Many regard Thucydides as the first genuine International Relations theorist and a writer of continuing, even timeless importance. His history of the Peloponnesian War is certainly a remarkable work that obviously has had an enormous influence on the development of the field. Its influence, however, is largely pernicious. This article explores why.

For several decades after International Relations (IR) became a fully-fledged field of study at British and American universities, it worked with a relatively simple conceptualisation of ‘politics’ as such. In the international context, ‘politics’ involved an ongoing struggle for power among sovereign states, with war the worst-case outcome of this struggle. Power itself was defined essentially in terms of military and economic ‘capabilities’. The fundamental structural condition of international anarchy meant that, in the absence of the kinds of constraints upon conflict that operate within states, only such crude mechanisms as a balance of power, or fragile institutions such as diplomacy or international law, served to impose some degree of order upon the system as a whole. While the Cold War brought an additional, ideological dimension to this struggle for power, in other respects it also simplified it by making it bipolar. Hence although much more was seen to be at stake in this contest than, for example, the nineteenth-century struggle for power in Europe, which gave the Cold War confrontation a zero-sum quality, the nature of the political processes at work was conceptualised in relatively straightforward terms. The ‘high politics’ of the global strategic contest between the superpowers not only transcended the ‘low politics’ of issues such as trade, they subsumed and gave a particular shape to numerous lesser conflicts in the Third World, which were frequently characterised as Cold War ‘proxies’.

The processes, problems and dilemmas generated by globalisation shape new contours of politics. They delineate some of the starkest challenges faced in the contemporary era. The first half of this article maps some of these, focusing particularly on questions of governance. Exploring the changing circumstances of politics illuminates why nationalism and statism provide inadequate political resources to meet the problems posed by a more global age. In the second half of the article, cosmopolitanism is defended as a more relevant and appropriate way of framing politics today. Four cosmopolitan principles are set out and a strategy is elaborated for cosmopolitan institution-building. In the final section of the article, cosmopolitanism is defended against possible charges of utopianism, and it is argued that cosmopolitanism is a political project for the here and now – and just as pertinent as the theory of the modern state was when it was first promulgated in Leviathan.

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the US response have been widely described as heralding a new kind of war. For over a decade previous to 11 September, however, a body of literature had developed arguing that during the 1990s a new kind of warfare had begun to emerge for the West. This article examines whether 11 September and its immediate aftermath – the US campaign in Afghanistan – confirmed these trends, or whether it really did constitute a different kind of war. It does so through a four-part framework: that during the 1990s wars were localised; that the enemy was not a state but a regime or individual leader; that civilian deaths should be minimised; and that wars were fought on behalf of the West by professionals, but that the risks to these forces should also be minimised.

The author argues that we have obligations to our fellow citizens as well as to those outside our community. Since these obligations can conflict and since neither automatically trumps the other, the author provides the general principles needed to resolve the conflict. While rejecting the notion of global citizenship, he argues for a globally oriented national citizenship and spells out its political and institutional implications.

A programme of research on learning in international relations began developing in the 1980s. However, learning research has not realised its potential. This article seeks to stimulate new work on learning by analysing why learning is important in international relations and outlining a research focus that reflects this assessment of learning's significance. The research so far has mostly treated learning as a foreign policy phenomenon, but this fails to capture one of the major reasons for interest in learning. Learning matters in part because of long-standing debates about whether it is possible to make progress in reducing the amount of armed conflict in world politics. For such progress to occur, it is likely that some form of learning would have to take place. However, learning by just a single state will often not be sufficient to change the quality of international outcomes. There thus needs to be research specifically on the possibility of shared learning by two or more states, a research focus this article will label ‘international learning’. A few illustrative examples will demonstrate the feasibility of doing research on shared, cross-national learning.

