This article examines how the exemplars of ideal theory have addressed what I term ‘the problem of preservation’. The ‘problem’ in question is not so much that a political community must make provisions for its self-preservation, but rather that its provisions must correspond to the intentions and capabilities of its neighbours. This constraint implies that the ability of a political community to pursue ideals rather than power depends heavily on who its neighbours happen to be. This article shows how Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls address this problem by recommending measures such as defensive fortification, collective security, and democratic peace, which, they claim, will dampen the anarchic nature of the international system. It argues that the implausibility of these measures renders the ability of political communities to heed the moral guidance offered by ideal theory contingent at best and impractical at worst. If proponents of ideal theory wish to resist this conclusion, then they must offer a more persuasive answer to the problem of preservation.

In recent years, critical scholars have emphasised how the recollection of past events as traumas can both constrain and widen the political possibilities of a present. This article builds on such research by suggesting that the management of contemporary financial crises is reliant on a ritual work of repetition, wherein prior ‘crisis’ episodes are called upon to identify and authorise specific sites and modes of crisis management. In order to develop this argument, I focus on how past crises figure within the public pronouncements of four key policymaking organisations during the financial instability of 2007–9. I find that while the Great Depression does enable these organisations to reaffirm old ways of managing crises, both it and the more recent Asian crisis are also made to disclose new truths about the evolution of multilateralism as a form of governance. In so doing, I argue, these historical narratives reveal how the management of global financial crisis depends upon a kind of ‘magic trick’. Rather than a strictly rational, historical process of problem solving, contemporary crises are instead negotiated through a contingent and self-referential conjuring of crisis-histories.

The study of Eurocentrism has become a hallmark of postcolonial International Relations theories. Of particular concern in this literature has been the resilience of Eurocentrism despite conscious efforts to move towards a post-Eurocentric understanding of world politics. This study argues that while existing works have highlighted many of the reasons why Eurocentrism persists today, it has not been sufficiently identified and conceptualised. In particular, why some policy actors, who have a vested interest in moving beyond Eurocentrism, inadvertently reproduce Eurocentrism? This article proposes to distinguish between different types of inadvertent reproductions. In particular it highlights rhetorical critique, deconstruction, decentring and dehierarchising, as different ways to critique, inadvertently reproduce and partially modify Eurocentrism. To illustrate this situation, this article looks at Turkey's migration policies and documents how Turkish governing elites have openly claimed the need to upend the Eurocentric order, yet have reproduced it in practice.

Why has English School theory, even as it has been re-imagined as critical international society theory, ignored the workings of gender in international politics? This article stages an encounter between the English School and feminists in International Relations (IR), first demonstrating the broad compatibility of the two approaches. I argue that to conduct a conversation between English School and IR feminist approaches, it is necessary to reconstruct the English School's three traditions – Realist, Rationalist, and Revolutionist – so as to allow a greater role for gender as a category of analysis. I then review the work of two key English School scholars, Hedley Bull and Barry Buzan with this reconstruction in mind. Finally, I argue that IR theorists who have participated in the recent English School revival should consider integrating gender into its theoretical and research agenda, and show several examples of how a hybrid approach can be brought to bear on the expansion of international society, diplomacy, and human rights.

Critical international relations theory has given too little attention to regionally specific manifestations of discourses of the ‘war on terror’. Using Richard Devetak's concept of a ‘gothic scene of international relations’, this article considers the final months of the regime of Kyrgyzstan's former President, Askar Akaev. Akaev evoked a gothic fantasy of a gloomy Kyrgyzstan terrorised by monsters recognisable from President Bush's nightmares, peculiarly Kyrgyz monsters, and obscene hybrids. That America was portrayed as a monster by an undemocratic regime fighting a desperate rearguard action highlights ironies both in Devetak's theory and in the international relations of Central Asia. We therefore suggest that attention needs to be paid to a gothic geography of international relations.

