How do we understand the relationship between ‘national security’ and a global capitalist economy? I argue in this article that liberal constructivist scholars have tended to ignore the constitutive effects of the global economy in the process of distancing themselves from ‘materialist ontologies’ and ‘rationalist epistemologies’. I contend that an important aspect of state identities is that they are dynamic and are historically constituted in and through a relationship to global capital. Only by paying close attention to this fluctuating terrain, can one make sense of the security practices of nation-states. In the latter half of the article, I illustrate my argument with an analysis of the Indian nuclear tests of 1998.

In a growing number of countries diplomatic systems are being overhauled so that the commercial activities of diplomatic services have been centralised, the commercial activities of diplomats have been extended, and business interests have been formally integrated within diplomatic systems. These changes result directly from the tendency of governments to reorganise, and in many cases merge, their trade and foreign ministries, as well as the strategy of building formal business–government links within diplomatic institutions. While none of these features is unfamiliar to previous diplomatic systems, what is exceptional is the relative neglect of the commercial aspects of diplomacy within diplomatic studies. This lack of attention to the commercial and business elements of diplomacy in traditional theories of diplomacy means that we find ourselves trying to analyse contemporary changes to diplomatic organisation and practice without a suitable conceptual and analytical framework. Highlighting the significance of a political economy approach to diplomacy, and also engaging with orthodox approaches to diplomacy, this article begins to develop some analytical and conceptual tools to better identify, explain and understand changes in diplomatic systems as well as the increased influence of private interests in diplomatic practice now under way.

Prevailing analyses of INGO influence have focused on their advocacy role, claimed that they are motivated by values and assumed state monopoly over legitimate coercive power. As INGOs increasingly implement policy where state power is weak or non-existent, their commitment to their mission frequently causes action that violates their proper role. This article examines one case to probe how the INGOs community responds when the principles to which it is committed conflict and generates two findings. First, when principles conflict, they structure competing responses to a problem and who falls on which side reflects a kind of ‘bureaucratic politics’ of the transnational community. Second, principled actors have a hard time reasoning through trade-offs when values conflict. The same principled commitments that yield more success in advocacy roles may hinder success in policy implementation.

After a decade of financial crises, international economic leaders have begun to talk about the need for reform. Yet, while they speak in dramatic terms of a ‘new financial architecture’, in practice, they seem more interested in more limited renovations to the international monetary system. Arguing that ‘A lack of reliable data . . . was critical to [recent] crises’, the International Monetary Fund has, for example, emphasised the importance of better data-gathering systems and greater surveillance. By defining the cause of the crises as informational rather than systemic, Fund leaders thus justify a limited solution: in Michel Camdessus' words, what is needed is ‘no new machinery, no new heavy public intervention’, but rather a series of limited technical fixes. This is not the first time that international financial leaders have succumbed to the seduction of technique. Four decades ago, as the Bretton Woods system struggled through an escalating series of monetary crises, state and global policymakers chose a similar path of technical expediency, opting for limited reforms. As we now know, those strategies ultimately proved to be inadequate to the task of rescuing the postwar monetary order. In this article, I revisit that regime and its collapse, examining the roots of the contemporary search for technical fixes.

This article presents an empirical case study of a type of nonstate actor largely overlooked in the IR literature on transnationalism: the diaspora or transnational ethnic actor. Building upon findings from contentious politics or social movements scholarship, I highlight the nexus of domestic and transnational politics by demonstrating how actors form ethnic networks and utilise transnational opportunities to pursue political goals in various states. Specifically, I argue that the formation of ethnic networks in the Tamil diaspora has enabled the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) or ‘Tigers’ to engage in protracted insurgency against the Sri Lankan government army. Whereas traditional contentious politics scholarship is unable to explain the longevity and intensity of that conflict, a consideration of the transnational dimension provides new insight into how ethnic conflicts may be sustained. The combination of greater political freedom, community organising and access to advanced communications and financial resources in receiving states has allowed Tamil separatists in the diaspora to maintain ‘transnational ethnic networks’ which are in turn used to mobilise funds that have prolonged the secessionist campaign in Sri Lanka.

In 1948, Hans J. Morgenthau wrote his classic text, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, that was largely responsible for establishing realism as the prevailing theory in the field of International Relations (IR). In 1979, Kenneth N. Waltz wrote an immensely influential book, Theory of International Politics, that resulted in a new structural version of realism – neorealism – becoming the dominant theory in IR. John J. Mearsheimer, who is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, has written a profoundly important book that rightfully deserves a prominent place along with Morgenthau and Waltz in the canon of realist thought about international politics. Mearsheimer's clearly written book puts forth a new structural theory of realism that he terms offensive realism. This version of realism argues that the observable patterns of behaviour among all of the great powers throughout history, most notably their ubiquitous power-seeking, can be explained by the fact that they exist in a condition of anarchy in which there is no higher source of authority above them. While sharing many of the same basic assumptions with neorealism, offensive realism, as elucidated by Mearsheimer, provides a fundamentally different account of the essential dynamics of international politics than that which Waltz and his students have been offering for the last twenty years or so.

Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Charles Kupchan, The End of the American Era (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002).

Ivo H. Daadler and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003).

Did 11 September 2001 change everything about the United States including its foreign policy? Have the subsequent US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq altered the scholarly calculus of what should be studied and how? Must authors determined to assert the continuing importance of history, geopolitics or domestic factors as explanatory variables recast or abandon their existing conclusions to highlight the newer realities after the terrorist attacks and their aftermath? If so, how? These questions lead to others. Is there a usable American past that helps illuminate the dilemmas of the present? If so, where is it found? Is there a sustainable future role for the US in the world, beyond ideology or improvisation? If so, what are its contours? Is the Bush administration truly ‘radical’ or even ‘revolutionary’ in its imperial thrusts? After Afghanistan and Iraq, is American foreign policy still largely a success story? Or is the United States en route to becoming an ordinary country, albeit one with extraordinary resources in both hard and soft power?

Gunther Hellmann, Klaus Dieter Wolf, and Michael Zürn (eds.), Die neuen Internationalen Beziehungen. Forschungsstand und Perspektiven in Deutschland (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2003), pp. 614.

The intensification in recent years of interest in the history and sociology of IR (as a discipline) has been manifested in a growing number of publications dealing with aspects of different IR communities. The appearance of a weighty and semi-official volume summarising the state of the art in German IR is therefore a noteworthy development, and one that merits attention beyond the German-speaking world where it will find its main audience. I refer to this volume as ‘semi-official’ because it has been published under the auspices of the Section for International Politics of the German Political Science Association (Deutsche Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft, DVPW). The book does not attempt to speak for IR scholars in Austria or Switzerland and so represents a national rather than a linguistic community, though not all the contributors teach at universities in Germany.

In ‘Beyond Economism in International Political Economy’, Marieke de Goede argues that the study of International Political Economy (IPE) fails to take seriously the insights generated by poststructuralism and discourse analysis. Specifically, much of IPE ‘remains wedded to a profound separation between the ideal and the realm of the real, whereby the politics of representation are seen to have a bearing only on the former domain, leaving the latter intact as an incontestable reality’. The result, especially apparent in analysis of international finance, is economism: the assumption of ‘a prediscursive economic materiality’ constituted independently of ideas, identity and discourse. Getting beyond economism requires using poststructualism to challenge the separation of the ideal and the real in the analysis of international finance and IPE more generally. Drawing on well-established literatures in geography and accounting, de Goede highlights the necessity of analysing the practices through which financial knowledge – and by extension capital itself – is produced.