One of the central assumptions underlying the stakeholder model is that strengthened opportunities for involvement of non-state actors in political procedures hold significant promise for making those procedures more democratically legitimate. However, recent studies show that more open international organisations (IOs) are not perceived as more legitimate by non-state actors. In this article we explore one potential reason to explain this apparent paradox, investigating whether, and under what conditions, strengthened opportunities of stakeholder involvement enable the effective representation of global constituencies. The article shows that globalisation and politicisation of IOs go hand in hand with greater political activity by non-state actors defending domestic, rather than global, interests. Globalisation and politicisation may thus contribute to the exponential growth of the community of non-state actors active at IOs, but they do not make such community more globalised in nature. The article also illustrates that granting greater access to stakeholders in international institutions can somehow mitigate the effects of this underlying structural factors, and that institutional openness disproportionally fosters political activity by civic, rather than business, global stakeholders. We advance these arguments relying on a novel dataset including over eight thousand organisations active at the UN climate conferences and the WTO Ministerial Conferences.

Why have states legalised international norms promoting domestic democracy in some regions of the world? This issue poses a difficult puzzle because standard assumptions about state preferences for sovereignty make the creation of strong, binding international rules on democracy unlikely. We identify four possible answers: the interests of powerful states, common government interests in domestic policy lock-in, the absence of fears that powerful states will use the rules to intervene unilaterally in domestic affairs, and the robustness of pre-existing norms. We explore our argument by applying it to the Organization of American States (OAS), a fairly unlikely organisation for the strong legalisation of international rules. Our findings suggest that legalisation of democracy is quite difficult to achieve. State interests in locking in democratic benefits and state power – even hegemonic power – are necessary but insufficient. An important set of new democracies attempted legalisation in the 1950s, yet failed. The United States, as strong a regional hegemon as ever, attempted further legalisation in 2005, yet failed. Motives and power must be accompanied by low fears of unilateral intervention and high levels of norm robustness in order to produce results.

The title of this paper contains three terms which require definition—sovereignty, vitality and the state. I shall begin by defining these, and shall then discuss various reasons why the state acquires vitality from its possession of sovereignty. Finally I shall ask whether sovereignty is likely to become less significant as a source of vitality, and? if so, what is likely to take its place.

This article applies a three-dimensional framework for the analysis of the role of motivation in foreign policy decision-making to the foreign policy decisions of individuals and cities in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. First, the authors briefly introduce their framework for analysis. Using the speeches in Thucydides to explicate the motives and goals of individuals and cities, the authors then trace the relationships between the motivational dispositions of foreign policy actors and their foreign policy behaviour. In so doing, they demonstrate both the relevance of a concern with individual motivation for foreign policy analysis and the usefulness of their analytical framework for studying the impact of the relevant motives. The authors also show how ideological statements can be analysed to determine the relative salience of individual motives and collective goals, suggesting a relationship between ideological reasoning and motivational imbalance which can adversely affect the policymaking process. In conclusion, they briefly assess the theoretical and normative as well as practical policy implications of their observations.

In 2007, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (BJPIR) devoted an issue to gendering International Relations. It opens with Cynthia Enloe addressing the ‘politics of casual forgetting’. I investigate this notion of casual forgetting using a framework informed by postcolonial and feminist scholarship. Working with ideas drawn from critiques of Orientalism and neoliberalism, I examine knowledge practices that centre binaries as forms of objectivity that disembed phenomena from context, and as forms of over-simplification that flatten the appearance of complexity. Together, these practices have a depoliticising effect; they obscure contestation, situate hierarchy as natural, and separate analysis from its embeddedness in historical and political conditions, even in work guided by critical agendas. I trace these depoliticising practices in a conversation in the 2007 Special Issue of BJPIR and show that Enloe's comments present a push for critical analysis that was overlooked by the Special Issue's editors in their attempt to more clearly delineate the subdiscipline of Gender and International Relations (IR) as distinct from feminist IR. This article suggests that Enloe's plea is effectively one for ‘active remembering’ as a way to render visible the insidious forms of power that give a stable appearance to categories of social phenomena.

