Current discourses about the everyday in relation to international peace interventions focus on two main aspects. First, the perceived quality or qualities of everyday life tend to be attributed to ‘local’ organisations or actors and assessed positively. Second, the control of life (including bio-political control and governance) tends to be associated with ‘international’ actors and viewed negatively. This article challenges these key assumptions by contextualising them in social and political theories of the everyday and in two key examples: ‘affective’ peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and ‘threatworks’ in Northern Ireland. It also calls for an approach to the ‘everyday’ in international interventions which moves beyond local/international power dynamics and is attentive to the pluralities of power and practice that emerge in these settings.

Richard Little's new book has considerably widened the scope for thinking about the balance of power in International Relations (IR), both by beginning to provide a conceptual history of the idea and by expanding existing balance-of-power models. His concept of the associational balance of power is an important corrective to the prevailing realist understanding of the balance of power. However, Little does not explore more fully the relationship between the balance of power as a myth and a reality. Moreover, the usefulness of distinction between adversarial and association balance of power is not given a direct evaluation against the historical record, nor is his own composite model of the balance of power partly based on the distinction fully developed.

Why have absolutist monarchies in the past three decades survived when so many succumbed to coups and revolution in the past? The rulers' use of divide-and-rule and balancing strategies as Lust-Okar and Jamal noted recently, served as a partial solution. Overlooked in the literature on the persistance of monarchies was how these mechanisms, which reduce the leader's domestic vulnerability, mar his offensive capabilities to cope with centralising, more effective and threatening neighbours. To cope with this trade-off between internal and external vulnerabilities, monarchs and leaders of other Third World states have been involved in a two-level game of ‘omnibalancing’ – allying with strong outside powers when possible while continuing to employ divide-and-rule and balancing techniques domestically. Only resource-rich or strategically located monarchies can enjoy such protection which is why most of monarchies that have persisted are located in the Middle East.

Within the current configuration of Critical Security Studies (CSS) the concept of ‘emancipation’ is upheld as the keystone of a commitment to transformative change in world politics, but comparatively little is said on the status of violence and resistance within that commitment. As a means of highlighting this relative silence, this article examines the nature of the connection between CSS and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. In particular it disinters the reflections of Herbert Marcuse on the connections between emancipatory change, violence and resistance as a means of interrogating and challenging the definition of ‘security as emancipation’. Doing so, it is argued, points towards some of the potential limitations of equating security and emancipation, and provides a provocation of contemporary CSS from within its own cited intellectual and normative foundations.

Chairs have a significant potential effect on the bargaining structure and conduct of multilateral negotiations, addressing collective action problems that arise in decentralised bargaining. We examine the role of the Chair as a policy entrepreneur in multilateral negotiations, identifying the parameters that increase the Chair's entrepreneurship potential and condition the outcome of the Chair's entrepreneurial activities. We cluster the identified parameters in three groups of organisational attributes, comprising the Chair's mandate, available resources and (formal) constraints, in particular decision-making rules. We use this typology to analyse four important case studies within the UN setting.

International law has changed significantly since the end of the Cold War. As long as the international was thought to be populated by sovereign states predominantly, international law was conceived of as a means for peaceful dispute settlement. That is: the reference to state sovereignty not only divided public from private international law, but structured most of public international law itself; from the very definition of and associated rights and duties to the attribution of responsibility. With the emergence of the post-national constellation, a reduction of law to questions of states' practices is increasingly problematic. At the same time, the post-national constellation denotes more than just a structural shift in the world polity. It challenges established dogmas rooted in an individualistic philosophy of science and thereby calls for a different understanding of how the world is (made) known. What uncertainty has to offer is the provision of a different vocabulary detached from the state through which we can reconsider some changes in international law.

This article examines the relationship between India's nuclear programme and its postcolonial identity. In particular, I argue that making sense of the anomalies and contradictions of India's nuclear behaviour, such as the gap of two decades between its nuclear tests, its promotion of nuclear disarmament and its failure to sign non-proliferation and test-ban treaties requires an understanding of the racially gendered construction of India's postcolonial modernity and the central roles given to science and morality within it. I suggest that India's postcolonial identity is anchored in anticolonial discourses that are deeply ambivalent toward what was viewed as a Western modernity that could provide material betterment but was also potentially destructive. What was desired was a better modernity that took into account what was believed to be Indian civilisation's greater propensity toward ethical and moral conduct. India's nuclear policies, such as its pursuit of nuclear technology and its promotion of disarmament cannot be seen in isolation from the successes and failures of this broader project of fashioning an ethical modernity.

This study explores the relationship between principles of distributive justice (DJ) and the durability of negotiated agreements. Sixteen peace agreements negotiated during the early 1990s were coded for the centrality of each of four principles of DJ – equality, proportionality, compensation, and need – to the core terms of the agreement. The agreements were also assessed on scales of implementation and durability over a five-year period. Another variable included in the analysis was the difficulty of the conflict environment. These data were used to evaluate three sets of hypotheses: the relationship between DJ and durability, the role of the conflict environment, and types of DJ principles. The results obtained from both statistical and focused-comparison analyses indicate that DJ moderates the relationship between conflict environments and outcomes: when principles of justice are central to an agreement, the negative effects of difficult conflict environments are reduced; when principles are not central, the negative effects of difficulty are heightened. These relationships are accounted for primarily by one of the four DJ principles – equality. Implications of these findings are discussed along with a number of ideas for further research.

Anarchism does not feature in contemporary international relations (IR) as a discreet approach to world politics because until very recently it was antithetical to the traditional use-value of a discipline largely structured around the needs and intellectual demands of providing for the world's Foreign Offices and State Departments. This article tells part of the story of how this came to be so by revisiting the historiography of the discipline and an early debate between Harold Laski and Hans Morgenthau. What I will show here is that Morgenthau's Schmittian-informed theory of the nation state was diametrically opposed to Laski's Proudhon-informed pluralist state theory. Morgenthau's success and the triumph of Realism structured the subsequent evolution of the discipline. What was to characterise the early stages of this evolution was IR's professional and intellectual statism. The subsequent historiography of the discipline has also played a part in retrospectively keeping anarchism out. This article demonstrates how a return to this early debate and the historiography of the discipline opens up a little more room for anarchism in contemporary IR and suggests further avenues for research.

Norman Angell's The Great Illusion, which ran through six versions in London between November 1909 and December 1938, has some claim to have launched International Relations as a self-consciously independent yet sub-consciously liberal discipline. Understood to argue primarily that the interlocking fragility of the international financial system stopped modern states profiting from aggression, its ideas were promoted by a specially created foundation as ‘the science of international politics’ or ‘international polity’. Since the 1970s, moreover, the book has been credited by scholars with pioneering the concepts of interdependence and globalisation. Now, therefore, it is less its seminal qualities than its fundamental flaws that require emphasis. Its celebrated claim about the irenic implications of financial interdependence was widely misunderstood as implying the impossibility, in addition to the disutility, of aggression. And a little-noticed second argument – that political control over territory brought no substantive benefits – was not only implausible but inconsistent with Angell's declared opposition to cuts in arms spending. The Great Illusion's policy recommendations were thus ambiguous, and altered from edition to edition as its author grappled first with the contradiction between pacifist and pro-defence strands in his thinking and then with the changing international situation.

How do states attempt to mitigate the pressures of financial globalisation? This article suggests that options can be understood in terms of monetary regime choice. These are best understood with their international component included – whether states integrate unilaterally, integrate multilaterally, or go it alone monetarily. But to understand the international side of monetary relations, one must look to domestic political structures, histories and politics. It is important that to understand that within the pressures of the international system, domestic politics is a fons et origo determining the health and stability of international economic relations.

This article develops and applies the role of ‘common sense’ in a Gramscian theory of transnational counter-hegemony. Building on recent interpretative literature on the alter-globalisation movement, it applies this framework to then evaluate empirically the impact of the alter-globalisation movement on the realm of global ‘common sense’ understandings of the world in the period 2002 to 2007. It shows that there is little empirical support for the notion that the alter-globalisation movement effected a legitimation crisis for neo-liberalism as a hegemonic project on a global scale. Instead, a more ambivalent and potentially reactionary situation amongst collectively held norms is revealed. This indicates the shortcomings of the alter-globalisation movement as a coalition of social forces capable of mounting an ideological attack on neo-liberalism and forging a new intellectual-moral bloc.

This article is concerned with a particular debate in mediation literature, revolving around the merit and necessity of power as a strategy employed by third parties in their efforts to negotiate a successful resolution to conflict. We argue that by subscribing to a one-dimensional spectrum of pure-to-power mediation, students of mediation have neglected the development of how power is conceptualised and operates within the changing dynamics of conflict and its mediation.

We therefore seek to redefine the concept of power mediation to project a closer fit between conflicting parties' understanding of their situation and the methods, aims and motivations of their mediators. Breaking away from the existing pure-power spectrum, we propose a heuristic framework that includes four distinct types of power mediation, defined here as real, made, critical and structural power. The contribution of our heuristic model is threefold. First, it assists us in asking the most basic question of social science research, ‘of what is this a case’, which in turn ought to lead to a more sophisticated observation of mediation instances. Concurrently, through the frame of ‘power’, it establishes common understanding of observable phenomena that makes the study of mediation more accessible to the wider audience beyond students of our modest literature. Finally, the synthesis of epistemological and ontological inquiry of conflict and power with the established International Relations (IR) approaches of realism(s), constructivism, critical discourse and structuralism, allows respective real, made, critical and structural types of mediation power to be tested.

