Causal inquiry has been a controversial matter in International Relations scholarship in recent years. While many new ‘non-positivist’ stances on causal analysis have been developed in recent years, many post-positivist and critical theorists in the discipline have remained unconvinced of the virtues of causal inquiry. Crucially, the political consequences of causal analysis seem to be a sticking point for many such critics. Yet, the politics of causal analysis are, we argue, complex and relatively poorly engaged with at present. Indeed, the arguments against causal analysis, which rely on warnings concerning the political nature of causal analysis, are inadequate and incomplete. We contend here that causal analysis is, indeed, political but that this does not mean that we should not engage in causal inquiry. On the contrary, we argue that this is what makes causal inquiry interesting and important in social science. A more nuanced and reflective approach to dealings with the politics of causal analysis is needed, and it is such a response that we provoke critics of causal analysis to consider.

The literature on de facto states challenges the conventional identification of states by legal recognition, proposing to identify states based on their effectiveness instead. Yet, as I argue in this paper, rather than turning the tables on recognition, the de facto state challenge ultimately reveals all state identification in International Relations and international law to be essentially indeterminate. This lacuna, I suggest, is not an accidental omission, but an expression of the foundational paradox of modern political order that is rooted in the intertwined ontology of the state system and the individual states constituting it, with each presupposing the other. As a result, the opposition between empirical facts, political decisions, and legal norms invoked in attempts to identify states cannot but remain irresolvable. This should not be regarded as a problem to be overcome, however, but as a source of social order. Although states cannot be substantively identified, any effort to do so in practice naturalizes the state as the very form through which we articulate and shape political claims, conflicts, and settlements. In performatively enacting states precisely at the contested margins, state identification thus both invokes and (re-)produces the statist international as the central imaginary of modern political order.

Is territory a trap? Does the concept of territory trap us into false assumptions of internally homogeneous, externally bounded political communities that exercise uniform sovereignty across their domain? Against the background of debates about territory and the territorial state in international relations, this symposium brings together five contributions in political theory that advance a nuanced and systemic understanding of what territory is. Taken together, they indicate that there is much to the territorial paradigm beyond the modern, sovereign, and territorial state model. There are diverse conceptions of territory, which may be relevant across different legal and political orders. The various conceptual analyses of territory in this symposium suggest that the sovereign state model is only one way in which a sovereign political authority can be territorial. These essays provide the conceptual tools to formulate (and subsequently test) the hypothesis that the transformations in statehood may not be best described in terms of the rise and decline of territorial sovereignty, but as moves from one model of territorially bounded political authority to another. In political theory, it is only in recent years that this foundational concept has received sustained attention from political theorists. This symposium aims to take forward this welcome theoretical development.

This contribution argues that the concept of protean power opens a space to think about the limits of control and knowledge about catastrophic possibilities such as nuclear war. To do so, it offers the first distinctive definition of nuclear luck, which has long been acknowledged by policy and military leaders but remains unaccounted for in scholarship. It further shows that the nuclear realm is defined by two key unknowables. However, it argues that protean power perpetuates a survivability bias which has characterized scholarship so far, before suggesting ways to overcome that bias and modify scholarly ethos to acknowledge such catastrophic possibilities.

The importance of concerns about status in world politics has rarely been as evident as it is today. Yet our understanding of how status dynamics influence politics and foreign policy remains limited. Dominant approaches draw on insights from social psychology about individual attitudes and behavior, but scale these up to build accounts of states as unitary or anthropomorphic actors. This results in serious theoretical problems and analytical blind spots. In this article, I offer a new framework – still rooted in social psychological insights about intergroup status dynamics – that addresses these problems. I recast the fundamental question from one about how states react to status dissatisfaction to one about how individuals – with different psychological profiles, different interests, and different positions within the national community – react to anxiety about the status of the state with they identify. I develop four broad logics that inform responses to national status dissatisfaction: identification change, emulation, transformation, and rejection. These logics subsume familiar arguments about how states seek status, but they also accommodate additional variation and explanatory possibilities. They thus constitute a more flexible framework that is better suited than existing alternatives to understand the full variety of ways in which status dynamics may influence world politics.

