Concerns over inequalities that have been located between the roles of the core and periphery within the development of the IR discipline have led to questions of whether it is possible to build up theoretical concepts in IR based on national differences. There have not yet been studies however providing an in-depth look at how IR theorising has been developing within a periphery country or region, and exploring both the local and core level factors inhibiting the development of original theoretical paradigms from within that context. By looking at the Turkish experience, the article postulates that homegrown theorising may be the only means for periphery IR to be respectfully acknowledged by the core IR discipline.

Noam Chomsky argues that, while the US news media are adversarial towards the US government on foreign policy, institutional filters operate to ensure that the criticisms made generally stay within narrow bounds set by the US political elite. Chomsky's research in this area is largely ignored even by academics who agree with this conclusion. The institutional tendency to filter out anti-elite perspectives applies not only to the news media but also to academia. Consequently, Chomsky's work is marginalised due to its emphasis on corporate power, principled opposition to US foreign policy and the role of academia in buttressing elite power.

In the context of the contemporary crisis of neoliberal political economy, the politics of austerity has reasserted the liberal utility of the state as the political authority of market freedom. This article argues that economy has no independent existence, and that instead, economy is a political practice. It examines the political economy of Adam Smith and the German ordoliberal tradition to decipher the character of the political in political economy and its transformation from Smith's liberal theory into neoliberal theology. Ordoliberalism emerged in the late 1920s at a time of a manifest crisis of political economy, and its argument was fundamental for the development of the neoliberal conception that free economy is matter of strong state authority. The conclusion argues with Marx that the state is the concentrated force of free economy.

Contrary to common assumptions that the liberal world order was ‘made in the West’, this article argues that it was produced in interaction with Pan-African ideology and actors. Developing a morphological analysis, it identifies three contending visions of world order within Pan-Africanism: a world of continental unity and transnational solidarity; a world of national sovereignty; and a world of racially defined units. It concludes that Pan-Africanism contains intellectual and political resources for the defence, reinvigoration, and invention of a more just, equal and rule-bound multilateral world, but that this cannot be taken for granted. Pan-Africanism is neither inherently progressive, nor reactionary, and can support multilateralism and sovereigntism in equal measure. Pan-Africanism's nativism also carries particular risks at a time when similar identitarian viewpoints are promoted by Radical Right movements. Understanding the manner in which Pan-Africanism informs and legitimises diverse political agendas is thus of crucial importance for IR, for Pan-Africanists, and for the future of world order.

So stark and swift was the collapse of the Cold War structure of international relations that few yet pretend to have been expecting it. The magnitude of the changes involved has forced practitioners and theorists alike into radical rethinking. For practitioners, the old certainties have gone and it is unclear what political and security structures will replace those of the Cold War: whether it will be a New World Order or a New World Disorder is still very much open to debate. But for international relations theorists the events have focused attention on the nature of international political structures. What kind of structures can international systems represent if they can be changed so fundamentally and so easily? Neo-realists especially have to rethink a dominant discourse which relies heavily on established regularities and on the stability of the bipolar system. What does it say for Waltz's conception of international structure if it can be so easily transcended by unit factors? If structural theories of international relations can say nothing about an event as momentous as the collapse of the Cold War system, what can they say anything about? Neo-realists could ignore the fact that their theories could not account for transformations of international structure precisely because these theories did explain the regularity and stability of bipolarity. Now that is gone, theorists have to look again at what they mean by a structure. Moreover, the nature of agency has to be reexamined; for neo-realists human agency was essentially irrelevant at the structural level of explanation, yet the collapse of the Cold War system seemed to depend very largely on active and calculating agents. Questions concerning the nature of agency and the meaning of structure and the relationship between them are now more relevant than ever in international relations theory.

