Barry Buzan

From international system to international society: structural realism and regime theory meet the English school

The idea of international society is an essential element in the study of international relations. International society is the core concept of the English school and has not yet been systematically integrated with American-originated structural realism and regime theory. This article brings together these three bodies of theory and shows how they complement and strengthen each other. It uses structural realism to show that international society is, like balance of power, a natural product of anarchic international relations and not, as some in the English school assume, only a result of exceptional historical circumstances. This line of analysis establishes definitional criteria for international society that enable a clear boundary to be drawn between international systems with and without international societies. It also shows how state-based international society relates to individual-based world society and supports an argument that in advanced systems, this relationship becomes complementary, not contradictory. The resulting theoretical synthesis provides an essential historical and political-legal foundation for regime theory, showing that international society is both the intellectual forebear and the necessary condition for the development of regimes. Connection strengthens all three bodies of theory and opens up useful channels that connect realist and liberal thinking. One result is that international society can be used both to conceptualize the complexities of a contemporary global international system, with its network of regimes ordered in terms of concentric circles, and to sketch out a policy-relevant research agenda for understanding it.

Macrosecuritisation and security constellations: reconsidering scale in securitisation theory

The Copenhagen schools theory of securitisation has mainly focused on the middle level of world politics in which collective political units, often but not always states, construct relationships of amity or enmity with each other. Its argument has been that this middle level would be the most active both because of the facility with which collective political units can construct each other as threats, and the difficulty of finding audiences for the kinds of securitisations and referent objects that are available at the individual and system levels. This article focuses on the gap between the middle and system levels, and asks whether there is not more of substance there than the existing Copenhagen school analyses suggests. It revisits the under-discussed concept of security constellations in Copenhagen school theory, and adds to it the idea of macrosecuritisations as ways of getting an analytical grip on what happens above the middle level. It then suggests how applying these concepts adds not just a missing sense of scale, but also a useful insight into underlying political logics, to how one understands the patterns of securitisation historical, and contemporary.

Rethinking Security after the Cold War

This paper examines aspects of the debate amongst traditionalist, widening and critical approaches to Security Studies. It looks at how the security agenda has expanded away from the narrow military focus generated by the Cold War, and argues against the traditionalist criticism that widening the concept of security necessarily makes it incoherent. To carry this argument, it proposes a constructivist method for security analysis that offers a way of confining the application of security, and some reintegrative potential, to all three schools. In this approach, security is understood not as the content of a particular sector (military), but as a particular type of politics defined by reference to existential threats and calls for emergency action in any sector. The paper concludes by examining some of the political issues raised by any attempt to widen the scope of security, setting the liberal case for narrowing security as much as possible against the pressures to widen the security agenda that ironically arise from the contemporary success of the liberal project.

The English School: an underexploited resource in IR

The English School is an underutilized research resource and deserves a larger role in IR than it currently has. Its distinctive elements are its methodological pluralism, its historicism, and its interlinking of three key concepts: international system, international society and world society. International society is the main focus, and the via media, between the other two, but more work needs to be done to develop the Schools theoretical position, particularly in understanding the relationship between international and world society. In order to realize its potential, the English School needs both to construct a more coherent research agenda and to recover some of the working method of the British Committee. It is potentially a way of challenging the theoretical fragmentation that afflicts IR, and of setting up the foundations for a return to grand theory.

Economic structure and international security: the limits of the liberal Case

The theory that a liberal international economic structure is associated positively, and a mercantilist structure negatively, with international security is widespread. But the case in favor of liberalism, and the case against mercantilism, are both one-sided, and the whole attempt to link economic structure to international security anyway overestimates the influence that economic structure has on the use of force. Political and military factors provide explanations more convincing than economic ones for the propensity of states to resort to, or refrain from, the use of force. Liberal and mercantilist structures each have both positive and negative impacts on the use of force, but these impacts become important only when they are complemented by noneconomic factors governing the use of force. Hence security grounds cannot be used convincingly either as a reason for maintaining the current liberal system or as a reason for opposing a shift toward a more mercantilist structure of international economic relations.

A Reductionist, Idealistic Notion that Adds Little Analytical Value

individuals within a particular state is at risk as a result of the actions or the incapacity of a government. But what kind of security are we talking about? Some prefer a narrow view focusing on protection from violence. Others suggest a wider scope, including rights, governance, development, the environment, and health. Violence is only one threat among many facing individuals. Protection from violence gives little solace to the starving or those threatened by potentially fatal preventable diseases or when individuals lack the resources to control their lives. There is no intrinsic reason to favor narrow over broad conceptions of human security. The merits of the two positions can, however, be judged in terms of conceptual value added and policy consequences. In the first instance, it is unclear what additional analytical or normative traction one gets from relabeling sustainable human development, for example, as human security. To the extent that calling development security is a rhetorical device designed to attract a larger share of public resources, there is no evidence that it has done so. In contrast, the narrower focus on protection has stimulated significant normative change (e.g. the attenuation of state sovereignty implicit in UN Security Council resolutions 1265 and 1296), which is to a degree reflected in practice (for example in the inclusion of civilian protection in peacekeeping mandates). In general, the widening of the concept makes the establishment of priorities in human security policy difficult. Diluting the concept diminishes its political salience. The more comprehensive the sweep of human security, the less likely are the objectives of its proponents to be achieved.

