This article addresses how entry into international society has been conceptualised, suggests a reconceptualisation that will make the concept more relational, and illustrates with a case study. Part one attempts a summary of relevant debates without the English School, and directs attention to the importance of how entrants draw on memories of its subject position in the suzerain system that it left as it entered international society. Part two discuses the experiences of Russia's predecessor polities, with the focus being on the place of Russian principalities within the suzerain system of the Golden Horde (ca. 1240–1500). I argue that Russia's basic stance towards European polities in the 16th and early 17th centuries is readily understandable in terms of a key memory, namely the one of being dominated by this polity, which was itself an outgrowth of the Mongol empire. Part three demonstrates how the resulting understanding of politics was confirmed by Russian experiences in the 16th and 17th centuries. I suggest that Russia never really let go of its memories of being part of a suzerain system, and that it is therefore still suspended somewhere in the outer tier of international society.

The turn to the philosophy of scientific realism as a meta-theory for the study of International Relations manifests a reluctance to confront the basic problem of the relationship between philosophy and social scientific inquiry. Despite the realists' rejection of traditional empiricism, and particularly the instrumentalist account of scientific theory, the enthusiasm for realism neglects many of the same problems that, more than a generation earlier, were involved in the social scientific embrace of positivism. One of these problems was a lack of understanding regarding the character and history of the philosophy of natural science and its relationship and applicability to the study of social phenomena. Proponents of realism have also neither adequately articulated and defended realism as a philosophical position, and distinguished it from other perspectives, nor confronted the fundamental challenge to realism and other foundationalist philosophies which has been mounted by the contemporary critique of traditional representational philosophy.

With the increasing influence of theocrats and other religious actors on policymakers and masses, recognising the agency of the clergy is crucial. This article uses the ‘epistemic communities’ framework to place the religious ‘agents’ in contemporary politics and it shows how hermeneutics can be treated as a form of ‘episteme’. Until recently, this framework has been used to explain how scientific communities affect policymaking. Using the cases of South Africa and Northern Ireland, this article claims that religious actors, especially with their shared set of normative and principled beliefs as well as shared norms of validity, also meet the requirements of the epistemic community category. The employment of this established IR framework in theorising religious politics has the potential to shed light not only on peacebuilding and mediation, but also violent movements and terrorist organisations that use religion as justification.

This article is interested in the impact of a singular international phenomenon, namely the global securitisation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, on the domestic structure of three Southern African states: Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa. These countries are geographically located in the epicenter of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, Southern Africa. However, notwithstanding their common HIV/AIDS burden, Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa present quite different political cultures and institutions which reflected upon the distinctive way they responded to the influence of international HIV/AIDS actors and norms. So, by investigating the latter's impact in these rather diverse settings, the present analysis aims to empirically demonstrate and compare variations in the effects of norm adaptation across states. To carry out this evaluation, the study provides a framework for understanding the securitisation of HIV/AIDS as an international norm defined and promoted mainly by the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the US government and transnational HIV/AIDS advocacy networks. The HIV/AIDS securitisation norm (HASN) is an intellectual attempt of the present work to synthesise in a single analytical concept myriad of ideas and international prescriptions about HIV/AIDS interventions.

The academic and policy debate on state failure reaches back to the early 1990s. Since then, its empirical and analytical sophistication has grown, yet the fact that state failure is a regional phenomenon, that is, that it occurs in clusters of geographically contiguous states, has largely been overlooked. This article first considers the academic and policy debates on state failure in the Political Science/International Relations and Development Studies literatures, and offers a definition of state failure that is derived from the means of the state, rather than its ends. Subsequently engaging with existing scholarship on the concept of ‘region’ in international security, the article develops a definition of ‘state failure regions’. Further empirical observation of such regions and additional conceptual reflections lead to establishing an analytical model for the study of state failure regions and allow indentifying a number of concrete gains in knowledge and understanding that can result from its application.

The causes and consequences of HIV and AIDS are social are well as biomedical. Given the scale of the pandemic, understanding the social dimensions of HIV and AIDS is vital. One key argument is that there is a link between conflict and the spread of HIV. This appears to be particularly the case for sub-Saharan Africa where high levels of HIV prevalence are matched by violent conflict and state instability. Recent evidence however suggests that HIV prevalence does not always increase in conflict and that in some instances it may even reduce. This article attempts to explain why HIV has not increased in some sub-Saharan conflicts. To do this it moves beyond the use of risk factors to offer a new explanation based on susceptibility and vulnerability. It uses this explanation to examine four cases – Sierra Leone, Angola, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – where conflict did not lead to a significant increase in the prevalence of HIV. The article concludes that, despite the fears of a few years ago, conflict does not readily act as a vector for the spread of HIV, though the potential for this to occur does still exist under certain circumstances.

