The last thirty years has seen the growth – or, as I should prefer to say, rebirth – of a field of inquiry that for much of the twentieth century was quiescent. That field would now routinely be called international political theory, in part to distinguish it from both political theory in general and International Relations (IR) theory in general, though of course, there are overlaps with both. Roughly speaking that field consists in ethical, historical and philosophical reflection on the manner and matter of international politics. There is a rich body of such inquiries in intellectual history (and not just in Europe) but for a variety of historical and intellectual reasons such inquiries had fallen out of fashion by the late nineteenth century. This situation was reinforced by the simultaneous evolution of the individual disciplines of political science and IR, and in particular by the rise of methodological and epistemological claims in both largely inimical to those earlier sorts of inquiry. Thus, as the story is widely told, ‘political theory’ and ‘IR’, as academic inquiries, followed largely independent paths for most of the twentieth century.

The twenty first century has opened, as so many centuries before it, with the drum roll of war depressingly audible. The optimism of the early 1990s that world politics was being remade, and that the threat of serious conflict was receding, vanished along with the twin towers that were so much a symbol of that world, one heart-breakingly beautiful September morning in 2001. And with the return of force and war to the forefront of international politics, so come the inevitable questions; when, under what circumstances, in what manner and with what restraint, may we (whoever the we might be) use force to secure our interests, protect our families, defend our communities or our values?

the rise of china became a popular subject in china comparatively recently, gaining prominence only in the last decade. for those in china who were used to understanding modern chinese history as a history of victimisation at the hands of imperialism, recognising such a return to the world stage was an uneasy shift. in the context of international concerns that china’s rise poses a threat to world peace or a contribution to the clash of civilisations, chinese narrators initially refused to portray a ‘rising china’ because this could easily lead to china becoming the target of a us-organised containment policy in the post-cold war era. shortly before the chinese communist party (ccp) outlined new policy directions at its fifteenth congress in 1997, leaders in beijing began to think about a way of describing china’s rise as unthreatening. yet this was a reluctant change because beijing was willing to acknowledge china’s rise only indirectly. what came out of the congress was the recognition of the necessity that beijing should frame its foreign policy to emphasise its relations with the other great powers more than those with the third world. accordingly, they decided that beijing should develop a distinctive strategy specifically to deal with the other great powers.

Mill's political and his international theory rest on a philosophy of history drawn in turn from the experience of nineteenth century imperialism. And yet, this philosophy of history remains unexamined in Political Theory and International Relations (IR) alike, largely because of the peculiar division of labour between the two disciplines. In this article I will argue that this omission results not just in a misconception of those aspects of Mill's thought with which Political Theory and IR directly engage; in addition, and more seriously, it has led in both disciplines to an unreflected perpetuation of Mill's justification of imperialism.

It is impossible not to encounter Habermas as an important interlocutor in the fields of critical theory, feminist theory and international relations theory across which I work. He is the outstanding critical theorist of his generation, in the tradition of critique which was carried through the Frankfurt School and traces itself back to Kant, Hegel and Marx. And for feminists and international relations theorists, he represents one of the directions in which feminist theory or post-positivist IR could develop, deepening its epistemological and sociological understanding without sacrificing the possibility of the rationally grounded critique of contemporary world politics. This article is the beginning of an attempt to trace through layers of difficulty encountered in using Habermas as a normative resource for a particular version of feminist international theory, which understands feminism to be a transnational, cosmopolitan (but not univocal) project, neither authorised nor legitimised by any foundational ground or teleological end. I will argue that although Habermas's notion of discourse ethics seems initially promising as a way forward for non-foundational feminist theory, in the end any ‘dialogue’ on Habermasian terms turns out to be one-sided and exclusive.

first, ‘peaceful rise’ was the theme of a keynote speech to a regional policy forum created by the chinese government, aptly named the bo’ao forum for asia, then it was an emphatic point made by china’s premier wen jiabao in a speech at harvard university, and still later it was a key feature in china’s president hu jintao’s talk at a gathering to mark the 110th anniversary of mao zedong’s birth. the phrase ‘peaceful rise’ (heping jueqi) has caught the imagination both inside china and abroad partly because all three events took place within a short two-month period beginning at the end of 2003. the chinese leadership seems to have a well-coordinated campaign to officially present the notion to the country and the world.

