This article examines the neo-conservative critique of global liberal governance. It provides a theoretically oriented assessment of the neo-conservative case against international law and human rights regimes, and draws out the main political and ethical implications for American democracy and American foreign policy. It is argued that the neo-conservative critique of global governance rests upon an interpretation of the normative order that weaves together democracy, individual rights and national autonomy through a volatile identity politics which is fundamentally at odds with both the pluralist character of ‘Westphalian diplomacy’ and the universal order of rights envisaged by advocates of global governance. More than just the policy autonomy of the US, what is really at stakes in those debates for neo-conservatives is the whole structure of cultural and socio-economic interests that is tied to the substantive interpretation of democracy upon which their domestic commitments to neo-liberal capitalism and liberal freedoms are predicated.

Since its popular appearance in 2001, the responsibility to protect has gained wide attention. Yet, the meaning of responsibility in the R2P report has remained unexamined. The first task of this article is to conceptualise responsibility as it seems to arise from the R2P report. It is argued that the responsibility in the report is collective in nature, and analogous to obligations erga omnes and collective responsibility to extinguish fires before the institutionalisation of fire departments. The second task is to provide a model of collective responsibility with criteria that allow dividing the burden of fulfilling the common responsibility among the members of the collective. The model bridges the conceptual level with the level of practice.

This article considers the United Nations (UN) as a creator and facilitator of innovative ideas in world politics. It thereby breathes new life into the world organisation's overlooked characteristics: the quality and diversity of its intellectual leadership, and its value-based framework for dealing with the global challenges of our times. The nature of UN ideas are examined – the good, the bad, and the ugly – while recognising that most have multiple origins and various carriers, and it continues by assessing impact. Three types of UN ideas – positive, normative, and instrumental – are discussed. Positive ideas are those resting on hard evidence, open to challenge and verifiable. Normative ideas are beliefs about what the world should look like. Instrumental (which some might label ‘causal’) ideas are often about what strategy will have what result or what tactic will achieve a desirable outcome, usually less verifiable and with a normative veneer. The article then examines nine UN ideas that changed the world, before illustrating the significance of this by examining two counterfactuals: a world without the world organisation and its ideas as well as with a more creative institution.

This article develops a domestic institutional explanation for the growing institutional diversity in global economic governance. Transgovernmental networks linking domestic regulatory agencies have emerged in a number of areas alongside more conventional cooperation based on international organisations and regimes. At the same time, the number and scope of private self-regulatory schemes at the international level has markedly increased. While rich literatures have developed around each of these three governance cluster, less attention has been paid to the critical questions why, where, and when we are most likely to see one type of governance as opposed to another. The article argues that broad observable patterns of global governance result from specific configurations of domestic institutional variables in leading markets against the backdrop of the dynamics of market globalisation. Empirical evidence from case studies of global governance in the fields of securities, Internet domain names, intellectual property, and hedge funds broadly support the argument.

In this article I discuss some of the connections between gender, gender mainstreaming and feminist theory. As a global initiative, gender mainstreaming is now well established; but the role of feminism and feminists in achieving this success is questionable. Some, including Harvard Law Professor Janet Halley claim that feminists, particularly in the realm of governance feminism, have been extremely successful. Yet despite this success Halley invites us to ‘take a break from feminism’. I consider this political and intellectual invitation in this article in order to shed some light on the relationship between gender mainstreaming and feminism but also to probe what Robyn Wiegman refers to as a ‘critical incomprehension’ around feminism. My discussion includes a brief analysis of the imagery used in documentation relating to the United Kingdom's Gender Equality Duty Legislation; the latter a contemporary example of a legislative attempt to properly mainstream gender. In conclusion I return to the Halley's invitation to ‘take a break from feminism’ and introduce, by way of contrast, Angela McRobbie's recent discussion of post-feminism ultimately suggesting that we might see Halley's call, as well as the popularity (and ‘failures’) of gender mainstreaming as examples of post-feminist practice.Image 1.