How universally useful are human rights in addressing violence against women? This article addresses this question by looking at the link between gender, ethnicity and human rights to uncover the complexities that underpin current debates about universal justice and multiculturalism. While my discussion of rape in Mexico and Pakistan illustrates significant particularities with respect to how violence against women is constituted in these different cultural contexts, it also shows that culturally specific manifestations of violence against women often share striking similarities in the way that they are allowed to persist, justified and made invisible. As such, they are part of a global mechanism that reproduces gender subordination in a predominantly patriachal world.

This interview was conducted over the Internet between February and April 2006. Armand Mattelart is Emeritus Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Paris VIII. From 1962 to 1973 he was Professor of Sociology of Population and Communication at the Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, and United Nations expert in social development. During the Popular Unity period (1970–73), he worked with the Government of President Salvador Allende until the military coup of September 1973, when he was expelled from Chile. Between 1975 and 1982, he taught at the University of Paris VII and Paris VIII, and, between 1983 and 1997, as founding member of the Communications Department at the University of Rennes 2 (Haute-Bretagne). He has carried out numerous research and teaching missions in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. His research interests include communication theory and history, media studies and international communication. He has authored and co-authored numerous books, translated into many languages, including: Advertising International: The Privatization of Public Space (1991); Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture (1994), The Invention of Communication (1996), Networking the World 1794–2000 (2000), The Information Society: An Introduction (2003), and, with Michèle Mattelart, Rethinking Media Theory: Signposts and New Directions (1992); The Carnival of Images: Brazilian Television Fiction (1990) and Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction (1998). His most recent book, published in French, is: La Globalisation de la Surveillance: Aux Origines de l’Ordre Sécuritaire (September 2007).

On April 30, 1937 Sir Nevile Henderson arrived in Berlin and assumed charge of the British Embassy as His Majesty's Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. There appeared to be nothing unusual about the appointment which seemed on the surface to reflect the new more active attempts to approach the leaders of the Third Reich by Neville Chamberlain who knew that he would shortly become Prime Minister. What was unusual about the choice was the fact it was made by Sir Robert Vansittart, then Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office and approved by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Both men soon regretted the grave decision and Vansittart, as if to try to rectify his error, spent an enormous amount of energy during the next two and a Jialf years severely critizing Henderson's recommendations, evaluations and actions.

Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-System is to be both praised and critiqued for opening spaces for discussing civilisational standards in the era of a globalising world. It offers a healthy provocation for inquiry into how non-Western states ought to comprehend the legacies of Western political evolution colouring existing ‘IR’ as a discipline. Linklater’s book inspires three thematic reactions: globalisation does bring harm; the notion of a universal civilisation remains open to debate; and the possibilities of civilising patterns in premodern Southeast Asia serving as supplementary mirrors and extensions of the relationship between violence and civilisation. It is suggested that Linklater’s sequel must consider the trajectory of non-Western sociologies of IR.

The performance of ritual and the ritualisation of performance are the two main theoretical repertoires of ritual study in international politics and beyond. However, they also escalate tensions between those who insist on ritual's ability to operate by virtue of participants’ presence and those who believe that global networks of media call for a representational turn, which must tie participants and audiences across borders. Should we fail to understand how these distinct theoretical repertoires interact, it would be difficult to study international ritual, identify its functions, and trace its effects. Anchored in the sociology of ‘social occasions’, this article weaves ritual's patterns, properties, and resources into a coherent analytical framework. The framework enables us to better to grasp how actors move between/within different worlds (ritual and performance) and to what effects. The comparative study of two post-terrorism ritual occasions (the 2011 Rose March in Oslo and the 2015 Republican Marches in France) illustrates the usefulness of this theoretical proposition and its related framework.

The first principle adopted by the United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 (hereafter referred to as UNCHE) proclaimed that “Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of quality which permits a life of dignity and well-being and bears a solemn responsibility to protect and improve the environment for present and future generations”.

