It is disturbing for a student of foreign policy to read Tolstoy. It is even more disturbing for anyone interested specifically in the implementation of foreign policy, for in several respects he said it all in War and Peace in a way that makes twenty-five years of theorising about foreign policy look ridiculous. Tolstoy is greatly interested in the execution of policy and his conclusions are not only distinctive but they attack some of the most basic assumptions on which foreign policy is based. For in his elaboration of a view of historical causation, he is concerned to examine the elusive forces which motivate events and to ridicule the notion that policy-makers shape history by making effective decisions. He demonstrates this most vividly in describing the business of war, where he adopts a tone of devastating sarcasm in his accounts of the generals, “who of all the blind instruments of history were the most enslaved and involuntary’. Thus, he states starkly:

Can cultural differences between states affect the chances of success of deterrence strategy? If so, what differences are relevant and how do they influence outcomes? The following paper seeks to suggest some answers to these questions in the context of a discussion of the crisis that preceded the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

In 1976 Robert A. Kann, the well known authority on Habsburg history, wrote a Research Note in World Politics called ‘Alliances versus Ententes’.1 This rescued a distinction which had not been entirely overlooked in the post-war literature of international Relations2 but was certainly in danger of extinction at the hands of a broad, all-purpose concept of ‘alliance’.3 An alliance, Kann claimed, is distinguished by its ‘airtight commitments’; by contrast an entente entails ‘no definite commitments’ and is altogether a looser and more flexible kind of association between states. The entente he alternatively described as a ‘consultation pact’ or ‘flexible agreement’. Kann, however, was not concerned only with conceptual explication. Indeed, his main purpose seems to have been (he was a little vague on this) to advance the argument that although ‘many examples of workable alliances and meaningless ententes can easily be adduced’, the entente is in principle a more efficient device for serving ‘the interests of peace’ than the alliance. This is an argument which can be challenged both on internal as well as historical grounds.

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.

At the December 1998 Saint-Malo summit, Britain and France promised to set aside past rivalries and work together on African issues. While brief indications were given as to possible areas of bilateral and ‘bi-multi’ cooperation, the terms and scope of this ‘partnership’ were not spelt out. Was this to involve only sporadic collaboration? Or was it to be an institutionalised partnership, such as the Franco-German tandem, or perhaps a more intuitive alliance, such as the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’? These questions are central to this article, which begins by showing how Anglo-French relations in Africa were largely marked by rivalry from the colonial era to the early post-Cold War period. Drawing upon extensive interviews, it demonstrates how, over the last decade or so, closer linkages have developed between the UK and French administrations and how there has been a greater degree of cooperation in response to the key challenges of Africa. It then uses a neo-classical realist framework to explain the readiness or reluctance of Britain and France to collaborate on Africa. It concludes by suggesting that, while there has been progress in ‘deconflictualising’ African policies, cooperation has been, and is likely to remain, limited.

In a post-Cold War era characterised by globalisation and deep interdependence, the actions of national governments increasingly have an effect beyond their own territorial borders. Moreover, key agents of global governance – international organisations and their bureaucracies, non-state actors and private agents – exercise pervasive forms of authority. Due to these shifts, it is widely noted that world politics suffers from a democratic deficit. This article contributes to work on global democracy by looking at the role of international courts. Building upon an original dataset covering the 24 international courts in existence since the end of the Second World War, we argue that international courts are able to advance democratic values and shape democratic practices beyond the state. They can do so by fostering equal participation, accountability, and public justification that link individuals directly with sites of transnational authority. We contend that the ability of international courts to promote these values is conditioned by institutional design choices concerning access rules, review powers, and provisions regarding judicial reason-giving. We canvass these design features of different international courts and assess the promises and pitfalls for global democratisation. We conclude by linking our analysis of international courts and global democratisation with debates about the legitimation and politicisation of global governance at large.

