first, ‘peaceful rise’ was the theme of a keynote speech to a regional policy forum created by the chinese government, aptly named the bo’ao forum for asia, then it was an emphatic point made by china’s premier wen jiabao in a speech at harvard university, and still later it was a key feature in china’s president hu jintao’s talk at a gathering to mark the 110th anniversary of mao zedong’s birth. the phrase ‘peaceful rise’ (heping jueqi) has caught the imagination both inside china and abroad partly because all three events took place within a short two-month period beginning at the end of 2003. the chinese leadership seems to have a well-coordinated campaign to officially present the notion to the country and the world.

Within the field of International Relations, theoretically informed explanations of the long peace in Europe since 1945 tend to focus on Western Europe, especially the revolution in Franco-German relations. In contrast, German relations with Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are ignored, despite the fact that this nexus was a major cause of instability prior to 1945. This article focuses on why the German question in CEE ceased to threaten the stability of Europe after 1945. The article empirically examines the development of the German question in CEE since 1945, which refers here mainly to the Oder-Neisse line and the plight of ethnic Germans expelled from CEE after World War II. It provides a theoretically integrated and chronologically sequenced explanation. First, it argues that Realism primarily explains the successful containment of the German question in CEE between 1945 and the late 1960s. Second, it argues that the Constructivist process of cultural change, which altered German intensions, was primarily responsible for subsequently increasing the depth of peace and stability between Germany and CEE, especially after the Cold War. Finally, it is argued that prior Realist factors and Liberal processes constituted a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for cultural change.

David Hume’s ideas on international relations are different than most international relations academics suppose. Close scrutiny of Hume’s views on the nation, international society, war, balance of power, empire and trade reveals the need to reassess his place within international political theory. Taking an English School perspective, the analysis also shows the possible benefits for IR theorists within this tradition to focus on Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, which will also strengthen the position of the pluralist perspective within international society.

This article explores political agency in the interstices of the bodily politics of asylum. It shows how its practices make bodily surfaces and how alternative forms of political authority emanate from bodies. Relying on Jean-Luc Nancy's ontology of the body, it examines forms of political agency that are enacted by people often considered as abjective subjectivities in the spaces of the international. Deriving from interviews conducted with failed asylum seekers, the article sheds light on agencies and resistances embedded in and extant despite the governmental efforts to solve the problem of the moving body. Ethnographic data and interviews with the failed asylum seekers show how they take control over their lives, not as separate, sovereign subjects, but in relation to their political surroundings and others. In a way, the failed asylum seekers produce and practice their own politics that both takes part in and exceeds the limits set by sovereign politics. By exploring political agency from underneath and beyond sovereign power and governmentality, the article presents a reading of the intertwining of the international, political, and bodily.

Much of the work that has been done by feminist International Relations (IR) theorists thus far has been to critique the existing discipline for its obvious inattention to questions of women and gender. It is time now to turn to more substantive work and explore not only the ways in which gender is absent from the study of international relations, but to document also the ways in which gender informs the various institutions and practices of international relations. To this end, feminist analyses of political economy, militarism, state-building, diplomacy and so on have begun to emerge. The present study is part of this project and seeks to develop an account of gender and international organizations and then apply it to an illustrative study of the International Labour Organization (ILO).

This article investigates how modern neo-liberal states are ‘securing by design’ – harnessing design to new technologies in order to produce security, safety, and protection. We take a critical view toward ‘securing by design’ and the policy agendas it produces of ‘designing out insecurity’ and ‘designing in protection’ because securing by design strategies rely upon inadequate conceptualisations of security, technology, and design and inadequate understandings of their relationships to produce inadequate ‘security solutions’ to ready-made ‘security problems’. This critique leads us to propose a new research agenda we call Redesigning Security. A Redesigning Security Approach begins from a recognition that the achievement of security is more often than not illusive, which means that the desire for security is itself problematic. Rather than encouraging the design of ‘security solutions’ – a securing by design – a Redesigning Security Approach explores how we might insecure securing by design. By acknowledging and then moving beyond the new security studies insight that security often produces insecurity, our approach uses design as a vehicle through which to raise questions about security problems and security solutions by collaborating with political and critical design practitioners to design concrete material objects that themselves embody questions about traditional security and about traditional design practices that use technology to depoliticise how technology is deployed by states and corporations to make us ‘safe’.

