While ontological security (OS) studies have gone through a recent evolution, shifting toward psychoanalytic and existential accounts of anxiety, this article argues there remains a deficient engagement with the affective environments within which actors operate. Specifically, focusing on shared emotions/affect allows for a thicker account of the mechanisms of OS – including the constitutive forces underpinning society/societal trust, the role/power of signifiers and narratives, and the basis upon which actors promote social change. Accordingly, it suggests Durkheim's social theory, his broader concept of ‘religion’ as an affective community constituted by faith in a moral order entwined with the sacred, offers a viable pathway to develop these insights and develop a new basis for the mechanisms of OS. The drive for OS thus becomes reconfigured as an effort to act faithfully toward a dynamic moral order, while ontological insecurity emerges from the unbearable lightness of being experienced within moral disorder. Following Durkheim's preliminary argument on nationalism representing the continuation of religion, we can then revise how/why nations are integral to OS and International Relations. Specifically, we can view foreign policy as informed by debates around how to act faithfully toward the moral order – a process interrelated with revitalization and renewal of the sacred.

This paper brings the notion of translation into dialogue with the growing literature on international hierarchies and the historical origins of the modern international order. Leveraging on the writings of Karl Marx, I draw parallels between the exchange of commodities and the translation of linguistic signs in order to unmask the inequalities and asymmetries that pervade the practice of translation. I then deploy these theoretical insights to illuminate the global constitution of the modern international order. In this Marx-inspired reading, the modern international order is cast as the ‘universal equivalent’ that has crystallized out of the asymmetries and contradictions that pervaded the global political economy of conceptual exchange in the long 19th century. As universal equivalent, the modern international order effectively functions as the socially recognized ‘metalanguage’ that undergirds the miracle of global translatability and makes international/interlingual relations possible on a global scale. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the analysis for the future of international/interlingual hierarchies and world order.

From Trump's America to Putin's Russia, from climate change denial to corona denial, so-called post-truth politics are experiencing a global rise. How can we understand and explain this phenomenon? In the attempt to answer this question, this article advances two core claims. First, it suggests that post-truth politics is (despite its name) marked not only by the denial of claims to objective truth, but also by the naturalization of one specific truth claim: namely, the cynical belief that self-interests are behind all public discourse. Second, it locates the social sources of this dogmatic cynicism in the global expansion of neoliberal competition.

Recent scholarship in just war theory has challenged the principle of symmetrical application of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). This revisionist work, which is increasingly dominating the field of contemporary war ethics, rejects the idea that the rules of conduct of war (jus in bello) should be agnostic about the justice of the decision to go to war (jus ad bellum). Just wars are perceived to be inherently at odds with the principle of symmetrical application of IHL, which appears to create a hard choice between justice and legality. I show that this challenge to IHL is misplaced. It derives from a widespread view among just war theorists according to which only one side in a just war can be justified in using force. By looking closely at the nature of adjudication of just causes of war, I show that there can be cases of war in which both sides are justified in using force, and cases in which, though not objectively justified, both sides may be excused for fighting. On the basis of this understanding of jus ad bellum, I argue that the principle of symmetrical application of IHL in fact best reflects the uncertainty and complexity that should characterize the practical doctrine of jus ad bellum.

The omnipresence of radical uncertainty asks for a concept of causality that moves beyond the notion of predicted probabilities. Protean power is a most important contribution to move International Relations research in this direction. Yet, some of the key components need further grounding in existing concepts and debates. First, protean power should include the notion of directionality in order to be power. Second, it should allow for an analysis of the different forms of relation between protean power and different types of uncertainties. And it should focus on features of the power relationship instead of the context in which it takes place to be able to transfer it to contexts other than uncertainty.

The traditional Laing–Giddens paradigm views ontological insecurity as an unusual mental state triggered by critical situations and characterized by feelings of anxiety, disorientation and paralysis. However, theories inspired by Lacan suggest a different perspective, stating that ontological insecurity is not an exception but rather a regular state of mind. Similarly, ontological security is a fantasy stemming from the desire to fill the primordial lack, thus fuelling agency. While these Lacanian interpretations have introduced a fresh viewpoint into Ontological Security Studies (OSS), they have not fully incorporated one of the key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis – the object-cause of desire (French: objet petit a) – into international relations theory. In this article, we present a framework of how to conceptualize and empirically study the objects-cause of desire in world politics. Our arguments are exemplified in a case study of Serbia's resistance to Kosovo's UNESCO membership in 2015.

This article contributes to the debate about the future of just war thinking, which has been challenged by the emerging school of just peace. Just peace thinkers hope that by foregrounding nonviolent means just war reasoning will become obsolete. Recently, the German Catholic Bishops have argued that the traditional understanding of just war contributed to their predecessors' silence on the Second World War. Grounded in just peace thinking, their argument implies that had the new framework been in place at the time, it would have been easier for their predecessors to oppose Hitler's war. In this article, I defend traditional just war thinking as encountered in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, just war thinking was part of an encompassing ethics of war and peace. In fact, peace was the primary goal. Grounded in Aquinas's understanding of virtue, I argue that there is a place for just peace scholarship within the just war framework. The tools of nonviolence should be seen as an important complement to the justifiable use of armed force.

