Conflict across African states has often been linked to ethnic-based biases in government, and exclusive policies. However, the domestic politics of developing states, and the elites who contest for power therein, have often been overlooked when explaining the patterns and risk of disorder and violence. We consider how African leaders practice politics in whom to represent, and at what level. These choices have consequences as how regimes accommodate political elites creates different competitive conditions which, in turn, create incentives and opportunities for political violence. Using a dataset on cabinet appointments over twenty years, we find that high levels of elite political inclusion and mal-apportionment in positions is consistently associated with increases in non-state violence. Power distribution levels among those groups included in senior positions account for more political violence than that which stems from exclusive politics.

Boat pushbacks and pullbacks by Italy and the European Union (EU) have returned migrants and refugees to Libya where they have been subjected to brutal human rights violations, such as torture and ill-treatment. This article argues that these pushbacks and pullbacks not only undermine key human rights principles, but they are also an act of cruelty. As Italy and the EU have used the law to evade their international human rights and refugee obligations, the law has had distributive effects that have shaped migration pathways and exacerbated the vulnerability of migrants and refugees to torture. Not only have legal manoeuvres stripped migrants and refugees of their rights, enabling Italy and the EU to return people to inhumane detention centres in Libya, but they have also had the sinister side effect of excluding migrants and refugees from moral concern. As Italy and the EU have sought to evade legal responsibility, it has created indifference to the suffering of people on the move in Libya. This article sheds important light on the factors that lead to the torture of migrants and refugees on their migration journeys and offers new insights into the relationship between cruelty, migration policies, and indifference to human suffering.

‘Northern Ireland Is free to determine its own future. It is a fundamental part of the United Kingdom, If the majority of the people in Northern Ireland wish not to be obviously we would honor their wish, whether it was to be independent or to join up elsewhere. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom because of the wish of the majority of its people.’

Kalevi J. Holsti retired from his position as Killam Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in June 1999. Prof. Holsti's long and wide-ranging career has produced a number of classic works in the IR field, among them The Dividing Discipline (1985), International Politics: A Framework for Analysis (7th edn., 1994), Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1648–1989 (1991), and The State, War, and the State of War (1996). The following interview was conducted in January 2001 in Vancouver. A number of alterations were subsequently made to the raw transcript in consultation with Prof. Holsti.

The last ‘great debate’ in international relations theory occurred in the 1960s, was concerned primarily with matters of method rather than substance, and eventually was called off due to lack of interest. The battle between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘scientists’ was short-lived. The so-called ‘post-behavioural’ revolution in political science conceded some part of the traditionalist case, but the more significant factor in the conclusion of the debate was the prevalence of an attitude of live and let live. Tolerance over method is a virtue in a relatively underdeveloped discipline, for who can predict the shape of future knowledge or the potential sources of insight? Unfortunately, a by-product of tolerance over methodological issues has been the development of such differences over matters of substance that the existence of a coherent discipline is called into question. Perhaps a new ‘great debate’ is called for, this time on matters of substance.

Scholars from various subfields have recognised a dangerous novelty for ethical thought on war in the combination of a detached, or virtual, technical ability to wage war and the ethical imperatives of human rights norms – deemed ‘virtuous war’. This article begins by discussing the contention that the just war tradition acts as the enabling discourse for virtuous war, and the further contention that the wars being enabled are paradoxically unjust. After assessing the validity of the virtuous war claim it is argued that the just war tradition's core ethical commitment not only remains the most sound starting point for thinking about the morality of war, but is a commitment that those in the virtuous war literature suggesting alternate ethical doctrines on war implicitly reject. It is contended, though, that the addition of a third pillar to the just war structure of cause and means criteria – a justice after war or jus post bellum – has arisen due to the virtuous war reality, and is necessary in order for the just war tradition to remain committed to its core ethical principle in a 21st century marked by virtuous war. Lastly, I present a brief sketch of jus post bellum informed by the article's key claims.

Our social circumstance is fundamentally changing, so we are told on this historical morning after the Cold War. What was formerly called the ‘Second World' has suddenly disappeared; apartheid appears to be in final retreat; class structures and gender relations are said to be undergoing substantial shifts; there are increased hopes for disarmament and a wider demilitarization of international life; existing state boundaries and to some extent also the nature of the state itself are deeply in question. At the same time, we of the late twentieth century are allegedly experiencing a world-wide upsurge in religious revivalism, an unprecedented global ecological awareness, a shift from states to markets and from globalism towards regionalism in the organization of the world economy, cascading democratization across the continents and so on. There is widespread talk of ‘a new world order’, of the emergence of what is variously called ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-capitalist’ or ‘post-modern’ society, and of ‘the end of history’. Symptomatic, too, of the pervasively felt sense of transition are insistent calls for new theories, new language, new politics, new institutions and new norms that will be equal to the challenges posed by this purportedly revolutionary world situation. True, sceptics might well argue that dynamism and upheaval of the kind that we are witnessing today constitute defining features of modern social life, and that our generation is but the latest in a long string t o succumb to a secular millenarian delusion that it has been granted the historical privilege of living through the dawn of a new epoch. However, whether they adopt a prophetic or an agnostic stance on the matter, most commentators would agree that the question of social change sits high on the agenda of current world affairs.

