This article examines the politics and explanatory plausibility of performative accounts of state action through a critical analysis of the themes of continuity and change in the work of David Campbell. As political interventions, performative models reproduce a number of taken-for-granted conceptual distinctions. As explanations, performative models are undermined by an account of the social that privileges representation. Drawing on materialist feminist critiques of performativity, I argue for the necessity of locating accounts of subject formation and state action in the multiple logics that constitute the social.

If students of world politics can be reasonably accused of ignoring the Troubles in Northern Ireland—in part because they seemed to have little to do with the larger East-West confrontation and partly because they were so obviously about something distinctly national in character—then by the same token specialists on Northern Ireland can justly be accused of a certain intellectual parochialism and of failing to situate the long war within a broader global perspective. The quite unexpected outbreak of peace however only emphasizes the need for a wider understanding of the rise and fall of the Northern Irish conflict. This article explores the relationship between the partial resolution of the Irish Question—as expressed in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998—and the changing character of the European landscape. Its central thesis is that while there were many reasons for the outbreak of peace in the 1990s, including war weariness, it is difficult to understand what happened without situating it in a larger European framework and the new definition of sovereignty to which the EU has given birth.

IR constructivism maintain that a proper understanding of the way subjects interact with the world and with each other alerts us to the fallacy of conventional IR theory. And yet, for a theory that is so obviously dependent upon a rigorous working of the relationship between social theory and its IR variant, it is curious that, with one or two exceptions, IR constructivists often advance incompatible theories. I argue that the confused manner by which, in particular, ‘soft’ constructivism relates to social theory is not accidental but a necessary component of a theory that asserts, but never proves, the primacy of norms and laws over material considerations, in domestic and international politics.

This article develops emerging critical approaches to global environmental politics by starting with the question, posed by Julian Saurin: ‘If degrading practices occur as a matter of routine, how do we account for this?’. Through an analysis of the global political economy of the car, it shows that widespread social practices which systemically produce global environmental change are simultaneously deeply embedded in the reproduction of global power structures. It focuses on three interconnected aspects of this global political economy—the role of the car industry in processes of globalization, its role in reproducing capital accumulation in the twentieth century, and the promotion of the car over its alternatives by states.

Global democratization rose to the international agenda in the past year as the three peak global economic associations all came under attack. In Seattle, at the meeting of the new World Trade Organization, and in Washington at the meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a diverse collection of labour unions and environmentalists from the industrial North and trade and finance ministers from the developing countries of the South each launched sharply critical barbs. The critics successfully disrupted the WTO meeting that had been designed to launch (and celebrate) a ‘Millennium Round’ of further reductions of barriers to global trade. The aims of the critics were very different, but together they derailed the entire proceedings and exposed important differences in priority among the developed states, and particularly the US and Europe. Charlene Barshefsky, the US Trade Representative and the meeting's chair, later conceded, ‘We needed a process which had a greater degree of internal transparency and inclusion to accommodate a larger and more diverse membership’.Quoted from Martin Khor, ‘Take Care, the WTO Majority is Tired of Being Manipulated’, International Herald Tribune, 21 December, 1999. This highly-regarded trade-o-crat had come to recognize that the eminently oligarchic WTO needed some democratization (as yet undefined).

There have been calls for policymakers to draw ‘lessons’ from Britain's experience of Empire and Northern Ireland to inform a new generation of post-Cold War interventions by the international community. This article emphasises the role that domestic public opinion, galvanized by the impact of casualties and the plight of military relatives, has played in shaping Britain's experience of ‘military intervention’ in the ‘civil wars’ of Palestine, Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. Three principal arguments are put forward.

This article explores Jim George's claim that Hans Morgenthau's notion of political realism is founded upon a spectator theory of knowledge and that it discloses no meaningful distinction between theory and practice. An investigation of Morgenthau's understanding of scientific inquiry, the relation of theory and practice, and his views on American foreign policy suggests that both of these claims may be misplaced. Rather Morgenthau's realism is an authentic moral voice in the discourse of world politics which emphasizes the importance of judgment and the need to locate statecraft in historical, social, and political context. It is a realism that is representative of a rich moral tradition, one which orders, arranges, and prioritizes fundamental human values and which is concerned with how these values might be realized. This conclusion not only emancipates a valuable tradition of scholarship, it also raises important question about how we engage and organize the discipline of international relations and it suggests that some critical thinking spaces may provide a rather limited refuge for those wishing to go beyond Morgenthau and realism.

This article analyses the early American commitment to maintaining its neutral rights from several theoretical perspectives. Rejecting recent constructivist interpretations as unsubstantiated by the empirical evidence, it concludes that early American leaders largely mirrored traditional eighteenth century mercantilist practices to suit the interests of the United States. In particular, Jefferson's ‘two-tiered’ approach to the international system was based on astringent calculations of power rather than prevailing notions of ‘republicanism’. This ideology, while manifest in partisan rhetoric, had little measurable impact on the conduct of early American neutral rights policy. By focusing on the relationship of theory and practice in this context, this article offers a case study of the role of norms and ideology in the shaping of foreign policy in a republican state.

