If there is a single event since the end of the Second World War that has seriously punctured America's sense of confident invulnerability it is, surely, not the withdrawal from Vietnam—that could always be explained away as a masterful reassessment of the nature of the communist threat—but the taking of American hostages by Islamic fundamentalists in Teheran in 1979. That event, more than any other, showed that America's faith in modernization, foreign aid, and a gradual injection of political liberalism as a means of drawing nations into the western orbit rested on brittle foundations. Until the Shah's overthrow Iran had seemed the perfect ally; despite the anti-libertarian blemishes of the Shah's regime, Iran had a prosperous middle class, a formidable standing in the region, a sound economy based on expensive oil, and was emerging from what was thought to be the constricting effect of Islam.

When Philip Reynolds opened the first issue of the British Journal of International Studies with an examination of the “state of the art” in Great Britain,2 he omitted any mention of the Open University as a source of such studies. In the sense that Reynolds was seeking establishments with full-time students of International Studies, the omission was justified; in the sense that the Open University forms a seat of learning whose students are concerned with the study of International Relations, it was not. Indeed, it is possible that the Open University may have, at any one time, more students reading International Relations than any other single institution in the United Kingdom. These several hundreds of part-time students, pursuing the single course under review, are distributed rather unevenly across the face of Great Britain. They have varying access to library facilities; the greatly varying environment of their own homes in which to work; greatly varying amounts of contact with their tutors, either on a “face-to-face” basis or by letter or telephone. In short, the student for whom this course is designed is different – he represents, perhaps, the “new actor” in academic life in Great Britain. He is ignored at our – the traditional academics, – peril, for whilst we may be concerned with standards of academic excellence there are many in high places who now judge success by such criteria as staff-student ratios, cost effectiveness, and the like.

The theologian Reinhold Neibuhr oftentimes warned that moralists who entered the foreign policy sphere were likely to be more destructive of a nation's ideals than were cynical realists. Evidently he feared that those who lacked a sense of the limits of foreign policy would proceed as if the values and goods which were attainable in the more intimate communities of the family, the locality and the nation were attainable in the international community as well. Whatever Neibuhr's quarrels and debates with classical Greek thought, he was at one with Plato and Aristotle and their present day followers in believing that justice could be more effectively pursued by the smaller communities, such as the city states. He insisted on a recognition of the differences between such communities and the major present day world powers. From World War II until his death, he wrote more about foreign policy than any other aspect of public policy. He wrote scores of articles, some published in less prominent journals, about American foreign policy and its moral basis.

For a discipline aspiring to the understanding of international relations in their totality, the accusation of omitting the insights of a theory purporting to structure the foreign policies of some one-third of the states and also the ideas of many western thinkers is rather serious. I take, therefore, the liberty of examining the validity of the accusation at some length and to state another, to my mind, much more serious omission on the part of the two authors.

National integration and the legitimation of authority

The study of foreign policy leadership is characterized by a number of conceptual and methodological problems for the researcher. It is located on the divide between the study of the individual and the idiosyncratic, on the one hand, and the structural and patterned on the other; it stands at the crossroads of the internal political system and the international arena; and it lends an aura of personalized comprehensibility to complex processes of change and development, integration and disintegration, in the multidimensional political, social and economic environment in which it is set. Its very choice of subject matter seems to assume that political actors, although working within specific systemic constraints, also possess opportunities to make and/or enforce choices under permissive conditions which allow a significant amount of conscious manipulation. Furthermore, such studies often take for granted that the nation-state is the most significant unit of analysis – in the sense that it is treated as given rather than as problematic. This essay attempts to chart a course through these complex waters by developing a set of interrelated hypotheses about a particular type of foreign policy leadership and the uses to which it is put – namely the legitimation of the authority of the state itself within what have been called “modern national culture societies”.

