Constructivism has inherited a hermeneutic tension from the sociology of knowledge tradition regarding a strong ontological proposition that all social beings interpret their reality and a qualified epistemological proposition that some social beings are better able to interpret the reality of others. This article focuses on the politics of knowledge production that arise from this tension, namely that a privileged group, the ‘scholastic caste’, possesses the power to de-value the explanations of ‘lay’ groups’ experiences by deeming them to be insufficiently ‘scientific’. The article explores these politics by addressing the meaning of the abolition of and emancipation from Atlantic slavery, a case study popularly used in constructivist literature. Noting the absence of engagement by constructivists with the ‘lay’ interpretations of enslaved Africans and their descendants, the article explores a hermeneutical position developed by the Jamaican sociologist and novelist, Erna Brodber, which directly addresses these tensions.

The past few decades have witnessed a renewed interest in the work of Carl Schmitt. Scholars from various disciplines have claimed that Schmitt’s critique of universalism, together with his analysis of irregular warfare, provides useful lenses to make sense of the post 9/11 world. In this article, I will critically assess whether Schmitt’s work is indeed useful for understanding the post 9/11 world. To that end, I will concentrate on one of the core arguments put forward by Schmitt: that the laws of armed conflict are unable to regulate irregular warfare, including acts of terrorism. In order to determine the validity of Schmitt’s arguments, I will focus on one of the instruments used in contemporary counter-terrorism policies: the deliberate killing of specific individuals who are regarded as a security threat (‘targeted killing’). Based on an analysis of US and Israeli practice, the article argues that using Schmitt’s work as an analytical tool yields mixed results. While his analysis of irregular warfare remains relevant for contemporary conflicts, his denouncement of universalism blinds us to the transformational potential of international law.

I argue that widely accepted just war theory precepts morally allow and require the assassination of politically powerful individuals under some circumstances instead of waging a just war or implementing any other policy such as non-targeted economic sanctions that would very likely severely harm more innocents. While all just war theory precepts permit just assassinations under certain circumstances, proportionality, necessity, and last resort make just assassinations required whenever they would cause severe harm to the fewest innocents. There are several implications of my argument. First, there are fewer circumstances when wars and other policies that foreseeably but unintentionally harm innocents are just than is commonly thought. Second, the realm of morally permissible violent and non-violent action for powerful individuals is more limited than many presume and politicians are more often morally liable to actions that would mitigate or end objectively unjust serious threats for which they are culpable, although this does not always include lethal force.

States have recently agreed that there is a responsibility to protect populations threatened by genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The international community, however, often lacks the resources and willingness to carry out a key part of this responsibility, that is, to undertake humanitarian intervention effectively when required. One potential solution to this problem is to outsource intervention to private military and security companies. In this article, I consider this option. In particular, I present a largely consequentialist argument which asserts that, when two conditions are met, using these companies to bolster the capacity to undertake humanitarian intervention might be morally justifiable overall.

Reification – the act of treating something socially created as if it were real – is often described as a problem in the study of international norms. Critical and post-colonial scholars argue that reification silences alternative worldviews, whereas practice-oriented scholars argue it diminishes agency and practical innovation. In his article ‘From Norms to Normative Configurations,’ Simon Pratt proposes a solution to the problem of reification, reconceiving norms as a configuration of interrelated social practices. In this piece, I argue that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Reification is an essential part of how norms are constructed, contested, and surmounted in international politics. I revisit the foundational figures in norms research to highlight problems in Pratt's analysis, and prove the value of reification, both analytically and methodologically. Then, I use these insights to amend the concept of normative configuration, redefining it as a complex network of discrete norms tied together through common social practices. Along the way, I offer directions for future research on the relationship between norms and practices.

