The rise of the radical ‘New Right’ (NR) across much of the global political landscape is one of the most striking political developments of recent years. This article seeks to foster international theory’s critical engagement with the NR by providing an overview of its thinking about world politics and the challenges it presents. We argue that in many ways international theory is in fact uniquely positioned to provide such an engagement, and that it is essential that international theory comes to terms more fully with its political vision and theoretical claims if it is to engage effectively with this increasingly potent and often deeply troubling intellectual and political movement.

Climate change is increasingly characterized as a security issue. Yet we see nothing approaching consensus about the nature of the climate change–security relationship. Indeed existing depictions in policy statements and academic debate illustrate radically different conceptions of the nature of the threat posed, to whom and what constitute appropriate policy responses. These different climate security discourses encourage practices as varied as national adaptation and globally oriented mitigation action. Given the increasing prominence of climate security representations and the different implications of these discourses, it is important to consider whether we can identify progressive discourses of climate security: approaches to this relationship underpinned by defensible ethical assumptions and encouraging effective responses to climate change. Here I make a case for an ecological security discourse. Such a discourse orients towards ecosystem resilience and the rights and needs of the most vulnerable across space (populations of developing worlds), time (future generations), and species (other living beings). This paper points to the limits of existing accounts of climate security before outlining the contours of an ‘ecological security discourse’ regarding climate change. It concludes by reflecting on the challenges and opportunities for such discourse in genuinely informing how political communities approach the climate change–security relationship.

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.

Why have many regional organizations adopted common markets and customs unions? This article proposes a cognitive diffusion mechanism – termed frame diffusion – to explain convergent institutional choices across structurally diverse settings. Using Strang and Meyer’s (1993) notion of ‘theorization’ to combine foundational work on framing with the literature on diffusion, I argue that processes of theorization transform the experience of successful institutional innovators into abstract cognitive schemas, which link a particular understanding of a cooperation problem to specific institutional solutions. As policymakers in other contexts encounter similar cooperation problems, they adopt framed institutional solutions, which results in institutional convergence at the macro level. I further suggest that this process of frame diffusion is conditional on ideational affinities in social purpose between the innovating organization and other regional organizations. Where other organizations pursue a distinct social purpose, policymakers rely on alternative frames and thereby cement institutional variation. After developing this argument theoretically, I illustrate it in an exploratory comparison of institutional choice in three most different regional organizations: Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Common Market of the South, and the Southern African Development Community. The argument points to significant ‘blind spots’ and conceptual complementarity between prominent mechanisms of diffusion.

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.

Many scholars now argue for deemphasizing the importance of international anarchy in favor of focusing on hierarchy – patterns of super- and subordination – in world politics. We argue that only one kind of vertical stratification, governance hierarchy, actually challenges the states-under-anarchy framework. But the existence of such hierarchies overturns a number of standard ways of studying world politics. In order to theorize, and identify, variation in governance structures in world politics, we advocate a relational approach that focuses on three dimensions of hierarchy: the heterogeneity of contracting, the degree of autonomy enjoyed by central authorities, and the balance of investiture between segments and the center. This generates eight ideal-typical forms: national-states and empires, as well as symmetric and asymmetric variants of federations, confederations, and conciliar systems. We argue that political formations – governance assemblages – with elements of these ideal types are likely ubiquitous at multiple scales of world politics, including within, across, and among sovereign states. Our framework suggests that world politics is marked by a heterarchy of nested and overlapping political structures. We discuss broad implications for international-relations theory and comparative politics, and illustrate our approach through an analysis of contemporary China and the evolution of the British ‘Empire’ in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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.

Assumptions regarding space and spatiality exist in all major theoretical traditions in international relations, from realism to constructivism, but the mutual constitution of space and social interaction in the study of world politics requires further conceptual development in its own right. This article suggests a preliminary research agenda for the study of space and social relations in IR by lending insight from Georg Simmel’s classical sociology of space. Simmel’s approach offers scholars of contemporary world politics an innovative conceptualization of the relations between physical and symbolic space (‘the physical-symbolic axis’) and between space and time (‘the spatio-temporal axis’); and a set of practical analytical tools to apply in IR research by defining the foundational qualities of space (exclusivity, divisibility, containment, positioning, and mobility) and suggesting a typology of distinct sociospatial formations: organized space, governed space, fixed space, and empty space. The article discusses the potential of Simmel’s nuanced relational approach to contribute to the contemporary study of world politics, and demonstrates its utility in two particular areas of research: the study of unbundled sovereignty and mobility in late modernity; and the study of empty spaces in IR.

