Dieter Senghaas, Klänge des Friedens: Ein Hörbericht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 188.

Ekkehart Krippendorff, Die Kunst, nicht regiert zu werden: Ethische Politik von Sokrates bis Mozart (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 467.

This article argues that the study of international political economy (IPE) in general, and the analysis of modern finance in particular, have much to gain from the insights articulated in poststructuralist international relations. In contrast to recent critiques of poststructuralism, this article argues that the study of international finance necessitates a consideration of the discursive practices which bring capitalist concepts such as money, profit and capital into being. Financial practices do not exist prior to, or independently from, ideas and beliefs about them. Thus, IPE should recognise the production of economic and financial knowledge as an important site where power is exercised.

The concept of societal security as developed by the Copenhagen school has three underlying weaknesses: a tendency to reify societies as independent social agents, a use of too vague a definition of ‘identity’, and a failure to demonstrate sufficiently that social security matters to individuals. This article shows that applying social identity theory to the societal security concept helps remedy these weaknesses and closes the theoretical gaps that the Copenhagen school has left open. It enables us to treat ‘society’ as an independent variable without reifying it as an independent agent. It also suggests a much sharper definition of identity, and a rationale for the Copenhagen school's claim that individuals have a psychological need to achieve societal security by protecting their group boundaries. Social identity theory thus supports the societal security concept in its central assumptions while giving it stronger theoretical foundations and greater analytical clout.

The notion of democracy has been invoked in the past decade by both opponents and proponents of global governance. Many in the so-called ‘anti-globalisation’ movement have underlined the inherently unaccountable, opaque and unrepresentative nature of global governance, whilst those more sympathetic to the pluralising dynamics of the phenomenon have emphasised the potentially democratic aspects of this new form of rule, especially with reference to the incorporation of a putative ‘global civil society’ into the structures of global governance and the accompanying diversification of sources of international political authority. Yet both critics and advocates also tend to agree that there are two basic challenges to (on some accounts, causes of) global governance: the global capitalist market and the concomitant system of sovereign states. The disjunctures generated by the operation of these two structures of power, so both liberal defenders of global governance and their radical, anti-capitalist contenders argue, have created the conditions for decentralised, multilateral mechanisms of socioeconomic and political management of world affairs, that is, ‘global governance’. It therefore seems that the question on both sides of this divide, is not so much whether to do away with transnational, multilateral forms of political authority altogether (although that is certainly one aim in some quarters of the anti-globalisation movement) but rather, how to render these democratic, that is, how to democratise global governance.

In a recent article in the Review of International Studies, Kai Alderson subjected the concept of state socialisation to considerable scrutiny. This kind of conceptual clarification is fundamental to both theory building and empirical work in the study of international relations. Alderson should be commended for his work on the concept, since there are only a handful of previous studies that explicitly explore state socialisation in any detail. However, his attempt to produce a ‘consensus definition’ of the concept to bring clarity to an emerging research programme has left me with more questions than answers. This essay is designed to raise questions about Alderson's conceptualisation of state socialisation based on a comparison with the literature on socialisation from other disciplines. The overarching goal is to stimulate healthy debate about a concept that should be central to our understanding of the social aspects of international politics.

This article highlights two of the most influential normative perspectives upon the ethical character of global civil society in Anglo-American political thought. These are considered under the headings of liberal cosmopolitanism and subalternist radicalism. Within international political theory, the main alternative to cosmopolitan arguments is usually regarded as provided by moral theories that invoke the continuing significance of national boundaries in relation to political community. The rivalry between cosmopolitan convictions and nationalist ethics is deeply entrenched within Anglo-American thinking. As a result, international political theory seems to throw up a fundamentally antinomian choice: either we possess overriding duties and obligations to others, irrespective of our nationhood; or the borders of a settled nation-state substantially define our sense of political identity and justify a marked ethical partiality towards our fellow nationals. Such is the hold of this antinomy upon the Western political imagination, it seems, that alternative conceptions of the relationship between territory, community and ethicality have been neglected or dismissed as unduly heterodox. Given the continuing purchase of this dualistic approach on international political ethics, the recovery and normative evaluation of various alternatives is a task of some intellectual importance.

