The centrality of the national interest to Morgenthau's political realism is well known yet often lamented for its lack of clarity. This article offers a grammatical reading in order to highlight the Platonic and Aristotelian roots of the metaphysical assumptions that inform the national interest in Morgenthau's work and to show that, despite his continuous injunctions against the dangers of utopianism, he fails to escape them himself. Ultimately, his attempts to insulate us against the possibility of totalitarianism leads us back into its violent embrace via a ‘mysticism’ that defines a role for the nation-state as the embodiment of eternal moral truths and values.

Almost twenty years old, the constructivist turn in international relations scholarship has succeeded in demonstrating the effects of norms, both in guiding the interactions of states with one another as well as influencing the domestic political debates that give rise to foreign policy outcomes. More recently, scholars have begun to study empirically the interactions between international and domestic normative systems. The origins of many international norms have been located in national understandings of what constitutes appropriate behaviour in a given issue area. The reverse, however, is also held to be true. Many national-level norms have been adopted after first finding their articulation in international institutions.

The end of the Cold War has seen Western internationalism migrate from the margins to the centre of International Relations theory and practice. As a consequence the modest ambitions of what we might now call ‘classical internationalism’ have come under challenge from more thoroughly cosmopolitan varieties from both the right and left of the mainstream Western political spectrum whose commonalities, moreover, are arguably becoming as prominent as their differences. This article attempts to recover the classical internationalist project and, more specifically, the understanding of statehood that underpins it. Some observations on the distinctions and tensions between varieties of contemporary internationalist and cosmopolitan thinking about international politics are followed by a critique of a pervasive scholarly disinterest in the varieties of Western internationalist states. These two exercises form the backdrop to advocacy of the idea of ‘the Good State’ as a response to dominant forms of contemporary Western cosmopolitanism and their critics.

accepting furet’s claim that events acquire meaning and significance only in the context of narratives, this article argues that a particular type of international relations narrative has emerged with greater distinction after the traumatic experience of september 11: the gothic narrative. in a sense the political rhetoric of president bush marks the latest example of america’s fine tradition in the gothic genre that began with edgar allan poe and nathaniel hawthorne and extends through henry james to stephen king. his discourse of national security, it will be shown, assumes many of the predicates of gothic narratives. the gothic scenes evoked by bush as much as poe involve monsters and ghosts in tenebrous atmospheres that generate fear and anxiety, where terror is a pervasive tormentor of the senses. poe’s narratives, for example, turn on encounters with dark, perverse, seemingly indomitable, forces often entombed in haunted houses. similarly, bush’s post-september 11 narratives play upon fears of terrorists and rogue states who are equally dark, perverse and indomitable forces. in both cases, ineffable and potently violent and cruel forces haunt and terrorise the civilised, human world.

This volume was produced in the context of the crisis of legitimacy that occasioned the 2003 Iraq War. As is well known, a bitter feud broke out in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) over the legality of using force against Iraq. The US government justified going to war in the context of a new doctrine of preventive use of force for self-defence – a doctrine that was soon named after President George W. Bush. The British government anchored its case for war in two previous UNSC resolutions; res. 678 which originally authorised use of force against Iraq in the 1990–91 Gulf War, and res. 687 which suspended res. 678 on a number of conditions including the disarming of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) stockpiles, facilities and programmes. Both the US and British positions were underpinned by intelligence, subsequently proved to be flawed, that Iraq had failed to get rid of its WMD. Opponents of the war disputed this intelligence and, moreover, argued that the Bush Doctrine was plain illegal and ridiculed the British idea of resurrecting twelve-year-old UNSC resolutions.

‘Isolationism’ is a much used and abused term in the contemporary American foreign policy debate. This article seeks to illuminate some of the misunderstandings that surround the use of this term by challenging seven persistent myths about isolationism. In so doing it sheds light on the often unarticulated role that this and other ideas play in the US foreign policy debate. It also seeks to demonstrate the nature of the main ideational cleavages within this debate which the isolationist name-calling obscures, and to show the way in which language is used in the political discourse and how its meaning in this debate changes over time.

