This special section breaks an important silence in British international relations journals toward Noam Chomsky's political writings. Behind this silence lies the bigger matter of the silence in these journals about the issues contained in Chomsky's work. These issues include the use and sponsorship by the United States of terrorism on a massive scale for many years; the failure of most Western academics to take any interest in those US actions; and the dereliction by Western academics of their duty to help those who are trying to stop the United States from acting in this way. Once we started to read Chomsky's work, we concluded that there was a great deal to be learned from it. However, when we began to draw on it, we came up against widespread hostility towards his work combined with both ignorance and misrepresentation of precisely what he writes. In order to explore this undue marginalisation, we solicited a number of articles, including one from Chomsky, which resulted in this collection.

This article explores the account of international hospitality found in the natural law tradition from Vitoria to Kant. Rather than limit itself to intellectual history, the focus here is on a more enduring theme: the double-bind of hospitality which the natural lawyers encountered in seeking to find a place for the welcome of the foreigner in the ‘law of nations’. Although these thinkers agreed on a natural right of communication, this proved destabilising, even destructive, of the property claims by which hosts establish their domain as properly theirs in the first place. All struggled with this double-bind, though this took different forms, from the concern that the law of hospitality might thereby justify colonial appropriation to fears for how it could threaten sovereignty. Two thinkers arguably find a way out of the double-bind of right of communication-right of property in hospitality, but sacrifice the law of hospitality in the process: Pufendorf, subordinating communication to property, turns hospitality into charity and thereby effectively denies it status as a law of nature; Kant, putting communication first, makes hospitality a matter of right, not philanthropy, but also sees it as instrumental to the development of a global civil condition, where it would be redundant.

This article applies rational institutionalism, to the case of the British-Irish relationship. Hypotheses are drawn about the role of institutions in advancing cooperation. In section two an overview and analysis of British-Irish agreements and policymaking processes are provided. In section three, the role of institution-building in causing British-Irish cooperation is highlighted. In conclusion, the enduring relevance of rational institutionalism to the British-Irish case is highlighted and its potential to understand conflict in the 21st century is stressed.

How can we make sure that states do not only sign international anti-corruption conventions, but also comply with them once the ink has dried? Peer review among states offers one answer to this question. This article develops a theoretical framework to study the different processes and mechanisms through which peer reviews can contribute to state compliance. It focuses on three processes: transparency, pressure, and learning. The article subsequently applies this framework to the OECD Working Group on Bribery (WGB) in order to identify how far participants in this peer review perceive the WGB as capable of organising these processes, and to what extent they consider these processes relevant for promoting state compliance. Data come from an online survey (74 observations) and 17 in-depth interviews. The findings reveal that this peer review exercise is perceived as effective in creating transparency about state behaviour, mobilising pressure, and stimulating learning. However, the extent to which these processes can promote compliance is more limited. For these processes to work, political will is crucial.

The study of international political economy is beset with complexity: the complexity of the empirical referent and the variety of intellectual perspectives. The complexity of contemporary international economic relations was discussed in the first of these two papers. This paper is devoted to a critical review of the major established perspectives on the global political economy and a discussion of some of the bases upon which it might be possible to construct a synthetic, and hopefully more satisfactory, approach.

International relations is now marked by a distinct bias against both realism and materialism. This, allied to the currently fashionable notion that in a globalized, liberal economy cooperation rather than competition is the norm, has meant that few scholars have been concerned to analyse the sources of rivalry between the various capitalist states. This article suggests that a version of realism informed by a keen sense of power and hierarchy remains essential if we are to understand the dynamics of US foreign policy in the post-Cold War period. The case study deployed here revolves around the various attempts made by one of America's allies to contest Washington's vision of a ‘new world order’. The French challenge assumed many forms but in the end was seen off by the dominant state; the outcome only confirming US preponderance and guaranteeing its hegemonic position into the 21st century.

Over the past few years Vendulka Kubálková and Albert Cruickshank have produced a substantial and wide-ranging oeuvre on the issue of Marxism and international relations. Their first work, Marxism–Leninism and Theory of International Relations, published in. 1980, stressed the importance of engagement between these two bodies of thought, and this theme is restated in a more composed manner in their later Marxism and International Relations. The themes of these books have been reiterated in article forms and most recently in their essay “The ‘New Cold War’ in ‘critical International Relations studies’” (in the July 1986 number of this Review). There is much that is disputable in their writings and their recent essay on the new cold war is no exception: but, before turning to some debatable aspects of their interpretation of the debate on the New Cold War, it may be worth emphasizing the points of more general value in their work.

