War experiences are a material of political currency, invoked, appropriated, and ‘written’ in particular configurations to sustain, complicate, and contest narratives about war. This occurs through and within the same relations of power that are intrinsic to the conduct of war as war-experiencing subjects comprise a political vocabulary of selves and others that populate and operate within war’s wider social (re)production. To track these power relations and consider implications for how dominant accounts of war can be complicated and contested, the article is grounded in an analysis of the visual regimes at work in footage, photographs, and testimony relating to the shooting of a group of people by an American Apache helicopter in Baghdad, Iraq in 2007. The event was publicised on a dedicated website and dubbed ‘Collateral Murder’ by WikiLeaks in 2010. Analysis of the website reveals how visual modes and the experiences of war subjects accompany each other, revealing war in contrasting locations of sight and violence: the ‘view from above’, the ‘view from below’, and the view of the ‘on-the-ground’ soldier eyewitness. Taken together these discursively produce ‘Collateral Murder’ and contest the dominance of war known through the experience of those who wage it ‘from above’.

The European Union's (EU) trade and development ‘partnership’ with the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries has long interested scholars of North-South relations. Historically, the theoretical literature on ACP-EU ties has been characterised by liberal institutionalist accounts of interdependence and critical assessments of Europe's neo-colonialism. In the timeframe of the Cotonou Agreement (2000–20), this division has expressed itself in relation to liberal assessments of Europe's pursuit of pro-poor market reforms in the Post-Washington Consensus and critical accounts of Europe's neoliberal ‘development’ agenda. This article argues that a moral political economy offers an innovative lens for the latter critical assessment of ACP-EU ties. With a constructivist focus on Europe's normative ‘development’ agenda, a moral economy standpoint may draw attention to the EU's role in (re)embedding poverty through recourse to legitimating ethical discourse. This is seen to enable the critical school to more closely consider ideational/discursive power in response to contemporary liberal institutionalist accounts. The article focuses on the European Investment Bank (EIB) and its activities in ACP countries – with particular focus on the Bank's Investment Facility (IF) – as an exemplar of the disjuncture between norms and outcomes.

Dr Savigear's ‘Philosophical Idealism and International Politics: Bosanquet, Treitschke and War’ is especially welcome because this important topic has not been much discussed. However, on a subject so complex and controversial, some disagreement is to be expected. I shall suggest that Dr Savigear's argument requires qualification because it underemphasizes the cosmopolitanism which provides continuity to this aspect of Idealist moral and political philosophy.

China and India, as rising powers, have been proactive in seeking status as nuclear responsibles. Since the 1990s they have sought to demonstrate conformity with intersubjectively accepted understandings of nuclear responsibility within the global nuclear order, and have also sought recognition on the basis of particularistic practices of nuclear restraint. This article addresses two puzzles. First, nuclear restraint is at the centre of the pursuit of global nuclear order, so why have China and India not received recognition from influential members of the nuclear order for the full spectrum of their restraint-based behaviours? Second, why do China and India nonetheless persist with these behaviours? We argue that the conferral of status as a nuclear responsible is a politicised process shaped by the interests, values, and perceptions of powerful stakeholder states in the global nuclear order. China’s and India’s innovations are not incorporated into the currently accepted set of responsible nuclear behaviours because, indirectly, they pose a strategic, political, and social challenge to these states. However, China’s and India’s innovations are significant as an insight into their identity-projection and preferred social roles as distinctive rising powers, and as a means of introducing new, if nascent, ideas into non-proliferation practice and governance.

The project of international development involves the reordering of states (or at least attempts to do so), it sits at the intersection between transnational forces and bounded political entities and it is a manifestation of the will to order of powerful states. It would seem then to be closely connected to practices of intervention. At times, the practices of development agencies have taken on a more interventionist character, but in recent years their relationship to many developing countries has taken on a more intricate, subtle, and everyday form. It has in important respects moved ‘beyond’ intervention. This has significance beyond international development. Development agencies have been recruited to wider projects of international ordering, especially the construction of regimes of global governance and the ‘development’ of post-intervention states.

The end of the Cold War and the transformation of the Yalta security system generated a debate about the survivability of the postwar institutions of security, particularly NATO. This debate is too narrow in its focus. We argue that security has two mutual constitutive elements, the political-military and the economic. The interdependence of these two elements of the future security architecture raises a set of interrelated questions addressed in this article: What are the economic elements of security? How have the changes in the European state system affected the prospects for the institutionalization of security cooperation, broadly defined? Does a stable security architecture require the parallel construction of the economic and military institutions of security?

This article explains how foreign assistance to one or both sides in a civil war influences the dynamics of the conflict. It submits that external assistance has the potential of affecting the military capabilities available to the belligerents. It then argues that the balance of those capabilities impacts significantly on whether the warfare in a civil war assumes a conventional, guerrilla or irregular form. These theoretical assertions are tested against the case of the Angolan Civil War. It is shown that during that war, variations in the form of warfare correlated closely to the type, degree, and direction of foreign intervention given to each of the belligerents.