Concerned about the continued dominance of Western International Relations (IR) theories, the global IR community has proposed various measures to address disciplinary hierarchies through encouraging dialogue and pluralism. By investigating the pedagogical preferences of instructors from 45 countries, this paper questions the global IR initiative's emancipatory potential, arguing that disciplinary practices in IR resemble those of dependent development. The study develops a new typology of IR theoretical (IRT) scholarship and examines the readings assigned in 151 IRT syllabi worldwide for evidence of similarity, replication, and assimilation. The findings show that mainstream core IRTs dominate syllabi globally, regardless of region, language of instruction, or instructors' educational/linguistic backgrounds. This domination extends to periphery scholars not using their own local products. Even when they do seek alternative approaches, they prefer to import core alternatives, that is, critical traditions, rather than homegrown IRTs. Finally, the results show that even in syllabi taught in local languages the readings remain dominated by core IRT works. These findings expose a structural defect in the current cry for global IR, by revealing the system's dependent development paradox. The paper concludes with suggestions for creating a symmetric interdependent structure, in the aim of achieving a genuine globalization of IR.

How burdens of proof are allocated in science has an important bearing on how new knowledge develops. Usually, the burden is on new theories to prove their worth relative to a default, baseline of knowledge that is considered established and secure. However, in the case of classical vs. quantum social science matters are not that simple because the long-standing classical default has itself already failed to pass crucial tests, which has spurred the search for quantum solutions instead. Part I of this paper, therefore, tries to ‘re-balance’ the burdens of proof with Quantum Mind and Social Science’ critics, by highlighting two significant limits to date of classical thinking about the mind and society: the philosophical problem of finding a place for consciousness in the universe, and the scientific problem of explaining the Kahneman–Tversky anomalies in psychology. Acknowledging these outstanding problems does not equalize the burdens of proof, but it does mean that as we head into the more substantive discussion in Part II there is no secure default position. Just burdens of proof all around.

Monteiro and Ruby (2009) argue that International Relations (IR) scholars should look to adopt a more ‘tentative attitude’ towards the philosophy of science (PoS) frameworks in IR. This is an attractive and timely call for more open-minded PoS argumentation in the field. Yet, the logic of Monteiro and Ruby’s argument is not (rather characteristically of PoS debates) infallible. As other commentaries in this forum show, it is not self-evident that Monteiro and Ruby’s account is ‘post-foundational’, or that it is premised on an accurate reading of existing PoS positions in IR. However, I do not here wish to elaborate further on the critiques that could be made of the internal coherence of Monteiro and Ruby’s argumentation or their reading of core philosophical schools. Instead, I want to discuss a different kind of an issue raised by Monteiro and Ruby’s intervention: their treatment of the interaction of political forms of argumentation and PoS debates.

Although in principle states can bargain over the entire extent of their combined territory, we observe historically that states bargain within far more limited confines defined by well-bounded claims. We argue that this observation stems from the fact that states generally have limited territorial aims due either to limited benefits of obtaining additional territory and/or the costs of absorbing and controlling new territories and their inhabitants. Using a formal model, we show that introducing states with limited aims over territory has strategic implications for bargaining that have not been appreciated in canonical models that do not consider heterogeneity in state preferences. Whereas traditional models generally imply that small demands undermine the credibility of a challenger's threat, the existence of states with limited territorial aims makes limited demands credible, effective, and stable in the face of shocks to relative power. We then employ geospatial data on the geographic extent of territorial disputes in the period 1947–2000 to establish two results: the size of claims is weakly related to the relative power of disputants and unaffected by dramatic changes in power, and smaller claims are associated with a higher probability that the challenger will receive any concession.

This paper argues that the process of deriving legitimacy criteria for political institutions ought to be sensitive to features of the political context in which that process is to occur. The paper builds on Allen Buchanan’s ‘Metacoordination View’ of legitimacy, which we explicate in the first section. While sympathetic to Buchanan’s practical approach, we believe the idea of a metacoordination process to be underspecified across two dimensions, which we explain in the second section: (i) constituency and (ii) normativity. Both dimensions admit of differing specifications. In the third section, we suggest that how best to fill in these dimensions in any one instance depends upon the political context in which the metacoordination process is to occur. We highlight three relevant elements of a political decision context – criticality, institutional time point, and motivational landscape – and illustrate their significance by way of reference, respectively, to the World Health Organization, the European Economic and Monetary Union, and the Bank of International Settlements. The ‘context-dependence’ of the metacoordination process, and therefore of legitimacy, entails the possibility that institutions that are similar, even identical, in terms of their nature and function may nevertheless be held to differing legitimacy criteria in differing political contexts.

