Friedrich Kratochwil engages critically with the emergence of a global administrative law and its consequences for the democratic legitimacy of global governance. While he makes important contributions to our understanding of global governance, he does not sufficiently discuss the differences in the institutional design of new forms of global law-making and their consequences for the effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance. I elaborate on these limitations and outline a comparative research agenda on the emergence, design, and effectiveness of the diverse arrangements that constitute the complex institutional architecture of contemporary global governance.

This paper probes the attempt to use power analysis to link three domains: ontology, explanation, and the strategy of political actors. It shows how Katzenstein and Seybert develop an open social ontology that serves as the backdrop for explanations that need to be causal but indeterminate, and a cautious political practice. It exposes tensions in two important links. First, the open ontology becomes retranslated as an explanatory cause. Second, the call for being cautious because of ‘unknown unknowns’ may just as well invite strategies of doubling down in control power.

This paper examines several aspects of Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science. The paper questions the nature of the task, as ontologies are debated in a scientific field once there is a widely accepted substantive theory that stands in need of interpretation, as with Newtonian physics or quantum mechanics; doing this job for international relations (IR) is highly questionable give that there is no widely accepted substantive theory of IR that needs an interpretation. Second, the paper questions Wendt's view of the consequences for ontology of quantum theory being replaced in the future; Wendt the interpretation of the history of science maintains that in the physical sciences a new theory subsumes the older theory, including its ontology. But, this seems to misread history, while the empirical content of classical physics is subsumed by relativity theory, it is far from true that the former's ontology was subsumed. The ontologies are in sharp contrast. The paper raises questions also about the notion of ‘truth’ and of the meaningfulness of evaluative concepts like ‘justice’.

The problem of ‘distance and engagement’ highlights the Weberian paradox that objectivity in the social sciences cannot be based on demonstrative proof; it has to take into account values as the constituents of our ‘interests’. Values should be explicit even if this ‘perspectivity’ cannot satisfy the criteria of necessity and universality. Allegedly, my skeptical approach to ‘social theory’ leaves researchers with insufficient ‘hope’, but one also learns from understanding that something is impossible or conceptually flawed. Moreover, deeper issues of analyzing social action, with existential and moral dimensions, should be considered. These involve our cognitive capacities, experiences, and emotions.

Kratochwil's critique of rights as a dominant moral theory that cannot avoid ‘hegemonic’ politics appears to be too crude. This article suggests that more theoretical and practical attention to the responsibilities necessary to implement rights could address some of Kratochwil's concerns. The language of political and ethical responsibilities is often missing from the practical action discourse of human rights. The article emphasizes the multitude of potential ‘agents of justice’ and how they can discharge forward-looking responsibilities in open and discretionary ways.

In order to understand the concept of law, that is to understand what law is and does, Friedrich Kratochwil proposes to look at how we ‘use’ norms and relate them to actions. His approach promises less theoretical impasses and the ability ‘to go on’. These comments contend that a focus on ‘norm practice’ can only provide a particular understanding of how law functions. The article further suggests that the proposition and contestation of conceptions of law, including the uses of law these conceptions enable and legitimize, form part of the social practice of law. This calls for a comparative perspective.

While The Global Transformation makes a compelling case for the importance of the oft-ignored 19th century for IR theory, the book also represents an opportunity for an audience for which it was probably not intended: American IR scholars working in the quantitative empirical tradition, whom it should prompt to re-think the question of how the interactions that they seek to understand are conditional on deeper material and ideational dynamics.

International Law in its current form is dominated by positivism and voluntarism; yet, it has accepted a number of concepts from the Natural Law tradition that seem on the face of things to ill-fit the dominant normative complex. Of primary concern here are the Natural Law notions of categorical obligation that have been brought into International Law in the form of jus cogens rules. A number of interesting questions present themselves. What are positivists doing talking about categoricals? How have they found a way to make this fit within their larger doctrine? Have positivists adopted the language of categorical obligation, but only the language, not the correlative practices? Is it simply a matter of smuggling in alien concepts and shoehorning them despite the lack of fit, or have they created something new that only seems not to fit? Ultimately, what we find is that International Law has accepted this idea in a form that ultimately is limited by voluntarism's insistence on the voluntary and specific character of all obligations.

In putting Wendt's recent Quantum Mind in a larger context both of his own disciplinary engagement and some larger philosophical issues, I try to avoid a hasty dismissal, since the book seems at first blush to offer a ‘theory of everything’, or an uncritical acceptance, since the desire to know what makes the world hand together has always been part of the knowledge game. As to the first problem, I find it rather odd that Wendt spends little time in justifying his particular take on quantum theory, which is far from uncontroversial. Second, I attempt to understand why he has given up on the profession trying now to solve puzzles in the field by claiming that ‘quantum consciousness theory’ provides us with an ‘ace up the sleeve’. But the fact that wave collapse plays havoc with our traditional notions of cause, location, and mass, does not without further ado entitle us to claim that all or most problems in social science dealing with issues of validity and meaning of our concepts (rather than ‘truth/falsity’, as decided by making existential assertions) have been solved by quantum mechanics.

Important scholarship in International Relations (IR) theory engages with the utopian tradition in order to render it ‘realistic’, whereby ‘failed’ utopian projects become necessarily unrealistic, and anti-political. The paper suggests such scholarship is informed by a narrow chronotic register, and a dichotomous ontology of chronos and kairos derived in part from the work of Karl Mannheim and E.H. Carr. As such, utopian scholarship in IR constructs a self-reinforcing relationship between change and realism, whereby only ‘realistic’ interventions can affect normatively desirable change, and therefore only interventions that are possible under current social and political conditions are normatively desirable. Drawing on the idea that the quest for utopia must always fail, the paper suggests that IR theory should be far more attuned to ‘failure’ than as simply a phenomenon that helps define the boundary between the realistic and unrealistic. The paper draws on non-canonical literatures from utopian studies and anarchism, to furnish an alternative ‘no-point’ form of utopianism that dissolves the chronos/kairos binary and thus engages neither in universalist and violent end-point, nor institutionally compromised ‘mid-range’ utopianism. This acts to reconceptualise ‘failure’ in excess of itself, a productive site for IR scholarship, and a political archive for movements and struggles to learn from.

