‘Why did they do that?’ is one of the most common questions in International Relations. However, we cannot access other people’s reasons for action the same way that we perceive our own; we cannot introspect the reasons of other actors. This paper provides a unifying framework that delineates different types of knowledge claims regarding reason attribution. There are three possible methodological responses: (1) assume a possible reason and explain behavior in terms of that reason; (2) avoid the direct attribution of reason to individuals and locate explanatory leverage at an analytical level beyond the individual actor reason; and (3) use empirical evidence to adjudicate between possible reasons. Excessive skepticism of evidence of reasons lessens our understanding of the causes of action. When using empirical evidence, contrary to existing arguments, the paper shows that private settings do not systematically favor the true revelation of reasons. The paper also proposes a general principle, consilience, that allows evaluation of empirical claims of reason attribution that subsumes several existing methodological considerations, organizes them, and gives a consistent means of choosing between alternative reason attributions.

Contemporary International Relations (IR) typically treats anarchy as a fundamental, defining, and analytically central feature of international relations. Furthermore, it is usually held that IR since its inception has been structured around a discourse of anarchy. In fact, however, until the 1980s anarchy was rarely employed as a central analytical concept, as I show by examining 145 books published between 1895 and 1978. The conceptual and analytic centrality of anarchy is not imposed on us by international reality. Rather, it is a recent and contingent construction. Given the shortcomings of standard uses of ‘anarchy’ – especially the facts that there is no clear, generally agreed upon definition, that ‘the effects of anarchy’ are not effects of anarchy (alone), and that anarchy is not the structural ordering principle of international systems – I argue for returning to earlier practice and putting anarchy back in the background of IR.

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.

In this article I seek to expand our understanding of the output legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). At the conceptual level, I refute the widespread view that output legitimacy is just a synonym for organizational effectiveness or efficiency. I argue instead that output legitimacy has an important democratic dimension. The touchstone of ‘democratic output legitimacy’ is the extent to which systems of governance produce results that cater to the public interest. Accordingly, the democratic output legitimacy of IOs can be understood in terms of their ability to safeguard the global public interest. This ability hinges upon their capacity to keep powerful factions in check, protect human rights, and safeguard a high epistemic quality of decisions. Attaining these qualities may require shielding IOs to some extent from the input dimension of the international political process. I do not, however, unconditionally praise de-politicization of IOs. I engage with the problem of technocratic paternalism, which is imminent when decision-making based on assumed citizen interests escapes confrontation with articulated citizen interests. The challenge is to devise global governance arrangements that enable an encompassing debate over the substance of the global public interest when needed, while keeping pressure from powerful factions at bay.

If torture is both ethically odious and usually ineffective as an interrogation method, why have states, especially democratic ones, practiced it? This paper develops a theoretical response to this puzzle by extending constructivist understandings of normative effects. I argue that the norm prohibiting torture has the perverse effect of making torture more attractive to some political leaders in two ways: first, the norm attracts those who are looking for an outside-the-box solution to challenging intelligence-gathering scenarios; second, the norm offers political leaders a narrative of heroism in which they sacrifice their morality for the greater good. I illustrate these explanations with the example of torture in the United States war on terror. My argument suggests that norms can shape the interests even of those who do not follow their scripts, implying that the scope of normative impact may be much wider than previously believed.

Can concerns for one’s reputation cause non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to alter their behavior to the detriment of achieving their policy goals? To answer this question, we explore the relationship between NGOs and their donors. Our theoretical model reveals that reputation can be a key piece of information in the decision to fund an NGO’s activities. Reputation can become so important to the NGO’s survival that it interferes with the long-term policy goals of the organization. As such, reputations can become a double-edged sword, simultaneously providing the information donors seek while constraining NGOs from realizing policy goals. We apply this logic to the problem of NGO accountability, which has received increasing attention in recent years, and demonstrate that the tools used by donors to improve accountability can trigger unintended consequences. We illustrate this strategic dynamic with two types of NGO activity: water improvement and international crisis mediation.