International law has changed significantly since the end of the Cold War. As long as the international was thought to be populated by sovereign states predominantly, international law was conceived of as a means for peaceful dispute settlement. That is: the reference to state sovereignty not only divided public from private international law, but structured most of public international law itself; from the very definition of and associated rights and duties to the attribution of responsibility. With the emergence of the post-national constellation, a reduction of law to questions of states' practices is increasingly problematic. At the same time, the post-national constellation denotes more than just a structural shift in the world polity. It challenges established dogmas rooted in an individualistic philosophy of science and thereby calls for a different understanding of how the world is (made) known. What uncertainty has to offer is the provision of a different vocabulary detached from the state through which we can reconsider some changes in international law.

This article has been constructed under the premise that International Political Economy provides the appropriate analytical tools for understanding the characteristics and performance of oil in economic and political relations. The article argues the need to articulate three levels of analysis (major players, scenarios, and exchange mechanisms) in order to understand the economic and political relations that underpin oil exchange during last decades. The central conclusion is that the current oil system is characterised by a set of asymmetric, unstable, and ungovernable relations, whose consequences are unpredictable but not necessarily traumatic.

In The Transformation of Political Community Andrew Linklater has given us a most impressive synthesis of critical normative thinking about international relations theory, and I might as well begin by emphasizing that I will not be able to do justice to the rich detail of its content in the space here allotted to me, and so I shall not try. I offer just an individual response to Linklater's book, addressed to its core theoretical assumptions. I shall propose a critique of it in two particulars. These relate to a central ambiguity in its underwriting of discourse ethics on the one hand, and to a certain too ready levelling, so to say, vis-à-vis modes of social oppression and exclusion on the other.

Machiavelli believed that diplomacy, unlike military service, was of no significance for civic virtue, and that in foreign policy it was no substitute for arms and money. Nevertheless, it enhanced the virtù of even the strongest prince. It was for this and other reasons that Machiavelli also believed that the good faith on which negotiation depends was generally observed. His view that promises need not outlast the conditions that produce them is an escape clause that is equally necessary. Machiavelli does not deserve the charge, laid at his door by Harold Nicolson, of corrupting the art of diplomacy.

The UK's domestic intelligence agency, MI5, has become increasingly involved in the realm of law enforcement over the last decade. This article puts the British experience in perspective by comparing it with France's main domestic intelligence agency, which has pushed deep into the law enforcement arena in recent years. A similar perception of Islamist terrorism underpins these parallel developments in the two countries. However, differences relating to accountability, legal systems and conceptions of the state mean that the French intelligence agency has expanded its role considerably more than its British counterpart. The analysis indicates that MI5's move into law enforcement is likely to remain a relatively conservative one.

While the study of games and gaming has increased in International Relations in recent years, a corresponding exploration of play has yet to be developed in the field. While play features in several key areas – including game theory, videogames and popular culture, and pedagogical role-plays and simulations – little work has been done to analyse its presence in, and potentials for, the discipline. The aim of this article is to introduce the study of play to IR. It does this by demonstrating that play is political, and that it is at work across the global arena. Drawing on the deconstructive tradition associated with Jacques Derrida, its core contribution is a theorisation of play. The central argument developed is that play is (auto)deconstructive. By this I mean (1) that play precipitates an unravelling of any attempt at its conceptualisation, and (2) that this illustrates the value of a deconstructive approach to international theory. This claim is substantiated through an analysis of four key binary oppositions derived from Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens. Having shown how play powerfully deconstructs its own conceptual foundations, I argue that a playful approach offers a robust challenge to entrenched assumptions in international theory.

This article subjects to a close philosophical scrutiny the internal logic of Wendt's extensive argument regarding his work's location in the field—in particular, how it relates to, and differs from, the American ‘rationalist’ orthodoxy in IR, comprising neorealism and neoliberalism. I argue that his empirical hypotheses regarding collective identity formation are plausible in their own right, but that his complex philosophical argumentation, by means of which he tries to locate his work within the American scientific orthodoxy, but away from its individualist core, is unconvincing.

International organisations (IOs) are said to command growing levels of authority. But in studying this phenomenon, scholars predominantly focus on the formal capacities member states assign to IOs. Much less attention is paid to the effects of IO authority, that is, how authority is exerted in practice and what it does within the affected societies. Based on a case study of the African Union's (AU) anti-coup regime, I make the case for a ‘bottom-up’ approach to IO authority, focusing on its localised enactment and effects. Analysing the AU's authority through a governmentality lens and drawing on several months of field research, I show that the AU's authority to govern coups is indeed effective: in commanding the re-establishment of constitutional order, the AU prescribes a particular imaginary of political order to resolve conflict and shapes the conduct of political actors in affected states by inscribing them into this order. But rather than operating in a top-down, direct way, the AU's authority is enacted in a distant, diffuse manner. Although based on formal powers assigned to the AU, neither the way this authority is exercised nor its effects can be inferred merely from these formal powers.

