Participatory approaches to humanitarianism, peacebuilding, and international development promise to listen to the voices of local aid beneficiaries. However, aid workers often listen to these voices through reductive narratives of aid beneficiaries, ventriloquizing their voice and inhibiting meaningful participation. Why do aid workers – despite humane intentions – continue to rely on reductive narratives? This paper inquires how the everyday emotional lives of aid workers make reductive narratives persist. Based on 65 semi-structured interviews in Singapore, Jakarta, and Aceh, and 40 aid worker books and blogs, I show how aid workers regularly experience emotional anxieties that question their complicity in the suffering of others and their powerlessness to do anything about it. Reductive narratives resonate and persist because they allow aid workers to cope with these anxieties. I illustrate the emotional resonance of three reductive narratives – civilizing; romanticized; and impersonal narratives – in three common practices of local participation in aid work: professionalized standards; visiting the field; and hiring locals. Given the emotional origins of reductive narratives, rational critique is insufficient for reforming or decolonizing aid work. Rather, change must also involve engaging the underlying emotions of aid workers.

Within the political-economy of the social sciences, Area Studies (AS) is supposed to supply contextually-informed knowledge on (non-Western) areas to the other social sciences, in exchange for theory to guide further empirical investigations. Based on this assumption, there are regular calls for greater engagement with AS to counteract the shortcomings of International Relations’ (IR) knowledge-base on many areas, perspectives, and practices of the international. However, there has been little work empirically detailing knowledge-exchange practices between IR and AS, so it remains an open question if the relationship functions as an exchange of ‘international’ theory-for-‘area’ empirics. This paper provides a macro-sociological analysis of the practices of IR–AS knowledge-exchange. By focusing on citation practice, it moves beyond accounts that treat the two disciplines as ‘black boxes’, to trace which parts of the ‘dividing discipline’ of IR are active in exchanging knowledge with which ‘area’ scholarships. Hence, it asks: Are there ‘area’ blindspots in IR's knowledge-production? And, what type of IR theory is exported to AS? This analysis informs an assessment of whether AS represents a significant resource for IR in its efforts to, one, better inform its knowledge-production about ‘other’ areas of the international, and two, assert its disciplinary-relevance within the academy.

This article focusses on the concept of decision and its significance for identity politics. Constructivist scholarship established long ago that identity and foreign policy are mutually constitutive and that difference and othering are key for the production of identities. As a consequence, constructivist literature on EU foreign policy has focussed on the role of specific others and explored how interaction with them shapes the EU’s identity. Our article turns the attention back inside and looks at the hegemonic struggles around the purpose and meaning of the European project. By analyzing the EU’s reaction to the Libyan events in 2011, we demonstrate how a major international crisis dislocates the identities involved and unleashes a struggle for hegemony between conflicting discursive articulations. Eventually this conflict is resolved through a political decision, which reconfigures the entire ‘global’ outlook on Europe and its role in the world. By defining decision along poststructuralist lines, as distinct from the conventional literature on decision-making, we demonstrate that the use of this conceptual prism helps deepen our understanding of how othering and bordering work to produce and reshape identities. By doing that, we seek to contribute to a better understanding of how identities change in time.

This paper reflects on the ethical possibilities and limitations of cosmopolitanism as practice, with particular reference to the contemporary European project. It begins with an exploration of the relationship between what I term a ‘market’ and a ‘legal’ cosmopolitics in the European context. Inspired by Foucault's recently published work on liberal government, the paper argues that these cosmopolitics and the subjectivities that they seek to produce variously overlap, reinforce one another, and conflict in practices of contemporary post-national government: in short, they co-exist in an inherently ambiguous relationship. Animating this argument, the paper considers the politics of European citizenship; it highlights what is at stake, ethically and politically, in the recognition of an ambiguous cosmopolitics. It focuses in particular on the European Union (EU)'s 2004 Directive on the free movement of EU citizens and its relevance in the context of the high-profile deportations of Roma from France in summer 2010. The paper makes the case that the recognition and ongoing identification of an ambiguous cosmopolitics – and, essentially, an ambiguous European identity or ‘us’ – offers the prospect for ongoing resistance by and with those who find themselves designated as the ‘other’ of the European project in particular or of a cosmopolitics in general.

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.

I explore the construction of women as the secret for the ‘successful’ prosecution of war in Afghanistan. To do so, I take up the mobilization of gender in the US counterinsurgency doctrine as deployed in Afghanistan. I draw on the 2006 Counterinsurgency Field Manual, human rights and humanitarian reports, and scholarly works to identify and analyze this mobilization, paying attention to the colonial histories upon which COIN explicitly and implicitly relies. By critically integrating these sources and the paradigmatic moments that exemplify COIN, I demonstrate the constitutive relationship of gender and COIN. The valence of the secret – of women as concealing, revealing, being, and bearing the secret – is still a lesser explored element in the analysis of the gendering of COIN and of its ‘military orientalism’. Even as scholars have powerfully shown how, in the case of Afghanistan and elsewhere, the veil functions as an overdetermined and ‘multilayered signifier’ in its own right, symbolizing the ‘tension between disclosure and concealment that defines the dominant conception of the secret’, less subject to detailed analysis in case of Afghanistan is the ways in which Afghan women are constituted through COIN in polysemous relation to the notion of the secret.