The International Labour Organisation’s Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work of 1998 formalised an approach to global labour issues known as the Core Labour Standards (CLS). The CLS have privileged a specific set of labour standards as possessing the kinds of universalistic qualities associated with ideas of ‘human rights’; the abolition of forced and child labour, equality of opportunity, and trade union rights. But what does this ‘human rights’ approach mean from the point of view of those women workers who dominate employment in some of the most globalised, and insecure, industries in the world? In this article, I make the case for critical feminist engagement with the gender-blind, and neoliberal-compatible, approach to economic rights as set out in the CLS. Not least, this article raises wider concerns about the insufficiency of approaches to economic rights that are designed to work within the (gendered) structures of a neoliberal economic development paradigm. It is suggested that the CLS have endorsed a voluntarist approach to labour standards that views the promotion and regulation of human rights by global corporations as unproblematic. The article challenges this perspective, drawing upon the work of number of feminist scholars working in the area of women’s employment and corporate codes of conduct. These feminist writings have specifically avoided the language of human rights; thus questions need to be asked concerning the possibilities and the limitations that the CLS opens up for women’s human rights activism.

Despite the development of an increasingly sophisticated literature on comparative regional integration drawing from a variety of cases, the European experience remains the most often used benchmark against which other integrative processes are judged; there is still an often implicit expectation that ‘successful’ processes of regionalism will end up looking something like the European Union. While it is correct to move away from such a ‘Euro-dominance’, the theoretical lessons learned continue to have salience when applied to emerging and competing forms of integrative processes in East Asia. In particular, when economic considerations dominate regional relations – at times of economic crises – then integrative logics and strategies come to the fore. In more ‘normal’ times when geo-strategic considerations reassert themselves, then the consensus over region building and the very nature of the region itself is weakened and cooperation is replaced by competing visions and the over-supply of region.

Many political theorists defend the view that egalitarian justice should extend from the domestic to the global arena. Despite its intuitive appeal, this ‘global egalitarianism’ has come under attack from different quarters. In this article, we focus on one particular set of challenges to this view: those advanced by domestic egalitarians. We consider seven types of challenges, each pointing to a specific disanalogy between domestic and global arenas which is said to justify the restriction of egalitarian justice to the former, and argue that none of them – both individually and jointly – offers a conclusive refutation of global egalitarianism.

No account of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 and popularly known as the Earth Summit, would be complete without coverage of the activity of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). They generated debate with the government and in the media in many, perhaps most, countries. They took part in the preparatory work, wrote special reports, joined governmental delegations to Rio and ran a large forum in parallel to the official conference. UN officials have described the role of NGOs as having been ‘unprecedented‘, and that is the general view. It is less widely known that NGOs have been influential at UN conferences for decades and that they were in danger of having less access than normal to the Earth Summit. Far from the situation being ‘unprecedented’, the NGOs made such an impact at Rio because the weight of precedents made it impossible to restrict their numbers and their activities.

To date, studies of international politics have little space for time. In this article, I argue that time is constitutive of the international system by offering a genealogical historical sketch of the coeval rise of territorial state sovereignty and Western standard time (consisting of seconds, minutes, and hours). Sovereignty is rightly a foundational concept of both the international system and the field of International Relations (IR), but the emergence of the contemporary method of reckoning time during the Enlightenment also supported the project of political modernity, and is thus critical to IR. The genealogical motive of the sketch is to understand what have become naturalised, global social conventions as historically contingent, cosmopolitical phenomena that resulted from significant socio-political efforts and conflicts. I locate ‘sites’ where modern sovereignty emerged and explicate contemporaneous processes, factors, and events implicated in the rise of modern time at those sites. In doing so, I outline how particular modes of understanding space and time were bred in Western Europe, spread around the world via colonialism, and embedded during the eras of global war and post-colonialism. I conclude by contrasting current challenges to territorial state sovereignty with Western standard time's untrammelled global hegemony.

This article explores the relationality of governance and resistance in the context of the constitution of refugee subjectivities in Malaysia. Whilst recognising their precarity, the article moves away from conceiving of refugees merely as victims subjected to violence and control, and to contribute to an emerging body of literature on migrant resistance. Its contribution lies in examining practices of resistance, and the specific context in which they emerge, without conceptualising power-resistance as a binary, and without conceiving of refugees as preconstituted subjects. Rather, drawing on the thought of Michel Foucault, the article examines how refugee subjectivities come into being through a play of governance-resistance, of practices and strategies that may be simultaneously affirmative, subversive, exclusionary, and oppressive. The relationality and mobility of this play is illustrated through an examination of practices surrounding UNHCR identity cards, community organisations, and education. Secondly, governance-resistance is conceptualised as a play of visibility and invisibility, understood both visually and in terms of knowledge production. What I refer to as the politics of (in)visibility indicates that refugee subjectivities are both constituted and become other than ‘the refugee’ through a continuous play of coming into being, becoming governable, claiming a presence, blending in and remaining invisible.

