This article argues that there are five major challenges currently facing Western intelligence communities. First – ensuring skills retention for intelligence officers and analysts, while developing knowledgeable managers and customers, all in an increasingly-complex security environment. Second – instituting and inculcating knowledge and expertise in these staff – while addressing an opponent in al-Qaeda which demonstrates increasingly sophisticated use of IT, new media, etc. Third – drawing-in outside expertise from the research and business communities, as is done currently in the US and Canada but in only a very limited manner in the UK. Fourth – overcoming institutional rigidity in dividing the foreign and domestic – alongside rigid sharing and co-operation relationships. Fifth – creating truly collaborative environments that offer genuine socio-cultural incentives to collaboration rather than mere ‘IT solutions’.

The US, China and Japan are often portrayed as three giant states dominating the region of East Asia in perpetual potential conflict. This article proposes that such assessments should be tempered in the light of changing regional and global dynamics and, in particular, in view of the growing centrality of the region of East Asia itself for foreign policy agendas. Adopting a framework underpinned by the concept of strategic regionalism, this article focuses upon the developing collective identification of region, and assesses the possibility for joint leadership in East Asia.

Although analysis in IR and IPE has increasingly started to focus on non-state actors and the information society, the role of the legal architecture of the Internet has been relatively under-analysed in terms of the structural power around communication interfaces. In this article I suggest the work of Lewis Mumford offers a useful lens for thinking about the political economy of technological change in an information society. I set out the role of intellectual property rights as the legal form of the global information society, and suggest a major challenge to this legal form is the idea of ‘openness’, specifically in the realm of open-source and/or free software. I examine this issue in the realm of (so-called) informational development, where major proprietary players (predominantly Microsoft) have been confronted by an increasingly vibrant open-source alternative. The open-source and free-software movements can be analysed as an emerging example of a globalised ‘double movement’, seeking to re-embed the tools of informational development in a societal realm of information, establishing in Mumford’s terms a ‘democratic technics’ as a reaction to the programme of information and knowledge commodification spurred by the TRIPs agreement.

A distinctive feature of the evolution of the modern international system has been the emergence of ideologies so universalist in their assumptions that they have ignored, or worse, denied the cultural and political diversities of mankind—diversities which constitute the ineluctable framework of international politics and which make the conduct of foreign affairs such a complex and difficult craft. One major obstacle, however, to understanding the problems which this development poses for the theory and practice of international relations is the fact that the correct usage of the term ‘ideology’ is very much broader than that which is generally accepted today.

This article explores the international political thought of one of the most prominent late Victorian public intellectuals, John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and author of the best-selling The Expansion of England (1883). Challenging conventional readings of Seeley, I argue that his vision of global politics must be located within the wider frame of his views on the sacred, and that he is seen best as articulating an intriguing political theology of international relations. In particular, I argue that instead of interpreting him as a realist, as has traditionally been the case, his position is classified most accurately as ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’. Only by situating him in the intellectual context(s) of his time is it possible to provide an adequate account of the identity of his political thought.

This article addresses the issue of disciplinary variety in French International Relations (IR) from the perspective of Bourdieu's scientific field theory. The tug of war between ‘dominants’ and ‘pretenders’ for the control of IR as ‘their’ discipline in French academia originates from the difficulty of (only) one discipline, that is, political science, monopolising IR. Compared to other subfields of political science, IR is the field of research that borrows most from other scholarly disciplines. These difficulties strengthened the imperviousness of French IR to the works of IR scholars from the Anglo-American world; until very recently, insularity and particularism could not proceed much further. This period matches roughly to one in which IR was dominated, in France, by law and history. Today there is still a very strong influence of this period when scholars from disciplines other than political science distrusted IR theories. Other reasons related to the issue of the disciplinary variety of IR, for instance the absence of a general acknowledgment of the peer-review system, may contribute to the complexity, if not confusion, which characterises the identify of French IR.

Anniversaries are occasions for celebration and reflection. The thirtieth anniversary of BISA presents the opportunity to look back over what has been achieved in the eventful years since the foundation of the Association, but also the duty of identifying things that have gone wrong, paths not taken or promising avenues that turned out to be dead-ends. We owe it to the people who founded BISA – some still here, others, sadly, gone – to preserve the critical spirit even when celebrating our achievements, and I will certainly honour that debt in this talk.

This collection of essays grapples, historically, with the complex issues involved in understanding system transformation. Often these transformations have taken the form of a shift along the spectrum of independence-centralization, and it is within the framework of such declining or emerging imperial systems that the degree of change has tended to be measured. The task of this contribution is to locate the specific case of the end of the Cold War within the broader reflections on these themes. It will respond to this challenge by applying a different litmus test for change from that already found in the existing literature about the significance of the end of the Cold War. Instead, it will broach the topic by an examination of prevailing concepts of legitimacy within international society. In short, it argues that a study of the role of legitimacy might be a useful way of documenting and measuring the kinds of changes taking place within an international system. Moreover, while the end of the Cold War might be thought to have nothing to say about the issue of empire as such (beyond recording the expiry of the Soviet version), it will additionally be suggested that the resultant extension of shared concepts of international legitimacy can be understood as a defining attribute of the contemporary imperial project.

