In 1948, Hans J. Morgenthau wrote his classic text, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, that was largely responsible for establishing realism as the prevailing theory in the field of International Relations (IR). In 1979, Kenneth N. Waltz wrote an immensely influential book, Theory of International Politics, that resulted in a new structural version of realism – neorealism – becoming the dominant theory in IR. John J. Mearsheimer, who is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, has written a profoundly important book that rightfully deserves a prominent place along with Morgenthau and Waltz in the canon of realist thought about international politics. Mearsheimer's clearly written book puts forth a new structural theory of realism that he terms offensive realism. This version of realism argues that the observable patterns of behaviour among all of the great powers throughout history, most notably their ubiquitous power-seeking, can be explained by the fact that they exist in a condition of anarchy in which there is no higher source of authority above them. While sharing many of the same basic assumptions with neorealism, offensive realism, as elucidated by Mearsheimer, provides a fundamentally different account of the essential dynamics of international politics than that which Waltz and his students have been offering for the last twenty years or so.

This article examines the status, role and development of imagery intelligence in the UK government. It is argued that imagery intelligence occupies a subordinate and marginalised position compared to other forms of intelligence, chiefly from human sources and the interception of communications. The origins of that position are recounted, and the problems arising from internal struggles over control of imagery examined. It is concluded that the existing approach to imagery represents a serious problem and that a substantial restructuring and upgrading of imagery intelligence is essential if UK foreign policy decision-making is to be properly informed in the 21st Century.

It is fitting that one of the last major statements of International Relations theory in the 1990s should be a response to Kenneth Waltz's path-breaking book, Theory of International Politics. Unlike many other critically inclined scholars, Wendt believes that Waltz asked the right questions but supplied the wrong answers. Putting it simply, Waltz incorrectly conceptualized the structure of the international system. The first half of Wendt's book sets out to offer an alternative social theory of international politics to the ‘materialism’ and ‘individualism’ found in Waltz's work (specifically, chapters on ‘Scientific realism and social kinds’, ‘Ideas all the way down? On the constitution of power and interest’, and ‘Structure, agency, and culture’).

This study investigates how International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline emerged and evolved in South Korea, focusing on the country's peculiar colonial and postcolonial experiences. In the process, it examines why South Korean IR has been so state-centric and positivist (American-centric), while also disclosing the ways in which international history has shaped the current state of IR in South Korea, institutionally and intellectually. It is argued that IR intellectuals in South Korea have largely reflected the political arrangement of their time, rather than demonstrate academic independence or leadership for its government and/or civil society, as they have navigated difficult power structures in world politics. Related to this, it reveals South Korean IR's twisted postcoloniality, which is the absence – or weakness – of non-Western Japanese colonial legacies in its knowledge production/system, while its embracing the West/America as an ideal and better model of modernity for South Korea's security and development. It also reveals that South Korean IR's recent quest for building a Korean School of IR to overcome its Western dependency appears to be in operation within a colonial mentality towards mainstream American IR.

Harold Laski was a writer who exercised enormous influence in the turbulent environment of the early to mid-twentieth century. Though normally regarded as a political theorist, Laski frequently wrote on the problems of international politics. Certainly, his work was fully engaged with world issues in the inter-war and post-war periods. Like many critical and idealist thinkers of the time, he initially hoped that the League of Nations would usher in a new, international democratic system. However his early hopes gave way to a more pessimistic (and more radical) perspective, and from the late 1920s onwards he believed that the only way of transcending the existing system of sovereign states was by moving beyond capitalism. Combining a critique of both the Westphalian system and the market which he assumed underpinned it, Laski raised major questions – relevant to his own times and to ours too. Mainly ignored since his death, it is perhaps time that the work of this unduly neglected figure should be revisited.

The aim of this article is to provide International Relations (IR) theorists with a better understanding of law. This is important for all IR theorists, not just those who focus on international law, because the legalistic way of viewing the world colours all aspects of our world, from teaching us what justice is and providing the means to achieve it, to framing our understanding of human relations and giving us the language of rights with which to articulate it. This article has two main goals: first, to question our own assumptions about law; and second, to introduce IR theorists to the basics of legal methodology and demonstrate how law actually operates.

International Relations scholars have drawn on history ever since the field first formed in the early twentieth century. They have trawled the beds of the past, far and near, to probe, substantiate, and analogize in the pursuit of theories about what have been taken to be the main pillars of contemporary international life: states and the institutions and systems that form around their interaction. Even if states as we now know them did not exist in a given period, one could still mine insights from the interaction of any relatively autonomous political units, from city-states to tribal bands.See, e.g., Marcus Fischer, ‘Feudal Europe, 800–1300: Communal Discourse and Conflictual Practices’, International Organization, 46 (1992), pp. 427–66; and Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society (London, 1992).

