Tim Dunne

• MPhil DPhil (Oxon)
• Professor at The University of Queensland

How is it that internationalism has become the dominant form of statecraft pursued by liberal states and by international organisations, and yet it has received relatively scant attention in International Relations (IR) both historically and conceptually? It is time that the field addressed the paucity of writings on an institutionalised idea that...

With a view to providing contextual background for the Special Issue, this opening article analyses several dimensions of ‘The end of International Relations theory?’ It opens with a consideration of the status of different types of theory. Thereafter, we look at the proliferation of theories that has taken place since the emergence of the third/fo...

The international response to the crisis in Libya has been remarkably quick and decisive. Where many other cases of mass atrocity crimes have failed to generate sufficient and timely political will to protect civilians at risk, the early response to Libya in 2011 has shown that the United Nations Security Council is able to give effect to the ‘resp...

Hedley Bull is one of the most influential theorists of his generation. His attempt to build a theory of international politics which was neither the servant of realpolitik nor the child of Wilsonian idealism remains the most convincing framework for understanding state practice. This article seeks to reassess Bull's contribution to the subject by...

To date, there has not been a sustained attempt to bring the philosophy of the Third Way into foreign policy. In order to fill this gap, the authors turn to the idea of ‘good international citizenship’ pioneered by the former Australian Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans. It is argued that good international citizenship provides a conceptual rationale...

In recent years claims about the end times of the liberal world order have gathered force, with the talk of order giving way to disruption. While there are different accounts of these disruptive dynamics and their causes, it is nevertheless a rare moment in International Relations when all mainstream theories concur that the hegemony of the liberal...

In this contribution to the forum marking the publication of Andrew Linklater’s remarkable book on Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems we first locate the book in the context of Linklater’s overarching intellectual journey. While best known for his contribution to a critical international theory, it is through his engagement wit...

This chapter argues that the the international community’s response to the Syrian civil war was a failure of resolute diplomacy. It first recounts how a popular uprising was brutally supressed by the Bashar al-Assad government’s military forces, sparking a ‘new war’ where many of the protagonists have more to gain from war than peace. It then consi...

Edited by Alex Bellamy, director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at The University of Queensland, and Tim Dunne, The Oxford Handbook on the Responsibility to Protect has been published with Oxford in 2016. The edited Handbook features essays from leading scholars and practitioners in the field, which comprehensively exa...

This paper examines the extent to which international society has been able to accommodate challenges such as the mid-twentieth century ‘revolt against the West’ and the twenty-first century ‘rising powers’. The Bandung Conference of 1955 has commonly been seen as posing a threat to the fabric of international society by proliferating cultural and...

A short paper delivered at Aberystwyth in March 2013. The purpose of the conference on 'Emancipatory Realism' was to consider Ken Booth's contribution to the field of International Relations.

This is a reply to Aiden Hehir's critique of our earlier article published in this journal, in which we analysed international negotiations over the 2011 Libya crisis and argued that the humanitarian norm of protecting civilians was germane in these debates and subsequent United Nations Security Council Resolutions. In the reply we challenge some o...

This article examines institutional patterns of leadership and followership in the UN Security Council with respect to the Responsibility to Protect principle. In a departure from existing literature on leadership and followership in international relations, which has hitherto been framed within a realist analysis, the article presents a constructi...

One of the most important developments in world politics in the last decade has been the spread of the idea that state sovereignty comes with responsibilities as well as privileges, and that there exists a global responsibility to protect people threatened by mass atrocities. The principle of the Responsibility to Protect is an acknowledgment by al...

On 18 March 2001, UN Security Council Res. 1973 enabled NATO forces to implement a protection of civilians mandate to limit the harm Muammar Gaddafi’s military could inflict on the armed uprising against his rule. After seven months of bombardment from sea and air, forces loyal to the National Transitional Council were able to topple the Gaddafi re...

This article analyses international negotiations over the 2011 Libyan crisis during the short weeks between the start of the uprising and the passage and implementation of un Security Council Resolution 1973. We make two arguments: first, following Risse, we demonstrate how and when argumentation around the humanitarian norm of protecting civilians...

The United States has historically been inconsistent and ambivalent about the responsibility to protect. Part 1 of the article sets out a theoretical framework for understanding how the United States aligns itself with the responsibility to protect; it does so by initially using the idea of norm localisation, which reveals important convergences an...

This chapter is a reassessment of the nature of the international system in English School theory. It argues that recent innovative theoretical work has threatened to bypass the system domain. We argue for the need to combine societal norms with a systemic logic, and that these analytics together have explanatory power in considering how the world...

Liberal world order is seen by many as either a fading international order in response to declining American hegemony, or as a failing international order riddled with internal tensions and contradicting positions. Either way, it is assumed to be in crisis. This book does not reject this claim. Nor does it deny that liberalism contains many inconsi...

The current liberal order is fading and has failed to deliver on some of its most fundamental promises. Yet, rather than taking flight from liberal order, this book suggests that liberal orders in the past always have been historically constituted and institutionally contested. Although liberal order's current crisis is not disputed, it suggests th...

This chapter argues that the spectre of imperial orders continues to haunt internationalism and has recently been resurrected with the increasing use, and expectation, of interventionism. It contemplates how the internationalist categories of 'pluralism' and 'solidarism' have conceived of the many dilemmas associated with the practice of interventi...

After considering the vexed question of whether it is possible to speak of a collective identity shared by scholars working in Britain, this chapter examines the debate surrounding the birth of international relations in the aftermath of the First World War. It discusses the arguments mobilized by E. H. Carr against the so-called idealists. This le...