Pop-art images advertising the ‘Gender Agenda’ on the Internet {http://www.gender-agenda.co.uk/} which is part of the UK's legislation on gender equality produced by the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission (formerly the Equal Opportunities Commission).

If you look around the United States, Canada, the European Union, the human rights establishment, even the World Bank, you see plenty of places where feminism, far from operating underground, is running things.1

Any force as powerful as feminism must find itself occasionally looking down at its own bloody hands.2

International institutions are prominent in the ‘global War on Terror’. But there remains variation in the institutionalisation of counter-terrorism, across policy domains and over time. I argue that institutions pursue tasks of counter-terrorism when they are backed by power. Institutions function as ‘swords’ as strong states seek to influence others. Weak states, too, are sensitive to the distributional consequences of cooperation and use institutions as ‘shields’ to resist the powerful. These claims are reflected in patterns of cooperation within the UN, and in terrorist financing and maritime security. Looking forward, multilateral counter-terrorism may remain contingent upon state power.

In the absence of comparisons with prior episodes of transformative change in the history of the state system, contemporary debates on the long-term significance of the 9/11 terror attacks and the ensuing war on terror are in danger of polarising around opposing caricatures of epochal change and obstinate durability. The tendency to organise transnationally, mobilise along religious lines, and employ terroristic violence for the purposes of achieving far-reaching religious and political transformation of target societies is not unique to Al-Qaeda, but can be seen also in the activities of the militant confessional networks that flourished in Reformation Europe. By comparing the global struggle against jihadist terrorism with early modern European rulers' struggles against transnational confessional militants, I demonstrate that existing accounts of jihadist terrorism's transformative potential have been seriously mis-specified and require substantial revision.

This article focuses on gender mainstreaming policies and advocacy on gender equality in the post-tsunami context in Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam. Through the analysis, this article illustrates how gender mainstreaming policy documents and gender advocacy of the provincial and central government, when drawing from sex/gender division and binary of genders, reproduce heteronormative boundaries. By focusing on details, I argue that the image of the heteronormative nuclear family participates in normalising other identity categories; such as urban and middle-class. I also provide examples of how simultaneous to the production of dominant norms, gender advocacy challenges heteronormativity and norms governing heterosexuality and actively question the dominant gender norms. Drawing from postcolonial feminist and recent queer critiques, I argue that advocacy that solely focuses on gender and/or sexuality reduces human bodies and their desires to simplistic stick figures. Thus, it remains blind to other forms of violence, such as global economic and political frameworks that define ‘building back better’ primarily as recovery and rehabilitation of economy, assets and labour force.

This article takes up Louise Arbour's claim that the doctrine of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ is grounded in existing obligations of international law, specifically those pertaining to the prevention and punishment of genocide. In doing so, it argues that the aspirations of the R2P project cannot be sustained by the idea of ‘responsibility’ alone. The article proceeds in arguing that the coherence of R2P depends on an unacknowledged and unarticulated theory of obligation that connects notions of culpability, blame, and accountability with the kind of preventive, punitive, and restorative action that Arbour and others advocate. Two theories of obligation are then offered, one natural the other conventional, which make this connection explicit. But the ensuing clarity comes at a cost: the naturalist account escapes the ‘real’ world to redeem the intrinsic dignity of all men and women, while the conventionalist account remains firmly tethered to the ‘real’ world in redeeming whatever dignity can be had by way of an agreement. The article concludes by arguing that the advocate of the responsibility to protect can have one or the other, but not both.

Gender mainstreaming is portrayed as the next step in the global gender equality landscape and has been widely adopted internationally in a variety of governments and political organisations. However, the radical potential of gender mainstreaming to transform organisations has not been fulfilled. In this article, I explore three paradoxes which are inherent in the intent, implementation and institutionalisation of gender mainstreaming. I argue that we cannot fully understand these global paradoxes without a better understanding of local experiences which underpin them in the everyday working lives of those people involved in advocating gender mainstreaming. Using results from an institutional ethnography of the implementation of the Gender Equality Duty by gender mainstreaming advocates in the Scottish Executive, I show that bureaucratic practices, fossilised norms and the continued reliance on soft measures to promote mainstreaming are reflections at the local level of barriers to the advancement of global gender mainstreaming. By taking seriously the local practices and knowledge of those who do gender mainstreaming, we can reflect on the inherent tensions within gender mainstreaming that prohibit its ability to truly transform the gender landscape at both the local and global level.

