‘The limits of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think. It is our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that shrink them.’

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Book II, Chapter 12.2

[cited from John Rawls The Law of Peoples, p. 7]

After presenting a brief sketch of John Rawls's theory of justice, his international political theory is outlined and evaluated. Rawls develops a classification of ‘peoples’ based on whether or not they are ‘well-ordered’. The Law of Peoples covers ‘liberal’ and ‘decent’ peoples who adhere to minimum standards of human rights and are not aggressive in their international relations. This is in the realm of ‘ideal’ theory; ‘non-ideal’ theory must cope also with societies that are not well-ordered, such as outlaw states and burdened societies. The long-term aim is that all should be part of a confederation of decent peoples. Rawls's theory has been criticized by cosmopolitan liberals for its communitarian tendencies, but has much to offer scholars of international relations, including a systematic basis for classifying states, a helpful discussion of the distinction between reasonableness and rationality, and a powerful restatement of the importance of utopian thinking in international relations.

This article subjects to a close philosophical scrutiny the internal logic of Wendt's extensive argument regarding his work's location in the field—in particular, how it relates to, and differs from, the American ‘rationalist’ orthodoxy in IR, comprising neorealism and neoliberalism. I argue that his empirical hypotheses regarding collective identity formation are plausible in their own right, but that his complex philosophical argumentation, by means of which he tries to locate his work within the American scientific orthodoxy, but away from its individualist core, is unconvincing.

In this article I outline the case made by the British government for UN economic sanctions on Iraq, and indicate many of the silences in, and counters to, it. When these silences and counters are taken into consideration, the British government's denial of any share of the responsibility for the devastation of Iraqi society becomes unsustainable. Iraqis have had their human rights violated on a vast scale not only by the regime but also by UN economic sanctions which have exacerbated the effects of the UN coalition's bombing of Iraq in 1991.

This article proposes that instances of ethnic violence can profitably be viewed through the concept of a societal security dilemma. It begins by arguing that the explanatory value of the security dilemma might be enhanced by shifting the focus of the concept away from its traditional concern with state sovereignty to an emphasis on ethnic identity instead. This is proposed through combining the security dilemma with the Copenhagen School's notion of societal security. In this way, the article claims that the resultant societal security dilemma is able to capture certain dynamics between ethnic groups that its traditional variant necessarily misses. The article then goes on to show how ethnic violence between Hungarians and Romanians in the Transylvanian city of Tirgu Mures can be partly explained by the societal security dilemma concept. It argues that many Romanians were mobilized on the basis of the misperception that Hungarian societal security requirements necessarily threatened their own identity. The article concludes that misperceptions on both sides were enabled by the weakness of the Romanian State; that insufficient mechanisms existed for the clear, unambiguous signalling of intentions.

How do the terms ‘community’ and ‘communitarianism’ apply in non-Western contexts? How useful are they as social science terms in understanding Iranian and, generally, Middle Eastern politics? What is the impact of communitarianism as a political project in one of the few countries where it has been tried, namely Iran after the Revolution of 1979? This article seeks answers to these questions as a way of modestly advancing the liberal-communitarian debate in international relations theory. Its argument, built on limited but precise evidence, is that the concept of ‘community’ suffers from irremediable conceptual problems and ambiguities and that the project of communitarianism has pernicious political implications. The critique is in three parts. The first points to the inapplicability of the term ‘community’ to national society and its superfluousness as a social science term, using Iran and the Middle East as testing grounds. The second part develops the anti-essentialist argument on Islam and culture as a way of refuting the essence of ‘community’. The third part is an exposition of the links between ‘community’ as a political project in Iran with ideology, hierarchy and corruption.