This article adds to the emergent body of constitutional-theoretical research on populist government. It argues that constitutional analysis has specific importance in explaining the hostility to global legal norms that characterizes many populist or neo-nationalist polities. However, it argues that more classical perspectives in constitutional theory have not provided adequate explanations for this phenomenon. This is because constitutionalism itself misunderstands the sociological foundations of constitutional democracy and it promotes normative models of democracy, based in theories of popular sovereignty and constituent power, which create a legitimational space in which populism can flourish. In contrast, this article sets out a historical-sociological account of national democracy, explaining how democracy has been formed through processes of global norm construction. As a result, the basic subjects imputed to democracy by both constitutionalism and populism only became real on global normative foundations. In advancing these claims, this article presents a global-sociological critique of populism, explaining that populism evolves where the realities of democratic formation enter conflict with the norms of constitutional theory. In so doing, it offers a sociological theory of constitutional democracy that might help to avert democratic self-subversion.

States have rights to unilaterally determine their own immigration policies under international law and few international institutions regulate states’ decision-making about immigration. As a result, states have extensive discretion over immigration policy. In this paper, I argue that states should join international migration institutions that would constrain their discretion over immigration. Immigration restrictions are morally risky. When states restrict immigration, they risk unjustly harming foreigners and restricting their freedom. Furthermore, biases and epistemic defects pervasively influence states’ decision-making about immigration policy. States should transfer some of their decision-making authority over immigration to more reliable institutions in order to mitigate the risks that they will unjustly restrict immigration. International institutions that include the interests of potential immigrants would be more reliable with respect to immigration policy than unilateral state decision-making. Thus, states should subject their immigration policies to international control.

This essay critically assesses the Tianxia Theories, a line of indigenous International Relations (IR) theorizing in China organized around the concept of Tianxia (‘all-under-heaven’). My goal is to tackle a seemingly prevalent issue among non-Western IR theories, that is, the indigenous scholars' subservience to state cues and often uncritical attitude toward their own ethnocentrism. To that end, I strategically target a recent contribution to this scholarship that explicitly seeks to articulate a non-ethnocentric theory: Xu Jilin's New Tianxia-ism (xin tianxia zhuyi). I first examine the main thesis of New Tianxia-ism to reveal its internal tensions. Then I examine what enables the formulation of New Tianxia-ism from a discursive perspective. I argue that a particular subject position, to which I refer as the ‘Sinocentric Subject’, plays an instrumental role in enabling contemporary Chinese intellectuals to think along the logics of New Tianxia-ism. The result, however, undermines the agenda to articulate an alternative theory that rectifies the ethnocentrism in IR. In conclusion, I suggest that Chinese indigenous scholarship ought to engage more critically the ideological inclination and the politics of knowledge within its own epistemic community.

This article develops a socio-legal approach to theorizing the construction of peremptory norms in international relations. It argues that due to its focus on formalism and abstract notions of rights, traditional legal treatments have failed to acknowledge the socially constructed nature of higher order norms. To address this shortcoming, the article transfers the concept of jus cogens into the realm of International Relations. Drawing on insights from constructivism and English School theory, it situates law in the context of society and conceptualizes jus cogens as part of international society’s constitutional structure. Proceeding from the assumption that the content and identity of jus cogens depends on the normative character of international society, the article then assesses two possible ‘normative logics’ through which the peremptory status of a norm may be generated. It rejects a solidarist logic, which sees universal norms as the manifestation of cosmopolitan ideas about inalienable rights. Instead, it argues for a pluralist approach to ethics and order that depicts jus cogens as key to the development of international society towards a social site marked by diversity and respect for difference.

This paper restates the central point of Protean Power, pushes the analysis forward by engaging each of the commentators, and concludes by underlining the importance of uncertainty and potentialities and mapping some of the areas that need further attention.

