How to theorise religion in International Relations (IR)? Does the concept of post-secularity advance the debate on religion beyond the ‘return of religion’ and the crisis of secular reason? This article argues that the post-secular remains trapped in the logic of secularism. First, a new account is provided of the ‘secularist bias’ that characterises mainstream IR theory: (a) defining religion in either essentialist or epiphenomenal terms; (b) positing a series of ‘antagonistic binary opposites’ such as the secular versus the religious; and (c) de-sacralising and re-sacralising the public square. The article then analyses post-secularity, showing that it subordinates faith under secular reason and sacralises the ‘other’ by elevating difference into the sole transcendental term. Theorists of the post-secular such as Jürgen Habermas or William Connolly also equate secular modernity with metaphysical universalism, which they seek to replace with post-metaphysical pluralism. In contrast, the alternative that this article outlines is an international theory that develops the Christian realism of the English School in the direction of a metaphysical-political realism. Such a realism binds together reason with faith and envisions a ‘corporate’ association of peoples and nations beyond the secularist settlement of Westphalia that is centred on national states and transnational markets. By linking immanent values to transcendent principles, this approach can rethink religion in international affairs and help revive grand theory in IR.

This article presents the operation of al-Qaeda and Hizb ut-Tahrir, two of the most radical Islamist movements, through the lens of the relationship between religion as an organising principle for world politics and the state-based logic. It examines these groups in the context of repeated attempts by religious actors throughout history to render religion the dominant and constitutive element in world politics. Prior to the Peace of Westphalia, religion had a critical role in shaping the political landscape, but Westphalia relegated religion to a secondary position. While it accepted religion's role in the domestic affairs of the units in the international system, the Westphalian order kept religion subordinated to the logic of the state system. But religion maintained its ability to provide an alternative organisation for world politics. While al-Qaeda and Hizb ut-Tahrir are highly unlikely to bring about systemic change, their ascendance should remind scholars that the existing order is not inevitable and that the resurgence of religion in international politics also involves the resurrection of interpretations of religion that compete with and challenge the logic of the state-based system.

This article contributes to the growing subfield of research on religion and International Relations (IR) by discussing ways to take substantial and sui generis aspects of religion into account. It is argued that IR scholars need more critical methodological and conceptual reflection on how to integrate religion in order to navigate between two typical analytical positions: either focusing on the instrumental relevance of religion only or treating religion as an unchangeable meta-category and delinking it from its practitioners or context. The article first discusses why there is a need to be attentive to distinctive aspects of religion and then moves on to scrutinise three IR-relevant pathways to include these aspects of religion in analysis, namely religion as belief community, religion as power, and religion as speech act. It appears that future research along these lines can contribute significantly to the way IR scholars habitually think about key issues such as parameters of behaviour, standards of legitimacy, and the dynamics of conflicts.

What explains major foreign policy changes? Why and when does the state change its foreign policy? Despite the importance of foreign policy change, which can (re)shape the nature of a given state's international relations vis-à-vis other states and international systems, explanations of foreign policy change have received only sporadic attention in foreign policy analysis literature. Against this backdrop, I offer in this article a new framework designed to capture both motivational and processual aspects of foreign policy change. I develop the framework by critically examining and synthesising two recent systematic explorations of foreign policy change: one framework within the tradition of rationalism (broadly defined) – David Welch's Painful Choice: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change (2005) – and the other within constructivism – Jeffrey Legro's Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (2006). For the motivational analysis, I link the role of crisis-defining ideas to threat perception to sharpen prospect theory. I illustrate this reformulated synthesis with an example of Japan's policy shift toward East Asian financial regionalism.

This article examines the subtle and not so subtle shifts in Canadian political culture that have taken place in, through and alongside the so-called ‘return’ of the Canadian warrior. It begins from the contention that while the racialised dimensions of the post 9/11 Canadian security state have been well analysed elsewhere, the gendered dimensions have not been fully explored. This article explores the re-emergence of a sacrificial imaginary in Canadian culture through an examination of seemingly irreconcilable accounts that have emerged of the Canadian security state – one that reads ‘Canada’ through the story of the torture and repatriation of Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, and one that tells the story of ‘Canada at War’ through the warrior's return. It examines both in terms of the tensions and instabilities they reveal in the Western liberal imaginary and in terms of the ways in which they collectively operate to redefine the aesthetic borders of the Canadian political community. The article argues that the sacralisation of violence which has refound this political community has been enabled by a remasculinised aesthetic that delimits the ‘progressive liberalism’ which animated the Canada of Old – ostensibly in order to protect it.