This article addresses the issue of the information revolution and international affairs. It makes three arguments. First, the evolution of a global digital information network is likely to diminish state capacity and autonomy, but the specific nature of the effects of new information technologies are indeterminate because the technology and the politics are inextricably intertwined and the technology itself is not yet ‘complete’. Second, the effects of a mature digital information infrastructure are best understood as the outcome of a three-way political struggle between centralized political authorities (states), centralized economic entities (firms) and individuals as both consumers and citizens. Third, in spite of the indeterminacy of technological change, a matrix of possible outcomes can be constructed. The globalization argument is partially correct: state capacities will drop, relatively speaking, and firm capacities will increase unless states and people can reconceptualize their relationship and guide technological development to suit their interests. The article analyses three representative pieces of a mature global digital information network—the physical network media, cryptography, and digital money—to show how the new information technologies are deeply political and their effects therefore indeterminate.

In recent years, some scholars have argued that there has been a convergence of the immigration control policies of the industrial democracies. This article demonstrates that, in fact, there has been an extraordinary similarity among the immigration control policies of the major receiving countries for over a century. It examines six alternative explanations for these similarities in immigration control policies: (1) a global hegemon that forces or persuades various countries to act in unison; (2) global or regional migration regimes and organizations; (3) interdependence between the immigration control policies of various countries; (4) emulation of immigration control policies of one country by other countries; (5) the world system approach; and (6) interdependence between the socioeconomic and foreign policy factors that lead to immigration control policies. The article argues that it is the last factor that explains most of the similarity among the immigration control policies. It demonstrates how global economic cycles, shared migratory pressures, alliances that produce common foreign policy considerations, wars that receiving countries are involved in and global ideological cycles produce the convergence of immigration control policies in various receiving countries.

This article compares Waltz and Kant as theorists who explicitly advocate a systemic approach to international relations. Waltz and Kant are compared with respect to their views on the nature of systemic approaches, the composition and dynamics of the international system, and the relationship between the international system and world society. It is argued that there are deep underlying similarities between their views on the nature of systemic approaches to international relations that may facilitate a much broader account of the international system. A final section examines the relevance of a Kantian view of the international system to the post-Cold War era by comparing its insights to those offered by neorealist and classical realist perspectives.

…the best way to understand the writings of philosophers is to seek out the questions they were attempting to answer.

Proliferation optimism is the controversial theoretical and worrisome practical product of neorealism. This article reviews and ultimately rejects proliferation optimism by showing how it actually reproduces what it seeks to eliminate: pessimism. This article interprets proliferation optimism through the lens of Burkean conservatism and contends—adopting the formative reasoning of neorealism and optimism—that as the ideal nuclear society which optimism envisions resembles the ideal conservative society Burke describes in his Reflections, that optimism reproduces a core belief of conservatism: flawed human nature. The article contends that, contrary to the first principles of neorealism, an unheralded view of human nature operates within optimism to yield its reservations about widespread proliferation which, in turn, reveal optimism's essential pessimism. Illustrating how optimism is pessimism may diminish its theoretical and practical allure.

In the class of political sciences, they invited us to speak. We told them about what we are living in our villages, about why we decided to struggle, we talked about what we know. And they told us that although they are students and have read a lot, these things that we were telling them they had never heard, what we have lived they have never lived. Afterwards we told them, ’but we have not come just to talk, also to listen, we want to listen to what you have to tell us’.

(Lucio and Argel, delegates of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) to the Universities in Mexico City in the EZLNÕs consultation with civil society, March 19992)

My aim in this review article is to advance the argument that some of the best accounts of how we relate internationally are to be found outside the conventional boundaries of international relations (IR). In a recent review article in this journal, Kate Manzo also suggests that international relations might profit from a closer engagement with examples of disciplinary boundary crossing located in—or, perhaps more accurately, between—other fields of study. She advocates a widening of the ‘international imagination’ so as to incorporate categories of analysis and approaches to the study of power usually seen as falling outside the remit of IR as it is traditionally understood. It is, of course, the very nature of this ‘traditional’ IR that finds itself under question today. Manzo convincingly demonstrates how the work of writers such as Roxanne Lynn Doty and Arturo Escobar refigures debates about colonialism, race and development such that their intrinsic import to the international is laid bare. Although I find myself in almost complete agreement with Manzo—particularly as regards her point about mainstream IR's neglect of other sites and forms of power—I want in this article to highlight a different, although equally subversive, dimension of doing multidisciplinary work in international relations.