This article starts from the premise that empathy is an inherent part of social and political life but that this is not sufficiently theorised in International Relations (IR). Building on the burgeoning debates on emotions in world politics, it argues that the study of empathy should be developed more rigorously by establishing an interdisciplinary and critical framework for understanding the experiences and processes of empathy in IR. The central contribution of the article is twofold: firstly, it highlights limitations of the dominant perspective on empathy in IR, and secondly, it argues that a range of meanings may be attributed to empathy when examined within the sociopolitical conditions of particular contexts. Drawing on research on the conflict in Israel and Palestine, the article identifies and articulates two such alternative interpretations: empathy as non-violent resistance and as a strategy of normalisation.

American grand strategy has undergone repeated changes in recent years. This essay clarifies the nature of those changes and offers an explanation for them. US foreign policymakers have had four basic strategic alternatives: a strategy of disengagement; a strategy of balance of power; a strategy of primacy; and a strategy of liberal internationalism. The Bush administration experimented with two of these strategies, and initiated two major strategic adjustments after coming into power: the first, early in 2001, by moving from Clinton's liberal internationalist approach towards a strategy of realism; the second, after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, by moving from a realist approach towards a strategy of American primacy. International structural pressures cannot explain why either of these changes occurred. The real explanation lies in the influence of distinctive policy ideas, as promoted by leading state officials. The irony of this twofold strategic adjustment is that the realists of the Bush administration have returned to many of the Wilsonian assumptions that characterised the Clinton years.

A study of ethics must be regarded as incomplete if it does not offer tools for analysing moral problems arising in the international context, particularly in an age of growing interdependence between the peoples of the world. Similarly, a study of international relations must be thought to be imperfect if it leaves out normative questions.

To this it may be objected that International Relations is an empirical discipline, and that it can legitimately leave normative considerations to moral philosophers. However, such a division of labour is unfortunately more likely to result in mere division rather than efficient co-operation. Moreover, international relations, the subject-matter, is logically, as well as historically, prior to International Relations, the academic discipline. Therefore, a study of international relations, undertaken by International Relations experts, cannot be claimed to be complete if it neglects those aspects of the subject-matter which have occupied the minds of many thinkers who do not consider themselves as IR specialists.

This article contributes to current debates about Just War by analysing an insufficiently recognised problem with the way Just War theorists have responded to the two principal challenges surrounding the ethics of violence in international relations since the end of the Cold War – humanitarian intervention and the ‘global war on terror’. The problem focuses on strongly embedded assumptions that exist in contemporary Just War debates about the nature and meaning of territory. The article argues that Just War needs to engage more systematically with challenges to dominant ‘Westphalian’ framings of territory, space and scale in order to contribute more effectively to important ethical debates about the use of violence in international relations.

Chairs have a significant potential effect on the bargaining structure and conduct of multilateral negotiations, addressing collective action problems that arise in decentralised bargaining. We examine the role of the Chair as a policy entrepreneur in multilateral negotiations, identifying the parameters that increase the Chair's entrepreneurship potential and condition the outcome of the Chair's entrepreneurial activities. We cluster the identified parameters in three groups of organisational attributes, comprising the Chair's mandate, available resources and (formal) constraints, in particular decision-making rules. We use this typology to analyse four important case studies within the UN setting.

This article aims to understand the phenomenon of international terrorism by wedding a constructivist understanding of terrorism with an overview of the historical evolution of the state. The Westphalian state has replaced three types of authority: religious, personal and local. Political challenges to the modern international system inevitably derive their claim to legitimacy from one of these other forms of authority. I argue that there is a correlation between the kind of legitimacy claim a ‘terrorist’ cause is based on and how threatening we find the activities based on that claim. The less the distance between the unrecognised legitimacy claim on the one hand and the principles conferring legitimacy in the modern states system on the other, the less ontologically threatening we find the claimants to be. All historical variants of modern ‘terrorism’ fall into one of two categories of disruptive activity. They are either based in claims to local authority and target only particular states, or in claims to personal and/or religious authority and reject the modern states system altogether. Groups labelled as terrorist can therefore be classified as system-affirming or system-threatening. The former is a contained problem, but the latter has followed geographically broadening spread pattern throughout the international system.

Gramscian theory has had a profound influence on critical and Marxist thought within International Relations (IR), particularly in bringing an alternative understanding to the realist concept of hegemony. Despite these developments much Gramscian theory remains developed within the often narrow sub-discipline of International Political Economy (IPE), with Gramscian scholars such as Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and Ernesto Laclau from diverse disciplines outside of IR largely ignored. This article argues that Gramscian theory needs to be re-thought so that it moves away from the Coxian dominated ontology that it is currently situated within, towards one which both provides a more open theory of global hegemony and engages more with civil societal areas that have often been ignored by those within IPE.