Although the non-intervention rule is often defended as a guarantee of international order, rigid adherence to it cannot be morally justified when governments commit or permit atrocities within their territory. In such cases, intervention is permissible and may even be obligatory. Drawing on the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, and to a lesser extent Hegel, this article examines the grounds of the argument for humanitarian intervention, demonstrating that intervention is in principle not only permissible but obligatory when considered philosophically. The right to intervene can be grounded on common morality, the protection of sovereignty and the coerciveness of justice. The duty to intervene rests on a respect for humanity and the conceptual relationship between rights and duties. Considering these two lines of argument shows that humanitarian intervention can be conceived as a duty that states can be reasonably required to perform.

This article is concerned with a particular debate in mediation literature, revolving around the merit and necessity of power as a strategy employed by third parties in their efforts to negotiate a successful resolution to conflict. We argue that by subscribing to a one-dimensional spectrum of pure-to-power mediation, students of mediation have neglected the development of how power is conceptualised and operates within the changing dynamics of conflict and its mediation.

We therefore seek to redefine the concept of power mediation to project a closer fit between conflicting parties' understanding of their situation and the methods, aims and motivations of their mediators. Breaking away from the existing pure-power spectrum, we propose a heuristic framework that includes four distinct types of power mediation, defined here as real, made, critical and structural power. The contribution of our heuristic model is threefold. First, it assists us in asking the most basic question of social science research, ‘of what is this a case’, which in turn ought to lead to a more sophisticated observation of mediation instances. Concurrently, through the frame of ‘power’, it establishes common understanding of observable phenomena that makes the study of mediation more accessible to the wider audience beyond students of our modest literature. Finally, the synthesis of epistemological and ontological inquiry of conflict and power with the established International Relations (IR) approaches of realism(s), constructivism, critical discourse and structuralism, allows respective real, made, critical and structural types of mediation power to be tested.

There has been a fashionable tendency in some recent scholarship on European history to look for some of the most important roots of European identity formation in the cultural, social and political interaction with the Islamic world. This article argues that this view is an exaggerated and over-simplistic one. In a long historical survey from the era of the Crusades to the nineteenth century, it seeks to show that the theme in European continental identity was frequently subordinated to political and diplomatic rivalries. While cultural themes in IR are important, they do need to be distinguished from realpolitik in the dynamics of international power politics.

‘Follow the money’ is currently the central principle of international financial security, although money itself is probably one of the most unlikely objects to make traceable. Two recent scandals around a security unit and the payment processor Wirecard show how existing systems of financial surveillance that seek to capture ‘flows’ of money for security purposes are either enabled or frustrated. While this current regime of financial surveillance adheres to demanding the free flow of money through financial infrastructures and various actors and intermediaries, new digital currencies build on a set type of ledger(s) in which money is stored as data. Hence, what we understand as money does not ‘flow’, but is rather updated. This change in the underlying infrastructure means that traceability does not need to be enacted; it is an intrinsic feature of digital currencies. With new central bank digital currencies (CBDC), the regime of financial security thus changes from the monitoring of financial flows and flagging of (potentially) illicit transactions towards the storage of financial data in (de)centralised ledgers. This form of transactional governance is engendered by shifting geopolitical agendas that increasingly rely on fractured instead of globalised financial infrastructures, thus making CBDCs themselves subject to security efforts.

This article traces the evolution of the political meaning of secession from an action taken by a state within a compact or union, to an action available to a nation within a state. It is argued that this evolution, often forgotten in the customary attention given to national self-determination in international law and international relations theory, is associated not only with the modern emergence of nations and of states, but also with the emerging importance of the United States in international affairs at the turn of the twentieth century. The article puts the phenomenon of secession, currently dominated by attention to the Balkans, in a broader context by examining features of four cases: the American South, the Irish Free State, Bangladesh and Quebec.

