This article proposes an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School theory of securitization in International Relations. In contrast to existing attempts to show how, suitably elaborated, this model can be ‘applied’ to various non-Western contexts, our anthropological strategy is to use the contingency of empirical materials (namely the Cuban Revolution and the political forms it instantiates) as a means for transforming the basic coordinates of the model itself. The argument involves two main steps. First we relativize the Copenhagen School model, showing the contingency of its premises. In its paradigmatic form, we argue, the model is liberal in that its abiding concern with states of emergency turns on an ontological distinction between political subjects (e.g. people) and political structures (e.g. state). By contrast, revolutionary politics in Cuba concertedly rescinds just this distinction, to bring about an alternative, non-liberal political ontology. We then go on to use the Cuban case to construct an alternative model of securitization, which we call revolutionary. On this model, the move of securitization pertains, not to a passage from ordinary politics into a realm of emergency, but to a deliberate ontological fusion of the two, such that rule and exception also become coterminous.

This article examines how the principles of complex systems can illuminate recurring mechanisms of change in theories of international relations. It applies the logic of complex systems to two specific puzzles in international politics – the problem of theorizing change in structural realism, and the dynamics of cross-border democratic diffusion. In the first case, by shifting the analysis of anarchy's consequences from state behavior to state attributes, complex systems can illustrate the sources of domestic and international transformations embedded in structural theories. This approach offers a way to think about democratization as a global process of interstate competition and socialization driven by the pressures of anarchy. In the second case, the principles of co-adaptation in complex systems can help reframe diffusion not as the unilinear spread of democracy but as the interplay of self-reinforcing and self-dampening dynamics, whose interaction shapes both actor expectations and democratic outcomes. In both cases, complex systems serve a limited but useful role; although not conducive to theory creation, the approach provides a useful analytical prism for examining patterns of change and continuity in global processes, and highlights concrete ways of improving models of transformations in international politics.

The insights of social psychology are not thoroughly integrated into international relations theory, yet social psychology has much to offer. Social psychology provides a conceptualization of a number of varieties of trust – moralistic, strategic, and generalized – and their opposites that implicitly drive the logic of major works of international relations. It also reveals the empirical presence of a number of different types of trusters who make different assumptions about the trustworthiness of others and consequently show markedly different propensities towards cooperation. The rough correspondence between these different ‘social orientations’ and the logics of the three approaches of structural realism, neoliberal institutionalism, and constructivism suggest that individuals carry a crude paradigm in their minds. Metatheoretically, the implication for international relations theory is that scholars capture a part but not the totality of world politics, the behavior of those who trust (or do not trust) in a particular way that matches the logic of their paradigms. Theoretically it suggests a research agenda at multiple levels of analysis, utilizing all of the types of trust and trusters. I review the work of others that offers some preliminary evidence for its plausibility, suggest some hypotheses of my own, and address potential theoretical objections.

To analyze how authority emerges, become institutionalized, and may be transformed, we are best served with a concept of authority that highlights its dynamic features, and that captures the multiplicity of actors involved in producing and sustaining it. Extant accounts tend to operate with a view of ‘solid’ authority, but such a concept of authority is mainly descriptive, not explanatory. A turn to the liquid features of authority is not only better suited to account for global authority, but also for those pockets of ‘solid’ authority that we can find in the global or international sphere. I develop an account of authority that draws selectively from some of Bourdieu’s core concepts and highlight the inherently relational aspect of authority. Authority, I submit, is based on actors’ search for recognition. Such a perspective is better able to account for how authority emerges and may stabilize as ‘solid,’ and also be transformed over time. I draw on examples from the World Health Organization and the UN Security Council to illustrate the argument.

This article defends a sentimentalist cosmopolitan approach to international ethics against the rationalist cosmopolitan claim that emotions ought to be subjugated by their master, reason, and in processes of ethical deliberation. It argues that emotions play an indispensable role in making moral judgements and help to motivate ethical actions. Drawing on elements of 18th century moral sentiment theory and recent advances in neuroscience and psychology, the article demonstrates that reason and emotion are intimately linked forms of reflective thought, that emotion is central to reason and, far from disrupting processes of ethical deliberation, may actually enhance our ability to make moral judgements. Focusing on the problem of global poverty, the article shows that a sentimentalist cosmopolitan ethic provides a holistic approach to moral dilemmas in world politics that is capable of identifying injustices, prescribing how we ought to respond to them, and motivating ethical action in response to the injustices we observe.

