Recent interest in the work of Historical Sociologists has concentrated on their renewed interest in the state. There is considerable regard for the historical account of state formation and development produced by writers such as Mann, Skocpol and Tilly. Surprisingly there has been less attention paid to another feature of their writings—the locating of states in an inter-state context. This article examines the international context envisioned by four historical sociologists. It argues that, although these writers have been successful at historicising state formations, this powerful account has not been matched with a historical account of international relations. If this project is to move forward, a complementary historical account of international contexts, or global structures, is required.

This paper specifies the conditions for conflict in Central Asia. Given Russian preponderance this should be an easy case for neorealism. But we demonstrate that the consequences of Russia's superior power will depend on the nature of its regime and domestic stability in Central Asia. The type of nationalism, the robustness of political institutions, and the success or failure of economic reform will be critical conditions for Central Asian stability. The paper also evaluates the prospects for conflict resolution and prevention.

This article argues that the modern concept of the state of nature as the defining claim of IR theory was developed in the course of the intercultural/international encounter between the Spaniards and the Amerindian peoples after the discovery of America. The analysis of the Spanish debate at the time demonstrates that the concept of the state of nature was itself the product of a highly charged moral discourse. Its continuous and unreflected use in the discipline of International Relations, where it supposedly describes a precultural, presocial, premoral condition between states, therefore hides the cultural, social and moral meanings the concept carries with it and suppresses a normative discourse of International Relations past and present.

When the Berlin Wall was breached in 1989 and the Cold War ended, specialists in the field of international relations (IR) readily acknowledged that it was necessary to take stock and assess the historical significance of these events. Unsurprisingly, no agreement has been reached. For most realists, the events reflect no more than an important shift in the power structure of the international system. But for liberals, the forty years of Cold War are now depicted not as a struggle for power, but as an ideological battle between capitalism and communism from which capitalism has emerged triumphant. The significance of this development for the future of international relations is difficult to gauge. As a key concept, ‘capitalism’ has largely been the preserve of the Marxian fringe in IR. It did not resonate amongst most mainstream theorists in the field, whether realist or liberal. The concept was most familiar as a term of communist propaganda. It was avoided by many specialists during the Cold War era who failed to see how capitalism could promote an understanding of superpower relations. But with the end of the Cold War now linked to the triumph of capitalism, it is impossible for liberals, in particular, to discuss the future of the international system without some evaluation of the unfolding international role being played by capitalism.

In spite of its initial rejection of the international system, the USSR became increasingly involved in diplomatic relations with the other—largely capitalist—powers. The intensity of diplomatic activity increased from the Khrushchev years, not only in relation to other states but also to international bodies and conventions. There was a comparable change, in the later wartime years and under Khrushchev, in the proportion of foreign states with which the USSR sustained relations; by the end of the Soviet period, in 1991, there were diplomatic relations with 85 per cent of the members of the international community. This evidence supports the thesis that outcast states will tend to become ‘socialised’ into a more cooperative relationship with their counterparts; it also suggests that the USSR had become a largely ‘normal’ participant in the international system before the end of communist rule.

Increasingly, International Relations (IR) theorists are drawing inspiration from a broad range of theorists outside the discipline. One thinks of the introduction of Antonio Gramsci's writings to IR theorists by Robert Cox, for example, and the ‘school’ that has developed in its wake. Similarly, the works of Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas are all relatively familiar to most IR theorists not because of their writings on world politics per se, but because they were imported into the field by roving theorists. Many others of varying success could be cited as well. Such cross-disciplinary excursions are important because they inject vitality into a field that – in the opinion of some at least—is in need of rejuvenation in the face of contemporary changes. In this paper, I elaborate on the work of the Canadian communications theorist Harold Innis, situating his work within contemporary IR theory while underlining his historicism, holism, and attention to time-space biases.

There has been a fashionable tendency in some recent scholarship on European history to look for some of the most important roots of European identity formation in the cultural, social and political interaction with the Islamic world. This article argues that this view is an exaggerated and over-simplistic one. In a long historical survey from the era of the Crusades to the nineteenth century, it seeks to show that the theme in European continental identity was frequently subordinated to political and diplomatic rivalries. While cultural themes in IR are important, they do need to be distinguished from realpolitik in the dynamics of international power politics.

