Beginning his career as a structurally oriented area specialist in Italy in the mid-1960s, Sidney Tarrow moved on to a paired comparison of France and Italy, then to more process-oriented work on social movements and contentious politics, and finally to European and transnational contention. In this article, he traces his theoretical development as a series of missteps, which – like a hiker crossing a turbulent stream – took him from one slippery rock to another.

Achievement of the full set of EU objectives in the long run requires basic and critical research in the social sciences and the humanities. A European Research Council (ERC) may offer economies of scale, the alleviation of coordination problems, and the provision of public goods or ‘club goods’ to the social sciences and humanities. It should focus on data sharing and large comparative projects; raising public awareness of the value of the social sciences and humanities, and funding basic and critical research in these disciplines – not just research offering immediate-term extrinsic pay-offs. In order to function properly, such a body should develop standards of assessment and peer review processes that are appropriate for research in the social sciences and humanities. An ERC must receive ‘fresh money’; it must minimise transaction costs – both to attract good applicants and to fund as many of them as possible – and, by giving priority to academic excellence over Lisbon relevance and geography, it must maximise its credibility as a supporter of high-quality research. At a time when competition is supposed to foster excellence in research, academies and private funding bodies must continue to be competitors of the European Research Council.

Since the re-election of George W. Bush in November 2004, there has been a renewal of optimism about the state of the transatlantic relationship. This meshes easily with those in the academic community who believe that the relationship has always been – and remains – far stronger than some argued before and after the Iraq War. This comfortable view is challenged here and, based upon an analysis of both domestic and international factors, the article insists that even though the relationship will persist, difficult times lie ahead in the European–US relationship. The future is likely to see more strains across the Atlantic not less.

This article reviews the general characteristics of the ‘crisis’ faced by the EU when confronted by the George W. Bush administration in the US, and considers it in relation to the EU's capacity for collective international action. On the basis of a range of examples, it appears that the EU's foreign policy ‘crisis’ was limited to one end of an extensive spectrum, and that in other areas there is considerable evidence of success in maintaining solidarity and proposing alternative policies. The article concludes by proposing an approach to EU collective international action that can account for and accommodate this unevenness, and which might be applied to EU–US relations more generally.

Realists and liberals dispute the post-war record of the transatlantic alliance. Yet, the crisis over Iraq has prompted consensus on the notion that transatlantic relations will ‘never be the same’. This article offers two central arguments. First, the US-European alliance was transformed, long before the Iraq crisis, by the end of the Cold War. Second, convergence on ends for the international order remain obscured by transatlantic disputes over means.

The European Union (EU) and the United States are the world's largest and most-interconnected economies. In the 1990s, they engaged in a series of joint initiatives designed further to liberalise the transatlantic marketplace through cooperation in trade and regulatory matters, including pursuant to the 1995 New Transatlantic Agenda. From 2000 to 2004, however, political tensions between the US and Europe intensified, as conflicts arose over the war in Iraq, the International Criminal Court, and the Kyoto Protocol, triggering fears that political turmoil could disrupt the mutually beneficial transatlantic economic relationship. Despite the political challenges, the transatlantic economic relationship has demonstrated extraordinary continuity and resilience amid the discord. The US/EU economic relationship has been subject to intensive disputes in areas such as steel, airplanes, and genetically modified foods, but there is little sign that the election of George W. Bush or the 2003 invasion of Iraq was responsible for these tensions, which arose primarily from pre-existing divergent domestic political pressures. This relative insulation of the economic relationship from the dispute over the Iraq war, however, does not imply that power politics is unimportant in the economic realm, and indeed we argue that outcomes in the economic realm are shaped significantly by differences in US and EU market and institutional power in different sectors.

An interpretive approach to political science provides accounts of actions and practices that are interpretations of interpretations. We develop this argument using the idea of ‘situated agency’. There are many common criticisms of such an approach. This article focuses on eight: that an interpretive approach is mere common sense; that it focuses on beliefs or discourses, not actions or practices; that it ignores concepts of social structure; that it seeks to understand actions and practices, not to explain them; that it is concerned exclusively with qualitative techniques of data generation; that it must accept actors' own accounts of their beliefs; that it is insensitive to the ways in which power constitutes beliefs; and that it is incapable of producing policy-relevant knowledge. We show that the criticisms rest on both misconceptions about an interpretive approach and misplaced beliefs in the false idols of hard data and rigorous methods.

Case-based learning (also known as problem-based learning and by a variety of other names) is well established in disciplines like medicine, business and law. Drawing on experience from these and other fields, a project at the University of Huddersfield is developing case-based learning for use in politics. This article describes the processes of creating and using case-based learning resources, and examines what is already being done in this area.