It is only fair to readers that I declare my unusually personal interest in the book that is the principal subject of this review essay. I was a (overall favourable) reviewer of an early version of Plowshares into Swords—albeit for a university press other than the one finally chosen by Grant Hammond—as the author attests in a generous acknowledgement. In addition, and rather more to the point, Hammond suggests strongly that the conceptual provenance of his study owes some debt to a 1971 article of mine. In Hammond's words:

Since the publication in 1983 of the first edition of People, States and Fear, Barry Buzan's work has established itself—for European scholars, at least—as the canon and indispensable reference point for students of security. His book and the revisions of the second edition (1991) have been the stimulus for further exploration of the security problem at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Research in Copenhagen. Together with Buzan, the collaborators have produced several publications on the security theme, sufficiently interrelated to warrant the collective shorthand, the ‘Copenhagen school’ of security studies.

By now there is a very considerable volume of work on the general subject of women, women's rights, feminism and gender in international relations. This has both engendered and been engendered by the development of undergraduate and graduate courses and seminars on these themes. By contrast the allied discipline of international history has been slow to develop a parallel literature or courses. Courses in women's history per se have multiplied; there is a respectable literature and a number of equally respectable learned journals, not only in the Englishspeaking countries, but also in Western Europe. But their concern has been very much focused on the issues of women in each particular society; they have tended, that is, to develop the study of women within the study of the history of a particular country, political culture or linguistic region. Confronted with questions about the lack of similar courses in the history of international relations, historians drawn from both sexes have tended either to take them as a comic act or to indicate that in their view there is a lack of relevant material or issues adequate to justify any isolation of the topic from the more general themes of inter-state relations, with the great issues of peace and war with which as members of the discipline they are chiefly concerned.

For some students of world politics, Clio has always been their primary muse. Nestling between the rival peaks of philosophy and poetry, she has always seemed a secure shelter for those who think of their concern as ‘what human beings do and suffer'. With recent doctrinal storms still howling around the increasingly windblown scholarly communities that constitute international studies, it is hardly surprising that the heavenly sister is more popular than ever. During the course of the twentieth century, moreover, Clio has claimed many of the best-known scholars of world politics (if not always the most influential academically), and many historians have left their mark on political science and international studies.

Writing about the United States and its highly ambivalent relationship to the United Nations, Conor Cruise O'Brien once noted how, in ‘the land which houses the United Nations, and which does most both to support and to use it, discussion of the functioning of the United Nations is almost all on [a] quas-supernatural plane, whether it be in terms of the strengthened Platonic UN, or in terms of a UN of evil enchantment—God or the Devil’. With some exaggeration, much the same can be said about the public debate of the UN's role in international relations in recent years. It is heartening, therefore, as the UN celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, to see a growing number of studies prepared to examine critically the performance of the organization; to explore its possibilities in a world where interdependence and transnational processes require greater cooperation; but also to acknowledge its limitations in the same world where the autonomy and primacy of the state remain unchallenged in vital spheres of activity.

The focus of inquiry for a critical, post-positivist International Relations requires a shift away from concern over universalist epistemological legitimacy and a move towards understanding the ontological underpinnings of international social, political, and economic life. Recent debates over the ‘agency—structure problem’, as represented in the Wendt vs Hollis and Smith debate and more recently in the latter's response to Walter Carlsnaes, have centred around Hollis and Smith's assertion that there are always ‘two stories to tell’, both ontological and epistemological, and that because of an assumed causal relationship between agency and structure, epistemology is as important as ontology, or stands on the same footing. In providing two further stories in our reply to Hollis and Smith, we argue firstly, that an ontological discourse, such as that suggested in Giddens's theory of structuration, must precede substantive epistemological questions, and secondly, that an assumed universalist epistemology negates difference in international social life.

In their rejoinder to our recent article, Vivienne Jabri and Stephen Chan argue that we have privileged epistemology at the expense of ontology. We welcome this engagement with our continuing discussion of the relationship between epistemology and ontology in international relations theory, and will confine our response to three main points: their interpretation of our argument, their use of the work of Giddens, and their arguments about the nature of epistemology in International Relations.