Ironically, since 11 September 2001, world politics seems to have taken a turn towards certainty. This article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the sovereign state in an insecure and anarchic international system is sustained and how it might be challenged. It does so through a Derridean analysis of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society. The article examines how International Relations (IR) thinking works; it teases out the implications of our reading of Bull's work and proposes that what we call generalising the international could lead to an alternative analysis of world politics, one that retains an openness to the future and to politics.

un arms embargoes have been increasingly applied to civil wars, yet these embargoes have tended to be either irrelevant or malevolent in their effects. arms embargoes are rarely enforced in a civil war; they undermine the credibility of the un; they are unlikely to change the political positions of civil war participants; they criminalise target societies; and they benefit arms suppliers willing to break the rules. this article argues for the reform of partial arms embargoes, which target select groups in a civil war. it also argues for the restriction in use of impartial embargoes, which apply to all sides in a civil war. enforcing impartial embargoes can actually make the situation worse, by shaping the course of the civil war in unpredictable and immoral ways.

It is no great surprise that in the contemporary world the use of deadly force by a political grouping or nation-state or on behalf of international society should raise troubling questions of legitimacy. The problem appears to be massively overdetermined and the intellectual challenge is to bring some order to a confused and confusing debate; to distinguish between short-term problems and deep-rooted changes in both understandings of legitimacy and patterns in the use of force; and try and identify where there might be scope for narrowing the very deep disagreements that have come to surround this question.

The discipline of International Relations has been slow to assess the ICC and American opposition to it. This article uses the English School approach to assess the impact of the ICC on international society. The Rome Statute's definition of core crimes and its provision of an independent prosecutor help to legally constitute world society which transcends the society of states. The US opposes this development by arguing that international criminal justice should remain within the framework of international society. This is because the society of states accommodates a strong exceptionalist discourse and furthers America's particular interests in a way world society does not.

This article is an attempt to rescue revolution, both as concept and practice, from the triumphalism of the contemporary world. To that end, the article uses three transformations from authoritarian rule – the end of apartheid in South Africa, the collapse of communism in the Czech Republic and the transition from military dictatorship to market democracy in post-Pinochet Chile – in order to test the ways in which these contemporary manifestations of radical change compare and contrast with past examples of revolution. Although these cases share some core similarities with revolutions of the modern era, they also differ from them in five crucial ways: the particular role played by the ‘international’ and the state, the nature of violence, the use of ideology, and the process of negotiation itself. As such, they signify a novel process in world politics, that of negotiated revolution.

What follows is an attempt to acknowledge the complexity and relevance of debates about the relation between legality and legitimacy as it bears on political behaviour. The opening section is intended to orient these international policy debates in wider traditions of political theory, particularly as they bear on the nature of sovereignty and the state. On this basis, the two prominent, recent instances of controversial recourse to war (Kosovo and Iraq) are considered from the perspective of legality and legitimacy, first as a matter of juridical evaluation and then from the perspective of international reputation. The focus throughout reflects a concern with the qualities of American global leadership since September 11th, and how this leadership should or should not be guided by canons of legality.

This article examines the complex relations between a violent non-state actor, the Al Qaeda network, and order in the international system. Al Qaeda poses a challenge to the sovereignty of specific states but it also challenges the international society as a whole. This way, the challenge that Al Qaeda represents is putting the survival of the system under risk. Consequently it requires that the international society will collectively respond to meet the threat. But challenges to both the practical sovereignty of states and to the international society do not have to weaken the system. Instead, such challenges if handled effectively may lead to the strengthening of the society of states: a robust international society is dynamic and responsive to threats. Its members could cooperate to adapt the principles and the institutions on which the system is founded to new circumstances. Through its focus on the preservation qualities of the international society this article also reinforces the significance of the English School to the study of international relations. It raises important questions that could be answered in the framework of the English School.

although the proximate cause of africa’s aids crisis is hiv, the underlining societal causes are much broader and familiar. across the continent, poverty structures not only the contours of the pandemic but also the outcome once an individual is infected with hiv. thus, until poverty is reduced there will be little progress with either reducing transmission of the virus or creating an enhanced capacity to cope with its socioeconomic consequences. it follows that sustained human development is an essential precondition for any effective response to the pandemic in africa.