Does international law have a place in a world being reshaped by globalization? Sceptics argue that international law belongs to a world order, based on relations among sovereign states, that is rapidly receding into history. But such a claim itself invites scepticism. Globalization is a journalist's term—a rough tool for making sense of what appears to be a trend toward a more integrated international economy and its attendant cultural homogenization.It is common to identify globalization with cultural uniformity and to contrast it with difference. See, for example, Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), and Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, expanded paperback edn. (New York: Anchor Books, 2000). Academics who use the term link it to the proliferation of intergovernmental organizations and transnational interest groups concerned with human rights, the environment, or economic issues, and to the emergence of a new normative framework, distinct from classical (‘Westphalian’) international law, for ‘global civil society’ and ‘cosmopolitan democracy’.See, for example, Michael Walzer (ed.), Toward a Global Civil Society (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995) and Daniele Archibugi, David Held, and Martin Köhler (eds.), Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998). Whether these trends will continue and how they might affect familiar political arrangements is not yet clear. It is possible that international law will disappear along with the pluralist system of sovereign states that the new global order is said to be replacing. It is more likely, however, that the old system will continue in a new form, and that there will be a place for international law in the new order. In this article, I discuss the character of law in the international system, on the assumption that globalization will not destroy that system. But even if international law does vanish, perhaps to be replaced by a different system of world law, the issues I consider here will remain relevant because they are inherent in the idea of law itself.

The argument that environmental degradation will lead to conflict is a well established concern of international studies, and it dominates the literature on environmental security. This article critically examines theories about wars fought over scarce ‘environmental’ resources, ‘water wars’, and the argument that population growth may induce conflict. One significant research programme—the Project on Environment, Population and Security— is also discussed. The article ends with an evaluation of the theoretical merits and practical effects of the environment–conflict thesis. It argues that the environment–conflict thesis is theoretically rather than empirically driven, and is both a product and legitimation of the Northern security agenda.

R.I.S. Jim, can we begin by asking you to sketch for us how your personal background—your early experiences and education—influenced your research and writing, if at all?

Traditionally, the central problematic of the Westphalian states system has been how to counteract the so-called ‘security dilemma’, the tendency for states in a context of uncertainty to defect from cooperative arrangements if they perceive other states' security preparations as threatening (misperception; arms racing). As the states system became more centralized and the number of major players declined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the nondivisibility of benefits—the dangers of potential defection (world wars; nuclear annihilation)—grew while states' incentives to defect increasingly necessitated control from the centre. The end of the Cold War, however, has reflected not a further centralization (nondivisibility) of benefits in the international system but (1) an increasing divisibility of benefits in a globalizing world economy and (2) the declining effectiveness of interstate mechanisms at preventing defection not only by states (‘defection from above’) but also by non-state, sub-state and trans-state actors (‘defection from below’). In this ‘new security dilemma’, the range of incentives grows for the latter to defect from the states system itself—unless coopted through the increased availability of divisible benefits. Furthermore, attempts to impose security from above (intervention) can create backlashes which interact with complex globalization processes to create new sources of uncertainty: overlapping and competing cross-border networks of power, shifting loyalties and identities, and new sources of endemic low-level conflict. In this context, emerging mechanisms of stabilization will be uneven, characterized by structural tensions and suboptimal performance.

It is fitting that one of the last major statements of International Relations theory in the 1990s should be a response to Kenneth Waltz's path-breaking book, Theory of International Politics. Unlike many other critically inclined scholars, Wendt believes that Waltz asked the right questions but supplied the wrong answers. Putting it simply, Waltz incorrectly conceptualized the structure of the international system. The first half of Wendt's book sets out to offer an alternative social theory of international politics to the ‘materialism’ and ‘individualism’ found in Waltz's work (specifically, chapters on ‘Scientific realism and social kinds’, ‘Ideas all the way down? On the constitution of power and interest’, and ‘Structure, agency, and culture’).

The title of this article brings together two terms, the latter, ‘international ethics’, is instantly recognizable as referring to a distinct aspect of the academic study of international relations with its own canonic tradition and debates. The former term, ‘feminist’, is much less familiar, and for many normative theorists in international relations refers to a political movement and set of ideological positions whose relevance to international ethics is far from clear. It is therefore necessary to engage in some preliminary explanation of the term ‘feminism’ and how it has come to be linked to ‘international ethics’ in recent scholarship in order to set out the argument of this article. It is only in the last fifteen years that theoretical perspectives under the label of feminism have come to be applied to international relations, although they have a rather longer history within other social sciences and, significantly, within ethical theory. Feminism as a political movement comes in a variety of ideological forms and the same is true of feminism within the academy. The common theme which connects diverse theoretical positions under the label of ‘feminism’ is the claim that paying attention to the ways in which social reality is ‘gendered’ has a productive impact on how it is to be understood, judged and may be changed. What counts as ‘productive’ is related not simply to the goal of enriching understanding and judgment as such (by drawing attention to its gendered dimension), but to the explicitly political goal of exposing and addressing the multiple ways in which both women and men are oppressed by gendered relations of power. It is clear, from the first, therefore, that there is a powerfully normative agenda inherent in any perspective labelled as ‘feminist’.

