The recent revival of interest in the English School has emphasised the historical and, hence, impermanent and incomplete character of international societies. Its focus has been upon the circumstances in which specific societies come into being, flourish and fade, with a view to making better sense of what is happening in and to the contemporary international society of states. Recent commentary, however, has noted both the insistence of the first generation of the English School upon the importance of diplomacy and its failure to develop any significant empirical work upon this insight. This case study of Mullah Zaeef and the Taliban embassy in Islamabad in the two years before the Afghan war seeks to rectify that shortcoming by providing an analysis of diplomatic activity in a context where there is little intersubjective understanding of both what an international society is or ought to be and the elements of the diplomatic culture which helps sustain it. It argues that while war was not averted, the episode provides grounds for modest optimism about the possibility of surmounting the obstacles to resolving conflicts of this kind in the future.

The concept of authority has recently received heightened attention in the international politics literature. Unfortunately, considerable confusion still exists regarding who possesses authority, how authority is constituted, how it erodes and how it differs from other means of generating compliance, most notably power. Drawing on work from international political economy and political theory, this article sets out to clarify some of the many ambiguities surrounding authority. It builds hypotheses regarding state/market authority relations and tests these hypotheses in the context of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) crisis of 1992–93. The article concludes that the ERM crisis did not represent a mere ‘bump in the road’ on the way to European Monetary Union, but rather the break-up of policy consensus in a dramatic way.

We live in an interconnected, hyper-mediated world. A plethora of communications surrounds our everyday lives and polities, whilst new media and technologies have brought forth possibilities for, and ways of, communicating across space and time. Long-distance communication and travelling, the accelerated flow of information, ideas, images and sounds across national and other frontiers, the construction of multinational urban centres and global media corporations, the live broadcasting and commercialisation of major events and crises, the expansion of global advertising, spin and political marketing, and the advent of the Internet, have modified and complicated the reality of national, international and transnational relationships. This very collection of essays was made possible via the Internet to connect the Editors, based in different locations and while they were travelling. This is now the norm. Slightly more unusually, yet underlining the growing potential of this area, a workshop held at the University of St Andrews in November 2006 brought some of the contributors together both physically and virtually through the medium of Skype. Physical presence has long not been necessary in order to communicate, influence, or indeed, coerce.

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.

This article highlights two of the most influential normative perspectives upon the ethical character of global civil society in Anglo-American political thought. These are considered under the headings of liberal cosmopolitanism and subalternist radicalism. Within international political theory, the main alternative to cosmopolitan arguments is usually regarded as provided by moral theories that invoke the continuing significance of national boundaries in relation to political community. The rivalry between cosmopolitan convictions and nationalist ethics is deeply entrenched within Anglo-American thinking. As a result, international political theory seems to throw up a fundamentally antinomian choice: either we possess overriding duties and obligations to others, irrespective of our nationhood; or the borders of a settled nation-state substantially define our sense of political identity and justify a marked ethical partiality towards our fellow nationals. Such is the hold of this antinomy upon the Western political imagination, it seems, that alternative conceptions of the relationship between territory, community and ethicality have been neglected or dismissed as unduly heterodox. Given the continuing purchase of this dualistic approach on international political ethics, the recovery and normative evaluation of various alternatives is a task of some intellectual importance.

This article focuses on Adam Smith's largely sympathetic response to the Rousseauian critique of the moral degeneracy of modern ‘economic man’. It thus emphasises his philosophical ambivalence towards commercial society over the textbook IPE presentations which ascribe to him an almost wholly unreflexive market advocacy. In doing so it provides important methodological lessons for the study of Everyday IPE today. Arnaldo Momigliano has identified a decisive break in historical method in the eighteenth century, of which Smith and Rousseau were key exponents. However unwittingly, contemporary Everyday IPE scholars are the spiritual heirs of the eighteenth-century move from writing public histories of the state to writing private histories of unnamed individuals who embody the most recent phase of human sociability. The eighteenth-century economic man was conceptualised in relation to evolving forms of economic organisation, where the economy in turn was thought to reflect the prevailing system of ‘manners’. Smith united with Rousseau in the belief that their society's bourgeois politeness allowed materialist ideologies to corrupt the moral autonomy of the individual. The historical method underpinning such concerns also allows Everyday IPE scholars to ground similarly-styled attempts to understand threats to moral autonomy arising from the struggle over economic surplus today.

This article joins the nascent debate on the causal status of securitisation theory. Relying on critical realist’s efforts to deepen and broaden the concept of cause – defined as ‘causal complex’ – and its insights to integrate discourse and constitutive relations into a non-positivist framework for causal explanation, the article aims to explore the explanatory status of securitisation theory, without downgrading its discursive core. To illustrate this argument, the article uses the securitisation of Somali piracy as an example of how the causal analysis of securitisation can contribute to explain some of the dynamics involved in security governance. From this perspective, securitisation works within a broader empirical framework of security, significantly implicated in causal relations, going beyond the Copenhagen School’s conception of securitisation as a non-causal constitutive theory merely defined as a formal framework for analysis. The article discusses, finally, the relevance and implications of introducing causal analysis in the study of securitisation.

