The promise of constitutionalisation is, according to Kratochwil, the existential comfort that comes from having a coherent framework for judgement and action. This apparent epistemological confidence comes at the price of parting with a realistic assessment of the concrete situation, and it conceals that politics operate across all levels all the time. This paper critiques this vision and points beyond the idea of exhaustive frameworks. Figuring out contextually appropriate configurations of constitutionalisation and fragmentation allows for greater agency and pluralism. A more fundamental tension in Kratochwil's work remains, however, his falling back on the abstract to articulate the experiential.

I argue that the dangers inherent in Wendt's project are not that it radically undermines the project of social science as it currently exists, in positivist or interpretivist forms, but rather that it reinforces the will to knowledge that has powered the development of the social and human sciences since the late 19th century. The ultimate significance of Wendt's argument is not ontological or epistemic but political.

Debates engaging the problems of ahistoricism and Eurocentrism in International Relations (IR) theory have taken on new dimensions in recent years. Scholars from a variety of different theoretical traditions have aimed to reconstruct IR theory on stronger historical–sociological grounds, while re-orienting the study of IR away from the fetish of ‘Western’ thought and agency. Buzan and Lawson’s The Global Transformation offers a welcome contribution to these endeavours to furnish a non-Eurocentric historical sociology of international relations. This article seeks to push their project further by re-assessing the relationship between history, theory, and contingency. In particular, it interrogates whether Buzan and Lawson’s ‘configurational’ approach to the ‘global transformation’, emphasizing the contingent concatenation of historical events and social processes, results in a displacement of theory through an over-emphasis on the interaction of free-floating contingently related causes, causes that are external to any theoretical schema. This approach obscures the deeper, structural forces in the making of global modernity, most notably those that escape Buzan and Lawson’s singular focus on the ‘long 19th century’.

Pogge has repeatedly compared the causes of global poverty with historical crimes against humanity. This claim, however, has been treated as mere rhetoric. This article argues that there are good reasons to take it seriously. It does this by comparing Pogge’s thesis on the causes of global poverty with the baseline definition of crimes against humanity found in international law, especially the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It argues that the causes of global poverty are comparable with the crimes of slavery and apartheid. This has important consequences for cosmopolitan thought, as it makes the need for practical solutions to global poverty more urgent and raises questions about the global poor’s right to resist the international system by violent means.

Academic discourse on global justice is at an all-time high. Within ethics and international law, scholars are undertaking new inquiries into age-old questions of building a just world order. Ethics – within political and moral philosophy – poses fundamental questions about responsibilities at the global level and produces a tightly reasoned set of frameworks regarding world order. International law, with its focus on legal norms and institutional arrangements, provides a path, as well as illuminates the obstacles, to implementing theories of the right or of the good. Yet despite the complementarity of these two projects, neither is drawing what it should from the other. The result is ethical scholarship that often avoids, or even misinterprets, the law; and law that marginalizes ethics even as it recognizes the importance of justice. The cost of this avoidance is a set of missed opportunities for both fields. This article seeks to help transform the limited dialogue between philosophers and international lawyers into a meaningful collaboration. Through a critical stocktaking of the contributions of the two disciplines, examining where they do and do not engage with the other, it offers an appraisal of the causes and costs of separation and an argument for an interdisciplinary approach.

This article develops a ‘spatio-political’ structural typology of (national and international) political systems, based on the arrangement of homogeneous or heterogeneous political centers and peripheries in layered political spaces. I then apply this typology to Eurocentric political systems from the high middle ages to today. Rather than see no fundamental change across nearly a millennium (the system remained anarchic) or a singular modern transition (with several centuries of fundamental structural continuity on either side), I depict a series of partial structural transformations on time scales of a century or two. I also recurrently step back to consider the nature and significance of such structural models; why and how they explain. International systems, I try to show, do not have just one or even only a few simple structures; their parts are arranged (structured) in varied and often complex ways. Structural change therefore is common and typically arises through the interaction and accumulation of changes in intertwined elements of interconnected systems (not from radical innovations or dramatic changes in core principles). And structural models, I argue, explain both continuity and change not by identifying causes (or mechanisms) but through configurations; the organization of the parts of a system into a complex whole.

