Most commentators on the 1949 sterling crisis have viewed it as an episode with implications merely for the management of the British economy. This paper, based on the public records now available, discusses the impact of the crisis on British economic foreign policy. In particular it suggests that the crisis revealed deep Anglo-American differences, centring on the nature of the Marshall Plan, on the international value of the sterling area, and on the proper relationship between the United Kingdom and Western Europe, Ultimately the British succeeded in resolving these disagreements: but this triumph ironically implied both the defeat of British aims in post-war European reconstruction and a long term delusion that great power status could be maintained on the basis of a special relationship-with the United States.

This paper offers an analysis of some of the problems arising in those international disputes concerning issues of public international law which do not present any proximate threat to international peace or security. It does so in the context of an examination of procedures for settling disputes over jurisdiction in public international law, disputes of the kind which arose in 1982 when the United States’ right to control—that is, its jurisdiction over—exports from Western Europe to the Soviet Union was challenged by the EEC and its member states. The analysis is also intended to have general relevance to all international legal disputes in which individuals are directly involved as disputants with or alongside states.

Surprisingly little systematic research has been completed on evaluating the impact of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) at a time when participation in their activities has come under close scrutiny. Both theoretical weaknesses and methodological inadequacies plague researchers who are interested in the effects of outcomes on affected parties, be they intergovernmental organizations, governments or, ultimately, individuals. In this paper, we examine the problems confronting this type of research and assess the strategies so far employed to overcome some of these shortcomings. We shall also examine some approaches appropriate to generating hypotheses concerning IGO impact and propose a comprehensive framework suitable for further research.

June 1985 marked the fortieth anniversary of the opening of the San Francisco conference on international organization that adopted the UN charter. This period, distinguished by the absence of war between the superpowers, is double the period that elapsed between 1918 and 1939. It was the hope and intention of those gathered at San Francisco that their labours would produce an institutional framework of collective security in which a recurrence of the conditions and behaviour that characterized the inter-war period could be avoided.

In reviewing any set of books, it is not often that one has the pleasure of welcoming an obvious classic. There is one here: John Vasquez's The Power of Power Politics, and much of this review article will be devoted to saying why. The other books fit together with it very well. They comprise two undergraduate textbooks, by Chan and by Russett and Starr; two lively contributions from the redoubtable John Burton; and an interesting collection of papers on the inter-paradigm debate, edited and commented upon in a rather muddled way by Maghroori and Ramberg. In different ways, all the books are concerned with the same two problems. How can we explain international relations? And how should we present to students what we think we know about it?

The problem of strategy in the nuclear age is simple–how to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war. Unfortunately, the solution to the problem is far from simple, Philip Lawrence's belief that students of strategic studies do not appreciate the moral, political and military complexities of the issues is both unfair and unscrupulous. To be sure, strategic studies like most disciplines has its fair share of crazies. But to label such extremists as models of the discipline is akin to blaming all politicians for the horrors-of Hitler or Pol Pot. Students of strategy have shown themselves to be far more sophisticated, and the problems they analyse are more complex, than Lawrence admits. Strategic studies deserves a better press.

Gerald Segal's paper is an attempt at a scathing indictment of my analysis of some of the dilemmas and contradictions inherent in strategic studies. By way of a riposte I shall deal with the general and specific points which Segal makes, but more significantly I will show that he ignores the most fundamental arguments advanced in my paper.