What is the student of politics to make of the revival of protectionism and the new mood of economic nationalism of which it is widely held to be a symptom? It is reasonably clear why nationalism raises problems for economists: for orthodox Marxists it entrenches false consciousness and delays the final crisis of capitalism; for liberals it frustrates the optimal allocation of resources by substituting group sentiment for the rational pursuit of individual self-interest and by endowing political frontiers with an economic significance to which their economic theory is opposed. But it is not self-evident that the assumptions on which the great neo-classical systems are built are the most helpful for understanding the phenomenon of economic nationalism or for evaluating the nature of the problem which it poses for international society. Since Marx himself was profoundly uninterested in the great debate between free trade and protection, while contemporary Marxist-Leninist governments all pursue economic policies which are unambiguously nationalist, I shall confine myself to the debate within the liberal tradition.

Realist international relations scholars have approached the connection between economics and security in two ways. Cold War-era realists derived the national interest from the international balance of power, and assessed the utility of both military and economic instruments of statecraft. A second realist approach, advanced by E. H. Carr in his 1939 The Twenty Years' Crisis, places interstate competition in the context of another struggle over wealth and power in which no-one's primary concern is the national interest. That is the realm of capitalism (and resistance to capitalism). That deeper set of connections between economics and security was overlooked in Cold War IR literature, at considerable cost to our understanding of world politics. Understanding why Carr's ‘historical realism’ was bypassed can help pave the way for a more fruitful realist approach to comprehending a new era in world politics.

The capacity to transfer wealth abroad had long served wealth-holders as a potent restraint on state encroachment. The creation of movable wealth, Montesqueau wrote in the eighteenth century, meant that ‘rulers have been compelled to govern with greater wisdom than they themselves might have intended’. In the years since then, new technology and increasing interdependence have greatly magnified this capability; one recent book argues that the increased mobility of capital and growing integration of economies means that all governments ‘have lost the vestiges of unchecked economic sovereignty’ and that they ‘must concede to the implied threats of quicksilver capital’ When enormous quantities of wealth travel across the world with a single tap of a computer key, a country risks paying heavy costs if it adopts the wrong policies. So if the nation-state is not yet dead, it appears to be severely weakened in its ability to pursue measures at odds with the wishes of mobile-asset holders

Many books, both scholarly and popular, consider how wars begin. There has also been a large number written on the question of limiting war in general and creating peace. Yet the question of how specific wars end has received far less attention. Except for memoirs and historical accounts of final battles and peace negotiations, it is difficult to find more than a handful of general works on war deescalation and termination.

In this essay I examine the main characteristics of the proposals which have been put forward over the past few years for the reform of international institutions, particularly the United Nations. The latter's social and economic arrangements in particular have been subject to a series of incisive, hard hitting reports—the most recent being Maurice Bertrand's Report of December 19851—which have themselves become almost a matter of routine: nothing changes, even the intelligence and perception of the criticism. This essay is intended to provide a part of the answer to the question of why nothing is ever done. In addition to difficulties arising from the interests of states and organizations which are involved, there are also a range of problems arising from different conceptions of what international organizations are and can do. This essay deals with the latter. The conceptions dealt with are those found in the writings of students of international organization, largely British and American, rather than in the words or deeds of practitioners. The nature of the link between scholarly writing and the practice of international relations is itself complex and contentious and is not explored in this essay. The minimalist assumptions are made, however, that disagreements among scholars make it less likely that practitioners will agree to co-operate, and that scholarly reconciliation is at least a first step towards practical improvement.

For a quarter of a century, Susan Strange—who died in October 1998—was the most influential figure in British international studies. While she held a number of key academic posts in Britain, Italy and Japan (including a ten-year stint as Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at LSE from 1978–88) and although she was a major figure in the professional associations of both Britain and the US (founder member and first Treasurer of BISA, President of ISA in 1995), it was predominantly as a creative scholar and a forceful personality that she exercised this influence. She was almost single-handedly responsible for creating ‘international political economy’ and turning it into one of the two or three central fields within international studies in Britain, and she defended her creation with such robustness, and made such strong claims on its behalf, that her influence was felt—albeit not always welcomed—in most other areas of the discipline.