The recent revival of interest in the English School has emphasised the historical and, hence, impermanent and incomplete character of international societies. Its focus has been upon the circumstances in which specific societies come into being, flourish and fade, with a view to making better sense of what is happening in and to the contemporary international society of states. Recent commentary, however, has noted both the insistence of the first generation of the English School upon the importance of diplomacy and its failure to develop any significant empirical work upon this insight. This case study of Mullah Zaeef and the Taliban embassy in Islamabad in the two years before the Afghan war seeks to rectify that shortcoming by providing an analysis of diplomatic activity in a context where there is little intersubjective understanding of both what an international society is or ought to be and the elements of the diplomatic culture which helps sustain it. It argues that while war was not averted, the episode provides grounds for modest optimism about the possibility of surmounting the obstacles to resolving conflicts of this kind in the future.

The argument advanced here seeks to demonstrate that terms like ‘guerrilla warfare’ and ‘low intensity conflict’ are fundamentally flawed. They do not exist as proper categories of war. Often they constitute inappropriate distinctions that impede intellectual understanding of internal war phenomena, which has in the past had a negative impact upon policymaking. The usage of these terms in strategic studies literature does not facilitate understanding but rather undermines the attempt to comprehend the complexity of warfare as a whole. What we call low intensity conflict can be fully understood – can only be understood – within Clausewitzian parameters, which embrace the entire spectrum of war.

This article calls for a widening of the debate about humanitarian intervention to incorporate insights from constructivism, ‘Welsh School’; Critical Security Studies, and critical approaches to Third World International Relations. After identifying a series of problems with the contemporary debate, which is dominated by the English School, it calls for a broadening of the concept of intervention and suggests a need to rethink the meaning of humanitarianism and terms such as the ‘supreme humanitarian emergency’.

Globalisation is not what it used to be. Earlier debates over how to read the indicators of economic liberalisation and the impact of technological expansion have now been joined by the increasingly pressing need to explore the social, environmental and political aspects of global change. Earlier discussions emphasised a number of dichotomies within the international political economy – open/closed, state/market and so on. These have proved limited in their ability to inform explanations of change under conditions of globalisation. To these we must now add what we might call the ‘governance from above’, ‘resistance from below’ dichotomy as a popular metaphor for understanding order and change in international relations under conditions of globalisation. But this new binary axis is in many ways as unsatisfactory as those that went before. It too can obscure as much as it reveals in terms of understanding the normative possibilities of reforming globalisation. In this article we wish to suggest that there is perhaps a more useful way of thinking about politics and the changing contours of political life in the contemporary global order. This approach blurs the distinction between governance and resistance by emphasising an ethical take on globalisation.

The article investigates the concept of lessons in IR. By means of a constructivist critique of the ‘lessons literature’, the article analyses one of the most important of IR lessons: that of Munich. Examining how the Munich lesson came about, the article shows the praxeological nature of lessons and emphasises the need to study the history of lessons rather than the lessons of history. This approach shows that Munich is the end point of a constitutive history that begins in the failure of the Versailles treaty to create a durable European order following the First World War. The Munich lesson is thus one element of the lesson of Versailles, which is a praxeology that defines how the West is to make peace, and against whom peace must be defended. The lesson of Versailles has been, at least in part, constitutive of the outbreak of the Cold War, and it continues to define the Western conception of what defines peace and security even in the ‘war against terrorism’.

If we assume that the state has no ontological status apart from the many and varied practices that bring it into being, then the state is an artefact of a continual process of reproduction that performatively constitutes its identity. The inscription of boundaries, the articulation of coherence, and the identification of threats to its sense of self can be located in and driven by the official discourses of government. But they can equally be located in and driven by the cultural discourses of the community, and represented in sites as ‘unofficial’ as art, film and literature. While such cultural locations are often taken to be the sites of resistance to practices of government, their oppositional character is neither intrinsic nor guaranteed. Indeed, states have often engaged in or benefited from practices of cultural governance. As Michael Shapiro argues, cultural governance involves support for diverse genres of expression to constitute and legitimise practices of sovereignty, while restricting or preventing those representations that challenge sovereignty. In this sense, cultural governance is a set of historical practices of representation – involving the state but never fully controlled by the state – in which the struggle for the state's identity is located.

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.

