This paper explores the relationship between statehood and the international system, with particular reference to the states of sub-Saharan Africa. It suggests, as the title implies, that statehood should be regarded as a relative concept; and that rather than distinguish sharply between entities that are, and are not, states, we should regard different entities as meeting the criteria for international statehood to a greater or lesser degree. Entities which we have been accustomed to regard as states, at least for the purposes of studying them in international relations, sometimes fail to exercise even the minimal responsibilities associated with state power, while those who control them do not behave in the way that is normally ascribed to the ‘rulers’ of states. Entities that are not accorded the status of states, such as guerrilla insurgencies or even voluntary organizations, may take on attributes that have customarily been associated with sovereign statehood. This conclusion carries at least a salutary warning against too readily ascribing the supposedly universal characteristics of states to peripheral areas of the modern global system, in which the categories in which we are accustomed to regard international politics have become blurred. More broadly, given the peculiar and privileged position of states in the conventional analysis of international relations, it may carry significant implications for the idea of international relations itself.

The questions with which I began and ended Women and War remain: How might we locate ourselves in order to create space for a less rigid play of individual and civic identities and virtues than those we have thus far known? What alternatives of citizenship can we draw upon? What perspectives within our reach offer hope for sustaining an ethos that extends the prospect of limiting force and the threat of force? In the book, I recommend a form of civic membership that cannot and does not place duty and loyalty to one's particular political body above all else; nevertheless, one that honours and gives ethical and civic weight precisely to that form of membership. I called this civic character a ‘chastened patriot’, one who is critical of the excesses of nationalism and critical, as well, of feminist arguments that express contempt for forms of identity as these are embodied in loyalties to ways of life shared by men and women. At the same time, this civic paragon of mine is also critical of those who defend particular ways of life in a way that generates contempt for the universalistic features of feminist concerns for the dignity and rights of woman. The ‘chastened patriot’ is one who understands and honours both universalistic and particularistic commitments, one for whom neither automatically trumps the other.

This article argues against a recent development within anglo-phone political philosophy which treats almost all group conflicts as deriving from cultural differences, thus downplaying the notion that conflicts may simply be over the distribution of things to which all the participants attach value: power, money, land and so on. Normative political philosophy, it is claimed by those who take this view, should be primarily concerned with issues of identity, recognition and culture at the expense of issues concerning distribution. There is however, little basis for these claims, whose implications are sketched in here and form the foundation for a defence of a liberalism ‘that has confidence in its own insights, a liberalism possessed of clarity as well as compassion.’

The work of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci has had a significant impact upon the study of International Relations (IR) over the past fifteen years. Despite the emergence of a distinct 'Italian School' in IR, however, there have been few assessments of the utility of Gramsci's concepts in this area. Our purpose here is to engage with the work of the new Gramscians. We begin by specifying the theoretical attractions of using Gramsci in IR, and then subject the key foundational claims of the new Gramscians to critical analysis. Our principal conclusions are that the Italian school's appropriation of Gramsci is far more conceptually problematic than they acknowledge, and that their use of his framework is difficult to sustain with respect to the scholarship devoted to his ideas. If Gramsci is to be used effectively within IR, closer attention must be paid both to the historical meaning of his work and to the problems raised by it. In short, Gramsci and his ideas must be more thoroughly historicized if his work is to be used to comprehend the multiple dynamics of world order today.

It is fitting that Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis should be the point of departure for the first Special Issue of the Review of International Studies. One of the earliest appraisals of Carr's contribution to international relations appeared in the very first issue of the journal of the British International Studies Association.1 More recently, by publishing the annual E.H.Carr memorial lecture, the Review has been partly responsible for the Carr revival that has gathered momentum.2 Although these lectures have rarely had Carr's general work or The Twenty Years' Crisis as their central theme, they have consistently shown how Carr's thought can be applied to the various sub-fields of international studies. In this first Special Issue we have likewise used Carr's work as the point of departure in this survey of both subject and subject-matter spanning the 80 years since the subject was placed in an academic setting.

The story of international relations (IR) is conventionally told in terms of a series of ‘great debates’. The first ‘great debate’ was the so-called idealist- or utopian-realist debate which took place in the late 1930s and the early 1940s. It was triggered by a number of ‘real-world’ events — Manchuria, Abyssinia, the failure of the League, Munich, the slide into war — but most importantly by the publication of E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis. This book, it is said, had a devastating impact on the discipline. Idealism, the predominant mode of thinking about international relations, was revealed as ‘bankrupt’, ‘sterile’, ‘glib’, ‘gullible’, a ‘hollow and intolerable sham’. The rout, indeed, was so complete that some authors have contended that it led to a Kuhnian-style paradigm shift: idealism, the normal mode of enquiry, was thrown into a state of ‘scientific crisis’, particularly by the ‘anomaly’ of World War Two, the occurrence of which it was utterly unable to explain; realism, Carr's alternative scientific standpoint, offered not only a cogent explanation, but also the prospect of accurate prediction and effective policy prescription. It soon replaced idealism as the ‘normal science’ of the field.