Alex Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics demonstrates perhaps more long and hard thought about social theory and its implications for international relations theory than most international relations scholars have dared to venture into. He admirably attempts to do in an explicit manner what most scholars in the discipline do only implicitly and often accidentally: suggest a social theory to serve as the foundation for theorizing about international relations. However, there are problems with his approach, a hint of which can be found in the epigraph he has chosen: ‘No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics, which tacitly it presupposes’. Because metaphysics cannot ultimately be proven or disproved, it is inherently insecure. The insecurity and instability of the metaphysical presuppositions present in Social Theory are not difficult to find, and what Wendt ends up demonstrating, despite his objective not to, is the absence of any secure, stable, and unambiguous metaphysical foundation upon which IR theory could be firmly anchored. Indeed, what Social Theory does illustrate is that there is no such ultimate centre within the discipline except the powerful desire to maintain the illusion of first principles and the essential nature of things. If I may paraphrase Wendt, this is a ‘desire all the way down’ in that it permeates his relentless quest for the essence of international relations. Two goals characterize this desire: on the one hand, to take a critical stance toward more conventional international relations theory such as neorealism and neoliberalism; on the other, to maintain unity, stability, and order within the discipline. Social Theory oscillates between these two goals and in doing so deconstructs the very foundations it seeks to lay.

This article seeks to contribute to a transatlantic discussion by examining the theoretical and policy claims for and against NATO expansion that have dominated discussions in the United States. American academics have been almost unanimous in opposing NATO expansion, but the arguments they have put forward have often been contradictory. The proponents of NATO expansion, on the other hand, have not been clear in their arguments, and have tended to stress deterrence over reassurance. It is suggested here that there are indeed good reasons to expand NATO. Central European states have legitimate security concerns and so does Russia. However, an expanded NATO's value rests in its ability to reassure not only its new members but Russia and other countries in the region. If its focus remains primarily to coordinate military plans for deterring attacks on its members alone, its expansion will most likely exacerbate security relations in Europe.

There are two popular claims about diplomacy in the modern history of international relations. According to the first, World War One constituted a decisive turning point in the modern era, marking the emergence of a new diplomacy, distinct in both essence and style from that which had existed previously. The second maintains that diplomacy is in a state of continuous decline. This study proposes that the distinction between old and new diplomacy is simplistic and inaccurate, and that the argument regarding the decline of diplomacy is not a valid one, Raymond Aron's observation that ‘diplomacy, in the traditional sense of the term, functions up to a certain degree between allies, but hardly any longer among enemies, or even between the blocs and the neutral nations’ is only partially correct, and reflects its time of writing at the height of the cold war.

The breakdown of the Soviet Union surprised most scholars of international relations, comparative politics, and Soviet politics. Existing explanations attribute the breakdown of the Soviet Union to the reformist leadership of Gorbachev, and/or to systemic factors. These explanations do not focus on the key contribution of the war in Afghanistan. This is surprising since many scholars view wars as key causal factors in empire breakdown and regime change. We argue that the war in Afghanistan was a key factor, though not the only cause, in the breakdown of the Soviet Union. The war impacted Soviet politics in four reinforcing ways: (1) Perception effects: it changed the perceptions of leaders about the efficacy of using the military to hold the empire together and to intervene in foreign countries; (2) Military effects: it discredited the Red Army, created cleavage between the party and the military, and demonstrated that the Red Army was not invincible, which emboldened the non Russian republics to push for independence; (3) Legitimacy effects: it provided non-Russians with a common cause to demand independence since they viewed this war as a Russian war fought by non Russians against Afghans; and (4) Participation effects: it created new forms of political participation, started to transform the press/media before glasnost, initiated the first shots of glasnost, and created a significant mass of war veterans (Afghansti) who formed new civil organizations weakening the political hegemony of the communist party.

