Millennium - Journal of International Studies recent issues

Situating Identities: Enacting and Studying Europe at a Russian Elite University

Muller, M. — 2008-08-07

The majority of studies on identity in the discipline of International Relations have analysed identities from an analytical perspective of distance; they elide the fact that identities are situated productions which unfold in specific contexts and through different forms of signification. In this article, I seek to work towards greater attentiveness to the situatedness of identities. I propose a reconsideration of the concept of discourse for situating identities and argue that ethnography can be a useful methodology for analysing the discursive construction of identities in micro-settings. This conceptual argument is illustrated by drawing on data from ethnographic research within Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), a Russian elite university. I analyse how identification with Europe shifts across multiple contexts as it is enacted in everyday life and represented in the multiple processes of studying international relations at this educational institution. Foregrounding the situatedness of identities in this way brings their ambiguities and instabilities into view, while cautioning against an all-too-easy universalization in identity research.

The Revival of Carl Schmitt in International Relations: The Last Refuge of Critical Theorists?

Chandler, D. — 2008-08-07

This article seeks to question the 'critical' readings of Carl Schmitt's understanding of international law and the use of force in international relations, particularly the approaches taken by many critical cosmopolitan theorists and many post-structuralists who have used Schmitt to distance themselves from, and to critique, American foreign policy, especially under the Bush administrations. I suggest that these critical theorists engage in a highly idealized understanding of Schmitt, focusing on his contingent political conclusions, using his work descriptively rather than analytically. It is argued that the idealist approach to Schmitt stems from these commentators' concerns to describe their work as critical rather than from any attempt to use Schmitt's underlying ontological framing of the relationship between law, ethics and the use of force to develop analytical insights into the practice and jurisprudence of the international sphere today. The revival of Schmitt in international relations therefore tells us more about the crisis of critical theorizing than the relevance of Schmitt's analysis to today's world.

War Crimes and the Ruin of Law

Dauphinee, E. — 2008-08-07

This article explores the manner in which the logic of the war crimes trial authorizes and legitimates the practice of war more generally. It proceeds from the recognition that all war involves injuring or the threat of injuring, and that articulating particular types of injuring as especially problematic takes as one of its effects the normalization of injuring in war more generally. The article queries the function of law through an analysis of the state of exception that is produced in the identification of 'war crimes'. It argues that the logic of excision, which produces the political conditions in which war crimes become possible is structurally replicated through the excision of the perpetrator in the context of the trial. It also explores the manner in which the narrative strategies of what Elaine Scarry calls 'active redescription' associated with war render most war-related deaths and injuries politically invisible. The article concludes with a number of strategies for rethinking what it means to account for violence.

Cosmopolitanism and Realism: Towards a Theoretical Convergence?

Beardsworth, R. — 2008-08-07

On both theoretical and analytic accounts, cosmopolitanism and realism seem destined to bypass each other, one entering, at best, the normative dimension of social science, the other, stressing its positive dimension. In this article, I want to suggest that this opposition needs to be unsettled for future theorization and (perhaps) practice of world politics. Taking these two schools of thought is exemplary since their respective theoretical modalities and tenets seem so far opposed. Arguing for convergence between them constitutes part of an emerging attempt, on the part of political philosophers, theorists and international relations scholars today, to recast the conceptual landscape of international relations in response to present complexities of political agency. This convergence is here situated in terms of: (1) the legitimacy of power; (2) the increasing immanence of justice to power in an interdependent world; and (3) the importance of moral leadership in the world political domain. The article is theoretical in modality and diction; outstanding empirical questions are posed once these points are made.

1988 and 1998: Contrast and Continuity in Feminist International Relations

Hutchings, K. — 2008-08-07

This article considers contrasts and continuities in feminist IR scholarship over the past twenty years. It traces various shifts in the substantive and methodological concerns of feminist IR in the decade between 1988 and 1998. It concludes with some reflections on the extent to which the agenda for feminist IR scholars in 2008 remains continuous with the last twenty years and the extent to which it has changed or is likely to change.

Men in the Feminist Gaze: What Does this Mean in IR?