This paper contributes to this special issue by examining the existentialist themes re-emerging in Ontological Security Studies (OSS) and does so by proposing an under-explored and overlapping terrain regarding the function of myths and ontological security. What Blumenberg calls the ‘absolutism of reality’ becomes something to avoid through the process of telling, retelling, and adapting myths to suit our existential needs. The paper distinguishes our existentialist intervention into OSS from recent ones within that research community and then draws examples of the work on and of myth from the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Speaking to the need for OSS to develop an ethical-political perspective to not only explain but also change the world, the account we develop here also provides a pathway for an alternative politics based in counter-myth. It discloses, therefore, a promising and, in the face of rising authoritarianism and anti-democratic forces, necessary moral ethos regarding prescriptive ideas about what to do and how to confront and and counter the mounting challenges of global politics in the 2020s and beyond.

Police assistance is an important, albeit understudied aspect of foreign policy. While many scholars have studied international and transnational policing, it remains largely unknown why donor police forces often support their colleagues in fragile states in different ways. This article discusses a variety of potential explanations of police assistance: a domestic rational actor model; a constructivist focus on international norms; and theories on the use of force by democracies. While all of these explanations are relevant, this article shows that they remain incomplete without studying police organisations and how these implement assistance on the ground. As the organisational cultures of donor police agencies differ, so do their assistance practices. The case of German and Italian police assistance in Afghanistan illustrates the relevance of an organisational approach: despite operating in the same environment, German police officers promoted civilian and Italian Carabinieri militarised policing. The article stresses that explaining security assistance, an important form of indirect intervention in fragile states, requires zooming in on policy implementation and policy implementers.

History is too important to be left to the historians. An individual or a society lacking an awareness of the past is as deprived as those who remain strangers to the world of imaginative literature. Moreover, anyone tempted to rely totally upon the pronouncements of professional historians for their ideas about earlier events still has to choose (even though the process is not always a conscious one) from among a wide range of versions and verdicts emanating from the ranks of those historians themselves.

Many analyses of the role of international norms in world politics study those particular norms that can be classified as relatively robust. Furthermore, such analyses critique alternative theories which foreground the role of domestic interests in affecting the behaviour of state elites, by calling into question the presumed objectivity of interests. The present article takes a different tack to the largely similar challenge. Specifically, it shows – on the example of Russian speakers in Ukraine – that even weak and contested international norms, like the norm of language rights for national minorities, can have independent effects on the behaviour and policy of state elites. The latter holds, in demonstrable terms, if state elites act in ways that militate against their most salient apparent interests. In the Ukraine case, this article argues, such ‘interests’ are the protection of the Ukrainian language as the country’s sole official language. So the cause of the (variable) behaviour of elites in Ukraine lay in a weak and contested norm, namely the norm of language rights for national minorities.

The title of the article is intended to focus the attention of Western writers on international relations theory upon two aspects of this rapidly growing research area. Rather than meeting with an incomprehensible neglect it is our argument that the aspects referred to might well be accorded one of the key places. Failure to do so, it our contention, when transferred from considerations of theoretical efficiency into the no less precarious realm of practical policy, might well have proportionately hazardous implications. We would beg forbearance, however, if within the necessarily limited scope of this article only a very perfunctory and sketchy outline of the meaning and implications of the omissions can be given. The sole purpose of this article is to provoke interest in these particular areas rather than to supply the deficiencies – a task which clearly could only be undertaken in the expanded context of a major work.

NATO has been a fixed point in international politics for forty years and is part of the basic framework of relations between the West and the Soviet Union. NATO present form owes much to the milieu of the late 1940s which gave it birth and to crucial developments in its early years. Important insight into the character of the alliance can be gained by examination of the negotiation of the North Atlantic Treaty itself. It has emerged from recent scholarship that those who created the Treaty were at variance not only on the details of the Treaty, but also on the fundamental nature of the alliance they were creating: its purpose, and the means by which it could best achieve that purpose. Important studies have highlighted the debate upon the issue of the obligation to assist a member if attacked (Article 5 of the Treaty) and the mutual assistance clause (Article 3). The debate on membership of the Atlantic Pact, and particularly the criteria to apply when assessing potential members also raises fundamental questions but it has been less exhaustively studied. There is especially a lack of detailed study of the development of British views, which were of some importance given the pivotal initiatory role the British played in the negotiations, now widely recognized. The British official documents reveal not only the development of ideas on aspects of the North Atlantic Treaty in debate within the British government, but also provide much information on the course of the Treaty negotiations and the views of the other participants, to supplement that available in the published sources. This information results from the close contacts between the British Embassy in Washington and the State Department, and Britain's close ties with the West European participants through the Brussels Treaty organization.