Amidst calls for containing an assertive Russia, politicians and pundits have been debating whether Ukraine should serve as a ‘buffer zone’ between the Russian and Western spheres of influence. These debates provide an opportunity to revisit the long and varied history of major powers’ efforts to manage buffer zones. We draw on this history to learn the conditions under which buffer zones succeed or fail to stabilise regions, how buffers are most successfully managed, and when alternative arrangements for borderlands work better.

Russia is by some measures the most successful imperial enterprise in history. Surpassed in size only by the British and Mongol empires, Russia and its Soviet successor proved far more durable than either one. It retained its peak territorial extent longer than any other empire, and for most of the last 400 years it has been the largest polity on earth. Moreover, both St. Petersburg and Moscow were hugely successful as great powers, playing major roles in European and world politics for the three centuries after 1700. And their influence as great powers peaked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—an era in which states based on nations appeared to have the competitive edge over old-fashioned polyglot empires.

Covert action has long been a controversial tool of international relations. However, there is remarkably little public understanding about whether it works and, more fundamentally, about what constitutes success in this shadowy arena of state activity. This article distills competing criteria of success and examines how covert actions become perceived as successes. We develop a conceptual model of covert action success as a social construct and illustrate it through the case of ‘the golden age of CIA operations’. The socially constructed nature of success has important implications not just for evaluating covert actions but also for using, and defending against, them.

Hans-Martin Jaeger argues in this Journal that Hegel endorses a ‘reluctant realism’, whereby Hegel's theory of international politics institutionalises a transnationalising civil society of states. In Jaeger's view, Hegel's conception of individuals in civil society is analogous to states in international politics. On the contrary, I argue Hegel's conception of abstract right is far more commensurable with his theory of international politics. The mutual recognition existing in civil society – which helps to produce legal relationships – does not exist beyond the state where there are no legal relationships. Thus, Hegel is a realist of a more familiar sort, without any ‘reluctance’.

The critical turn in IR promised a continuous archeology of the field, an empathetic understanding of those we study, and a social science unwedded to the pursuit of universally valid laws. In the United States, this movement was rooted more in a critique of peace research, than in a critique of the ‘NeoNeo’ mainstream, to which it became sort of ‘official opposition’. The promise has not been fulfilled because the research strategies of critical theorists have rarely given them direct access to the understandings of those outside the privileged core of world society. Other research programmes, including that of the Human Development Reports and of some feminists and ethnographic scholars in IR, have been more successful.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote of the territorialising of the world, describing the commodification of space; its parcelling out and regimentation ensuring stable, unvarying coherence. Territorialised space, when well regulated, becomes a settled base for the political and for notions of political identity, heritage and kinship. Kenan Ferguson describes this as ‘the location and creation of civilization in a specific consumption of the land, as well as the subsequent delegitimation of those with different conceptions of it.’ The contemporary state is the receptacle of human ambition and desires, with history, allegiance and kinship understood in terms of its borders; there is a retrospective history premised on strategic forgetting and the cultivation of a collective memory coherent before the contemporary state.

The British Way in Warfare was the title of a book by Basil Liddell Hart published in 1932. It was an elaboration of ideas first propounded a year earlier in a celebrated lecture on ‘Economic Pressure or Continental Victories’ to the Royal United Services Institute. Like many of his generation, the more Liddell Hart reflected on his own encounter with war (he had been gassed and wounded at the Somme), the more he became convinced that such folly must not be repeated. This required transforming the very conduct of war. With equal conviction he believed that he had hit upon some answers. These appeared as general principles of strategy—the ‘indirect approach’—and a particular policy for his own country— ‘limited liability’. He claimed that he was doing little more than distilling the essence of a long–standing national approach. This was ‘the British Way in Warfare’.