Toynbee's theory of international relations was embedded in a species of grand narrative which plotted the rise and fall of all known civilizations. Both the end of nationalism and the rise of the universal state, central elements of his theory, were presented as aspects of a universal historical process evident in all previous social orders. The coming fate of Western civilization was but the most recent example of recurrence. It was also didactic: he saw his great Study of History as laying the foundations for the creation of a viable world order. Beginning with a cyclical view of history which emphasized decline, and in which the universal state was an aspect of decline, he eventually concluded that Western Civilization might evade the law of recurrence. Toynbee claimed to have detected laws of history; he also claimed to have understood what was unique about Western Civilization such that it might break the historical chain. It was not as optimistic, but it belongs generally to the tradition of liberal progressivism of which Fukuyama's recent excursion is the latest expression.

Social Theory of International Politics is in my view a major work in our field, fully deserving of this symposium in the Review of International Studies. Indeed, I think that Alexander Wendt's book is virtually certain to become a classic work on international relations theory, standard on graduate reading lists. Wendt's distinctive combination of scientific realism, holism, and what he calls ‘idealism’, will certainly spark much conversation and, it is to be hoped, a great deal of thought.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report: Five Volumes, Basingstoke and Oxford, Macmillan, 1999

On 29 October 1998 Archbishop Desmond Tutu presented the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to President Nelson Mandela. This massive report has now been published by Macmillan in a handsome, extensively illustrated five-volume set. The fine quality of the production would seem appropriate to what has been hailed as a document of lasting importance for South Africa. Indeed, it is evident that many foreign commentators see it as important not just for South Africa but for the whole world. That has been reflected in the interest shown in the TRC by commentators, such as Timothy Garton Ash and Michael Ignatieff, who have not previously written about South Africa. The report was the culmination of nearly three years of work by the TRC. President Mandela announced the names of the 17 commissioners (designating Desmond Tutu as chairperson and Alex Boraine as deputy chairperson) in November 1995. It began to function in December that year, while the first public hearings were held on 15 April 1996. However, while the report has been the most significant product of the TRC's endeavours, it is not the end of its work. In particular, the Committee on Amnesty will continue to function until it has reached decisions on all the outstanding applications for amnesty received by the deadline of 30 September 1997. When it has completed this task a further volume of the final report will be published.

Even leading globalizers—that is, proponents of the continued liberalization of the global economic order occupying positions of influence in either the public or private domain—now concede that in its failure to deliver a more just global economic order, globalization may hold within it the seeds of its own demise. As James Wolfenson, President of the World Bank, noted in an address to the Board of Governors of the Bank in October 1998, ‘. . . [i]f we do not have greater equity and social justice, there will be no political stability and without political stability no amount of money put together in financial packages will give us financial stability’. An economic system widely viewed as unjust, as Ethan Kapstein recently argued, will not long endure. These views, of course, are not new. Adam Smith himself acknowledged in Wealth of Nations that no society could survive or flourish if great numbers lived in poverty. Ethan Kapstein, ‘Winners and Loses in the Global Economy’, International Organization, 54:2 (2000), pp. 359–84.

Focusing primarily on questions of methodology, this article argues that mediation in international affairs has yet to be properly analysed using the theoretical tools provided by the post-positivist turn in international relations theory. Recognizing the familiar distinction between power-political and facilitative approaches, the article makes the case for a third approach based on the political theory of Jurgen Habermas. The debate between neorealist forms of analysis and critical theory is well known. More contentious, however, is the argument that facilitative forms of third party intervention, such as the Norwegian mediation of the Oslo Accords, cannot operate without a more formal and abstract notion of the ‘right’ in politics. Facilitation's gently working of the lifeworld has much in common with the hermeneutic approach to social science. Like hermeneutics, therefore, facilitation may suffer as it fails to root out relations of power and domination. Even ‘interim stages’ in conflict resolution need a sense of ‘final status’ to gather a sense of pace and direction. The Oslo Accords, for example, demonstrate the need to create a strong vision of ‘final status’ during the interim stage. The article leaves the practical political questions to one side. However, a ‘methodological space’ for critical theory opens up once the defects of the tradition are highlighted, a space which may be filled by distinct forms of mediation practice.

Peter Sutch's article offers an excellent overview of the constitutive theory of individuality which I developed in Ethics in International Relations. Sutch offers a lucid expository section which is followed by a series of criticisms of the theory. These (taken together with others I have encountered) require of me that I sharpen and restate my argument in crucial ways. I welcome this opportunity to do so. What follows is not just a defence of the original argument but an elaboration of it. My comments fall under four headings: