Critical work in international political economy (IPE) has sought to theorise US financial power through the concept of structural power, intended as a means to go beyond state-centric conceptions of political power and to trace the state’s interaction with socio-economic forces. But due to the tendency to ontologise the distinction between state and market, IPE has not been fully successful in articulating the linkages between structural power and state power. The article then examines literature in the field of cultural political economy (CPE), which emphasises the constitutive importance of the cultural norms and practices situated at the level of everyday life. The CPE literature fails to challenge established IPE accounts in some key respects, and the article relates this to its conception of political power. The article develops an institution-based perspective that is more suitable to theorising the linkages between structural power and state power, and then proceeds to develop an interpretation of the construction of American financial power over the course of the 20th century. It reinterprets some of the key moments in the history of US and global finance and re-examines notions of American financial decline.

The ‘liberal peace’ is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy at the level of the everyday in post-conflict environments. In many such environments; different groups often locally constituted perceive it to be ethically bankrupt, subject to double standards, coercive and conditional, acultural, unconcerned with social welfare, and unfeeling and insensitive towards its subjects. It is tied to Western and liberal conceptions of the state, to institutions, and not to the local. Its post-Cold War moral capital, based upon its more emancipatory rather than conservative claims, has been squandered as a result, and its basic goal of a liberal social contract undermined. Certainly, since 9/11, attention has been diverted into other areas and many, perhaps promising peace processes have regressed. This has diverted attention away from a search for refinements, alternatives, for hybrid forms of peace, or for empathetic strategies through which the liberal blueprint for peace might coexist with alternatives. Yet from these strategies a post-liberal peace might emerge via critical research agendas for peacebuilding and for policymaking, termed here, eirenist. This opens up a discussion of an everyday ‘post-liberal peace’ and critical policies for peacebuilding.

When confronted with images of war and other forms of human suffering, not looking is not an option, not only because we are permanently exposed to images but also because it would not seem to be a morally tenable position. However, looking at images of human suffering is often said to prolong this very suffering and to fix human subjects as victims. Especially when acts of violence have been committed in order to produce images of these very acts the relationship between viewing the images and participating in the acts of violence qua viewer appears to be uncomfortably close indeed. Thus, looking is not an option, either. This article, in the first part, engages with standard criticisms of photography, especially with accusations according to which photographs aestheticise that which they depict and desensitise their viewers. In the second part it discusses Alfredo Jaar's and Jeff Wall's work in order to show possible ways to circumvent the looking/not looking dilemma.

This article is interested in the hegemony which neo-realism accomplished during the second half of the 20th century in both the academic field and policy making of I/international R/relations. Our examination posits the argument that neo-realism can be seen as an ideology rather than a theory of international politics. While this view can connect to individual voices from the 1960s as well as to an emerging body of critical literature since the 1990s, we propose an ideology critique to explore this argument. To unfold this approach we will elaborate some neo-realist misreadings which we think manipulate intellectual history (among others, the writings of Hans J. Morgenthau) and represent an ideological impact intrinsic in the development of IR. An ideology critical approach – which is inherent in Morgenthau's thoughts on international theory themselves and thus helps to reveal profound discrepancies at the heart of an ostensible ‘realist’-neo-realist ‘unity’ – has, firstly, to problematise those discrepancies and, secondly, to focus on hegemonic strategies applied to ideologise and mainstream the academic field. The first part of such an agenda is what we present here; the second part is what we outline methodologically and suggest for further studies in, and of, IR.

This article explains variations in state war-propensity. I introduce a new typology of state war-proneness based on four major types of states: revisionist, failed, frontier, and status quo. The major novel contribution of this essay is the argument that the combined effect of variations in the extent of success in state-building (strong or weak states) and nation-building (nationally congruent or incongruent) shapes the level and the type of state violence by producing different categories of states with regard to their war-propensity. Strong states but nationally incongruent generate revisionist states, which initiate aggressive wars. The combination of state strength and national congruence leads to a status quo state. Weakness and incongruence bring about civil wars and foreign intervention in ‘failed’ states. Weakness but congruence produce the ‘frontier state’ with boundary and territorial wars, but also with a reasonable likelihood of evolution of status quo orientation over time. I focus here on key examples of these types of states, especially from two regions: Iraq and Lebanon in a highly war-prone region – the post-World War II Middle East; and Argentina and Brazil in a more peaceful one, at least in the 20th century – South America, although these states experienced quite a number of wars in the 19th century.