The greatest works of political and social theory are often the shortest, and none more so than the text of Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History, written just over two hundred years ago in 1784: it is all of thirteen pages long, and advances a thesis that should concern us all. In essence, it argues that history can, and to some degree does, move in a progressive direction—one in which the domestic organisation of states on an increasingly legal, constitutional, basis will lead to greater cooperation between states and ultimately to some form of world government. Kant's hope was ‘that after many reformative revolutions, a universal cosmopolitan condition, which Nature has as her ultimate purpose, will come into being as the womb wherein all the original capacities of the human race can develop’. There are many readings of Professor Kant, not least when this text is combined with others. Yet to put it in modern terms, not entirely traducing his meaning, his work can be read as envisaging a world of constitutional regimes and liberal democracies, one that will be without war. This is a bold thesis with many unproven assumptions: but it is not entirely implausible, on either theoretical or historical grounds. Abused as it may have been by the twin menaces of a modish post-1989 triumphalism, and a postmodernist pessimism, it nonetheless sets us a goal that can, and should, command attention. Two centuries later, the goals of Enlightenment, and a measured concept of progress, retain an, albeit chastened, validity in international as in domestic affairs.

This article examines Soviet foreign policy during the Second World War in the light of new evidence from the Russian archives. It highlights the theme of spheres of influence and the relationship between the pursuit of this goal by the USSR and the outbreak of the Cold War. It argues that the Cold War was the result of an attempt by Moscow to harmonise spheres of influence and postwar cooperation with Britain and the United States with the ideological project of a people’s democratic Europe.

They tell us that the Pharoahs built the pyramids. Well, the Pharoahs didn't lift their little fingers. The pyramids were built by thousands of anonymous slaves . . . and it's the same thing for the Second World War. There were masses of books on the subject. But what was the war like for those who lived it, who fought? I want to hear their stories.

Writing about international relations is in part a history of writing about the people. The subject sprang from a desire to prevent the horrors of the Great War once again being visited upon the masses and since then some of its main themes have been international cooperation, decolonisation, poverty and development, and more recently issues of gender.

Marx always predicted that the development of capitalism as a social system would be punctuated by major crises, which would become progressively deeper and broader until the system itself was swept away. What he could not have foreseen was that the development of Marxism as a theory would also be marked by crises, both of belief and of method, which have periodically threatened its survival. In this respect at least Marxism has achieved a unity of theory and practice. No crisis has been so profound for Marxism, however, as the crisis brought about by the collapse of Communism in Europe after 1989. With the disappearance after seventy years of the Soviet Union, the first workers' state and the first state to proclaim Marxism as its official ideology, Marxism as a critical theory of society suddenly seemed rudderless, no longer relevant to understanding the present or providing a guide as to how society might be changed for the better. Marx at last was to be returned to the nineteenth century where many suspected he had always belonged.

Constructivism in the study of world politics is little more than a decade old, yet in that short time it has risen to challenge realism and liberalism as a leading approach in international relations. Its ascent has been dramatic. One prominent theorist recently suggested that constructivism has now replaced Marxism as the main paradigmatic rival to realism and liberalism. While this particular judgment might be debated—other scholars may wish to defend the continued relevance of a revived Marxist or socialist approach, for example—the fact remains that constructivism has reshaped many core debates in international relations theory.

Stafano Guzzini, Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy: The Continuing Story of a Death Foretold, London and New York, Routledge, 1998

Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1998

The philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, cautioned many years ago that ‘A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost’. If this injunction is true, then there would appear to be very little hope for the study of international relations. Although there is considerable debate about who constitute the founding fathers – names as different as Thucydides, Grotius and Kant come to mind – without doubt, interest in the seminal thoughts about international relations of such figures has never been higher.

The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, lasting from 1979 to 1989, was one of the major chapters in the Cold War. Analysis of how Soviet policy was made has, hitherto, focused on the decision to intervene, in December 1979. Equally important, however, as an episode in the final stages of the Cold War, and as an example of Soviet policy formulation, was the decision to withdraw. Basing itself on declassified Soviet documents, and on a range of interviews with former Soviet and Afghan officials, this article charts the protracted history of the Soviet decision and sets it in context: as with the decision to invade, the withdrawal reflected assessment of multiple dimensions of policymaking, not only the interests and calculation of Soviet leaders, but also relations within the Afghan communist leadership on the one hand, and strategic negotiation with the West on the other.

Feminist discourses have changed the vision of the issues and sites of political encounter that are important for study in IR. IPE scholars have also been reframing the discipline by their focus upon other agents besides states, and other structures of power and change, besides those of security and production. But these discourses could also complement each other to mutual benefit. This article suggests ways to do that, by positing a framework of analysis through which IPE, Feminist, International-Legal/Institutional, Peace and other critical discourses could intersect. It suggests that world political economy be conceived of in terms of seven intersecting, dynamic structures, in which some common historical processes unfold. These include bargaining and rivalry, realist self-interest and morally enlightened action. This goes beyond the four structures already recognised in critical IPE discourse, and the dichotomous materialist or idealist assumptions about agent motivations, in mainstream IR. By including Nurture/Reproduction as one of the seven structures, women’s agency, with its possibilities and limits, cannot be missed in the normal business of the discipline.