Carver, T. — 2008-08-07

Some of the contributors to the 1988 and 1998 special issues of Millennium on women/gender and IR queried conventional accounts of sex and gender. Some of these put down markers for the study of sexuality in IR. The political thrust of this enterprise was broadly inclusive in character, deriving from various forms of identity politics, while also presuming a transformative outcome of some sort. A few contributors looked forward to a world beyond the confines of gender hierarchy. This article poses the question: 'What would it be like if "feminist IR" actually were "IR tout court "?' Answering this question requires a non-referential theory of language that goes 'all the way down' — as the 'constructivism' deployed in IR does not, because it relies instead on an unexamined acceptance of 'the material'. The answer also requires an analytical view of masculinity as both apparently ungendered and overtly gendered, thus asymmetrical with femininity. Following through on this analysis resolves the dilemma that many IR feminists feel they face: how to sustain a critique of the manly content and masculinized framing of IR without reinvoking the gender binary through which 'woman' and the feminine are always and already subordinated to men and masculinity, and marginalized as subject and object of knowledge.

Feminist Scholarship in International Relations and the Politics of Disciplinary Emotion

Soreanu, R., Hudson, D. — 2008-08-07

The article engages with the relationship between feminist scholarship and the discipline of International Relations. Taking a step back from the recurrent concerns with marginality and those with the absent feminist revolution in IR, we recast the problem of the complicated ménage between feminism and the field of IR as a case of a failure to love. Drawing on the sociology of thinking of Randall Collins and his theory of interaction ritual chains, we read the logic of practice in intellectual fields as one rooted in emotion. In this framework, we theorize citation practices as bearing the trace of intellectuals' emotion-loaded coalitions of the mind. The article maps out the intellectual coalitions in IR with respect to the feminist question by reconstructing the citation networks emerging from the special issue of Millennium, published in 1988 on 'Women in IR'. The maps we put together are read as snapshots of the emotional economy of IR, allowing further reflection about the status of feminist scholarship in IR, about intellectual creativity and about change and stasis in our discipline. We conclude that it is IR which is in trouble, not feminists, with regard to creative potential. Feminists are not marginal in or to IR; instead they are part of a ring of creativity connecting the emotional energies of different disciplinary fields.

Roundtable Discussion: Reflections on the Past, Prospects for the Future in Gender and International Relations

2008-08-07

Slow Looking: The Ethics and Politics of Aesthetics: Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) Gillo Pontecorvo, director, The Battle of Algiers (Criterion: Special Three-Disc Edition, 2004)

Shapiro, M. J. — 2008-08-07

This review essay treats three texts: Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art; Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain; and The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.

List of Books Reviewed

2008-08-07

Book Review: GENERAL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Jonathon W. Moses and Torbjorn L. Knutsen, Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies in Social and Political Research (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 330 pp., {pound}20.99 pbk.). Sean Molloy, The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 187 pp., {pound}42.00 hbk.)

Stocchetti, M. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Raffaella Del Sarto, Contested State Identities and Regional Security in the Euro-Mediterranean Area (London: Palgrave, 2006, 296 pp., {pound}45.00 hbk.)

Barbullushi, O. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War: Looking for Bosnia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, 160 pp., {pound}14.99 pbk.)

Hutchison, E. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Mats Berdal and Spyros Economides (eds), United Nations Interventionism, 1991--2004 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 303 pp., {pound}17.99 pbk.)

Ker-Lindsay, J. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Francois Debrix, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics (London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 193 pp., $41.95 pbk.). Philip Hammond, Media, War and Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 175 pp., $34.95 pbk.)

Rowley, C. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: CONFLICT AND PEACE STUDIES Oded Lowenheim, Predators and Parasites. Persistent Agents of Transnational Harm and Great Power Authority (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007, 280 pp., $25.95 pbk.)

Leander, A. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Tan See Seng, The Role of Knowledge Communities in Constructing Asia-Pacific Security. How Thought and Talk Make War and Peace (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007, 284 pp., {pound}69.95 hbk.)

Freistein, K. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 240 pp., {pound}45.00 hbk.)

Varada Raj, K. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT Radoslav S. Dimitrov, Science and International Environmental Policy: Regimes and Nonregimes in Global Governance (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006, 222 pp., {pound}21.99 pbk.). Robert Falkner (ed.), The International Politics of Genetically Modified Food: Diplomacy, Trade and Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 280 pp., {pound}58.00 hbk.)

Mallick, S. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS Stephen Holmes, The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 332 pp., $19.80 hbk.)

