John MacMillan

Liberalism and the democratic peace

Recent trends in Democratic Peace theory have called into question the orthodox ‘separate democratic peace’ position that liberal states are peace-prone only in relations with other liberal states. This article seeks to recast the bases and scope (or parameters) of the relationship between liberalism – primarily left-liberalism – in domestic politics and peace-proneness in foreign affairs, to the effect that whilst this is manifest more broadly than conventionally understood, it is far from universal or undifferentiated. Whilst liberal ‘norms’ – as indicators of the legitimacy of force – are an important factor in determining when liberals will and will not support the use of force, liberals are also shown to have a higher threshold for the use of force than other groups on the mainstream domestic political spectrum (usually to the Right), indicating greater unwillingness to use force. The cases examined are reasonably neutral, not cherry-picked, in that they are drawn from the three major conflicts of the twentieth century and, as a starting point for the examination of liberal imperialism, Gladstones Second Ministry (1880–1885). Whilst the above findings are presented as highly significant for understanding the character of liberal peace-proneness and an advance on the separate democratic peace position, the argument is necessarily qualified in an effort to reflect the political complexities of the phenomenon and the limitations of liberal norms as an explanatory factor. It is, however, these very qualifications that put the politics back into the research agenda and connect the knowledge claims to a wider body of academic scrutiny which, ultimately, should lead to a fuller understanding of the relationship between liberalism, democracy and peace.

Making First-Year Tutorials Count. Operationalizing the Assessment-Learning Connection.

This article reports the design and effects of a practical, pedagogic experiment motivated by the wish to encourage greater ‘active learning’ in first-year tutorials along with a range of other learning skills, in particular the practice of ‘good’ argumentation. The project has its roots in a formal accredited programme in teaching and learning that provided frameworks for thinking about how to change the assessment regime and in a measure of dissatisfaction with the existing, ‘conventional’ organization of the tutorial as a site of learning. The aim was to create an environment in which the students prepared thoroughly for each tutorial, engaged in challenging discussion, and reflected on what and how they were learning. The method employed was to centre the assessment regime on the tutorial itself in conjunction with frequent and rapid feedback on student work.

Intervention and the ordering of the modern world

I am lead editor of a special issue of the Review of International Studies, which is the house journal of the British International Studies Association. The special issue arose from a competitive process. I am scheduled to have two pieces in this issue.

‘Hollow promises?’ Critical materialism and the contradictions of the Democratic Peace

The Democratic Peace research programme explicitly and implicitly presents its claims in terms of their potential to underpin a universal world peace. Yet whilst the Democratic Peace appears robust in its geographical heartlands it appears weaker at the edges of the democratic world, where the spread of democracy and the depth of democratic political development is often limited and where historically many of the purported exceptions to the Democratic Peace are found. Whereas Democratic Peace scholarship has tended to overlook or downplay these phenomena, from a critical materialist perspective they are indicative of a fundamental contradiction within the Democratic Peace whereby its universalistic aspirations are thwarted by its material grounding in a hierarchical capitalist world economy. This, in turn, raises the question of whether liberal arguments for a universal Democratic Peace are in fact hollow promises. The article explores these concerns and argues that those interested in democracy and peace should pay more attention to the critical materialist tradition, which in the discussion below is represented principally by the world-system approach.

Historicising intervention: Strategy and synchronicity in British intervention 1815-50

This article identifies three key themes in British intervention for purposes of liberal reordering in the period 1815–50, namely the ‘opening-up’ of new market spaces (discussed in relation to Uruguay/the Argentine Confederation in the 1840s), a cosmopolitan humanitarianism evident in the campaign for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade that ran throughout this period, and the political-ideological contest between constitutionalist and absolutist forces and represented here by intervention in the Iberian Peninsula in the late 1820s to1830s. In developing a strategic perspective upon military/naval intervention the analysis shows its utility to have been subordinate to more fundamental sociopolitical, cultural, and institutional determinants. With regard to understanding the outcomes of specific intervention the analysis shows the importance of systematically evaluating developments in the domestic political environments of both intervening and target state as well as the military campaign itself and the need for sufficient general alignment or synchronisation in the timeline of developments in each of these three domains. This model helps to explain that whilst liberal interventions are not necessarily bound to fail, they frequently prove more difficult, complex, and protracted than the interveners expect.

Myths and lessons of liberal intervention: The British campaign for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil

This article takes issue with recent references to the British nineteenth century campaign for the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Brazil that serve to bolster interventionist or imperialist agendas. In particular, such accounts reproduce two and a half myths about the campaign: that it can serve as a model for the present age; that the success of the campaign can be explained through the actions of the intervening party alone (with a corresponding neglect of those of the ‘target’ state); and the half-myth that the campaign’s success was due to military action (at the expense of institutional (legal) and normative factors and the capacity of the target state). I argue instead that this case - and interventions more generally - would benefit from an analysis that considers the role of force in relation to a series of residual institutional and cultural constraints within the liberal state and to political conditions in the target state. In light of the complexities and contingencies that these factors present the underlying lesson is that military force should be used sparingly, if at all.

Review of the politics of international intervention. The tyranny of peace, edited by Mandy Turner and Florian P. Kühn, Routledge, London, 2016, 288 pp., ISBN 9781138891272 £90 hardback

A hallmark of the Radical tradition has been critical analysis of the systemic and discursive contradictions that thwart or distort the attainment of politically and ethically desirable goals. ‘Intervention’, in which elevated moral justification for action rasps against residual questions of interests and selectivity and manifests a recurring disjuncture between stated aims and practical outcomes, is a natural subject for such a mode of analysis. For the United States, Britain and France in particular, intervention is not solely a matter of policy choice but an embedded method of addressing (and defining) certain types of situation; akin to what President Obama referred to in his interview in The Atlantic as the ‘Washington playbook’. The ‘playbook’ refers to the foreign policy establishment’s tendency to pursue militarised responses to various events, which Obama recognised as ‘a trap that can lead to bad decisions’.1 It does, however, affirm the point that institutions and infrastructures are in place that reproduce and serve to normalise a militarised approach to a range of social and political circumstances. At the personal level too, for many politicians the prospect of a successful, ideally swift and low-cost intervention stands as a way to establish their masculine leadership credentials. But individuals and institutions do not exist autonomously, and it is in the cultural and normative realms that one finds the deep roots of intervention and the permissive conditions for political practice. Accordingly, (liberal) interventions tend to require a certain episteme in which the possibility of outsiders rescuing or otherwise helping others retains sufficient ideological coherence and moral utility such as to sustain a political support base. Interventions can be difficult to undertake and costly to sustain and for these reasons politicians invest heavily in discursive justifications and moral defence of the practice, as evident for example in Tony Blair’s criticism of the present leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, for ‘standing-by’ in the face of atrocities in Syria.2 There is then a paradox that whilst interventions are a long-standing and seemingly residual feature of liberal state foreign policy they are also vulnerable in the face of epistemological and political criticism. The collection of essays in this volume, for the most part updated articles from a special issue of International Peacekeeping, comprises a well-edited, sustained critique of the epistemic bases and wider political context of liberal intervention, particularly those whose