In joining together to become citizens of particularist communities, we have made ourselves the enemy of humankind. This thought, which Rousseau intimated two centuries ago, forms the backdrop to Andrew Linklater's new book. It opens with a description of the Westphalian international system as one in which force and domination have been the regular condition of international relations. In contrast to exponents of the realist tradition, Linklater argues that there are good reasons for thinking these patterns will not be reproduced in the future. To support this contention, he points to the zones of cooperation which exist in world politics today, where new and more inclusive forms of community and citizenship are emerging.

The main body of The Transformation of Political Community draws on the work of critical theorists—from Kant and Marx to Habermas—to consider the possibilities of a ‘triple transformation’ in international relations. By this, Linklater means pursuing greater moral and economic equality whilst remaining sensitive to cultural difference. Crucial to this transformation is the idea of an inclusive inter-cultural dialogue which, it is hoped, will provide a foundation for a new cosmopolitan community of humankind.

While it is commonplace to argue that international relations reflects a ‘masculinist’ world of men, this article reverses the argument and asks whether international relations might also discipline men and help produce masculinities. In thinking through this question, the article provides an alternative route to understanding the feminist argument that the ‘gender variable’ cannot simply be added to mainstream analysis. By drawing attention to the epistemological and methodological problems which would arise even with empirically oriented research on the subject, the limitations of mainstream approaches to this hitherto largely neglected area of research are highlighted, and alternatives suggested.

Many expected that after the Cold War, there would be peace, order, increasing prosperity in expanding markets and the extension and eventual consolidation of civil and political rights. There would be a new world order, and it would in these ways be liberal. In international politics, the United States would be supreme. It would through security treaties command the peace in western Europe and east Asia; through its economic power command it in eastern Europe and Russia; through clients and its own domination command it in the Middle East; through tacit understanding command it in Latin America; and, in so far as any state could, command it in Africa also. It could choose whether to cooperate in the United Nations, and if it did not wish to do so, be confident that it would not be disablingly opposed by illiberal states. In the international markets, it would be able to maintain holdings of its bonds. In the international financial institutions, it would continue to be decisive in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; it would be an important influence in the regional development banks; and it would be powerful in what it was to insist in 1994 should be called the World (rather than Multinational) Trade Organisation. Other transactions in the markets, it is true, would be beyond the control of any state. But they would not be likely to conflict with the interests of the United States (and western Europe) in finance, investment and trade, and would discipline other governments.

The breakdown of the Soviet Union surprised most scholars of international relations, comparative politics, and Soviet politics. Existing explanations attribute the breakdown of the Soviet Union to the reformist leadership of Gorbachev, and/or to systemic factors. These explanations do not focus on the key contribution of the war in Afghanistan. This is surprising since many scholars view wars as key causal factors in empire breakdown and regime change. We argue that the war in Afghanistan was a key factor, though not the only cause, in the breakdown of the Soviet Union. The war impacted Soviet politics in four reinforcing ways: (1) Perception effects: it changed the perceptions of leaders about the efficacy of using the military to hold the empire together and to intervene in foreign countries; (2) Military effects: it discredited the Red Army, created cleavage between the party and the military, and demonstrated that the Red Army was not invincible, which emboldened the non Russian republics to push for independence; (3) Legitimacy effects: it provided non-Russians with a common cause to demand independence since they viewed this war as a Russian war fought by non Russians against Afghans; and (4) Participation effects: it created new forms of political participation, started to transform the press/media before glasnost, initiated the first shots of glasnost, and created a significant mass of war veterans (Afghansti) who formed new civil organizations weakening the political hegemony of the communist party.

During the 1980s the proliferation of new technologies transformed the potential of the news media to provide a constant flow of global real-time news. Tiananmen Square and the collapse of communism symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall became major media events communicated to Western audiences instantaneously via TV news media. By the end of the decade the question was being asked as to what extent this ‘media pervasiveness’ had impacted upon government – particularly the process of foreign policy making. The new technologies appeared to reduce the scope for calm deliberation over policy, forcing policy-makers to respond to whatever issue journalists focused on. This perception was in turn reinforced by the end of the bipolar order and what many viewed as the collapse of the old anti-communist consensus which – it was argued – had led to the creation of an ideological bond uniting policy makers and journalists. Released from the ‘prism of the Cold War’ journalists were, it was presumed, freer not just to cover the stories they wanted but to criticise US foreign policy as well. The phrase ‘CNN effect’ encapsulated the idea that real-time communications technology could provoke major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to global events.