International law is generally considered to be a good thing. With important exceptions, such as Critical Legal Studies, scholarship in both International Relations (IR) and International Law (IL) reinforces this ‘nice law’ assumption and therefore overlooks or underestimates the law’s negative aspects. In contrast, this article assumes the power of international law to examine how international law can have effects that are unintended, unhelpful, or even perverse. In particular, I argue that international law distorts policy- and decision-making processes in liberal democracies by eroding personal responsibility and decreasing accountability; legal expertise and legal virtues crowd out important virtues of statecraft and prudence while shrinking our capacity for sophisticated moral and political thought; and an excessive focus on law can lead to suboptimal foreign policy outcomes. Rather than law being a bad thing per se, I examine the significant strategic and moral limits of international law. This raises the need to lower our expectations of international law, carefully examine the relationship between power and international law, and political responsibility and legal ethics, and more fully embrace our own personal responsibility. The article closes by suggesting a research programme on the dark sides of international law from various theoretical perspectives.

In this contribution to the forum marking the publication of Andrew Linklater’s remarkable book on Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems we first locate the book in the context of Linklater’s overarching intellectual journey. While best known for his contribution to a critical international theory, it is through his engagement with Martin Wight’s comparative sociology of states-systems that Linklater found resonances with the work of process sociologist, Norbert Elias. Integrating Wight’s insights into the states-system with Elias’s insights into civilising processes, Violence and Civilization presents a high-level theoretical synthesis with the aim of historically tracing restraints on violence. The article identifies a tension between the cosmopolitan philosophical history which underpins the argument of the book, and which has underpinned all Linklater’s previous works, and the ‘Utrecht Enlightenment’ that offers a conception of ‘civilized statecraft’ at odds with a universal conception of morality and justice. The article then examines Linklater’s argument about the ‘global civilizing process’ as it applies to post-Second World War efforts to build greater institutional capability to protect peoples from harm. It is argued that Linklater over-estimates the extent to which solidarism has civilised international society, and that the extension of state responsibilities and development of civilised statecraft owe more to pluralism than solidarism.

This article highlights Marysia Zalewski's scholarship as reflective and generative of the multifarious sources and contributions of feminist IR and its ‘scavenger methodologies’, which seek to centre subjects, processes, and practices historically excluded, ignored, and minimised. The productive depth of her scholarship is evident in the uniqueness of each article in this collection, all of which distinctly document the uses to which Zalewski's writings can be uniquely put. Each of the articles performs a ‘turning operation’ of sorts on the elementals of feminist IR (gender/women/power/difference) and brings further elaborations of masculinities, sexualities, silences as well as screams, that shift and change what is taken to be feminist research/method – at each point disordering our sensibilities and our assumptions as to what we do when we do feminist work.

The United States presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 was observed by global health commentators as posing dire consequences for the progress made in global health outcomes, governance, and financing. This article shares these concerns, however, we present a more nuanced picture of the global health governance progress narrative pre-Trump. We argue that Trump’s presidency is a displacement activity to which global health’s pre-existing inequalities and problems of global health security, financing, and reproductive health can be attributed. Unfettered access to sexual and reproductive rights, sustained financing of health system strengthening initiatives, affordable medicines and vaccines, and a human security-centred definition of global health security were already problematic shortfalls for global health governance. Trump no doubt exacerbates these concerns, however, to blame his presidency for failings in these areas ignores the issues that have been endemic to global health governance prior to his presidency. Instead of using Trump as a displacement activity, his presidency could be an opportunity to confront dependency on US financing model, the lack of a human-security centred definition of global health security, and the norm of restricting reproductive health. It is such engagement and confrontation with these issues that could see Trump’s presidency as being a catalyst for change rather than displacement as a means of preserving the uncomfortable status quo in global health. We make this argument by focusing on three specific areas of US-led global health governance: reproductive health and the ‘global gag rule’, health financing and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and pandemic preparedness and global health security.

The death of Hirohito on 7 January 1989 provided the Japanese with an opportunity of reappraising the Showa era, as Hirohito's reign is called in the Japanese calendar. This lasted for sixty-two years, which the press described as years of ‘turmoil and drastic changes.’ While the role of the Emperor and, to a greater degree, the role of the military in imperial Japan have been long-running themes for historians, intellectuals, and journalists, Hirohito's death certainly encouraged the publication of a large number of books, including reprints of works about the Pacific War, from semi-official histories, the memoirs of some of the leading decision makers and a series of histories of Japan from 1868 to 1945. Television programmes showed for two full days panel discussions by historians and documentary films of the Showa era—a series of bloody wars in China and eventually with the Americans, the British and the other Allied powers, leading to unconditional surrender and occupation.