The last twenty years have seen the emergence of an intriguing postsecular discourse which seeks to remedy the limitations of the secular interpretation of politics. The resurgence of religion in the public sphere, the vociferous articulation of fundamentalist worldviews, and the intensification of conflict within and between religious traditions as well as between religious and secularist dispositions are evidence enough of the need to rethink standard secularist formulations. However, this article argues that postsecularity as a concept raises as many questions as it answers. While it rightly draws our attention to the profound discontinuities of our age, post-secularist thought is too preoccupied with certain specificities of contemporary Western discourse and practice to be able to make sense of the wider challenge-response dynamic that is integral to the current period of transition. This article examines the lacunae of post-secularity and avenues for further development of its insights by reference to four closely interlinked features of a rapidly transforming world order: (a) the transnational character of much religious discourse and practice; (b) the decline of the West and the corresponding shift in the economic and geopolitical centre of gravity; (c) the complex relationship between the resurgence of religion and the wider phenomenon of identity politics; and (d) the emerging dialectic between conflictual and dialogical approaches to cultural and geopolitical pluralism.

This article further conceptualises and empirically tests the concept of ontological security. This concept, which refers to an actor's need to have a secure identity, has been used in International Relations (IR) mainly to study situations in which states face a threat to one of their identities. However, my focus here is on situations in which states are facing threats to a number of identities they hold, situations that result in what I term ontological dissonance. In such cases, not only are various distinct identities threatened, but the solutions to ease these threats are contradictory, forcing the state to choose between different cherished values. I contend that in such situations avoidance can become an attractive option for states in dealing with the difficulties arising from this dilemma. This theoretical framework is used to explain Israel's unilateral steps toward the Palestinians in recent years. I argue that the terror attacks of the Second Intifada (2000–2005) represented more than a physical security threat to Israel. The attacks and Israel's initial response to them aggravated threats to a number of Israel's identities and, more importantly, emphasised existing and potential future clashes among these identities. As a result, Israeli policy makers advanced unilateral steps to reduce these threats and to ease the accompanying ontological dissonance. These unilateral measures can thus be understood as measures of avoidance, and as such they complicated further cooperation between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The Eisenhower administration's tough containment policy toward China has been conventionally viewed as an unsensible policy resulting from domestic political pressures or ideology. Refuting the conventional explanations, this article argues that during the early Cold War, the US superiority in bipolarity drove China to balance the United States in Asia. Dulles, the architect of the China policy, made accurate assessments of the power structure in Asia and the inevitable enmity with China. Driven by structural imperative, he decided to pursue containment to maintain the favourable balance of power in Asia by retarding the relative power growth of China allied with the Soviet Union and secondarily by accelerating their conflict through harder pressure on a weaker China. This case long considered as a prime anomaly to balance of power theory actually demonstrates how powerfully distributions of power shape alliance behaviours of states in the anarchic international system.

‘Politics has become a contest of competitive credibility’, argued Nye in Soft Power. Indeed, being perceived as honest and reliable is a necessary condition for obtaining and holding the attention of target audiences, as well as for effective persuasion, which is the objective of strategic communication. This task has become all the more difficult with the explosion of information sources and the discreditation efforts of opponents, but it is an essential element in the conduct of public diplomacy. How, then, do states and other international actors go about establishing their credibility while undermining that of opponents? This article employs rhetorical theory, impression management theory, and account theory to situate contests of credibility within the broader context of the accountability of social conduct. The theoretical part discusses the rhetorical strategies that actors use to credit their accounts and discredit those of their rivals. The empirical part addresses the debate between Israel and human rights groups over the Qana bombing incident of July 2006. The analysis of the blame imposition strategies used by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the accounts offered by Israel, indicates the range and variability of credibility talk and the rules for crediting accounts that underlie it.