There is a widespread feeling that globalization represents a major system change that has or should have brought world society to the forefront of international relations theory. Nonetheless, world society remains an amorphous and undertheorized concept, and its potential role in shaping the structure of the international society of states has scarcely been raised. We build on Buzan's (2018, 2) master concept of ‘integrated’ world society (‘a label to describe the merger of world and interstate society’) to locate the integration of world society in the globalization of social networks. Following the advice of Buzan (2001) and Williams (2014), we use conceptual frameworks from international political economy to systematically explore the structure of integrated world society along six dimensions derived from Mann (1986) and Strange (1988): military/security, political, economic/production, credit, knowledge, and ideological. Our empirical survey suggests that, on each of these dimensions, power has centralized as it has globalized, generating steep global hierarchies in world society that are similar to those that characterize national societies. The centrality of the United States in the networks of world society makes it in effect the ‘central state’ of a new kind of international society that is endogenized within integrated world society.

This paper argues that the current calls for a practice turn in International Relations (IR) while positive in many respects, are problematic and potentially limiting because they are premised on a confused understanding of the role of philosophy and realist philosophy in particular and a restricted view of the role of sociological investigation. This arises from the problematic tendency to lapse into advocacy of an anti-realist philosophical and sociological imagination. We suggest that the problems that practice theorists point to should lead not to knee-jerk anti-realism but rather can motivate a reinvigorated conversation with realism. This entails revisiting the role of philosophy, realism, and sociology in the study of practices. We argue that far from being antithetical to practice theory, a reconsideration of realist philosophy helps make sense of the role of practice and provides those advocating practice theory with better tools to deal with the challenges which motivated the development of these theoretical stances. Reconsidering realism entails, however, a reconsideration of a wider social ontology within which practice takes place, and openness to the role of philosophical and theoretical abstractions in teasing out the role of practice.

Should constructivist research engage empirical debates with other approaches, especially non-constructivists? Recent calls for ‘eclectic’ and ‘pluralistic’ scholarship seem to encourage engagement, including across epistemological divides many constructivists have long perceived with non-constructivists. Yet this literature downplays competition between approaches, instead emphasizing that they answer different parts of questions. In seeming to evoke a division of labor, the eclectic turn actually strengthens a sense that approaches occupy distinct spaces. This article offers a sympathetic corrective to the eclectic turn, and to common accounts of older epistemological divides. Before eclectic combinations, empirical work necessarily begins from contrasting accounts on the same terrain. Only a naïve positivist imagines that meaningful scholarship tests solitary hypotheses against reality. Today’s scholars vary in how far they move toward more socially based epistemologies, with constructivists moving furthest – and the further we move, the more the shape and significance of our accounts depends on contrasts to others. Thus, all scholars should seek out competing alternatives, especially constructivists. After making this point, the article unpacks how it has been obscured by four arguments that limit competition between constructivist claims and alternatives, concerning constitutiveness, understanding, holistic methodology, and anti-foundationalism. Each view contains errors that can be corrected without undercutting the epistemological commitments of its proponents. This clears the way for introducing more competition into constructivism and into the eclectic turn more generally. All scholars, including all constructivists, working within their own epistemologies, will do their best work through contrasts to alternatives across our old divides.

While the discipline of International Relations (IR) has a long tradition of celebrating ‘great thinkers’ and appropriating their ideas for contemporary theories, it has rarely accounted for how these authors came to be seen as ‘great’ in the first place. This is at least partly a corollary of the discipline’s long-standing aversion to methodological reflection in its engagement with intellectual history, and it echoes IR’s infamous tendency to misportray these great thinkers’ ideas more broadly. Drawing on existing attempts to import the methodological insights of historians of political thought into IR, this article puts forward a unified approach to the study of great thinkers in IR that combines the tenets of so-called ‘Cambridge School’ contextualism with those of what broadly falls under the label of reception theory. I make the case for the possibility of developing a coherent methodology through the combination of what is often seen as separate strands of intellectual history, and for the value of such an approach in IR. In doing so, the article ultimately offers a more rigorous methodology for engaging with the thought of great thinkers in IR, for analyzing the way a specific author’s ideas come to have an impact in practice, and for assessing the extent to which these ideas are distorted in the process.