If international society sets as its objective the protection, preservation and even the enhancement of the existing global environment then the development of laws and standards ensuring the acceptance of the necessary obligations and their enforcement is the sine qua non of their achievement.

This article explores how sovereignty and (non-)intervention are implicated in the (re)production of specific social orders. Sovereignty and the non-interference principle circumscribe ‘domestic’ politics from ‘the international’, defining who is legitimately included or excluded from the struggles that determine political and social orders. State managers seek to admit forces and resources favourable to the order they are seeking to create, whilst excluding those deleterious to it. In revolutionary periods, however, these attempts to ‘cage’ social relations often crumble as transnational forces engage in fierce, multifaceted conflicts overlapping territorial borders. In such circumstances, both norms of non-interference and practices of intervention may be used by dominant forces to help contain the spread of sociopolitical conflict and to strengthen their hand in the struggle to (re)define social order. Sovereignty regimes are thus shaped by the strategies and ideologies of the various social groups locked in conflict at a particular historical moment. This argument is illustrated through the case of Cold War Southeast Asia, where sovereignty and intervention were both used to stabilise capitalist social order and curtail transnational, radical threats from below.

One of the most striking differences between British defence policy since 1945 and military policy during the inter-war period has been the acceptance by post-war Labour and Conservative governments of the value of undertaking a continental commitment. During the 1920s and 1930s Britain clearly retained a close interest in European affairs but consistently steered away from any form of major military involvement on the continent,, In traditional terms policy makers continued to recognize the importance of maintaining a favourable Balance of power in Europe and preventing any hostile state from dominating the Low Countries, At the same time there was also a fundamental political assumption that Britain and France would be in alliance in the event of renewed German aggression in Western Europe. Until Munich, however, the emphasis in defence planning centred on home and imperial defence. True, there were those in the defence establishment who recognized that Britain's vital interests were closely linked to Western Europe and who advocated serious preparation of an expeditionary force. But even they failed to recommend the kind of highly mobile mechanized force for specialized European operations which might have avoided the magnitude of the disasters which befell British forces in 1939–40. After Munich the British government did arrive at a recognition of the importance of some form of continental commitment but by then it was clearly too late either to create an expeditionary force of the kind required or to supplement Britain's military weakness through the establishment of an effective western alliance system.

As a result of the spread of International Parliamentary Institutions (IPIs), international organisations face crucial questions of representational design. We introduce a distinction between citizen-centred and state-centred IPIs in international organisations (IO). Drawing on original data, we show that, even though parliaments might seem likely to foster citizen representation in the international realm, they in fact often follow state-centred representational designs. We further find that citizen-centred IPIs are a near exclusive phenomenon of a few, democratic regional integration projects. Given the prevalence of state-centred representational designs, we conclude that IPIs’ potential to represent different cross-border communities, concerns, and conflict lines than intergovernmental IO bodies remains institutionally limited. IPIs are thus unlikely to challenge these bodies in similar ways as often observed in the relationship between the European Parliament and the European Union's Council of Ministers.

The language of the ‘postsecular’ acknowledges the enduring presence of faith in politics, repudiating secularisation theses claiming diminution or privatisation of religion in social and political life. In cognitive and experiential worlds, those presumably unfettered by these conceptions (for example, the Islamic Cultural Zones or ICZs), the postsecular presents a different order of challenge and possibility. The term ICZs refers to Muslim majority areas informed by transnational subjectivities loosely connecting varied Islamic societies around symbolic commonality, memory, and historical experience. The term stresses the plurality of Islamic cultural experience, albeit distinguished by recognisable semiotic markers, without essentialising Islamic identity. This article questions the hegemonic view pervasive in both secular and postsecular theorising of the fiction of immutability of faith in the ICZs and recognises its rupture and displacement under conditions of late modernity. The ontological dislocation in the character of religion itself under conditions of late modernity opens up the possibility to account for the assumed resistance of Islam to secular modernity, but also to explain Islam's imbrications in politics read under the sign of Political Islam. Paradoxically, under the condition of late modernity, a more homogenised Islam appears to crystallise in the ICZs at odds with an ‘open’ Islam.