What drives East Asian regionalism? The rise of China and the perceived decline in the influence of the United States have sparked debates about the future of the regional order, including the yet-unresolved question of whose leadership is likely to be more stable and accepted as legitimate by other regional actors. What is puzzling, however, is that persistent demands for the formation of a coherent and uniquely East Asian regional institution have come not from China or the US, as is the focus of existing studies, but rather Japan and South Korea. In this article, we propose an alternative framework that conceptualises the varieties of East Asian regionalism, emphasising the multiple pivots and variegated levels of politics involved in efforts toward regional cooperation. We find that competing proposals for East Asian regionalism since the 1990s are not determined by structural pressures or the convergence of interests but rather result from domestic legitimacy politics. Japanese and Korean leaders have, at different time periods, proposed their own alternative region-making initiatives appealing to domestically contested views on how best to seek autonomy from the region's Great Powers as a way to enhance their political standing domestically and regionally.

‘Isolationism’ is a much used and abused term in the contemporary American foreign policy debate. This article seeks to illuminate some of the misunderstandings that surround the use of this term by challenging seven persistent myths about isolationism. In so doing it sheds light on the often unarticulated role that this and other ideas play in the US foreign policy debate. It also seeks to demonstrate the nature of the main ideational cleavages within this debate which the isolationist name-calling obscures, and to show the way in which language is used in the political discourse and how its meaning in this debate changes over time.

Instead of asking whether regional organisations can promote democracy, a well-established conclusion, this article asks what type of democracy regional organisations can promote. Where their commitments to democracy are weak, regional organisations can promote the transition away from authoritarianism but cannot drive that process to completion with the creation of embedded liberal democracies. Under such circumstances regional organisations serve as regimes of bounded toleration, and can provide regional linkages that sustain defective democracies. Through examining the relationship between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and Myanmar, three supporting roles are identified; regional legitimacy, defence from external pressure, and future-oriented accommodation. The presence of these linkages between defective democracies and regional organisations provides a caveat to the positive assessments of regional organisations as socialisers of democracy.

This article (originally given as the Annual War Studies Lecture at King's College, London, on 25 January 2010) challenges the assumption that Britain's relationship to genocide is constituted by its ‘vigilance’ towards the genocide of others. Through a critical overview of the question of genocide in the historical and contemporary politics of the British state and society, the article suggests their wide-ranging, complex relationships to genocide. Utilising a conception of genocide as multi-method social destruction and applying the interpretative frames of the genocide literature, it argues that the British state and elements of identifiably British populations have been involved directly and indirectly in genocide in a number of different international contexts. These are addressed through five themes: the role of genocide in the origins of the British state; the problem of genocide in the Empire and British settler colonialism; Britain's relationships to twentieth-century European genocide; its role in the genocidal violence of decolonisation; and finally, Britain's role in the genocidal crises of the post-Cold War world. The article examines the questions of national responsibility that this survey raises: while rejecting simple ideas of national responsibility as collective guilt, it nevertheless argues that varying kinds of responsibility for genocide attach to British institutions, leaders and population groups at different points in the history surveyed.

The concept of world society has elicited sharp criticism for being too diffuse and amorphous owing to its synonymy with all transborder social relations, equability with humankind, or conflation with solidarist international society. To overcome these shortcomings, this article reconfigures world society by attaching otherwise unmoored social activity to an understanding of the world as comprised of shared social spaces. This spatialised reading foregrounds constellations of relations that have emerged in conjunction with discrete geographies – natural, economic, cyberspatial, cultural, anthropic – within which humans interact, and demonstrates that the world has become an actionable, political concept generative of activities peculiar to the space itself. A review of English School literature extracts four theses – purposive, plural, spatial, and stewardship – that invite conceptual reconstruction of world society. The article then addresses the discursive construction of cultural heritage as a worldly space populated with distinctive institutions and cognitive and normative commitments, and is followed by reflections on the added value of such an approach and directions for future research.