The causes and consequences of HIV and AIDS are social are well as biomedical. Given the scale of the pandemic, understanding the social dimensions of HIV and AIDS is vital. One key argument is that there is a link between conflict and the spread of HIV. This appears to be particularly the case for sub-Saharan Africa where high levels of HIV prevalence are matched by violent conflict and state instability. Recent evidence however suggests that HIV prevalence does not always increase in conflict and that in some instances it may even reduce. This article attempts to explain why HIV has not increased in some sub-Saharan conflicts. To do this it moves beyond the use of risk factors to offer a new explanation based on susceptibility and vulnerability. It uses this explanation to examine four cases – Sierra Leone, Angola, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – where conflict did not lead to a significant increase in the prevalence of HIV. The article concludes that, despite the fears of a few years ago, conflict does not readily act as a vector for the spread of HIV, though the potential for this to occur does still exist under certain circumstances.

This article broadens the understanding and empirical study of regime complexes by shifting the focus from the negotiation outcome to the processes of negotiating new international agreements. Although they are important to regime-complex formation and delimitation, the sites where states negotiate new agreements are rather neglected. We aim to enhance the methodological toolbox available to scholars studying global governance in two ways: (1) by demonstrating how dynamic relationships between states and international organisations (IOs) unfolding within the social space of international treaty negotiations contribute to regime-complex formation; and (2) how social network analysis (SNA) can help us to detect patterns in these relationships. Combining participant observation and collaborative event ethnography (CEE) with social network analysis, we present new empirical material illustrating how we delimited a regime complex and how IOs interact throughout the negotiation process. We applied our methodology to the case of marine-biodiversity governance and use observational data collected during three intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) (2018–19) on a new treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) for our analysis. We discuss the results in relation to our approach’s strengths and weaknesses and implications for future research on regime complexity.

This article analyses the Russian reaction to the Sarajevo crisis of February 1994 when NATO threatened air strikes in response to the market-place mortar explosion. I argue that Russia's shift to a realist great-power policy led to a crisis with the West as Russia sought to demonstrate its great power credentials, protect what it saw as specific Russian interests in the Balkans, and limit the role of NATO in conflict resolution, while Western leaders aimed to demonstrate NATO credibility and its new post-Cold War role as peace-keeper/peace-maker. This was the first major East-West crisis since the end of the Cold War, and Russian responses and actions foreshadowed its reactions to the Kosovo crisis.

The article explores the complicity of children’s picturebooks in the construction and critique of world politics. Focusing on The Gruffalo, it argues that this spectacularly successful book: (1) stories the international as a pessimistic, anarchical world populated by self-interested, survival-seekers; (2) disrupts this reading and its assumptions through evocation of the social production of threat; and, (3) provides a more fundamental decolonial critique of the international through parochial privileging of its protagonist’s journey through a ‘deep dark wood’. In doing this, we argue, the book vividly demonstrates the world’s susceptibility to multiple incompatible readings, while rendering visible the assumptions, framing, and occlusions of competing understandings of the international. As such, it theorises both world politics and knowledge thereof as contingent and unstable. In making this argument, three contributions are made. First, empirically, we expand research on popular culture and world politics through investigating a surprisingly neglected example of the former. Second, theoretically, we demonstrate the work such texts perform in (re)creating and (de)stabilising (knowledge of) global politics. Third, we offer a composite methodological framework for future research into the context, content, and framing of complex texts like The Gruffalo.

Since US President Donald J. Trump took office in January 2017, the future of the global economy has looked distinctly uncertain. This is not because a process of clear and purposeful change can be said to be underway. Instead, it is because of a pattern of piecemeal, inconsistent and contradictory fragments of policy, both domestic and international in orientation, in the arenas of trade, taxation, business relations, finance and banking, social and welfare provision, immigration, and environmental protection, whose cumulative significance remains unclear. The modest task of this essay is therefore to sketch the contours, patterns, inconsistencies and confusions presented by the Trump administration's approach to shaping the US economy and, by extension, the global economic order, and on that basis to offer an interpretation of its emerging implications for inequality both within the United States and across the world.