Does International Humanitarian Law (IHL) impose a duty of care on the attacker? From a moral point of view, should it? This article argues that the legal situation is contestable, and the moral value of a legal duty of care in attack is ambivalent. This is because a duty of care is both a condition for and an obstacle to the ‘individualization of war’. The individualization of war denotes an observable multi-dimensional norm shift in international relations. Norms for the regulation of war that focus on the interests, rights, and duties of the individual have gained in importance compared to those that focus on the interests, rights, and duties of the state. As the individual, not the state, is the ultimate locus of moral value, this norm shift in international relations, and the corresponding developments in international law, are morally desirable. When it comes to IHL, the goal of protecting the interests of the individual creates strong reasons both for and against imposing a legal duty of care on the attacker. The enquiry into whether IHL does and should impose a legal duty of care therefore reveals that the extent to which war can be individualized is limited.

Buzan and Lawson’s The Global Transformation establishes that many of the basic parameters of world politics originated in the ‘long 19th century’. Despite finding much to admire in their book, we are concerned that it lacks an explicit theory of change. In its drive to highlight the novelty and exceptionalism of the 19th century, it offers insufficient guidance on two key issues: first, how international relations scholars should situate Buzan and Lawson’s ‘global transformation’ in existing debates over transhistorical processes; and, second, how they should apply lessons from that transformation to understanding emergent trends in the contemporary world. We argue that a more explicit study of causal factors might help account for why the 19th century was unusual. We conclude with thoughts about how the field should proceed after The Global Transformation. In particular, it points to how concatenating changes could profoundly alter international politics – an approach we term ‘Exotic International Relations’. Buzan and Lawson’s book therefore serves as a marker for the importance of systematically theorizing how radical potentialities for transformation might rearrange existing structural assemblages in world politics.

As the so-called liberal international order has come under duress, the problem of ‘peaceful change’ has reappeared on the agenda of International Relations (IR), mainly in a realist guise drawing upon E.H. Carr and Robert Gilpin's renditions of the problem. Making a conceptual archaeological intervention, this paper recovers long-neglected multidisciplinary debates on ‘peaceful change’ taking place in the tumultuous interwar period. It concurs that peaceful change is an IR problem par excellence, central to academic debates in the burgeoning interwar discipline, but also a more complex conceptual figure than posterity portrays it. The paper explores the debates between negative and positive conceptions of peaceful change, between political, legal-institutional and communitarian mechanisms of peaceful change, and different policies of peaceful change, particularly its troubled relationship to appeasement. The paper concludes that the interwar debate on peaceful change, while highly embedded in its context, does offer IR an alternative and more aspirational perspective on the problem of power and order transitions.

From an international political theory perspective, this paper assesses the justifiability of ascribing human rights obligations, in the form of international or extraterritorial law, onto transnational corporations (TNCs). The major policy prescriptions in favour of extending human rights duties to include TNCs become deeply problematic when considered in light of advocates’ claims that human rights rules, rather than a sovereign’s legal rules, are necessarily the rules that are truly authoritative and/or in line with a ‘global rule of law’. This paper discusses concepts such as authority, human rights and the rule of law, and juxtaposes these concepts: firstly, with one another; secondly, with the legal status quo about jurisdiction over companies; and thirdly, with corporations’ de facto transnationality in the contemporary international system. This paper discusses key similarities and differences between companies, states, and individuals, and highlights the relevance of these distinctions to those agents’ potential human rights duties. This paper concludes by arguing that the ‘TNC and human rights’ project is well worth pursuing, but according to different theoretical foundations than those currently endorsed by legal and policy analysts, and it suggests important directions for future research.

The efficiency-oriented part of the literature on informal governance points to institutional costs as a reason for governments to prefer to cooperate with each other through commitments that are not binding. Left unexplained is what I call the dilemma of informal governance: how informal governance copes with the problem of cheating, to which formal governance has traditionally provided the solution. I show that like-mindedness, the current solution to the dilemma, is convincing but underspecified. Working from a model of governance encompassing the three time-honored dimensions of obligation, precision, and delegation, I analytically explore two other solutions, one that fails, information transmission, another that works, outside option, which I borrow from the power-oriented part of the literature on informal governance. A key finding is that informal governance, despite being neither self-enforceable nor informative, is sustainable for mild Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) types in the presence of outside options. I illustrate the model findings by tracing an historical correlation between power polarization and formalism in the design of security regimes.