The past few decades have witnessed a fundamental change in the perception of threats to the security of states and individuals. Issues of security are no longer primarily framed in terms of threats posed by an identifiable, conventional enemy. Instead, post-Cold War security policies have emphasised the global and radically uncertain nature of threats such as environmental degradation, terrorism and financial risks. What are the implications of this transformation for one of the constitutive principles of international society: state sovereignty? Existing literature has provided two possible answers to this question. The first focuses on the alleged need for states to seek international cooperation and to relax claims of national sovereignty. In Ulrich Beck's terminology, this would amount to a transformation of sovereign states into ‘cosmopolitan states’. The second takes the opposite position: in response to uncertain threats states rely on their sovereign prerogatives to take exceptional measures and set aside provisions of positive law. In Beck's terminology, this would amount to the creation of a ‘surveillance state’. None of these two answers, however, does justice to the complex relation between sovereignty, power and (international) law. As this article will show, the invocation of radical uncertainty has led to a transformation in sovereignty that cannot be captured in terms of the cosmopolitan/surveillance dichotomy. What is at stake is a more fundamental transformation of the way in which sovereignty is used to counter threats. Based on a study of the UN Counterterrorism Committee, this article demonstrates how state sovereignty is used as a governmental technology that aims to create proactive, responsible subjects.

Use of the ‘states and markets’ pair to conceptualise the international is pervasive. This article narrates the intellectual genesis of this dyad in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British political œconomy. Adam Smith's arguments in Wealth of Nations are central, for there the analysis of strength is uncoupled from the analysis of wealth, de-politicising the international and making the economic denunciation of war possible. In the process the international economy is elaborated as a new theoretical object.

Europe's numerous fiscal crises – 2003 Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) crisis, its subsequent 2005 reforms, and the recent sovereign debt woes – draw attention to a shift in the management of EMU; namely the inclusion of more uncertainty-based governance. Understood as modalities of government, risk, and uncertainty make the production of this fiscal-monetary space intelligible as a recognised form of knowledge and object of government. Whereas the Pact was devised as the anchor for EMU, it has come to symbolise its weakness. This article argues that the result is an antagonistic relationship between the programmatic and operational dimensions of fiscal governance; otherwise seen as a dialectic between the two competing domains of expertise/law and politics. Starting with the 2005 SGP reforms, and exacerbated by the credit crisis, uncertainty has been mobilised to justify alternative forms of managing fiscal conduct linked to new strategies of calculation and issues of responsibility. Bound to variegated notions of ‘fiscal normality’, I contend that the 2005 reforms signal the (re)politicisation of the budgetary framework and the reconfiguration of the politics of limits. Rather than marginalising informal judgment, the government through uncertainty places a greater emphasis on creative entrepreneurialism in fostering compliance in ways risk does not.

This article provides a critique of the discourse of ‘failed states’, and outlines an alternative approach. It is argued that by taking the model of the modern state for granted, and by analysing all states in terms of their degree of correspondence with or deviation from this ideal, this discourse does not help us understand the nature of the states in question, or the processes that lead to strong or weak states. Instead, the idea of the state should be treated as a category of practice and not as a category of analysis. Post-colonial state formation could then be analysed by focusing on the inter-relationship between the idea of the state and actual state practices, and on the ways that states have become linked to domestic society on the one hand and their relations with the external world on the other.

This article explores conceptions of post-war world order promoted in appeals to ‘filmic internationalism’ – an Anglo-American movement of filmmakers, artists, and cultural bureaucrats who became committed to social-realist documentary films throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Examining this movement, I argue, allows us to reflect on the cultural consititution of embedded liberalsim, a vision of post-war order pursued not only in political-economic but also in cultural terms. Moreover, retelling the story of filmic internationalism also unsettles our accounts of embedded liberalism by foregrounding the lingering importance of imperial governmentality to interwar conversations regarding post-war world order. Traces of imperial governmentality are visible in both the ways in which filmmakers conveived the cultural agency of ‘other’ populations as well as the universal conceit with which they promoted a form of social governance. Recovering these ‘other’ stories, I argue, is a critical gesture which provincialises embedded liberalism by situating it in a more diverse set of contexts than is often acknowledged.

This article applies rational institutionalism, to the case of the British-Irish relationship. Hypotheses are drawn about the role of institutions in advancing cooperation. In section two an overview and analysis of British-Irish agreements and policymaking processes are provided. In section three, the role of institution-building in causing British-Irish cooperation is highlighted. In conclusion, the enduring relevance of rational institutionalism to the British-Irish case is highlighted and its potential to understand conflict in the 21st century is stressed.