ABSTRACT This article examines Britain's post‐war turn from the world's leading food importer to being largely self‐sufficient in food, as a key process within the transition from first to second global food regime. It focuses on the special soil fertility resources mobilised to implement this transition in British agriculture; looking first at the economic, political and military strategic factors which drove the heavy use and stockpiling of chemical fertilisers; and then at Britain's colonial phosphate rock networks. This article affirms the value of a concrete and historicised theoretical approach to Food Regimes Analysis, to appreciate secondary dynamics and regional differences. By employing an archive‐centred historical method with close attention to the role of the state and political economy, this article reveals the endurance of formal colonialism and colonial forms of exploitation—alongside the development of a US‐led international state system—in determining the hierarchy of states under the Second Food Regime.

Between 1926 and 1974 Portugal was governed under a dictatorship, the longest in Western Europe. We argue in this article – focusing on the period between 1926 and 1945 – that the dictatorship was the last act of consolidation of the Portuguese bourgeoisie and the affirmation of its State. The Portuguese nation-state, a backward country, semi-peripheral and dependent on England within the framework of the international system of states, will survive in the world market with labour imposed on African colonies and the ban on unions and political parties, political police and rural underdevelopment organized by the Catholic Church. In the next article, we will analyze the regime between 1945 and 1961–1974, when the combination of anti-colonial revolutions and the socialist revolution in Lisbon led the regime to collapse.

The transformation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to African Union (AU) was a historical landmark of African Leaders’ intention towards integration, projecting Africa’s continental interest in the international state system and seeks for African initiative in solving African problems. This paper seeks to outline the history of Africa’s regional integration and suggest what would strengthen the operations of the African Union. The paper proceeds by examining the efforts of African Leaders towards African integration, obstacles confronting or militating against the integration, and seeking ways to strengthen the integration of the Union. This presentation is aimed at sharing ideas on protecting the continental interest of Africa in the International State System as well as seeking for ways on how to achieve African integration. Creating a philosophy that will drive the African integration concept, involve the private sectors and non-governmental organizations in the integration process, and create peace within the continent institute dispute settlement mechanisms. Internal insurgencies group need to be settled/arrested, and transparent democratic, electoral and leadership need to be strengthened. There should be a collective effort to combat terrorism, ensure stability in the political system; and use a collective effort to combat pervasive corruption among African Countries. Corruption kills economic growth and demeans political legitimacy. These factors inhibit investment process hence, trading among African countries is very low.

Abstract Substantive research in the Social Sciences regularly investigates signed networks, where edges between actors are positive or negative. One often-studied example within International Relations for this type of network consists of countries that can cooperate with or fight against each other. These analyses often build on structural balance theory, one of the earliest and most prominent network theories. While the theorization and description of signed networks have made significant progress, the inferential study of link formation within them remains limited in the absence of appropriate statistical models. We fill this gap by proposing the Signed Exponential Random Graph Model (SERGM), extending the well-known Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) to networks where ties are not binary but positive or negative if a tie exists. Since most networks are dynamically evolving systems, we specify the model for both cross-sectional and dynamic networks. Based on hypotheses derived from structural balance theory, we formulate interpretable signed network statistics, capturing dynamics such as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. In our empirical application, we use the SERGM to analyze cooperation and conflict between countries within the international state system. We find evidence for structural balance in International Relations.

Between 1926 and 1974 Portugal was governed under a dictatorship, the longest in Western Europe. We argue in this article – focusing on the period between 1926 and 1945 – that the dictatorship was the last act of consolidation of the Portuguese bourgeoisie and the affirmation of its State. The Portuguese nation-state, a backward country, semi-peripheral and dependent on England within the framework of the international system of states, will survive in the world market with labor imposed on African colonies and the ban on unions and political parties, political police and rural underdevelopment organized by the Catholic Church. In the next article, we will analyze the regime between 1945 and 1961–1974, when the combination of anti-colonial revolutions and the socialist revolution in Lisbon led the regime to collapse.

This study aims to determine historical origins of the modern globalization and deglobalization processes. Globalization is characterized as an economic process leading to political consequences, contrary to deglobalization which is described as a political process leading to economic consequences. We suggest discussing these two processes exclusively in tandem. Mutual conditionality of the expansion of modern capitalism and the development of the international system of modern-day sovereign states is analyzed. This paper also provides an overview of the three waves of globalization and deglobalization in modern history: the birth of modern capitalism in the 16th century and the establishment of the international system in the 17th century; active development of capitalism in the 19th century and the deglobalization caused by the First World War; and globalization and deglobalization of the modern age. The study characterizes the specifics of the modern globalization as the only political globalization in the history of the world. Modern deglobalization is considered to be a process of consolidation and in some cases restoration of sovereignty performed by the most active participants in world politics. The paper analyzes the circumstances and possible historical dates marking the start of the modern deglobalization. In conclusion, it is suggested that humanity will continue moving through the cycles of globalization and deglobalization comparable to what it has experienced since the 16th century.

