Since its popular appearance in 2001, the responsibility to protect has gained wide attention. Yet, the meaning of responsibility in the R2P report has remained unexamined. The first task of this article is to conceptualise responsibility as it seems to arise from the R2P report. It is argued that the responsibility in the report is collective in nature, and analogous to obligations erga omnes and collective responsibility to extinguish fires before the institutionalisation of fire departments. The second task is to provide a model of collective responsibility with criteria that allow dividing the burden of fulfilling the common responsibility among the members of the collective. The model bridges the conceptual level with the level of practice.

The role of private organizations and think tanks in the United States have been well documented. The Council on Foreign Relations in particular has been much discussed—less so, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This article seeks to fill that gap by exploring its influence on American public opinion during World War II. Based upon archival research, the essay examines the background of the key members of the Endowment, their outlook and the impact their work had in shaping US attitudes. Using Gramsci's notion of an ‘historic bloc’ wedded to the insights of the ‘corporatist’ school of American foreign relations, the conclusion reached is that the organization—along with other key bodies situated at the interface between the private and public spheres—played a not inconsiderable part in educating Americans for internationalism before the end of the war and the onset of the Cold War two years later.

With the precipitate and well-deserved demise of positivism as the only theory of knowledge backstopping international relations, a large number of ethical issues, emasculated by positivism's non-cognitivist views of morality, are emerging for philosophical reflection and analysis. One of the most important of these is relativism. Despite its obvious (and increasing) significance, however, few international theorists have specifically addressed the issues it raises. One of the main reasons for this neglect, this article argues, lies in the conspicuous failure on the part of the newer normative approaches to international relations even to acknowledge that a relativist interpretation is a plausible construal of their position. In the next section, three examples of such failure will be described. It is no accident that these examples derive from anti-realist positions. A perspicuous feature of anti-realism has been its evident incapacity to give sufficient weight to the fact that the world is divided into antagonistic groups which have serious, perhaps even irreconcilable, moral and political conflicts with one another. But whatever may be the case for anti-realists, revisionary political realism is in no position to obscure its relation to relativism. The possibility of relativism, for the revisionary political realist, arises from simple reflection on the realist tradition.

Recent literature in International Relations has argued that the absence of ‘balancing’ behaviour by European states during the Napoleonic Wars from 1798 to 1815 calls into question current explanations for the presence or absence of such behaviour in international relations. This literature has argued that: (1) Napoleonic France presented a significant threat to the stability of the international system; (2) European states did not balance against this threat from 1798 to 1813, and subsequently balanced only after Napoleon's defeat in Russia in 1812; (3) members of the system possessed adequate power to balance successfully against this threat; and (4) since European states engaged in co-opting, rewarding, avoiding, or bandwagoning behaviour towards the French threats to the system, a new explanation for the absence of balancing behaviour is required. Each of these four points can be refuted by: taking a longer time perspective of the international system during the period in question, expanding state motives to include interests other than security, using a long cycle model of coalition leadership by a global leader, recognizing the constraints faced by European states in their choices of balancing or bandwagoning behaviour under threats from France, and taking into account the role of innovation and change in a period of global war.

It is now twenty years since Richard Snyder and two associates published a monograph presenting their “framework” for studying international relations as foreign policy decision-making. The basic assumptions of this approach have become an indispensable part of the study of international relations. No-one would now think of ignoring the important processes by which groups of leaders formulate and choose among policy alternatives. Yet the approach itself has been relegated to subsections of surveys of the field, or dismissive footnotes. Although James Rosenau's influential anthology, International Relations and Foreign Policy, still retains three “decision-making” selections in its most recent edition, Rosenau himself pronounced a respectful epitaph for this approach some years ago. Glenn Paige's initial, massive study of the United States' intervention in Korea has had no successors.

Scholarly interest in radical Islam is long-standing and crosses multiple disciplines. Yet, while the labelling of Islam and Muslim actors as ‘radical’ is extensive, this has not been interrogated as a particular scholarly practice. And while studies of non-Western radicalism have grown in recent years, cross-cultural analysis of radicalism as a particular concept in political thought has been neglected. This article aims to begin to address this question, with reference to radical Islam. By treating radicalism as a meta-concept, it identifies radical Islam as a malleable and composite category that is constituted by, and made legible through, conceptual properties associated with four discourses in the study of radicalism with origins in the Western academy: Euro-radicalism, identified with the European left and critical theory; fundamentalism; radicalisation; and liberalism. I argue that radical Islam is under-theorised and over-determined as a scholarly category. This can be explained by how concepts originating in the Western academy to address Western contexts and phenomena function as master frameworks, narratives, or pivots against or around which radical Islam is defined. This is the case even when Eurocentrism is contested by critical theorists who tend to reproduce it because they do not abandon Western conceptions of radicalism but rather draw on them. Academic accounts of radical Islam also authenticate Islam by advancing selective, strategic or apologetic descriptions of what constitutes radicalism. In these ways, critical scholarship, including within IR, can also be insufficiently attentive to marginal and heterodox voices that fall outside hegemonic conceptions of Islamic normativity.