This article examines British preferences on European monetary integration. It challenges dominant theories of preference formation, suggesting an alternative explanation focusing on governmental majority. Empirical evidence is presented on both UK economic behaviour and the views of domestic economic interests, as well as government majority. The article also analyses first and second-hand accounts of the main players involved in three cases: the decision not to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1979, the decision to join the ERM in 1990, and the decision to opt out of stage 3 of Economic and Monetary Union.

The ideas debate in mainstream IR/IPE was generated by cumulative dissatisfactions with rational choice theory and with Realist tenets. This article examines the contours of this debate and explains how it reached its limit in the form of ‘conventional constructivism’, a bowdlerised form of critical theory and Gramscian cultural studies. ‘Context’ and Gramsci's ‘common sense’, however, are sufficiently equivalent terms to enable productive conceptual connections across the intradisciplinary divide. The overarching obstacle remains the resistance of mainstream IR to integration with other social sciences.

Global public goods (GPGs) are vital to human welfare and security worldwide. Yet often they suffer from under-provision and free-riding, and are not accessible or beneficial to everyone. They illustrate starkly problems of collective action. This article examines multilateral negotiations in which countries seek agreement on the terms for collaboration in providing GPGs. It argues that common obstacles to an effective agreement concern justice and fairness issues, which arise from the earliest phase when the agenda is set to the final stage of securing implementation and compliance. Drawing on recent negotiation practice, it proposes a framework and a set of strategies for how such issues could be tackled.

In what sense can foreign aid be understood as a moral practice? Is there any empirical substance to this claim? This article reconceptualises a type of foreign aid in which this claim is most plausible – grants by multilateral aid agencies – as a contemporary form of beneficence, a trans-historical phenomenon. Drawing on Aristotelian virtue ethics, it identifies such donations as a moral practice with deep roots in Western history. This analysis substantiates a view of the relations between states that goes beyond the simple notion of reciprocity emphasised by neoliberals. It concludes with the political implications of identifying donor states with moral distinction.

The critique of state-centrism is a crucial aspect of the restructuring of International Relations theory, widely seen as a precondition for the conceptualisation of international transformation. In this article, I argue that the terms on which this critique is framed lead to claims which are both too sweeping in their implications for a transformation to a post-Westphalian system, and not radical enough with respect to the Westphalian period itself. The critique of state-centrism is premised on the assumption that modernity was a territorial order in which states contained ‘their’ societies. But modern social relations always included global dimensions. If the modern social sciences discounted these global aspects of modernity, the way forward for the social sciences, and IR in particular, cannot be in embracing the notion of a contemporary shift from the national to the global, but in a reconsideration of modernity itself. Just as the new globalism is inadequate as a basis for understanding our supposedly postmodern times, so nation-statism was always defective as a basis for understanding modernity. I argue that the notion of a national/global dialectic provides a better basis for understanding the current socio-spatial transformation.

Over the past two decades, monetary crises have played a key role in spurring increased monetary cooperation. From one, materialist, vantage, such crises appear as exogenous shocks, which matter primarily as they alter the material incentives to cooperation. However, such frameworks obscure the importance of debates over the meaning of crises, monetary understandings, and state interests themselves. I therefore offer a constructivist theory of crises, and trace the post-1980s evolution from New Classical interpretations of crises, which stressed domestic policy errors and obscured interests in cooperation, to subsequent New Keynesian interpretations, which have stressed market instabilities and legitimated greater cooperation.

This is a study of legitimacy in a global order, not legitimacy of the global order. It explores the challenging issue of what legitimacy might mean within such a context, and on what basis that order could develop its own principles of legitimacy. Its purpose is to garner further insights into the nature of contemporary global governance, and resistance to it, inasmuch as the latter is widely deemed to be symptomatic of the legitimacy crisis at its heart. A multitude of writers, working from quite different perspectives, is in agreement that it is this lack of legitimacy that threatens the very fabric of the order. Indeed, it is common to regard the emergence of concerns about the declining legitimacy of any system as itself indicative of some kind of failure within it: the concept tends to be associated with the ‘politics of crisis’. Accordingly, we are most likely to ask questions about the legitimacy of a system only when things appear to be going wrong. If this is so, legitimacy provides a vital key to understanding the tensions within the contemporary global order.