How does Durkheim's thought relate to colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonial theory? To answer these questions, I first examine his explicit discussions of empire and colonialism, which are more extensive than previously thought. I then explore the implications of his general perspective—particularly his theories of anomie and morality—for discussions of colonialism and empire. I find that Durkheim was very critical of violent forms of colonialism and imperialism and that he firmly rejected the civilizational and racist discourses that underpinned modern European, and French, colonial conquest. He rejected forms of empire that exist “without internal acquiescence from their subjects,” and that engage in “conquest via annexation” and military imperialism. As an alternative he advocated an “international system of states” based on a universal but socially and historically grounded morality. The article examines the ways Durkheim's thinking pushed beyond existing French understandings and criticisms of colonialism. I then examine the afterlives of his ideas in later research on colonialism by French sociologists. The conclusion considers postcolonial critiques of Durkheim and adumbrates a Durkheimian theory of colonialism and empire.

This study aims to explore Afghanistan through the lens of Neo-Classical Realism. In order to encapsulate the proper foreign policy accumulation there are various theories that suggests and depicts foreign policy behaviors of several states. A theory not only defines politics of emotions but it also predicts the behavior of a state in a certain particular time. In international relations there are several theories that are used as a lens in order to understand the behavior of a state, the foreign policy of a state and to predict the future behavior according to which international arena would behave. There are two major strands in international relations that are used for analysis, and they provide a different and opposing view whenever a state behavior is concerned. These two strands are realism and liberalism. Realism in a theory that explains the behavior of a state in international politics. It states that in international system there is a lack of a centralized political authority due to which the state interactions are not viewed in a particular manner. It also emphasizes that there is an anarchy prevailing international system which can be regulated and can be maneuvered to bring out some favorable results by a sovereign power. The theory emphasizes the role of a state in international system and the way national interests and power grabbing of each state paves a new way towards international. The philosophical ideas that are in the theory have a very long history but in international relations the theory emerged after World War Two. The followers of this theory claim that they offer the most accurate behavior of a state and the explanation that they provide is more accurate to understand the policy perception and prescription for various elements that destabilized the international affairs.

The concept of “just war” has become politically and scientifically relevant due to the collapse of the “European international system of sovereign states”; in the modern situation of “world disorder” (R. Haas), it becomes an instrument of public rhetoric; the inevitable consequence is the degradation of meaning – philosophical research, thus aimed at the formation of the concept, becomes relevant. Understanding the structure, meaning and scope of the concept of “just war” involves putting it in context; the goal, therefore, is to construct a horizon. The main task is to clarify the meaning of the concept of “just war” as a phenomenon of modernity. The concept of “just war” belongs to the field of ideas, that is, understanding presupposes going beyond the methodological framework of disciplinary science – the trans-boundary can be ensured by using methods developed by philosophical hermeneutics to analyze and identify the meaning of ideas and concepts, as well as understanding the ways in which they have power and determine reality. It is revealed that the reduction of the political to morality and the direct application of moral principles to politics necessarily leads to the degradation of war: the rejection of the “non-discriminatory concept of war” in favor of the concept of “just war” removes any restrictions from armed violence. It is demonstrated that war remains necessary on its periphery as normalization, police operation, “humanitarian intervention; the concept of ’just war’ is a tool for ensuring security. It is concluded that the anti-terrorist war as a police operation to ensure the security of the global liberal political order is the conceptual core of the modern concept of “just war”.

Abstract International relations theory tends to build on the conventional narrative of the Wars of Religion (WoR), which holds it was the irrationality of religious violence that generated the modern international system of pragmatic secular states—resulting in the presumed secularized, rational, and unemotive nature of politics. In contrast, this article reorients our focus to Durkheim's more social view of religion as a community of believers and to the continued role of the sacred and shared emotion/affect in social and political life. Specifically, it examines how modern communities (such as nations) remain constituted by a shared faith in conceptions of the sacred and how the corresponding sense of moral order is central to the enduring pursuit of ontological security. Therefore, it argues that international relations should focus on the perennial struggles over what communities hold sacred and that we can better understand the propensity for (“religious” or “secular”) violence by examining the continual interplay between the sacred, ontological security, and the hermeneutics of morality—with the so-called WoR being the locus classicus of this argument. Historical studies exploring how participants in the WoR navigated such struggles over the sacred thus allow us to explore these dynamics and further conceptualize our understanding of the sacred within modern “secular” politics. The article concludes by examining how the prospect for violence is interrelated with the perennial struggles over the sacred within, and between, political orders—a sentiment that brings into relief some of the hazards accompanying growing intrastate moral polarization and interstate ideological rivalry.

