ABSTRACT
The determinations of the systemic relations in which states engage with other states, and the historical transformations through which those structures, practices and determinations have changed from, say, the era of gunpowder and pirates to that of the strategists and merchants of nuclear threat. Many have been lulled into thinking that to understand them alone is sufficient to respond to the widespread sense of uncertainty informing demands for more sensible policies or more sophisticated accounts of the relation between security and shifting historical circumstances. Much of the rhetorical force and political legitimation expressed through modern discourses of security rest ultimately on this simultaneous appeal to the hard and the vacuous, the precise and the imprecise, the exaction of blood and sacrifice in the name of the grand generalization. According to the formal claims of state sovereignty, international relations cannot turn into an analysis of world politics, and there can be no alternative to national security except anarchy or empire.