The constructivism-inspired study on hegemony focuses on the dominant state's ability to shape the beliefs and values of ruling elites in secondary states as a basis of hegemony while paying less attention to the attitude of the mass public in secondary states toward hegemony and the effects of its ‘socialisation’ with hegemonic ideas. This article provides a conceptual framework for studying the relations between hegemony and the mass-public of secondary states and then subjecting it to a preliminary test against postwar Japan's cooperation with the United States on China policy.

The main argument of this article is that hegemony may be strengthened and maintained if the mass public of secondary states is socialised with hegemonic conceptions of world order, state identities and underlying ideologies, and acquires an independent constraint on hegemony. The mass public's socialisation with hegemonic ideas, which amounts to a cultural transformation in secondary states, may take place as a result of propagation by the dominant state and secondary state elites, or as a result of important international and domestic events caused by the hegemon, and then come to feed back on the political structures and processes of secondary states in ways conducive to the maintenance of hegemony. When hegemonic ideas are firmly embedded in the security culture of secondary states, ruling elites in those states may cooperate with the hegemon because they themselves genuinely embrace hegemonic ideas. More importantly, some ruling elites may cooperate with the hegemon out of political expediency as the hegemon-induced cultural transformation may change political structures and processes in such ways as to link the ruling elites' political legitimacy closely with secondary states' continued support for hegemony.

Colin Gray's ‘Clausewitz Rules, OK’ was the one contribution to the Interregnum special issue of this Review that engaged the problem of modern war in general. Issues of war and peace were represented only patchily in a volume aiming to reflect on the ‘post-Cold War’ decade, but put together before ‘9/11’ brought it to an abrupt end. The Balkans didn't play a large part in William Wallace's account of Europe; unstable Asian great-power rivalries and local wars, which could make Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter's ‘Pacific Century’ anything but pacific were barely noted; while Caroline Thomas wrote about the Third World without mentioning Africa's wars. The Middle East, Rwanda and genocide were not covered. Bruce Cumings' wise reflections on the military bases of American liberalism, a brief discussion of the ‘new interventionism’ by Geoffrey Hawthorn, and dutiful mentions of Kosovo across the chapters, hardly compensated for these omissions.

Realism remains the dominant approach in America to international relations. Modern American realism has developed into a neorealist strand focused on the structure and outcomes of the international system, and a neoclassical strand concerned with the behaviour of individual states. Within each of these are hard-core offensive realists who see a world full of opportunities for aggressive ‘power maximisers’, and defensive realists who see more possibilities for cautious cooperation between ‘security seekers’. At its heart, however, realism remains a world-view where states and power rule. Realism's great claim to fame is that it explains those aspects of world politics that matter most to policymakers. However, three developments in this past decade give reason to question the relevance of the realist world-view.

This special section breaks an important silence in British international relations journals toward Noam Chomsky's political writings. Behind this silence lies the bigger matter of the silence in these journals about the issues contained in Chomsky's work. These issues include the use and sponsorship by the United States of terrorism on a massive scale for many years; the failure of most Western academics to take any interest in those US actions; and the dereliction by Western academics of their duty to help those who are trying to stop the United States from acting in this way. Once we started to read Chomsky's work, we concluded that there was a great deal to be learned from it. However, when we began to draw on it, we came up against widespread hostility towards his work combined with both ignorance and misrepresentation of precisely what he writes. In order to explore this undue marginalisation, we solicited a number of articles, including one from Chomsky, which resulted in this collection.

Can cultural analysis tell us anything significant about strategic outcomes? This question has provided the focus for strategic culture research since it was first introduced as a concept by Jack Snyder in 1977. Nearly 25 years on, we appear no closer to establishing a consensus on what strategic culture is and what it can tell us. In terms of theory and methodology, the concept of strategic culture remains underexplored. As Colin Gray notes, ‘any scholarly work on strategic culture is granted importance because of its rarity’. Hence the recent debate in RIS between Gray and Alastair Iain Johnston should be seen as significant.

Noam Chomsky argues that, while the US news media are adversarial towards the US government on foreign policy, institutional filters operate to ensure that the criticisms made generally stay within narrow bounds set by the US political elite. Chomsky's research in this area is largely ignored even by academics who agree with this conclusion. The institutional tendency to filter out anti-elite perspectives applies not only to the news media but also to academia. Consequently, Chomsky's work is marginalised due to its emphasis on corporate power, principled opposition to US foreign policy and the role of academia in buttressing elite power.

