This article argues that the role of surrender in shaping international legitimacy has been largely overlooked – particularly its symbolic dimension. Challenging dominant views that reduce victory and defeat to moments of rupture, it adopts a long-term, relational perspective, reframing surrender as embedded in ongoing processes that shape and reshape legitimacy over time. It explores how symbols that become central during surrender – including foreign and domestic leaders – can mediate tensions between coercion–consent, pride–stigma, autonomy–dependence, while fostering social cohesion across domestic and international societies. Drawing on case studies, process sociology, complexity theory, the English School, and Thucydides, it demonstrates how the symbolic management of surrender can lead to path dependencies that influence state-formation, a defeated state’s identity, and regional integration. Emphasising the fluidity and political weight of symbolic meanings, it advances a relational understanding of hegemonic legitimacy. In doing so, it links the origins of legitimacy to its continuous development and critiques both simplistic victor’s peace narratives and process-reductive histories. Ultimately, it illuminates not only the challenges but also the symbolic opportunities for constructing legitimacy in an interdependent world – underscoring that power endures through its symbolic anchoring in meaning and, with it, the hope for reconciliation despite defeat.

How might international society serve as an ontological security provider? Ontological security studies sees societies as both containers of anxiety and providers of security, but there is little research on how international society relates to this. Any answer to my question is further complicated by multiple takes (Lacanian, Kleinian, and Winnicottian) on the way the subject secures its self. I demonstrate how this multiplicity is accommodated by the conceptual heterogeneity of the ‘English School’ and offer three separate answers. Lacanian theory suggests a ‘pluralist’ international society can mitigate ontological insecurity because its institutions encircle ‘the lack’ that constitutes (collective) subjectivity. Kleinian theory supports the institutions of a ‘thin solidarist’ international society because it demonstrates how the collective action needed to protect the legal rights that recognise and secure the (collective) self does not necessarily cause anxiety. Drawing on Winnicott, Honneth argues that the (collective) self can only be fully secured if the institutions of a ‘thick solidarist’ international society go beyond legal recognition to socially esteem the contribution the subject makes to realising the common good. The analytical framework is applied to interpret and respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, offering a timely intervention into debates on a post-liberal international order.

One of the problems with the problem of world order is that what makes for order within societies is often precisely what makes for disorderly relations between them. I argue in this short essay that many of the problems with the problem of world order arise from assumptions that are widely shared within a discipline where the language of power and interest dominates and where a view of states as “like units” permeates. With more emphasis on values and visions of the good life, and acceptance that the ontological foundation of IR is difference rather than sameness, the debates about the problem of world order would take on a different form. The essay adapts the work of Hedley Bull and introduces the concept of “resilience-governance” to distinguish between resilience as a practice of self-governance taking place within ordering domains and resilience as a practice of “diversity-governance” taking place between ordering domains. The combination of the two allows for a bifocal view into how practices of resilience as self-governance may produce order within individual domains but will at the same time increase diversity and difference between the ordering domains, hence making the practices of resilience as diversity-governance much more challenging.

Drawing on recent debates in English School (ES) theory, this article develops an analytical framework for examining how states use multilateral institutions, or what ES theorists call ‘secondary institutions’, to reshape ‘primary institutions’, i.e. fundamental practices in international society. The framework highlights the role of states’ agency in international institutional change by shedding light on strategies that they employ to bring about changes in primary institutions. It posits that, although they can seek to directly remould primary institutions, states in practice often seek to bring about primary institutional changes through existing or newly formed secondary institutions and that this is especially the case at the level of regional international societies (RISs). The article demonstrates the utility of the framework by using it to analyse the case of Russia’s peacekeeping policy in the post-Soviet regional international society (PSRIS), focusing on its efforts to institutionalise the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) as an alternative ‘peacekeeping’ actor.

This article explores the theoretical challenges for normatively progressive foreign policy following the rise of populist nationalism during the 2010s, using analytical concepts from the English School. It argues that populist nationalism exposes a problem of internal dissensus on the future trajectories of solidarist international society, within the Western states that have traditionally been its principal supporters. The ‘populist moment’ reveals problems of disconnection between domestic publics, the practices, and institutions of contemporary international society, and state actions that are premised in part on ethical regard for non-citizens. The article contends that, as an interface point between rooted communities and global ethical concerns, progressive foreign policy approaches have an important role to play in ameliorating these disconnections. However, these approaches must look beyond a simple ‘re-booting’ of liberal internationalism, focussing instead on building a path towards solidarist international society that is rooted in everyday-lived experiences, communities, and identities within the state. Building upon theorizations of good international citizenship, the article advances an alternative framework of good global statehood, which draws upon a coproduction methodology as a means of creating progressive foreign policies that are better attuned to pluralism and diversity across, but also within state borders.

As part of the Cambridge Law Journal's centenary celebrations, this article reads two essays from the journal's 50th anniversary issue. The essays, by Cambridge professors Robert Jennings and Derek Bowett offer resources for the history of international law and its historiography. They shine a light on key debates on the law of the sea at a crucial moment of its development. A close reading of these essays also reveals starting points for new scrutiny of an “English” tradition of international law, including the place of the academy within the tradition, its blueprints for the future of international law and international legal order, and its relation to empire and capitalism.

While scholars within the English School have increasingly approached the traditionally liberal concept of solidarism in a normatively agnostic fashion, the idea of an ‘illiberal solidarism’ and historical manifestations thereof remain underexplored. One notable case in point surrounds the peculiar body of Italian interwar international thought, herein referred to as ‘international Fascism’. By discerning a synchronic outline of international Fascism, alongside the manner by which this project mutated and ultimately failed as it transformed from a vision theorised in the abstract to a practical initiative under the auspices of the Fascist regime, this article offers historical and theoretical insights into the realisability of illiberal forms of solidarism. Combining this historical account with theoretical insights derived from Reus-Smit's study on international order under conditions of cultural diversity, this article argues that the realisation of some form of solidarism necessitates the acceptance of a substantive pluralist component. Yet messianic illiberal visions that endeavour to retain the states-system, while simultaneously asserting the superiority of one community or a highly exclusionary vision of the ‘good life’, ostensibly lack the capacity to reconcile the contradictions inherent in efforts to universalise such projects.

In the English School, the relationship between international and world society has recently received increasing attention – conceptually and empirically. Adding to this developing literature, we study how world societal actors not only serve as normative counterpoints to international society or function as norm-entrepreneurs, but decisively contribute to its reproduction. Going beyond the common preoccupation with actor types, we focus on practices that are performed on the international stage. We examine the role which world sport events, especially FIFA's World Cup and the infrastructure of football, play for international society. Building on Wight, we conceptualize world sport events as a (world societal actor driven) derivative primary institution of international society, which is embedded within the particularly hybrid master primary institution of sites and festivals. We find that world sport events allow for the ludic and festive reproduction of key primary institutions (like sovereignty, territoriality, and nationalism), while they highlight how members of international society compete on the basis of shared norms and values. Naturalizing world order as international order, they make international society emotionally experienceable as feasible and desirable at a global level. In performing world sport events, world societal actors uphold rather than challenge international society.