The global justice debate has largely ignored law. But that debate presupposes a legal order within which principles of justice could be implemented. Paying attention to law alters our understanding of global justice by requiring us to distinguish principles that are properly prescribed and enforced within a legal order from those that are not. Given that theories of global governance depreciate law and that cosmopolitan and confederal theories are utopian, the most promising context for a realistic global justice discourse is one that is focused on strengthening, not transcending, the international legal order.

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.

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.

IR scholars have always invoked history as a valuable resource for understanding the present. However, the question of how should we go about investigating and interpreting the past is rarely asked, let alone answered. While most IR approaches are anchored to the attempt to situate oneself outside history – reading the past in terms of the present or in terms of a hypothetical future – this article strives to redress the kind of historical perspective adopted, if at all, by IR scholars. It does so by advancing a distinctive historicist approach that emphasises the importance of understanding past practices and discourses in their own historical and intellectual contexts. In order to substantiate this claim, the article goes on to critically engage with recent calls to historicise intervention in IR, arguing that a historicist mode of analysis represents a corrective to presentism as well as an alternative route into present-day debates.

The objective of this paper is to identify the process by which military research and development (R&D) priorities affect the evolution of major sectors of the civil economy in capitalist states. Military priorities channel a significant proportion of the resources that capitalist societies devote to R&D: for the United States in the period 1982–4, military R&D amounted to 28.9 per cent of gross domestic expenditure on R&D. The nature of military priorities favours some areas of technological development over others, and when these favoured areas are opened up for military purposes, it is often possible to build a major civil industry on the resultant technology. Examples of this process include nuclear power, civil aviation, space satellites and computers. Some, though by no means all, of the commanding heights of civil economies are thus powerfully shaped by the opportunities created by specifically military R&D.

Somebody reading these books in rough chronological order of subject matter without previous knowledge of Japan might well end up bemused and sceptical. In the early part of the story we have a militarized and expansionist power, colonizer of Korea and Taiwan, creator of the puppet state of Manchukuo, extending Its control over large tracts of China, competing In military might and especially naval tonnage with the great powers of Europe and North America, then destroying the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and carving out a huge empire stretching from the Gilbert and Ellice islands to the borders of the Soviet Union, from Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians to Java and Sumatra in the far south.

The Financial Agreement signed between the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom on the 6th December 1945 (popularly known as the Washington Loan Agreement, and hereafter referred to as ‘the Agreement’) is widely interpreted as an agreement which imposed fundamental constraints on British external economic policy and is even seen as a benchmark in postwar international relations signalling the subordination of Britain to the level almost of a client state of the United States.

The school of thought known as Realism (with a large R) has been a central focus of debate in international theory. Nevertheless, its content and epistemological status (and therefore the criteria for its evaluation) remain elusive. In part this is due to the variety of contexts and debates within which Realism has been discussed in the field. In the 1930s and 1940s the debate was framed around a Realist-Idealist axis. In the 1970s Realism was contested by liberal analyses of the causes and consequences of an allegedly growing global interdependence. In the 1980s there emerged a three-cornered debate between competing Kuhnian ‘paradigms’, among which Realism dominated. Given that the meaning of Realism has been partly constructed by historically variable theoretical and political issues, its identity has also varied over time. If, however, one chooses to think about Realism outside of these various contexts within which it has been both defined and evaluated, it remains unclear how such diverse thinkers as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Carr, Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz can coherently be considered as part of a single tradition of thought. Sensitivity to their differences may be a virtue for the historian of ideas, but it runs the risk of undermining the point of the exercise! Despite these problems, which are only partially corrected by distinguishing between types of Realism (notably classical and ‘neo’ or ‘structural’ varieties), most scholars would agree with Alan James that Realism is a school whose members harbour shared assumptions about the primacy of states as international actors, the separation of domestic and international politics, and who describe the latter in terms of anarchy and a concomitant ubiquitous struggle for power and security.

