Recent trends in international law scholarship recycle objections to international law advanced by an earlier generation of political and legal realists. Such objections fail to understand the place of international law in the global order. To understand that place, we must distinguish the idea of the rule of law from other understandings of law. That idea is an inherently moral one. Theories of international law that ignore the moral element in law cannot distinguish law as a constraint on power from law as an instrument of power. A Kantian theory of international law can help to recover that moral element.

This article deploys a historical analysis of the relationship between law and imperialism to highlight questions about the character and role of international law in global politics. The involvement of two British international lawyers in practices of imperialism in Africa during the late nineteenth century is critically examined: the role of Travers Twiss (1809–1897) in the creation of the Congo Free State and John Westlake’s (1828–1913) support for the South African War. The analysis demonstrates the inescapably political character of international law and the dangers that follow from fusing a particular form of liberal moralism with notions of legal hierarchy. The historical cases raise ethico-political questions, the importance of which is only heightened by the character of contemporary world politics and the attention accorded to international law in recent years.

The official US attitude towards the prosecution of crimes against humanity and war crimes changed dramatically from the universality of Nuremberg to the exceptionalism of the Rome Treaty negotiation. This article argues that the history of US legal thinking indicates that both stances are the result of a conceptual battle between legal realism and legal idealism – strains of international legal thought that pose a battle of opposites which is never fully resolved into a coherent approach. Although Nuremberg would seem to illustrate the idealist extreme and the abstention from Rome the realist one, in fact both stances were the culmination of intense negotiation and argumentation between the two strains of thought.

This discussion focuses on the content of the responsibility to protect the norm. It specifically addresses the historical roots and development of the norm by describing its fundamental differences from the doctrine of humanitarian intervention. The legal heart of the responsibility to protect concept and questions of when and how the norm is engaged are also examined. Finally, the discussion explores the role that the UN institutions can play in interpreting and applying the norm, as well as the mechanisms of cooperation in protection available to the international community.

Why have states legalised international norms promoting domestic democracy in some regions of the world? This issue poses a difficult puzzle because standard assumptions about state preferences for sovereignty make the creation of strong, binding international rules on democracy unlikely. We identify four possible answers: the interests of powerful states, common government interests in domestic policy lock-in, the absence of fears that powerful states will use the rules to intervene unilaterally in domestic affairs, and the robustness of pre-existing norms. We explore our argument by applying it to the Organization of American States (OAS), a fairly unlikely organisation for the strong legalisation of international rules. Our findings suggest that legalisation of democracy is quite difficult to achieve. State interests in locking in democratic benefits and state power – even hegemonic power – are necessary but insufficient. An important set of new democracies attempted legalisation in the 1950s, yet failed. The United States, as strong a regional hegemon as ever, attempted further legalisation in 2005, yet failed. Motives and power must be accompanied by low fears of unilateral intervention and high levels of norm robustness in order to produce results.

According to many of its proponents, the proposition that democracies do not fight each other is ‘as close as anything we have to an empirical law’. However, there have been several incidents among solidified liberal democracies where force was threatened or even used. Since these inter-democratic militarised interstate disputes (MIDs) almost always took place in the context of fisheries disputes, we examine two of these conflicts in detail: the cod wars between Iceland and Britain between the 1950s and the 1970s and the turbot war between Canada and Spain. We ask why these fisheries conflicts became militarised in the first place but did not escalate further. In both cases it was actually the presumed impossibility of a more violent escalation which led the parties to use force in the first place. Moreover, the (limited) use of force was almost always accompanied by the efforts of the parties involved to achieve some formalisation of international rules in the context of expanding regimes. Having demonstrated how some of the more prominent causal mechanisms stipulated by democratic peace theorists fail to convincingly account of these cases, we refrain from concluding that any of this falsifies the democratic peace proposition. However, in conclusion we do call into question the premises of the falsificationist methodology underlying much of the democratic peace debate on both theoretical and metholdological grounds. Reframing the democratic peace proposition in terms of a large-scale process of descuritisation, we contend, allows us to understand better how democratic interstate interaction remains inherently conflictive and possibly still subject to process of resecuritisation.

This article develops a political economy account of global environmental governance to improve upon our understanding of the contemporary conduct of environmental politics and to clarify thinking about the potential for, and barriers to, effective environmental reform. By elaborating the key contours of a political economy account on the one hand and opening up to critical enquiry prevailing understandings of what is meant by ‘global’ ‘environmental’ and ‘governance’ on the other, such an approach is able to enhance our understanding of the practice of environmental governance by emphasising historical, material and political elements of its (re) constitution and evolution.

Are international standards of democratic governance applied to sub-state actors as well as to states? By examining the international response to self-determination claims, this article demonstrates that the international community does indeed hold sub-state groups accountable to such standards. Claimant groups that have internalised human rights and democratic norms are more likely to receive international support in the form of empowerment (promoting some form of self-governance). Through a comparison of the Kosovars’ quest for self-determination with the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians’ claim, the article suggests that ‘standards before status’ is neither unique to Kosovo nor a deviation from the pre-1999 international response to that claim.

Despite initial fanfare surrounding its launch in the White House Rose Garden, the War on Terrorist Finances (WOTF) has thus far languished as a sideshow, in the shadows of military campaigns against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. This neglect is unfortunate, for the WOTF reflects the other multilateral cooperative dimension of the US-led ‘war on terror’, quite contrary to conventional sweeping accusations of American unilateralism. Yet the existing academic literature has been confined mostly to niche specialist journals dedicated to technical, legalistic and financial regulatory aspects of the WOTF. Using the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) as a case study, this article seeks to steer discussions on the WOTF onto a broader theoretical IR perspective. Building upon emerging academic works that extend Foucauldian ideas of governmentality to the global level, we examine the interwoven overlapping national, regional and global regulatory practices emerging against terrorist financing, and the implications for notions of government, regulation and sovereignty.