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.

States rarely declare war. For many international law scholars, just war theorists, and moral philosophers, the declaration of war is a moribund tradition that serves no important purpose. When declarations of war are defended, the argument is situated in the war powers debate about executive authority. In contrast, I argue that declaring war – making conditional and reasoned moral demands – continues to be an important requirement for just wars. States should declare war because states should make explicit (formal) moral demands before fighting. Declaring war is procedurally important because it ensures that a state makes a formal moral case, showing respect to innocent third parties whose interests are affected and providing targets the right to confront their accusers and hear evidence. While not a panacea, requiring declarations is a significant improvement on the ad hoc politics of wartime justification that plagues wars such as Iraq. Further, declarations, as ultimatums, are the only reasonable interpretation of the ‘last resort’ requirement in just war theory. A final section extends the argument to contemporary wars against non-state actors, showing that a politics of recognition underlying declarations of war may prove especially fruitful today.

It is the orthodox view in the cosmopolitan and normative international relations literature that Immanuel Kant is a staunch critic of European colonialism. This paper offers a far more critical stance towards Kant’s position with respect to minority nations and stateless Indigenous peoples through an analysis that draws on the criticisms developed by his contemporary and former student, Johann Gottfried Herder. The paper proceeds in three parts. In the first section, I present the evidence in favour of seeing both Kant and Herder as strident opponents of colonialism. In the second section, I then show the problems that arise in Kant’s position when his views on the state and property rights are taken into consideration. Kant’s coupling of the nation and state in contrast to Herder’s insistence that they are separate entities is highlighted as a crucial distinguishing point in their positions. In the third and final section, I indicate how Herder provides a far deeper critique of colonialism than Kant, also due to his recognition of the problematic nature of ideological pronouncements of progress.

The argument that reputational concerns promote compliance is at the center of the literature of international cooperation. In this paper, we study how reputational sanctions affect compliance when domestic parties carry their own reputations in international negotiations. We showed that the prospect of international cooperation varies a lot depending on who sits at the negotiation table, how partisan preferences for compliance are different, and how much international audiences discriminate between different types of noncompliance. We illustrate implications of our model using episodes from the negotiations between the United States and North Korea over North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

There seems to exist a general consensus on how to conceptualize cooperation in the field of international relations (IR). We argue that this impression is deceptive. In practice, scholars working on the causes of international cooperation have come to implicitly employ various understandings of what cooperation is. Yet, an explicit debate about the discipline's conceptual foundations never materialized, and whatever discussion occurred did so only latently and without much dialog across theoretical traditions. In this paper, we develop an updated conceptual framework by exploring the nature of these differing understandings and situating them within broader theoretical conversations about the role of cooperation in IR. Drawing on an array of studies in IR and philosophy, our framework distinguishes between three distinct types of cooperative state interactions – cooperation through tacit policy coordination (‘minimal’ cooperation), cooperation through explicit policy coordination (‘thin’ cooperation), and cooperation based on joint action (‘thick’ cooperation). The framework contributes to better theorization about cooperation in two main ways: it allows scholars across theoretical traditions to identify important sources of disagreement and previously unnoticed theoretical common ground; and the conceptual disaggregation it provides grants scholars crucial theoretical leverage by enabling type-specific causal theorization.

This article introduces an innovative theoretical conception of the corporate agency of international organizations (IOs). Existing rationalist and constructivist accounts attribute IO agency to the influence of intra-organizational agents. Drawing on general conceptions of corporate agency in International Relations, sociology, and philosophy, we elucidate how IOs can develop corporate agency, even if the member states prepare and adopt all organizational decisions themselves. In line with recent studies on international political authority, we replace the IO-as-bureaucracy model with the more comprehensive concept of IOs-as-governors. To establish the micro-foundations of IO agency, we adopt a bottom-up perspective and outline how, and under which conditions, IO agency arises from the interaction of constituent actors. Irrespective of any specific institutional design, IOs become actors in their own right whenever they gain action capability and autonomy. They acquire action capability whenever their members pool governance resources like the right to regulate certain activities or to manage common funds and authorize IOs to deploy these resources. IOs gain autonomy whenever they affect organizational decisions. Both dimensions of IO agency are variable and open to empirical enquiry. To illustrate our argument, we refer to the United Nations Security Council and other IOs with member-driven decision processes.

The paper introduces a new explanation of international order that focuses on representants. Representants are practices, artifacts, and language that stand in for the international system's units in international fora. They are crucial for International Relations (IR), given that IR deal with a macro-realm that can never be fully present, but needs to be made concrete in specific localities. Representants have four interrelated effects: (1) they define the units of the international system; (2) they legitimize them; (3) they provide them with differential degrees of power; and (4) they serve as tools for governing. When representants are seriously challenged, orders are in crisis; when new representants emerge, a new order has taken hold. The paper develops a mechanism of change emerging from struggles over representants. It studies the transition from the medieval order of universal monarchy to an order of divine right absolutism. Representants, such as gothic cathedrals, the mass, and coronation rituals maintained the medieval hierarchical order with the pope/emperor at the apex. The Reformation provided the last step in kings' challenge to the medieval order. Kings adapted existing representants, so that they would portray the independence of kings from the papacy/emperor, and simultaneously position kings above feudal lords.