Good journals attract good contributors. They also come up with good ideas for special issues, and thereby help to lead debate as well as reflect it. The Review of International Studies has now consolidated the breakthrough made by last year's special issue on ‘the Eighty Years Crisis’ of International Relations, by producing another collection of essays around a big theme which transcends the various specialisms and sub-divisions of the profession.

Here the big theme is the nature of the international system after the end of the Cold War. Historians might say that it is too early to tell what structural changes (if any) might have been brought about by the dramatic events of 1989–91, but other social scientists will not be discouraged from analytical speculation, bearing in mind that if Chou En Lai was right about even 200 years being insufficient to judge the impact of the French Revolution, we may as well chance our arm right from the start. A diverse and distinguished group of contributors has been brought together by the editors—themselves noted authorities on the Cold War and its aftermath—to deal with all the major aspects of the problem, geographical and thematic.

A particularly interesting strand running through all the articles in this collection is the way in which the end of the Cold War raises issues at all levels: for the state system, for world society, for the international political economy/global capitalism, and for the domestic affairs of particular countries.