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Welcome to the first issue of a new year and a new volume of the Journal of International Relations and Development. We hope that you enjoyed the special features from volume 12, including last issue's Forum on everyday post-socialism; that Forum turned out to be large enough that there wasn't room for a separate editorial introduction to the issue, so we omitted it. In fact, due to the economics and technology of journal publishing, a two-page editorial introduction to each issue of the journal ends up costing us a total of four pages per issue, which adds up over time. That, combined with the fact that we have a number of special issues, Forums, and other special features in the queue for the next few issues (all of which takes up all of the available page space that we have) has led me to the conclusion that we simply cannot afford to do these editorials in every issue. So while you can rest assured that we continue the editorial philosophy that led us to begin these editorials in the first place - the philosophy that if we can't explain the significance of an article to our readers then we ought not publish it - we will no longer be providing you with that explanation in every issue. In exchange, we save more room for the articles themselves, which I think is a fair trade.

That said, here is what we have on offer in this current issue of JIRD.

Our lead article, by Ondrej Ditrych, uses the conceptual equipment provided by the ‘critical political ontology' of Schmitt, Benjamin, and Agamben to conduct an analysis of the distinctive pathologies of the state of Georgia. Since 1991, Ditrych argues, Georgia has been in a state of ‘sovereign dictatorship', a permanent state of exception within which opponents of the regime are de-politicised and criminalised instead of being incorporated into the political order. Enmity intensified in this way shored up the extra-legal power of the state through successive regimes, a finding that casts some critical doubt on whether anything fundamental has changed with the most recent orientation of Georgia towards the West.

We follow this article with Bernhard Zangl and Monika Heupel's contribution to the ongoing debate about ‘new wars'. Seeking to move beyond assertions about the changed nature of violence after the Cold War, or to avoid falling victim to the methodological temptation to select illustrations that exemplify one's own preferred theoretical claims, the authors conduct case studies of three conflicts that began during the Cold War, in order to ascertain whether the nature of the violence committed in those conflicts shifted when the Cold War ended. In order to do so, the authors engage in a careful reconstruction of the concept of a ‘new war', a reconstruction that even those who disagree with their conclusions should find a helpful contribution to further thinking about the issue.

Our third article, by Liam Clegg, draws on Margaret Archer's notion of ‘morphogenesis' as a way of integrating agent and structure into a single account of change within international organisations. Clegg seeks to move past the existing alternatives presented by principal agent theory and organisational culture theory, and to provide a way of thinking about organisational change that incorporates insights from both of these streams of theorising into a coherent, dynamic model. Case studies of the IMF and the World Bank provide a sense of what the model can explain in practice.

Finally, we have an article by Jean d'Aspremont canvassing recent international legal scholarship from Eastern Europe in order to explore the issues raised by efforts to conceptualise the international legal order in ways that differ from the dominant liberal and constitutional emphasis on shared values. D'Aspremont identifies an alternative interest-based conceptualisation, present among some Eastern European scholars, and seeks to advance a debate in which value-based conceptions of international law are confronted with an alternative that still upholds the existence of international society - albeit on a somewhat different basis.

Subsequent issues of JIRD will contain a number of special features, in addition to our usual complement of high-quality scholarly articles that have been through a rigorous process of anonymous peer review. As always, we remain grateful to our peer reviewers for facilitating this process, and to everyone who keeps submitting manuscripts to us for our consideration.