Moral realism theory takes political leadership as the core variable, which differs from the traditional realism theory. Moral realism theory aims to analyze the motivation and logic of rising state replacing dominant state in international system. This paper uses documentary analysis to introduce and analyze this theory, which provides an innovative perspective for analyzing the current strength comparison between China and the United States and its impact on international relations in the future, while also helping to understand the diversified development of realism theory in international relations.

ABSTRACT Liberal democratic states can respond to the presence of irregular migrants in three basic ways: by attempting to deport all migrants without legal status, by ignoring their irregular presence without providing them with rights or legal status, or by attempting to include them in the host society. This epilogue to a special issue on sanctuary discusses three inclusive responses to unauthorised immigration: sanctuaries, firewalls and regularizations. We describe their characteristic features by examining their specific benefits for migrants (protection from deportation, access to public services, and pathways to membership), the types of actors promoting or providing these responses (subnational or national governments, civil society actors), and the challenges to national immigration control they raise (contestations over jurisdiction, division of competencies, and determination of legal status). We acknowledge overlaps and ambiguities between the three responses and discuss whether asylum can be considered as sanctuary within the international state system and whether not only regularizations, but also sanctuaries and firewalls can promote inclusive membership. Finally, we lay the ground for empirical and normative analyses of justifications for each of the three responses by showing that these invoke specific claims about contestation rights, benefits for migrants, and benefits for the wider society.

Introduction . The International System of States is currently facing a threatening political and military situation of a global danger. It is possible to restrain the growing threat only by using the qualitatively new methods, which complement to the diplomatic measures. The Russian Federation military security must be ensured by reaching the goal of military system improvement using various state administration methods, including the legal ones. The Russian Federation provides the state military security by means of the legal rules, however in the course of the Special Military Operation started on February 24, 2022 it has become evident that adjustment of the military policy and the legal regulation in the military sphere is required. To increase the efficiency of the national military security provision, the deep theoretical research into the essence and content of the military security is necessary. The aim of this research is to identify the challenging aspects in the system of political and legal provision of the Russian Federation military security. Materials and Methods . The article analyses the political and legal basis for ensuring the military security of Russia. In the process of the study, the general scientific as well as special scientific methods were used, i.e. the cognitive analysis methods for studying the essence of the military security, the official legal documents analysis providing juridical definition of the categories framework of the military security as the object under research, sociological method of surveying the public opinion on the topic of military security and other methods. Results . It has been proved that the level of support among population of the military defense of Russia’s sovereignty and territory is high. The legal, material and ideological components of the Russian military policy need to be strengthened. Measures to improve the military policy in compliance with the public demand of the Russian citizens are proposed. Discussion and Conclusions . The problems of political and legal provision of the Russian Federation military security have been identified. The military policy goals on provision of the military security in the frame of the Russian national security for prevention of potential conflicts expansion are being solved in the process of strengthening the legal basis for the allied relations with the neighboring states, as well as strengthening the resource and ideological components of the military security system.

Scholars often view anti-colonialism as litle more than moral rhetoric in which former colonised states question the West by employing narratives of historic victimisation and marginalisation. While this moral messaging has shaped aspects of post-colonial foreign policy, anti-colonialism is rarely appreciated as a tool of geopolitical practice. This article applies theories of critical geopolitics to argue that anti-colonialism was and is a unique geopolitical strategy allowing formerly colonized states to re-balance centers of political, economic, and military power from historically colonising states to the colonised states. Importantly, anti-colonialism is a geopolitical alternative to territorially defined, Westphalian concepts such as sovereignty and the anarchic international system of states. India has historically maintained a leading role in elucidating and employing anti-colonialism as a geopolitical framework and this article explores four sub-themes of this framework: autochthonous freedom, Pan-Asianism, non-violence, and non-alignment. Each of these sub-themes is explored by examining the geopolitical discourse of Indian leaders through the lens of critical geopolitics, which argues that geography is not objective fact but contested history. Through these sub-themes, Indian leaders have used anti-colonialism as a geopolitical tool to challenge existing power-territory structures to rebalance global power in favor of the formerly colonized world.

The global financial order that emerged after the Second World War was primarily westernled with the USA as the center essentially making the international state system a unipolar one. The need for reforms in the global financial order has long been discussed citing the dangers of globalization that became evident after the 2008 global financial crisis and more recently after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In response to the sanction being imposed, Russia has taken up initiatives to detach itself from the dollar-based global financial order where China and India are seen as potential partners. The research paper takes up the concept of the Primakov Doctrine and the current Russia-India China (RIC) trilateral as a possible strategic triangle that can counterbalance the western-led global financial order by adopting a common currency.