In 1983, for almost the first time since the end of the Second World War, defence became a major party political issue at a general election. In that year it was one of the major campaign issues between the political parties and, according to one poll, ranked second only to unemployment as an issue influencing voter behaviour. Indeed, poll evidence indicated that the Conservatives held an unprecedented and overwhelming 54 per cent lead over Labour on the question of British retention of nuclear arms. Furthermore, of those who thought of defecting from the Labour Party, 42 per cent gave defence as the main reason. Such figures as these suggest strongly that by 1983 the inter-party consensus which had governed defence issues since 1945 had broken down, particularly in view of the fact that the question of defence had not been raised as an issue affecting voting intentions in the 1979 election. The breakdown of consensus may thus be judged by the emergence of defence as a party political issue. It might even be said that in 1983 it was an electiondeciding issue, especially when one set of policies could be represented by opponents as being contrary to the continuation of British membership of NATO, the one issue on which all parties were agreed. Defence thus moved from being a peripheral issue to one at the centre stage of the election campaign and it had a major impact on the outcome of the election. However, the.demise of inter-party consensus was not reflected in the electorate as a whole, which chose to continue to support the tried, and trusted policies of the past rather than adopt the radical alternative presented by the Labour Party, If a new consensus is to emerge—and it is beyond the limits of this particular paper to consider whether a consensus in defence policy is desirable—then all parties will have to review their present policies. However, before turning to the reasons for the breakdown, it is instructive to consider the nature of the post-1945 consensus and the origins of its apparent demise.

Great Power intervention in the Balkans since the late nineteenth century shows a striking continuity in motivations, methods, and consequences. The article proposes that current intervention practices are largely a response to the Balkan theatre in the 1990s and thus institutionalise this continuity more than arguments about normative and institutional change since 1990 suggest. Three continuities are emphasised: the concept of a ‘turbulent frontier’ to explain an unintended dynamic of nearly continuous intervention, the importance of local actors' interests (the pull of intervention) alongside those of major power interests (the push), and the primary influence on domestic orders and cause of the ‘turbulence’ of economic relations.

Demands for apology are a prominent rhetorical means for pointing out transgressions in contemporary world politics. They transform ‘seen but unnoticed’ conduct into ‘seen and noticed’ transgression and attach a price tag to the restoration of damaged relations. Nevertheless, compared to the widely discussed practice of apologising, demands for apologies have received scant scholarly attention. In this article we adopt an actor-oriented perspective in order to situate the speech act of demanding an apology within the delicate management of interstate relations. In-depth content analysis of 57 cases of demands made by various state actors in a variety of diplomatic contexts between 1999 and 2019 let us delineate the discursive construction of transgressions, the normative scripts that inform acts of demands, the types of sought-after remedies, and their discursive consequences. We conclude by discussing the normative diplomatic scripts that guide demands for apology and how these speech acts reconfigure power relations in international politics.

This article aims to contribute to the critical understanding of how International Relations (IR) was built as a social science field within Brazil's modern project. I argue that the foundation and the development of IR in Brazil in the twentieth century is closely associated with foreign policy, on the one hand, and with the national geopolitical thinking, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War, on the other. In its trajectory, Brazil's IR has been influenced, among others, by the analysis of domestic and systemic determinants of foreign policy, historical interpretations, the study of the components of state power, studies of diplomacy and its contribution to the country's development, the analysis of decision-making processes and to a lesser extent, cognitive approaches. This article is organised around three sections. First, I present a brief history of the geopolitical tradition in Brazil's IR. Second, I discuss IR development in Brazil, stressing the role of diplomats, the key contribution of intellectuals coming from social and human sciences, and finally the emergence of the first generations of IR scholars in the eighties. Third, I analyse the institutionalisation of the field, its quantitative and qualitative growth, presenting some data on its organisation in recent times.

Intervention comprises one of the most contentious issues in International Relations. This controversy results from the way normative understanding is structured around two key, but mutually exclusive, taboos: the moral expectation to respond in cases of humanitarian need and the protection of state sovereignty. In examining this dilemma, this article asks: what happens to the construction of rhetorical strategy, where that strategy seeks to justify intervention (or not), within a binary normative environment? It is argued that actors can only successfully construct a rhetorical case by engaging in, what is termed here, normative invalidation. In a binary situation, actors cannot adhere to both taboos. These taboos are so compelling, however, that actors must necessarily invalidate or neutralise any taboo not adhered to. This is discussed in relation to the Strategic Narratives paradigm and comparative case studies on the presidential rhetoric of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Social theory almost invariably equates modernity with the sovereign state. This equation must be nuanced because the modern era and modern strategies of international stability have contained non-sovereign units. In the nineteenth century, the Great Powers tried to create international stability by engineering forms of rule in Europe. These strategies built on distinctively modern ideas: the possibility of radically breaking with the past, redesigning political organisations, and actively controlling political events through rational planning. Throughout the century the Great Powers alternated between creating non-sovereign units and creating sovereign units as instruments in these stabilising strategies. The degree of trust between the Great Powers accounts for the shift between the two strategies: they tended to create non-sovereign units when mutual trust was high and sovereign ones when trust was low. This article analyses Great Power strategies of designing forms of rule in the Balkans between 1820 and 1878. Like in previous centuries, nineteenth-century Europe actually consisted of two parallel but connected systems: the egalitarian system of sovereign states and a system of non-sovereign entities. Non-sovereign units disappeared only late in the century and this process was affected by the increasing rivalry and mistrust between the sovereign states.

