I Have thought it appropriate, in a lecture that bears the name of Henry Sidgwick, to choose a theme that focuses on individual rights and on questions of reform and change, with which he was, of course, so much associated.

The focus of inquiry for a critical, post-positivist International Relations requires a shift away from concern over universalist epistemological legitimacy and a move towards understanding the ontological underpinnings of international social, political, and economic life. Recent debates over the ‘agency—structure problem’, as represented in the Wendt vs Hollis and Smith debate and more recently in the latter's response to Walter Carlsnaes, have centred around Hollis and Smith's assertion that there are always ‘two stories to tell’, both ontological and epistemological, and that because of an assumed causal relationship between agency and structure, epistemology is as important as ontology, or stands on the same footing. In providing two further stories in our reply to Hollis and Smith, we argue firstly, that an ontological discourse, such as that suggested in Giddens's theory of structuration, must precede substantive epistemological questions, and secondly, that an assumed universalist epistemology negates difference in international social life.

My aim in this article is to ask how both the findings and the limitations of social science should inform the debate on global economic justice among liberal political philosophers. More specifically, I make three claims. First, I show that social science research casts doubt on key premises of important liberal global justice theories. However, second, I also suggest that empirical questions pivotal to these theories bring to the fore important limitations inherent to social science work on global issues. These limitations lead me to argue, third, that new normative concerns should feature in liberal discussions about global reform.

The current era is often described in epistemic terms, as an ‘information age’ or ‘knowledge society’. Such claims reflect ideals that are deeply ingrained in modern societies. There is a widespread assumption that successful social and political interaction involves access to information and that political power is gained when knowledge replaces obscurity. Such assumptions reflect contemporary ‘epistemic folkways’, which are manifested in two widespread epistemic phenomena – faith in ‘transparency’ and conspiracy theorising

International Relations (IR) theorists should be well-equipped to understand such developments. However, reflection concerning epistemic matters in IR is in under attack, increasingly presented as a distraction from the formulation of empirically grounded accounts of international politics. This article argues that reflexive theory can in fact play an important role in helping IR scholars to understand contemporary epistemic folkways. Drawing on the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno, it is argued that the transparency ideal and conspiracy theorising reflect the efforts of individuals to increase their influence in a world in which they are both objects of technical knowledge and, in principle, epistemically empowered subjects. Reflection on the subject-object relationship suggests that the pursuit of increasingly unmediated access to information is in fact a key source of reification and disempowerment.

Why have non-Western powers, such as China, pursued a grand strategy of commercial integration into the liberal system? In developing a general theory of competitive pressure, this article builds upon a growing body of literature that seeks to develop a liberal systemic theory. Powerful network externalities – system-level pressures and incentives – have emerged as a by-product of the highly integrated liberal core. Outsiders have been moved by an interest in accessing these network benefits as well as a fear of falling behind in the struggle for relative power. In a plausibility probe, the article explores China's decision to join the world.

Boat pushbacks and pullbacks by Italy and the European Union (EU) have returned migrants and refugees to Libya where they have been subjected to brutal human rights violations, such as torture and ill-treatment. This article argues that these pushbacks and pullbacks not only undermine key human rights principles, but they are also an act of cruelty. As Italy and the EU have used the law to evade their international human rights and refugee obligations, the law has had distributive effects that have shaped migration pathways and exacerbated the vulnerability of migrants and refugees to torture. Not only have legal manoeuvres stripped migrants and refugees of their rights, enabling Italy and the EU to return people to inhumane detention centres in Libya, but they have also had the sinister side effect of excluding migrants and refugees from moral concern. As Italy and the EU have sought to evade legal responsibility, it has created indifference to the suffering of people on the move in Libya. This article sheds important light on the factors that lead to the torture of migrants and refugees on their migration journeys and offers new insights into the relationship between cruelty, migration policies, and indifference to human suffering.

International organisations reflect global power configurations and as such, are deemed to reproduce global inequalities. Nevertheless, they also represent opportunities for the Global South to challenge the global stratification of power, for instance by providing personnel to international agencies and bureaucracies. This article examines the role of leadership personnel from the Global South in implementing robust peacekeeping mandates.

Given that states from the Global South have often been hesitant to support the use of force internationally, can leadership positions in peace operations help these states to influence norms at the implementation level? We develop a conceptual understanding of individuals’ role in implementing norms and apply the framework to military force commanders from Brazil, India, and Rwanda. The analysis demonstrates that appointments provide an opportunity for norm contestation, but do not necessarily guarantee such influence. Under certain circumstances, we find that military force commanders can actually undermine their governments’ preferences. However, the relation between force commanders’ practices and their country of origin's policy stance is complex and influenced by a variety of different factors that merit further investigation.