Justice and peace are commonly seen as mutually reinforcing, and key international peacebuilding documents stress the importance of human rights. Is this apparent normative shift reflected in post-Cold War peace agreements? The existing literature is divided on this issue but has crucially treated both conflicts and peace agreements as aggregate categories. This article argues that the conflict type and the agreement's ‘core deal’ impact on the inclusion, or exclusion, of human rights provisions. Based on new coding of the 29 comprehensive agreements signed between 1990 and 2010, it compares agreements signed in territorial and non-territorial conflicts, and agreements with and without territorial autonomy. Qualitative Comparative Analysis is used to examine the different combinations of conditions that led to the inclusion of human rights. The analysis finds that agreements signed in territorial conflicts are significantly less likely to include effective human rights provisions, especially if the settlement includes territorial autonomy. Moreover, such provisions tend to be the result of high levels of international involvement, and the consequent lack of local commitment, or outright resistance, undermines their implementation. These findings point to important trade-offs between group rights and individual rights, and qualifies the notion of a liberal peace.

The summer of 2014 saw several campaigns to name the dead of Gaza. This article aims to explore these initiatives through the idea of the ‘human’; understood both in terms of grievability, as a life that matters, and as a ‘litigious name’ employed by subaltern groups to make political demands. My argument in this article is that politically not all attempts at nomination are equivalent and that a distinction needs to be drawn between those carried out on behalf of the ‘ungrievable’ and those engaged in by them. Only the latter enables a critical politics of the human potentially capable of transforming the prevailing order of grievability in order to make their lives count. After exploring the interventions that occurred in Gaza in 2014, I turn to how the Western (and Israeli) media represent international deaths to consider what that reveals about the differential valuation of human life. To help make my case I elaborate the idea of an order of grievability. I then explore various attempts by others to name Gaza’s dead, and the limitations of their ensuing politics, before finally examining the activities of Humanize Palestine as an example of a more radical, critical politics of the human.

The Second World War acted like an earthquake on the international law of war and left some of it in ruins. This essay attempts to explain why. But before analysing the nature of the historic forces, and, so far as they are relevant, specific events which produced this disturbance, it will be helpful if we remind ourselves of something even more basic: the intrinsic fragility of the law of war – a fragility which exists and has its unsettling effects even when historic forces happen to be helpful. The law of war of course shares in the chronic weakness of international law in general, that is it is a law without a sovereign – rules without a ruler. But before that, the law of war rests uniquely upon a paradox which hostile critics have not hesitated to call an absurdity. It offers mediation between the demands of on the one hand Humanity, on the other Military Necessity. It opens a middle path between the peaceable brotherly conduct which civilized men believe they would, in favourable circumstances, like to observe towards their neighbours, and the lethal violence they find themselves using when the circumstances are those of war. It requires a cohabitation of logical inconsistencies which some – certainly not all – interpretations of Humanity or Military Necessity have alleged to have been no more practical than squaring the circle. Yet the idea of the law of war has survived, something about which the philosopher and psychologist at any rate might have much to say. The historian, however, feels obliged to pass by those deeper levels of his theme with the reflection, for what it is worth, that such tolerance, even appetite, for inconsistency need not surprise anyone whose idea of human nature includes a divided mind or whose idea of the human condition includes tragedy.

As a discipline, IR returns repeatedly to the ‘problem of harm’; debating what harm is or should mean. Exploring the discipline through this lens allows us to understand it as contributing to a broader process of negotiation centred on harm as a principle of restraint. However, existing accounts of what harm means for IR are challenged by the scale and visibility of large-scale harm. This article attempts to push beyond recent accounts of harm by Linklater and Mitchell by examining their respective framings of the relationship between harm and its explanation in IR. Building on their limitations, I propose a framework centred on arguments for ontological realism and structure as a focus for explanation. The resulting ontology sustains the concerns of both while: (a) more fully characterising the relationship between explanation and values in IR; and (b) providing a more adequate account of the role of abstraction. In developing upon existing accounts, this article seeks to provide a stronger ground for the analysis of harm in IR. More broadly, it contributes to contemporary debates centred on the relationship between ontology and values with a view to clarifying the nature of explanation in IR as a social science.