Brown, R. S. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Valerie M. Hudson, Foreign Policy Analysis: Classic and Contemporary Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, 225 pp., $21.21 pbk.)

Bilgin, P. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Cornelius Friesendorf, US Foreign Policy and the War on Drugs: Displacing the Cocaine and Heroin Industry (London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 230 pp., {pound}65 hbk.)

Friedrichs, J. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: James Mann, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (London: Viking, 2007, 144 pp., {pound}9.92 hbk.). Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower: How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 336 pp., {pound}15.99 hbk)

Lemish, L. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: George A. MacLean, Clinton's Foreign Policy in Russia: From Deterrence and Isolation to Democratisation and Engagement (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006, 172 pp., {pound}55.00 hbk.)

Oskanian, K. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: GOVERNMENTS AND THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE James N. Rosenau, David C. Earnest, Yale H. Ferguson, Ole R. Holsti, On the Cutting Edge of Globalization: An Inquiry into American Elites (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006, viii + 201 pp., {pound}21.99 pbk.)

Akturk, S. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Global Politics. Discourse and Democracy in a Divided World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006, 191 pp., $24.95 pbk., $59.95 hbk.)

Beckstein, M. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: INTERNATIONAL HISTORY Lorna Lloyd, Diplomacy with a Difference: the Commonwealth Office of High Commissioner, 1880--2006 (Leiden: Brill, 2007, 353 pp., $168 hbk.)

Davies, T. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY Brett Bowden and Leonard Seabrooke (eds), Global Standards of Market Civilization (London: Routledge, 2006, 248 pp., {pound}70 hbk.)

Strange, M. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: RELIGION AND POLITICS Maryam Panah, The Islamic Republic and the World: Global Dimensions of the Iranian Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2007, 232 pp., {pound}45 pbk.)

Gocer, D. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007, 403 pp., $29.95 hbk.)

Rao, R. — 2008-08-07

Editors Introduction

2008-07-10

Peace, Order, Justice: Competing Understandings

Elshtain, J. B. — 2008-07-10

Peace, War and the Heuristics of Fear

Coker, C. — 2008-07-10

Reclaiming Peace in International Relations

Richmond, O. P. — 2008-07-10

What is peace? This basic question often appears in contemporary orthodoxy to have been settled in favour of the `liberal peace'. Yet, this has, in many post-conflict settings, proved to create a `virtual peace'empty states and institutions which are ambivalent about everyday life. In this context peace is widely referred to but rarely defined. Though the concept of peace is often assumed to be normatively irreproachable, formative in the founding of the discipline, and central to the agendas of liberal states, it has rarely been directly approached as an area of study within IR. This essay endeavours to illustrate how developing accounts of peace helps chart the different theoretical and methodological contributions in IR, and the complex issues that then emerge. These include the pressing problem of how peace efforts become sustainable rather than merely inscribed in international and state-level diplomatic and military frameworks. This also raises issues related to an ontology of peace, culture, development, agency and structure, not just in terms of the representations of the world, and of peace, presented in the discipline, but in terms of the sovereignty of the discipline itself and its implications for everyday life. In an interdisciplinary and pluralist field of study — as IR has now become — concepts of peace and their sustainability are among those that are central. This raises the question of what the discipline is for, if not for peace? This paper explores such issues in the context of orthodox and critical IR theory, methods, and ontology, and offers some thoughts about the implications of placing peace at the centre of IR.

Agonistic Peace: A Postmodern Reading

Shinko, R. E. — 2008-07-10

This paper considers the postmodern concept of agonism and its relationship to the concept of peace. Connolly's concept of `agonistic respect' is seminal in this regard because it can be argued that such a formulation gestures towards an iteration of postmodern peace. However, this paper will reread Connolly's version of agonism through Foucault's analytic of war and peace to draw attention not only to Connolly's own deeply entrenched indebtedness to `liberal peace' but to indicate why Foucault's more expansive analytic of agonism is better suited to interrogating international relations' most intractable sources of conflict. I seek to reposition the discussion of agonism in such a way that it opens up a critical research agenda with the potential to resist the trap wherein peace emerges as just another tactic for reinscribing hegemonic structures of domination, exclusion, and marginalisation. The implications of such an approach are significant because it ultimately requires that we problematise considerations of respect and recognition when we approach the study of conflicts and that we self-reflexively question our own moral analytical frameworks embedded in the structural components of the peace we strive to create.