This paper presents a framework within which to understand the legitimacy of the global order called ‘cosmopolitan sovereign equality’. It is Kant inspired and consists of three formal and three political duties. The formal duties are those of structural coherence, innate right and publicity, and the political duties those of legitimate enforcement within states, non-intervention between states, and free communication between entities within different states. These duties are constructed from a reading of Kant’s Doctrine of Right and are defended in current International political theory debates on human rights, the role of the state and international law. The framework enables conceptualization of legitimate international relations between a world state and a system of autarkic states, and places a premium on states as legitimators of force, while working from the premises of moral cosmopolitanism.

International norm polarization is a rare but recurring process within international norm dynamics. Polarization describes the most combative response to attempted norm change: ‘a candidate norm is accepted by some states but resisted by others, leading to a period of international disputation between two groups in which socializing pressures pull states toward compliance with rival norms’. We identify several cases of polarization and explain this phenomenon by elaborating the constructivist model of the norm life cycle to processes of international resistance to norm change as well as to norm acceptance. We also draw on social identity theory (SIT) to examine group-psychological responses where disputed norms become closely linked to state identity. We illustrate these dynamics with reference to conflict over the norm that recognizes sexual orientation and gender identity as subjects of international human rights protection. Over the past decade this candidate norm has become increasingly contentious internationally, and bitter debates over resolutions concerning extra-judicial killings and discrimination have divided the United Nations General Assembly and Human Rights Council. The article makes a primary contribution to analysis of international norm change and also contributes to an emerging literature concerning sexuality and international relations.

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.

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.

This paper analyses Jürgen Habermas’s claim that democracy and human rights are co-original and its implications for his international theory. A central argument in his theory, the co-originality thesis suggests that human rights and democracy are not only both fundamental and mutually supportive, but also ‘equi-primordial’ and internally related. Reconstructing Habermas’s argument as it has developed over two decades, I argue that his account of constitutional democracy has difficulties accounting for the enmeshment of constitutional and international human rights, while his three-tiered model of global governance, in the absence of democratic legitimation, amounts to a downgrade of the currently institutionalized practice of international human rights. Instead, I suggest that shifting the focus from ideal global institutions to actual processes of domestic contestation, through which groups appropriate and apply international legal norms in order to claim their rights, provides a plausible account of the practice of international human rights consistent with the co-originality thesis.

The end of the Cold War led to intense debates about how change happens in international politics. In this article, we argue that practice theory has great potential for illuminating this question. Drawing on Vincent Pouliot’s empirical analysis of NATO-Russia relations after the end of the Cold War, we elaborate how change happens in and through practice. We show that post-Cold War security practices are inherently unstable, because there is a fundamental uncertainty about whether the Cold War is really over or whether the Cold War logic of bipolar confrontation still applies. Uncertainty about the meaning of the past destabilizes present practices and thus makes sudden and drastic change possible. To date, many contributions to the literature on international practices have, however, failed to grasp the inherent instability of practice. We argue that this failure is due to a particular conception of change that can be found in the works of Pierre Bourdieu. Through a close reading of Pouliot’s Bourdieusian analysis of post-Cold War politics, we demonstrate the limitations of such a perspective, notably that it is unable to grasp how change originates in practice.

It is the orthodox view in the cosmopolitan and normative international relations literature that Immanuel Kant is a staunch critic of European colonialism. This paper offers a far more critical stance towards Kant’s position with respect to minority nations and stateless Indigenous peoples through an analysis that draws on the criticisms developed by his contemporary and former student, Johann Gottfried Herder. The paper proceeds in three parts. In the first section, I present the evidence in favour of seeing both Kant and Herder as strident opponents of colonialism. In the second section, I then show the problems that arise in Kant’s position when his views on the state and property rights are taken into consideration. Kant’s coupling of the nation and state in contrast to Herder’s insistence that they are separate entities is highlighted as a crucial distinguishing point in their positions. In the third and final section, I indicate how Herder provides a far deeper critique of colonialism than Kant, also due to his recognition of the problematic nature of ideological pronouncements of progress.

