We live in an interconnected, hyper-mediated world. A plethora of communications surrounds our everyday lives and polities, whilst new media and technologies have brought forth possibilities for, and ways of, communicating across space and time. Long-distance communication and travelling, the accelerated flow of information, ideas, images and sounds across national and other frontiers, the construction of multinational urban centres and global media corporations, the live broadcasting and commercialisation of major events and crises, the expansion of global advertising, spin and political marketing, and the advent of the Internet, have modified and complicated the reality of national, international and transnational relationships. This very collection of essays was made possible via the Internet to connect the Editors, based in different locations and while they were travelling. This is now the norm. Slightly more unusually, yet underlining the growing potential of this area, a workshop held at the University of St Andrews in November 2006 brought some of the contributors together both physically and virtually through the medium of Skype. Physical presence has long not been necessary in order to communicate, influence, or indeed, coerce.

For anti-cosmopolitan critics, cosmopolitanism is equated with the universalisation of a particular, liberal, account of justice and is therefore problematic for a number of reasons. The liberal principle ‘do no harm’ principle – and the cosmopolitan principle of humanitarianism, can be used to correct the depiction of cosmopolitanism as hostile to ‘pluralism’, to identify the universalism that is latent or undeveloped in much ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’, and to identify further means of reconciling these positions. A cosmopolitan harm principle argues that the absence of a universal conception of justice should not provide an obstacle to the recognition of an obligation to limit transboundary harms.

Recent trends in international law scholarship recycle objections to international law advanced by an earlier generation of political and legal realists. Such objections fail to understand the place of international law in the global order. To understand that place, we must distinguish the idea of the rule of law from other understandings of law. That idea is an inherently moral one. Theories of international law that ignore the moral element in law cannot distinguish law as a constraint on power from law as an instrument of power. A Kantian theory of international law can help to recover that moral element.

This article investigates Morgenthau’s views on the ethics of scholarship and argues that all his works should be read in the light of his central goal: speaking truth to power. Doing so demonstrates that for Morgenthau, a realist theory of international politics includes two dimensions: it is supposed to explain international relations, but it is also, fundamentally, a critical project which questions the existing status quo. While the explanatory dimension of realism is debated at great length, its critical dimension is consistently overlooked by the more recent, self-named ‘critical’ approaches which tend to present the two adjectives ‘realist’ and ‘critical’ as mutually exclusive. This amounts to an insidious high-jacking of the very adjective critical, which in most cases merely signals one does not espouse a realist perspective. This is highly problematic as it obscures the fact that for Morgenthau, the founding father of realism, political science is by definition a subversive and revolutionary force critical of the existing order. Highlighting the critical dimension that lies at the core of the realist project as formulated by Morgenthau therefore challenges the current narrow use of the adjective ‘critical’ in the discipline and leads to reclaim it for the realist tradition.

This interview was conducted over the Internet between February and April 2006. Armand Mattelart is Emeritus Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Paris VIII. From 1962 to 1973 he was Professor of Sociology of Population and Communication at the Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, and United Nations expert in social development. During the Popular Unity period (1970–73), he worked with the Government of President Salvador Allende until the military coup of September 1973, when he was expelled from Chile. Between 1975 and 1982, he taught at the University of Paris VII and Paris VIII, and, between 1983 and 1997, as founding member of the Communications Department at the University of Rennes 2 (Haute-Bretagne). He has carried out numerous research and teaching missions in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. His research interests include communication theory and history, media studies and international communication. He has authored and co-authored numerous books, translated into many languages, including: Advertising International: The Privatization of Public Space (1991); Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture (1994), The Invention of Communication (1996), Networking the World 1794–2000 (2000), The Information Society: An Introduction (2003), and, with Michèle Mattelart, Rethinking Media Theory: Signposts and New Directions (1992); The Carnival of Images: Brazilian Television Fiction (1990) and Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction (1998). His most recent book, published in French, is: La Globalisation de la Surveillance: Aux Origines de l’Ordre Sécuritaire (September 2007).

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.