One of the most common themes in the vast literature on globalization is that it is gradually undermining the state by making it meaningless if not obsolete. This article is a contribution to the growing body of literature that seeks to challenge that thesis. It does so by arguing that there are two distinct sets of processes at work in contemporary world politics: globalization and interstate interaction. While the former tends to break down territorial boundaries and replace them with new, uniform configurations of power, money and culture, the latter reconfirms territorial boundaries and the structures and processes contained by them. The interaction among states, which is often ignored by globalization theorists, may best be understood by situating it within the traditional international relations concept of an international society, provided that this is redefined to give it a more ‘constructivist’ orientation.

Almost no historian of the Second World War nowadays fails to acknowledge the important role of signals intelligence (SIGINT). By contrast, most histories of postwar international relations omit – without explanation – all reference to SIGINT. Neglect of this and other aspects of intelligence has significantly distorted the study of the Cold War. A new generation of scholars, however, has begun to challenge this neglect. The article seeks to show how recent research on intelligence is changing our understanding of the early Cold War.

This essay introduces Max Weber’s sociology of modern culture to International Relations. Previous treatments of Weber in the discipline have focused on Morgenthau’s use of Weberian ideas rather than on the differences between their positions. In appropriating Weber’s ‘ethic of responsibility’ for his theory of power politics, Morgenthau neglected Weber’s sociology of ‘rationalization’ and analysis of the displacement of cultural values in modern policy-making. In Morgenthau’s theory foreign policy is judged in terms of consequences for state power, while for Weber policy is judged in terms of consequences for cultural values. This crucial difference in their understanding of the political ethics of realism is anatomized. Using Weber’s sociology of modern culture and often misunderstood view of the relation between science and values, the article then traces the repercussions of Morgenthau’s influential understanding of realism in strategic policy science.

European security depends on the effective collaboration of the five major powers; it will be undermined by the extension of NATO, a policy driven by US domestic politics. The main threats to security are: the breakdown of political and economic stability; unintended nuclear proliferation and/or failure of the START process; Russia's evolving political and territorial aspirations. All three will remain marginal as long as Russia is constructively engaged with the West. NATO expansion threatens that engagement. It is seen by all strands of Russian opinion as violating the bargain struck in 1990 and will likely lead to the withdrawal of cooperation. Invitations to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic cannot be rescinded, but the consequences can be mitigated by refraining from integrating them into NATO's military structure, by ceasing to insist that NATO membership is open to all, and by perpetuating the de facto nuclear-weapons-free zone that presently exists in Central and Eastern Europe. Britain's stance could be pivotal.

This article assesses the general significance for International Relations theory of the literature on globalization. It argues that globalization is a pervasively unsettling process which needs to be explained not only as an issue in its own right but for the insight which it affords into cognate areas of theory. In short, it advances an analytical model whereby globalization itself can be understood and utilizes this as a theoretical scheme that may be applied more generally. The predominant conceptualization of the globalization issue within International Relations has been the debate between the proponents of state redundancy and the champions of continuing state potency. In turn, these arguments rest upon an image of state capacities being eroded by external forces, or alternatively of external forces being generated by state action. In either case, there is the assumed duality of the state(s) set off from, and ranged against, a seemingly external environment. Instead, this article argues that the state occupies a middle ground between the internal and external and is itself both shaped by and formative of the process of globalization.

The article uncovers the intellectual link between Morgenthau’s theory of power politics and the German thinkers Max Weber and Carl Schmitt. Through this it sheds light on the forceful claims to objectivity contained in Morgenthau’s theory of power politics. The author reveals how, by combining Schmitt’s ideas of ‘the Political’ with Weber’s ideas on the objectivity of social science, Morgenthau finds an elegant way to overcome the value-determinacy of social science. This enables him to assert the objectivity of (international) political science. The same arguments allow Morgenthau also to formulate a moral defence of the state.

Our present understanding of British intelligence and its relationship to Anglo-American cooperation in the postwar period leaves much to be desired. Indeed while it has often been remarked that the twin pillars of Anglo-American security cooperation were atomic weapons and intelligence exchange, there remains an alarming disparity in our understanding of these two areas. The importance of intelligence is often commented on, but rarely subjected to sustained analysis. This article seeks to fill that gap by looking in turn at the nature of the Western ‘intelligence community’, the impact of alliance politics upon intelligence common to national estimates and the significance of strategic intelligence cooperation.

This article seeks to contribute to a transatlantic discussion by examining the theoretical and policy claims for and against NATO expansion that have dominated discussions in the United States. American academics have been almost unanimous in opposing NATO expansion, but the arguments they have put forward have often been contradictory. The proponents of NATO expansion, on the other hand, have not been clear in their arguments, and have tended to stress deterrence over reassurance. It is suggested here that there are indeed good reasons to expand NATO. Central European states have legitimate security concerns and so does Russia. However, an expanded NATO's value rests in its ability to reassure not only its new members but Russia and other countries in the region. If its focus remains primarily to coordinate military plans for deterring attacks on its members alone, its expansion will most likely exacerbate security relations in Europe.