1. Theory and the application of hegemonic power

The idea of hegemony, in the general sense in which it has been employed by scholars of international relations and historians since the 1970s, has been intended to deepen understanding of the behaviour of states possessing characteristics that qualify the states as hegemons and the effect of that behaviour upon the international system. But the lengthy debate over hegemony has failed to characterize adequately the distinction between hegemonic power and its use by policy-makers in the hegemonic state. Analyses of the role of hegemonic states in the international system that seek to explain the rise and fall of hegemons mechanistically, such as the theory of hegemonic stability in its various permutations,Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley, CA, 1973; Stephen D. Krasner, ‘State Power and the Structure of International Trade’, World Politics, 28:3 (1976) pp. 317–43; Robert O. Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge, 1981); Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton, 1984); Duncan Snidal, ‘The Limits of Hegemonic Stability’, International Organization 39:4 (1985), pp. 579–614. have not explained successfully either the behaviour of policy-makers in the governments of hegemonic states or the variety of resulting effects upon the hegemon and the international system within which it operates.Conybeare’s theory of the tariff-setting behaviour of large and small states, for example, by Conybeare’s own admission fails to explain the behaviour of the two most important trading powers over the period that he considers, Britain and the United States whilst hegemons. See John A. C. Conybeare, Trade Wars: The Theory and Practice of International Commercial Rivalry (New York, 1987), pp. 22–7, 44–5, 272–6. Hegemonic stability theory has paid too little attention to the process of policy-making in the hegemonic state. What makes hegemony a useful characterization for discussion and analysis (separate from the more general analysis of ‘large’ economies or ‘powerful’ states) is that hegemonic states possess a combination of types of power resources that, insofar as that power is used, allows hegemonic states to affect the international system in ways that other, merely large states cannot. This makes the distinction between power and its use, as well as the question of awareness of power by policy-makers, more important with respect to hegemons than to other states.

It is often said that reciprocityÑreturning good behaviour for good behaviour and bad for badÑstabilizes co-operation by making nonco-operative behaviour unprofitable. Nevertheless, our understanding of how reciprocity works in international politics is unnecessarily limited. Only two patterns are now well recognized. In one of these, both actors in a relationship insist that the value of their concessions must be equivalent and that each must be made highly conditional on the other. The polar opposite pattern is one in which the actors consider both the value and timing of individual concessions to be irrelevant. What is not well understood is that there are two other exchange patterns that actors may also see as mutually satisfactory. In these situations, even though the value and timing of individual concessions both clearly matter to the actors, the pattern of exchange on oneÑthough not bothÑof them is clearly ‘unbalanced’. We lack a way to make sense of such partially unbalanced relationships. This article develops a typology that specifies four types of reciprocity, analyses the conditions under which they are likely to evolve, and draws out the implications of each pattern for actors' strategic choices and bargaining behaviour. The utility of this typology is demonstrated through an analysis of the shifting patterns of reciprocity in Russian-American relations from 1947 through to 1997.

In this article I argue that Chomsky's political writings, widely ignored in the discipline, are a significant resource for thinking about contemporary world politics, how we should analyse it, and to what ends. This claim is defended through an analysis of recent efforts by IR scholars to interpret the post-Cold War order. When viewed through the analytic perspective articulated by Chomsky, disciplinary accounts of the post-Cold War world as liberal and peaceful are shown to be insufficiently attentive to the empirical record. Chomsky's political writings are also shown to be compatible with standard accounts of critical social science.

This article examines the impact of the establishment of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the introduction of the euro on the monetary power of its member states. Taking into consideration continuing capitalist variety among national political economies of the Eurozone, I examine the implications of EMU for the macroeconomic autonomy of different national models capitalism. Drawing on a comparative capitalism perspective, it is argued that the Eurozone's coordinated market economies – Germany in particular – have gained much more from the introduction of the euro in terms of monetary power than the other models. This argument will be based on an analysis of two key dimensions of EMU's macroeconomic governance regime: (1) exchange rate policymaking; and (2) the management of balance-of-payments.