Participatory approaches to humanitarianism, peacebuilding, and international development promise to listen to the voices of local aid beneficiaries. However, aid workers often listen to these voices through reductive narratives of aid beneficiaries, ventriloquizing their voice and inhibiting meaningful participation. Why do aid workers – despite humane intentions – continue to rely on reductive narratives? This paper inquires how the everyday emotional lives of aid workers make reductive narratives persist. Based on 65 semi-structured interviews in Singapore, Jakarta, and Aceh, and 40 aid worker books and blogs, I show how aid workers regularly experience emotional anxieties that question their complicity in the suffering of others and their powerlessness to do anything about it. Reductive narratives resonate and persist because they allow aid workers to cope with these anxieties. I illustrate the emotional resonance of three reductive narratives – civilizing; romanticized; and impersonal narratives – in three common practices of local participation in aid work: professionalized standards; visiting the field; and hiring locals. Given the emotional origins of reductive narratives, rational critique is insufficient for reforming or decolonizing aid work. Rather, change must also involve engaging the underlying emotions of aid workers.

In this paper, I argue that a new principle of background justice should be added to Rawls’s Law of Peoples because climate change is an international and intergenerational problem that can destabilize the Society of Peoples and the well-ordered peoples therein. I start with explaining the nature of my project and Rawls’s conception of stability. I argue that climate change poses a realistic threat to the stability of climate-vulnerable liberal peoples and as a result undermines international peace and security. Despite the uncertainties due to the complexity of the climate system and about the resilience of liberal societies, liberal peoples’ fundamental interests in just basic institutions and national security call for the adoption of a precautionary principle. Rawls’s own principles are, I argue, inadequate to solve the stability problem from climate change. Still, his framework provides the theoretical resources to develop a new extension. I propose a new Rawlsian principle of international, intergenerational justice that guarantees the environmental background conditions under which well-ordered peoples can sustain their basic structure over generations and sketch the principle’s institutional implementation. I conclude with the theoretical and practical significance of this extension of Rawls’s theory.

Within the political-economy of the social sciences, Area Studies (AS) is supposed to supply contextually-informed knowledge on (non-Western) areas to the other social sciences, in exchange for theory to guide further empirical investigations. Based on this assumption, there are regular calls for greater engagement with AS to counteract the shortcomings of International Relations’ (IR) knowledge-base on many areas, perspectives, and practices of the international. However, there has been little work empirically detailing knowledge-exchange practices between IR and AS, so it remains an open question if the relationship functions as an exchange of ‘international’ theory-for-‘area’ empirics. This paper provides a macro-sociological analysis of the practices of IR–AS knowledge-exchange. By focusing on citation practice, it moves beyond accounts that treat the two disciplines as ‘black boxes’, to trace which parts of the ‘dividing discipline’ of IR are active in exchanging knowledge with which ‘area’ scholarships. Hence, it asks: Are there ‘area’ blindspots in IR's knowledge-production? And, what type of IR theory is exported to AS? This analysis informs an assessment of whether AS represents a significant resource for IR in its efforts to, one, better inform its knowledge-production about ‘other’ areas of the international, and two, assert its disciplinary-relevance within the academy.

This essay examines the relationship between history and theory through a historical and political analysis of the rise of distinctly social theories, concepts, and practices in the ‘long 19th century’. Sociomania, obsession with things ‘socio’, is a problem in international theory. It is also a serious missed opportunity for Buzan and Lawson’s study of the 19th century. The Global Transformation contributes to international theory in showing how mainstream IR has failed to grasp the full significance of this period. But, in this crucial regard at least, so too have its authors. In adopting rather than fully historicizing the rise and expansion of social theories, works of ‘historical social science’ obscure rather than illuminate the historical and political origins of social forms of governance and thought; underestimate their significance for the history of international theory; and are unable to identify the more fundamental governance form of which the rise of the modern social realm is a concrete historical expression.

This paper reflects on the ethical possibilities and limitations of cosmopolitanism as practice, with particular reference to the contemporary European project. It begins with an exploration of the relationship between what I term a ‘market’ and a ‘legal’ cosmopolitics in the European context. Inspired by Foucault's recently published work on liberal government, the paper argues that these cosmopolitics and the subjectivities that they seek to produce variously overlap, reinforce one another, and conflict in practices of contemporary post-national government: in short, they co-exist in an inherently ambiguous relationship. Animating this argument, the paper considers the politics of European citizenship; it highlights what is at stake, ethically and politically, in the recognition of an ambiguous cosmopolitics. It focuses in particular on the European Union (EU)'s 2004 Directive on the free movement of EU citizens and its relevance in the context of the high-profile deportations of Roma from France in summer 2010. The paper makes the case that the recognition and ongoing identification of an ambiguous cosmopolitics – and, essentially, an ambiguous European identity or ‘us’ – offers the prospect for ongoing resistance by and with those who find themselves designated as the ‘other’ of the European project in particular or of a cosmopolitics in general.