This paper examines the emergence of the corporeal turn in International Relations (IR) research on war. It argues that a lack of a sustained ontological investigation leaves open two theoretical gaps, which impedes the development of an embodied theory of war: (1) the core concept of a body and its linkages with war are underdeveloped, and (2) existing research on the embodiment of war slips into discursivism or empiricism. The paper invites the corporeal turn scholarship to bring ontology to the forefront of IR war research and to expand a pool of theoretical resources for analyzing the corporeality of war by turning to existential phenomenology. With the phenomenological concept of the lived body placed at the heart of war ontology, war is conceived as a complex social institution with the generative powers born out of the capacity of the violent politics of injury to disrupt the lived bodies' sense-making and agential capacities, on the one hand, and the potential of individuals and communities to reclaim their interpretive integrity and agency through embodied everyday practices, on the other.

What should happen to a concept as it loses real-world application? The concept of ‘middle power’ rose to prominence in the mid-20th century, establishing an influential practitioner–scholarly nexus over the next several decades. This prestigious history came at a cost, embedding three core assumptions into the concept: that middle powers are International in focus, Multilateral in method, and Good Citizens in conduct. While there have been significant attempts by scholars to reform the concept, middle power theory has proven inseparable from these assumptions. In this paper, we examine six middle power states (Canada, Australia, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, and Mexico) and show middle power theory no longer helps us distinguish or interpret these states. Changes in the international environment suggest this finding will endure. As such, we argue for the historicization of the concept of ‘middle power’. We conclude by identifying a series of analytical puzzles which researchers will need to address to develop an appropriate conceptual lexicon for theorizing this type of state in the 21st century.

Michael Zürn's A Theory of Global Governance is a major theoretical statement. The first section of this essay summarizes Zürn's argument, pointing out that his Global Politics Paradigm views contestation as generated endogenously from the dilemmas and contradictions of reflexive authority relationships. Authoritative international institutions, he maintains, have difficulty maintaining their legitimacy in a world suffused with democratic values. The second section systematically compares Zürn's Global Politics Paradigm with both Realism and Cooperation Theory, arguing that the three paradigms have different scope conditions and are therefore as much complementary as competitive. The third section questions the relevance of Zürn's argument to contemporary reality. Great power conflict and authoritarian populism in formerly democratic countries generate existential threats to multilateralism and global institutions that are more serious than Zürn's legitimacy deficits.

This paper examines recognition in the cosmopolitan sphere of recognition – a sphere of ethical life and social freedom formed in the processes of recognition between individuals and groups across, over, and beyond, the state. The paper contends that Axel Honneth’s recognition theory can overcome many of the limitations inherent to established cosmopolitan paradigms, and, through normative reconstruction, provide a unique methodological framework from which existing cosmopolitan social relations can be examined. This will provide the foundations for a relational cosmopolitanism. The paper argues that only a form of mutual recognition that satisfies both local and cosmopolitan ties of political community could adequately secure the intersubjective conditions necessitated in the Hegelian, ontological notion of freedom (freedom as ‘being at home with oneself in one’s other’). This contention is pursued through three interrelated arguments: (i) an engagement with Honneth’s analysis of the intersubjective conditions necessary for leading a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ life through mutual recognition; (ii) deploying the method of normative reconstruction to identify social freedoms in the cosmopolitan sphere, and; (iii) by exploring the existence of cosmopolitan recognition as a unique form of personal relations, an extension of rights in transnational civil society, and, as a unique form of solidarity in an emergent cosmopolitan public sphere.