On the face of it, this might seem a somewhat frivolous, not to say over-familiar, title for an essay on the influence of Charles Beitz's Political Theory and International Relations (hereafter, PTIR); Beitz, however, will recognise the implicit comparison between his work and John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, and will accordingly, I hope, forgive the familiarity. But, accepting that this is a title that conveys respect, it might still be argued to be inappropriate on the rather different grounds that it substantially overstates the influence of PTIR. Can it really be the case that this relatively short (under 200 pages) volume with an over-ambitious title ‘changed the subject’ in the way that A Theory of Justice certainly did a few years earlier? Obviously the subject in question – international political theory – is rather more limited than the whole world of at least Anglo-American political theory that was changed by Rawls's work, but such a claim can, I think, be defended.

Jürgen Habermas' thinking gained influence within the German International Relations (IR) community in the early 1990s. At the core of the so-called ‘ZIB-debate’ was the controversy whether rationalist theory can explain interstate cooperation. Constructivists accused rationalists of ignoring communication, language and reason, thereby leaving a logical gap in their analyses of interstate cooperation. This gap exists between the plausible motivation for states to cooperate and their actual achievement of cooperation. Rationalist approaches assume that actors face problematic, interdependent situations, in which they can only optimise their preferences by collaboration. Such situations involve a plausible motivation for actors to cooperate but they are not a sufficient condition to ensure that cooperation will actually happen. What is missing is a theoretical link between a general motivation to cooperate and its realisation, given that rationalist theory, following realism, regularly assumes a dangerous anarchical environment with its daunting security dilemma. These circumstances make cooperation risky and should normally work as a show-stopper for nation-states to collaborate.

Why have President Bush and his administration consistently, and publicly, stated their commitment to fully comply with the laws of war protecting civilians while, simultaneously, refusing to fully comply with the laws of war protecting prisoners of war? How do we understand President Bush and his administration’s unquestioning acceptance of the protection of civilians, but the rejection of the same for prisoners of war? Are the strategic and normative costs of each so dissimilar as to justify this difference? Considering the recent exposé of abuses and torture of prisoners of war held in both Iraq and Cuba, the answers to these questions are not merely academic.

Among political philosophers, discussion of Charles Beitz's very important book Political Theory and International Relations has focused mainly on Part Three, in which Beitz addresses the issue of global distributive justice, and argues in favour of applying Rawls's difference principle globally: an ideally just world would be one in which the share of income and other primary goods going to the least advantaged group of persons would be maximised, no matter which society those persons belonged to. There has been much debate about whether relationships across the world are cooperative in the sense that this principle is thought to presuppose, how one might construct an international index of advantage and disadvantage, and so forth. Beitz himself has contributed to this debate, and it remains central to contemporary work on global justice.

The works of Jürgen Habermas have amounted to an inspiration to many within IR. His writings on communicative rationality and communicative action are widely regarded as a useful counterpoint to the emphasis on instrumental rationality and strategic action. Also, Habermas has greatly influenced the development of Critical International Theory. However, as other contributions in this Forum demonstrate, IR scholars have at times found it difficult to apply Habermas to service their specific social scientific inquiries. In particular, it has been difficult to unequivocally locate communicative action in diplomatic exchanges or international negotiations. It is partly for this reason that the contributions of the so-called ‘Third Generation’ of Frankfurt School scholars have attracted increasing interest. Axel Honneth's attempts to reconstruct insights in relation to the struggle for recognition into a social theory (with critical intent) have to date been of particular importance in this context. Indeed, given the perceived difficulties in ‘applying’ Habermas, there appears to be an emerging trend to end the honeymoon with Habermas in favour of a reorientation toward Honneth.

The American-led Iraq war that began in 2003 has generated intense discussion about when it is legitimate to use force and what force can accomplish. Often this debate is portrayed as a breakdown in consensus, with the US charting a new unilateralist course that undermines existing multilateral understandings of how force should be used. Often, too, the debate is portrayed as a transatlantic one in which Europeans (notably France, supported by Germany) are leading the multilateralist defence against growing US unilateralism.

The duties, if any, of European states to participate in multilateral operations in Africa are currently a matter of some controversy. What are the obligations of European states with regard to the maintenance of international peace and security in Africa? How far is it legitimate for them to avoid the contribution of troops to UN peacekeeping operations in Africa? Does the reluctance of European and other developed states to participate in UN peacekeeping operations in Africa have significant legal consequences? This article will consider these issues in three main sections. The first provides an overview of UN peacekeeping in recent years at a time when there has been a substantial surge in demand for peacekeeping troops. It discusses the problems that the UN has faced in securing troops from developed member states, particularly for operations in Africa. The second section describes the pattern which has emerged in recent practice with regard to peacekeeping and enforcement action in Africa. Although developed states have generally been reluctant to provide troops for UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, they have undertaken Chapter VII operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire as ‘coalitions of the willing’. They have also provided assistance to certain African governments threatened with violent overthrow, such as the governments of Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire. They have turned to regional and sub-regional organisations to take the lead in certain conflicts: they have provided financial assistance, logistical support and military training for such organisations.