In this article I intend to give more attention to Pufendorf's ideas than has been the custom among international relations theorists. The main focus will be upon Pufendorf's distillation and conceptualization of the implications of Westphalia in terms of sovereignty and the integrity of states. Furthermore, his extension of the Aristotelian classification of types of state, and his attempts to go beyond Bodin's and Hobbes's theories of sovereignty, provide the vocabulary and concepts in terms of which the different international actors of the late seventeenth century could be understood. In this respect the focus is altogether different from Linklater. My emphasis upon the historical and emblematic character of the Peace of Westphalia, the personification of the state and its animation by sovereignty, which serves to facilitate Pufendorf's exploration of the idea of a system of states, and my suggestion that his ideas are not wholly redundant and may be used to explore some facets of a modern states system, serve considerably to extend Forsyth's brief analysis.

While the euphoric predictions of a ‘New World Order’ and the ‘End of History’ have been buried in the alleys of Sarajevo and the killing fields of Rwanda and Chechnya, the end of the Cold War still constitutes the primary prism through which world affairs in general, and Middle Eastern events in particular, are observed. When in 1991 an American-led international coalition under the auspices of the United Nations expelled Iraq from the emirate of Kuwait, invaded and annexed six months earlier, this move was at once lauded as a confirmation of the New World Order, based on respect for and enforcement of international law, and castigated as an imperialist ploy by the United States, now ‘the only remaining superpower’, to impose its hegemony over the Persian Gulf and the Arab world as a whole. Likewise, the first-ever agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, signed on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993, was widely interpreted as a corollary of the end of the Cold War. To its proponents the accord represented the immeasurable potential for coexistence and cooperation generated by the end of superpower global rivalry; to its detractors, a humiliating pax Americana imposed on two disorientated and subservient clients.

It is over fifty years since a young scholar named Hans J. Morgenthau sought refuge in the United States, and forty years since the publication of his influential text, Politics Among Nations. Morgenthau's ‘theory’ of political realism figures prominently in the academic study of international relations during these years and shows no sign of disappearing. Many of those scholars who differ markedly from Morgenthau regard it as worthwhile or.at least necessary to respond to his arguments. If perhaps for no other reason than that it is an appealing target, Morgenthau's political realism remains an important subject of evaluation for even its most serious and most severe critics.

International migrants are subject to many types of violence, such as trafficking, detention, and forced labour. We need an improved understanding of what protects migrants from such violence. The concept of ‘migrant protection regimes’ draws our attention away from formal rights advocacy and to both the informal dimensions of protection and the way migrants help determine the quality of protection they receive. ‘Migrant protection regimes’ are sets of rules and practices regarding who ought to protect whom. These regimes include formal rights to protection in the law and informal relationships that protect migrants from lawful violence by the state. They may be changed by ‘power grabs’, when sovereign actors seek to monopolise protection relationships, but also by ‘exits’, when migrants refuse to accept the protection on offer. The study demonstrates the value of these concepts by using them to explain an unlikely case: a change in laws concerning migrant protection in an authoritarian state: Thailand. Drawing on rich qualitative sources, the article reveals how, after a human rights advocacy campaign had placed migrants’ protection in jeopardy, a mass migrant exodus compelled the country's junta to offer migrants protection on better terms.

This article critiques constructivist approaches to the international relations of the Middle East and sets out an alternative interpretation of the role of ideas based on political economy and the sociology of knowledge. It cautions against using constructivism as a way of ‘building bridges’ between IR and Middle East Studies and disputes the claim that the norms of ‘Arabism’ as a putative regional identity are in contradiction with those of sovereignty. The article shows that this assumption is based on the combined influences of modernisation theory and Orientalist assumptions about the power and continuity of regional culture that have persisted in Middle East IR. This is despite the fact that there is no reason to believe the Arabs constitute a more ‘natural’ nation than do the Syrians, Iraqis or Egyptians. The political role and resonance of ideas can be better established by viewing the modern history of the Middle East in terms of domestic structure and social change, and in particular emphasising the role of rising middle classes in revolutionary nationalist movements. The findings of this article raise questions for the utility of ‘moderate’ constructivist interpretations of International Relations as a whole.