This article uses the trope of ‘hysterical motherhood’ to elucidate one of the unique forms that women’s protest action took at the height of the American anti-nuclear movement. It advances an understanding of ‘hysterical motherhood’ as both an embodied tactic and a performative act, arguing that its tactical effectiveness lay in its ability to redirect the societal gaze from the ‘hystericized’ bodies of women to the bodies and practices of militarised men. In so doing, it (re)structured the field of the possible: constraining and enabling performative enactments of masculinity and the nuclear state.

The boat was leaky, the sea heavy, and the shore a long way off. It took all the efforts of the one man to row, and of the other to bail. If either had ceased both would have drowned. At one point the rower threatened the bailer that if he did not bail with more energy he would throw him overboard; to which the bailer made the obvious reply that, if he did, he (the rower) would certainly drown also.

Sir Norman Angell (1914)

Introduction

While most European Union (EU)I use the term EU when referring to events after November 1993 and when discussing the general history of the Union, but I reserve the usage 'European Community' (EC) for specific occurrences before the enactment of the Treaty on European Union in November 1993. scholars agree that international economic interdependence is a key variable in understanding politics between states, only a small number of studies have recognized the impact of interdependence on politics within states. Traditionally, scholars have been concerned with the effects of interdependence on states' external autonomy and have focused on the limitations that increased levels of interdependence impose on states' foreign policies.The classic piece being Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr, Power and Interdependence (Boston, MA, 1977). More recent scholarship, however, has suggested that the effects of rising interdependence also manifest themselves domestically.See, e.g., Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crisis (Ithaca, NY, 1986); and Helen V. Milner, Resisting Protectionism: Global Industries and the Politics of International Trade (Princeton, 1988). In scholarship on international organizations, for example, it has been argued that international organizations increasingly shape the domestic policy choices of states and have lasting implications for executives' autonomy.Andrew P. Cortell and James W. Davis, Jr, 'International Institutions and Domestic Politics: Structure, Interest and Agency', unpublished ms., University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University, 1995; and Vivien A. Schmidt, 'Upscaling Business and Downsizing Government: France in the New European Community', paper presented at American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 2-5 September 1993. More specifically, it has been suggested in the context of the EU that membership has 'strengthened' the domestic autonomy of governments.Andrew Moravcsik, 'Why the European Community Strengthens the State: Domestic Politics and International Cooperation', Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Working Paper Series No. 52 (1994).

The discourse about the morality of humanitarian intervention – though undeniably well- (over-?) trodden in recent years – has two critical gaps. First, despite its central moral concern with the rights and lives of individuals living under massively oppressive states or terrible conditions, and despite its powerful attacks on traditional notions of state sovereignty, the discourse remains statist. Humanitarian intervention understood as something that states do, and if there is a right or responsibility to intervene it is a right or responsibility held by states. The second gap in the discourse follows from the first: because we think of humanitarian intervention as something that states do, the role of the individual soldiers who make up the intervening force – their rights and responsibilities – has been undertheorised.

This article argues that a reconsideration of the role of individuals in the context of humanitarian intervention not only helps us to ensure that interventions are carried out in a manner consistent with their own justice claims, but also to recapture the moral heroism of those individuals who willingly sacrifice for the rights and lives of others. Although the moral issues raised here may demand a more constrained politics of humanitarian intervention, they also ultimately have an emancipating effect.

This article asks the question: ‘Why have the French not developed ‘‘think tanks’’?’ by looking at the period when such institutions were being set up in The UK and the United States, during the preparation for the Paris Peace Conference and its aftermath. It is suggested that the reasons were a mixture of French bureaucratic and intellectual disposition but also in a growing revulsion in Paris at what was seen as duplicity and conspiracy by its Allies to ignore the legitimate concerns and needs of the French people. The central source material used is the papers of the ‘Commission Bourgeois’ whose deliberations are often rather air brushed out of academic literature on the period and work done within the French Foreign Ministry.