The editors of the Review of International Studies have posed a timely challenge to what they term American realism. In broad terms, their editorial makes two points: first, realism has lost its relevance to current international policy; and second, realism does a poor job of explaining the behaviour of the world's major powers. In this brief essay I argue that both of these points are greatly overstated, if not simply wrong. At the same time, I accept that realism provides less leverage in addressing the full spectrum of issues facing the major powers in the post-Soviet and now the post-9/11 world than it did during the Cold War. However, this is neither surprising nor a serious problem, because scholars who use a realist lens to understand international politics can, and have, without inconsistency or contradiction also employed other theories to understand issues that fall outside realism's central focus.

‘Given the success of Naomi Klein with her book No Logo and Noreena Hertz's The Silent Takeover, can we infer from this that feminists are finding themselves in the limelight of the anti-globalisation movement?’ With this question a reporter of the Dutch magazine Op Gelijke Voet approached me about two years ago.

This article analyses the extent to which Israeli-Palestinian water relations were affected and transformed by the Oslo process. Focusing in turn on the management of water systems and supplies, the monitoring of water resources and the development of new supplies, the article suggests that many of the seeming and much-lauded achievements of the Oslo process were more cosmetic than real. Comparing Israeli-Palestinian water relations before and since the onset of the Oslo process, the article contends that the Oslo agreements did little more in this particular sphere than to dress up and discursively repackage Israel's domination of the West Bank water sector in a new vocabulary of Israeli-Palestinian ‘cooperation’.

Orthodox narratives of US foreign policy have been employed as uncontested modes of historical interpretation with US post-Cold War foreign policy in the Third World characterised by discontinuity from its earlier Cold War objectives. Chomsky's work adopts an alternative revisionist historiography that views US post-Cold War foreign policy as characterised by continuity with its earlier Cold War objectives. This article examines the continuities of US post-Cold War policy in Colombia, and explains this in terms of the maintenance of US access to South American oil, the preservation of regional (in)stability and the continued need to destroy challenges to US-led neoliberalism.

It is rarely sensible to reply to an unsympathetic review. If I could not persuade in 150,000+ words, it is not likely that a thousand or two by way of rebuttal will accomplish much. However, since two generations of editorial command of this excellent official organ of ours have invited me to break my rule of never writing an apparently whingeing response, here goes.

Talk of human rights is, currently, nearly as ubiquitous as talk of globalisation. While globalisation has been described as ‘the most over used and under specified term in the international policy sciences since the end of the Cold War’, the same could reasonably be said of ‘human rights’. Human rights are a product of the immediate aftermath of World War II, and thus they developed, in their contemporary form, in the context of the Cold War. The philosophical and political roots of human rights, of course, date back at least to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and some would say even further, to the Stoics of Ancient Greece. Globalisation, too, has unfolded mainly in the late twentieth-century and has reached a position of prominence in the post-Cold War context; at this juncture, and according to popular perception, the spread of market capitalism, Western culture and modern technology fit comfortably with the death of socialism and the ‘end of history’. But globalisation too has roots that date back much earlier – as early as, it has been argued, the fourteenth century.

‘No one loves a political realist’, Robert Gilpin once lamented. A major reason for this hostility towards realism is its sceptical view of the role of ethical norms (principled beliefs about state action) in international relations. Some critics dislike realism because they think it leads to an immoral international order. Thucydides' famous adage that the ‘strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’ is widely interpreted as evidence that one of realism's founding fathers was an advocate of an immoral approach to statecraft. Niccoló Machiavelli's well-known advice to his Prince that it is politics that determines ethics, not vice versa, reinforces these widely-held views of realism's amorality. The fact that modern realism has been influenced by unsavoury individuals like the German theorist Carl Schmitt, whose indisputable intellectual brilliance was tainted by his overly close association with the Third Reich, leads many to see a continuing link between realpolitik and evil in the international system. Thus, Richard Ashley spoke for many when he concluded that

In ‘The Politics of Bandwidth‘, Geoffrey Herrera examines the relationship between the information revolution and international affairs. His main point is that the evolution and ultimate shape of a mature digital information network will be decided by a three-way political struggle between states, firms and individuals. This short essay intends to expand and refine some of Herrera's assumptions. More importantly, however, the essay draws attention to the factor that Herrera neglects, namely the difference that being a democracy makes when determining the outcome of the three-way struggle.