The 7/7 terrorist attacks demonstrated that there were some clear deficiencies with the organisation of the United Kingdom's counter-terrorism intelligence community. In the aftermath of the attacks, there were moves to develop a more robust ‘counter-terrorism network’ in the United Kingdom that would facilitate better communication and intelligence sharing. While recent developments are to be welcomed, the reforms have not addressed some of the fundamental cultural, institutional and technological issues at the heart of the problem. The creation of an effective counter-terrorism network demands that information flows more freely through the intelligence community and that institutional boundaries are broken down. Until these obstacles have been overcome, the new counter-terrorism network will continue to be hampered by the same old problems of intelligence sharing.

Refugees are often considered as a source of disorder if not fundamental threat to international society. In contrast, and drawing from an English School approach, this article argues that the figure of the refugee is foundational to the constitution of both modern international society and its agent, the sovereign territorial state; hence refugee protection represents a primary institution of international society. Starting with conceptual and methodological considerations for studying primary institutions, the article then highlights the longstanding and widespread state practice of granting asylum. It is shown that on the one hand, the figure of the refugee serves to consolidate and naturalise the nation/state/territory trinity underpinning the modern state system; and on the other hand, protecting refugees plays a central role in the construction of statist self-identities as liberal, humanitarian, and altruistic agents. The last section of the article turns to the politics of contestation of refugee protection, examining domestic, regional, and international reactions to ‘anti-refugee’ policies in the United States, Hungary, and Australia. The considerable amount of criticism generated by these restrictive policies, it is argued, evidence the enduring importance and relevance of refugee protection in (and for) international society.

Declarations of independence continue to be commonplace in international affairs, yet their efficacy as means towards statehood remains disputed in traditional international legal and political thinking and conduct. Consequently, recent scholarship on state recognition and emerging statehood suggests that the international persistence of such declarations should be understood in the context of broader international processes, narratives, and assemblages of state creation. Such suggestions, however, risk reifying declarations’ effectiveness more in relation to international structure(s) than to independence movement's own agency. This article, therefore, calls for a reframing of declarations of independence as a ritual in international relations. It argues that participating in the international ritual of independence declaration forms an attempt to ‘fuse’ the movement's political practice with international recognition, serves to express an internal belief in ‘redemption’ through the ‘ascension’ into the ‘celestial’ existence of recognised statehood, and offers an opportunity to internally bolster political community through political performance. Ritual theory, thus, uncovers how the global persistence of independence declarations cannot be explained merely through discrete oppositions of non-recognition versus recognition, belief versus reality, and/or non-state versus state community, and instead opens up new space for understanding the contradictions characterising the international political (in)significance and persistence of statehood declarations.

Contemporaries who witnessed the fall of the Bastille did not doubt that an event of shocking significance had occurred. On 19 July 1789 the Ambassador of Saxony reported that so important and extraordinary a revolution ‘cannot fail to bring about a considerable change in the political system of France’. The Portuguese Ambassador wrote that if he had not witnessed it himself ‘he would not dare to describe it, for fear the truth should be considered a fable… A king of France in an army coach, surrounded by the bayonets and muskets of a large crowd, finally forced to display on his head the cockade of liberty.’ If it was not immediately clear that this attack on the legitimacy of the ancien régime would also involve an attack on the diplomatic practices and conventions of the European states-system, it quickly became so.

This article examines representations of the League of Nations as a creature of early twentieth century modernity. In particular it focuses on the propagation of the doctrine of rationalization in that forum from mid-1920s until early 1930s. Rationalization came to signify not only the scientific organization and control of social development, but also world interpenetration in technical, industrial, cultural and political spheres. Conjuring images of a globe crisscrossed by streams of electric energy, League functionaries and devotees spoke of a bright new dawn. Industrial flow would meld the ‘minds of men’. Discussions of globalization today have a similar repertoire of arguments and many of the same linguistic items as of rationalization. In the inter-war period rationalization was held out as the destiny of the world's people, promising both harmonious integration and cultural profusion. Its rapid evaporation from intellectual and public discourse in the face of the crises of the 1930s serves as a warning to those who would weave fantastic tales of globalized tomorrows.

Typical of the opposing trends that have been a part of the decade 1989 to 1999, many of the states in the Asia-Pacific in these ten years have shifted from ‘miracle’ status to crisis. From being the political and economic model for other countries in both the developing and the developed world, they now signal how best to avoid the less savoury pitfalls of rapid development. The miracle status, deriving from two decades or more of impressive growth rates on the basis of a presumed distinctive politico-economic model, was supposed to herald a Pacific Century. The key characteristics of this new era were a newfound regional coherence and a related transfer of economic and above all political power from the Atlantic community towards Asia-Pacific. The crisis, in turn, is seen as marking the end of that shift in the economic and political centres of gravity.

This article argues that the research on institutionalised inequalities pays too little attention to competing understandings of stratification and the variety of interlinkages between the patterns of stratification and the institutions of international society. Building on the English School and theories of stratification, it develops an analytical framework that conceptualises these ‘stratificatory interlinkages’ as a twofold decision: firstly for a coupling – instead of a decoupling – of institutional characteristics to patterns of stratification and secondly for a specific classification scheme and type of interlinkage. The article draws on empirical examples from the League of Nations and other interwar international institutions to demonstrate that different understandings of stratification and classification schemes were used for different institutional purposes, for example, voting rights and the apportionment of budget expenses. In addition, it proposes four analytical dimensions that allow mapping the variety of classification schemes and types of interlinkages that were chosen for institutionalised inequalities. The dimensions relate to the composition of the reference group, the decision-making about the classification scheme, the institutional purposes, and the institutional form of the interlinkage. The variety of stratificatory interlinkages entails a more variable and diverse relation between stratification and institutions than usually assumed.

The assumption that ‘states' primary goal is survival’ lies at the heart of the neorealist paradigm. A careful examination of the assumption, however, reveals that neorealists draw upon a number of distinct interpretations of the ‘survival assumption’ that are then treated as if they are the same, pointing towards conceptual problems that surround the treatment of state preferences. This article offers a specification that focuses on two questions that highlight the role and function of the survival assumption in the neorealist logic: (i) what do states have to lose if they fail to adopt self-help strategies?; and (ii) how does concern for relevant losses motivate state behaviour and affect international outcomes? Answering these questions through the exploration of governing elites' sensitivity towards regime stability and territorial integrity of the state, in turn, addresses the aforementioned conceptual problems. This specification has further implications for the debates among defensive and offensive realists, potential extensions of the neorealist logic beyond the Westphalian states, and the relationship between neorealist theory and policy analysis.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) is located in a fortified compound in central Freetown. Inside its militarised space a project of global significance is unfolding. Together with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the International Criminal Court, the SCSL is an experiment in bringing the rule of international law and governance to regions recently destabilised by war and conflict.

Several scholars have raised concerns that the institutional mechanisms through which transitional justice is commonly promoted in post-conflict societies can alienate affected populations. Practitioners have looked to bridge this gap by developing ‘outreach’ programmes, in some instances commissioning comic books in order to communicate their findings to the people they seek to serve. In this article, we interrogate the ways in which post-conflict comics produce meaning about truth, reconciliation, and the possibilities of peace, focusing in particular on a comic strip published in 2005 as part of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report into the causes and crimes of the 1991–2002 Civil War. Aimed at Sierra Leonean teenagers, the Report tells the story of ‘Sierrarat’, a peaceful nation of rats whose idyllic lifestyle is disrupted by an invasion of cats. Although the Report displays striking formal similarities with Art Spiegelman's Maus (a text also intimately concerned with reconciliation, in its own way), it does so to very different ends. The article brings these two texts into dialogue in order to explore the aesthetic politics of truth and reconciliation, and to ask what role popular visual media like comics can play in their practice and (re)conceptualisation.

International institutions are prominent in the ‘global War on Terror’. But there remains variation in the institutionalisation of counter-terrorism, across policy domains and over time. I argue that institutions pursue tasks of counter-terrorism when they are backed by power. Institutions function as ‘swords’ as strong states seek to influence others. Weak states, too, are sensitive to the distributional consequences of cooperation and use institutions as ‘shields’ to resist the powerful. These claims are reflected in patterns of cooperation within the UN, and in terrorist financing and maritime security. Looking forward, multilateral counter-terrorism may remain contingent upon state power.

The UK intelligence system is engaged in three distinct roles – producing strategic assessments in the traditional way; acting as a ‘global policeman’ by monitoring terrorist and criminal networks; and raising the capability of other countries to defeat terrorist and insurgency groups. Counter-intuitively, it is perhaps the first role that is most questionable. The use of single source intelligence reporting, drawn from individuals selected principally for their willingness to share secrets, may not be the best way to analyse emerging issues such as climate change, energy security and financial stability. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) may be drawing on too narrow a range of reporting to compete with increasingly sophisticated assessments from the private sector, academia and NGOs. In any event, the JIC has less impact on policy than is often imagined. The second task of ‘global networker’ is better-suited to the intelligence community's ability to combine human intelligence with communications intelligence and bulk data gathering, and is producing results. The third task of helping other countries to enforce the law and resist insurgency is proceeding on an ad hoc basis with occasional successes, but requires co-ordination across Whitehall so that improvements in the capabilities of other countries' intelligence services are accompanied by improved police and justice systems and enhanced oversight. Joint Intelligence Committee perhaps ought to be a Joint Action Committee.

This article explores the normative international relations theory of Mervyn Frost. Frost's unorthodox approach to questions of human rights offers a way through the political and philosophical morass that has often threatened to obscure the most pressing issues of our time. Significantly, Frost claims to able to ‘construct’ a background justification for international ethics that can unite the demands for sovereign autonomy with declarations of human rights. In doing so Frost attempts to offer an new understanding of universal ethics and thus of the role of human rights in international politics. Acknowledging the importance of this approach, this article examines two issues that arise from Frost's ‘constitutive theory’ and seeks to offer a signpost for the future development of human rights theory.

In this article, I investigate the processes of the discursive construction of the identity of Kazakhstan as a sovereign and non-nuclear state, and show how the construction and performance of these identities are both productive and the product of Nuclear Weapons Technology (NWT) as a threat to the national security of Kazakhstan. I argue that both practices – the production of the state identity and the abolition of the ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal from the territory of Kazakhstan – are instrumental ways to secure the values of Kazakhstan, in this case the existence of Kazakhstan as a sovereign state.

The Eurocentric critique of the International Relations discipline has brought welcome attention to non-European international thinkers, and anti-colonial or anti-imperial thinkers in particular. Frequently these thinkers and associated movements are rightly described in thematic terms of emancipation, equality, and justice, in opposition to the hierarchical worldview of empires and their acolytes. Notwithstanding the broad validity of this depiction, a purely oppositional picture risks obscuring those aspects of ‘non-European’ international thought that evade simple categorisation. Drawing upon archival material and historical works, this article applies approaches offered by global intellectual history to the works of late colonial Indian international thinkers, exploring the mixed registers of equality and hierarchy, internationalism and imperialism present in their writings. Concentrating on three ‘sites’ connected by the common themes of diaspora and mobility: the plight of Indians overseas in East Africa; the concept of ‘greater India’; and the international political thought of Benoy Kumar Sarkar, the article complicates the internationalism/imperialism divide of the early twentieth century, showing how ostensibly opposed scholarly communities sometimes competed over similar forms of knowledge and ways of ordering the world. This offers a framework by which the contributions of global intellectual history can be applied to the study of international political thought.

While economic growth is not a sufficient condition for the elimination of hunger and abject poverty, it certainly looks like a necessary condition, particularly in the poorest countries (Ahluwalia, Carter and Chenery? 1979), So economic growth is desirable, and desired, in the third world (irrespective of one's evaluation of the effects of growth in industrialized, high income countries). As well as pressures for growth? there are internal and external pressures for the democratization of the political systems of less developed countries. Yet some authors claim that democracy and economic growth are incompatible. A strong version of the incompatibility thesis is maintained by the sociologist Andreski (1969: 266): ‘Democracy is compatible with rapid economic growth only in countries which already have enough resources to make heavy investment a relatively painless process. There is no case of a democratic government breaking through a vicious circle of misery and parasitism.’ Though qualifying the incompatibility proposition and restricting it to ‘later phases of development’, Huntington and Nelson (1976: 42–3) similarly argue that ‘… higher levels of political participation tend to produce lower rates of economic growth’. While political participation is not identical to democracy, the latter obviously permits the former. If democracy and growth were indeed incompatible in LDCs (or some subgroup thereof), then a major problem of choice has to be faced.

This article examines the historical sociology that informs Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems. On the sociological side, it critically assesses Linklater’s use of Elias and Wight, arguing that his ‘higher level synthesis’ is internally incompatible. On the historical side, the article argues that the occlusion of the transnational interactions that, in great measure, drive historical development means that Linklater’s analysis is inadequate for its stated purpose: to chart the development of civilising processes within the Western state-systems.

Normative international theory addresses the moral dimension of international society and the logic of ‘ought’ statements in international relations. The traditional content of normative international theory has been dominated by such issues as: the nature of international law and the moral basis of the rights and duties it imposes on states and individuals; the ethics of pacifism and the theory of the 6just war’ the morality of intervention; and, most fundamentally, the nature of the ethical requirements that need to be met if a system of inter-state relations can justly be characterized as an ‘international society’. While such issues have never disappeared from academic study, the dominant modes of international relations theorizing in the 1960s and 1970s—whether realist, neo-realist, pluralist or structuralist—were at one, if for different reasons? in keeping them at the bottom of the agenda paper. And yet, the 1980s has seen a revival of normative international theory. The reasons for this renewal of interest are two-fold. On the one hand, the traditional agenda of normative theory, as outlined above, has never lost its salience in the real world even if unfashionable in academia; since it is in the nature of fashions to change some sort of revival of interest in the old questions was to be expected. But of rather more importance has been the emergence of a new range of normative issues: demands from the ‘south’ for a New International Economic Order have placed the politics of redistribution on the international agenda for the first time—revisionist states in the 1980s no longer make territorial demands but appeal to status quo oriented states to make concessions on the basis of economic justice. In today's world normative statements are as likely to be about the debt crisis as they are to be about the conduct of the Gulf War or the US intervention in Grenada. Mainstream international relations theory has generally refused to ask or answer moral questions, but this strategy of avoidance has not succeeded. Questions such as ‘what ought to be our attitude to poverty in the South?’ or ‘how ought the world' financial system respond to the debt problems of Brazil or Zambia?’ cannot be wished away—as anyone who has taught international political economy will be well aware. Normative theory cannot answer questions like this but it can help each individual to provide his or her own response—and no more important task exists for the discipline of international relations.