This article argues that opportunities for unilateral influence within international bureaucracies create a delegation problem akin to that in coalition governments. Parties in coalitions that suspect each another of diverting from the coalition bargain avail themselves of mechanisms, such as junior ministers and parliamentary scrutiny, to monitor their coalition partners’ actions within the executive. Similarly, states that suspect cooperating partners of abusing their unilateral influence within the bureaucracy employ mechanisms, reminiscent of those in coalition governments, in order to ‘keep tabs’ on one another. I illustrate the plausibility of this claim using the case of the European Commission. However, this delegation problem of interstate control can be expected to apply more widely. The article has implications for the study of international organization, international delegation and informal governance.

The ‘systems turn’ amongst deliberative democrats advocates incremental institutional reform guided by deliberative democratic ideals. Whilst ideal global democracy is beyond our reach, incremental reforms can improve the quality and inclusiveness of global deliberation. However, incremental reform in non-ideal circumstances involves trade-offs between competing normative goals. The paper highlights a neglected purpose of democratic deliberation: the integration of highly fragmented technocratic deliberation on isolated issues with more holistic social perspectives emerging from the public sphere. As global governance has shifted beyond the nation state, jurisdictions have become functionally fragmented encouraging issue-specific technical framings of problems (trade policy is institutionally separated from labour, the environment and development). Fragmentation across the domestic executive is mitigated by the legislature’s role in bringing isolated technical perspectives together and subjecting them to wider public scrutiny. No analogous institution exists internationally. Highlighting functional fragmentation is important because dominant concerns with cosmopolitanism (unsettling state-centric issue framing) and republicanism (the need for institutional variety to combat the potential domination of a world state) in global governance lead to an active enthusiasm for overlapping functional jurisdictions in much of the literature, obscuring important trade-offs with the need for social integration.

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.

Deliberation has not only epistemic and moral value, it also has transformative value. Even if deliberation faces the problem of indeterminacy, it is assumed to have explanatory power. This article spells out why this is so and suggests a way to establish the causing effect of deliberation. It outlines a reason-based (RB) model of political decision-making applicable also to international affairs. By specifying a theory of argumentation on collective decision-making, we get to the nuts and bolts of deliberative decision-making, which, when supported by institutional powers, ensures a justified and well-grounded decision. The model contains a set of rules of inference and offers ‘mechanismic’ accounts of social events. It allows for explanations, but not predictions. The RB model conceives of decision-making as consisting of three sequences: claims-making, justification, and learning, each containing a set of explanatory mechanisms: values referring to conceptions of the common good, mandatory norms concerning the right thing to do, and evidence to the fact that non-compliance is wrong. The explanatory potential of this scheme is exemplified with reference to agreement making in the European Union. Some actors changed opinion voluntarily with regard to empowering the European parliament.

This article focusses on the concept of decision and its significance for identity politics. Constructivist scholarship established long ago that identity and foreign policy are mutually constitutive and that difference and othering are key for the production of identities. As a consequence, constructivist literature on EU foreign policy has focussed on the role of specific others and explored how interaction with them shapes the EU’s identity. Our article turns the attention back inside and looks at the hegemonic struggles around the purpose and meaning of the European project. By analyzing the EU’s reaction to the Libyan events in 2011, we demonstrate how a major international crisis dislocates the identities involved and unleashes a struggle for hegemony between conflicting discursive articulations. Eventually this conflict is resolved through a political decision, which reconfigures the entire ‘global’ outlook on Europe and its role in the world. By defining decision along poststructuralist lines, as distinct from the conventional literature on decision-making, we demonstrate that the use of this conceptual prism helps deepen our understanding of how othering and bordering work to produce and reshape identities. By doing that, we seek to contribute to a better understanding of how identities change in time.