The Cold War remains, despite the proliferation of studies of the subject, one of the most enigmatic and elusive international conflicts of modern times. Like all complex international conflicts, it does not have a single cause. Rather, it is the end result of a concatenation of a number of problems which, by their interaction, made it so intractable. Of these problems, none was more central or pervasive than the German problem. This was central to the outbreak of the Cold War, central to its continuation and central to its decline. So close, in fact, is the inter-connection between the German problem and the Cold War that it becomes difficult to distinguish cause and effect. Clearly, the problems of what to do with Germany contributed to the breakdown of relations between the wartime allies, just as the growing conflict between those allies affected the course of German history. By drawing on the documents relating to United States policy towards Germany during the early post-war period, the present article seeks to shed some new light on the process by which Germany came to be divided and to place the developments in Germany in the broader context of the struggle between East and West. In a nutshell, the argument to be advanced here is that there was never any real possibility of avoiding the partition of Germany given the bipolarity which characterized the international system after 1945, If this was indeed the case, then it follows that the arguments of the traditionalist historians who view the Soviet Union as exclusively responsible for the partition of Germany and the arguments of the revisionist historians who lay the blame entirely at America's door, must be rejected as equally unconvincing. To put it another way, the search for a solution to the problem of Germany which would safeguard the security of Europe and satisfy the basic security needs of both superpowers, represented an attempt to square the circle. The failure to do so contributed in a crucial and decisive way to the emergence of a global conflict between East and West which we call the Cold War.

Both policy articles about US post-Cold War foreign policy and the recent rhetoric of US policymakers appears to be slipping back into the language of the ‘arrogance of power’, against which Senator Fulbright warned America in the 1960s. In what follows, the USA's style of foreign policy; its criteria for intervention; its invasion of Panama; its capabilities; its intervention in Bosnia; and the impact of contending theories about changes in the international sphere will be examined with a view to casting some light on how the USA has responded to the world outside its boundaries after the Cold War. Finally, in the light of Senator Fulbright's criticisms of US interventionism in the recent past, the essay draws towards its conclusion by specifically addressing the key questions of the whens, whys and wherefores of US intervention into and exits from international crises. It explores some of the problems posed by continuity and change in the struggle to adjust US foreign policy to a non-Cold War world and examines the wisdom of enthusiastic calls for the US to spread democracy abroad.

Proposals for large-scale technical interventions into the Earth system to mitigate global warming – or climate engineering – have sparked considerable debate about their potential implications for international security and global governance. The article furthers this debate by bringing it into dialogue with the literature on visual global politics to develop a more ‘imagistic’ concept of climate engineering imaginaries. Based on a novel visual dataset, three major visual clusters in the public discourse on climate engineering are identified: images of the human–nature relationship, of climate engineering as tangible infrastructure, and of the actors involved in climate engineering projects. The analysis shows how images and other visuals do not only shape the dominant understanding of climate engineering but also competing imaginaries of future political orders in which such approaches might be deployed. Three main results of this analysis stand out. First, dominant ways of seeing climate engineering can further reinforce already dominant discursive frames by adding ‘visual proof’ to their underlying claims. Second, climate engineering visuality can also enable the politicisation of climate engineering by rendering concrete projects visible and hence contestable. Third, climate engineering images can paradoxically limit the scope of imagination as they often revolve around powerful visual icons and symbols of the past and present.

This article contributes to current debates in materialist geopolitics and contemporary IR theorising by restating the centrality of social forces for conceptualising geopolitics. It does so by offering a detailed conceptual reading of the corpus of the ‘Eastern Question’, which is composed of a series of political analyses written by Marx and Engels in the period of 1853–6. This archive presents unique analytical and conceptual insights beyond the immediate temporal scope of the issue. I unpack this argument in three movements. The article (i) offers an overview of the debates on materialist geopolitics; (ii) contextualises the historical setting of the ‘Eastern Question’ and critically evaluates the great powers’ commitment to the European status quo; and (iii) constructs an original engagement with a largely overlooked corpus to reveal the ways in which Marx and Engels demonstrated the interwoven relationship between domestic class interests, the state, and the international system. I maintain that revisiting the ‘Eastern Question’ corpus (i) bolsters the existing materialist frameworks by underscoring the role of class as an analytical category; (ii) challenges an important historical pillar of the balance of power argument; and (iii) empirically strengthens the burgeoning scholarship in international historical sociology.