Since antiquity justice has been thought of as a political or civic virtue, more recently as belonging in a ‘bounded society’,John Rawls relies on the idea of a bounded society throughout his work. References to Rawls's writings cited here may be abbreviated in subsequent footnotes: A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); ‘Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy’ (1989), in Collected Papers, Samuel Freeman (ed.), (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 497–528; Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). or as a primary task of states.This view evidently underlies the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948; the text uses a varied range of seemingly nonequivalent terms, including member states, peoples, nations and countries; a coherent reading of the document requires us to take all of these as referring to states. All such views assume that the context of justice has boundaries, which demarcate those who are to render and to receive justice from one another from others who are to be excluded. Yet the view that justice is intrinsically bounded sits ill with the many claims that it is cosmopolitan, owed to all regardless of location or origin, race or gender, class or citizenship. The tension between moral cosmopolitanism and institutional anti-cosmospolitanism has been widely discussed over the last twenty years, but there is still a lot of disagreement about its prpoer resolution.A selection from this literature might begin by noting Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), ‘Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiment’,Journal of Philosophy, 80 (1983), pp. 591–600 and ‘Cosmopolitan Liberalism and the State System’, in Chris Brown (ed.) Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives, (London: Routledge, 1994); Simon Caney, ‘Global Equality of Opportunity and the Sovereignty of States’, in International Justice, ed. Anthony Coates (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), and ‘Cosmopolitan Justice and Equalizing Opportunities’, forthcoming in Metaphilosophy; Joseph Carens, ‘Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders’, Review of Politics , 49 (1987), pp. 251–73; Charles Jones, Global Justice: Defending Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); David Miller, ‘The Nation State: A Modest Defence’, in Political Restructuring in Europe, Chris Brown (ed.), pp. 137–62 and ‘The Limits of Cosmopolitan Justice’ in International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives, David R. Mapel and Terry Nardin (eds.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), Thomas Pogge, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty’ in Political Restructuring in Europe, Chris Brown (ed.), pp. 89–122 and ‘An Egalitarian Law of Peoples’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 23 (1994), pp. 195–224; Onora O'Neill, ‘Justice and Boundaries, in Political Restructuring in Europe, Chris Brown (ed.), pp. 69–88 and Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Henry Shue Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and US Foreign Policy, 2nd edn. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

For Carr, the contrast between utopians and realists was between ‘those who regard politics as a function of ethics and those who regard ethics as a function of politics’. In other words, can we direct society in benevolent directions, perhaps to a utopia, or do we take what we are given and try to rationalize this into some form of moral acceptability? In the context of International Relations, the utopian aspires to a world without war and where power is not the primary determinant of relationships. The realist is more sceptical. Broadly, the realist stresses the constraints in life; the utopian stresses the opportunities. At this level, they are not social theories but temperamental attitudes.

The emergence of social theory is closely linked to the transformations inaugurated by the rise of a distinctly capitalist modernity from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. In this article, I reconstruct the outlines of two strands of social theorising that emerged in response to the radical challenges posed by ‘the great transformation’ on the one hand, and the French Revolution on the other. I juxtapose two responses to the transnational constellations these events signify, one heralded by Auguste Comte, and the other, inter alia, by Karl Marx. While the Comtean frame obliterates meaningful registers of thinking about political transformation, I argue that conflict-theoretic tradition indebted to G. W. F. Hegel and Marx is much more amenable to analytical and practical concerns with responding politically to the challenges posed by ‘the rise of the social’. In the final part, this is discussed with reference to the ‘social turn’ in IR theory.

This article explores the ambivalent if not hostile responses of mainstream international historians to what is generally characterized as ‘postmodernism’. It attempts to trace the roots of this antagonism in the sub-discipline's culture and historical evolution as a distinctive mode of knowledge creation with very particular links to the real worlds of politics and international relations. It then suggests that maintaining this sceptical attitude towards ‘theory’ incurs costs for international history that are too seldom recognized, and explores the potential of post-structuralist-inspired critical historiography and discourse analysis approaches to reinvigorate practice.

Based upon the current debate on international practices with its focus on taken-for-granted everyday practices, we examine how Security Council practices may affect member state action and collective decisions on intrastate conflicts. We outline a concept that integrates the structuring effect of practices and their emergence from interaction among reflective actors. It promises to overcome the unresolved tension between understanding practices as a social regularity and as a fluid entity. We analyse the constitutive mechanisms of two Council practices that affect collective decisions on intrastate conflicts and elucidate how even reflective Council members become enmeshed with the constraining implications of evolving practices and their normative implications. (1) Previous Council decisions create precedent pressure and give rise to a virtually uncontested permissive Council practice that defines the purview for intervention into such conflicts. (2) A ratcheting practice forces opponents to choose between accepting steadily reinforced Council action, as occurred regarding Sudan/Darfur, and outright blockade, as in the case of Syria. We conclude that practices constitute a source of influence that is not captured by the traditional perspectives on Council activities as the consequence of geopolitical interests or of externally evolving international norms like the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P).

The aim of this short paper is to explore the concept of ‘general’ rules of customary international law (i.e., rules in principle binding upon all states, as contrasted with ‘special’ rules binding only on a few states, usually on a regional or local basis), and-the tension which exists between that concept and the consensual basis of customary international law. It will be suggested that it is possible to hold a view of international law which denies the general applicability of most rules of customary law and preserves its consensual character, while admitting that a few rales of truly general application do exist which, however, must derive their binding force from outside the framework of consensual law creation.

The conceptual foundations of the eighteenth century international system, long neglected in narrative diplomatic histories, are enjoying increased attention with the recent contributions of Jeremy Black, Paul Schroeder, and Michael Doyle. Nevertheless, in political science literature the period is routinely treated as an interesting—yet quickly dispatched—‘prequel’ to the post-1815 order which matured in the Bismarckian alignments of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, as a field of study the period has been all but ignored in the discipline of international relations.