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This article analyzes the question of information control and how it influences the conduct and the study of international relations. Three theories are advanced as possible explanations for secrecy: The first, the External Threat explanation, suggests that government secrecy is designed to protect sensitive information from external enemies. The second explanation, the Bureaucratic Politics explanation, views secrecy as a relatively unsystematic process that results from the (collectively) irrational features in any government bureaucracy. The third explanation, the Internal Threat approach, argues that government officials use secrecy to mislead the populations of their own countries. These three explanations are applied to a case study of US information policy with regard to the Congo Crisis of 1960-1. The article concludes that the Congo case tends to support the Internal Threat explanation of secrecy.

The globalization of international relations -- Realist theories -- Liberal and social theories -- Foreign policy -- International conflict -- Military force and terrorism -- International organization, law, and human rights -- International trade -- Global finance and business -- International integration -- Environment and population -- The north-south gap -- International development -- Postscript

What is the relationship between security and secularization in International Relations? The widespread acceptance of secularism as the paradigmatic framework that underlies the study of world politics has left this question largely unexplored. Yet, the recent challenges to the secularization thesis and the growing attention that is being devoted to questions of religion and secularism in international politics increasingly suggest the importance of undertaking this investigation. This article takes up this task in three main steps. First, it will explore how the limits of a widely accepted but nonetheless problematic account of the emergence of the modern Westphalian nation-state contribute to a dominant underlying assumption in security studies that implicitly associates security with secularization. Second, it will articulate a competing genealogy of security and secularization which suggests that rather than solving the problem of religious insecurity, secularization makes the question of fear and the politics of exceptionalism central to the state-centric project of modernity and its related vision of security. Finally, the article will examine how these elements inform and, most of all, constrain attempts to move beyond the traditional state-centric framework of security. The focus will be on three such attempts: human security, the securitization theory and Ken Booth's critical theory of security. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Sage Publications Ltd. & ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research.]

Ashworth, L. M.: Interdisciplinarity and international relations. - S. 16-25 Ross, F.: Degrees of disciplibarity in comparative politics: interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and borrowing. - S. 26-36 De Shalit, A.: Political philosophy and empirical political science: from foes to friends? - S. 37-46 Kelly, J.: What can interdisciplinarity offer to policy problems? Understanding the public policy of obesity. - S. 47-56

The overall objective of the dissertation is to analyze the interaction of national development in developing societies and the world political economy. It is an attempt to challenge the bidden selectivity of present day IR by going beyond the partial explanations of the bits and pieces of the whole international system and at the same time uncover claims of scientific "objectivity" and "natura) laws" in human nature. It is also challenging the mainstream discourse of IR, which denotes that development has been consigned to the realm oflow pol i tics, except when the international order, as it has been constructed, is threatened. The objective then is to "connect the dots" by providing an overall theoretical framework for the concepts and empirical material presented in five sections and chapters of this dissertation. This is done by examining competing views of what development and later on international relations means and how they may be intertwined. The idea is not necessarily to reach a unified approach but to investigate the different theories, concepts and methodologies involved in a search for a valid framework, which may give explanatory value to a merger of the two disciplines "Development studies" and "International Relations".

This last paper in the volume tries to pull the threads together and to detect trends of evolution in the analysis of international relations. The discussion is limited to three issues deemed basic to this evolution: 1) the increasing g importance of technology and its impact on the world System, and especially on one of its basic components: the nation-state ; 2) contents and characteristics of the new industry of futurology ; and 3) the rise of political economy as a basic approach to the study of international relations. It is suggested that we are growing beyond such simplistic divisions as "High" and "Low Politics", and obsession with methodologism per se, and that we are increasingly putting rigor and interdisciplinarity in the service of analysing "substantial" issues of international relations.