Brismes Lecture: The Future of British Foreign Policy in the Middle East

Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw draws on his experience and Britain's colonial legacy to argue that while the United Kingdom needs to recognise the effects of past policy and how it is perceived in the Middle East, the UK should not be a prisoner of its legacies from the past. In this annual address to the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) he argues that knowledge should be used to create in-depth understanding that in turn should be built on to create more enduring foreign policy goals. He puts forward a coherent case for a more positive and comprehensive relationship with Iran and Turkey as potential allies in building more stable and yet also more democratic and accountable governments throughout the Middle East. Jack Straw argues that the UK is better placed than many to learn from past mistakes and create more robust strategic goals for the future.     

Tocqueville's return again from America

Tocqueville et les Françis. By F. MÉLONIO, Aubier, 1993. Pp. 408. FF160. ISBN 2–7007–2244–2.     

Yunnan,China: minority peoples observed

An account of the time which the author spent among the Iban more than 30 years ago. He describes the customs, festivals and way of life of a people who were still headhunters in recent memory. More particularly he explains how people who lived in longhouses the way their ancestors had lived were slowly brought to change their traditional beliefs, thus enabling development to take place.     

The debate over south Africa's foreign policy

South Africa is no exception to the rule that there tends to be continuity in a state's foreign policy even in the event of far‐reaching domestic political change. But given the new South Africa's debt to a global human rights campaign, the emphasis on ‘staking out the moral high ground’ in the rhetoric of the country's new decision‐makers and of commentators is not surprising. The article discusses the creative tension between the claims of morality and the constraints of realpolitik in the debate on the formulation of the new South Africa's foreign policy. It identifies both differences and overlaps in the approaches of realists and radicals to the conduct of the country's foreign policy.     

Incomplete Democratization and the Outbreak of Military Disputes

Whereas most research on the democratic peace has focused on relations within pairs of states, research on the relationship between democratization and armed conflict has centered primarily on the behavior of individual states. Moreover, the existing literature has placed primary emphasis on explaining the effects of democratization on war, rather than military disputes more generally. In this article, we find that certain types of democratic transitions markedly increase the risk of such disputes within dyads, even when economic and political relations between states are taken into account. Particularly prone to violence are dyads in which either state undergoes an incomplete democratic transition; that is, a shift from an autocratic to a partially democratic (or anocratic) regime that stalls prior to the establishment of consolidated democratic institutions.