I explore the construction of women as the secret for the ‘successful’ prosecution of war in Afghanistan. To do so, I take up the mobilization of gender in the US counterinsurgency doctrine as deployed in Afghanistan. I draw on the 2006 Counterinsurgency Field Manual, human rights and humanitarian reports, and scholarly works to identify and analyze this mobilization, paying attention to the colonial histories upon which COIN explicitly and implicitly relies. By critically integrating these sources and the paradigmatic moments that exemplify COIN, I demonstrate the constitutive relationship of gender and COIN. The valence of the secret – of women as concealing, revealing, being, and bearing the secret – is still a lesser explored element in the analysis of the gendering of COIN and of its ‘military orientalism’. Even as scholars have powerfully shown how, in the case of Afghanistan and elsewhere, the veil functions as an overdetermined and ‘multilayered signifier’ in its own right, symbolizing the ‘tension between disclosure and concealment that defines the dominant conception of the secret’, less subject to detailed analysis in case of Afghanistan is the ways in which Afghan women are constituted through COIN in polysemous relation to the notion of the secret.

Buzan and Lawson’s The Global Transformation establishes that many of the basic parameters of world politics originated in the ‘long 19th century’. Despite finding much to admire in their book, we are concerned that it lacks an explicit theory of change. In its drive to highlight the novelty and exceptionalism of the 19th century, it offers insufficient guidance on two key issues: first, how international relations scholars should situate Buzan and Lawson’s ‘global transformation’ in existing debates over transhistorical processes; and, second, how they should apply lessons from that transformation to understanding emergent trends in the contemporary world. We argue that a more explicit study of causal factors might help account for why the 19th century was unusual. We conclude with thoughts about how the field should proceed after The Global Transformation. In particular, it points to how concatenating changes could profoundly alter international politics – an approach we term ‘Exotic International Relations’. Buzan and Lawson’s book therefore serves as a marker for the importance of systematically theorizing how radical potentialities for transformation might rearrange existing structural assemblages in world politics.

Does International Humanitarian Law (IHL) impose a duty of care on the attacker? From a moral point of view, should it? This article argues that the legal situation is contestable, and the moral value of a legal duty of care in attack is ambivalent. This is because a duty of care is both a condition for and an obstacle to the ‘individualization of war’. The individualization of war denotes an observable multi-dimensional norm shift in international relations. Norms for the regulation of war that focus on the interests, rights, and duties of the individual have gained in importance compared to those that focus on the interests, rights, and duties of the state. As the individual, not the state, is the ultimate locus of moral value, this norm shift in international relations, and the corresponding developments in international law, are morally desirable. When it comes to IHL, the goal of protecting the interests of the individual creates strong reasons both for and against imposing a legal duty of care on the attacker. The enquiry into whether IHL does and should impose a legal duty of care therefore reveals that the extent to which war can be individualized is limited.

The efficiency-oriented part of the literature on informal governance points to institutional costs as a reason for governments to prefer to cooperate with each other through commitments that are not binding. Left unexplained is what I call the dilemma of informal governance: how informal governance copes with the problem of cheating, to which formal governance has traditionally provided the solution. I show that like-mindedness, the current solution to the dilemma, is convincing but underspecified. Working from a model of governance encompassing the three time-honored dimensions of obligation, precision, and delegation, I analytically explore two other solutions, one that fails, information transmission, another that works, outside option, which I borrow from the power-oriented part of the literature on informal governance. A key finding is that informal governance, despite being neither self-enforceable nor informative, is sustainable for mild Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) types in the presence of outside options. I illustrate the model findings by tracing an historical correlation between power polarization and formalism in the design of security regimes.

From an international political theory perspective, this paper assesses the justifiability of ascribing human rights obligations, in the form of international or extraterritorial law, onto transnational corporations (TNCs). The major policy prescriptions in favour of extending human rights duties to include TNCs become deeply problematic when considered in light of advocates’ claims that human rights rules, rather than a sovereign’s legal rules, are necessarily the rules that are truly authoritative and/or in line with a ‘global rule of law’. This paper discusses concepts such as authority, human rights and the rule of law, and juxtaposes these concepts: firstly, with one another; secondly, with the legal status quo about jurisdiction over companies; and thirdly, with corporations’ de facto transnationality in the contemporary international system. This paper discusses key similarities and differences between companies, states, and individuals, and highlights the relevance of these distinctions to those agents’ potential human rights duties. This paper concludes by arguing that the ‘TNC and human rights’ project is well worth pursuing, but according to different theoretical foundations than those currently endorsed by legal and policy analysts, and it suggests important directions for future research.