This article uses the concept of international practices to explore the distinctions between human rights and humanitarianism in the contemporary period and, in turn, uses this exploration to comment on the concept of international practices. First section proposes to advance the theoretical and empirical utility of the concept of practices by parsing it into the ‘problem’ that sets the story in motion, what counts as competent action, background knowledge, and meanings. Second section applies this framework to the relationship between human rights and humanitarianism. Beginning in the 1990s, they began responding to many of the same material realities, which unleashed two, interrelated, processes, but had different ways of understanding competent action, background knowledge, and meanings. They began to revise their practices not only in response to new challenges but also to how the other evolved, generating new distinctions. These points of distinction were structured by different kinds of suffering and informed their contrasting narratives of precarity in the case of humanitarianism, and progress in human rights. The conclusion considers how this discussion of human rights and humanitarianism redirects contemporary research on international practices.

Globalization, foreign intervention, and failed states have drawn new attention to theoretical issues of how political orders and communities can be legitimately founded, and what it means for a people to be self-governing. In this article, I will challenge an argument in this debate saying that the founding of new political orders is always in some sense illegitimate insofar as it cannot be decided democratically. In opposition to this view, I will suggest that the founding of political orders is legitimate even from a democratic point of view when decided together by people within as well as beyond the boundaries inherent in the foundation. In case of persisting disagreement over boundary issues, political decisions can still derive democratic legitimacy from global procedures that are equally inclusive of everyone capable of contesting those decisions. Elaborating on the implications of this argument, I will also reject the notion that foreign interventions for establishing democracy are themselves necessarily illegitimate or undemocratic.

Contemporary global governance takes place not only throughs formal inter-governmental organizations and treaties, but increasingly through diverse institutional forms including informal inter-governmental organizations, trans-governmental networks, and transnational public–private partnerships. Although these forms differ in many ways, they are all what we call ‘low-cost institutions’ (LCIs): the costs of creating, operating, changing, and exiting them, and the sovereignty costs they impose, are substantially lower on average than those of treaty-based institutions. LCIs also provide substantive and political governance benefits based on their low costs, including reduced risk, malleability, and flexibility, as well as many of the general cooperation benefits provided by all types of institutions. LCIs are poorly-suited for creating and enforcing binding commitments, but can perform many other governance functions, alone and as complements to treaty-based institutions. We argue that the availability of LCIs changes the cost–benefit logic of institutional choice in a densely institutionalized international system, making the creation of new institutions, which existing research sees as the ‘last resort’, more likely. In addition, LCIs empower executive, bureaucratic, and societal actors, incentivizing those actors to favor creating LCIs rather than treaty-based institutions. The availability of LCIs affects global governance in multiple ways. It reduces the status quo bias of governance, changes its institutional and actor composition, enables (modest) cooperation in times of polarization and gridlock, creates beneficial institutional divisions of labor, and expands governance options. At the same time, the proliferation of LCIs reduces the focality of incumbent institutions, increasing the complexity of governance.

Commentary on the United Nations (UN) reform efforts of 2004–05 has broadly followed two different trajectories. International lawyers and political theorists have focused on the implications of reform for sovereignty as a fundamental principle of international law and international relations. International Relations (IR) scholars have discussed reform focusing on state power and the UN’s institutional authority. Against the background of these debates and drawing on Foucault’s political theory and related IR scholarship, this article argues that UN reform discourse indicates a biopolitical ‘reprogramming’ of contemporary sovereignty and global governance. The analysis ‘displaces’ the concerns with sovereignty, state power, and institutional authority by demonstrating that UN reform (also) constitutes the UN as a project of managing and regulating the global population through a variety of securitizing, economizing, and normalizing rationalities and techniques. The article illustrates this by pointing to the biopolitical rationales of reform conceptions of human security and collective security, and to (neo)liberal governmentalities of risk and responsibility, contractualism, benchmarking, and networks. It thereby challenges the conceptual and normative priority accorded to juridical sovereignty in international law, and to state- and institution-centric accounts in IR theorizations of UN-relayed global governance.

When ontological insecurity looms, what comes next? Is chaos the sole alternative to the maintenance of established role-identities and routines? Or is there a more complex set of possible responses to the dread threat of ontological insecurity? The principal approach to ontological security in International Relations (IR) relies unduly on Giddens' account. Consequently, this approach fails to adequately capture both the variety of ways in which coherent and continuous identities can be maintained and the variety of ways in which the available cultural repertoire can support ontological security differently when challenged. Typically, ontological security is re-established, prior to collapse, through re-balancing of the cultural repertoire to give broader scope to an alternative cultural form and the qualitatively different practices it organizes. Due to misrecognition, this reorganization may proceed without disturbing the ontological security of states-in-interaction. Unconscious processes, encoded into cultural forms, are integral to such variable defenses against ontological insecurity. A re-conceptualization that regards Wendt's cultures of anarchy, and their qualitatively different modes of relating, as dynamically co-present within cultural repertoires, but with potentially variable weightings, complements this approach to ontological in/security.