Soft power and hard power are conceptualised in International Relations as empirically and normatively dichotomous, and practically opposite – one intangible, attractive, and legitimate, the other tangible, coercive, and less legitimate. This article critiques this binary conceptualisation, arguing that it is discursively constructed with and for the construction of Self and Other. It further demonstrates that practices commonly labelled and understood as soft power and hard power are closely interconnected. Best understood as ‘representational force’ and ‘physical force’ respectively, soft and hard power intertwine through the operation of productive and disciplinary forms of power. We illustrate this argument by analysing the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Both governments exercise representational force in constructing their respective versions of events and Self/Other. The soft/hard power binary itself plays a performative role as the Self is typically associated with soft power and the Other with hard power. The operation of productive power, moreover, privileges the attractiveness of the former and the repellence of the latter, and disciplinary power physically enforces these distinctions on subjects in both states. Finally, reinforced Self/Other distinctions legitimise preparations for violence against the Other on both sides, thus exposing how fundamentally entangled soft and hard power are in practice.

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to look at the United Nations Security Council and certain of the 646 resolutions and 232 public vetoes (vetoing 192 draft resolutions) cast between 1946 and the end of 1989, and to discover in what ways both it and they have been legally and politically relevant and significant. Security Council resolutions are, of course, passed by majority vote. This had to be 7 out of 11 votes until the end of 1965 when the Council was enlarged from 11 to 15. Security Council resolutions have had since then to be passed by at least 9 votes: these can only be vetoed by the five Permanent Members (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and China) if the resolution would otherwise have been passed. By the end of 1989 the veto total for each Permanent Member (the Peoples Republic of China took over the China seat in 1971) was as follows: Soviet Union 114; United States 67; United Kingdom 30; France 18 and China 3.

The contributions to this Special Issue examine multispecies perspectives on the political dynamics of international life. Building on this theme, I consider the complex and manifold ways in which the subject of security can be understood in terms of more-than-human personhood. First, by thinking of more-than-human animals as phenomenally conscious persons, we might better appreciate the multispecies complexity of security as an agentic and affective experience. Second, attending to the spiritual character of certain indigenous articulations of personhood presses us to decipher how spiritual claims might inform moral and legal dimensions of multispecies security-seeking behaviour. To illustrate the significance of these moves, I first draw on more-than-human experiences of war, pathogenic viruses, and the global factory farm. I then explore conceptions of spiritual personhood in the context of Ojibwe responsibilities to protect wolves. These perspectives on personhood demonstrate possibilities for cultivating greater interest in the multispecies experience of security.

Many expected that after the Cold War, there would be peace, order, increasing prosperity in expanding markets and the extension and eventual consolidation of civil and political rights. There would be a new world order, and it would in these ways be liberal. In international politics, the United States would be supreme. It would through security treaties command the peace in western Europe and east Asia; through its economic power command it in eastern Europe and Russia; through clients and its own domination command it in the Middle East; through tacit understanding command it in Latin America; and, in so far as any state could, command it in Africa also. It could choose whether to cooperate in the United Nations, and if it did not wish to do so, be confident that it would not be disablingly opposed by illiberal states. In the international markets, it would be able to maintain holdings of its bonds. In the international financial institutions, it would continue to be decisive in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; it would be an important influence in the regional development banks; and it would be powerful in what it was to insist in 1994 should be called the World (rather than Multinational) Trade Organisation. Other transactions in the markets, it is true, would be beyond the control of any state. But they would not be likely to conflict with the interests of the United States (and western Europe) in finance, investment and trade, and would discipline other governments.

Contemporary theorists of international politics do not see the world in the same ways nor do they agree on what is important to know, or how to know it. Disagreements are partly due to the increasing complexity of the world, but also derive from the development of many different viewing points. Some are geographic and cultural (Americans often view the world differently than, say, Japanese), but other perspectives come from different epistemological starting points and from different assumptions as to what constitutes reliable or useful knowledge, and how to create it. Debates in the 1960s revolved around problems of methodology. Today, we see in addition arguments over metaphysics, the purposes of theoretical activity (understanding versus praxis, for example), and a whole host of other divisive questions.

The Eisenhower administration's tough containment policy toward China has been conventionally viewed as an unsensible policy resulting from domestic political pressures or ideology. Refuting the conventional explanations, this article argues that during the early Cold War, the US superiority in bipolarity drove China to balance the United States in Asia. Dulles, the architect of the China policy, made accurate assessments of the power structure in Asia and the inevitable enmity with China. Driven by structural imperative, he decided to pursue containment to maintain the favourable balance of power in Asia by retarding the relative power growth of China allied with the Soviet Union and secondarily by accelerating their conflict through harder pressure on a weaker China. This case long considered as a prime anomaly to balance of power theory actually demonstrates how powerfully distributions of power shape alliance behaviours of states in the anarchic international system.