This article defends the case for a global extension of democracy by deploying a cosmo-federalist theory. As a response to the current state of international exclusion, the radical project of stretching the paradigm of democratic inclusion to the extreme limits encompassing the whole of mankind, is here presented. The article begins by taking position for a choice-based version of consequentialism that generates a principle of political justice centred on political participation. From this, a political project is developed that envisages a cosmopolitan system where all world citizens are included within a scheme of a direct representative participation under an overarching authority governing the process of democratising world affairs. Crucial in this is the establishment of an all-inclusive authority to legitimately delineate jurisdictional boundaries and a multilayered system of political interaction.

This article deploys a historical analysis of the relationship between law and imperialism to highlight questions about the character and role of international law in global politics. The involvement of two British international lawyers in practices of imperialism in Africa during the late nineteenth century is critically examined: the role of Travers Twiss (1809–1897) in the creation of the Congo Free State and John Westlake’s (1828–1913) support for the South African War. The analysis demonstrates the inescapably political character of international law and the dangers that follow from fusing a particular form of liberal moralism with notions of legal hierarchy. The historical cases raise ethico-political questions, the importance of which is only heightened by the character of contemporary world politics and the attention accorded to international law in recent years.

The commonplace view that the intellectual roots of Hans J. Morgenthau’s Realist theory lie in conservative central European political traditions (such as Bismarckian Realpolitik) requires modification. The young Morgenthau was a protégé of one of Weimar Germany’s most prominent left-wing legal thinkers and barristers, Hugo Sinzheimer, a committed Social Democrat who influenced many young jurists who hoped to pursue a peaceful, legally-based transition to democratic socialism. Although Morgenthau’s biographers have acknowledged his close personal ties to Sinzheimer, they have ignored the ways in which his early work was directly influenced by Sinzheimer’s left-wing legal sociology. Morgenthau’s initial rendition of Realism took the form of a critical-minded sociology of law, inspired by Sinzheimer, which aimed to bring about fundamental reforms to the international system. Only after the demise of the democratic Left did Morgenthau begin to shed his reformist faith in the possibility of legally based global reform. His mature version of Realism can be interpreted as a response to his disillusionment with the politically progressive and socially reformist vision of law championed by the interwar democratic Left.

David Hume’s ideas on international relations are different than most international relations academics suppose. Close scrutiny of Hume’s views on the nation, international society, war, balance of power, empire and trade reveals the need to reassess his place within international political theory. Taking an English School perspective, the analysis also shows the possible benefits for IR theorists within this tradition to focus on Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, which will also strengthen the position of the pluralist perspective within international society.

This article begins from the observation that while communication is a widely used catch-phrase in current IR theorising, the very concept of ‘communication’ is still mainly treated in terms of simple sender-receiver models which do not sufficiently elaborate how the insights of the ‘communicative turn’ can be made fruitful for IR theorising. The argument is developed in three steps. First – particularly drawing on the work of Karl W. Deutsch – we identify those pockets in IR theory, namely conflict studies and theories of ‘communicative action’, in which ‘communication’ plays a considerable theoretical role. Second, it is claimed that placing ‘communication’ at the centre of any theory of IR requires taking full account of the theoretical consequences of the ‘linguistic turn’. To develop this argument requires an examination of the often implicit notion of ‘communication’ in contemporary uses of speech act theory and symbolic interactionism in current IR theory. Such a move necessarily leads to the diagnosis that all social systems and orders of exchange, including international relations, are communicatively constituted. Finally, such a view enables a reconfiguration of the central problems of ‘order’ and ‘conflict’ in IR theory in an innovative fashion: while the problem of order can be restated not as the problem of establishing regularities and patterns but as a problem of disconnecting communications, the problem of conflict can be restated not as a problem of a disruption of communication but as a problem of continuing conflict communication.

