This chapter ties together the narratives presented in the book’s three substantive chapters to provide an overview of the conceptual history of ethnicity. The chapter then unpacks the ideological functions performed by this concept in service of the international order, and recaps how the emergence of ethnicity contributed to both the negation and preservation of imperial hierarchies. Drawing inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s discussion of ‘nomos’, the chapter concludes by proposing a speculative notion of ‘ethnos’ as the foundational ordering of beings.

Although no comparable preoccupation with freedom developed in any other part of the world, each region had its own experiences of it. This was true of Africa, but the difficult conditions of survival promoted a reliance on other values, such as courage, honor, and loyalty. The widespread presence of slavery, only rarely as harsh as in the West, and sometimes entered into voluntarily to ward off some crisis, impeded the diffusion of liberty as a value for society as a whole. Islamic society was pervaded by an egalitarian spirit based on the universal submission of everyone to God, but political rule was absolute once established, and only justice, not liberty, set limits to what rulers could do. Formally an empire, Mughal India displayed many forms of local independence, but those who exercised local authority regarded themselves as channels of sovereign power rather than as barriers to it. In China imperial authority was formally absolute but in practice people enjoyed much freedom of action, even against state officials. As in India, however, these limits on imperial authority were not conceived as liberties, chiefly because the state was regarded as essential to providing the moral order on which stable civilized life depended.

This chapter sets out to identify key conceptual resources available for exploring power in the social construction of global environmental degradation for collective response. The chapter begins with the epistemic community model, which illuminates the role that transnational communities of scientists have in identifying issues like climate change and informing political action. This approach has been important for documenting the origins and establishment of the IPCC in 1988. However, empirical accounts informed by discursive and normative frameworks in other issue areas challenge the centrality of scientists in treaty formation. The studies reviewed identify the emergence of environmental issues as the source of new institutions; however, they also highlight how problem diagnosis has to converge with prevailing political and economic orders. Revisiting the IPCC’s emergence through the idiom of co-production at the end of the chapter, reveals how climate change had to be transformed into a global problem to fit with the existing remit of international organisation.

The debate about whether state or non-state players have primacy has been a major preoccupation for International Relations researchers. This chapter argues the key is not so much to determine which players are dominant, but how they interact to produce the prevailing order. The 1985 book Bringing the State Back In declared the return of the state for international politics and political economy (Evans et al. 1985). This chapter argues instead for bringing state–society relations ‘back in’ to the centre of what makes international relations.

This chapter introduces a new research program on the politics of religion and secularism. A focus on the politics of religion and secularism offers a productive port of entry into the study of international politics. Following a brief introduction to religion and international relations, it offers a basic introduction to the concept of secularism, explains why the politics of secularism is significant to the study of global politics and concludes with a discussion of the politics of secularism in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus deploys modal vocabulary, especially “possibility.” Some readers take this to signal commitment to substantive modal theories. For others, it is metaphysical nonsense to be thrown away. We steer a middle path. We uncover the central role of possibility in Wittgenstein’s philosophical development from criticism of Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgment to the conception of propositions as pictures in the Tractatus. In this conception, modality is not the subject matter of theorizing but an ineluctable aspect of picturing of reality whose showing forth Wittgenstein aims to help us see by operationalizing the construction of propositions.

This chapter investigates monastic experience, which has been a deliberate pursuit of religious life for most of Christian history and also appears in other religious traditions. It argues that monasticism is especially characterized by structures of stability that are achieved through communally shared rules and vows of stability. The tasks of prayer and labor – often accomplished in silence – mark monastic life and often interpenetrate each other, as prayer becomes labor and work is infused with prayer. The monastic self is shaped through obedience to the rule, shared communal practices, and mutual love. It is a profoundly communal religious way of life to the point that the individual is entirely absorbed into the monastic community. In this regard, it carries human plural experience – usually pursued in a more temporally limited fashion – to its height.