Differentiation: A sociological approach to international relations theory

This article sets out an analytical framework of differentiation derived from sociology and anthropology and argues that it can and should be applied to international relations (IR) theory. Differentiation is about how to distinguish and analyse the components that make up any social whole: are all the components essentially the same, or are they distinguishable by status or function? We argue that this approach provides a framing for IR theory that is more general and integrative than narrower theories derived from economics or political science. We show why this set of ideas has so far not been given much consideration within IR, and how and why the one encounter between IR and sociology that might have changed this — Waltz’s transposition of anarchy and functional differentiation from Durkheim — failed to do so. We set out in some detail how differentiation theory bears on the subject matter of IR arguing that this set of ideas offers new ways of looking not only at the understanding of structure in IR, but also at structural change and world history. We argue that differentiation holds out to IR a major possibility for theoretical development. What is handed on from anthropology and sociology is mainly designed for smaller and simpler subject matters than that of IR. In adapting differentiation theory to its more complex, layered subject matter, IR can develop it into something new and more powerful for social theory as a whole.

Security architecture In Asia: the interplay of regional and global levels

I argue that there is a distinct and longstanding regional structure in East Asia that is of at least equal importance to the global level in shaping the regions security dynamics. Without considering this regional level neither ‘unipolar’ nor ‘multipolar’ designations can explain East Asian international security. To make this case, I deploy regional security complex theory both to characterize and explain developments in East Asia since the end of the Cold War. The shift from bipolarity to unipolarity is well understood in thinking about how the ending of the Cold War impacted on East Asia. Less written about in Western security literature are the parallel developments at the regional level. Prominent among these are the relative empowerment of China in relation to its neighbours, and the effect of this, as well as of the growth of regional institutions, and the attachment of security significance to East Asian economic developments, in merging the security dynamics of Northeast and Southeast Asia. How China relates to its East Asian region, and how the US and China relate to each other, are deeply intertwined issues which centrally affect not only the future of East Asian, but also global, security. With the notable exception of some crisis between China and Taiwan, this whole pattern looks mainly dependent on internal developments within China and the US. Also significant is whether the basic dynamic of interstate relations in East Asia is more defined by the Westphalian principle of balancing, or by the bandwagoning imperative more characteristic of suzerain-vassal relationships. The main probability is for more of the same, with East Asian security staying within a fairly narrow band between mild conflict formation and a rather odd and weak sort of security regime in which an outside power, the US, plays the key role.

The Inaugural Kenneth N. Waltz Annual Lecture A World Order Without Superpowers Decentred Globalism

The category of superpower, as distinct from great power, has become naturalized in the discourses about international relations. But ‘superpower’ has only become common usage since the end of the Second World War and in modern history cannot meaningfully be applied much further than the 19th century. This article argues that superpowers are a historically contingent phenomenon whose emergence rested on the huge inequality of power between the West and the rest of the world that developed during the 19th century. As this inequality diminishes, the most likely scenario for world politics is decentred globalism, in which there will be no superpowers, only great powers. The largest section of the article uses a framework of material and social factors to show why the US is unlikely to remain a superpower, and why China and the EU are unlikely to become superpowers. The following three sections use the same framework to look more briefly at why a world with only great powers is likely to take a more regionalized form; why this might produce a quite workable, decentralized, coexistence international society with some elements of cooperation; and what the possible downsides of a more regionalized international order might be, focusing particularly on the problem of regional hegemony. The conclusions offer five policy prescriptions for living in a decentred globalist world.

Reconceptualizing Anarchy: structural realism meets world history

How can the understandings of world historians about the critical changes in the international system be brought into harmony with the way IR theorists think about system change? One of the main obstacles to this task is Waltzs conception of structure, particularly his much criticized elimination of functional differentiation of units in anarchy. Until this flaw is corrected, the theory remains fundamentally incoherent, having misguidedly sacrificed rigour for parsimony. Waltz cannot defend both his exclusive anarchy-hierarchy dyad as the first tier of structure, and the closure of the second tier, against attacks by Ruggie, Watson and Deudney. While the anarchy-hierarchy formulation of deep structure is defensible, the closure of the second tier is not. Both on theoretical and historical grounds, anarchy is compatible with differentiation of units — there is more than one type of anarchic international system. Neorealism therefore gives a partial and Eurocentric view of international systems, and cannot sustain its transhistorical claim. With carefully specified definitions for functional and structural differentiation of units, it is possible to retain a coherent, and still quite parsimonious, theory that is capable of encompassing all of the known manifestations of international systems. Only with such modifications is it possible to address the significant systemic transformations both ancient and modern that now pass unnoticed through the broad mesh of the neorealist net.