‘New regionalism’, ‘region’, ‘city-region’, ‘cross-border region’, ‘border’ and ‘identity’ have become important catchphrases on the global geo-economic and geopolitical scene. The resurgence of these terms has been part of the transformation of both political economy and governance at supra-state, state and sub-state scales. Regions have been particularly significant in the EU where both the making of the Union itself and the ‘Europe of regions’ are concrete manifestations of the re-scaling of state spaces and the assignment of new meanings to territory. Such re-scaling has also led to increased competition between regions; a tendency that results from both the neo-liberalisation of the global economy and from a regionalist response. Regional identity, an idea at least implicitly indicating some cohesiveness or social integration in a region, has become a major buzzword. It has been particularly identified in the EU’s cohesion policy as an important element for regional development. In spite of their increasing importance in social life and academic debates, regions, borders and identities are often studied separately, but this paper aims at theorising and illustrating their meanings in an integrated conceptual framework and uses the sub-state regions in Europe, and particularly in Finland, as concrete examples. Regions are conceptualised here as processes that gain their boundaries, symbolisms and institutions in the process of institutionalisation. Through this process a region becomes established, gains its status in the broader regional structure and may become a significant unit for regional identification or for a purported regional identity. This process is based on a division of labour, which accentuates the power of regional elites in the institutionalisation processes.

The ‘rise of China’ is seen by some observers as a precursor of inevitable hegemonic competition in East Asia. At the very least, it seems likely that China’s influence in East Asia will grow at the expense of the United States. Whether this will eventually amount to a form of ‘hegemonic transition’ is far less clear. It is, therefore, an opportune moment to consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of China and the US in East Asia. This paper suggests that the nature of hegemonic competition and transition is more uncertain and complex than some of the most influential theoretical understandings of hegemony would have us believe.

In this article I enquire into the conceptualisation and construction of the event, a topic much neglected in International Relations, but one which has become increasingly central to recent debates in continental philosophy. I juxtapose the fictional event depicted in Don DeLillo's brilliant novel, White Noise, with the non-fictional event of September 11. I suggest that apprehending any kind of socially or politically significant event, depends on narrative. To take the argument further, I argue that narrative is a crucial device by which we moderns (and postmoderns) actually experience such events and social reality.

This article examines the assumptions that underlie Noam Chomsky's politics and argues that his analysis of US foreign policy since World War II may best be situated within the realist tradition in international relations. Chomsky's left realism has not been adequately understood or addressed by IR scholars for both political and disciplinary reasons. In opposition to most classical realists, he has insisted that intellectuals should resist rather than serve national power interests. In contrast to most political scientists, he has also refused to theorize, critiquing much of the enterprise of social science in terms of what he sees as highly suspect power interests within the academy. Hostility to Chomsky's normative commitments has consequently prevented IR scholars from discerning key aspects of his project, as well as important historical and theoretical continuities between radical and realist thought.

This article aims to reinvigorate the utopian imagination as a vital and necessary component in IR theory. Since the First Great Debate between the Realists and the Utopianists (or more accurately, the Liberal-Internationalists) the utopian tradition has been viewed as being both subjective and arbitrary, leading to its dismissal as vain idealism in world politics. This article re-interrogates the arguments of Carr and Morgenthau and finds that they have relevance today only as against closed systems of utopia and have little bearing against the open-dialectical utopianism which is advocated here as a viable alternative to the sterility of realism. The article also examines the historical nexus between realism's dismissal of utopianism and the wider movements in political philosophy via a critical engagement with the works of Popper, Berlin and Arendt. Finally, after exploring the limitations of Booth's idea of ‘Utopian Realism’, the article argues that utopianism should no longer be assumed to be a blueprint for a future, perfect society, a tradition fraught with the danger of proto-totalisation, but as a critical imaginary that acts as a heuristic device to reveal the fissures in existing reality and as an ideational motivating force for progressive change in world politics.

