People who are seriously concerned with international relations—whether as scholars, officials, or interested citizens—generally purport to prefer that states should act in accordance with principle in their dealings with each other. This preference is usually stated wistfully, or even plaintively, as an ideal that is unfortunately far from any prospect of realization. The proposition is that states do not, but certainly should, consistently engage in principled behaviour in the international setting.

The name of Alexis de Tocqueville is not generally associated with the study of international relations. Social analyst, political thinker, and informed commentator on the fundamental intellectual currents of his age, he left to others the illumination for posterity of the states-system in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet, while he was not primarily concerned with foreign affairs, he did not ignore them. Some of the most famous passages in Democracy in America point to the capacities, or incapacities, of democracies in conducting foreign policy. His service in the Chamber of Deputies under the Orleanist Monarchy and in the Legislative Assembly under the Second Republic from 1839 to 1851 brought him into contact with the foreign and colonial questions of the day; it was he who largely wrote the reports of two committees on which he served during those years, dealing with the abolition of slavery in France's West Indian possessions and French military and colonial policy in Algeria. The highest post—and sole Cabinet responsibility—he attained in this world of practical politics was that of Foreign Minister in 1849.

For NATO's first four decades the overwhelming threat to its members' security arose from the enormous military strength of the Soviet Union … the allies were unable to match the numerical levels of the Warsaw Pact's conventional armaments and manpower. This … underlined the key role of nuclear weapons in deterrence, ensuring that the cost of aggression was plainly too high for any attacker to contemplate.

The choice of name given to or adopted by a collectivity is often immaterial. It probably does not matter much whether a new football team, for example, is called the Braves or the Valiants. All that is needed is some distinctive terminology, by whch the group in question can easily be identified. Sometimes, however, a name may be meant to reflect some substantive qualities, aspirations, or associations which are already connected with or claimed by the collectivity. The names adopted in 1947 by the two successor states to Britain's empire on the Indian sub-continent, for instance, were seen to be significant. Both India and Pakistan had their own reasons for wishing to be so called. Burma's 1989 translation into Myanmar was perhaps indicative of the same kind of consideration.

Radical changes in the international arena in recent years have shattered many of the time-worn accounts of political order on the European continent. As the axis along which international politics evolves continues to shift, not only are states and international institutions being re-ordered into a new hierarchy of power, authority and influence but the changes are also affecting the organization of international political space. In the process, many traditional features of the international political arena are becoming outdated. In particular, (in)security, a central concern of states since early modernity, is giving way to economic growth, integration, cooperation and interdependence. Whereas ‘bipolarity’ used to describe the structure of Europe ‘hegemony’ and ‘hierarchy’ are now more accurate terms for analyzing the distribution of power on the continent.

The development of the academic study of international relations has been peculiarly conditioned by traditions of thought. Martin Wight was the first theorist to reject the binary dualism of the founding traditions of realism and idealism, as he believed it to be ‘the reflection of a diseased situation’. In its place Wight constructed three traditions of Realism, Rationalism and Revolutionism.

These served as the foundations for his lectures on international theory given at the London School of Economics in the 1950s which, as Brian Porter acknowledges, ‘have been more heard about than heard’. Due to the relative paucity of Wight's printed legacy, scholars have had to piece together the fragments of his ideas on international theory. With the publication of these twelve lectures there is now a rich resource to be mined, and for this reason, the academy of international relations owes a considerable debt to the editors, Brian Porter and Gabriele Wight, for preserving and transmitting these remarkable orations on international theory.