Rather than reading the work of Richard K. Ashley as iconic – as some dead, stable image used to signify the whole of post-modern or post-structural International Relations (IR) in a single swoop – this article considers Ashley's work as an interruption to the discipline of IR (mainstream and critical). In so doing, the article suggests that what is important about Ashley's work is how it creates a thinking space where it is possible to think again about international politics, about international theory, about what Ashley's interruption itself permits and limits and about how this interruption unfolds and sometimes folds back on itself.

When Churchill became Prime Minister and Anthony Eden Foreign Secretary in 1951 they had to try to adjust Britain's world role to match her capabilities, while confronting a wide range of problems. Britain faced a balance-of-payments crisis and troublesome questions from the USA about both dollar aid and trade with Communists. In the Middle East the nationalization of the massive Anglo-Iranian Oil Company operations by the Iranian leader Mossadeq was another difficult issue: Britain emphasized the need to coerce the Iranians in order to safeguard her economic interests, whereas the Americans saw Cold War dangers in pressurizing Iran. They feared British policy would destabilize Iran and create opportunities for a Communist takeover. In Egypt also, nationalist forces caused a division between the two allies, with the USA evincing more caution for fear of being tainted with colonialism and thereby alienating Third World countries from the Western camp. In Europe, Britain dragged her feet on integration and the creation of a European Army, which made more difficult the agreed aim of rearming Germany. In NATO the British resented the appointment of an American as the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic (SACLANT); and they worried about America's strategic plans and general stance towards the Soviets, and about the atom bomb regarding both its possible use and the breakdown of wartime Anglo-US cooperation. There were American doubts about the integrity of Britain's security after the Klaus Fuchs spy case and her failure to make reforms suggested by the Americans, and there were relatively minor disagreements on such issues as the choice of a standard rifle for NATO and the location of NATO headquarters. The most immediate trouble-spot for Anglo-US relations, however, was the Far East where there were differences about the Korean War, the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Nationalist Chinese on Formosa, and the Japanese Peace Treaty.

Even scholars who support multilateralism in principle frequently question the value of securing approval from existing multilateral bodies for humanitarian intervention. The United Nations (UN) and regional organisations such as NATO, the argument goes, are far from democratic; furthermore, multilateralism is often a recipe for doing nothing; therefore, unauthorised intervention should be permissible in circumstances of ‘humanitarian necessity’. This article maintains that although today’s multilateral organisations and related procedures for authorising armed intervention may be suboptimal, they have significant output legitimacy. First, existing authorisation procedures reduce the risk of destabilising conflict spirals among powerful states. Second, they diminish the likelihood that humanitarianism will be used as a pretext. Third, they reduce epistemic problems concerning the identification of a just cause for intervention and thus the risk of accidental abuse. Fourth, they minimise the ‘moral hazard’ of humanitarian intervention. Finally, compliance with multilateral procedures is increasingly required for successful peacebuilding. This leads me to conclude that humanitarian warfare should always be authorised by the UN or regional multilateral organisations.

A major feature of current security is the development of intelligence networks between agencies within and between nations and across public and private sectors. The performance of the UK Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is examined within this context, especially regarding allegations of collusion by UK agencies in rendition and torture. Proposed changes to the ISC are discussed and it is argued that the ISC must seek to leverage its limited powers by helping to construct an oversight network.

Beyond the initial infatuation with his work, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions has had a lasting impact on the field of International Relations. The article analyses the reception of Kuhn in IR and suggests that it contributed to overcoming the ‘second debate’ by making science and realism fully compatible. More importantly, Kuhn offered a vision of science in which scientific communities operated on the basis of realist principles. This not only consolidated the academic hold of neorealism, but transformed realism into a theory of knowledge, which its critics have failed to acknowledge. This lasting transformation is analysed by looking at Kuhn’s influence on the classic studies of strategic decision-making by Graham Allison and Robert Jervis.

This article investigates the works of Dussel, Maldonado-Torres, and Mbembe as representatives of a tendency in the field of decolonial thought to assume the templates of warfare and the camp as the archetypal registers of violence in the contemporary world. Identifying this focus as the remnant of a Eurocentric vocabulary (the paradigm of war), the article proposes a shift from the language of warfare predominant in the field to a language of welfare. The article turns to the gated community (GC), instead of the camp, and the imperatives of (re)creation, instead of the logics of elimination, as new templates with which to make sense of modern/colonial violence. Moving beyond militaristic imagery, the analysis shows a form of violence that emerges as a response to the endless search for a life of convenience inside the walls of the GC. To this end, the article advances the concept of the dialect of disarrangement, the enforced but uneasy encounter between two subjectivities that inhabit the GC: the patrons (the homeowners who consume the easy life) and servants (the racialised service staff). In the GC, violence emerges in attempts to respond to this (in)convenient encounter via misrepresentations of both patrons and servants as out of their place.