The historical interpretations of British diplomacy during the 1930s are difficult to separate from those interpretations that explain the occurrence of the Second World War. Historians often link them by relating the British policy of appeasement to the outbreak of the war. British policy becomes a “permissive” cause of World War II by allowing Hitler to rearm Germany, consolidate western German frontiers, and expand towards the east. First, the British failed to prevent Hitler from occupying the Rhineland in March, 1936, and then merely protested the German annexation of Austria two years later. Within six months after the Anschluss Prime Minister Chamberlain accepted the cessation of the Sudetenland to Germany at Munich. Finally, after Hitler conquered the remainder of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, the British guaranteed the territorial integrity of Poland. When Hitler attacked Poland in September, 1939, the British government, with the French as allies, came to Poland's defence. The British decision to honour this commitment belatedly but irrevocably reversed their earlier appeasement policy, which was to concede Hitler's territorial demands in an attempt to reach a peaceful European settlement with Germany.

In the forty years since the Second World War there have been many situations which have been widely viewed as military occupations—that is, where the armed forces of a country are in control of inhabited territory beyond the recognized boundaries of their own state. Hungary in 1956, the Israeli-occupied territories since 1967, Namibia since 1968, northern Cyprus since 1974, Western Sahara since 1975 and Kampuchea since 1978 have been among the territories which have been designated as ‘occupied’ in UN General Assembly resolutions.

This article will offer a description and explanation of the rise of the Brazilian media corporation Globo by situating it in the context of the periphery and semi-periphery of the World System and the globalisation of communication. In particular it focuses upon the changing role that Globo has played in the construction of an elite-led political culture in Brazil that has moved through phases of authoritarian and democratic government. The article sets out an historical account of the emergence of Globo from being a regional media organisation in the periphery of the world system to a global broadcaster in the semi-periphery. It moves through three phases: First, 1925–1964, the colonial legacy and Brazil in the periphery; second, 1964–1985, a period of transition and conservative modernisation, into the semi-periphery; and finally, 1985 onwards, the age of globalisation.

Since the end of World War II social commentators have attempted to explain why Germany was so susceptible to Nazi rule. One sociologist has argued that the social structure that existed in Germany at the end of the First World War made it likely that Germany would take a totalitarian rather than a democratic road to modernity. Others have argued that the breakdown of the stratification system permitted the Nazis to prey upon the fears of the newly atomized individuals who joined in the mass movement. Still other studies have focused either on the whole country or on the different regions to explore in detail how the Nazi movement grew and which elements of the population were most prone to join it. These works have ranged from descriptive case studies to more analytic, but conflicting, voting studies. But the analyses of the mass represent only one half of the equation which may explain why the Nazis came to power and, perhaps more significantly, why they managed to retain the loyalty of the populace even when it was apparent that Germany would lose the war that the Nazis initiated. The other part of the equation is Adolf Hitler whose “ability not only to win over the majority of the German people, but to lead them so completely astray, has no precedent in history”. No other revolutionary mass movement, neither bolshevism in Russia nor communism in China, has been so much the product of its leader as was national socialism in Germany.

This study demonstrates the link between rising levels of capital mobility and European financial and monetary integration. State policies are driven and constrained by the financial structure of the international political economy. However, political adaptation to structural conditions can itself force changes in the structure – a process of ‘structuration’. Practically, the study outlines the rise of capital mobility in the post-war period, and argues that the creation of a European Financial Area was an imperative of the associated deregulatory dynamic. The consequences of this development for state sovereignty are outlined in terms of the Capital Mobility Hypothesis. The proposition is advanced that political motivation to reassert some degree of state autonomy is the driving force behind the move to a single currency. In taking this innovative policy step, the EU countries will have challenged the financial structure by reasserting some degree of political control over the way finance flows around the global economy.

