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This chapter provides a policy-based reading of the drivers, processes, and long-term ramifications of the outsourcing of military support services that has thus far been all but absent from the literature. Military support services represent the vast majority of contracts let by the military, so that the findings arrived at here are seen to be representative for the broader issue of military contractorisation. Focusing on the USA and the UK, the chapter will 1) identify the structural, contextual factors that frame defence services acquisition, 2) map the defence services acquisition “policy network”, and 3) identify a systemic bias towards contractorisation. Based on these findings, the chapter will 4) conclude with an outlook over the future of military contractorisation within the political context identified earlier.

The concept of 'uneven and combined development' was originally coined by Leon Trotsky to theorise Tsarist Russia's distinctive experience of modernity and revolution. But it has re-emerged over the last decade or so as a burgeoning research programme within International Relations (IR) and historical sociology. It has been critically and creatively deployed in two main areas: the provision of a sociological foundation to international theory overcoming the chronic schism between ‘sociological’ and ‘geopolitical’ modes of enquiry; and, relatedly, in superseding prevailing Eurocentric approaches in the social sciences. This volume is the first to provide a sustained reflection on the idea of uneven and combined development as the intellectual basis for a non-Eurocentric social theory of ‘the international’. It does so through a series of empirically rich and theoretically informed analyses of socio-historical change, political transformation, and intersocietal conflict ov...

Governments in Europe and around the world amassed vast pharmaceutical stockpiles in anticipation of a potentially catastrophic influenza pandemic. Yet the comparatively ‘mild’ course of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic provoked considerable public controversy around those stockpiles, leading to questions about their cost–benefit profile and the commercial interests allegedly shaping their creation, as well as around their scientific evidence base. So, how did governments come to view pharmaceutical stockpiling as such an indispensable element of pandemic preparedness planning? What are the underlying security rationalities that rapidly rendered antivirals such a desirable option for government planners? Drawing upon an in-depth reading of Foucault’s notion of a ‘crisis of circulation’, this article argues that the rise of pharmaceutical stockpiling across Europe is integral to a governmental rationality of political rule that continuously seeks to anticipate myriad circulatory threats to the...

Most people hold that in its quest for natural resources abroad, China shields rogue states with egregious human-rights record from international opprobrium and sanctions. Its political support for Sudan is a case in point. By examining Chinese perspectives on humanitarian intervention and national sovereignty, this article first argues that Beijing's interests are so multiple and complex that concern about the implications of humanitarian intervention for national integration is more crucial than oil in determining its policy towards Sudan. Paradoxically it asserts that China, a non-democratic country, is more influential than liberal democratic states in making the rules of humanitarian intervention in Darfur because of a lack of political will in the West. In addition, there are early signs that China intends to utilise its newfound power to remake international rules regarding territorial sovereignty. Further development is likely to be shaped by its interactions with the Un...

This paper offers an analysis of the illiberal practices and discourse of the Global War on Terror (GWoT) and demonstrates how the United States of America used the liberal argument as a qualitative metric of its success and failure in the GWoT. I argue that ‘the othering’ of Salafi Jihadists as well the full military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq were both philosophically rooted in the liberal thinking of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, which have traditionally guided US foreign policy. More significantly, these liberal philosophies of history and international relations hold within them the seeds of illiberalism by depicting non-liberal, undemocratic societies/organisations as ‘barbaric’ – and as such prime candidates for intervention and regime change. Predicated upon this logic, the discourse of the GWoT framed Al Qaeda as a key existential threat to not only the United States but also the ‘civilised world’ in general and one which required a ‘liberal defensive war’ in...

ABSTRACT Ten years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC on September 11, 2001, the United States remains embroiled in a long-term struggle with what George W. Bush termed the existential threat of international terrorism. On the campaign trail, his successor as US President, Barack Obama, promised to reboot the ‘war on terror’. He claimed that his new administration would step back from the rhetoric and much of the Bush administration policy, conducting a counterterrorism campaign that would be more morally acceptable, more focused and more effective—smarter, better, nimbler, stronger. This article demonstrates, however, that those expecting wholesale changes to US counterterrorism policy misread Obama's intentions. It argues that Obama always intended to deepen Bush's commitment to counterterrorism while at the same time ending the ‘distraction’ of the Iraq War. Rather than being trapped by Bush's institutionalized construction of a global war on terror, the continuities in counterterrorism can be explained by Obama's shared conception of the imperative of reducing the terrorist threat to the US. The article assesses whether Obama has pursued a more effective counterterrorism policy than his predecessor and explores how his rhetoric has been reconstituted as the actions of his policy have unfolded. By addressing his policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, Guantánamo Bay and torture, the uses of unmanned drone attacks and domestic wire-tapping, this article argues that Obama's ‘war’ against terrorism is not only in keeping with the assumptions and priorities of the last ten years but also that it is just as problematic as that of his predecessor.

... American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Niall Ferguson, Empire ...

The Treaty of Amiens, which brought an end to almost a decade of Franco-British warfare in March 1802, has long been understood as a flawed attempt at peace making. The British government’s surrender of most of its wartime colonial acquisitions, combined with a failure to push for guarantees on the Continent, has been interpreted as a meek acquiescence in France’s domination over Western Europe. The recommencement of war in May 1803 simply seems to confirm the supposition that the treaty was fundamentally inadequate. This article questions that interpretation by examining Britain’s relations with and policies towards Europe, and above all towards the Netherlands, during the period of negotiation and subsequent peace, 1800-3. It suggests that the British government did not conceive Amiens as the surrender of key interests, but as a base from which British influence could be reasserted. By looking at the context of Britain’s historical connections to the Netherlands, their experience ...

The nature, subject matter and future direction of International Political Economy has been opened up for debate following interventions by Benjamin Cohen, John Hobson and special issues of the Review of International Political Economy and New Political Economy. Most contributors to the debate are dissatisfied with the current state of International Political Economy and desire to identify the ‘Big Questions’ of the 21st century. This article argues, however, that all contributors miss the ‘Really Big Question’ of the 21st century: the rise of a planetary labouring class of over 3 billion (and counting), living, for the most part, in poverty or near-poverty. While this class’s existence is not new (although its size is), International Political Economy’s ignorance of it is as old as the discipline’s institutional formation. This article shows that mainstream International Political Economy’s sidelining of class relations disables it from explaining the global systemic transformation...