Crisis research focuses primarily on how response structures should be organized. There are ongoing debates about the required degree of flexibility in the response structure and what role emergent groups should have. A shared assumption in this research is that organization and structure are synonymous with order in a crisis and enable a rapid, coordinated response. Disorganization, by extension, is criticized for crisis response failures. This view ignores the risk of over-organization and crisis response rigidity. In uncertain crises, disorganizing might produce a looser, less ordered structure that facilitates a novel, adaptive response. The dilemma for frontline responders revolves around the need for both organizing and disorganizing during crises. It is worthwhile noting that different types and phases of the crisis demand different forms of reorganizing. The reorganizing process, through disorganizing and organizing, needs to be ongoing throughout the duration of the crisis situation to ensure that crisis demands and organizational response structures evolve synchronously.

The First World War precipitated a crisis in power politics in the creation and maintenance of the post-war international order. Peacemaking after 1918 revealed the difficulties in accommodating traditional practices of power politics within the new normative environment that prevailed in the aftermath of the Great War. This environment emphasised the importance of international law, the principle of self-determination and the creation of international institutions to manage conflicts and promote cooperation. This chapter explores the influence of these norms on territorial claims and settlements in Europe, East Asia and the Middle East, and the different strategies adopted by victors and vanquished. It highlights a fundamental paradox: power politics were marginalised in the creation of a settlement that owed its existence and future viability to a preponderance of power on the part of the victorious allies. The American Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, compounded by the onset of the global economic crisis at the end of the 1920s, deprived the international order of the combination of power that had delivered victory in 1918. This would have far-reaching consequences when that order was challenged by revisionist powers that rejected the norms underpinning the Paris peace settlement in Europe.

This chapter begins from the proposition that there was neither peace settlement, nor order, nor peace in the British and French empires after 1919. It focuses on those regions where British and French imperial territories and new imperial claims rubbed against one another with greatest friction. With typical acuity, historian John Mackenzie has warned against what he terms ‘the space station approach’ to the analysis of interwar imperialism. Viewed from a great distance, the First World War ‘becomes a sort of hinge or lever that articulates the events of the decades that went before and also those that came afterwards’. Mackenzie’s insight offers a starting point for this chapter’s analysis, which warns against regarding decolonisation deterministically, written as much in the failure of peacemaking as in the intensification of international rivalries in the 1930s. It thus draws the British and French empires back from their historical precipice, restoring a sense of contingency and according due importance to the short-term imperial expansions of the 1920s and the persistence of everyday violence and colonial rights abuses despite the new architecture of supranational oversight emerging from the peace settlement.

Chapter 2 lays out the managerial system that applies to protest in the U.S. It uses a protest typology to describe the scope and limits of protesters’ rights under the First Amendment. The chapter identifies the public forum and time, place, manner, and other restrictions that limit protest activity. It addresses protest permits, policing tactics, enforcement of public order laws, limits on press activity at protests, and other elements of the “managed dissent” system. The chapter sets the stage for the book’s argument that public protest is over-managed in ways that make protest more costly, less safe, and less effective.

The first section of this chapter, ‘The Scope of Discipline’ traces the fashion in which the benchers initially sought to impose disciplinary constraints on members’ behaviour and demeanour. The growth of the inns after 1550 made it increasingly difficult to police the personal lives of junior members. But the benchers became more anxious to maintain and enhance their own authority, establishing sumptuary regulations on apparel, long hair and beards which emphasised the subordinate status of those below the bench, and sharply escalating measures against casual interpersonal violence within the societies.

They seem to have had some success in eliminating armed assaults, if not other forms of physical violence, while traditional violent behaviour outside the walls of the inns appears to have waned towards the end of our period.However, as ‘The Range of Defiance’ illustrates, collective defiance of and disobedience to the bench became a feature of life from the 1610s onwards, with sporadic outbreaks continuing until the end of the century and beyond, over sumptuary regulations, gambling at Christmas commons, and other issues.

The final section, ‘Authority and Revolt’ proposes that outbreaks of protest and rebellion in the latter half of our period were closely related to the major institutional changes examined in the preceding chapters.

