This article provides a normative account of sovereign rights to natural resources on the basis of moral principles which underlie its international legal structure – the right to self-determination and human rights. The first part locates the emergence of the system of sovereign rights to natural resources in the process of the decolonisation and justifies it as a correction of historical injustice of violent appropriation of natural resources. The second part identifies the key moral component and justificatory principle of the system of sovereign rights to natural resources – the right to self-determination. I outline a justice-based interpretation of the right to self-determination and show why rights to natural resources are its corollary. The last part connects rights to self-determination and rights to natural resources to human rights and shows how human rights define the permissible scope of rights to natural resources in two dimensions – the dimension of political legitimacy of the exercise of resource rights and the dimension of the distribution of resource benefits.

Global constitutionalism offers a utopian picture of the future of international law. Its advocates suggest a governance system is emergent that will fill the gaps in legitimacy, democracy and the rule of law present in international law. Speculation about the future of international law is shaped, partly at least, by global constitutionalism aspiring to create a better global legal order, by filling these legitimacy gaps with both normative and procedural constitutionalism. But this raises the question ‘better for whom’? Feminist theory has challenged the foundations of both international law and constitutionalism; demonstrating that the design of normative structures accommodates and sustains prevailing patriarchal forms that leave little room for alternative accounts or voices. Both international and constitutional law’s structures support the status quo and are resistant to critical and feminist voices. The question is whether it is possible for constitutionalism to change international law in ways that will open it up to alternate possibilities. Building on a seven-point manifesto of feminist constitutionalism, previously proffered by the authors, which inculcated feminist concerns into global constitutionalism, this article offers an alternative starting point: feminist science fiction. Feminist utopian tracts such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness offer valuable lessons for global constitutionalist discourses. The article uses feminist utopias in science fiction to better understand how to dismantle hierarchical structures, how to build feminist societies, and how to find approaches to governance not predicated on patriarchy. It does so by focusing on feminist alternatives for constructing communities, for understanding constituent power and constituent moments, and dismantling manifestations of the public/private divide. This article demonstrates that reading feminist utopian science fiction facilitates the reimagining of global constitutionalism.

Finnemore and Sikkink’s norms life cycle model (NLCM) is a powerful heuristic device that continues to be a mandatory point of reference for theoretical and empirical scholarship on norm change. Yet the internalisation stage as conceptualised in the NLCM is problematic. Drawing from Wiener’s Theory of Contestation, this article proposes to reconceptualise the norm internalisation stage as the phase at the extreme of the norm cascade in which inherently contested norms simultaneously enjoy formal validity, social recognition, and cultural validation among stakeholders. Unlike Finnemore and Sikkink’s, this conceptualisation focuses solely on norm validity and does not assume ‘almost automatic’ compliance. While Finnemore and Sikkink emphasise habit and institutionalisation as mechanisms of internalisation, the proposed conceptualisation highlights the role of applicatory contestation under conditions of high contestedness. Furthermore, I argue that internalised norms continue to be contested. Finally, my conceptualisation explicitly incorporates norm regression as the fourth stage of the NLCM. Norms might regress because they become obsolete, they change, or they are replaced. To assess the descriptive power of the proposed conceptualisation vis-à-vis Finnemore and Sikkink’s, the article applies them to the analysis of the norm that prohibits torture.

The intense reception of Carl Schmitt’s writings among Chinese constitutional theorists is one of the more striking phenomena within the globalisation of constitutional thought in recent decades. This article approaches it from two angles. First, the reception of Schmitt and the subsequent debates about his oeuvre and persona are interpreted as performative practices in which Schmitt soon emerged as both the bête noire of a liberal-leaning constitutional scholarship and an object of romantic projection for avant-garde theoretical endeavours. Engagement with Schmitt thus crucially contributed to the emergence of both a neo-conservative and a critical-liberal sensibility among Chinese legal scholars. Second, with the rise of what is known in China as Political Constitutionalism in the mid-2000s, Schmitt also began to exert a more substantive terminological and conceptual influence on Chinese constitutional theory more generally, leaving his imprint on some of its fundamental theoretical binaries. Looking at the Chinese debate on Schmitt, therefore, not only grants us a unique glimpse into how constitutional debates are structured and evolving in contemporary China, it also demonstrates the often-unexpected trajectories of conceptual migration in the global age.