Scholars have attempted to theorise the social structure of the international system from the perspective of the ‘middle powers’ for decades. However, scholars have struggled to agree on the essential dispositional characteristics of this category of actors, stunting theoretical progress. Drawing on sociological and literary approaches to the rhetoric of the ‘middle class’ in domestic societies, this article shifts the terms of this debate away from asking who the ‘middle powers’ are or what their ‘essence’ is, to ask what actors do with the term in practice. Combining this with and contributing to scholarship on hierarchy in international relations, I recast ‘middle powers’ as a category of practice and argue that one of the term's main uses is to differentiate certain status-anxious states – that hold no real prospect of achieving great power status – from ‘small states’ that occupy the lowest stratum of stratification within the ‘grading of powers’. Following an illustrative case study of Australian and Canadian attempts to establish the ‘middle power’ category in the 1940s, the article then outlines the contributions of the argument for the study of status and hierarchy in world politics.

Scholars and policymakers in the West commonly hold that liberal countries that intervene to stop genocide subsequently ought to establish democratic political institutions to enable peaceful collective self-determination. I argue that this guidance is problematic. First, introducing electoral democracy in deeply ethnically divided societies – especially but not only after genocide – often results in either tyrannical majority rule or deadlocked decision making rather than inclusive self-determination. Second, normatively speaking, John Rawls made a strong case that inclusive self-determination can be achieved through ‘decent,’ less than democratic political structures that enable group-based representation. Bringing these insights together, I argue that particularly for postgenocidal societies that lack prior experience with liberal democratic rule, outside interveners should stop short of actively promoting full electoral democracy and instead consider promoting hybrid political institutions that combine popularly elected bodies with customary authority structures. Such hybrid institutions can prevent tyrannical majority rule as well as decision-making deadlock. They are also likely to fit better with local culture. Therefore, they may offer a more robust foundation for peaceful self-determination. A discussion of hybrid institutions in postwar Somaliland and Bougainville illustrates how these arrangements can facilitate peaceful self-determination in practice.

The article advances three options to create new ways for thinking about humanity. First, reject humanity and view interconnectedness as state centric rather than human centric, with international law upheld as the bedrock institution of international society. Second, thin humanity puts forward a reductionist view that the value of humankind lies in the human worth of its members – human beings. In short, humanity is the sum of its parts. Third, thick humanity, which views humankind as an independent value in its own right. From this perspective, the value of humanity lies in its ubiquity, which reveals that it is not just more, it is different, to the sum of its parts. It is important to note that this is not a purely theoretical issue. One’s view of humanity shapes one’s view of whether citizens of one state should care for the citizens of another, which lies at the heart of contemporary debates over issues such as the responsibility to protect, human security, and redistributive justice. In so doing, the article speaks to broader debates on humanity that reflects the need for greater interdisciplinary research in the future.

In the English School, the relationship between international and world society has recently received increasing attention – conceptually and empirically. Adding to this developing literature, we study how world societal actors not only serve as normative counterpoints to international society or function as norm-entrepreneurs, but decisively contribute to its reproduction. Going beyond the common preoccupation with actor types, we focus on practices that are performed on the international stage. We examine the role which world sport events, especially FIFA's World Cup and the infrastructure of football, play for international society. Building on Wight, we conceptualize world sport events as a (world societal actor driven) derivative primary institution of international society, which is embedded within the particularly hybrid master primary institution of sites and festivals. We find that world sport events allow for the ludic and festive reproduction of key primary institutions (like sovereignty, territoriality, and nationalism), while they highlight how members of international society compete on the basis of shared norms and values. Naturalizing world order as international order, they make international society emotionally experienceable as feasible and desirable at a global level. In performing world sport events, world societal actors uphold rather than challenge international society.

This article analyses the disregarded notion of the ius legationis (right of legation), revisiting historical debates in diplomatic theory and law over who possesses or ought to have this right. By examining how the ius legationis manifested into a volitional or subjectional or natural right, we argue that this renders it not merely a legal issue, but a highly political and ethical question that is of direct relevance to contemporary international relations. In an era where inclusivity is rhetorically promoted at the United Nations, we suggest that a rekindled right to diplomacy (R2D) – conceiving diplomacy as a right that is claimed but also contested – can shed light onto inequalities of representation and the role international law can play in remedying asymmetries and ethicizing the practice of diplomacy. Beyond its primary normative contribution, we argue that the R2D can also provide an analytical framework to understand UN's efforts at institutionalizing diplomatic pluralism, its logics of inclusion and exclusion, as well as the struggles of diverse groups to obtain accreditation, consultative status, and negotiation ability within multilateral diplomacy.