This article argues that public expressions of Islamophobia are best understood as securitising requests (that is, calls on powerful figures/bodies to treat an issue in security mode so that extraordinary measures can be used to combat it), especially in those cases where Muslims are feared and disliked because of the perception that Islamic people are prone to terrorism. This article argues that harmful and derogatory securitising requests targeting racial, ethnic, or religious minorities are on par with hate speech and it highlights the fact that many contemporary societies are now seeking legal protections against such security speech (expressed most notably in the desire to ban Islamophobia). It is from this perspective that this article poses an important research question: With a view to protecting those adversely affected, are legal protections against harmful and offensive securitising requests justified? The research question can be answered by drawing parallels to the existing hate speech debate in legal and political theory. The research reveals that, although the case against legal protections of harmful and defamatory security speech is ultimately more convincing, security speech alone can be so damaging that it should be informed by a number of ethical considerations. This article goes on to suggest three criteria for governing the ethics of requesting securitisation. As such this article fills a lacuna in the ‘positive/negative debate’ on the ethics of security that has engaged with securitisation, but that has failed to consider the ethics of speaking security.

This article argues that conventional understanding of how IR theory conceptualizes the state is in need of revision. By relocating IR theories of the state within the ‘second state’ debate, we find that neorealism underestimates the power of the state in world politics, while neoliberal institutionalism exaggerates its power. Moreover, liberalism, constructivism, Marxism, postmodernism, and ‘second-wave’ Weberian historical sociology, all endow the state with greater degrees of agential power in the international realm than does neorealism. The significance of the second state debate will be not merely to reconfigure our understanding of how IR theory conceptualizes the state, but to turn conventional understanding of IR theory upside-down.

Ideas of smart power and Global Health Diplomacy have developed considerable prominence over the past decade in, respectively, the foreign policy and public health communities. Although in some respects separate, both suggest the potential for using health assistance to generate political as well as health benefits. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan provide an opportunity to examine these assertions at the ‘sharp end’. We consider both the health and wider strategic benefits of health assistance in these conflicts, as well as some of the ethical challenges involved. We conclude however that we should adopt the precautionary principle because: there is doubt over the quality of health services provided in such circumstances; concern over the wider effects of politicising health aid; and little proof that the claimed strategic benefits materialise in practice.

Internal displacement is increasingly perceived as an international problem. This has led to suggestions that international norms have begun to govern state behaviour towards their own displaced populations. I argue that this change occurred through the innovative use of soft law, in particular the guiding principles on internal displacement, by a consortia of norm entrepreneurs including NGOs and a UN Office, that of the Representative of the Secretary-General for Internally Displaced Persons. As soft law, these principles lack the usual markers which suggest an emerging norm. Instead, the article argues that alternative methods – including the international recognition of the principles and their adoption in domestic legislation – has triggered a change in state behaviour. This is demonstrated by examining two cases of forcible return of IDPs – the closure of the Kibeho Camp in Rwanda in 1995, before the principles were created, and the closure of the Znamenskoye camp in Ingushetia, Russia in 2002, after their creation. Both situations are similar in that the norm appears to have been rejected – forced repatriation did occur. In the Russian case, however, government statements, along with widespread international condemnation of the closures, suggest rhetorical instantiation of a norm of non forcible return for IDPs.

Recently, the field of International Relations has seen increased interest in international hierarchy, and also an upswing in the analytical study of imperial logics of rule. Nonetheless, existing structural models of empire focus on core-periphery dynamics, and so cannot explain polities that display elements of both core and periphery. Therefore, I offer the new concept of ‘semi-cores’. Semi-cores are a specific form of historical political associations whereby certain imperial provinces are different from the others in terms of the close relationships it maintains with the imperial metropolis. Semi-cores are different by virtue of being relatively similar. The conceptualisation of semi-cores is followed by a section illustrating its logic, examining the relatively unfamiliar cases of Scotland and Norway and their position within the Danish and British empires, respectively. Although being separate imperial provinces, these were tightly connected to an imperial core. This concept helps us better understand imperial logics, and in the process shows how cultural factors can be formalised into accounts of structural logics of rule, impacting our understanding of both historical and contemporary hierarchical international affairs.

The twenty first century has opened, as so many centuries before it, with the drum roll of war depressingly audible. The optimism of the early 1990s that world politics was being remade, and that the threat of serious conflict was receding, vanished along with the twin towers that were so much a symbol of that world, one heart-breakingly beautiful September morning in 2001. And with the return of force and war to the forefront of international politics, so come the inevitable questions; when, under what circumstances, in what manner and with what restraint, may we (whoever the we might be) use force to secure our interests, protect our families, defend our communities or our values?