Part II responds to some of my critics' substantive concerns about QMASS. However, to sharpen that discussion I first introduce the idea of classical and quantum physical instantiation tests or ‘PITs’. PITs are a thought experiment taking advantage of the causal closure of physics. To encourage critical self-reflection on the usually tacit ontological assumptions of our theories, PITs invite social scientists to translate their mostly qualitative, folk psychological arguments into physical descriptions, meeting classical and quantum constraints respectively, to see which feels more appropriate to the case at hand. With this diagnostic tool in hand, the paper addresses criticisms of QMASS in five areas: (1) the threat of physics reductionism; (2) the potential for epistemic repression stemming from the realist nature of QMASS’ argument; (3) doubts that a quantum approach can support a genuine notion of human freedom; (4) the place of ethics and normativity in social and international life; and (5) implications for graduate methods training and quantum pedagogy more generally.

International relations (IR) has witnessed an emerging interest in neuroscience, particularly for its relevance to a now widespread scholarship on emotions. Contributing to this scholarship, this paper draws on the subfields of affective neuroscience and neuropsychology, which remain largely unexplored in IR. Firstly, the paper draws on affective neuroscience in illuminating affect's defining role in consciousness and omnipresence in social behavior, challenging the continuing elision of emotions in mainstream approaches. Secondly, it applies theories of depth neuropsychology, which suggest a neural predisposition originating in the brain's higher cortical regions to attenuate emotional arousal and limit affective consciousness. This predisposition works to preserve individuals’ self-coherence, countering implicit assumptions about rationality and motivation within IR theory. Thirdly, it outlines three key implications for IR theory. It argues that affective neuroscience and neuropsychology offer a route toward deep theorizing of ontologies and motivations. It also leads to a reassessment of the social regulation of emotions, particularly as observed in institutions, including the state. It also suggests a productive engagement with constructivist and poststructuralist approaches by addressing the agency of the body in social relations. The paper concludes by sketching the potential for a therapeutically-attuned approach to IR.

This article develops a ‘spatio-political’ structural typology of (national and international) political systems, based on the arrangement of homogeneous or heterogeneous political centers and peripheries in layered political spaces. I then apply this typology to Eurocentric political systems from the high middle ages to today. Rather than see no fundamental change across nearly a millennium (the system remained anarchic) or a singular modern transition (with several centuries of fundamental structural continuity on either side), I depict a series of partial structural transformations on time scales of a century or two. I also recurrently step back to consider the nature and significance of such structural models; why and how they explain. International systems, I try to show, do not have just one or even only a few simple structures; their parts are arranged (structured) in varied and often complex ways. Structural change therefore is common and typically arises through the interaction and accumulation of changes in intertwined elements of interconnected systems (not from radical innovations or dramatic changes in core principles). And structural models, I argue, explain both continuity and change not by identifying causes (or mechanisms) but through configurations; the organization of the parts of a system into a complex whole.

The politics of open international markets are frequently characterized as a Prisoners’ Dilemma, where states’ incentives to adopt protectionist policies are restrained by trading partners’ threat or use of retaliatory exclusion mechanisms. However, because Ricardian theories of comparative advantage suggest that unilateral trade openness enhances aggregate welfare, states whose domestic political institutions are encompassing – where the policymaker is responsive to a large proportion of the population and can authoritatively coordinate policy across diverse issues – have incentives to support open international markets without the threat or use of retaliatory mechanisms by other states. This explanation for the existence of an open international market has implications for theoretical and empirical research in international organization, as well as for discussions on the possibility of ‘self-contained regimes’ in international legal scholarship.

In this paper, I argue that a new principle of background justice should be added to Rawls’s Law of Peoples because climate change is an international and intergenerational problem that can destabilize the Society of Peoples and the well-ordered peoples therein. I start with explaining the nature of my project and Rawls’s conception of stability. I argue that climate change poses a realistic threat to the stability of climate-vulnerable liberal peoples and as a result undermines international peace and security. Despite the uncertainties due to the complexity of the climate system and about the resilience of liberal societies, liberal peoples’ fundamental interests in just basic institutions and national security call for the adoption of a precautionary principle. Rawls’s own principles are, I argue, inadequate to solve the stability problem from climate change. Still, his framework provides the theoretical resources to develop a new extension. I propose a new Rawlsian principle of international, intergenerational justice that guarantees the environmental background conditions under which well-ordered peoples can sustain their basic structure over generations and sketch the principle’s institutional implementation. I conclude with the theoretical and practical significance of this extension of Rawls’s theory.

This essay examines the relationship between history and theory through a historical and political analysis of the rise of distinctly social theories, concepts, and practices in the ‘long 19th century’. Sociomania, obsession with things ‘socio’, is a problem in international theory. It is also a serious missed opportunity for Buzan and Lawson’s study of the 19th century. The Global Transformation contributes to international theory in showing how mainstream IR has failed to grasp the full significance of this period. But, in this crucial regard at least, so too have its authors. In adopting rather than fully historicizing the rise and expansion of social theories, works of ‘historical social science’ obscure rather than illuminate the historical and political origins of social forms of governance and thought; underestimate their significance for the history of international theory; and are unable to identify the more fundamental governance form of which the rise of the modern social realm is a concrete historical expression.