Combining key elements of classical and constructivist approaches to representation, this article suggests a novel reconceptualisation of political representation. Developed through participatory agency research with people in socio-economically difficult situations and anchored in people’s lived experiences and sense-making processes, the representative relationship is redefined as a pragmatic and solution-oriented partnership between representatives and the represented. Expanding the classical Pitkinian model, it enables representatives to be better informed about how to address peoples’ concerns. In doing so, it advances the notion of dynamic political representation, where the represented are not passive principals but active partners in decision-making. While we uphold the classical principle of acting in the interests of the represented, we reconceptualise these interests as dynamic and continuously evolving – a perspective consistent with constructivist thought. This research aligns with scholarly calls to rethink representation and revise the roles of the representatives and the represented, fostering meaningful and effective engagement. Our empirical findings highlight the urgency of reform for people in socio-economically difficult situations and underscores the broader relevance of these insights, in a context of increasing legitimacy deficits and rising discontent with current modes of representation in contemporary democracies.

How should the responsibility for refugees be distributed among states? While scholars have proposed various sources of responsibility to make the distribution more equitable, they have not provided guidance on how to weigh each principle within a composite scheme. This is an important problem to resolve because the principles often implicate different actors, resulting in distinct distributions of responsibility. Moreover, states are particularly able to obfuscate their level of responsibility when multiple principles exist. To remedy this problem, I specify the range of possible solutions to the weighting problem, based on the principles of liability, community, and capacity. This argument identifies the relative importance of each principle based on the stated goals of a particular framework. These goals include whether the scheme is intended to operate under ideal or non-ideal assumptions, or if it intends to optimize state or refugee interests. By focusing on how to weigh various sources of responsibility, this paper paves the way for scholars to develop determinate schemes that can identify each state’s fair share in contexts where multiple principles apply.

This article argues against the cliché (posited most famously by Alexis de Tocqueville and Carl Schmitt), that there were inherent correspondences between religious and political concepts. Such connections were historically contingent, and had to be forged by polemicists and apologists who eclectically drew upon a variety of sources. This is evident from an examination of differing Presbyterian reactions to the French Revolution. John Brown in Scotland combined an aristocratic Presbyterian ecclesiology with a Burkean view of authority to argue for an anti-democratic conception of “representative government.” By contrast, the Scottish-American Alexander McLeod synthesized radical Presbyterian political theology with Painite ideas of “representative democracy.” Thus representation emerged as the key concept in both authors, yet its compatibility with democracy was an open question. The examples of Brown and McLeod also show that religion, as much as “secular” politics, had to grapple with and re-imagine “democracy.”

Boat-based metaphors, which portray individual societies or even humanity as a whole as cast adrift on a sea of challenges, have resonated within political theory since the time of Plato, and they continue to frame how we understand and respond to key political choices. However, unless handled very carefully, they can facilitate mis-framings of our contemporary predicament. To date, these metaphors have often done a poor job of capturing the ecological challenges we face. They also risk downplaying the messy pluralism that enduringly characterises political life. If this is true, we should be suspicious of the conclusions their authors seek to draw about our collective future. Lifeboat metaphors, I will suggest, are prone to the same general problems but also add some distinctively their own. As a consequence they should be deployed with especial caution.

This article addresses recent work on empire and colonisation which calls for a reappraisal of how agency and resistance manifests among groups responding to structural marginalisation. We argue that approaching these questions from within the colonial order reveals important idiosyncrasies regarding how groups understood resistance, agency, and popular organising as possible responses that emerged from within imperial landscapes. Using the example of race as a central regulatory category and practice of colonial power, we analyse two cases which we suggest benefit from an account of agency and resistance within colonial order: the Black Loyalists in English America and the Indigenous royalists of New Granada, two groups which pursued emancipation by choosing to remain under colonial rule. The resulting analysis produces a more dynamic account of resistance and emancipation which responds to the far-reaching influence of colonial order for resistance movements at local, national, and international levels. This account contributes to recent debates which call for theoretical analysis of “middle actors” and popular thinking as it relates to international politics, postcolonial movements, and studies of empire.

Colonization processes have resulted in the naturalization and universalization of a particular Eurocentric construction of political ordering. As a result, Indigenous claims of sovereignty – especially significant in settler colonial contexts since the 1960s and 1970s – have historically been obfuscated and are still construed as anomalies or impossibilities. Based on poststructuralist international relations theory and Indigenous political theory, as well as interviews conducted with Māori actors participating in the mobilization of sovereignty politics, this article advances two main contributions. Firstly, it develops a particular approach to the state-Indigenous contention of political ordering by calling attention to the metaphysical foundations of the particular conceptions of sovereignty they respectively deploy. Secondly, it contends that Māori political actors are enacting a ‘metaphysical revolt’ through their reconceptualization of sovereignty theory and practice; one that contains potential for a decolonial rearticulation of political ordering. Through its direct engagement with Indigenous political mobilization and the theorizing sustaining it, this article illustrates how Indigenous theories of sovereignty translate into conceptual alternatives that break away from the colonial roots and underpinnings of paradigmatic sovereignty. Therefore, this article contributes to exploring alternative models of political ordering by illuminating the links between Indigenous thought and decolonial imagination.

This article presents two related arguments. First, the limits of doctrinal analysis cut deeper than many EU lawyers realise. Most would probably accept that legal doctrine does not determine every legal dispute, but lawyers studying EU institutional balance often still assume that it can be deduced from the positive law what is good institutional practice. This paper argues instead that the allocation of EU institutional authority cannot be determined by the exercise of legal judgement, but instead requires the exercise of political judgement on the relative merits of different institutions. Second, this means that political and normative discourses and disciplines cannot be assumed to fall outside the domain of legal scholarship. What we need instead is a distinctive kind of legal scholarship that interweaves doctrinal analysis with normative political theory, broadly conceived. I will argue that political theory, in addition to evaluative value, has adjudicative value, provided that our theories are sensitive to the EU’s social and political setting and the constraints this setting imposes on what is realistically feasible.

John Stuart Mill is central to parallel debates in mainstream contemporary political epistemology and philosophy of federalism concerning the epistemic dimension(s) of legitimate authority. Many scholars invoke Mill to support epistemic arguments for democratic decision-making and decentralized federalism as a means of conferring democratic legitimacy. This article argues that Millian considerations instead provide reason to reject common epistemic arguments for decentralized federalism. Combining Mill's own insights about the epistemic costs of decentralization and recent work in philosophy, politics, and economics undermines purportedly Millian arguments for federalism focused on political experimentation, diversity and participation. Contrary to many interpretations, Millian considerations weaken, rather than strengthen, arguments for federalism. Any valid justification for federalism must instead rest on non-epistemic considerations. This conclusion is notable regardless of how one interprets Mill. But it also supports Mill's stated preference for local decisions subject to central oversight.