Silviya Lechner’s and Mervyn Frost’s book Practice Theory and International Relations offers a new approach to theorise international relations in terms of ‘practices’. It is a welcome contribution to an intensifying debate about ‘praxis’, ‘practice’ and ‘practices’ because Lechner and Frost actually engage key authors of praxis, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, in IR, have often only been referenced in passing. While the rediscovery of Wittgenstein as praxis theorist is welcome, the reading of his approach to praxis is irritating because ‘internalism’ and ‘descriptivism’ – two concepts which Lechner and Frost highlight as central in both Wittgenstein’s work and their new practice theory – are interpreted in ways which are difficult to reconcile with Wittgenstein’s late philosophy. This critique offers a different reading of Wittgenstein’s approach to praxis and argues that such an alternative reading opens up an understanding of praxis which, if adopted more widely, would also free IR theorising from self-imposed strictures.

In their ground-breaking philosophical investigation of the ‘practice turn’ Lechner and Frost prompt a standpoint debate in international relations theory, which touches upon the relationship between practice theory and its subject matter. Lechner and Frost decidedly opt for an internal standpoint, which promises to understand a social practice in terms of the meaning-in-use of its participants. This article argues that the internalist promise will ultimately remain unfulfilled, however, for the aim of collapsing the distinction between the ‘language of action’ and ‘language of observation’ is epistemologically impossible. Taking such an ‘internal’ perspective not only underestimates the problem of the double hermeneutic. It also disregards the gap between theory and practice. Any social enquiry that fails to acknowledge this gap inevitably becomes externalist, for it misses to reflect on its own normative presuppositions. The way ahead is to address this gap reflexively by way of a triple hermeneutics that is bolstered by abductive reasoning.

How can we account for the normative dimension of international practices? Silviya Lechner and Mervyn Frost’s Practice Theory and International Relations answers this question by proposing, with a considerable degree of epistemological sophistication, what the authors call ‘normative descriptivism’, which they combine with a focus on ‘macro practices’. In this contribution, I start by examining the authors’ engagement with IR’s practice turn, and the insights this engagement may offer on the underlying objective of their approach. I then turn to Lechner and Frost’s decision to eclipse history. The contribution concludes by using the evolution of international law as a cursory illustration of the types of analyses Lechner and Frost’s approach would lead to. It thereby emphasises potential challenges inherent in the authors’ combination of internalism as rooted in individual self-consciousness and a focus on ‘macro practices’, including the possibility that it might limit the potential to critically question the standard that becomes identified as universal.

In Practice Theory and International Relations, Silviya Lechner and Mervyn Frost make a useful distinction between ‘praxis’ and ‘practices’ and correctly insist on the importance of describing the identity of distinct practices. They also make the important point that practices have ethical value for their participants. There is much to like about Lechner and Frost’s argument, including its solid philosophical grounding. However, from the perspective of a social scientist, there are some points of concern as well. First, while they champion ‘description’, they settle for ‘naming’ practices. Proper description requires more attention to detail than what the authors offer in the book. Second, the authors appear to discriminate between social practices in spatial terms rather than in functional terms. As a consequence, they end up with a description of the practices of international relations, where the different practices are all animated by the same value of freedom. As such, Lechner and Frost offer a reductionist interpretation of the ethical significance of international practices. Third, the authors push their anti-foundationalism too far. When one interprets the (ethical) significance of social practices, it is useful to bring on board philosophical–anthropological models, even if only because it opens up one’s interpretive horizons.

Practice Theory and International Relations will challenge all you’ve come to know about the practice turn in international relations. It will ask you to question how you define practices and call for more precision. It will challenge your starting point of ground-up actions in everyday life and look at practices from above. It will push you to rethink your empirical methodology and call out sociological approaches as misconceived. And yes, it will ask you to reread Hegel and bring philosophy back in to your practice theorising. In short, it will make a lonely, and for many, unwanted call for a U-turn in the field. In this review, I’ll take up this call for a U-turn back to philosophical foundations, and ask what is gained and what is lost in rethinking practice theory from a philosophical perspective.