I discuss different kinds of deviation from the parallel sequence criterion; I illustrate with detailed examples from Fula, Udmurt, and Eastern Mari. In Fula verb inflection, rules of subject and object marking involve a default applicational sequence that is overridden in specific circumstances by the opposite sequence of application; this deviation can by modeled by postulating two patterns of rule composition, one realizing the default sequence and the other overriding that default. Udmurt noun inflection is different, since it involves two patterns of rule composition that do not stand in a default/override relation but are instead simply complementary. Nevertheless, the Fula evidence and the Udmurt evidence both conform to the unique sequence criterion. The declensional morphology of Eastern Mari, by contrast, deviates from that criterion, since it allows alternative acceptable sequences of rule application; in the rule-combining approach to morphotactics, these can be seen as involving alternative patterns of rule composition realizing the same morphosyntactic content.

Democracy, sovereignty, citizenship, and the rule of law are foundational yet contested concepts. Their foundational role has been extensively discussed with reference to modern nation-states and global order, and their contested quality has come to the fore through norm contestation. This chapter suggests that contestation’s move into the limelight represents an opportunity to address the future of democracies. It argues that first, norm contestedness is expected due to its value- and practice-based roots. Second, contestedness has implications for everyday norm-use and academic norm-conceptualization. This chapter conceives norms and their multiple contestations as the constitutive ‘glue’ of global ordering rather than as a ‘means’ towards implementing governance rules. This chapter identifies a conceptual gap between state-negotiated norms of global governance and societal contestation of norms. It recalls Tully’s ‘Unfreedom of the Moderns’ claim and the central role of agonism in including the multitude of affected stakeholders in establishing norms of governance. Using the cycle-grid model, this chapter frames democracy from below.

There is one fundamental argument in the Republic for the conclusion that justice is the greatest good. It begins in Book II; although adumbrated in Book IV, it is not completed until Book IX; and it draws essentially on material in Books VI and VII about Platonic forms, knowledge, and philosophical training. Justice consists in the rule of reason over spirit and appetite, but to understand the value of this state fully we must see how it is instantiated in the philosopher. Goodness consists in order, and by cognizing and loving forms (the most orderly objects there are) the philosopher possesses the highest goods. A fully just person is a creator and lover of orderly relationships among human beings. This condition exists to some degree in all just individuals, but it is most fully present in those who understand what justice is – philosophers.

Chapter 1 offers a reappraisal of the pathbreaking efforts of the peacemakers of the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) to establish a more durable European peace order, and a new European concert, after the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. It then shows how the 19th century’s Vienna system provided novel mechanisms, rules and understandings to preserve peace and a new, more legitimate international equilibrium in and beyond Europe, thereby also creating essential conditions for the rise of the United States. Yet it also illuminates how changes in international politics and competing nationalist aspirations eventually led to the disintegration of the peace order of 1814–15 and the European concert in the aftermath of the trans-European revolutions of 1848–49 and the Crimean War of 1853–56.

The relationship between Book I of Aristotle’s De Generatione et Corruptione to the rest of his writings on the physical world has been found puzzling. Aristotle’s first statement of its scope promises an account of very general principles of explanation. But the actual focus seems very restricted: theory of elements and of homoeomerous mixture. This study proceeds by examination of cross-references to and from other Aristotelian treatises. These reveal the reading order – the order of argument and exposition – that Aristotle intended for them. GC I presupposes readers already familiar with the cosmology and conceptual system expounded in the Physics, while in the other physical treatises the basic ideas of GC 1 are adapted and refined in explanations of more complex physical entities. GC 1 in fact provides three kinds of foundation: physical, conceptual, and teleological. The order Aristotle insists upon is directed towards a definite goal, the understanding of life and living things. It is not merely pedagogical. More likely it reflects a cosmic scale of values which grades living things as better than non-living, and knowledge of better things as a finer, more valuable kind of knowledge.