I start this article by addressing Kant's question why rightful interactions require both domestic public authorities (or states) and a global public authority? Of central importance are two issues: first, the identification of problems insoluble without public authorities, and second, why a domestic public monopoly on coercion can be rightfully established and maintained by coercive means while a global public monopoly on coercion cannot be established once and for all. In the second part of the article, I address the nature of the institutional structure of individual states and of the global authority. Crucial here, I argue, is Kant's distinction between private and public right. Private right concerns rightful relations between individual legal subjects, where public right concerns legal subjects’ claims on their public institutions. I propose that the distinction between private and public right should be central to liberal critiques of current legal and political developments in the global sphere.

Current US counterinsurgency doctrine is gendered diversely in the different geographic locations where it is formulated, put in practice, and experienced. Where Iraqi and Afghan populations are subjected to counterinsurgency and its attendant development policy, spaces are made legible in gendered ways, and people are targeted – for violence or ‘nation-building’ – on the basis of gender-categorisation. Second, this gendering takes its most incendiary form in the seam of encounter between counterinsurgent foot-soldiers and the locals, where sexuality is weaponised and gender is most starkly cross-hatched with class and race. Finally, in the Metropole, new masculinities and femininities are forged in the domain of counterinsurgency policymaking: While new soldier-scholars represent a softened masculinity, counterinsurgent women increasingly become visible in policy circles, with both using ostensibly feminist justifications for their involvement.

Critical international relations theory has given too little attention to regionally specific manifestations of discourses of the ‘war on terror’. Using Richard Devetak's concept of a ‘gothic scene of international relations’, this article considers the final months of the regime of Kyrgyzstan's former President, Askar Akaev. Akaev evoked a gothic fantasy of a gloomy Kyrgyzstan terrorised by monsters recognisable from President Bush's nightmares, peculiarly Kyrgyz monsters, and obscene hybrids. That America was portrayed as a monster by an undemocratic regime fighting a desperate rearguard action highlights ironies both in Devetak's theory and in the international relations of Central Asia. We therefore suggest that attention needs to be paid to a gothic geography of international relations.

One way to describe the role of the social sciences (international relations included) is by relating to its function of rendering the social world transparent. This is a major conception of moral significance. The social world is a world of moral subjects. To render this world of moral subjects transparent involves exposing the inner states of the human mind. Moreover, according to the moral principle of reciprocity, those who make others transparent should be also transparent themselves. Furthermore, as facts do not order themselves objectively into parsimonious theory, the social scientist requires an extra-theoretical mechanism to classify and filter out data on the way to constructing theory. This extra-mechanism comprises the scientist's a priori assumptions of normative, ontological, and epistemological types: a priori assumptions that constitute the inner states of the theoretician's mind and necessarily precede theory. It is argued here that according to the moral and social principle of reciprocity, theoreticians have an individual and communal moral obligation to ensure that theory and theorising are transparent; an obligation attainable and preceded by strong individual and communal reflexivity. The extra-theoretical mechanism, and especially the ideological inclinations and normative convictions of theoreticians that allows parsimonious theory to be constructed from unbounded social complexity, should be made visible to the public.

A new casting of diasporas, exiles and returnees as potentially transformative agents in post-conflict polities is the topic of this article. ‘Return of Qualified Expatriates’ programmes have recently been launched by international agencies in a number of post-conflict countries in an attempt to promote better capacity-building within post-conflict states institutions. This article argues that the ostensible technical orientation of these programmes is misleading, and they have a political significance which is noted and contested locally. In political terms, they represent attempts to smuggle Western hierarchies of knowledge into post-conflict reconstruction efforts under the cover of ethnic solidarity, to the detriment of local participation and empowerment. The article argues further that this is always contested by interested parties locally, often by mobilising alternative capacities, labelled ‘authentic’, in opposition. As such, strategies that attempt to use ethnic ties to overcome this local contestation are placing a significant burden on ethnic categories that are slippery, malleable and contested in post-conflict contexts. These points are demonstrated with reference to the cases of Cambodia and Timor-Leste.

The global justice debate has largely ignored law. But that debate presupposes a legal order within which principles of justice could be implemented. Paying attention to law alters our understanding of global justice by requiring us to distinguish principles that are properly prescribed and enforced within a legal order from those that are not. Given that theories of global governance depreciate law and that cosmopolitan and confederal theories are utopian, the most promising context for a realistic global justice discourse is one that is focused on strengthening, not transcending, the international legal order.