This article argues that scientific and critical realism have embraced several mistaken claims, among them that social science enquiry cannot proceed unless the theoretical objects of study are specified in advance. The article argues, rather, that although pre-scientific, observable objects and events must be specified from the outset, theoretical objects come to our attention only in the course of formulating theories. The article advances an alternative to scientific realist and critical realist foundations, namely, causal conventionalism, which is an adaptation to the social sciences of several elements of Pierre Duhem's conventionalist account of physical science. The article argues that major goals of theorising that scientific realism and critical realism seek to fulfill are better satisfied by the conventionalist alternative. In an effort to clarify some important issues, the article identifies and responds to a series of related criticisms of my views offered by Colin Wight in his recent article ‘A Manifesto for Scientific Realism in IR: Assuming the Can-Opener Won't Work!’ in ‘Millennium’, and in his book, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology.1

What is international legitimacy and whence does it stem? What entities seek it and why, and who grants or withholds it? How might the different meanings of the concept be reconciled? This article argues that Family Resemblance Concept (FRC) methods are particularly well-suited to explicating the complex meanings associated with this multidimensional concept. We start with a basic level definition based on subjective perceptions and beliefs, the normative quality of oughtness, and the idea of consent. We then expand this definition by developing several secondary-level dimensions: shared values, constitutionalism (consisting of two forms of process legitimacy), and outcome legitimacy. At the indicator level, we examine 14 different survey questions asked in international public opinion polls to provide a tentative empirical glimpse of how our FRC version of legitimacy could be operationalised and tested. The paper concludes with a discussion of the usefulness of the FRC scheme in imposing some order on the legitimacy concept and in illuminating the recent legitimacy problems afflicting the United States.

In this article we critically consider the idea that feminism has performatively failed within the discipline of International Relations. One aspect of this failure relates to the production of sexgender through feminism which we suggest is partly responsible for a weariness inflecting feminist scholarship, in particular as a critical theoretical resource. We reflect on this weariness in the context of the study and practice of international politics – arenas still reaping the potent benefits of the virile political energies reverberating since 9/11. To illustrate our arguments we re-count a familiar feminist fable of militarisation – a story which we use to exemplify how the production of feminist IR is ‘set’ up to ‘fail’. In so doing we clarify our depiction of feminism as seemingly haunted by its inherent paradoxes as well as explaining why it matters to discuss feminism within the locale of the academic study of international politics. We conclude with a consideration of the grammar of temporality that delimits representations of feminism and move to recast feminist failure as aporetic and concomitantly implicated in the process of intervening politically.

This article focuses on the production and dissemination of photographic images by serving US soldiers in Iraq who are photographing their experiences and posting them on the Internet. This form of visual communication – in real time and communal – is new in the representation of warfare; in earlier wars soldiers took photographs, but these were not immediately shared in the way websites can disseminate images globally. This digital generation of soldiers exist in a new relationship to their experience of war; they are now potential witnesses and sources within the documentation of events, not just the imaged actors – a blurring of roles that reflects the correlations of revolutions in military and media affairs. This photography documents the everyday experiences of the soldiers and its historical significance may reside less in the controversial or revelatory images but in more mundane documentation of the environments, activities and feelings of American soldiery at war.

Students of regionalism almost reflexively include North America in their lists of regions in contemporary global politics. Inevitably students of regionalism point to the integrative agreements between the countries of North America: the two free trade agreements that transformed the continental economy beginning in the late 1980s – the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement that came into force on 1 January 1989, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, that came into force on 1 January 1994 – and the Secutity and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), launched in March 2005. These agreements, it is implied, are just like the integrative agreements that forge the bonds of regionalism elsewhere in the world. We argue that this is a profound misreading, not only of the two free trade agreements of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the SPP mechanism of 2005, but also of the political and economic implications of those agreements. While these integrative agreements have created considerable regionalisation in North America, there has been little of the regionalism evident in other parts of the world. We examine the contradictions of North America integration in order to explain why North Americans have been so open to regionalisation but so resistant to regionalism.

A multi-levelled hegemonic encounter has developed in Central Asia, in which a global hegemon, the USA; a regional hegemon, the Russian Federation; an aspirant sub-regional hegemon, Uzbekistan; and an emergent regional and global hegemon, China, co-exist within the framework of Central Asian security politics. Where these hegemons’ interests do not conflict this can be characterised as a matrioshka model of hegemony: the different level hegemons can accommodate one another peacefully and where their interests coincide they can form alliances. The model of multi-levelled hegemony developed here highlights the simultaneous presence of competition and cooperation. This article explores the way in which the various bilateral hegemonic relations in the region also indicate that actual and emergent hegemonic states at different levels can cooperate as hegemons in order to challenge, or to respond to challenge, by hegemonic states at other levels. This helps to clarify the question of whether the increasingly competitive interaction between these states is likely to lead to conflict.

