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.

This commentary focuses on Kratochwil's observation about the gap between the pervasiveness of human rights language and its susceptibility to perverse effects and abuse. After demonstrating that Kratochwil shares much of the contemporary skepticism about the alleged foundations and legitimacy of human rights, the comment elaborates on his claims that human rights were and are particularistic and that ‘rights talk’ produces unintended consequences for the individuals whose autonomy was meant to flourish. He questions but ultimately does not answer whether the broader anthropocentric ethos that underpins Western societies, and legal systems, may one day be superseded by ‘non-rightist’ approaches.

In this forum five scholars bring their particular postcolonial perspectives to bear upon the constructivist concept of norms. Charlotte Epstein introduces the forum by considering what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’; and how this casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key epistemological schemes with which these have been studied in International Relations (IR), such as norms. In her contribution Ayze Zarakol argues that the constructivist paradigm of ‘norm diffusion’ commits two fallacies: first, it mishandles the causal explanation because it conflates internalisation, socialisation and compliance. Second it reproduces existing international social hierarchies by treating (bad) non-compliance by non-Western actors as endogenously driven, and (good) compliance as the result of external Western stimuli. She uses Erving Goffman’s concept of stigmatisation to show how our understanding of norm diffusion in the international order – or lack thereof – can be improved. Julia Gallagher’s article examines the norm of good governance as acted out by the World Bank in its policies towards African countries. She uses psychoanalytic object relations theory to show how the Bank employs good governance to structure the world into good and bad objects, thereby overcoming internal ambiguity and creating an idealised self-image. Robbie Shlliam’s contribution challenges constructivism to attend to calls for epistemic justice regarding the delineation of interpretive communities to the ostensibly “moderns”. He does so by explicating the understandings of slavery provided by knowledge traditions inhabited by descendants of enslaved Africans. Vivienne Jabri’s article mobilises Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon in a critical engagement with constructivist readings of postcolonial agency in the normative ordering of the international. She argues that a postcolonial reading of the international must account for both the discursive and material presence of the postcolonial subject, a presence at once both constituted and constituting of the international.

In this reply to Miles Evers, I clarify some of my positions and argue that social facts should not be reified. Just as with norms, they should be defined as arrangements of practices rather than as social objects.

Human rights law posits a close, almost self-evident, relation between human rights and peace. Peace researchers, however, see this relation as an unsettled empirical question. In this essay, we consider the peace researchers’ (implicit) critique of human rights law. We argue that seeing the relation between human rights and peace as an empirical question rests on a largely unexamined conceptual separation of justice and peace. Re-investigating this conceptual relation reveals two positions that have different implications for human rights and peace: (1) a ‘negative’ understanding of peace as stability, and (2) a ‘positive’ understanding of peace as a working social contract. On the negative understanding, human rights may or may not be instrumentally effective in maintaining stability, which is rightly seen as an empirical question. On the positive understanding of peace, on the other hand, human rights are potentially conceptually related to peace, and the relation cannot be reduced to an empirical question. We argue that (2) is a better understanding of peace – at least the kind of peace envisioned in human rights philosophy – and provides a potential bridge between human rights scholarship and peace research.

Kratochwil criticizes two important teleological global narratives of universal progress – Luhmannian systems theory and jus cogens – and defends the need for a non-ideal and situated approach to law and politics. Despite the cogency of Kratochwil's analysis, why should we place our hope in his pragmatic program given the complexity of actual decision-making? This paper shows that more needs to be said about the role of hope grounding Kratochwil's account. Which hopes are hopeless, and which warranted? Why should we care and ‘go on’, choosing to be prudential and political rather than focusing on one's inner development or pleasure?

This symposium addresses the role of anxiety, fear, and ontological (in)security in world politics. Proceeding from the recognition of the scholarly interest and multitude of approaches that characterize the field of ontological (in)security studies, the Symposium homes in on the relationship between anxiety and fear, and between anxiety, subjectivity, and agency. The Introduction critically engages with Anthony Giddens' understandings of ontological (in)security, in an effort to spur the revisiting, questioning, and, in some cases, leaving behind Giddens' assumptions in order to develop a more dynamic conception. In response, the first three contributions draw on resources in existentialist philosophy, especially Heidegger, Tillich, and Kierkegaard, to further unpack the relationship between anxiety and ontological (in)security. They do so by returning to the experiential moment of confronting existential anxiety, a moment that Giddens quickly closes down, to better grasp how existential anxiety resolves into an orientation to action. The final two essays, in comparison, bring anxiety ‘back in’ to locales where Giddens' theory occludes it: the unconscious and the international, thus arguing that emotional configurations other than fear are always possible.

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.

Moral responsibility is a prominent concept used in political discourses and theoretical debates. Yet disagreement remains on how it could work in practice. When attempting to address global challenges such as global poverty, combating atrocities, or artificial intelligence, approaches often revert to retrospective accounts of responsibility that focus on non-compliance with regulatory frameworks. As a result, cases where prospective responsibility would be required often go unaddressed. In this article, we introduce an analytical conceptualization of responsibility that should help to guide the application of moral responsibility in such situations. In the first step, we develop a typology that distinguishes between four types of responsibility: ‘obligatory’, ‘structural’, ‘prescribed’, and ‘discursive’. Second, we identify responsibility gaps for each responsibility type. Third, we introduce different ethical principles from political theory that help to identify potential responsibility relations. We illustrate the utility of this framework with the example of climate change, where ethical principles beyond the contribution principle have already been applied. The paper facilitates new perspectives in political debates about how to allocate responsibility in light of global challenges and enhances theoretical debates in International Relations scholarship.

International legal structuralism arrived on the shores of international thought in the 1980s. The arrival was not well received, perhaps in part, because it was not well understood. This essay aims to reintroduce legal structuralism and hopefully pave the way for new, and more positive, receptions and understandings. This reintroduction is organized around two claims regarding the broader encounter between international lawyers and critical theory in the 1980s. The first was a jurisprudential claim about how the critics sought to show how international law was nothing more than a continuation of international politics by other means. The second was a historical claim about how the critics wanted to show that international law had never been anything but politics, and that it always would be. In the view of this essay, both of these claims about international legal structuralism were wrong, and they are still wrong today. For despite the tendency to think of it as a cover for postmodern nihilism or relentless deconstruction or both, legal structuralism offers international theorists an enriching and edifying method for rethinking the relation between law and politics on the one hand, and law and history on the other. It is in the effort to carry a brief for a reawakened legal structuralism that the essay brings focus to some of the early works of Koskenniemi and Kennedy, identifies the semiotic foundations of that work, and ultimately suggests the possibility of a second generation of international legal structuralism.

This foreword frames the Symposium in two ways. It summarises the core themes running through the nine ‘meditations’ in The Status of Law in World Society. Moreover, it places these themes in the wider context of Kratochwil's critical engagement with how we pursue knowledge of and in the social world and translate this knowledge into action. Ultimately, also his pragmatic approach cannot escape the tensions between theory and practice. Instead, we are in the midst of both.