Discussing matters of philosophy of science within the boundaries of an academic field, which seems to have a fairly well-delineated subject matter, a carefully circumscribed universe of cases to struggle with, is a distinct deviation from normal science. Yet, meta-theoretical quarrels have been lurking on the boundaries of International Relations (IR) ever since the field constituted itself as a relatively autonomous academic enterprise. Never at the centre of the discipline, philosophy of science debates have still been among the most tenacious ones, so there doesn't seem to be a need to justify or legitimate such intellectual pursuits. Suffice it to say that among the many niches of International Relations as a discipline there may also be one dealing with meta-theoretical inquiry.

There is now significant policy and academic interest in the governance of science and technology for sustainable development. In recent years this has come to include a growing emphasis on issues of public understanding of science and innovative processes of deliberative and inclusive policy-making around controversial technologies such as nuclear power and agricultural biotechnology. Concern with such issues coincides with rising levels of interest in deliberative democracy and its relationship to the structures and processes of global governance. This article connects these two areas through a critical examination of ‘global’ deliberations about agricultural biotechnology and its risks and benefits. It draws on an extensive survey concerned with the diverse ways in which a range of governments are interpreting and implementing their commitments under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety regarding public participation and consultation in order to assess the potential to create forms of deliberation through these means. The article explores both the limitations of public deliberation within global governance institutions as well as of projects whose aim is to impose participation from above through international law by advocating model approaches and policy ‘tool kits’ that are insensitive to vast differences between countries in terms of capacity, resources and political culture.

From the ‘long’ sixteenth century the Ottoman regencies of North Africa operated as major centres of piracy and privateering across the Mediterranean Sea. Though deemed by emerging European powers to be an expression of the ‘barbarian’ status of Muslim and Ottoman rulers and peoples, piracy, and corsairing in fact played a major role in the development of the ‘primary’ or ‘master’ institutions of international society such as sovereignty, war, or international law. Far from representing a ‘barbarian’ challenge to the European ‘standard of civilization’, piracy and privateering in the modern Mediterranean acted as contradictory vehicles in the affirmation of that very standard.

This article explores how Barbary piracy, privateering, and corsairing acted as ‘derivative’ primary institutions of international society. Drawing on recent ‘revisionist’ accounts of the expansion of international society, it argues that piracy and corsairing simultaneously contributed to the construction of law and sovereignty across the Mediterranean littoral whilst also prompting successive wars and treaties aimed at outlawing such practices. The cumulative effect of these complex historical experiences indicates that primary institutions of international society owe much more to ‘barbarism’ and ‘illegality’, an indeed to international stratification uneven development, than is commonly acknowledged.

A novel form of international order was developed in the nineteenth century by international administrative unions such as the International Telegraph Union and the Universal Postal Union. This administrative internationalism posed a striking alternative to the international society of great powers, sovereignty, and forms of imperial domination, for the members of administrative unions included not only sovereign states but also semi-sovereigns, vassals, and colonies. Members were equal and bound identically to the union treaty and its international administrative law. This article examines the structure of unions and their politics of membership in the nineteenth century, and engages theories of global governance to argue that early administrative unions present a mode of international order different from theories of both global networks and the international system of neorealism.

Disease is a transnational phenomenon which pays no heed to territorial state boundaries; yet it rarely features in the discussion of International Relations. It is important that the discipline should address the issue of disease and more broadly, health, not simply to facilitate containment of disease transmission across international borders but also because central notions of justice, equity, efficiency and order are involved.

IR scholarship has recently seen a burgeoning interest in the right-wing populist politics of security, showing that it tends to align with the international ultraconservative mobilisation against ‘gender ideology’. In contrast, this article investigates how local feminist actors can resist right-wing populist constructions of (in)security by introducing counter-populist discourses and aesthetics of security. I analyse the case of Poland, which presents two competing populist performances of (in)security: the Independence March organised by right-wing groups on Poland's Independence Day and the Women's Strike protests against the near-total ban on abortion. The article draws on Judith Butler's theory of the performative politics of public assembly, which elucidates how the political subject of ‘the people’ can emerge as bodies come together to make security demands through both verbal and non-verbal acts. I argue that the feminist movement used the vehicle of populist performance to subvert the exclusionary constructions of (in)security by right-wing populists. In the process, it introduced a different conception of security in the struggle for a ‘livable life’. The study expands the understanding of the relationship between populism, security and feminism in IR by exploring how the populist politics of security is differently enacted by everyday agents in local contexts.