This article reviews Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems. Focusing upon the book’s explanation of the ‘European civilizing process’ in the modern era, it suggests that the account is limited by ‘civilizational isolationism’ and ‘metrocentric diffusion’. These analytic operations serve to minimise the agency and contributions of non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial actors to the global civilizing process. The occlusion of such agency and contributions, however, are not specific to this work, but reflect broader limitations in historical sociology writ large.

The most significant intellectual contribution of Charles Beitz's book, Political Theory and International Relations, was captured by his use of the word ‘and’ in the book's title to connect the previously estranged fields of political theory and international relations (IR). His book constituted a bold challenge to a prevailing realist view in the field of IR, that was sceptical ‘about the status of moral principles’ in a Hobbesian state-eat-state world. Beitz's work also challenged the traditional orientation of contemporary political theory, that took for granted the bounded rather than ‘universal community’ as the locus of inquiry about issues of justice and political morality. The marriage of political theory and IR has produced in the past twenty-five years a rich and diverse body of international political theory that engages, in a direct and rigorous fashion, previously obscured or marginalised normative dimensions of international issues ranging from war and intervention to global poverty and economic inequality.

The student of international relations seeks from Clausewitz not a theory of politics but an analysis of war. For some 150 years those who have sought to understand war have turned to Clausewitz—to find inspiration or to condemn him, to borrow or to steal from him, to quote or to misquote him. He has been called upon to support particular wars and strategies, to take sides in the Cold War and to throw light on nuclear deterrence. He has been both venerated and vilified, and frequently misunderstood. Few have ignored him altogether.

This article focuses on David Miller's recent and influential study National Responsibility and Global Justice (2007). After outlining Miller's methodological commitments in the book, the article offers an interpretation of the major aspects of Miller's case against ‘Cosmopolitan egalitarianism’ before focusing especially on the issue of migration and refugees. Here the article argues that while membership of a nation is (under certain conditions) of intrinsic value, it is not the only thing that is of intrinsic value – friendship, family and other practices can also be sources of intrinsic value – nor is it necessarily the most important. It is therefore not clear, the article argues, why an account of global justice that seeks to take seriously the existence of national communities on the grounds of their intrinsic value, should propose rules of justice concerning freedom of movement that entail the de jure privileging of the value of national community over other sources of intrinsic value. The article concludes by assessing how Miller's arguments can support the movement from mere ‘distributivism’ towards political justice, towards an account that more adequately integrates agency, responsibility and power into our account of global justice.

This article aims to uncover the socially constructed normative foundation for the alternative East Asian economic development paradigm to neoliberalism in the context of civilisational politics. The question I seek to address is why East Asian states make value claims when promoting their alternative method of economic development. In addressing this question, I make two interrelated arguments. First, I argue that the politics of Asian values can be understood as another case of non-Western society's struggle to demonstrate multiple paths to modernity. Second, on a deeper level, I show that the discourse and narratives on Asian values is part of civilisation politics aimed to recalibrate the place of East Asia in a world consisting of the civilised and the uncivilised, a divide that still remains today in various forms following European expansion in the nineteenth century. In so doing, I shed light on the performative power of ‘the standard of civilisation’, which naturalises the temporal and sequential hierarchy of civilisational identities in world politics. On the basis of this article's findings, I draw out implications of a recalibrated East Asia for the ideas of hierarchy and progress in world politics.

What do Third World countries want? More wealth. How can they get it? By adopting more economically rational policies. What should the North do? Facilitate these policies. How should the North approach global negotiations? With cautious optimism. What is the long term prognosis for North–South relations? Hopeful, at least if economic development occurs. This is the common wisdom about relations between industrialized and developing areas in the United States and much of the rest of the North, Within this fold there are intense debates among adherents of conventional liberal, reformist liberal, and interdependence viewpoints. But the emphasis on economics at the expense of politics, on material well-being as opposed to power and control, pervades all of these orientations.