To analyse an academic field of study in a particular era assumes two things: (1) that a particular era has properties that distinguish it clearly from predecessors and successors, and (2) that a field of study necessarily reflects or takes on a colouration of actual social conditions. Both assumptions are arguable, but the first is less contentious than the second. The Cold War was in many ways a distinct era, an era of anxiety caused by nuclear weapons, and an era in which diplomatic and military ideas, practices, and norms differed in significant ways from those prior to 1945 and after 1989. There were significant continuities, of course, but one would have little difficulty drawing compelling contrasts between the major characteristics of international politics in the 1920s and those of the 1950s.

. . . it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past. Hannah Arendt

It is almost two decades ago that the Review published Roy Jones' famous ‘case for closure’ against what he christened the English school of international relations. While that case was couched in an anxious foreboding that the school was ‘still in its prime’, that its bonds ‘are proving much too strong’, and that ‘young recruits are constantly coming forward’, it arguably registered a growing sense at the time that its target was a safe one, a spent force — one whose attraction defied explanation. For the work of the English school was a ‘sterile regime’. It lacked intellectual coherence, rigour, passion, and acquaintance with such important social-scientific fields as economics. Whether Jones had cast his polemical net too widely over a heterodox group, or missed the mark with his criticisms, the absence of any spirited, sustained reply along these lines seems, in retrospect, to reinforce the impression that the approach identified most closely with Martin Wight and Hedley Bull had run out of steam. It had made little impression in the United States. In British circles it had become the faintly embarrassing traditionalism which scholars were obliged to overcome, a synonym for scholarly provincialism, one that engaged the world from such insular vantage points as the common room of the London School of Economics. It stood accused of inhibiting access to the fruits of American social science while inclining, at bottom, to the same political realism that had predominated in the U.S. The mostly unspoken accusation of anachronism has never gone away.

The recent release of previously classified Foreign Office files has helped illuminate the early history of the secret propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD). Although launched in 1948 by the Attlee government with the avowed intention of promoting Britain as a socialist ‘Third Force’ in world politics, IRD tended in practice to devote its earliest efforts to attacking the Soviet Union and Communism, not only abroad but also at home, where leaders of the Labour movement deployed its materials against the far left. By 1950 the Third Force mission had been abandoned altogether as British foreign policy shifted decisively towards support for an American-led coalition of Atlantic powers.

Even though a vibrant literature on gender in international relations has developed over the last decade, students of international sanctions have not explored sanctions from a gendered perspective: analyses tend to have been either gender-neutral or gender-blind. By the same token, however, feminist scholars of international politics have not included sanctions in their empirical investigations. This article examines sanctions from a gendered perspective. Using conclusions suggested by the feminist IR literature, we examine the case-study of the sanctions against Iraq, and demonstrate the degree to which these measures had deeply gender-specific impacts, ranging from differential deprivations to declines in dowry wealth. We conclude from the Iraqi experience that the gendered effects of sanctions have considerable implications for sanctions theory.

Concerns about Third World military industrialization, which animate a broad range of international security debates, often take for granted the South's capacity for sustained military-industrial development. A convergence of favourable conditions spurred rapid defence-sector growth in much of the South beginning in the late 1970s. But the increasingly competitive character of the global arms economy and the turbulent political situations of most would-be military industrializers have derailed this growth. The collapse of Brazil's defence sector in the early 1990s illustrates that the largest barriers to Third World military industrialization are not financial or technological but rather institutional. Simultaneous domestic-political and global-market changes destabilized the institutional foundation of Brazilian military-industrial growth, despite the defence sector's impressive technological, industrial, and political advantages. It has proven impossible to reconcile the military's domestic political needs in post-authoritarian Brazil with the global-market integration on which the sector's financial and technological development depends.

The end of the Cold War is a story that will no doubt be written and rewritten as historians discover evidence that casts light on presently unknown facts, and provide new ‘spins’ on those already known. Indeed, it is quite likely that, like its origins, the end of the Cold War will have its equivalents of orthodoxy and revisionism. Of all the players in this story it is Mikhail Gorbachev who will take the leading role; for some the hero and for others the villain. The story of the Gorbachev era is a controversial one, with the answers to many questions in dispute. Did the West win due to ‘peace through strength’? Was new thinking primarily driven by the need for economic recovery? Was the West too hesitant in its response to Soviet initiatives? For some, the end of the Cold War brought to a conclusion a tragedy in which the two superpowers had embarked upon defensive measures which had led each to believe that the other harboured malign intent; hence Robert Jervis’s assertion that the ‘Cold War may . . . have been an unavoidable tragedy rather than the result of an evil Soviet Union, as the orthodox school has it, or an evil United States, as most revisionists argue’.Robert Jervis, 'The End of the Cold War?', Diplomatic History, 17 (Fall 1993), p. 659. On this interpretation the Cold War was a security dilemma in which ‘each side, in pursuing its own clearly indicated and deeply cherished principles, was only confirming the fear of the other that it was bent on aggression’.Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, 'Origins of the Cold War', Foreign Affairs, 46 (Oct. 1967), p. 45. In this article the story of how this tragedy was ended will be told from the perspective of graduated reciprocation in tension reduction (GRIT). It will focus on whether Gorbachev employed such a strategy and whether it had a role in ending over forty years of hostility.