Punishment and Peace: Critical Reflections on Countering Terrorism

Lang, A. F. — 2008-07-10

This article argues that the punishment of terrorists can lead to a more peaceful world order only if we better understand what it means to punish justly. The just war tradition is considered, focusing on Augustine and Grotius, especially for its understanding of war as being occasionally necessary for punitive purposes. The military dimension of the US counter-terrorism campaign is assessed in terms of `just international punishment', with specific reference to US military actions in Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq, framed partly as punitive responses to the 9/11 attacks. The article concludes that these military actions contain a punitive ethos, one that has come dangerously close to vengeance. It finds these military actions punitive, but not just for two reasons: (1) they are undermining the very international security structures that they supposedly seek to enforce by violating those norms, especially in the case of Iraq; (2) their primary focus on self-defence prevents them from being actions that might contribute to a more just international order. Finally the article considerers how a turn to the just war tradition might reinforce the norms of the international security order rather than undermine them.

`Eternal Peace' as the Graveyard of the Political: A Critique of Kant's Zum Ewigen Frieden

Behnke, A. — 2008-07-10

The purpose of this essay is a critical investigation of Immanuel Kant's Zum Ewigen Frieden as a metaphysical and transcendental rather than political project. The essay argues that this project, despite Kant's protestations to the contrary, necessarily produces the `peace of the graveyard'. Eternal Peace needs to be understood not only as a guide to the creation of peaceful relations between states — a common interpretation reflected in the misleading translation of the treatise as `Perpetual Peace' — but also as a philosophical response to the problem of Difference in international politics. As such, it establishes many of the metaphysical tenets through which Liberalism has ever since attempted to establish the conditions for Eternal Peace via the ontological eradication of Difference and the operation of an ethnoand temporocentric epistemology. Consequently, Eternal Peace depends on the death, rather than affirmation, of the Political as the agonistic engagement with the Other.

Balancing Peace, Justice and Sovereignty in Jus Post Bellum: The Case of `Just Occupation'

Evans, M. — 2008-07-10

Theories of jus post bellum have tended to be what I call `restricted', in that they have focussed on the norms to govern the ending and immediate aftermath of a just war. But the goal of building a just peace, which is the ultimate aim of a just war, often places rather longer-term responsibilities on the shoulders of the victorious just, especially where occupation of the defeated unjust state is required (the scenario on which I concentrate). Given the variety of possible post-conflict situations, then, we should expect there to be various conceptions of jus post bellum, sensitive to the context-specific demands of the `just peace' objective. This article therefore sets out the case for an `extended' theory of jus post bellum which is likely to be required in, for example, occupation scenarios. But, having argued that `restricted' conceptions do not fully lay out what might be reasonably expected of just occupiers, the article then contends that the `extended' considerations may be in significant tension with another post- bellum requirement, namely, the obligation to restore sovereignty to the occupied state as soon as is reasonably feasible. Various ways of negotiating the tension are discussed and found to be wanting. Given that just war theory in general is supposed to be action-guiding, the concern is that an extended jus post bellum may be unhelpfully action-disorienting. The ostensibly strong case for it is therefore cast into some doubt and some implications for how the obligations of peacebuilding for just occupiers should theorised are considered.

The Concealed Violence of Modern Peace(-Making)

Meyer, J. — 2008-07-10

By drawing on the work of anti-Eurocentric critics, this article inquires into the legitimisation of military interventions and the imposition of certain practices of governance in the name of peace. Special emphasis is put on the approach of transmodernity that rejects the standard picture of modernity and modern identities as utterly European/Western products and tries to reveal the concealed violence of European and North-American modernism. In view of current military interventions, the article analyses how an obligation of the Western self to produce peace is derived from the allegedly precedent unwillingness or inability of the non-Western other to maintain peace. It is argued that contemporary protagonists of modernity, thus, do not take seriously their own contribution to the violence they claim to fight. With reference to non-military practices performed as peace-making, it is shown how Eurocentric reason is prone to non-listening and ignoring the experiences of others.