The past few decades have witnessed a renewed interest in the work of Carl Schmitt. Scholars from various disciplines have claimed that Schmitt’s critique of universalism, together with his analysis of irregular warfare, provides useful lenses to make sense of the post 9/11 world. In this article, I will critically assess whether Schmitt’s work is indeed useful for understanding the post 9/11 world. To that end, I will concentrate on one of the core arguments put forward by Schmitt: that the laws of armed conflict are unable to regulate irregular warfare, including acts of terrorism. In order to determine the validity of Schmitt’s arguments, I will focus on one of the instruments used in contemporary counter-terrorism policies: the deliberate killing of specific individuals who are regarded as a security threat (‘targeted killing’). Based on an analysis of US and Israeli practice, the article argues that using Schmitt’s work as an analytical tool yields mixed results. While his analysis of irregular warfare remains relevant for contemporary conflicts, his denouncement of universalism blinds us to the transformational potential of international law.

Constructivism has inherited a hermeneutic tension from the sociology of knowledge tradition regarding a strong ontological proposition that all social beings interpret their reality and a qualified epistemological proposition that some social beings are better able to interpret the reality of others. This article focuses on the politics of knowledge production that arise from this tension, namely that a privileged group, the ‘scholastic caste’, possesses the power to de-value the explanations of ‘lay’ groups’ experiences by deeming them to be insufficiently ‘scientific’. The article explores these politics by addressing the meaning of the abolition of and emancipation from Atlantic slavery, a case study popularly used in constructivist literature. Noting the absence of engagement by constructivists with the ‘lay’ interpretations of enslaved Africans and their descendants, the article explores a hermeneutical position developed by the Jamaican sociologist and novelist, Erna Brodber, which directly addresses these tensions.

I argue that widely accepted just war theory precepts morally allow and require the assassination of politically powerful individuals under some circumstances instead of waging a just war or implementing any other policy such as non-targeted economic sanctions that would very likely severely harm more innocents. While all just war theory precepts permit just assassinations under certain circumstances, proportionality, necessity, and last resort make just assassinations required whenever they would cause severe harm to the fewest innocents. There are several implications of my argument. First, there are fewer circumstances when wars and other policies that foreseeably but unintentionally harm innocents are just than is commonly thought. Second, the realm of morally permissible violent and non-violent action for powerful individuals is more limited than many presume and politicians are more often morally liable to actions that would mitigate or end objectively unjust serious threats for which they are culpable, although this does not always include lethal force.

Reification – the act of treating something socially created as if it were real – is often described as a problem in the study of international norms. Critical and post-colonial scholars argue that reification silences alternative worldviews, whereas practice-oriented scholars argue it diminishes agency and practical innovation. In his article ‘From Norms to Normative Configurations,’ Simon Pratt proposes a solution to the problem of reification, reconceiving norms as a configuration of interrelated social practices. In this piece, I argue that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Reification is an essential part of how norms are constructed, contested, and surmounted in international politics. I revisit the foundational figures in norms research to highlight problems in Pratt's analysis, and prove the value of reification, both analytically and methodologically. Then, I use these insights to amend the concept of normative configuration, redefining it as a complex network of discrete norms tied together through common social practices. Along the way, I offer directions for future research on the relationship between norms and practices.

States have recently agreed that there is a responsibility to protect populations threatened by genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The international community, however, often lacks the resources and willingness to carry out a key part of this responsibility, that is, to undertake humanitarian intervention effectively when required. One potential solution to this problem is to outsource intervention to private military and security companies. In this article, I consider this option. In particular, I present a largely consequentialist argument which asserts that, when two conditions are met, using these companies to bolster the capacity to undertake humanitarian intervention might be morally justifiable overall.