Global democratization rose to the international agenda in the past year as the three peak global economic associations all came under attack. In Seattle, at the meeting of the new World Trade Organization, and in Washington at the meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a diverse collection of labour unions and environmentalists from the industrial North and trade and finance ministers from the developing countries of the South each launched sharply critical barbs. The critics successfully disrupted the WTO meeting that had been designed to launch (and celebrate) a ‘Millennium Round’ of further reductions of barriers to global trade. The aims of the critics were very different, but together they derailed the entire proceedings and exposed important differences in priority among the developed states, and particularly the US and Europe. Charlene Barshefsky, the US Trade Representative and the meeting's chair, later conceded, ‘We needed a process which had a greater degree of internal transparency and inclusion to accommodate a larger and more diverse membership’.Quoted from Martin Khor, ‘Take Care, the WTO Majority is Tired of Being Manipulated’, International Herald Tribune, 21 December, 1999. This highly-regarded trade-o-crat had come to recognize that the eminently oligarchic WTO needed some democratization (as yet undefined).

In the foreign policy arena, decision-making represents that area of governmental action where domestic and foreign interests intermesh. Regardless of size, resources or power, all states operate in an international environment not of their own making and not under their own control. This international system creates and limits the state's possible actions and reactions. At the same time, all those involved in national foreign policy making act in a domestic context which shapes the national interest and the choice of options. Given this Janus-like position, nations respond to common problems but evolve distinctive and different methods of handling them. A comparison between British and American practice reveals striking parallels and contrasts.

Non-state entities that aspire to statehood are increasingly developing democratic norms and practices, in part to enhance their claims for independence. However, the prospects for democracy in cases of ‘problematic sovereignty’ are little understood. This article seeks to explore the important but under-explored relationship between sovereignty and democracy, and in particular to assess the extent to which sovereignty is, or is not, a prerequisite for democracy. The article advances two arguments. First, it argues that there is no clear-cut relationship between sovereignty and democracy, as sovereignty is a complex concept that is comprised of several important, and distinct, constituent elements. Second, the article argues that the legal recognition of statehood (international legal sovereignty) is of marginal importance in this area, and should not be seen as a necessary condition for democratic rule. The article examines the process of democratic transition in the non-state entity of Somaliland to provide empirical support.

David Campbell's recent review article of single-authored monographs on the Bosnian conflict serves as a vehicle for him to sketch the outlines of what he calls ‘a different objectivity’. The article is interesting insofar as it represents a serious attempt by a self-proclaimed postmodernist/poststructuralist writer, although perhaps not a card carrying one to use his own phrase, to grasp the epistemological nettle. For despite the many trenchant critiques of prevailing epistemologies by post-modernist writers and much talk of a ‘postmodern epistemology’, there has been very little, if any, attempt to elaborate just what such an epistemology might involve. Campbell highlights what is a stake here by noting that ‘how one goes about making a judgement as to which narrative of the Bosnian War is better raises the thorniest of historiography's issues.’ Unsurprisingly, Campbell's answer to this issue is the standard postmodern fallback position of Nietzscheian perspectivism.

Over the past two decades, psychologists, economists, and political scientists have developed a substantial literature on diplomatic bargaining. Its descriptive and normative development has substantially increased our understanding of the fundamentals of bargaining structures and strategies, outlined the fundamental choices facing negotiator and hypothesized an array of variables to explain outcomes.

Vietnam has been the subject of several studies in our times; yet a need remains for an analysis of the Vietnam experience as an exercise in international peacekeeping. Possibly because interest in peacekeeping has tended to be concentrated on UN exercises, the International Commission for Supervision and Control (ICSC) in Vietnam has escaped serious study. I hope in the course of this paper to partially fill the lacuna. I intend to show the achievements and shortcomings of the ICSC by subjecting its workings to as close a scrutiny as is feasible within the constraints of an article. In the process, I shall be breaking down the Commission into its constituent elements, the three delegations. This procedure allows us both to understand the workings of the Commission as a whole, and to comment upon the coincidence of voting patterns of the delegations with the foreign policies of their respective countries. Polish behaviour, it might be noted, will receive less than equal emphasis. The study is thus simultaneously an examination of ICSC behaviour in Vietnam, and of Canadian and Indian behaviour in the ICSC.

Raymond Aron is a neglected theorist, at least if we understand by ‘neglected’ a theorist whose theory no longer engenders critical scholarly debate. More often than not, students of international politics either ignore Aron altogether or wrongly subsume him under the rubric of classical Realist. This is not to deny points of agreement between Aron and theorists like Carr and Morgenthau, but merely to indicate that many scholars fail to articulate and to take into consideration the numerous fundamental differences between Aron and other classical Realists. Aron’s Peace and War is probably ‘more quoted than read’ today, and it is doubtful whether more than a handful of students seriously study this monumental work at all.J. Hall, Diagnoses of Our Time: Six Views on Our Social Condition (London, 1981), p. 164.