Since Rousseau political theorists have had frequent recourse to a contrast between the fragmented nature of modern social and political life and the allegedly communitarian character of the Greek polis. At the heart of this opposition was the belief that the polis represented a condition of unsurpassable harmony in which citizens identified freely and spontaneously with their public institutions. Unlike their ancient counterparts, modern citizens exhibited less identification with their public world than resolution to advance their separate individual interests and pursue their private conceptions of the good. Nevertheless, the disintegration of the polis was not depicted in the language of unqualified loss. History had not been simply an unmitigated fall, because the individual's claim to scrutinize the law of the polis on rational grounds involved a significant advance in man's self-consciousness. The positive aspect of its decline was man's transcendence of a parochial culture in which neither the right of individual freedom nor the principle of human equality had been recognized. If the modern world had lost the spontaneous form of community enjoyed by the ancients, it surpassed that world in its understanding and expression of freedom.

One of the central objectives of the field of international political economy (IPE) in the last 20 years has been to introduce insights from the field of international relations into the study of global economic affairs. Although this effort has been largely successful in the study of international trade, much less attention has been focused on the financial sector of the global economy. Seemingly highly technical and arcane, the study of international finance has been left largely to specialists in international economics, financial journalists, and international financial practitioners.

During the postwar era, much scholarship was concerned with understanding the causes of the Cold War and with identifying ways in which East—West tensions might be reduced. Since the 1980s, however, an increasing number of analysts have chosen to characterize the years following World War II as a ‘Long Peace’, during which, contrary to many fears and expectations, a major war never occurred. Rather than focusing on the sources of hostility between the leading powers of the period, these scholars have sought to explain how military conflict between them was avoided for an extended length of time.

the rise of china became a popular subject in china comparatively recently, gaining prominence only in the last decade. for those in china who were used to understanding modern chinese history as a history of victimisation at the hands of imperialism, recognising such a return to the world stage was an uneasy shift. in the context of international concerns that china’s rise poses a threat to world peace or a contribution to the clash of civilisations, chinese narrators initially refused to portray a ‘rising china’ because this could easily lead to china becoming the target of a us-organised containment policy in the post-cold war era. shortly before the chinese communist party (ccp) outlined new policy directions at its fifteenth congress in 1997, leaders in beijing began to think about a way of describing china’s rise as unthreatening. yet this was a reluctant change because beijing was willing to acknowledge china’s rise only indirectly. what came out of the congress was the recognition of the necessity that beijing should frame its foreign policy to emphasise its relations with the other great powers more than those with the third world. accordingly, they decided that beijing should develop a distinctive strategy specifically to deal with the other great powers.

Although, as the quotations above indicate, the question of the importance of the ‘balancer’ in balance of power systems has generated strong opinions from both critics and proponents, it has never stimulated a specific study of the balancer. The picture of the balancer as it currently exists has to be obtained by abstracting descriptions of the balancer role from general writings on the balance of power. This is unfortunate for even those authors like Padelford and Lincoln who saw the balancer role as critical, failed to devote more then a few paragraphs to the topic. The aim of this paper therefore is to try to clarify the nature and function of the balancer by synthesizing the views of analysts of the role over the past three centuries to produce a paradigm of the balancer strategy.

The article analyses the involvement of pharmaceutical companies from emerging markets in global health governance. It finds that they play a central role as low-cost suppliers of medicines and vaccines and, increasingly, new technologies. In so doing, pharmaceutical companies from emerging markets have facilitated the implementation of a key goal of global health policy: widening access to pharmaceutical treatment and prevention. Yet, looking closer at the political economy underlying their involvement, the article exposes a tension between this policy goal and the political economy of pharmaceutical development and production. By declaring access to pharmaceuticals a goal of global health policy, governments and global health partnerships have made themselves dependent on pharmaceutical companies to supply them. Moreover, to provide pharmaceutical treatment and prevention at the global level, they depend on companies to supply medicines and vaccines at extremely low prices. Yet, the development and production of pharmaceuticals is organised around commercial incentives that are at odds with the prices required. The increasing involvement of low-cost suppliers from emerging markets mitigates this tension in the short run. In the long run, this tension endangers the sustainability of global access policies and may even undermine some of the successes already achieved.

No-one seriously doubts the importance of E. H. Carr in the history of the study of international relations. The publication of The Twenty Years' “Crisis, 1919–1939, in 1939 marked a turning point in international theory, ending, as it did in Britain, the dominance of the more traditional ‘pro-gressivist’ or ‘idealist’ schools of thought characterized in the writings of, for example, Norman Angell, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Zimmern, Arnold Toynbee, G. Lowes Dickinson and others. The bulk of Carr's work in the field was written in the twenty or so years between 1936 (when he accepted the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics at Aberystwyth) and 1955 (when he accepted a Fellowship at Trinity, his old Cambridge College), and since then his energies have been concentrated on his abiding concern with the history of Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, he is still an important figure in the field and although international relations has not been his life' work, his unique contribution to its understanding, ensures him a permanent place in the British tradition of international studies.