In recent decades, sovereignty has come under increased academic scrutiny for being a Eurocentric notion antithetical to emancipatory politics, leading critical theory scholars to call for an overcoming or even abandonment of the concept. Paradoxical as it may seem, it nonetheless remains an appealing ideal for many colonised peoples. Indigenous activists and scholars have actively re-appropriated the language of sovereignty to encapsulate and advance Indigenous political aspirations. This paper discusses how Māori, Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Indigenous people, navigate their relations to the concept in their contemporary political discourses pursuing self-governance. Building on interviews with Māori leaders, scholars, and activists, it offers empirical insights into Indigenous political thought’s engagement with the idea of sovereignty. It highlights an ambivalence oscillating between rejection and rearticulation present both in Indigenous theorising and Māori politics. From an analysis of Māori contemporary conceptual strategies, this paper suggests that Yarimar Bonilla’s notion of ‘strategic entanglement’ offers a productive account to comprehend the approached Māori actors’ deployment of the sovereignty concept, and possibly that of Indigenous peoples beyond Aotearoa. This paper thus highlights the continued relevance of the sovereignty framework, both analytically and politically, to meaningfully engage with contemporary Indigenous politics.

The development of new kinds of weapons in the immediate post-war period led to a great increase in academic interest in strategic problems. After occasional forays into the field by thinkers such as Bernard Brodie, the output of literature on strategic matters by academics has grown enormously. Most of the work has been done by Americans and reflects an American perspective of the world. It deals with problems that the United States has faced, and is facing, in strategic policy matters.

This article argues that Dialogue among Civilisations can be put forward as a crucial contribution to debates addressing IR’s Eurocentrism. It highlights the blurring of West/non-West, domestic/international, and imperial/post-imperial bifurcations. This is evident in three ways. First, Dialogue among Civilisations needs to be appreciated in Iran’s wider historical context and its multifaceted intellectual heritages. This demonstrates that the idea of the West as distinctly different from the East is problematic because of engagement between Iran and the so-called West. Second, Khatami’s intellectual endeavours are based on a simultaneous engagement with Western political thought, Islamic philosophy, and the idea of Ancient Iran. Finally, the notion itself reflects an internal dialogue whereby Western civilisation along with Islam and Iran’s pre-Islamic heritages are considered integral to Iranian political culture. Furthermore, it is an aspiration for how post-colonial Muslim societies can engage with colonial power while maintaining a post-colonial authenticity. Our contention is that an in-depth understanding of Iran alongside a revisiting of Khatami’s Dialogue among Civilisations can act as a means of bringing the perspective of the ‘other’ into debates on the international and our epistemological and ontological understanding of the West.

This article further develops and illustrates the argument that relationships between individuals help to explain the success of human rights advocacy in international institutions. Drawing from advocacy theory and socio-legal studies, I shift the attention from collective forms of advocacy to the importance of interpersonal relationships of advocates with individuals in international institutions to influence the development of human rights. I introduce a framework consisting of three analytical steps – mapping the key actors in a network, process-tracing, and biographical research – and apply the framework to three cases of norm development by a United Nations human rights treaty body. My findings highlight the power of interpersonal relationships for the making of human rights, and they inform scholarship on transnational elites, human rights advocacy, and the politics of international law.

This article seeks to take further some themes that were touched on in an exchange of views that the author had with Gerald Segal in the Review in 1985. It aims to widen the scope of the theoretical discussion, to stipulate a more specific target for criticism and to clarify why the issues under scrutiny are so important.

As the covert and clandestine practices of states multiplied in the twentieth century, so did these practices’ footprint in public life. This footprint is not just visual and material but sonic and aural, sounding the ‘secret state’ into being and suggesting ways of ‘listening in’ on it. Using multisensory methodology, this article examines Careless Talk Costs Lives, a UK Second World War propaganda campaign instructing citizens on how to practice discreet speech and listening in defence against ‘fifth columnist’ spies. This campaign reproduced the British secret state in the everyday: it represented sensitive operations as weaving in and out of citizens’ lives through imprudent chatter about ‘hush-hush’ activities and sounds you shouldn't overhear. The paradox at the campaign's heart – of revealing to people the kind of things they shouldn't say or listen to – made the secret state and its international operations a public phenomenon. Secret sounds therefore became entangled within productions of social difference, from class inequalities to German racialisation. Sound and listening, however, are unwieldy phenomena. This sonic life of the secret state risked undermining political legitimacy, while turning public space and idyllic environments into deceptive soundscapes – for international espionage, it seemed, sounded like ordinary life.