The term ‘Special Relationship’ can give the false impression that Britain and the US have related to each other in an unchanging way since the forging of close bonds during World War II. If, like the present author, one chooses to use this terminology it is important to identify how the relationship has changed over the years.

This article focuses on the period 1961–67, which was an important period of transition. In 1961, Suez notwithstanding, it was possible for British leaders to continue to think in terms of drawing on unique links with the US, some of which had been forged in World War II and still existed, others which had been developed in their common struggle against communism. By 1967 some of these links had been broken and others greatly weakened for a variety of reasons. Britain's relative world power had continued to decline, thus reducing her usefulness to the US; Britain began to look seriously to the EEC for its future and away from the US, which, for its part, was becoming increasingly preoccupied with Vietnam and the Far East in general; the economic structure Britain and the US had designed to manage the free world's. economy and in the direction of which they had cooperated extensively began to breakdown; and finally after the Kennedy–Macmillan friendship there was no really close relationship between British and American leaders until the mid-1970s. Before looking at this period of transition, however, it is necessary to review an earlier era when the Special Relationship was unquestioned.

The regionalisation of the world economy is one of the most important developments in global governance in the past two decades. This process has seen ‘inter-regional’ economic agreements emerge between two or more regional groupings. Drawing mainly on the European Union’s external relations, observers accordingly point to the growing importance of regional actors, explaining their agency (or ‘actorness’) with regional attributes such as (supranational) institutional design, size, and member state cohesion. This article challenges this dominant explanation of regional agency. It argues that regional actors are socially, politically, and historically ‘embedded’. Agency reflects the contingency of regional integration processes, the motivations that underpin those processes, and the specific relationships between regions and third parties. This approach explains an important case of inter-regionalism from the Asia-Pacific: CER-ASEAN relations. Since the early 1990s, Australia and New Zealand have used their ‘Closer Economic Relations’ trade agreement for relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. This reflects the ambitions of Australasian officials to shape processes of Asian-Pacific regionalism, and the interests of ASEAN officials in consolidating their own process of transnational market-making. Here, regional agency owed to a transforming world economy and the reconceptualisation of regions within new networks of trade governance.

Were precolonial state systems different to the European model? If so, how did these state systems vary, and do variations in system structure influence the frequency of war? In this article we assess the structure off international systems in nineteenth-century West Africa, Southeast Asia, and South Asia using new data on precolonial states that corrects for some of the biases in the existing Correlates of War state system membership data. We develop a framework to capture variation in political order above and below the state, and explore the similarities and differences between these systems and the European system we know and study. We then assess how rates of inter- and intra-state war varied across these systems. Our results suggest: (1) It is the nature of hierarchy (not so much anarchy) that varies across these systems; and (2) inter-state wars are more frequent, but less intense, in systems composed of decentralised states.

The field of International Relations (IR) although in many quarters still immersed in the epistemological trenches surrounding the fourth debate between positivism and post-positivism saw the emergence of a renewed interest and debate about the state and rigour of ‘our’ ontological assumptions. One currently very prominent contribution to this emerging or re-emerging interest in ontological questions can be found in the Critical Realist (CR) approach.

Toynbee's theory of international relations was embedded in a species of grand narrative which plotted the rise and fall of all known civilizations. Both the end of nationalism and the rise of the universal state, central elements of his theory, were presented as aspects of a universal historical process evident in all previous social orders. The coming fate of Western civilization was but the most recent example of recurrence. It was also didactic: he saw his great Study of History as laying the foundations for the creation of a viable world order. Beginning with a cyclical view of history which emphasized decline, and in which the universal state was an aspect of decline, he eventually concluded that Western Civilization might evade the law of recurrence. Toynbee claimed to have detected laws of history; he also claimed to have understood what was unique about Western Civilization such that it might break the historical chain. It was not as optimistic, but it belongs generally to the tradition of liberal progressivism of which Fukuyama's recent excursion is the latest expression.

In recent debates in IR theory a specific trend has evolved which advocates a renewed focus on matters of ontology as a way to overcome or at least to reconceptualise the divides within the field of IR that we encounter especially after the considerable widening of scope after the end of the Cold War. Responding to these claims the article sets out to provide a closer look at the different arguments presented for a renewed concern with ontology and its ramifications. With this task in mind, three particular complexes will be addressed. First, we have to identify the central claims of these new ontological approaches and assess them in respect to coherence and analytic rigour. Secondly, then, we will proceed with identifying the underlying reasons for their shortcomings which as will be shown lie with the misguided concept of ontology. If this conception is properly reworked, can indeed bring new light into otherwise protracted or even deadlocked debates.