The Democratic Peace research programme remains a prominent and influential strand of International Relations theory. It occupies a central place in the discipline, both as a dominant version of liberal internationalism, and as a supposedly paradigmatic case demonstrating the strengths of positivist scholarship. Nonetheless, Democratic Peace scholarship has been challenged by recent real world events, notably the belligerent behaviour of democratic states during the so-called ‘War on Terror’, and the use of its findings to justify the US led invasion of Iraq. In this regard, Democratic Peace research has struggled to deal with the ethical and practical consequences of its work, as the focus has been on empirically observable and testable problems that fit within the remit of positivist social scientific practice. Responding to this state of affairs, it is argued here that there is a pressing need to further extend and pluralise existing scholarship by incorporating approaches which commence from different ontological, epistemological and methodological starting points. While there are multiple possibilities, Frankfurt School Critical Theory has great potential to contribute to an expanded research agenda. The article outlines what a Critical Theory approach to the study of Democratic Peace would entail, highlighting the substantial contribution it can make.

The emergence of a new urban form, the global city, has attracted little attention from International Relations (IR) scholars, despite the fact that much progress has been made in conceptualising and mapping global cities and their networks in other fields. This article argues that global cities pose fundamental questions for IR theorists about the nature of their subject matter, and shows how consideration of the historical relationship between cities and states can illuminate the changing nature of the international system. It highlights how global cities are essential to processes of globalisation, providing a material and infrastructural backbone for global flows, and a set of physical sites that facilitate command and control functions for a decentralised global economy. It goes on to argue that the rise of the global city challenges IR scholars to consider how many of the assumptions that the discipline makes about the modern international system are being destabilised, as important processes deterritorialise at the national level and are reconstituted at different scales.

This article examines how the exemplars of ideal theory have addressed what I term ‘the problem of preservation’. The ‘problem’ in question is not so much that a political community must make provisions for its self-preservation, but rather that its provisions must correspond to the intentions and capabilities of its neighbours. This constraint implies that the ability of a political community to pursue ideals rather than power depends heavily on who its neighbours happen to be. This article shows how Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls address this problem by recommending measures such as defensive fortification, collective security, and democratic peace, which, they claim, will dampen the anarchic nature of the international system. It argues that the implausibility of these measures renders the ability of political communities to heed the moral guidance offered by ideal theory contingent at best and impractical at worst. If proponents of ideal theory wish to resist this conclusion, then they must offer a more persuasive answer to the problem of preservation.

This article makes theoretical and empirical contributions to the recent literature on the socialisation and punishment of state and non-state actors. First, it argues that the English School can add significantly to our understanding of the socialisation and punishment processes because of the theory's emphasis on great powers as ‘custodians’ of the society of states. Second, it analyses the policies of the United Kingdom, France, and, to a lesser degree, a number of other powers toward the Bolsheviks and the Whites during the Civil War and beyond (1917–1924). The basic argument is that London, Paris, and other capitals acted like ‘guardians’ of the society of states in their attempt to punish and socialise the participants in the Civil War.

In the April 2010 Review of International Studies, Roland Paris argued that liberal peacebuilding is the only viable solution for rebuilding war-torn societies, and supported this by assailing critics of the liberal peace. In this article we challenge four key claims made by Paris: imposed and consensual peacebuilding are different experiences; there are no echoes of imperialism in modern peacebuilding; there is no alternative to the capitalist free market; and critics of the liberal peace are ‘closet liberals’. We argue that Paris ignores the extent to which all peacebuilding strategies have had a core of common prescriptions: neoliberal policies of open markets, privatisation and fiscal restraint, and governance policies focused on enhancing instruments of state coercion and ‘capacity building’ – policies that have proved remarkably resilient even while the democracy and human rights components of the liberal peace have been substantially downgraded. There is little space to (formally) dissent from these policy prescriptions – whether international peacebuilders were originally invited in or not. Furthermore, the deterministic assumption by Paris that ‘there is no alternative’ is unjustifiable. Rather than trying to imagine competing meta-alternatives to liberalism, it is more constructive to acknowledge and investigate the variety of political economies in post-conflict societies rather than measuring them against a liberal norm.

Chris Brown's invitation in ‘IR Theory in Britain – the New Black?’ to consider whether theory's pre-eminence in British IR is warranted appears to have gone unheeded. He asks whether the consuming preoccupation with theory can be justified or will turn out to be as transitory as the ‘new black’ soon to be supplanted by the next ‘new black’. There are many possible explanations for the neglect of Brown's views, but whatever the reason, epistemology can provide some answers. It draws attention to the applied aspect of IR theory as well as the nature of theory's relations with the rest of the discipline, buttressing Brown's arguments to this effect. I go further to ask whether theory's place is not ultimately best seen as one element in an approach not unlike classical redux.

In a recent issue of this journal Campbell Craig put forward an amended version of Power Preponderance theory seeking to explain why US unipolar predominance has turned out to be not simply a ‘moment’ and as such represents ‘a serious anomaly for neorealist theory’. In using Waltz's own work on how nuclear weapons affect state behaviour, Craig appears to further bolster the case for Power Preponderance theory. Craig exploits what at first sight seems to be a contradiction in Waltz's work. However, Craig's error is that he treats security qua territorial security rather than considering a more encompassing view of state security. In the arena of ‘secondary’ security issues the usual logic of counter-balancing with conventional military forces still holds sway. This reply argues that a balance of power will return to the international system, it is just that at this moment no country or coalition of countries is quite up to the task.