The Democratic Peace research programme explicitly and implicitly presents its claims in terms of their potential to underpin a universal world peace. Yet whilst the Democratic Peace appears robust in its geographical heartlands it appears weaker at the edges of the democratic world, where the spread of democracy and the depth of democratic political development is often limited and where historically many of the purported exceptions to the Democratic Peace are found. Whereas Democratic Peace scholarship has tended to overlook or downplay these phenomena, from a critical materialist perspective they are indicative of a fundamental contradiction within the Democratic Peace whereby its universalistic aspirations are thwarted by its material grounding in a hierarchical capitalist world economy. This, in turn, raises the question of whether liberal arguments for a universal Democratic Peace are in fact hollow promises. The article explores these concerns and argues that those interested in democracy and peace should pay more attention to the critical materialist tradition, which in the discussion below is represented principally by the world-system approach.

Emerging scholarship on global governance offers ever-more detailed analyses of private regulatory regimes. These regimes aim to regulate some area of social activity without a mandate from, or participation of, states or international organizations. While there are numerous empirical studies of these regimes, the normative theoretical literature has arguably struggled to keep pace with such developments. This is unfortunate, as the proliferation of private regulatory regimes raises important issues about legitimacy in global governance. The aim of this paper is to address some of these issues by elaborating a theoretical framework that can orientate normative investigation of these schemes. It does this through turning to the idea of experimentalist governance. It is argued that experimentalism can provide an important and provocative set of insights about the processes and logics of emerging governance schemes. The critical purchase of this theory is illustrated through an application to the case of primary commodities roundtables, part of ongoing attempts by non-governmental organizations, producers, and buyers to set sustainability criteria for commodity production across a range of sectors. The idea of experimentalist governance, we argue, can lend much needed theoretical structure to debates about the normative legitimacy of private regulatory regimes.

Causal inquiry has been a controversial matter in International Relations scholarship in recent years. While many new ‘non-positivist’ stances on causal analysis have been developed in recent years, many post-positivist and critical theorists in the discipline have remained unconvinced of the virtues of causal inquiry. Crucially, the political consequences of causal analysis seem to be a sticking point for many such critics. Yet, the politics of causal analysis are, we argue, complex and relatively poorly engaged with at present. Indeed, the arguments against causal analysis, which rely on warnings concerning the political nature of causal analysis, are inadequate and incomplete. We contend here that causal analysis is, indeed, political but that this does not mean that we should not engage in causal inquiry. On the contrary, we argue that this is what makes causal inquiry interesting and important in social science. A more nuanced and reflective approach to dealings with the politics of causal analysis is needed, and it is such a response that we provoke critics of causal analysis to consider.

In a dialogue discussing issues of the relation between empirical and normative theory, four contributors comment upon the edited volume by Richard Price, Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics, and Richard Price responds. The contributions principally revolve around the following themes: (1) whether a division of labor between normative and empirical theory can or should be overcome, which in turn presupposes notions of (2) just what constitutes normative and empirical international relations as such; and (3) the ethics of constructivism itself, including what if anything is distinctive about how constructivism might respond to the question of ‘how we should act’.