Gramsican approaches in International Relations (IR) have sought to outline the relationship between ideas and material forces in the construction of world order. Scholars working within this broad school have sought to emphasise that ideas are material forces, and must be considered as concrete historical structures (Cox, 1987) central to the establishment of particular historical and hegemonic blocs. This literature has primarily focused on the discursive construction of hegemony by international elites and the impact this has on political practices. While these insights are important in understanding the construction of world order, it is necessary to extend them to include the creation of actual physical structures – that is, it is vital to link the ideational aspects of hegemony with actual material processes. I will argue that a consideration of the role of technology provides an ideal vehicle for this process, building on the preliminary work of Bieler and Morton in this regard (2008). Technological structures are the product of particular cultural values and embed these cultural values within their very structure. Physical material factors thereby express ideational values constructed by specific social forces. Social practices are thus not only a function of the dominance of certain ideological formations, but also the product of the material environment itself and the manner in which the human metabolism with nature must function through these physical constructions.

This article uses the example of Wittgenstein’s decision to go to war in 1914 to frame a contrast between two different ways of thinking about moral stupidity and moral intelligence in relation to war, those of Jeff McMahan and Jane Addams. The article clarifies how pathways for thinking about the morality of war are blocked and enabled not only by different accounts of justice but also by different understandings of war. It is argued that if we want to be morally intelligent in our judgments about the ethics of war we should follow the pathway marked out by Addams and think less about justice and more about war.

Two rival accounts have come to dominate discussion of the origins and character of the contemporary international system. One, closely associated with the English School and the traditional account, places its origins with the appearance, and acceptance, of the centralised authority of the modern state. We might call this ‘the Westphalia version’. In this account, the modern state system is often represented in terms of what it is not. It is not a feudal regnum with a multiplicity of functionally distinct authorities. It is not a theocratic imperium where one power aimed at ‘the control and protection of Christendom’. It is a society of sovereigns, of de jure equals, each of whom accorded the others’ right to exist, and whose common ideological quantum is low. The rival is located within democratic transition theory. It postulates the modern state system as an extension of the liberal democratic state. The liberal state is not sovereign in the Westphalian sense: liberal authority is diffuse. Moreover, the liberal state produces its own, distinctive, international impulses that distance it in significant ways from the Westphalian pattern. Both see the state system as ‘produced’ by the state, as an immanent effect of stateness, but the account of the state’s trajectory differs radically.

The Venezuelan participation in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in 2015 and 2016 was expected to be a challenge for the institution, as the Maduro government adopted controversial positions at the General Assembly (UNGA). However, Venezuela contestation line did not appear clearly at the UNSC. Drawing upon an in-depth qualitative study, Erving Goffman's work, and literature on contestation in international organisations (IOs), we interpret this apparent inconsistency from the concept of interaction order. We argue that the UNGA and the UNSC each constitutes a specific interaction order that influences the way contestation practices are channelled. The contestation practices Venezuelan representatives set up at the UNGA hardly work during the UNSC official sessions, where they adapt their practices to its interaction order. Venezuelan representatives also use informal and backstage actions to express their dissent, without avoiding being called into order. Venezuela's moderation at the UNSC results from an invisibilisation of contestation by interaction practices.

This paper specifies the conditions for conflict in Central Asia. Given Russian preponderance this should be an easy case for neorealism. But we demonstrate that the consequences of Russia's superior power will depend on the nature of its regime and domestic stability in Central Asia. The type of nationalism, the robustness of political institutions, and the success or failure of economic reform will be critical conditions for Central Asian stability. The paper also evaluates the prospects for conflict resolution and prevention.

Later years have seen the growth of a vibrant theoretical discussion on agonistic peace and the importance of creating space for contestation, plurality, and dissensus post-accord. However, there has been very few attempts at embedding agonistic theory in empirical analyses of peace agreements. This study attends to that lacuna by investigating how agonistic principles can be integrated and investigated in peace agreements. We suggest a threefold set of indicators for assessing the degree to which peace agreements are invested with agonistic dynamics: (1) what types of spaces for interaction are offered post-accord; (2) what forms of inclusion are stipulated; and (3) how is the peace agreement framed in terms of conflict termination and consensus/dissensus? We illustrate how the various indicators could be put into motion in concrete analyses applying them to examples from the Oslo Accords, the Belfast Agreement, and the Colombian Peace Agreement. Finally, we discuss four dilemmas and problematiques of integrating agonistic ideas in peace agreements; the issue of power, the mixing of agonistic and liberal ideals in peace agreements, the principle of ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’ and the related double-edged potential of constructive ambiguity and finally the challenges of implementing peace agreements.