Charles Beitz's Political Theory and International Relations has had an enormous impact on analyses of the ethical issues raised at the global level. It was the first systematic discussion of such ethical issues in the last 50 years if not more. It remains a landmark for a number of different reasons. First, it stands out for the sophistication of its philosophical argument and the meticulous argumentation throughout. The latter is deployed not simply to provide powerful critiques of other perspectives (such as realism and the morality of states). It also puts forward and defends with considerable ingenuity a cosmopolitan theory of distributive justice. A second striking and impressive feature of the book is that it successfully integrates philosophical argument with a deep grasp of the nature of world politics and the empirical and theoretical literatures on salient aspects of world politics.

Critical theory in the Frankfurt School mould has made various inroads into IR theorising, and provided many a stimulus to attempts at redressing the ‘positivist’ imbalance in the discipline. Many of the conceptual offerings of the Frankfurt School perspective have received critical attention in IR theory debates, and while these are still ongoing, the purpose of this discussion is not to attempt to contribute by furthering either methodological interests, or politico-philosophical inquiry. Instead, I focus on the near omission of the social-theoretic aspect of the work especially of Juergen Habermas. I argue that a more in-depth exploration of critical social theory has considerable potential in the context of the ‘social turn’ in IR theory. The lack of attention to this potential is arguably due in part to the importance of Habermas' contribution to cosmopolitan normative theory, and the status held by the cosmopolitan-communitarian debate as a key site of critical IR debate for many years throughout the 1990s. The productivity of the Habermasian conception of the discourse theory of morality within this set of concerns has been obvious, and continues.

An action is legitimate if the pertinent community deems it so. Most would agree that Russia’s conduct in the 1990s in Georgia was illegitimate. Military intervention in another state, unless the other state is preparing an imminent attack on one’s own territory, or is engaged in the systematic abuse of one’s own citizens, is a violation of the international norm of sovereignty, at a minimum. Some have argued that European politics has gone beyond this ‘territorial integrity norm’ to something more expansive, to a consensual renunciation of any and all territorial claims on other states. This was first codified in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975.

The most significant intellectual contribution of Charles Beitz's book, Political Theory and International Relations, was captured by his use of the word ‘and’ in the book's title to connect the previously estranged fields of political theory and international relations (IR). His book constituted a bold challenge to a prevailing realist view in the field of IR, that was sceptical ‘about the status of moral principles’ in a Hobbesian state-eat-state world. Beitz's work also challenged the traditional orientation of contemporary political theory, that took for granted the bounded rather than ‘universal community’ as the locus of inquiry about issues of justice and political morality. The marriage of political theory and IR has produced in the past twenty-five years a rich and diverse body of international political theory that engages, in a direct and rigorous fashion, previously obscured or marginalised normative dimensions of international issues ranging from war and intervention to global poverty and economic inequality.

After 11 September 2001, the Administration of George W. Bush dismissed any criminal-justice model, put forth by various voices at home and abroad, for understanding and combating terrorism. This was ‘war’, the President insisted on 17 September, as he did repeatedly – directly, implicitly, and by analogy – in his 20 September address to Congress and on many later occasions, with American war in Afghanistan and later Iraq making that claim true. The criminal-justice model persisted, however, not least in Bush’s more colourful rhetoric. As he commented on the 17th regarding Osama bin Laden, ‘There’s an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, ‘‘Wanted: Dead or Alive” ’. On the 20th came his odd analogy, ‘Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime’. On 11 October, drawing on crime-fighters’ lingo, he announced a ‘Most Wanted Terrorist list’ as part of his effort to ‘round up’ – both cowboy and cop words – ‘the evildoers’. In word and action, he kept blurring the neat line between war and crime he asserted.

I am grateful to all five contributors to this Forum for the generosity of their comments about Political Theory and International Relations and their critical interest in the issues taken up in the book. It is a good thing that these issues have attracted the attention of so many talented scholars. This would certainly have occurred even if PTIR had never been written, but I am delighted that the book seems to have been a constructive provocation.