The breakdown of the North-South, East-West governing principles, and the removal of superpower overlay have led to an increasingly decentralised system setting the stage for the so called new geography of trade and the reconfiguration of political – diplomatic strategies. Such strategies now include contestation, articulation, competitive liberalisation, ample inter-state coalition building such as the G-20, G-33, G-90 in the Doha Round and the proliferation of regional and wider ranging preferential arrangements. Regionalism is both policy and project. Agreements vary widely in motivation, form, coverage and content. It is very often the case that, as in multilateral institutions, one major actor sets the agenda at the regional level with the view not only of constructing and retaining power at that level but also of setting global precedents. New balancing or bandwagoning efforts vis-à-vis the local strong power are set in motion with fresh implications for the emerging global architecture. Regional alignments are thus constantly shaping and reshaping market relations. Intra-Latin American agreements (those not including the majors, the US and the EU) were motivated by the search for wider markets building up economies of scale amongst similar countries. Such agreements mostly focused on market liberalisation through diverse schedules of tariff reduction. The result has been the emergence of shallow regional agreements. Nonetheless, most have not been fully implemented, but they show a long term trend towards potential convergence, especially if the Community of South American Nations moves on. External pressures have also spurred agreements as defensive mechanisms. So we witness impulses to regionalism complementing and at times competing with older patterns and trends. This contribution focuses on the different avenues that Latin America is undertaking in terms of regional projects. It will assess the dynamics of intra- regional integration and the inter-action effects with varieties of North-South integration.

This article examines the US response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks using Carl Schmitt's concept of the exception. It argues that the Bush administration's response is consistent with Schmitt's view, which argued that US policy continued the historical practice of drawing lines that separated ‘civilisation’ from zones of exception where the normal laws governing warfare did not apply. This suggests that the state of exception declared after 9/11 is not contingent on the rise and fall of the terrorist threat, rather it is the latest manifestation of ‘global linear thinking’ and therefore a permanent feature of American hegemony. However, the article does not accept this pessimistic conclusion. US policy since 9/11 fits squarely with a Schmittian explanation only because conservative nationalists have used the war on terror to help reconstruct a sense of American ‘exceptionalism’. An alternative reading of how American liberalism should respond to terrorism can be found in the manner in which the Bush administration's policy was rejected by the US Supreme Court.

In this article I explore the nature of the relationship between art and terror/ism and ask why identifications between the two are so routinely and often insistently made. In so doing, my aim is twofold. Firstly, I explore the possibility of there being a deep-seated structural link that exists between art, terror/ism and creativity. In other words, I ask if terror is a necessary corollary of the ‘creative event’. Secondly, I explore explicit examples in which artists have sought to create or to emphasise this relationship, from the perspective of Contemporary Art practices. In the spirit of experiment rather than of judgment then, this article sets up a series of trials in which art and terror/ism are philosophically, aesthetically and politically blended. It asks where else should such tests be conducted, if not in relation to the artwork and in particular, in relation to those artworks which toy with terror/ism and those artists who claim on some level, to be ‘terrorists’? How is the ‘artist-as-terrorist’ to be interpreted and understood alongside existing definitions of both terrorism and of Art? And finally, what role does imagination play in the construction of experience?

In recent debates in IR theory a specific trend has evolved which advocates a renewed focus on matters of ontology as a way to overcome or at least to reconceptualise the divides within the field of IR that we encounter especially after the considerable widening of scope after the end of the Cold War. Responding to these claims the article sets out to provide a closer look at the different arguments presented for a renewed concern with ontology and its ramifications. With this task in mind, three particular complexes will be addressed. First, we have to identify the central claims of these new ontological approaches and assess them in respect to coherence and analytic rigour. Secondly, then, we will proceed with identifying the underlying reasons for their shortcomings which as will be shown lie with the misguided concept of ontology. If this conception is properly reworked, can indeed bring new light into otherwise protracted or even deadlocked debates.