Both relationality and separateness are aspects of our everyday lives. How we engage these phenomena hinges on the particular existential assumptions that we take for granted. Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), both relationality and separateness have informed how global politics is studied and practiced. How states and their relations are conceived has, for instance, varied by the distinct degrees of privilege given to separation and interconnection: from notions of completely autonomous units like billiard balls to always emergent phenomena co-constituted through relations. The plurality of trajectories that inform this Special Issue illustrate how much broader the spectrum of relational engagement can be when we are cognisant of the impact of these existential assumptions on forms of life, knowing, and knowledge production in International Relations. By highlighting a spectrum of relational engagement, we raise important questions about the way the various knowledge frames in IR are acknowledged, legitimised, limited, and reproduced.

The development of a ‘practice turn’ in International Relations promises to reconstitute IR theory around the study of embodied practices. Despite occasional references to Judith Butler’s work, the contributions of feminist and queer theory are under recognised in existing work. In this piece I note the distinctive approach to gender as a practice represented by Butler and other feminist/queer theorists for its emphasis on intelligibility and failure, particularly the importance on ‘competently’ practising gender in order to established as an intelligible subject. Given the centrality of ‘competency’ in ‘practice turn’ literature, theorising practice from the perspective of ‘gender failures’ sheds light on the embedded exclusions within this literature. To demonstrate the stakes of this critique, I discuss airport security practices, a growing area of interest to IR scholars, in terms of the experiences of trans- and gender non-conforming people. I argue that such practices ultimately complicate success/failure binaries. I conclude by considering the political stakes of practising theory in IR and how competency in theory is similarly marked by the exclusion of feminist/queer work.

This article considers the rise and fall of the first institution of international academic cooperation on international relations, the International Studies Conference (ISC), which was established in 1928 and continued activities into the 1950s. Its formation preceded by decades the present ISA as well as the international organisation of political scientists. The demise of the ISC was a result of the failings of the ISC itself, the influence of UNESCO especially its Department of Social Sciences, and the challenge posed to the ISC by the formation of the International Political Science Association.

Rudolf Kjellén was an important politicalscientist during the first half of this century. He is perhaps the most influential Scandinavianpolitical scientist ever. Together with the political geographer Fredrich Ratzel, Kjellén wasthe founder of the German geopolitical school. All his major works were translated into German, butthey were, to my knowledge, never translated into English. They were important sources of inspirationfor the leading geopolitical theorist and military general, Karl Haushofer.Karl Haushofer, Grenzen in ihrer geographischen und politischen Bedeutung (BerlinGrünewald: Kurt Vowinckel Verlag, 1927); Dan Diner, ‘Grundbuch desPlaneten’—Zur Geopolitik Karl Haushofer, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte,32: 1 (1984), pp. 1–28; Barbro Lewin, Johan Skytte och de skytteanska professorerna[Johan Skytte and the Skyttean Professors]. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis (Skrifterutgivna av Statsvetenskapliga föreningen i Uppsala, 100), (Stockholm: Almqvist & WiksellInternational, 1985); Rainer Sprengel, ‘Land und Meer—Eine diskursanalytischeBetrachtung’, WeltTrends (1994), pp. 61–84. By the time of his visit toSweden in 1935, Haushofer was about to publish the 25th German edition of Kjellén'sDie Grossmächte [The Great Powers].EdwardThermænius, ‘Geopolitik och politisk geografi’ [Geopolitics and PoliticalGeography], Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, 19 (1937), pp. 213–328. The idea that states were not fixed juridicial entities but dynamic organisms competing on theinternational scene, was something that appealed to Haushofer. He was to fuse this thought withRatzel's concept of Lebensraum, that was later to reachHitler.

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.

Political cosmopolitanism comes in many different shapes and sizes. Despite its intellectual diversity, cosmopolitanism typically agrees on one crucial matter: any prospective global democracy is best envisioned not in terms of a hierarchical world state, but instead as a multilayered system of global governance resting on an unprecedented dispersion of decision-making authority. In discarding traditional ideas of world government, cosmopolitans typically succumb to a series of mistakes. First, they presuppose unfairly dismissive accounts of world government. Second, they misleadingly contrast their own multilayered and (allegedly) institutionally novel vision to early modern (for example, Hobbesian) ideas of sovereignty, or to Max Weber's influential definition of the modern state. They thus obscure the fact that the modern state's diverse manifestations can only be partly grasped by ideal-types drawn from either Hobbes or Weber. Consequently, they depend on straw person accounts of the modern state. Third, envisioning their proposals as building on the familiar ideal of institutional checks and balances, they misconstrue the contribution that checks and balances can make to global-level democracy. Their hostility to statist ideas about global democracy notwithstanding, their proposals sometimes mimic core attributes of traditional statehood, and they tend inadvertently to ‘bring the state back in’ to global democracy.