The official US attitude towards the prosecution of crimes against humanity and war crimes changed dramatically from the universality of Nuremberg to the exceptionalism of the Rome Treaty negotiation. This article argues that the history of US legal thinking indicates that both stances are the result of a conceptual battle between legal realism and legal idealism – strains of international legal thought that pose a battle of opposites which is never fully resolved into a coherent approach. Although Nuremberg would seem to illustrate the idealist extreme and the abstention from Rome the realist one, in fact both stances were the culmination of intense negotiation and argumentation between the two strains of thought.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in questions about justice after war (jus post bellum), fuelled in large part by moral questions about coalition operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a result, it has become common to argue that jus post bellum is a third strand of Just War thinking. This article evaluates this position. It argues that that there are broadly two ways of understanding moral requirements after war: a minimalist position which holds that moral principles derived largely from jus ad bellum and jus in bello concerns should constrain what victors are entitled to do after war and a maximalist position which holds that victors acquire additional responsibilities that are grounded more in liberalism and international law than in Just War thinking. Finding problems with both approaches, the article argues that it is premature to include jus post bellum as a third element of Just War thinking and concludes by setting out six principles to guide future thinking in this area.

This article asks the question: ‘Why have the French not developed ‘‘think tanks’’?’ by looking at the period when such institutions were being set up in The UK and the United States, during the preparation for the Paris Peace Conference and its aftermath. It is suggested that the reasons were a mixture of French bureaucratic and intellectual disposition but also in a growing revulsion in Paris at what was seen as duplicity and conspiracy by its Allies to ignore the legitimate concerns and needs of the French people. The central source material used is the papers of the ‘Commission Bourgeois’ whose deliberations are often rather air brushed out of academic literature on the period and work done within the French Foreign Ministry.

Although analysis in IR and IPE has increasingly started to focus on non-state actors and the information society, the role of the legal architecture of the Internet has been relatively under-analysed in terms of the structural power around communication interfaces. In this article I suggest the work of Lewis Mumford offers a useful lens for thinking about the political economy of technological change in an information society. I set out the role of intellectual property rights as the legal form of the global information society, and suggest a major challenge to this legal form is the idea of ‘openness’, specifically in the realm of open-source and/or free software. I examine this issue in the realm of (so-called) informational development, where major proprietary players (predominantly Microsoft) have been confronted by an increasingly vibrant open-source alternative. The open-source and free-software movements can be analysed as an emerging example of a globalised ‘double movement’, seeking to re-embed the tools of informational development in a societal realm of information, establishing in Mumford’s terms a ‘democratic technics’ as a reaction to the programme of information and knowledge commodification spurred by the TRIPs agreement.

This discussion focuses on the content of the responsibility to protect the norm. It specifically addresses the historical roots and development of the norm by describing its fundamental differences from the doctrine of humanitarian intervention. The legal heart of the responsibility to protect concept and questions of when and how the norm is engaged are also examined. Finally, the discussion explores the role that the UN institutions can play in interpreting and applying the norm, as well as the mechanisms of cooperation in protection available to the international community.

This article argues that minority rights developed as an indemnity offered to defeated parties. As a grudging and begrudged calculus of compensation, considered inadequate by the vanquished and offensive by the victors, minority rights have been unable to compete in terms of legitimacy with either an increasingly robust international human rights regime or with the right of national self-determination. After reviewing some explanations for the weakness of the existing minority rights regime, this article traces the rationale of what may be described anachronistically as minority rights provisions in international treaties from the Peace of Westphalia to the Versailles settlement, concluding with a consideration of present-day implications of the argument elaborated here.

By remaining epistemologically committed to an outdated distinction between facts and values, traditional definitions of legitimacy either divest the concept of an important critical component or fail to properly anchor it in the social reality. As an alternative, the article proposes a constitutive theory of legitimacy that reconciles the epistemological tension via the concepts of fairness and tractability and bridges the theoretical gap via the concept of deliberative legitimacy. By applying it to the issue of the use of force, the article argues that a normatively sound and politically relevant model of legitimacy must take into account both to the manner in which actors’ commitment to social norms is crafted and the type of conditions that facilitate or constrain the definition, contestation, and adjudication of what counts as legitimacy in a particular political context.

This article employs newly declassified documents from the National Archives in Washington and London to re-examine foreign policymaking of the Nixon Administration during the Cienfuegos crisis of 1970. The article seeks to answer two fundamental questions with regard to policy decision-making during the crisis: why did the Administration pursue a public policy of ‘business as usual’ while cloaking the crisis in extreme secrecy, and how was this achieved? Answers to these questions can be found in the unique situation the Administration found itself during the ‘Autumn of Crises’, and in Kissinger’s manipulation of NSC mechanisms and procedures, respectively.