For Whom Nobel Tolls? An Interpretive Account of the Migration of the Concept of Peace as Perceived through the Solemn Eyes of Norwegian Lawmakers

Bulloch, D. — 2008-07-10

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded on an annual basis since 1901. Since then there have been some years when no prize was awarded, usually during wartime, and other years where the award has proved controversial. Nevertheless, the award has always reflected something important about prevailing ideas concerning the concept of peace. This paper seeks to make sense of this history in order to explain some of the underlying discursive dynamics that make certain awards controversial, and others widely applauded. In particular some reflection is offered on the recent direction of the award towards wider social issues such as poverty and the environment. What this analysis reveals is the slow evolution of the Peace Prize from reflecting and legitimising notions of `peace as order' towards more entrepreneurial notions of `peace as justice'. The paper then moves on to briefly consider how the discourse of peace has subtly shifted in the aftermath of 9/11, and why — in the absence of universally accepted accounts of justice — peace is being recast in terms of legitimate frameworks of human security. In the light of this the paper argues for being positive about negative peace, and suggests that if the Norwegian Nobel Committee continues to reflect wider discourses of peace, it will reverse its recent trend of using the prize to highlight wider and wider questions of development and the environment. Lastly, the paper makes a brief case in favour of Interpol being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, both in recognition of its place at the centre of quotidian matters of legitimate international police and security cooperation, and as a means of establishing some conceptual benchmarks by which to disaggregate the police and security measures that states already agree on, from those they do not.

Unpacking the Liberal Peace: The Dividing and Merging of Peacebuilding Discourses

Heathershaw, J. — 2008-07-10

This paper assesses the discursive environment of post-conflict intervention as a prism through which to view the international politics of the post-Cold War era. I argue that the `liberal peace' is not a single discourse but a tripartite international discursive environment that dynamically reproduces technical solutions which fail to address the core issues of conflict in a given place. The paper starts from the assumption that over the last twenty years we have seen a shift from an understanding of peace as a state of affairs in a given territory (as explored by Michael Banks in a 1987 paper) to peace as a process of post-conflict intervention; a move from peace to peacebuilding. This `liberal peace' sets a standard by which `failed states' and `bad civil societies' are judged according to ethical, spatial and temporal markers. However, the apparent homogeneity of the model obscures the divisions and mergers which characterise the scholarship and practice of international peacebuilding. The boundaries of the peace debate remain; the political differences latent in Banks' three conceptions are retained in the evolving discourses of democratic peacebuilding, civil society and statebuilding. The paper shows how these three basic discourses are reproduced in international policy analyses and major academic works. Moreover, the discursive mediation of their differences is the dynamic by which the liberal peace is sustained, despite its detachment from the lived experiences of post-conflict environments. It is in this sense that we can comprehend international peacebuilding as a virtual phenomenon, maintained in the verbal and visual representations of international organisations, diplomats and academic policy-practitioners. In light of this disaggregation of the discursive environment, a better, more nuanced understanding of the liberal peace can be attained: one that is able to grasp how critics and criticisms become incorporated into that which they seek to critique. The paper concludes with three propositions regarding the nature of world order in the era of the tripartite `liberal peace'. During this time coercion, military force and even warfare have become standard and legitimate features of peacefare. The discursive dynamics of international peacebuilding illustrate how peace has become ever more elusive in contemporary international politics.

Resuscitating a Discipline: An Agenda for Critical Peace Research

Jutila, M., Pehkonen, S., Vayrynen, T. — 2008-07-10

In this article we write a narrative of the emergence and decline of Peace Research (PR), reflecting especially on its relationship to neighbouring disciplines. In writing this narrative we play critically with medical metaphors, which are often used in PR. We begin with an analysis of the development of PR as it has been practised in the two main journals, Journal of Conflict Resolution and Journal of Peace Research, and show how the initial critical and creative spirit of PR has turned into a `normal science' that does not reflect on its basic categories or its role in society. Then we show how PR could learn from the critical research agendas developed in Security Studies. In the last section we move beyond the academic critical research to a more reflexive and participatory agenda. The article concludes with an idea of Critical Peace Research as an epistemic community that can house a variety of approaches with a shared understanding of the importance of critical reflection, dialogue and creativity.

List of Books Reviewed

2008-07-10

Book Review: General International Relations: Alejandro Colas, Empire (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, 233 pp., $22.95 pbk., $59.95 hbk.)