The notion of democracy has been invoked in the past decade by both opponents and proponents of global governance. Many in the so-called ‘anti-globalisation’ movement have underlined the inherently unaccountable, opaque and unrepresentative nature of global governance, whilst those more sympathetic to the pluralising dynamics of the phenomenon have emphasised the potentially democratic aspects of this new form of rule, especially with reference to the incorporation of a putative ‘global civil society’ into the structures of global governance and the accompanying diversification of sources of international political authority. Yet both critics and advocates also tend to agree that there are two basic challenges to (on some accounts, causes of) global governance: the global capitalist market and the concomitant system of sovereign states. The disjunctures generated by the operation of these two structures of power, so both liberal defenders of global governance and their radical, anti-capitalist contenders argue, have created the conditions for decentralised, multilateral mechanisms of socioeconomic and political management of world affairs, that is, ‘global governance’. It therefore seems that the question on both sides of this divide, is not so much whether to do away with transnational, multilateral forms of political authority altogether (although that is certainly one aim in some quarters of the anti-globalisation movement) but rather, how to render these democratic, that is, how to democratise global governance.

Like every other part of the world, the Caribbean is having to come to terms with the deep-seated changes in the nature of the world order manifest at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. These changes have set in train a process which is beginning to constitute a reconfiguration of what is meant by and included within the concept of the Caribbean. Conventionally, the Caribbean has been defined by a blend of its geography and history. From a simple geographical viewpoint, it consists of all the islands in the Caribbean Sea, making up a huge archipelago which runs some 2,500 miles from the southern tip of Florida in the north to the coast of Venezuela in the south, facing Central America to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. From a more complex historical viewpoint which emphasizes the common, searing impact of slave-based European imperialism, it also includes Belize on the Central American isthmus and the three ‘Guianas’ on the South American coast: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. Conceived in this way, the region has widely been said to possess an intellectual coherence that makes it possible to analyse its modern politics and economics within a single framework.

In recent years, scholarship on international organisations (IO) has devoted increasing attention to the relations in which IOs are embedded. In this article, we argue that the rationalist-institutionalist core of this scholarship has been marked by agentic, repressive understandings of power and we propose an alternative approach to power as productive in and of relations among IOs. To study productive power in IO relations, we develop a theoretical framework centred on the concept of ‘metagovernance norms’ as perceptions about the proper ‘governance of governance’ that are shared among IOs in a governance field. Drawing on discourse theory, we contend that metagovernance norms unfold productive power effects, as dominant notions of how to govern well and effectively (i) fix meanings, excluding alternative understandings and (ii) are inscribed into practices and institutions, hence reshaping inter-organisational relations over time. To illustrate our framework, we trace metagovernance norms in discourses among health IOs since the 1990s. We find a historical transformation from beliefs in the virtues of partnerships, pluralisation, and innovation, towards discursive articulations that emphasise harmonisation, order, and alignment. Moreover, we expose the productive power of metagovernance norms by showing how they were enacted through practices and institutions in the global health field.

Ex-combatant youth originated the commercial motorcycling sector in Liberia and have played a dominant role in its development. This article collates key insights narrated by one of Liberia's young ex-combatants-turned-commercial motorcyclists, Edwin Nyankoon, to build narrative accounts of peacebuilding around conceptualisation of youth livelihood, identity, and politics after war. The article contributes to diverse literatures on youth agency by emphasising the need for narrative and subject-led methodologies that anchor research questions and data analysis to research participants’ own language and narrated experiences of post war. It applies insights about everyday peace to interpret hustling as bottom-up peacebuilding, in opposition to dominant top-down peacebuilding accounts of ex-combatants. These latter accounts largely fail to see youth actors as peacebuilding agents, constructing them instead as troublemakers and interpreting their livelihood activities in terms of criminality and threat. Additionally, it argues that hustling also constitutes a peacebuilding style. More than a coping strategy or an indicator of peace, hustling-as-peacebuilding-style is performative: relational, embodied, contradictory, and recognisable to its adherents as peace-promoting even if (and arguably because) outsiders construct it as peace-negating. This analysis problematises agency, social relations, gendered identity, and collective security as they relate to ex-combatant and conflict-affected youth during peace processes.