Written by two leading scholars, this book is an accessible overview of the global political consequences of the 9/11 terror attacks. The War on Terror has defined the first decade of this century. It has been marked by the deaths of thousands of people, political turmoil, massive destruction, and intense fear. Regardless of the name it goes under,...

9/11 has been the trigger for a decade-long revival in research work on terrorism. The ten books under review illustrate the diversity of approaches to this growing field of study: the quality of the books does not, however, entirely refute the suggestion that there are diminishing returns to knowledge within the so-called terrorism industry. What...

America won an asymmetric war in Iraq and lost an asymmetric peace. Translating material power advantage into favourable political outcomes has been a challenge for great powers down the ages—what makes this bridge even more difficult to cross today is the raised expectations on the part of liberal publics about the moral purpose of US-led interven...

A persistent struggle within liberal thought is how to recognise cultural particularity within an ethical system in which toleration does not become indifference. The liberal internationalism espoused by leading US-based authors assumes a single logic of modernity, in which adherence to liberal rules and institutions is both necessary and inevitabl...

Liberal internationalism is the default setting for thinking about the development of international institutions since 1919. It provides the template for practitioners whose job it is to juggle contending norms of power and justice, rights and responsibilities. For complex reasons, proponents of liberalism believe that the default needs to be reset...

Is there a crisis of legitimacy in relation to fundamental human rights commitments? At one level, the human rights regime has endured legitimacy problems from the outset, in part due to the scope and complexity of the standards but also as a result of the unwillingness of states to regard human rights norms as properly binding. I argue that Septem...

The evolution in the international system from bipolarity to unipolarity has led to shifting patterns of alliances in world politics. Since 9/11, the United States has demonstrated a willingness to use its overwhelming military power to deal with potential or real threats. Contrary to its policy of embedded power in the economic and security instit...

This article develops a critical conception of security by showing the limits of traditional realist and pluralist discourses. It does this by exploring the deficiencies of realist and pluralist approaches when it comes to thinking about the promotion of human rights. Realism leads to moral indifference and a myopic approach to security and plurali...

The emerging pattern of crisis and war triggered by the terror attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001 and sustained through successive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, provides a new context within which we must re-evaluate the English School claim that international society is a key element in the reality of world politics. From to...

The fate of East Timor provides a barometer for how far the normative structure of international society has been transformed since the end of the Cold War. In 1975, the East Timorese were abandoned by a Western bloc that placed accommodating the Indonesian invasion of the island before the protection of human rights. Twenty-five years later, it wa...

Noam Chomsky, Benjamin Barber, Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sissela Bok are among the better-known contributors to this volume, edited by two academic specialists in international relations, and represent the range of approaches covered: political, ethical, legal, economic. Can globalization help in the war against terror? Can we still find common valu...

The fate of East Timor provides a barometer for how far the normative structure of international society has been transformed since the end of the Cold War. In 1975, the East Timorese were abandoned by a Western bloc that placed accommodating the Indonesian invasion of the island before the protection of human rights. Twenty-five years later, it wa...

This volume looks outward to the twenty-first century and to the dynamics of this first truly global age. It asks the fundamental question: how might human societies live? In contrast to the orthodoxies of academic Philosophy and International Relations in much of the twentieth century, which marginalised or rejected the study of ethics, the contri...

International society refers to the dominant diplomatic and normative discourse in the practice of world politics. At a minimum, its rules and institutions regulate interactions by sovereign communities, prescribing permissible forms of behaviour. There is also a deeper sense of society in which members share values about the ‘ends’ that communitie...

International society is arguably the master-concept of academic international relations. Just as society is said to be present when individuals take account of others, international society exists because states recognise each other and act according to shared interests and norms. The article begins by noting the paradox that, despite the relative...

Choice is at the heart of ethics, but our choices are never entirely free. Human choice is fettered by history, by context, by biology, by expected consequences and by imagination. Every choice has a history, and a price. In world politics, the scope for choice seems particularly fettered. Historical and geographical contextualization, and projecte...

The shock waves of whathappened in 1989 and after helped make the 1990s a peculiarly interesting decade,and while all periods in history are by definition special, there was somethingvery special indeed about the years following the collapse of the socialistproject in the former USSR and Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, this has not beenreflected in...

There is a stark contradiction between the theory of universal human rights and the everyday practice of human wrongs. This timely volume investigates whether human rights abuses are a result of the failure of governments to live up to a universal human rights standard, or whether the search for moral universals is a fundamentally flawed enterprise...

It is fitting that Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis should be the point of departure for the first Special Issue of the Review of International Studies. One of the earliest appraisals of Carr's contribution to international relations appeared in the very first issue of the journal of the British International Studies Association.1 More recently, by...

Inventing International Society is a narrative history of the English School of International Relations. After E.H. Carr departed from academic international relations in the late 1940s, Martin Wight became the most theoretically innovative scholar in the discipline. Wight found an institutional setting for his ideas in the British Committee, a gro...

Metatheoretical debates, once the preserve of political and social theory, have entered the iron cage of International Relations. This article opens with a discussion of these debates, in particular the argument that the social sciences have inherited two radically different understandings of the nature of the social world: `objectivism' and `subje...

In a recent issue of Cooperation and Conflict, Ole Waever argued that `theoretical progress is hard to find in the work on international society'. This article seeks to challenge this verdict by reasserting the continued relevance of the international society tradition to contemporary international relations thinking. In the first instance, an anal...

The development of the academic study of international relations has been peculiarly conditioned by traditions of thought. Martin Wight was the first theorist to reject the binary dualism of the founding traditions of realism and idealism, as he believed it to be ‘the reflection of a diseased situation’. In its place Wight constructed three traditi...