This article offers an experiment in theorising within or across a ‘space’ of ontological disagreement – which, as numerous authors have contended, characterises much that is at stake in relations between states and Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Such ontological disagreements, I argue, contain radical potential for disrupting globally dominant and anthropocentric patterns of thinking and relating, and for generating alternatives. I substantiate this point with reference to the relational ontologies informing different Indigenous ways of analysing and practicing existence. Drawing on Amazonian Kichwa thinking and Anishinaabe accounts of treaties, I show how these relational ontologies recast the problem of how it is possible to relate with difference, in such a way as to fold an inter-human ‘international’ into a continuum of relations that include human-nonhuman ones. Distinct normative horizons emerge. I argue that non-Indigenous people can draw a range of provocations here concerning our constitution as selves and the political space in which we understand ourselves to possibly participate. I also claim, however, that this more transformative potential is predominantly squandered through processes of what I call ontological capture, which troublingly re-entrench dominant construals of reality and forestall a more radical questioning and re-patterning of accompanying lifeways.

Right-wing free speech advocacy is increasingly shaping global politics. In IR, free speech has generally been viewed within human rights and international legal frameworks. However, this article shows that contemporary free speech advocates often ignore or oppose human rights and international law, focusing instead on (what they describe as) a defence of the nation state against the enemies of free speech. This article examines this articulation of free speech's enemies: first historically as the ‘savage’ in John Stuart Mill's influential formulation of free speech; and then contemporarily as the ‘snowflake’, ‘mob’, and ‘cultural Marxist’ by elected officials and lobbyists in the UK and US. The article argues that John Stuart Mill's savage is figured within a racialised civilisational hierarchy of degrees of humanity. Today, right-wing free speech advocates extend and reconfigure this hierarchy, imagining the ‘snowflake’, ‘mob’, and ‘cultural Marxist’ as lesser human, subhuman, and extra-human, respectively. Thus, in contrast to rights-based analyses of free speech advocacy – which assume or assess the promotion of rights as a ‘public good’ – the article argues that narratives of free speech's enemies are deployed by right-wing free speech advocates to underwrite racialised policy responses and global hierarchies.

Since humanity is no longer the epistemological, ontological, or moral measure of all things, then (how) should international political theorists rethink animal politics? The archive ‘When They Fight Back’ records incidences of when animals ‘fought back’. It explores ways of conceptualising resistance and the implications of broadening the concept to include non-human actors via three findings: (1) Animal conflicts are everywhere and classifying them as revolt, reaction, and resistance is a creative exercise that encourages reflections about interspecies relations; (2) Most animal/human conflicts are not treated as ‘conflicts’. Instead, they are normalised within a biopolitical discourse that seeks to reduce resistance (characterised as Animal living) in order to promote living (characterised as Human resistance). (3) If excluded, animal resistance finds its way back into literatures via ethical-aesthetic figurations, traces, and desires ‘for’ the Animal. As such, the archive stages a Clausewitzian case of escalation from resistances into total war. In open hostility towards a perceived enemy, animals fight back – and because they fight back, humanism has built its own form of resistance (i.e., politics, ethics, aesthetics, biopolitics, international relations, etc.). I conclude that Human Being (as a form of resistance) must be surrendered if the war on life itself is to end.

After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 Ulrich Beck placed terrorism alongside other potentially catastrophic events such as global warming, nuclear disaster, and influenza as one of the ‘dimensions’ of risk society. In risk society, executive governments take ‘precautionary measures’ and parliaments pass ‘preventative laws’ allowing them to accumulate information, detain terrorism suspects, freeze funds and prohibit various groups, in order to stop catastrophic risks from eventuating. International Relations and legal scholars have used risk society theory or the ideas of Michel Foucault to criticise such excesses of the executive and parliamentary branches of government. Most studies either ignore the judiciary or argue that it stands in opposition to the other branches of governments, that it imposes checks and balances in order to uphold the rule of law and protect individual rights. The article argues that this view is naïve and does not acknowledge a long history of judicial deference to the will of the executive and parliament. Through an analysis of case law from Australia and Canada the article explores parallels between early 21st century judicial reasoning and previous periods of crisis, including the Cold War, while identifying some new ‘precautionary approach’ aspects. The judiciary defers to the executive, asserts that the executive is more accountable than it, and seeks to avoid responsibility for engaging in this ‘precautionary justice’. Furthermore, seized by the same fear of terrorism as executive governments, the judiciary shows an ability to adapt existing legal concepts to the exigencies of risk society. The article concludes that as the memory of the 9/11 attacks fades some of the most draconian preventative measures may be scaled back but the judiciary cannot be relied on to keep the executive or parliament in check.