Gorman, D. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Brock F. Tessman, International Relations in Action: A World Politics Simulation (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007, 138 pp., $16.95 pbk.)

Hallward, M. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Kerim Yildiz and Tanyel B. Taysi, The Kurds in Iran: The Past, Present and Future (London: Pluto Press, 2007, 134 pp., {pound}25.00 hbk.)

Kaya, Z. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Daniel H. Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, 391 pp., {pound}19.95 hbk.)

Mabee, B. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane (eds.), Anti-Americanisms in World Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007, 351 pp., $24.95 pbk., $55.00 hbk.)

Newnham, R. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Helle Malmvig, State Sovereignty and Intervention: A Discourse Analysis of Interventionary and Non-Interventionary Practices in Kosovo and Algeria (London and New York: Routledge, 2006, 199 pp., {pound}65.00 hbk.)

Sonnichsen, A. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Conflict and Peace Studies: Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War: Terror, Technology and Strategy in the Twenty First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 224 pp., {pound}17.99 pbk., {pound}42.75 hbk.)

Petersen, K. L. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Robert K. Brigham, Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (New York: Public Affairs, 2006, 224 pp., $24.00 hbk.)

McKechney, K. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Alex J. Bellamy, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006, 248 pp., {pound}17.99 pbk., {pound}55.00 hbk.): Brian Orend, The Morality of War (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006, 289 pp., {pound}16.99 pbk.)

Neu, M. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Aaron Hof, Building Trust: Overcoming Suspicion in International Conflict (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, 213 pp., $55.00 hbk.)

Pinfari, M. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, 153 pp., {pound}11.99 pbk., {pound}45.00 hbk.): Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, 281 pp., {pound}11.95 pbk., {pound}29.95 hbk.)

Ross, A. A.G. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Foreign Policy Analysis: Ian Shapiro, Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007, 132 pp., $24.95 hbk.)

Kenny, P. D. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Robert J. Jackson and Philip Towle, Temptations of Power: The United States in Global Politics after 9/11 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 228 pp., $16.99 pbk.)

Reeves, C. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Gender and Human Rights: David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention (London: Pluto Press, 2006, 304 pp., {pound}15.99 pbk.)

Birdsall, A. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Saladin Meckled-Garcia and Basak Cali, The Legalization of Human Rights: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights and Human Rights Law (London: Routledge, 2006, 208 pp., {pound}19.99 pbk.): Paul Gready (ed.), Fighting for Human Rights (London: Routledge, 2004, 198 pp., {pound}15.99 pbk., {pound}55.00 hbk.)

Dudai, R. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel (eds.), (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006, 252 pp., {pound}55.00 hbk.)

Gregory, T. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: R. Charli Carpenter, `Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2006, 230 pp., $85.95 hbk.): Laura Sjoberg, Gender, Justice and the Wars in Iraq: A Feminist Reformulation of Just War Theory (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006, 278 pp., $32.95 pbk.)

Shepherd, L. J. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Mary Kaldor, New & Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006 [1999], 231 pp., $30.86 pbk.)

Ahram, A. I. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Daniel Cohen, Globalization and Its Enemies (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006, 204 pp., $27.95 hbk.)

Vinayaraj, V.K. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: International History: Richard Tanter, Desmond Ball and Gerry van Klinken (eds.), Masters of Terror: Indonesia's Military and Violence in East Timor (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006, 218 pp., $26.95 pbk., $72.00 hbk.)

Bottomley, D.C. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Lawrence W. Serewicz, America at the Brink of Empire: Rusk, Kissinger, and the: Vietnam War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007, 235 pp., $40.00 hbk.)

Cooper, L. F. — 2008-07-10

Book Review: Religion and Politics: Peter D. Hershock, Buddhism in the Public Sphere: Reorienting Global Interdependence (London: Routledge, 2006, 229 pp., $120.00 hbk.)

Timmermans, P. — 2008-07-10

A `Shallow Piece of Naughtiness': George Orwell on Political Realism

Hall, I. — 2008-05-07

George Orwell's concern for political language and political morality has long been recognised, but his thought on `political realism' has not received the attention that it deserves, especially from scholars of International Relations. This article examines his treatment of realism in his journalism of the 1940s and in his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It argues that although Orwell's account, assembled from his study of the political discourse of his day and the work of contemporary intellectuals, was deeply flawed, it asked important questions about the account of political motivation underpinning realism. It suggests that Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four to satirise or parody the idea of `power-hunger' he thought realists depended upon and to demonstrate how realism might generate its own form of totalitarianism.