As the concept of human security has become part of the mainstream discourse of international politics it should be no surprise that both realist and critical approaches to international theory have found the agenda wanting. This article seeks to go beyond both the realist and biopolitical critiques by situating all three – political realism, biopolitics and human security – within the history and theory of the modern rise of the social realm from late eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. Human security is the further expansion of social forms of governance under capitalism, more specifically a form of socialpolitik than realpolitik or biopolitics. Drawing on the work of historical sociologist Robert Castel and political theorist Hannah Arendt, the article develops an alternative framework with which to question the extent to which ‘life’ has become the subject of global intervention through the human security agenda.

To advance the on-going debate on Securitisation Theory (ST), we argue that the important questions of audience and attention can be addressed through careful historical study. In an analysis of the securitising moves concerning the American military base on Diego Garcia, we are able to demonstrate that the Copenhagen and Paris Schools are not methodologically incompatible, and empirically that public attention for security issues has a tendency to dissipate without continual discursive investment.

Prevailing political and ethical approaches that have been used to both critique and propose alternatives to the existing food system are lacking. Although food security, food sovereignty, food justice, and food democracy all offer something important to our reflection on the global food system, none is adequate as an alternative to the status quo. This article analyses each in order to identify the prerequisites for such an alternative approach to food governance. These include a focus on goods like nutrition and health, equitable distribution, supporting livelihoods, environmental sustainability, and social justice. However, other goods, like the interests of non-human animals, are not presently represented. Moreover, incorporating all of these goods is incredibly demanding, and some are in tension. This raises the question of how each can be appropriately accommodated and balanced. The article proposes that this ought to be done through deliberative democratic processes that incorporate the interests of all relevant parties at the local, national, regional, and global levels. In other words, the article calls for a deliberative approach to the democratisation of food. It also proposes that one promising potential for incorporating the interests of all affected parties and addressing power imbalances lies in organising the scope and remit of deliberation around food type.

Comparisons of peacebuilding with historic practices of imperialism are common, but these comparisons have sustained a hegemonic antagonism between humanitarian and imperialist interpretations of international peace intervention. This article argues that this common framing externalises the problem of intervention, romanticises local resistance, and forecloses to investigation the articulation between militarised peace practices and transnational capitalist relations. To do so, the article analyses the case of Francophone Africa, thus providing a context that has been left unexplored in peacebuilding debates. By bringing back in the historicity of particular Franco-African imperial experiences into peacebuilding research, the article reveals the militarisation of politics, transnational elite networks, and the dominant intellectual predispositions that work to reproduce the legitimacy of hegemonic practices of ‘peace’ interventionism. In the last section, the article analyses the debates over the UN-French 2011 intervention in Côte d'Ivoire to reveal the connections between the ethics of humanitarian interventions and the political economy of imperialism. The article concludes that the imperial legacy of peacebuilding is found in old capabilities, new organising logics, and specific practices and power relations and that to focus on the humanitarian-imperialist antagonism caricatures the relationships between ‘local’ and ‘international’ actors.

This article addresses the problématique of the subject and the subject-object dichotomy from a post-objectivist, reflexivist perspective informed by a ‘strong’ version of reflexivity. It clarifies the rationale and epistemic-ontological requirements of strong reflexivity comparatively, through a discussion of autoethnography and autobiography, taken as representatives of other variants of reflexive scholarship. By deconstructing the ontological, epistemic, and reflexive statuses of the subject in the auto-ethnographic and auto-biographical variants, the article shows that the move from objectivism to post-objectivism can entail different reconfigurations of the subject-object relation, some of which can lead to subjectivism or an implicit positivist view of the subject. Strong reflexivity provides a coherent and empowering critique of objectivism because it consistently turns the ontological fact of the social situatedness of knowledge into an epistemic principle of social-scientific research, thereby providing reflexivist scholars with a critique of objectivism from within that allows them to reclaim the philosophical, social, and ethical dimensions of objectivity rather than surrender them to the dominant neopositivist tradition.