Declarations of independence continue to be commonplace in international affairs, yet their efficacy as means towards statehood remains disputed in traditional international legal and political thinking and conduct. Consequently, recent scholarship on state recognition and emerging statehood suggests that the international persistence of such declarations should be understood in the context of broader international processes, narratives, and assemblages of state creation. Such suggestions, however, risk reifying declarations’ effectiveness more in relation to international structure(s) than to independence movement's own agency. This article, therefore, calls for a reframing of declarations of independence as a ritual in international relations. It argues that participating in the international ritual of independence declaration forms an attempt to ‘fuse’ the movement's political practice with international recognition, serves to express an internal belief in ‘redemption’ through the ‘ascension’ into the ‘celestial’ existence of recognised statehood, and offers an opportunity to internally bolster political community through political performance. Ritual theory, thus, uncovers how the global persistence of independence declarations cannot be explained merely through discrete oppositions of non-recognition versus recognition, belief versus reality, and/or non-state versus state community, and instead opens up new space for understanding the contradictions characterising the international political (in)significance and persistence of statehood declarations.

Contemporaries who witnessed the fall of the Bastille did not doubt that an event of shocking significance had occurred. On 19 July 1789 the Ambassador of Saxony reported that so important and extraordinary a revolution ‘cannot fail to bring about a considerable change in the political system of France’. The Portuguese Ambassador wrote that if he had not witnessed it himself ‘he would not dare to describe it, for fear the truth should be considered a fable… A king of France in an army coach, surrounded by the bayonets and muskets of a large crowd, finally forced to display on his head the cockade of liberty.’ If it was not immediately clear that this attack on the legitimacy of the ancien régime would also involve an attack on the diplomatic practices and conventions of the European states-system, it quickly became so.

This essay examines the complex relationship between international law and the balance of power which Hedley Bull claims is paradoxical. Bull argues that the balance of power is an ‘essential condition’ of international law and that the actions required to preserve the balance ‘often involve’ violation of international law. It is shown that what seems to be a paradox is not a paradox but essentially a normative problem related to the difficulties in regulating power within international society, and that the perceived paradox does more to obscure than to clarify the fundamental normative problem to be dealt with.

Typical of the opposing trends that have been a part of the decade 1989 to 1999, many of the states in the Asia-Pacific in these ten years have shifted from ‘miracle’ status to crisis. From being the political and economic model for other countries in both the developing and the developed world, they now signal how best to avoid the less savoury pitfalls of rapid development. The miracle status, deriving from two decades or more of impressive growth rates on the basis of a presumed distinctive politico-economic model, was supposed to herald a Pacific Century. The key characteristics of this new era were a newfound regional coherence and a related transfer of economic and above all political power from the Atlantic community towards Asia-Pacific. The crisis, in turn, is seen as marking the end of that shift in the economic and political centres of gravity.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) is located in a fortified compound in central Freetown. Inside its militarised space a project of global significance is unfolding. Together with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the International Criminal Court, the SCSL is an experiment in bringing the rule of international law and governance to regions recently destabilised by war and conflict.

There is an emerging consensus among a growing body of scholars that the present era is one in which fundamental change is occurring. Among International Relations theorists, for example, John Ruggie has argued that we are witnessing ‘a shift not in the play of power politics but of the stage on which that play is performed’. Similarly, James Rosenau contends that the present era constitutes a historical break leading to a ‘postinternational politics’, while Mark Zacher has traced the ‘decaying pillars of the Westphalian Temple’. This belief in epochal change is mirrored outside of the mainstream of International Relations theory in, for example, pronouncements of the emergence of ‘the information age’, ‘post-industrialism’, ‘post-Fordism’, or, more generally, ‘postmodernism’. While these analyses differ widely in terms of their foci and theoretical concerns, there is at least one common thread running through each of them: the recognition that current transformations are deeply intertwined with developments in communications technologies, popularly known as the ‘information revolution’.

The 7/7 terrorist attacks demonstrated that there were some clear deficiencies with the organisation of the United Kingdom's counter-terrorism intelligence community. In the aftermath of the attacks, there were moves to develop a more robust ‘counter-terrorism network’ in the United Kingdom that would facilitate better communication and intelligence sharing. While recent developments are to be welcomed, the reforms have not addressed some of the fundamental cultural, institutional and technological issues at the heart of the problem. The creation of an effective counter-terrorism network demands that information flows more freely through the intelligence community and that institutional boundaries are broken down. Until these obstacles have been overcome, the new counter-terrorism network will continue to be hampered by the same old problems of intelligence sharing.

Refugees are often considered as a source of disorder if not fundamental threat to international society. In contrast, and drawing from an English School approach, this article argues that the figure of the refugee is foundational to the constitution of both modern international society and its agent, the sovereign territorial state; hence refugee protection represents a primary institution of international society. Starting with conceptual and methodological considerations for studying primary institutions, the article then highlights the longstanding and widespread state practice of granting asylum. It is shown that on the one hand, the figure of the refugee serves to consolidate and naturalise the nation/state/territory trinity underpinning the modern state system; and on the other hand, protecting refugees plays a central role in the construction of statist self-identities as liberal, humanitarian, and altruistic agents. The last section of the article turns to the politics of contestation of refugee protection, examining domestic, regional, and international reactions to ‘anti-refugee’ policies in the United States, Hungary, and Australia. The considerable amount of criticism generated by these restrictive policies, it is argued, evidence the enduring importance and relevance of refugee protection in (and for) international society.