This article introduces an intercultural theory of international relations based on three distinctive ways of establishing self-worth: honor, face, and dignity. In each culture of self-worth, concerns with status and humiliation intervene differently in producing political outcomes. The theory explains important variation in the way states and nations relate to members of their own culture of self-worth, as well as members of other such cultures.

While IR’s Eurocentric limits are usually acknowledged, what those limits mean for theorizing about the international is seldom clarified. In The Global Transformation, Buzan and Lawson offer a ‘composite approach’ that goes some way towards addressing IR’s Eurocentrism, challenging existing myths about the emergence and evolution of the international system and society. This paper seeks to push the contribution made by Buzan and Lawson in two further directions: first, by underscoring the need to adopt a deeper understanding of Eurocentrism; and second, by highlighting how this understanding helps us recognize what is missing from IR theorizing – conceptions of the international by ‘others’ who also constitute the international. I illustrate this point by focussing on a landmark text on Ottoman history, Ortaylı’s The Longest Century of the Empire.

The article analyzes the contested concept of global health through the lens of orders of worth. Drawing on pragmatist political and social theory, especially the work of Boltanski and Thévenot, I conceptualize orders of worth as moral narratives that connect visions of universal humankind to ideas about moral worth and deficiency. They thereby differ from the self/other narrative of political identity that is emphasized in International Relations scholarship. Orders of worth do not pitch a particularistic identity against foreign identities, but tie collective identity to a higher common good. They provide tools for moral evaluation and the justification of hierarchy. I use this heuristic to reconstruct four main conceptions of health in global politics: The order of survival, the order of fairness, the order of production, and the order of spirit. Each of them articulates a distinct political identity, as ‘we species’, ‘we liberals’, ‘we bodies’ and ‘we souls’, and implies different notions of virtuous and selfish conduct in the global community. These orders are derived from scholarly writings and the policies of global health institutions. Finally, I discuss the nature of compromises between the four orders regarding contested issues such as health emergencies or digital medicine.

In this article, we begin to extend ontological security to third-image theorizing. We argue that the autobiographical conceptions of international agents, along with other stories told about international politics, constitute ‘the international’ as a system, society, community, or inhabitable realm beyond and between first- and second-image relations. To develop this point, we focus on the relationship between narrative, anxiety, and time. We contend that ontological security issues resound in the third image once we shift from treating the international realm as social agents' external environment to treating it as a collective project in its own right. Doing so highlights the promise of ontological security studies for further differentiating international fear and anxiety, for enabling novel explanations of international phenomena, and for elaborating third-image identity formation as a wide-ranging timing effort to surmount a dynamic, processual environment full of interconnected coordination challenges.

How does the understanding of time and temporality in international relations (IR) shape the study of international politics? IR is centrally concerned with the study of issues such as armed conflict, but wars are events – a series of occurrences that only come into being through their relationship across time. The concept of time at work in the understanding of this event thus plays an inextricable role in the scholarship produced. IR shares an understanding of time that pervades (traditional) social science and is based on the Western notion of clock-time. This conception of time encourages a spatiotemporal model of the past that epistemologically privileges temporal understandings that value generalizable, time-invariant theory and discount temporal fluidity and context. These temporal commitments operate at a deep level, informing and shaping theory construction in important ways and de-emphasizing alternative approaches that may more accurately reflect the contingency of international events, discontinuities in political practice, and the radical shifts in international structures, which are often most in need of scholarly analysis. This article concludes that by treating temporality as a stand-alone issue, IR can better model and predict international political practices.

Current approaches for understanding and analyzing religion in international politics insufficiently incorporate the role of ethics in the practices of religious actors. Primordialist approaches essentialize religion, instrumental approaches consider it to be an epiphenomenon, and cosmopolitan approaches a priori downgrade alternative ethical constructs as insufficiently universalist. An approach to religion that begins with a constitutive understanding of religious belief and economic, social, and political practice as outlined in Weber’s Sociology of Religion, is more helpful. However, because Weber’s method insufficiently addresses ethical intentionality, the ‘neo-Weberian’ approach I advance here incorporates the concepts of ‘common good’ and ‘popular casuistry’ into socio-historical contextualization. This approach provides a way to understand and theorize how religious adherents connect religious guidelines to moral action that avoids the essentialization of religion which is often characteristic of other perspectives.