This article takes as its starting point the failure of the so-called normativewing of the English School to theorise the foundational determinants of valuefrom which international society derives its normative character. In otherwords, they have not adequately thought through ‘the law behind thelaw’; that is, the underlying basis of obligation in internationallife. Thus, English School theorists are able to describe and to explain variousnorms but they cannot make sense of the reasons why any of these norms should beregarded as obligatory. Failure in this regard is attributable in large part tothe way in which pluralist and solidarist conceptions of international life aretypically understood as representing conflicting moral claims. This articleseeks to move beyond these seemingly incommensurable claims, and the debate towhich they give their names, by putting forward an account of obligation thatreconciles the unity of human community and the freedom of international societyin a single, intellectually coherent argument. The article concludes by arguingthat a normative version of English School theory formulated in this way opensspace for thinking through much of what still confounds the English School,including the normative character of political economy, the existence of arational order of values, and the ever elusive meaning of world society.

Two rival accounts have come to dominate discussion of the origins and character of the contemporary international system. One, closely associated with the English School and the traditional account, places its origins with the appearance, and acceptance, of the centralised authority of the modern state. We might call this ‘the Westphalia version’. In this account, the modern state system is often represented in terms of what it is not. It is not a feudal regnum with a multiplicity of functionally distinct authorities. It is not a theocratic imperium where one power aimed at ‘the control and protection of Christendom’. It is a society of sovereigns, of de jure equals, each of whom accorded the others’ right to exist, and whose common ideological quantum is low. The rival is located within democratic transition theory. It postulates the modern state system as an extension of the liberal democratic state. The liberal state is not sovereign in the Westphalian sense: liberal authority is diffuse. Moreover, the liberal state produces its own, distinctive, international impulses that distance it in significant ways from the Westphalian pattern. Both see the state system as ‘produced’ by the state, as an immanent effect of stateness, but the account of the state’s trajectory differs radically.

This essay examines the complex relationship between international law and the balance of power which Hedley Bull claims is paradoxical. Bull argues that the balance of power is an ‘essential condition’ of international law and that the actions required to preserve the balance ‘often involve’ violation of international law. It is shown that what seems to be a paradox is not a paradox but essentially a normative problem related to the difficulties in regulating power within international society, and that the perceived paradox does more to obscure than to clarify the fundamental normative problem to be dealt with.

The sub-field of International Communication within International Relations is insufficiently cognisant of the social foundations of communication. Through a selective interpretation of three prominent interwar thinkers’ works, it will be argued that International Communication is a largely social, even ideological, field. The advantage of reading interwar international theory lies in their eclectic appreciation of the power of public opinion and leadership without undue fixation with realist and idealist labels. By reading Edward Carr, Norman Angell and Walter Lippmann, one can tease out the following three themes for organising the study of International Communication: human nature assumptions; opinion as power; and leadership in foreign policy in terms of public education.

This article uses the trope of ‘hysterical motherhood’ to elucidate one of the unique forms that women’s protest action took at the height of the American anti-nuclear movement. It advances an understanding of ‘hysterical motherhood’ as both an embodied tactic and a performative act, arguing that its tactical effectiveness lay in its ability to redirect the societal gaze from the ‘hystericized’ bodies of women to the bodies and practices of militarised men. In so doing, it (re)structured the field of the possible: constraining and enabling performative enactments of masculinity and the nuclear state.

In this article I argue that the demands of irregular migrants to belong to political communities constitute key contemporary sites of ‘the political’. I also argue that geographies associated with neoliberal globalisation (transnational production circuits, special economic zones and global cities) are implicated in irregular migration flows and in new conceptions of political belonging. In relation to these claims, I reflect upon recent mobilisations in the US context, in which hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants and their supporters asserted the right to belong. I suggest that similar claims to belong are likely to proliferate and that neoliberal geographies may provide some clues as to where and how these contemporary frontiers of the political might proceed. I conclude by suggesting that a multidimensional approach to political belonging provides a sound conceptual starting point for the analytical and normative challenges raised by both the claims of non-status migrants and the sovereign practices of contemporary states.

This article offers both a critique and reconstruction of cosmopolitan democracy. It argues that cosmopolitan democracy promotes an excessively individualist account of political life and a functionalist approach to political community that are likely to undermine the kinds of national communities and citizens that are most likely to mobilise against global injustices. It argues that the alleviation of global injustices depends on the rescuing and reframing, rather than weakening, of national identities so that they take on a more cosmopolitan character. Cosmopolitan democracy is dependent upon cosmopolitan nationalism, based on a commitment to common liberty and justice at home and abroad.

The concept of solidarity has been used in IR theory with social theoretic connotations, which have remained, by and large, murky and unclear. Below, I argue that the concept of solidarity must be understood together with its normative implications, that these implications matter per se, and that this has yet to be realised in contexts where the concept is used in IR.

Cosmopolitan thought and practice bring into sharp focus the question of solidarity, its articulations, and implications in relation to how the political is understood in the sphere of the international. Where liberal cosmopolitanism aims its remit at a transcendent sphere of humanity, seeking to place humanity as the constitutive feature of a redesigned political community, a cosmopolitanism that is distinctly political in its orientation takes the postcolonial critique seriously, unravels the complicities of liberal cosmopolitan articulations of solidarity in global structures of domination, and locates its self-definition in an imminent critique of modernity. The political cosmopolitanism defined in the article presents a conception of solidarity without community, a conception that at once both recognises modernity’s legacy in the perpetuation of inequality and enables a conception of the universal that is not complicit in such relations.

The article is concerned with the constitutive tension between solidarity and difference in feminist practice. It is argued that while a ‘politics of difference’ has dogged efforts to build feminist solidarity across the boundaries of class, nation, ethnicity and religion, this does not refute the continuing importance of the concept of solidarity in understanding the dynamic interaction of agents in transnational political space. Drawing upon a number of illustrations from contemporary feminist practice, it is further argued that differences among women do not preclude solidarity. On the contrary, respect for difference is a necessary condition for forging solidarity. Moreover, conflict need not be divisive and can be creative in this process.