For some students of world politics, Clio has always been their primary muse. Nestling between the rival peaks of philosophy and poetry, she has always seemed a secure shelter for those who think of their concern as ‘what human beings do and suffer'. With recent doctrinal storms still howling around the increasingly windblown scholarly communities that constitute international studies, it is hardly surprising that the heavenly sister is more popular than ever. During the course of the twentieth century, moreover, Clio has claimed many of the best-known scholars of world politics (if not always the most influential academically), and many historians have left their mark on political science and international studies.

This article examines the concept of State Civil Disobedience (SCD) in the context of international society. It is argued that SCD is problematic for several reasons. First, that SCD is extremely difficult to practice in an association such as international society, relying, as it does, a great deal on the policies and powers of a few dominating actors; second, that the unequal status of states makes SCD mainly an instrument of the strong, hence undermining not only the idea of civil disobedience as the strategy of the weak but also questioning the role of SCD within an international society based on the formal equality of states. It is concluded that the practice of SCD in international society requires an invigoration of international society as a moral association. A more practical alternative, it is argued, is to conceive of a limited concept of SCD confined largely to non-violent means and preferably practiced in order to resist legal anomalies.

Standard conceptions of the relationship between international law and war in International Relations (IR) mostly oscillate between the sceptical view that law is mostly irrelevant in times of conflict, and the optimistic view that law is a meaningful moral standard that effectively constrains violence. Modern asymmetric conflicts between liberal democratic states and non-state actors such as the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or Hamas challenge these conceptions, however, as they are at once increasingly legal and extremely violent. Drawing inspiration from IR and International Law (IL) scholarship from multiple theoretical paradigms, this article examines the legal asymmetries before, during, and after asymmetric conflict. Noting that law is at once a useful tool and a strong normative force, it argues that a good understanding of legal asymmetries can supplement existing theories of asymmetric war, continue the dissolution of false dichotomies and open up interesting avenues of research in IR, and help both scholars and policymakers understand how international law influences modern asymmetric conflict against non-state actors.

This article draws on fresh archival research to challenge Robert Putnam's ‘Two Level Game Theory’. In his seminal article, ‘Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two Level Games’, published by International Organization in 1988, Putnam contended that international negotiations proceed at the domestic level and at the international level. In taking diplomatic initiatives forward, leaders are compelled to respond to the needs of domestic constituencies, through granting concessions and building coalitions, while international negotiations are pursued with one goal in mind: that any agreement will not damage the domestic political calculus. This article contends that Lyndon Johnson's actions in 1968 disprove this thesis. The President was in fact relaxed about a Richard Nixon victory in the general election as his commitment to defend South Vietnam from communism was stronger than that of his sitting Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. The President's concern for the fate of South Vietnam thus superseded his concern for his ‘normal supporters'– the Democratic Party at large – who had become so hostile towards his management of the Vietnam War.

While the importance and key features of transnational benchmarking have received increased attention in recent years, the organisational contexts of this benchmarking have not yet been analysed systematically enough. Drawing on actor-network theory, this article identifies two key aspects of these contexts. The first is embeddedness, which refers to the degree to which there are networks that carry information and action from the benchmark to its contexts and back that are sustained institutionally, including by technical artefacts, objects, and routine local practices. Embeddedness is critical to the effectiveness of benchmarking. The second is publicness, which refers to the degree to which these networks exhibit expanding flows of information across widening circles of engagement, or instead are marked by control, domination, and exclusion. The article argues that benchmarking as a form of governance has an inherent impetus toward greater publicness, although this can be prevented by self-interested actors or problems associated with embeddedness. The article then explores the relevance of these conceptual points by examining cases of transnational benchmarking: disaster risk reduction and supply chain management.

Since the end of the Cold War, many of America’s closest allies have complained about the rise of American unilateralism, a tendency in Washington to take decisions without much regard for the interests or views of its own allies or the rest of the world. Prime examples of what most offends America’s partners would be the restrictions America has attempted to apply to allied trade with Cuba or Iran, in clear violation of traditionally understood rules of international law.