Last December, in the university town of St Andrews, the British International Studies Association (BISA) celebrated its 30th anniversary conference. As it was a rather special occasion, BISA members took this opportunity to indulge in some reminiscences about its founding, some studies of the work that had been carried out since the founding of the Association and reflect upon the relationship of British scholarship in international studies to scholarship elsewhere. It has been customary for there to be, at the BISA conference, a plenary address given by a prominent British or overseas scholar or (on occasion) a practitioner. It has also long been a tradition that The Review of International Studies, the Journal of the Association produced in association with Cambridge University Press, publishes the plenary of the conferences. For the thirtieth anniversary, however, BISA commissioned three plenary lectures. In this edition of the Journal, therefore, we devote a section to the lectures that were given by Professors Chris Brown, Lawrence Freedman and Geoff Roberts. We will come on to the content of these lectures in a moment, but thought that, by way of introduction, it would be timely to reflect upon the circumstances in which BISA was born, and say something about the changes in the environment of British International Studies from the mid 1970s until today.

This article reconstructs Hannah Arendt’s theory of political freedom in the context of her analysis of globality. In a first step it is shown that Arendt builds her theory of political freedom around the core concepts of plurality, action, sovereignty and judgment. This theory arises out of Arendt’s experience and understanding of totalitarianism. This experience also underpins Arendt’s analysis of the ‘global condition’. Having argued in her analysis of totalitarianism that the modern state in the form of the nation-state had become compromised as the space of political freedom since its development in the early nineteenth century, Arendt asks in which alternative space, in the post-totalitarian global age, freedom can be located. In her tentative answer, Arendt develops a political and philosophical understanding of federalism. Going back to Thomas Jefferson’s discussion of ‘elementary republics’, Arendt attempts to combine her notion of participatory citizenship with the idea of confederal structures of ward republics. Reflections upon the conditions of the possibility of the interrelationships between such confederations lead Arendt back to Karl Jasper’s notion of ‘limitless communication’. This notion opens her analysis up to contemporary ‘intercultural’ arguments.

International Relations (IR) textbooks often make reference to an idealist paradigm in interwar IR. This article argues that an idealist paradigm did not exist, and that interwar references to idealism or utopianism are contradictory and have little to do with defining a paradigm. Not only is there no idealist paradigm in IR at this time, but authors from the interwar period that have since been dismissed as idealists rarely share the attributes assigned to idealism or utopianism by later writers. If IR scholars are serious about understanding the history of their discipline then they will have to stop applying misleading and anachronistic terms like idealism.

International state-building has become central to international policy concerns and has marked a clear neo-Wilsonian shift in international thinking, spurred by the leadership of the United States and the European Union. Today’s approaches insist on the regulatory role of international institutions and downplay the importance of locally-derived political solutions. This privileging of ‘governance’ over ‘government’ is based on the assumption that the political process can be externally influenced through the promotion of institutional changes introduced at the state level and pays less attention to how societal pressures and demands are constitutive of stable and legitimate institutional mechanisms. This article questions this approach and analyses the transformation in the assessment of the importance of the societal sphere. It considers how this shift has been shaped by current understandings of war and conflict, and how the prioritisation of governance has fitted with critical and post-positivist trends in academic thinking in international relations and security studies. The discussion is illustrated with examples drawn largely from the Balkans and the international regime in Bosnia–Herzegovina in particular.

It has become rather commonplace to read that, what is referred to as ‘traditional, western IR theory’, is problematic when taken to the African continent. At best, we are told, IR theory misrepresents or misunderstands African reality, at worst it participates in an exercise of neo-colonial theoretical hegemony. In this article I will seek both to assess this ‘Africanist critique’ and to mount something of a qualified defence of IR theory. However, I argue that in exploring the relevance of IR theory to Africa we need to distinguish between neorealism – the real target of the critics’ fire – and other strands of IR theory. Once we do this we can see that other theoretical standpoints within IR are relevant. Moreover, I argue that while trying to question neorealism, the critics in fact maintain neorealism’s conceptualisations of the state and anarchy, simply inverting the picture. I argue that this represents a theoretical step backwards. Problematic issues in IR theory do not simply appear when one moves one’s focus to Africa, they are there to begin with.

This article explores the uses of history in contemporary Eurosceptic discourse in Britain. It does so in the knowledge that studying an essentially contested concept such as Euroscepticism poses severe methodological problems, and in the first section I situate my article in the emerging scholarly literature on the subject. Having explained why I limit my research to popular Euroscepticism in the tabloid press, in the second section I critically analyse the rhetorical strategies employed by the Sun and the Daily Mail to garner support for their line on Europe, suggesting that the appeal of their discourse resides in its recourse to national history of the school textbook variety. In the third part I use this finding to argue that the discipline of history has been an unwitting accomplice in making Euroscepticism so popular amongst the British public, press and politicians. This has considerable ramifications both for the theoretical study of Euroscepticism and the political efforts to counter its popularity, and I consider all of these in the conclusion.

Anniversaries are occasions for celebration and reflection. The thirtieth anniversary of BISA presents the opportunity to look back over what has been achieved in the eventful years since the foundation of the Association, but also the duty of identifying things that have gone wrong, paths not taken or promising avenues that turned out to be dead-ends. We owe it to the people who founded BISA – some still here, others, sadly, gone – to preserve the critical spirit even when celebrating our achievements, and I will certainly honour that debt in this talk.