1976 was a vintage year for Clausewitzian studies. No less than three major works were published; Raymond Aron's two volume study Penser la Guerre, Peter Paret's Clausewitz and the State and a new English translation of Vom Kriege by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. In curious way all three works are complementary; we have a modernized text complete with introductory essays by Michael Howard, Peter Paret and Bernard Brodie, together with a reader's guide; a full biographical study placing Glausewitz in his intellectual and political milieux; and an extensive critical analysis of his thought with an attempt at relating it to the modern world. There is no longer any excuse for Glausewitz to be “well-known, but little read”. Taken together they make an impressive oeuvre, of interest to the historian, whether of ideas or of war and to the strategic theorist. One thing all these writers have in common is their conviction that Vom Kriege has a continuing relevance to the study of war. It is with this, in particular the relation between theory and practice, that this article is primarily concerned. Consequently, it is first to Aron, who devotes most of his study to this question, that I turn.

Vietnam’s initial response to Covid-19 was conspicuous for various reasons, including how its attempt at securitisation drew deeply from historical narratives, symbols, and traditions specific to the Vietnamese experience, as well as how the securitisation project was not simply top-down and state-driven but also featured ground-up participation where the public was mobilised to participate in and actively reiterate securitisation practices. This richly textured empirical case study of the workings of Vietnamese society and politics represents an invitation to explore key debates surrounding securitisation theory. Reflecting on the empirical material of the case, this paper builds on scholarship seeking to highlight the shortcomings of the Copenhagen School’s model of securitisation and from there further explore securitisation theory and its limits. It takes aim at how the audience and its agency is conceptualised in the theory and develops the notions of ‘historical resources’ and ‘activation architecture’ to more adequately explain the processes of securitisation.

This article examines the neo-conservative critique of global liberal governance. It provides a theoretically oriented assessment of the neo-conservative case against international law and human rights regimes, and draws out the main political and ethical implications for American democracy and American foreign policy. It is argued that the neo-conservative critique of global governance rests upon an interpretation of the normative order that weaves together democracy, individual rights and national autonomy through a volatile identity politics which is fundamentally at odds with both the pluralist character of ‘Westphalian diplomacy’ and the universal order of rights envisaged by advocates of global governance. More than just the policy autonomy of the US, what is really at stakes in those debates for neo-conservatives is the whole structure of cultural and socio-economic interests that is tied to the substantive interpretation of democracy upon which their domestic commitments to neo-liberal capitalism and liberal freedoms are predicated.

This article makes theoretical and empirical contributions to the recent literature on the socialisation and punishment of state and non-state actors. First, it argues that the English School can add significantly to our understanding of the socialisation and punishment processes because of the theory's emphasis on great powers as ‘custodians’ of the society of states. Second, it analyses the policies of the United Kingdom, France, and, to a lesser degree, a number of other powers toward the Bolsheviks and the Whites during the Civil War and beyond (1917–1924). The basic argument is that London, Paris, and other capitals acted like ‘guardians’ of the society of states in their attempt to punish and socialise the participants in the Civil War.

This article considers a neglected question in International Relations, namely how violence of war contributes to the constitution of the political community at the intersection between war and peace. It exposes limitations of means-ends, instrumental understanding of war violence due to the overlooking of violence’s performative attributes stemming from the centrality of bodily injuries in war. The instrumental violence on which the constitution of the political community is grounded finds expression in an order of representation that can be termed ontopology, and a pervasive – circular – relationship between ontopology and violence insofar as ontopology has inspired extreme forms of human behaviour and also been used to justify violence as a means to enact an ontopological goal. Yet, recognising the role of bodily injuries in the course of fighting allows for a more complete understanding of war. Crucially it enables an interpretation of the structure of war as a relation between war’s interior content – casualties in war – and the exterior, verbal issues standing outside it (pertaining to security, identity, sovereignty, authority, ideology), that lead to a surrogate contest of reimagining political community in the process of which performative power of violence contributes directly to the emerging post-war peace and laws that justify it.

