For anti-cosmopolitan critics, cosmopolitanism is equated with the universalisation of a particular, liberal, account of justice and is therefore problematic for a number of reasons. The liberal principle ‘do no harm’ principle – and the cosmopolitan principle of humanitarianism, can be used to correct the depiction of cosmopolitanism as hostile to ‘pluralism’, to identify the universalism that is latent or undeveloped in much ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’, and to identify further means of reconciling these positions. A cosmopolitan harm principle argues that the absence of a universal conception of justice should not provide an obstacle to the recognition of an obligation to limit transboundary harms.

This article defends the case for a global extension of democracy by deploying a cosmo-federalist theory. As a response to the current state of international exclusion, the radical project of stretching the paradigm of democratic inclusion to the extreme limits encompassing the whole of mankind, is here presented. The article begins by taking position for a choice-based version of consequentialism that generates a principle of political justice centred on political participation. From this, a political project is developed that envisages a cosmopolitan system where all world citizens are included within a scheme of a direct representative participation under an overarching authority governing the process of democratising world affairs. Crucial in this is the establishment of an all-inclusive authority to legitimately delineate jurisdictional boundaries and a multilayered system of political interaction.

David Hume’s ideas on international relations are different than most international relations academics suppose. Close scrutiny of Hume’s views on the nation, international society, war, balance of power, empire and trade reveals the need to reassess his place within international political theory. Taking an English School perspective, the analysis also shows the possible benefits for IR theorists within this tradition to focus on Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, which will also strengthen the position of the pluralist perspective within international society.

This article argues that minority rights developed as an indemnity offered to defeated parties. As a grudging and begrudged calculus of compensation, considered inadequate by the vanquished and offensive by the victors, minority rights have been unable to compete in terms of legitimacy with either an increasingly robust international human rights regime or with the right of national self-determination. After reviewing some explanations for the weakness of the existing minority rights regime, this article traces the rationale of what may be described anachronistically as minority rights provisions in international treaties from the Peace of Westphalia to the Versailles settlement, concluding with a consideration of present-day implications of the argument elaborated here.

This essay addresses two questions. It first asks what happens to security practices when they take species life as their referent object. It then asks what happens to security practices which take species life as their referent object when the very understanding of species life undergoes transformation and change. In the process of addressing these two questions the essay provides an exegesis of Michel Foucault’s analytic of biopolitics as a dispositif de sécurité and contrasts this account of security with that given by traditional geopolitical security discourses. The essay also theorises beyond Foucault when it interrogates the impact in the twentieth century of the compression of morbidity on populations and the molecular revolution on what we now understand life to be. It concludes that ‘population’, which was the empirical referent of early biopolitics, is being superseded by ‘heterogenesis’. This serves as the empirical referent for the recombinant biopolitics of security in the molecular age.

This investigation explores the ways in which discourses of security functioned to allow military intervention in Iraq to become ‘thinkable’, and how these actions serve to reconfigure not only the identities of states – the US and Iraq – but also the characteristics of the international as a spatial and conceptual domain. In the weeks preceding the military intervention in Iraq, significant negotiations were conducted between the US government and the UN that were commented on extensively in press statements and other documents released by both parties. Drawing on UNSC Resolutions, public debates and academic analyses, in this article I analyse the relations between the US and the UN in the build-up to the Iraq war, making two related claims.

First, I argue that each discourse is organised around a particular logic of security. By ‘logics of security’, I mean the ways in which various concepts are organised within specific discourses of security. That is, each competing conceptualisation of security has a distinct primary focus, referent object and perspective on the arrangement of the international system. The ways in which these claims are made, the assumptions that inform them, and the policy prescriptions that issue from them, are what I refer to as ‘logics of security’. Second, I argue that the intervention in Iraq, a violence undertaken in the name of ‘security’, has functioned to reproduce the international as a spatial and conceptual domain according to the logic of a highly conventional narrative of sovereigneity, and, ultimately, of state identity.

This article applies E. H. Carr’s analysis of utopia and reality, and a Searlean-constructivist analysis of rules and norms, to the concept of ‘sovereignty’ in general, and Stephen Krasner’s argument in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy in particular. In doing this, the article charts a theoretical space that incorporates insights from classical realism, scientific realism, and philosophical (social) constructivism. To view ‘utopia’ and ‘reality’ as distinct yet equally important planes of International Relations (IR) inquiry, thereby treating ‘sovereignty’ as a single concept with descriptive and normative elements, highlights both the merits and the shortcomings of Krasner’s approach. Furthermore, this type of analysis suggests a fruitful way to continue a contemporary normative discussion about what sovereign entities ought to do.

Why do democratic states try to deceive their own citizens as to the foreign policies they practice, their motives, and their consequences? This question presupposes not only that states craft ‘stories’ to disguise activities abroad, but that they do so because they are constrained by an audience of non-elite actors. Theories derived from realpolitik, at best, make little allowance for such domestic ‘interference’. Yet there is evidence that in democracies the role of mass publics in driving, curbing, or modifying the conduct of foreign policy is a force, and explanatory factor, to reckon with.

In a 2004 forum, Alexander Wendt, Patrick Jackson, Colin Wight and Iver Neumann asked two questions about state personhood: Are states real, or merely as-if? Are they people? I question the terms of their debate, which relies upon a problematic distinction between ‘real’ and ‘as if’. Drawing largely upon Foucault, I challenge that distinction. This challenge has important theoretical and normative implications. Theoretically, a discourse of state personhood is completely unnecessary to understand world politics. Normatively, by tightly linking personhood and responsibility, some of the authors obscure important dimensions of responsibility to and respect for the non-human world.

Unfortunately, a number of small errors were published in this article. The correctedtext appears below.