The Trouble with `Never Again!': Rereading Levinas for Genocide Prevention and Critical International Theory

Schiff, J. — 2008-05-07

After the Holocaust, the world said `Never again!' That declaration has since been repeated often, to no avail. The insufficiency of this declaration is symptomatic of a problem with redemptive politics: They might spur us into action to deliver the world from violence, cruelty and injustice, but they might also overwhelm us with paralysing responsibility and provoke a retreat into bad faith. Emmanuel Levinas offers a more sober, but also more promising, view of politics that resists redemptive aspirations. Critical international theorists have explored the resources that Levinas offers for thinking about world politics, but they have underestimated those resources because they have attributed to him a redemptive account of politics. From this perspective, they have criticised his infamous response to the massacres at Sabra and Chatila during Israel's war with Lebanon. Reconsidering his comments about that event, I defend Levinas and suggest that the charges against him stem from that misunderstanding of his view of politics. Once reconstructed, these comments point towards a challenging — but more productive — politics of disquietude that might inform a more constructive approach to the prevention of genocide.

Welcome to the `All-American' Fun House: Hailing the Disciplinary Neo-liberal Non-subject

Uluorta, H. M. — 2008-05-07

How is it possible that neo-liberalism can maintain its supremacy within the United States given present contradictions? In this article, I argue that the basis for this supremacy is consent. Making use of both neo-Gramscian and Lacanian theories, I focus on the potential consenting subject of neo-liberalism, what I refer to as the `All American'. However, this potential consenting subject is not truly a subject per se but an identification that constantly forms and re-forms in the reflective gaze of three signifying mirrors that constitute neoliberalism within the contemporary United States. These mirrors are capitalist-market, religious-moral and nationalist-patriotic. Together, they create the `All-American Funhouse', a site in which identity and desire are dialectically engaged toward the perpetuation of neo-liberal supremacy.

Out of Place: Re-thinking Diaspora and Empire

Varadarajan, L. — 2008-05-07

Much of the recent scholarly work analyzing the changes in the contemporary international system celebrates diasporas as embodying not just a break from the past, but the emergence of a new world order. This article presents a critical engagement with these claims — in particular, as they appear in two influential texts, Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire — to argue that the existence of diasporas should not be automatically understood as a challenge to structures of dominance at the international level. I make this argument by analyzing the constitutive relationship between imperialism and diasporas. Through an examination of the colonial diasporas created by the British Empire in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, I contend that significant continuities exist between past and present, and that they should caution us against an uncritical celebration of the role played by diasporas in the contemporary international system.

International Relations Theory: Hegemony or Pluralism?

Schmidt, B. — 2008-05-07

Debating Schmidt: Theoretical Pluralism in IR

Smith, S. — 2008-05-07

Cosmopolitanism vs. Terrorism? Discourses of Ethical Possibility Before and After 7/7

Brassett, J. — 2008-05-07

The article provides a critical analysis of the relationship between cosmopolitanism and terrorism, via the question of response. Using 9/11 and 7/7 as key moments in the evolution of this relationship, the article asks: how does cosmopolitanism respond to terrorism? What limits does this response contain? How might we go beyond such limits? It is argued that cosmopolitan responses to terrorism provide an important, but limited (and sometimes limiting), alternative to mainstream discourses on terror. After 9/11 the possibility for cosmopolitan thinking `beyond' the mainstream view was articulated by a range of authors, including Archibugi, Habermas, Held and Linklater. A brief survey suggests that defending international law, constructing international institutions and alleviating global poverty were seen as good responses, in the context of divisive mainstream politics. However, by engaging a case study of the Make Poverty History campaign, the article argues that when cosmopolitan ideas were cemented in practice, the distinctiveness of a cosmopolitan response faded. This point was brought into sharp relief by a number of moralising responses to 7/7. Straightforward dichotomies between `barbaric terrorists' and `civilised cosmopolitans' served to construct cosmopolitanism as a coherent, and united, global community. Available tactics, for this `community', were reduced to more-of-the-same — more aid, more global democracy — and assertions of a moral equivalence between Bush and `Terror', such that `you are either with cosmopolitans, or, you are with the War on Terror'. In light of these ethical closures, and drawing from the arguments of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, the article identifies some cursory ways in which cosmopolitans might think beyond such limits, to articulate an imaginative and engaged approach to global ethics.