Nations do not trust each other because they are armed, and they are armed because they do not trust each other. The security dilemma is a major problem of the international state system, which is a result of its "anarchic" structure. Lack of trust is the main thing that brings uncertainty and stress and turns mutual fears and suspicions into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Every country needs sufficient and well-trained human resources to enhance its national security. Education must provide the appropriate competencies in every aspect of the national security.

The international system of states displays an inherent drive to territorialize the global commons. But territorialization is not a continuous process—it occurs in episodes. In this article, I use one case from ocean governance, the expansion of territory into near-shore areas of the seas, to advance a twofold argument about the nature of these episodes. First, I argue that the root causes of this drive to territorialize “empty space” are located in global politics, norms, and economics. Second, a territorializing episode occurs when there are impelling economic incentives, and when great powers are unable or unwilling to oppose territorialization. However, this can lead to different outcomes: sovereign territories, functional territories, or internationalized territories. Oceanic space has seen a series of these territorializing episodes since the end of the Second World War and functional territorialization has become more prevalent over time.

Globally, migration is to a certain degree an important and highly debated political topic among scholars because of its peculiarity to human movement and relationship between states. Migration is fundamental to liberal democracies and a function of the international system of states. Following the demise of the apartheid system and the adoption of inclusive governance in South Africa in 1994, the country has continued to witness an influx of migrants. However, the call for the deportation and rejection of migrants amongst South Africans has continued to increase with black foreign nationals at the receiving end, sometimes openly or clandestinely done by government officials. Using a qualitative research method, underpinned by the following questions (i) Is South Africa playing politics with its migration policies, while surreptitiously legalizing xenophobism? (ii) Can well-managed migration policies allay the fears of foreign nationals, particularly the blacks in South Africa? (iii) What effects would anti-immigrants’ laws and attitudes have on South Africa’s relations with other [African] countries? The paper argued that South Africa’s preoccupation with restrictionism policies, driven by xenophobism and political interest, seems to have compromised inroads for immigrants that are very important to its economic growth, concluding that unless the rhetoric of a perceived socio-economic threat, posed by migrants, is countered effectively, South Africa’s economies stand to lose out substantially from the implementation of anti-immigration policies.

ABSTRACT The Ethiopian empire retained its political independence through the European Scramble for Africa. The imperial elites oversaw the transformation of the empire into a territorially-bounded state, part of an international system of states regulated by international law and by international institutions such as the League of Nations, and later the UN. Ethiopian intellectuals were keenly aware that Ethiopia had joined this international system from a subordinated position and that its sovereignty remained at risk. The struggle for sovereignty was fought not only at a diplomatic level, but also at a narrative level. Afäwärḳ Gäbrä-Iyyäsus’s 1908 Traveller’s Guide to Abyssinia and Käbbädä Mikael’s 1949 Ethiopia and Western Civilisation pushed back against the European depiction of Ethiopia as intrinsically inferior and intrinsically unable to develop. Both Afäwärḳ and Käbbädä rejected the rigid determinism of stagist models of development, and argued that Ethiopia and Europe were natural allies by virtue of their shared Christian heritage. Global power hierarchies rigidified Ethiopia’s domestic power hierarchies. The article shows how the way in which Afäwärḳ and Käbbädä defended Ethiopia’s place in an unequal world had important consequences on their vision of domestic nation building, resulting in hierarchical assimilationist policies that marginalised Ethiopia’s non-Christian citizens.

Abstract Afghanistan is not traditionally seen as a ‘decolonized’ state, given that it was never formally part of any empire. Yet Afghan state leaders embraced the language of anti-colonialism and self-determination to assert influence in the international community, and especially at the UN. This paper explores the interactions between Afghan elites and the UN, particularly the way that Afghanistan fought the growing global consensus that self-determination in the era of decolonization meant the establishment of an international states system. Afghan elites instead argued that self-determination was for peoples, not states. Afghanistan’s stance on self-determination, as an exception to territorial state centrism, provides a way of thinking about decolonization’s universalisms and particularities, as well as how it ultimately complicated Afghanistan’s own place in the international community. The article uses Afghanistan’s engagement with the UN General Assembly and its various subcommittees, from its membership in 1946 to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, to reflect on the ways decolonization became a global yet fractured phenomenon that came to mean numerous practices and could be used by different historical actors to articulate multiple, potentially competing visions of political autonomy and rights. International institutions like the UN provided crucial arenas where postcolonial statehood became the norm yet was nevertheless contested and questioned. By providing an exception to the UN’s focus on territorial statehood, Afghanistan demonstrates the ongoing fluidity and complexity of decolonization’s meaning and consequences, as well as the ways in which nations continue to inform the global.