In 1919 the world's first chair in international politics was founded at Aberystwyth. Now fifty-six years later a British Journal of International Studies achieves publication. The journal is timely – even overdue. It has predecessors of high quality in the United States, in Canada, in India, in Norway and in many other countries. The subject is taught widely in Europe, in Japan and many countries of Asia, in Africa and Latin America, more recently in Eastern Europe, and throughout the United States; but in the United Kingdom, though it is represented in some twenty-four universities and in several polytechnics, it is taught extensively only in eight of these institutions. It seemed appropriate, in the first number of the new journal, to review the somewhat hesitant cultivation of the field in this country, and to consider how the subject generally appears to be moving. The paper accordingly begins with a quick survey of evolution n i a changing historical context, examines recent explorations of methodology and expansion of range, and makes some comments about directions of advance which in the opinion of the writer seem promising or likely to be fruitful.

Is the relatively long peace of Northeast Asia a result of crisis stability or general stability? The article introduces two stability concepts – crisis and general stability. Crisis stability occurs when both sides in military crisis are so secure due to its military capability and are able to wait out a surprise attack fully confident that it would be able to respond with a punishing counter attack. On the other hand, general stability prevails when two powers greatly prefer peace even to a victorious war whether crisis stability exists or not, simply because war has become inconceivable as a means of solving any political disagreements and conflicts. While crisis stability entails delicate balance of military power from the deterrence literature of security studies, general stability bases its logic of inquiry on constructivism where the idea of war aversion – categorically rejecting war as a means to end conflicts – becomes the prevailing norm. Therefore, this article empirically examines how Northeast Asia has sustained its peace through crisis stability and presents a new trend toward general stability.

Official boycotts of trade by individual countries and UN sponsored economic sanctions against South Africa have been on the international agenda for a good many years. India and Pakistan were the first countries to declare an official boycott of trade with South Africa in the early 1950s although Pakistan withdrew her boycott in 1956. As long ago as 1963 some twenty-five countries,, largely in Africa and Asia, had declared an official boycott against South Africa, In addition attempts to organize unofficial voluntary consumer boycotts against South African products such as fresh and canned fruit, wine etc., began as long ago as 1959 in Britain and the Scandinavian countries. Since 1973 there has been an embargo on oil sales to the Republic by the Arab members of OPEC and a UN embargo on arms sales in 1977, Voluntary consumer boycotts have failed to reduce the level of sales in Western countries. Even in the case of countries that officially boycott South Africa, trade has not been eliminated entirely if one looks at official statistics. But besides officially recorded trade, there is a good deal of trade via intermediaries. It is well known, for example, that South Africa continues to recieve some arms supplies from Western countries in this way. In the case of oil, while 90 per cent of South Africa's supply came from Iran, which refused to join a partial embargo until the Shah's fall, most of the balance is still supplied by countries like Bahrain, Oman, Quatar and the United Arab Emirates, which subscribe to an official embargo. This oil gets to South Africa, probably without the knowledge of the governments concerned, via intermediaries of the major international oil companies. The vulnerability of South Africa to an oil embargo will be discussed at some length later.

By mid-1947 the division of Europe had acquired clear momentum and definable contours, yet it had not yet fully congealed. The period was a transitional one, moving away from the contexts of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements which anticipated post war great power collaboration in Europe, and moving toward the complete Stalinizatioh of eastern Europe and the concomitant linking of western Europe to an American led economic and security order. Yet despite the recent Soviet backed ouster of Nagy in Hungary in May, some elements of a pan-European fabric remained intact if uncertain The Four Power negotiations over Germany's future were continuing and the allied occupation machinery remained in place. The establishment of the Economic Commission for Europe in May 1947 provided at least an institutional framework for considering recovery problems on a pan-European rather than an east-west basis. And during this pre-Cominform period the east European states appeared to anticipate some independence in foreign affairs, as suggested by the initial expressions of interest by Czechoslovakia and Poland in responding to Secretary of State Marshall's aid initiative.