This article examines the tension between British and Egyptian counterterrorism discourses and Western tourism industry discourses. I analyse how guidebooks like the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet attract tourists by representing Egypt as an appealing tourist destination in a way that accounts for its positioning, in counterterrorism discourses, as a location and source of terrorism. They do so by producing ‘risk’ in a very specific way. Guidebook representations construct one extreme of Egyptian society as ‘bad’ Muslims who pose an essential threat to Western tourists and their inherently progressive liberal democratic values. Having defined risk in this way, guidebooks justify the production of ‘states of exception’ and ‘exceptional states’ that exclude ‘bad’ Muslims and protect Western tourists. These strategies function together to construct Egypt as non-threatening and appealing to tourists. I argue that guidebooks not only account for terrorism but represent Egypt in a way that largely reinforces British and Egyptian ‘war on terror’ strategies. These strategies similarly protect subjects and spaces that uphold Western liberal democratic values. This article highlights the constitutive role of tourism in international politics and simultaneously helps us better understand the complex and mundane means by which the current Western liberal order is (re)produced.

The language of the ‘postsecular’ acknowledges the enduring presence of faith in politics, repudiating secularisation theses claiming diminution or privatisation of religion in social and political life. In cognitive and experiential worlds, those presumably unfettered by these conceptions (for example, the Islamic Cultural Zones or ICZs), the postsecular presents a different order of challenge and possibility. The term ICZs refers to Muslim majority areas informed by transnational subjectivities loosely connecting varied Islamic societies around symbolic commonality, memory, and historical experience. The term stresses the plurality of Islamic cultural experience, albeit distinguished by recognisable semiotic markers, without essentialising Islamic identity. This article questions the hegemonic view pervasive in both secular and postsecular theorising of the fiction of immutability of faith in the ICZs and recognises its rupture and displacement under conditions of late modernity. The ontological dislocation in the character of religion itself under conditions of late modernity opens up the possibility to account for the assumed resistance of Islam to secular modernity, but also to explain Islam's imbrications in politics read under the sign of Political Islam. Paradoxically, under the condition of late modernity, a more homogenised Islam appears to crystallise in the ICZs at odds with an ‘open’ Islam.

Although the Westphalian model takes many forms the association of Westphalian and sovereign equality is a prominent one. This article argues firstly that sovereign equality was not present as a normative principle at Westphalia. It argues further that while arguments for sovereign equality were present in the eighteenth century they did not rely on, or even suggest, a Westphalian provenance. It was, for good reasons, not until the late nineteenth century that the linkages of Westphalia and sovereign equality became commonplace, and even then sovereign equality and its linkage with Westphalia were disputed. It was not until after the Second World War, notably through the influential work of Leo Gross that the linkage of Westphalia and sovereign equality became not only widely accepted, but almost undisputed until quite recently. The article concludes by suggesting that not only did Gross bequeath a dubious historiography but that this historiography is an impediment to contemporary International Relations.

This article examines the challenges and contradictions between some of the leading conceptions of security within the field of International Relations (IR), from those stating that the concept can only be employed by the state with regard to immediate, existential threats, to those that see security as the foundation of social life or as a human good. This article continues a discussion that has taken place in the Review of International Studies regarding the development of positive security, examining the potential use of the terms ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ security to bring clarity to these diverging security perspectives and to argue for a multi-actor security approach. It is argued that positive security perspectives, which rely on non-violent measures, ensure an emphasis upon context, values, and security practices that build trust, and by use of a multi-actor security model, shows the dynamics between state and non-state actors in the creation of security.

This article makes the case for rethinking the relation between poststructuralism and postcolonialism, by building on the claims advanced by Robert Young, Azzedine Haddour and Pal Ahluwalia that the history of deconstruction coincides with the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria, and with the violent anti-colonial struggle that ensued. I choose to examine narratives of theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Cixous because not only they provide the link between colonial violence, the poststructuralist project that ensued, and postcolonialism, but also because the problems I identify with their projects are replicated by much poststructuralist work in International Relations (IR). I signal that one of the most significant consequences of conducting poststructuralist research without attention to postcolonial horizons lies in the idealisation of the marginalised, the oppressed or the native without attending to the complexity of her position, voice or agency. Bringing these theories together aims to highlight the need for a dialogue, within IR, between poststructuralism's desire to disrupt the disciplinarity of the field, and postcolonialism's potential to transcend the self-referential frame of IR by introducing perspectives, (hi)stories, and voices from elsewhere.