Some time before the middle of this century Europe ceased to be a self-regulating political system. This is much the most upsetting event in European history for centuries. It means that Europeans now look beyond their continental confines, not if and when and where they wish, but because they must. During the past 500 years or so—from the emergence of strong centralized French and English monarchies to the disruption of the polyglot empires of eastern Europe by self-determination—Europe has been increasingly articulated into secular sovereign states constructed and fuelled by national languages and national passions. These states have existed in a condition of conflict with one another. But their conflicts, however intense, were never perpetual, so that conflict itself became systematized and found its most characteristic expression in two things: in changes of alliance for the purpose of preserving the multinational system and in war. Europe was a political system which operated through alliances, reversals of alliances and war; and whenever one state threatened to become powerful enough to destroy or atrophy the system, there was always at hand an alliance of other states capable of checking its advance and ensuring the system's essential fluidity. There was, in consequence, no need to go outside the system in order to preserve it.

In his recent Review article, ‘Do general rules of international law exist?’, Lowe states that there are at least two interpretations of the nature of customary international law.1 In the following, I shall attempt to clarify what these two interpretations are, examine the implications which Lowe attaches to the interpretation which he favours, and discuss his assertions about truly general rules of international law.

In the last three years or so the Nine have been more active in promoting consultation, co-ordination and occasionally common action in the realm of the external relations of the European Community than in fostering the integration process within the Community. However, a good deal of this activity has been procedural in nature rather than substantive and at times such modest progress as has been achieved has been extolled beyond its due, if only to conceal the lack of progress on the internal side. Moreover, it is as well to remember that each of the Nine member governments continues to rely mainly upon its nexus of bilateral relations for promoting its own particular interests with the outside world. Thus to focus on the external relations of the Community per se is to highlight only part - and not necessarily the most significant part - of the spectrum of the external relations of individual members. Nevertheless, the inauguration of a new European Commission on the 6 January 1977 provides a convenient moment to assess the state of the Community's external relations1 and, in particular, to try and separate the achievements of substance from those of a more shadowy or procedural nature.

It is a great thrill to find that someone has picked up the gauntlet thrown into the arena at a time when the Cold War seems to many to be nothing but remote history. Here are my brief answers to Michael Cox's gallant repartee:

• Tito did not ‘defect’ he was expelled from the Cominform by Stalin. Moscow did not ‘stay put’ altogether; Tito's expulsion was supposed to be followed by a putsch by the Stalinist faction within the CP of Yugoslavia, which failed, however. Here, as with the Berlin Blockade and later in condoning aggression in Korea (hardly ‘cautious, circumspect’ policy decisions), Stalin made a great mistake.

• Western analysts did predict the attack on South Korea. In May 1950 Kennan himself thought Stalin was looking for an area to have a ‘limited war’, and thought Yugoslavia a likely danger area. Mr Kennan's later Memoirs and memory are here, once again, not very reliable.

• The Communist victory in China and the Soviet explosion of an atomic device, far from being of little concern to the West, caused Truman to ask for NSC-68 to be written.

• The economically weak USSR was far from inferior to the West in manpower, as Dr Cox rightly notes, and it should be remembered that the Red Army had held its own against the formidable Wehrmacht for quite a while. The massive rearmament of the satellites of the USSR only started in 1948. Matthew Evangelista's article only deals with the period up to 1948, and its findings can not be applied to the 1949–1953 period. Satellite rearmament took off in 1950, peaking in 1952. By 1952 Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria alone had as many forces (including small naval and air forces) as the 800,000 Western troops available on the Central Front in 1948.