Fear and Trust: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes and the War on Terror

O'Driscoll, C. — 2008-05-07

This paper examines the July 2005 shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube Station. It argues that the action of the police officers who shot and killed Menezes was conditioned by same logic that informs the prosecution of the war on terror. This logic bares comparison to the humanist conviction that states possess a right of response where they perceive themselves to have a `fear' of impending injury or assault. This paper explores the historical lineage of this trope in the writings of Alberico Gentili, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and, humanist thought more generally. The aim is to explore the politics of fear at work in Britain in the political climate defined by the war on terror, with a view to ascertaining how deep it runs and whether a politics of trust might offer a possible remedy to it.

Book Review: General International Relations: Neil E. Harrison, ed. Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, 213 pp., $60.00 hbk.)

Bloodgood, E. — 2008-05-07

Book Review: Jurgen Habermas, Time of Transitions (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2006, 188 pp., {pound}14.99/$22.95 pbk., {pound}45.00/$54.95 hbk.)

Dufour, F. G. — 2008-05-07

Book Review: Brunello Vigezzi, The British Committee on the Theory of International Politics (1954-1985): The Rediscovery of History (Milano: Edizioni Unicopli, 2005, 440 pp., 30.00 pbk.)

Hall, I. — 2008-05-07

Book Review: Henry R. Nau, Perspectives on International Relations: Power, Institutions, and Ideas (Washington, D. C.: C Q Press, 2007, 401pp., pbk.)

Humphreys, A. R.C. — 2008-05-07

Book Review: Volker Rittberger and Bernhard Zangl with Matthias Staisch, International Organization, Polity, Politics and Policies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 246 pp., {pound}19.99 pbk.)

Koch, M. — 2008-05-07

Book Review: Mark Neocleous. The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005, 152 pp., $39.95 pbk.)

Seri, G. — 2008-05-07

Conflict and Peace Studies: Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, 357 pp., $28.00/{pound}44.50 pbk, $28.00/{pound}18.00 hbk)

Chowdhury, A. — 2008-05-07

Book Review: Development and Environment: W. Bradnee Chambers & Jessica F. Green (eds.), Reforming International Environmental Governance: From Institutional Limits to Innovative Reforms (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2005, 234 pp., $30.00 pbk.)

Costa, O. — 2008-05-07

Book Review: Hakan Seckinelgin, The Environment and International Politics: International Fisheries, Heidegger and Social Method (London: Routledge, 2006, 213pp., $9.60 pbk.)

Karlsson, S. — 2008-05-07

Book Review: Foreign Policy Analysis: Paul D. Williams, British Foreign Policy Under New Labour, 1997--2005 (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 263 pp., 2005, {pound}50.00 hbk.)

Mccourt, D. — 2008-05-07

Book Review: Governments and Theories of Governance: April Carter, Direct Action and Democracy Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005, 298 pp., $28.95 pbk., $69.95 hbk.)

Davies, T. — 2008-05-07

Book Review: Simon Chesterman, Michael Ignatieff and Ramesh Thakur eds., Making States Work: State Failure and the Crisis of Governance (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2005, 400 pp., $45.00 pbk.)

Haesly, R. — 2008-05-07

Book Review: John Higley and Michael Burton, Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, 229 pp., $29.95 pbk.): G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Order & Imperial Ambition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006, 300 pp., $23.95 pbk.). Steven Slaughter, Liberty beyond Neo-Liberalism: A Republican Critique of Liberal Governance in a Globalising Age ( Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005, 257 pp., $69.95 pbk.)

Kamis, B. — 2008-05-07

Book Review: Integration and Transition: Gabriel Weinmann, Terror on the Internet: the New Arena, the New Challenges (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 320 pp., $24.95 hbk.). Michael Dartnell, Insurgency Online: Web Activism and Global Conflict (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006, 172 pp., $24.95/{pound}15.00 pbk., $65.00/{pound}42.00 hbk.)

Kifer, M. J. — 2008-05-07