The relationship between the political and socially constructed nature of territory (or, territories’ ‘constitutive properties’) and international politics has recently attracted substantial attention from scholars hailing from political science as well as political geography and critical international relations. The conversations across these scholarly traditions, however, leave a lot to be desired. The question then becomes, how can we, if at all, facilitate further interaction and cross-fertilization across seemingly disparate literatures? This study proposes a strategy of ‘pragmatic interaction’, which entails three steps: (i) establishing a simple conceptual framework that would be both recognizable and agreeable to scholars hailing from different perspectives; (ii) emphasizing a number of research topics that are of relevance to these scholars; and (iii) examining some of the recent entries from the relative literatures in the light of the identified research topics. The analysis suggests that there is much potential for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization over two broad research areas – ‘territorial heterogeneity’ of the past and present global territorial orders and the relationship between territory and power – also driving attention to potential research venues such as territorial interpretations of the anarchy/hierarchy problematique and the interaction between identity and territoriality.

Pogge has repeatedly compared the causes of global poverty with historical crimes against humanity. This claim, however, has been treated as mere rhetoric. This article argues that there are good reasons to take it seriously. It does this by comparing Pogge’s thesis on the causes of global poverty with the baseline definition of crimes against humanity found in international law, especially the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It argues that the causes of global poverty are comparable with the crimes of slavery and apartheid. This has important consequences for cosmopolitan thought, as it makes the need for practical solutions to global poverty more urgent and raises questions about the global poor’s right to resist the international system by violent means.

Building on John Ruggie’s pioneering study of multilateralism, this paper presents an analogous study of multistakeholder governance, or multistakeholderism. Its central argument is that multistakeholderism is, as yet, a much less well-defined institutional form. Cases exhibit significant variation both in the combinations of actor classes entitled to participate and the nature of authority relations among those actors. The first section discusses multistakeholderism as an institutional form, and proposes a taxonomy of its types. This section also briefly addresses the implications of the analysis for International Relations theory. The paper then conducts a comparative analysis of multistakeholderism, applying the taxonomy to five illustrative cases. It demonstrates the degree of inter-case variation, and the range of issue-areas across which the institutional form is employed and invoked by actors. Three cases are drawn from the increasingly contentious area of Internet governance; the paper thus makes a secondary contribution to this growing literature. The paper’s most striking finding in this regard is that Internet governance often fails to live up to its multistakeholder rhetoric. Other cases include governance of securities regulation and the governance of corporate social responsibility. The paper concludes by examining the implications of our argument, and identifying areas for further research.

International relations scholarship largely accepts that multilateralism lies at the heart of the liberal international order and is instantiated in formal, intergovernmental organizations. This paper revisits the conventional wisdom regarding the multilateral character of international organization (IO) governance by drawing attention to the funding methods used to finance contemporary IOs. I argue that different funding rules constitute different modes of governance. While mandatory funding rules are easily reconciled with traditional conceptions of multilateralism, voluntary rules are not. In particular, restricted voluntary funding rules devolve authority over funding decisions to individual actors, undercutting the collective decision making that is central to multilateral governance. I demonstrate the relevance of the argument in the case of the United Nations, which has transformed from an institution reliant primarily on mandatory contributions, to one disproportionately reliant on restricted, voluntary funds. The counterintuitive result is an increasingly bilateral United Nations. The paper contributes to our understanding of the relationship between multilateralism and IO governance, and has implications for literature related to institutional design, delegation, and development aid. In addition, it raises empirical and normative questions regarding reliance on voluntary funding.

The efficiency-oriented part of the literature on informal governance points to institutional costs as a reason for governments to prefer to cooperate with each other through commitments that are not binding. Left unexplained is what I call the dilemma of informal governance: how informal governance copes with the problem of cheating, to which formal governance has traditionally provided the solution. I show that like-mindedness, the current solution to the dilemma, is convincing but underspecified. Working from a model of governance encompassing the three time-honored dimensions of obligation, precision, and delegation, I analytically explore two other solutions, one that fails, information transmission, another that works, outside option, which I borrow from the power-oriented part of the literature on informal governance. A key finding is that informal governance, despite being neither self-enforceable nor informative, is sustainable for mild Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) types in the presence of outside options. I illustrate the model findings by tracing an historical correlation between power polarization and formalism in the design of security regimes.