Conventional understandings of security cooperation are rooted in the state-centric and materialist assumptions dominant in the Cold War and subscribe to the dictum of the Reagan years, ‘trust but verify’. In today's more complex setting, however, governance arrangements with the most potential to address constantly mutating security threats, such as the concern over nuclear terrorism, may not be those solely designed to ensure compliance, but rather those that are better equipped to identify and solve new problems. This article draws on a burgeoning literature on ‘new’ or ‘experimental’ governance and advances an analytical framework to consider the extent to which states and other actors might be turning toward an alternative set of mechanisms that rely more heavily on non-binding standards and recommendations, peer review, increased participation, and experimentation to generate new knowledge about the challenges they face, even in the ‘hard’ case of security cooperation. It then explores this potential reorientation in two separate, but complementary cases that have emerged as key tools in preventing illicit nuclear proliferation: the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF), which seeks to bolster states' counter-financing of terrorism systems, and the UNSC Resolution 1540 Committee, which guides efforts to fill the governance gaps in the nuclear non-proliferation regime. Although both cases on paper contain more traditional enforcement components, in practice they rely increasingly on experimental governance. The article concludes with an evaluation of the promise and limits of an experimentalist framework in understanding the evolution of governance arrangements in response to a more complex security environment and suggests potential avenues for future research.

Global benchmarks (re)shape political conversations and institutionalise authoritative languages. It does not necessarily follow, however, that benchmarks can exert a lasting or significant influence over policies and behaviour of benchmarked actors. We analyse how the World Bank uses benchmarks to manage its relations with both donors and recipient governments. We analyse the role of the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA), both at headquarters and in relation to the recent history of two countries in Africa: Ethiopia and Malawi. We find that the CPIA is not – and contrary to what one would expect from the CPIA’s nominal function and the literature on benchmarks – a very important tool for signalling incentives and allocating funds, or shaping the policy dialogue or the World Bank’s strategy in these two countries. Rather, the CPIA is used highly selectively as one factor among many in the negotiations between World Bank staff and governments. We conclude that the CPIA helps establish the World Bank as an actor that embodies global authority on development issues, including with donors, but that there is a tension between such global authority on the one hand, and concrete authority to shape policy in domestic contexts, on the other.

What are we to make of the neoconservative challenge to traditional international thought? Should we content ourselves, as many have done, to return to classical realism in response? Rather than offer another realist assessment of neoconservative foreign policy this article turns to Hannah Arendt. In a very different language, Arendt articulated a critique of the dangers of moralism in the political realm that avoids realist cynicism. She is also better placed to challenge the neoconservative vision of international affairs, ideological conviction, and their relationship to democratic society. Reading Arendt against Leo Strauss suggests that the fundamental problem with neoconservative ideology concerns its understanding of the place of philosophy in the public realm, the relationship between political thought and practice, ideas and action. She suggests why neoconservatives may be experts at selling wars but seem less adept at winning them.

Based on considerable archival research in Switzerland and France, this article considers the creation of specialised institutions and centres for scientific research, discussion and information on international questions after the First World War. It analyses the origins and development of the International Studies Conference from 1928 until 1946, and it pays particular attention to the institutional setting provided by the ISC. With the help of an international questionnaire of the League of Nations from the early 1930s the article also discusses the university teaching of IR in the US, Great Britain and on the European continent in the interwar period, and it looks at some of the institutional settings, especially academic institutions (departments, chairs, schools and so on), that were available at the time.

The rise of China has sparked a debate about the economic and political consequences for the global economy of the internationalisation of the renminbi. We argue that the dominant focus of this literature – primarily the external conditions and requirements for a national currency to become an international currency – misspecifies the connections between the international and domestic requirements for currency internationalisation, as well as the potential to become the dominant international reserve currency. We correct this oversight by developing an integrated theoretical framework that highlights the domestic adjustment costs which a state must accommodate before its currency can carry the weight of internationalisation. These costs constitute a critical element of an international currency’s ‘political economy’, and they force states to negotiate contentious social trade-offs among competing domestic claims on finite public resources in a sustainable manner. Our analysis suggests that the likelihood of China being able to successfully negotiate the social costs associated with running a fully internationalised currency is currently very low, precisely because this will place unacceptable pressure on groups benefiting from the economic and political status quo. This further suggests that the American dollar will remain unchallenged as the global economy’s pre-eminent international currency for the foreseeable future.

This article argues that hierarchy plays an important role in shaping the practice of intervention, and that the changing nature of international hierarchy is a crucial part of the story of how the modern practice of intervention emerged. It describes the early modern order of precedence, and contends that it was ill-suited to encouraging people to recognise intervention as a distinctive kind of practice. However, over the course of the eighteenth century the structure of international hierarchy changed, with the emergence of a new kind of grading of powers, which provided the context for the development of a practice of intervention after 1815.

Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict and the International System, Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner, 1995