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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.