The capacity of the Kurds—a scattered, divided and stateless people—to make headline news never ceases to astonish. Perhaps most sensational were the extraordinary events early in 1999 which accompanied the seizure in Kenya and subsequent extradition to Turkey of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish Workers Party, with its now familiar acronym, the PKK. Ocalan's arrest, and his sentencing to death by a Turkish court in June 1999, are only the most recent in a series of Kurdish-related events that have captured the imagination of the international public. The post-Cold War period alone has witnessed the massacre, by chemical weapons, of Kurdish villagers in Iraq after the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88) and a failed Kurdish uprising and massive refugee crisis after the Gulf War (1991), to be followed by the creation of a Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. In 1992, far away in Berlin, which saw some particularly ugly scenes at the time of Ocalan's capture, three Iranian Kurdish opposition leaders were murdered. So significant has been the Kurdish imprint on the contemporary International Relations agenda, that some have suggested that the Kurdish issue today can be likened in some respects to that of Palestine.

Tony Evans (ed.), Human Rights Fifty Years On: A Reappraisal (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)

Robin Holt, Wittgenstein, Politics and Human Rights (London: LSE/Routledge, 1997)

Peter Van Ness (ed.), Debating Human Rights: Critical Essays from the United States and Asia (London: Routledge, 1999)

Questions concerning the linkage, or lack of it, between theory and practice are perennial in International Relations (IR). This is particularly acute in the case of studies of universal human rights in world politics. Problems associated with universal human rights are familiar; what are their foundations?, what are their origins?, do they exist in all cultures?, why, when it comes to implementation, do we see such failure and inconsistency across the globe and the persistence of human wrongs?, why does power seem to play such a large role in stifling ‘progress’? All these questions appear in one form or another in the books under review here and readers will, perhaps, take comfort from their familiarity as old, difficult friends.

To speak of the ‘future’ of strategy is to reveal a deep tension in the way we commonly think about the subject. On the one hand we are confronted by revolutionary changes in the geo-political landscape. The transformation of Europe, the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, for example, encourage the belief that the Cold War—a term which has been almost synonymous with-strategy for nearly half a century—is now an historical artifact. These events, analyzed so intensively by leaders and commentators, open up significant questions about the future of strategy.

Within the academy we are taught to look for silence – as a noun. We are counselled to find gaps in the literature or empirical case studies that have yet to be researched in order to bring our own voice to the issues that they raise. But, there is a tension with the other face of silence, when it assumes the form of a verb. Silence and silencing have therefore been integral motivators for the entire spectrum of ‘critical’ literature within international studies, not only to show what cannot be spoken or thought about within international studies but also, at times, how this can be a deliberate political practice. But there remains a hope. The hope is that the catalyst for transformation – not merely change – is within that which we already know and that which we already have the ability to articulate or to speak. But should we take these assumptions for granted? It is at this precise point where the concerns of Richard K. Ashley with dissidence can combine with the conceptual provocations of the case of the Pirahã people of western Amazonia to generate some uncertainty about the revelations that ‘critical’ scholarship often wants to provide.

State and non-state actors interact in both formal and informal ways during migration governance. Yet, we know little about such interactions, especially in the field of transit migration, a largely regional phenomenon. Here the categories of migrants are fluid between refugees, regular and irregular migrants, including those from conflict regions. Governance takes place also informally. Building on relational theories in International Relations, this article introduces a novel relational approach to polycentric governance. I argue that at the centre of such governance are not simply institutions or migration regimes, but power-laden relations among governmental, non-governmental, supranational, and non-state actors, as well as sending and destination states. These form architectures of partially official, partially informal dynamics that govern transit migration in a particular world region. Such architectures are based on mechanisms of cooperation, conditionality, containment, contestation, and others, combined in regionally specific ways. The mechanisms manifest themselves differently depending on how actors are embedded in places with different political regimes and statehood capacities. The article illustrates this relational perspective to polycentric governance with comparative evidence from the Balkans and the Middle East.

As the Cold War has receded, it has left behind a world system characterized by two divergent trends. On the one hand, as the two superpowers have withdrawn their security umbrellas, a host of ethnic and territorial conflicts have sprouted around the globe. On the other hand, as former rival blocs now create alliances, international mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of contentious issues have proliferated. A central concern of our times, then, is whether, and under what circumstances, these new mechanisms will be successful in dealing with the disorderly aspects of the new world ‘order’.

The injection of a western world-view into a research field has never been more apparent than in the study—or rather9 the non-study—of crisis initiation. The status quo orientation of western strategic thought has led to a predisposition to view international crises as generically ‘bad’ and disruptive processes. The utilization of crises as a foreign policy instrument has long been perceived as taboo, despite the enormous diversity of crisis theory and research, and despite the locus of crisis at the ‘center of gravity’ between peaceful and violent interactions among states.