This article asks whether international law is moving towards a more unified constitutional order or whether differentiated types of constitutional processes are emerging. We study the sequencing and ratification pace of 32 ‘quasi-constitutional’ international agreements containing procedural guidelines for inter-state relations and fundamental human rights provisions for individuals drawn up between 1945 and 2007. We do so in a comparative and quantitative fashion applying sophisticated statistical tools, namely event history techniques combined with counting processes. On the basis of our multi-treaty framework, the findings do not lend support to a unified and quick process of global constitutionalisation. Rather, they provide evidence for the idea of a ‘multi-speed globe’ of differentiated constitutionalisation. We also make a first attempt to study antecedents to global constitutionalisation. Our findings show that processes of global constitutionalisation vary across regime types and world regions (while there is no effect for new and old states).

Writing about the United States and its highly ambivalent relationship to the United Nations, Conor Cruise O'Brien once noted how, in ‘the land which houses the United Nations, and which does most both to support and to use it, discussion of the functioning of the United Nations is almost all on [a] quas-supernatural plane, whether it be in terms of the strengthened Platonic UN, or in terms of a UN of evil enchantment—God or the Devil’. With some exaggeration, much the same can be said about the public debate of the UN's role in international relations in recent years. It is heartening, therefore, as the UN celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, to see a growing number of studies prepared to examine critically the performance of the organization; to explore its possibilities in a world where interdependence and transnational processes require greater cooperation; but also to acknowledge its limitations in the same world where the autonomy and primacy of the state remain unchallenged in vital spheres of activity.

More than a decade after the revolutions of 1989, we can see these as a high point of a new, worldwide and increasingly global wave of democratic revolution and counter-revolution. Violent struggles between the political forces unleashed have produced genocidal wars and stimulated global state formation. These developments present concerned citizens and students of international relations and politics with new challenges. This article criticizes two trends in the responses of political intellectuals in the West: the ‘new anarchism’ of some critical thinkers in the academic discipline of international relations, and ‘yesterday's radicalism’ which has led some left-wing critics to revive the defence of sovereignty for repressive and genocidal non-Western states. The lecture concludes by outlining an alternative ‘new politics’ of international relations

Bargaining power is a somewhat neglected concept in the study of international negotiations. Who comes on top in the negotiating process and why, i.e. its power or influence aspect, has never been a central perspective of negotiation theorists. The ‘classical’ negotiation theorists of the 1960s1 make only passing references to the effects of differences in power resources on international negotiations, and even though more recent works pay considerably more attention to such variables,2 they can hardly be said to be central to the field. Nor has bargaining as a particular instance of the exercise of power been an important preoccupation of power theorists. Perhaps for these very reasons, the concept has remained a rather tricky one, often being used as an ad hoc or residual factor to ‘explain’ what cannot otherwise be accounted for. However, Christer Jönsson has argued that ‘focussing on bargaining power promises to be… an avenue to further clarification of the perennially elusive concept of power’.3 To what extent what he calls the ‘bridge-building and cross-fertilization between power analysis and bargaining studies’4 may also contribute to a better understanding of international negotiations, is an empirical question to which this article will attempt to give at least a preliminary answer.

Power is one of the most commonly used concepts in the social sciences and in ordinary political discourse. It would seem to be central to the study of international relations. Before we consider the role of power in international relations in the short twentieth century, it is necessary to clear up some preliminaries about the concept in general. This is because power is a frustrating concept; its use seldom lives up to our expectations. To begin with there is a fundamental ambiguity; is power a phenomenon to be explained or an explanatory tool, a dependent or an independent variable? On closer inspection, the explanatory power of the concept of power is low. It is difficult to explain social relations and their outcomes, at either the national or the international level, in terms of power as it is normally conceived in the social sciences. Yet, however theoretically sophisticated we try to be, we are driven to use some such concept for want of an alternative.