This article is concerned with the historical trajectory and legacy of British liberal internationalist ideas in the opening three decades of the twentieth century. Despite this body of ideas being a major force behind the establishment of International Relations (IR) in Britain following the Great War, only scant attention is paid to its pre-war configuration. The article attempts to remedy this gap by focusing on internationalist thought prior to and during the war. It is argued that internationalist ideas during the Great War accelerated a drift towards institutional arguments, which are herein distinguished from moral arguments, and that the concept of anarchy played a major role in this shift in internationalist ideas. While the transformation of liberal internationalist ideas during the war constitutes a central backdrop to the early practices of British IR, it should not overshadow the powerful, underlying continuity in ethico-political convictions entertained by internationalists before and after the Great War.

The article discusses the salience of different theories of regional security integration through the prism of the experience of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It tracks the region's progress from a hostile security complex to a nascent security community and asks what strategy for security integration should be employed to continue this positive trend. Although Southern African leaders seem to prefer a collective security strategy à la NATO, the common security approach of the OSCE is more appropriate: most of the region's security threats are domestic and lack of capacity warrants an incremental, decentralised process focused on the weakest SADC members. The current state-centric approach, which tends to conflate the security needs of regimes with those of the population as a whole, will not further the cause of building a security community in Southern Africa.

This article considers the relationship between geopolitical change and the evolving international rules on military force. Its focus is the impact of the United States’ rise to hegemonic status on the rules governing recourse to force (the jus ad bellum) and the conduct of hostilities (the jus in bello, otherwise known as ‘international humanitarian law’). For reasons of space and clarity of analysis, the article does not focus on the different, more traditional IR questions of whether and why the behaviour of the United States might be constrained by these rules.

‘a useful conceptual distinction in understanding the motivation for civil war is that between greed and grievance’. thus wrote paul collier in 1999. drawing on statistical data of civil wars since the mid-sixties, his conclusion at the time was stark and unequivocal: ‘grievance-based explanations of civil war’ were ‘seriously wrong’. in seemingly uncompromising terms, he argued instead that the key to understanding why such wars erupt lay in greed and the quest for loot by rebel actors. it most certainly was not to be found in self-serving ‘narratives of grievance’ or in any claim on the part of insurgents to be fighting for justice. the likelihood of greed-driven wars breaking out was particularly high, collier suggested further, in countries that relied heavily on primary commodity exports, had a surfeit of young, unemployed and poorly educated men, and were experiencing a period of rapid economic decline. this, in short, was the ‘greed thesis’ of contemporary civil wars.

John H. Herz is a significant, but comparatively neglected, figure in the development of International Relations (IR) as a discipline. Although he contributed to the emergence of realism as the dominant approach to international relations in the United States, his thought is characterised by an insight into the fragility of the international order and the state which stands in marked contrast to the emphasis upon durability and persistence evident in recent surveys of a self-avowed American realism.

Understanding the origins of capitalism in terms of feudal crisis, agrarian class structures and economic development in Europe has been an enduring concern of a growing body of scholarship focusing on changes in social property relations. This work has been distinctive in highlighting long-term patterns of social property relations central to shaping late medieval and early modern Europe, variegated patterns of serfdom within feudalism, class conflicts intrinsic to the emergence of agrarian capitalism, and thus capitalist ‘transition’ through different paths of development. Most recently, the implications of a focus on social property relations have been drawn out in its relevance for International Relations (IR), expressly in terms of tracing specificities within the age of absolutism that shaped the expansion of the states-system and its relation to modernity. This article outlines and engages with past and present debates linked to the social property relations approach. It raises several problematics through an engagement with the theorising of political modernity by Antonio Gramsci and on this basis offers pointers towards future lines of enquiry from which further reflection on the conditions of historical and contemporary state formation and restructuring may proceed.