an insufficient grounding for an adequate understanding of the world. Yet both are silent on providing reasons why this is the case. Hence, it might well be that constructivists and critical realists actually do share some reservation or critique.

Among India's foreign policy crises since independence the most intense were in the military-security issue-area. Some, like the concentration of Indian and Pakistani forces on the Kashmir and Punjab borders in July 1951, de-escalated without war. Others, like the disputed claims over the Rann of Kutch in the early months of 1965, led to limited military hostilities followed by stalemate. Still others culminated in war with India's principal neighbours - with Pakistan in 1947–9, 1965 and 1971, and with China in 1962. All of these conform to the definition of a crisis along the peace-war continuum:

‘History is too important to be left to the historians”.

The relationship between history, international history and international relations has never been an easy or a particularly amicable one. To talk of a cold war may be something of an exaggeration, but it does capture something about the way in which the various subjects tended to regard the other for the greater part of the post-war period. Thus practising historians and international historians appeared to have little time for each other, and together had even less for those seeking to establish the new discipline of International Relations.

In July 1996, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a controversial Advisory Opinion on the legality of nuclear use (including, threat of use). The ICJ found that ‘nuclear use would generally be contrary to the rules of international law’, but it failed to conclude that nuclear use would be unlawful in all circumstances. The major reason for this was because it recognized nuclear norms (that is, the practice of deterrence) to which many states adhered. Taking the American case, this article examines norms of nuclear non-use and nuclear targeting. It shows where these national norms came from, and how they came to be empowered in US policy and embodied in American practice. It is critical of the ICJ's conclusion because, while the norm of non-use is consistent with international law, it finds American targeting norms to be contrary to humanitarian law.

In this paper I am going to argue a familiar but still controversial thesis about the relation between international ethics and international law, which I would sum up in the following list of propositions:

First, international law is a source as well as an object of ethical judgements. The idea of legality or the rule of law is an ethical one, and international law has ethical significance because it gives institutional expression to the rule of law in international relations.

Secondly, international law—or, more precisely, the idea of the rule of law in international relations—reflects a rule-oriented rather than outcome-oriented ethic of international affairs. By insisting on the priority of rules over outcomes, this ethic rejects consequentialism in all its forms.

As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign showed, walls are a hot topic. While ‘globalisation’, with its free flow of capital and goods, characterised world politics after the end of the Cold War, the twenty-first century has witnessed a reassertion of cultural, legal, and physical barriers. It is common to criticise such post-Cold War walls, especially the US-Mexico Barrier and Israel’s West Bank Barrier, as ineffective and immoral. This article problematises such critical discourse by using unlikely juxtapositions (the Great Wall of China) and new conceptual frameworks (gaps, critical aesthetics) to explore: (1) how walls can be a rational security policy; (2) how they are not simply barriers, but can be complex sites of flows; and (3) how walls are not simply texts waiting to be decoded: they are also sites of non-narrative affective experience that can even excite the sublime. This critical juxtaposition of walls first explores what they can tell us about the politics of borders, identity, and foreign policy, and then considers how walls, as concrete visual artefacts, can be examples not simply of ideology, but also of affect. The article aims to understand walls in a different register as active embodiments of political debate – and of political resistance.

This article focuses on the control of international mobility through the gathering, processing, and sharing of air travellers’ data. While a lot has been written about pre-emptive rationalities of security translated into the functionalities of IT systems used for border controls, we take a step further and investigate how these rationalities are operationalised through data transfer, screening, validation, discarding, profiling, contextualisation, calibration, and adjustment practices. These practices may seem banal and technical; however, we demonstrate how they matter politically as they underpin the making of international security. We do so by analysing the work of Passenger Information Units (PIUs) and retracing how they turn Passenger Name Record (PNR) data into actionable intelligence for counterterrorism and the fight against serious crime. To better understand the work of PIUs, we introduce and unpack the concept of ‘epistemic fusion’. This explicates how security intelligence comes into being through practices that pertain to cross-domain data frictions, the contextualisation of data-driven knowledge through its synthesis with more traditional forms of investigatory knowledge and expertise, and the adjustment of the intelligence produced to make it actionable on the ground.

In his article on ‘The enigma of Martin Wight’ (Review of International Studies, i, 1981, pp. 15–22), Michael Nicholson makes some questionable assertions. One concerns the object of international studies. He says, ‘Surely the point of studying international relations or any other aspect of human behaviour is to improve the human condition not to stand as passive spectators deploring the appalling standard of play’ (p. 19). He goes on to doubt whether Wight's position was really that of the passive spectator, but on the revealing ground that a man who had such a big impact on others could hardly have been in the business for its ‘entertainment value’ (p. 20). I find this a remarkable pair of alternatives: improvement or entertainment! There seems no place here for the scholar, the man dedicated to finding out how the world works because he is fascinated by it. Nor is account taken of the vocation of teaching, the desire just to pass on to others the understanding one has gained. Of course, I am sure Nicholson would say that his remarks were not an exhaustive account of the possibilities. But what he does seem to be, saying is that the scholar must also be concerned about making the world a better place. I see no ground for this position. It implies a moral deficiency in those who are simply devoted to learning or who do not believe in the possibility of progress. This is a large claim.

The questions with which I began and ended Women and War remain: How might we locate ourselves in order to create space for a less rigid play of individual and civic identities and virtues than those we have thus far known? What alternatives of citizenship can we draw upon? What perspectives within our reach offer hope for sustaining an ethos that extends the prospect of limiting force and the threat of force? In the book, I recommend a form of civic membership that cannot and does not place duty and loyalty to one's particular political body above all else; nevertheless, one that honours and gives ethical and civic weight precisely to that form of membership. I called this civic character a ‘chastened patriot’, one who is critical of the excesses of nationalism and critical, as well, of feminist arguments that express contempt for forms of identity as these are embodied in loyalties to ways of life shared by men and women. At the same time, this civic paragon of mine is also critical of those who defend particular ways of life in a way that generates contempt for the universalistic features of feminist concerns for the dignity and rights of woman. The ‘chastened patriot’ is one who understands and honours both universalistic and particularistic commitments, one for whom neither automatically trumps the other.