Most people hold that in its quest for natural resources abroad, China shields rogue states with egregious human-rights record from international opprobrium and sanctions. Its political support for Sudan is a case in point. By examining Chinese perspectives on humanitarian intervention and national sovereignty, this article first argues that Beijing's interests are so multiple and complex that concern about the implications of humanitarian intervention for national integration is more crucial than oil in determining its policy towards Sudan. Paradoxically it asserts that China, a non-democratic country, is more influential than liberal democratic states in making the rules of humanitarian intervention in Darfur because of a lack of political will in the West. In addition, there are early signs that China intends to utilise its newfound power to remake international rules regarding territorial sovereignty. Further development is likely to be shaped by its interactions with the United States.

Securitisations permit the breaking of rules: but which rules? This article argues that any given security situation could be handled by a variety of different ‘rule breaking’ procedures, and that securitisations themselves, whilst permitting rule breaking in general, do not necessarily specify in advance which rules in particular have to be broken. This begs the question: how do specific threats result in specific rule breaking measures? This article explores this question through reference to ‘control orders’, an unusual legal procedure developed in the UK during the course of the war on terrorism. Once applied to an individual, a control order gives the government a meticulous control over every aspect of their life, up to and including deciding on which educational qualifications they can take. Despite this control, individuals under the regime remain technically ‘free’: and have frequently used this freedom to abscond from the police who are supposed to be watching them. How did a security policy which controls a suspect's educational future, but not their physical movements, develop? This article aims to answer this question, and in so doing present a reevaluation of the mechanisms through which the effects of securitisation manifest themselves.

Most of our knowledge of the Peloponnesian War comes from the text of Thucydides' History, yet IR scholars are strangely credulous when evaluating Thucydides' pronouncements. I explore what Thucydides does not tell us, and suggest that his text obscures important information regarding the outbreak of the war. Thucydides has a secular bias which leads him to discount the Spartan religious self-narrative, but by attending to this schema, in which Sparta sees itself in the role of the pious defender of moderation pitted against the corrupt Athenians, we gain a richer understanding of the chain of events that led to war. Contemporary scholars have too readily adopted Thucydides' perspective on this issue, but by assessing Thucydides' data using insights drawn from contemporary cognitive theories of narrative and image we see that misperceptions based in the conflicting Athenian and Spartan narratives played an important role in the escalation of the crisis.

This article considers a conceptual framework for peacekeeping cooperation between the United Nations and regional organisations. It articulates the ‘subcontracting’ and ‘partnering’ modes of global-regional peacekeeping cooperation, and examines how they have been practiced through efforts to form institutional partnerships with the African Union (AU) and the European Union (EU). The article argues that there is incremental progress in institutionalising global-regional cooperation in peacekeeping, and yet managing such cooperation in the future requires a clearer understanding of the role of the UN in the globalisation of peacekeeping.

At the heart of the notion of the postsecular is an implied and largely under-theorised idea of resistance against the pathologies of modern secular formations. This is most notably exemplified by Jürgen Habermas's highly influential approach which argues that these pathologies can be resisted through a cooperative cognitive effort of secular and religious consciousnesses. This article contends that this understanding overlooks more embodied forms of resistance to the effect that it curtails our capacity to conceptualise postsecular resistance in international relations. Following a contextualisation of Habermas's approach in the broader Kantian tradition to which it belongs, the article develops a contending Foucauldian reading of the body as a locus of resistance and uses this framework to analyse some of the events leading to the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The focus is on the publication of images and videos of police abuses by Egyptian bloggers and independent media as a practice of resistance to the widespread and systematic use of torture. The emotional response to these images, it will be argued, contributed to unite Egyptians despite longstanding fractures, most notably that between secularists and Islamists, thus turning the body from an ‘inscribed surface of events’ into a postsecular locus of resistance. The article concludes by highlighting the main implications of this analysis for future research agendas on the postsecular in international relations.

The empirical and theoretical study of the effect of foreign intervention in the electoral processes of states is exceedingly weak. Using insights from the nationalism literature, this article provides a theoretical argument on domestic reactions to foreign interference in a state's internal politics. It then tests the predictions generated by the argument using mass survey data in Ukraine. The article analyses the Ukrainian people's reaction to Western and Russian intervention in the 2004 presidential elections – the Orange Revolution. We find that efforts by Western governments, international organisations, and non-governmental organisations to shape Ukraine's electoral landscape appear to be unwelcome to average Ukrainians while electoral interference by a non-democratic state, Russia, is seen as less alienating. Our theoretical framework accounts for these potentially surprising results.