It took some time for Labour and Conservative politicians to come to terms with the modest though useful role that Britain performed in Asia after the withdrawal from the Indian sub-continent. Old perceptions and postures were slow to fade aways a fact that was clearly demonstrated by their response to the ANZUS treaty. For three years nostalgia and a desire to remain a global power distorted their assessment of this new pact in the western Pacific. They were far more myopic on this occasion than their military and civilian advisers, who found it easier to adjust to the post-imperial situation.

Over the last few years the term common security has come into widespread use in debates about military policy. To date, however, this potentially important concept has not acquired any clear or generally accepted meaning. It is used by a variety of writers with quite different purposes in mind, and is therefore in danger of degenerating into an empty phrase. This article tries to bring common security into sharper focus. It starts by examining the general meaning of common security in terms of its core insight that the security of states in the contemporary international system is fundamentally interdependent. It goes on to test this meaning against the contents of four recent books all of which specifically address the idea. The discussion centres on the possible linkages between common security as an overall policy objective on the one hand, and a variety of specific policies for implementing it—including disarmament, arms control, minimum deterrence, and non-provocative defence–on the other. The next section makes the argument that a combination of minimum deterrence and non-provocative defence provides the most logically convincing implementation strategy for common security.

The undisputed proliferation of international organizations has been interpreted in several ways by members of the scholarly community. Probably most see the explosion in numbers and kinds of actors as a peripheral development; in the realist and neo-realist tradition, the primacy of the state and the state system remains largely unaffected. Others are sceptical of what the trend means and so have developed research agendas examining more closely international organization influence on states and impact on issues. Yet few international relations scholars have paid attention to what this proliferation means for relations among various organizations and its effects on states. However, with so many of these organizations involved in economic development activities, it is very likely that these organizations willingly and sometimes unwittingly encounter each other particularly in Third World countries. Rumours abound of IGOs and NGOs ‘stumbling over each other’ in the capitals of Sahelian countries vying for the attention of too few government officials, leading to negative impacts on policy. In Indo-China, Gordenker finds ‘increasing friction and clogging’ from the rapid expansion of United Nations High Commission for Refugees activities, as they intersect with the International Red Cross, Unicef, and private voluntary organizations. Yet not all interaction is conflictual. Nongovernmental aid agencies in Thailand co-operate closely, as do the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Kenya.

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.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 has prompted a large number of scholars and journalists to embark on the analysis of Afghan affairs. Even before the invasion, much valuable material was available in Western languages to the interested reader. The internal politics of Afghanistan had been studied by Louis Dupree, Vartan Gregorian, Hasan Kakar, Leon B. Poullada, and Richard S. Newell; Maxwell J. Fry and Gilbert Etienne had analysed the Afghan economy; and Afghanistan's international relations had been examined in detail by Ludwig W. Adamec. Indeed, a recent bibliography of works on Afghanistan has listed no fewer than 1,611 items dealing with Afghan history and politics. None the less, had it not been for the Soviet invasion, the study of Afghanistan would surely have remained the province of a few cognoscenti. In the wake of the invasion, however, a large body of literature on Afghanistan has been published, containing works varying in quality from the outstanding to the atrocious. An appraisal of the relative merits of some of the more widely cited studies therefore seems to be in order.

Over recent years the birth of the post-war world—of the East—West divide in Germany and Europe; the Soviet preponderance in the East; and the Atlantic alliance—has come to exert an enormous attraction over academics and students, and as the archives have been opened in Britain, America and elsewhere, the year 1945 has ceased to be a 'barrier' for historical studies.