Despite a growing awareness about the importance of emotions to global politics, the discipline of International Relations is still working towards adequate theorisations and investigations of their role. This is particularly noticeable in the fact that there has been little sustained, scholarly examination of the effects of various emotions on the shape and orientation of the US foreign policy reaction to 9/11. This essay seeks to begin to address both of these gaps by examining the role that dynamics of humiliation and counter-humiliation have played in contemporary global politics. In particular, it develops a theoretical understanding of humiliation and then applies this framework to explain how dynamics of humiliation have impacted post 9/11 American global policy. It concludes that we cannot fully understand the sources, and the effects, of post 9/11 contemporary politics (especially US global policy) without taking into account the dynamics of humiliation.

In his book Small World, David Lodge has the globe-trotting Maurice Zapp explain the revolution that had taken place in academic life during the 1970s. Two things had become more portable – information and people – and three things had made this possible ‘jet travel, direct-dialling telephone and the Xerox machine’. As long as you have access to these, Zapp explains, ‘you're plugged into the only university that actually matters – the global campus. A young man in a hurry can see the world by conference-hopping’. That is the theme of Lodge's book.

Relatively early in the attempts to gender the discipline of International Relations (IR), it was argued by some feminist scholars that it was easier to raise feminist concerns in International Political Economy (IPE) than in IR. However, it has subsequently proved very difficult to articulate these concerns within mainstream IPE, as ‘the neo-realist and neo-liberal frameworks, with their common focus on state-centric issues of co-operation and conflict and their positivist and rationalistic methodologies, do not lend themselves to investigating gendered structures of inequality …’. In contrast, more overlap has been discerned between feminist perspectives and methodologies and the less influential ‘globalist’ (also known as critical/transdisciplinary or heterodox) approaches to IPE than with the dominant statist approaches. This article takes this position as its starting point and will focus on the relationship between gendered analyses and critical IPE (as it will be known here). It therefore does not engage with the undoubtedly important question of how far it is possible or desirable to have a gendered analysis that is not linked to feminism, as within both feminist and critical approaches to IPE an emancipatory agenda is entirely legitimate and even an integral part of those approaches.

In this article, we critique the Eurocentric character of security studies as it has developed since World War II. The taken-for-granted historical geographies that underpin security studies systematically misrepresent the role of the global South in security relations and lead to a distorted view of Europe and the West in world politics. Understanding security relations, past and present, requires acknowledging the mutual constitution of European and non-European worlds and their joint role in making history. The politics of Eurocentric security studies, those of the powerful, prevent adequate understanding of the nature or legitimacy of the armed resistance of the weak. Through analysis of the explanatory and political problems Eurocentrism generates, this article lays the groundwork for the development of a non-Eurocentric security studies.

Why do great powers expand? Offensive realist John Mearsheimer claims that states wage an eternal struggle for power, and that those strong enough to seek regional hegemony nearly always do. Mearsheimer’s evidence, however, displays a selection bias. Examining four crises between 1814 and 1840, I show that the balance of power restrained Russia, Prussia and France. Yet all three also exercised self-restraint; Russia, in particular, passed up chances to bid for hegemony in 1815 and to topple Ottoman Turkey in 1829. Defensive realism gives a better account of the Concert of Europe, because it combines structural realism with non-realist theories of state preferences.

This article seeks to contribute to opening up a space of possibility for the state to become something other than a competitive entity in and through a critical (re)problematisation of ‘international competitiveness’ as a governmental problem. In more specific terms, it inquires into how international competitiveness was constituted as such a problem in the first place; how both the meaning of international competitiveness and the terms of the ‘competitiveness problem’ have been transformed by globalisation talk and multilateral efforts at neoliberal global governance; and how the discourse of international competitiveness works to (re)produce the state as a competitive entity on a continuous basis.

My lecture has three main themes:

First, the nature and extent of the turn to history and narrative in the study of international relations.

Second, the contribution of narrative history to IR theory, not as an adjunct or empirical resource, but as a theoretical perspective in its own right. Narrative historians of international relations may not adhere to an explicit theory of international relations but they do practice an implicit philosophy of history, a philosophy as sophisticated and theoretically fertile as any other IR theoretical approach.

The central argument of this article is that Theodore Roosevelt’s worldview was formed at the intersection of geopolitics and cosmopolitan morality. The intellectual roots of his political and foreign policy convictions contributed to a diplomatic style for which the conventional labels of realism or idealism are both inadequate and misleading. Contrary to the stereotypical caricature of Roosevelt as an American architect of realpolitik, or ruthless man on horseback, he held a complex set of beliefs about international relations that transcends familiar academic theorising about either power politics or universal principles of morality. Neither the vision of international anarchy, nor the calculation of state capabilities, do justice to Roosevelt’s sense of the interplay between values and power in foreign policy conduct. Moral principles, Roosevelt claimed, help make clear the inescapable tension between ideals and reality. The moral problem persists, he thought, because foreign policy involves political choices obscured by faulty perception, controlled by national interests, and complicated by multiple purposes and goals. Roosevelt’s more nuanced worldview underscores the need for a revised historiography of international relations, one that builds upon the recognition that realists and idealists were never divided into clearly-identifiable camps either before or after the First World War.

This article begins by deconstructing the dominant discourse on arms control and disarmament, and argues that it works to dismiss disarmament as an idea whilst simultaneously coopting really existing disarmament into a perspective that imagines a world long on dangers and short on peaceful strategies to confront them. In contrast, it is argued, not only is the traditional distinction between arms control and disarmament problematic but, in certain respects, the world is experiencing quite a lot of disarmament. Partly however, this is because both disarmament and broader arms limitation activities are taking place as part of an asymmetrical arms limitation system underpinned, in particular, by the US in its role as a ‘disarmament Empire’. Nevertheless, there are a number of factors immanent in the contemporary international system that suggest a more radical form of emancipatory disarmament might be both realisable and indeed necessary.