I critically examine the existing literature on the security dilemma in ethnic conflict, thus laying part of the foundation for constructing a dynamic and integrative theory of ethnic conflict. I show that many attempts to apply the security dilemma to the understanding of ethnic conflict have been based on an imprecise and often mistaken understanding of the concept. I then emphasise that the security dilemma theory and the broader spiral model constitute a dynamic, versatile and powerful theory of strategic interaction that captures some general dynamics leading to the outbreak of war. As such, the security dilemma theory and the broader spiral model, when properly understood, can serve as part of the foundation of a dynamic and integrative theory of ethnic conflict, and such a theory will be able to integrate many diverse understandings of ethnic conflict from different schools of International Relations (IR) theory. I show the feasibility and the utility of such a theory.

This article explores the process by which norms of international climate governance have diffused and evolved over time. The author develops a constructivist explanation for observed normative shifts in international climate governance. This explanation highlights the importance of building and maintaining congruence between domestic conditions and international norms. Due to the inherently fluid nature of both domestic conditions and international norms, it is argued that normative congruence building should be understood as an integral and iterative aspect of the norm diffusion process. This argument is substantiated through an analysis of the norm diffusion process in the context of India: a state commonly identified as an important player in international climate change politics, but one that has received surprisingly little scholarly attention in this area.

Myth-making has historically been an essential component of the modern state's quest for territorial control and legitimacy. As a sui generis post-national political entity in search for identity and recognition, the European Union (EU) seems to mimicking its more established national counterpart. By formulating and reproducing a narrative that hails Europe's border control regime (‘Schengen’) as a success story of European integration and by deploying evocative imagery at Europe's common borders, the EU is in fact trying to establish itself as an integral part of the European political landscape. This article argues that what we are witnessing today in Europe is indeed the emergence of the ‘myth of Schengen’; however, the regime's mythopoiesis goes beyond the EU's official narrative and symbolic representations. To capture the full range of actors, locations and activities involved in the establishment and reproduction of this post-national myth, it is necessary to shift the attention to the performative dimension of this process. To support this argument, the article relies on the insights of anthropological and sociological works that have emphasised the role of rituality and performativity in constituting social structures and identities. These insights are then applied to examine the rituals and performances characterising four cases of ‘unofficial’ Schengen myth-making beyond Europe: a hotel in Beijing, street kids in Kinshasa, a British music band, and a group of Eastern European artists.

There are two central theses to this article, the first is that a special kind of governance authority is needed for principles of distributive social justice (‘social justice’ from now on) to be applicable to any sphere of human action. The second is that international law does not and cannot represent that kind of governance authority. It is not ‘social justice-apt’, in my terminology. This is due to the limits inherent in the statist character of international law, a character that underlies the point and purpose of international law in the first place. Putting these together, one can conclude that international law cannot be used to govern the global order according to those principles of social justice that liberal theorists typically defend in the domestic context. This shows that if the cosmopolitan project of extending social justice to the global arena does not find an alternative form of governance for the international order (the problem of ‘cosmopolitan coordination’) it ceases to be a viable project.

Scholars debate whether Eurocentric theories of International Relations (IR) offer useful explanations of African international politics. They also debate the applicability of Eurocentric theories of state making for understanding African state making in the post-colonial era. I argue that theories like realism and war-and-state-making appear inconsistent with African political reality because when IR scholars apply these theories to Africa, they study the wrong actors. The ‘right’ actors for understanding these theories include not only the official states IR scholars traditionally analyse, but also all of the autonomous political entities that control territory, possess military resources, and struggle to survive under anarchy. I substantiate my claims about the usefulness and necessity of expanding the roster of actors studied with an historical narrative of the first six years of Congo's independence. During this time six autonomous political entities, in addition to the one official state, warred with each other, allied with each other, and struggled to make states.

Non-state entities that aspire to statehood are increasingly developing democratic norms and practices, in part to enhance their claims for independence. However, the prospects for democracy in cases of ‘problematic sovereignty’ are little understood. This article seeks to explore the important but under-explored relationship between sovereignty and democracy, and in particular to assess the extent to which sovereignty is, or is not, a prerequisite for democracy. The article advances two arguments. First, it argues that there is no clear-cut relationship between sovereignty and democracy, as sovereignty is a complex concept that is comprised of several important, and distinct, constituent elements. Second, the article argues that the legal recognition of statehood (international legal sovereignty) is of marginal importance in this area, and should not be seen as a necessary condition for democratic rule. The article examines the process of democratic transition in the non-state entity of Somaliland to provide empirical support.