The non-use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 has emerged as a major puzzle in international politics. Traditional International Relations scholarship views this largely as a function of the deterrent relationship that emerged between the nuclear powers, especially during the Cold War era. The fact that nuclear weapons have not been used against non-nuclear states, despite temptations to use them, remains a challenge to the deterrence-only explanation. More normatively oriented scholars have argued that a taboo has emerged against the non-use of nuclear weapons. Nina Tannenwald's book, The Nuclear Taboo is the most comprehensive study on this subject which relies on constructivist logic of inter-subjective taboo-like prohibition in accounting for the puzzle. While I see much merit in Tannenwald's empirical case studies, it is far-fetched to call the non-use largely a function of a taboo-like prohibition. For, taboos by their very nature forbid discussions of their breaking, whereas nuclear states have national military strategies that call for nuclear use under certain circumstances. They have also in many crises situations considered the use of nuclear weapons. I have argued in my book, The Tradition of Non-use of Nuclear Weapons (Stanford University Press, 2009), that a more modest tradition can be given partial credit for the absence of nuclear attacks on non-nuclear states. The tradition emerged because of a realisation of the horrendous effects of nuclear attack (a material fact) which generated reputation costs for a potential user. These reputation costs in turn generated self-deterrence which has helped to create a tradition which is partially restraining nuclear states from using their weapons for anything other than existential deterrence. Unlike Tannenwald, I contend that the tradition is not a strict taboo and hence it can be altered if material and political circumstances compel nuclear states to do so. The recent policy changes that have taken place in nuclear powers such as the US, Russia, UK, and France do not augur well for the tradition as the conditions for atomic use have been expanded to include prevention, pre-emption and other non-proliferation objectives involving rogue states and terrorist groups.

Internal displacement is increasingly perceived as an international problem. This has led to suggestions that international norms have begun to govern state behaviour towards their own displaced populations. I argue that this change occurred through the innovative use of soft law, in particular the guiding principles on internal displacement, by a consortia of norm entrepreneurs including NGOs and a UN Office, that of the Representative of the Secretary-General for Internally Displaced Persons. As soft law, these principles lack the usual markers which suggest an emerging norm. Instead, the article argues that alternative methods – including the international recognition of the principles and their adoption in domestic legislation – has triggered a change in state behaviour. This is demonstrated by examining two cases of forcible return of IDPs – the closure of the Kibeho Camp in Rwanda in 1995, before the principles were created, and the closure of the Znamenskoye camp in Ingushetia, Russia in 2002, after their creation. Both situations are similar in that the norm appears to have been rejected – forced repatriation did occur. In the Russian case, however, government statements, along with widespread international condemnation of the closures, suggest rhetorical instantiation of a norm of non forcible return for IDPs.

The evolving international counter-terrorism regime obliges and permits countries to make changes in their domestic and foreign policies. At the same time, policy-makers in national capitals respond creatively to the global regime. By examining India's response to the evolving international regime on terrorism, I will demonstrate the mechanism through which the regime is influencing Indian policy: by setting up an identity that the country can aspire to. Further, by highlighting the leveraging of regime norms by the Indian state to further its own projects, I will show that states are not restricted to either passively receiving and complying with international norms on the one hand, or rejecting them on the other.

Louise Arbour presents a pleasant picture of international society in her article on ‘Responsibility to protect’ (R2P) as a ‘duty of care’ – one where states not only have a moral responsibility but also a legal responsibility to intervene in some of the worst situations on the planet. However, this argument is misleading and based on faulty legal assumptions which pose significant problems for Arbour's case. This response will argue that upon examination, Arbour's legal case is not very strong or persuasive. Even more importantly, even if we accepted Arbour's legal arguments, it would not make much of a difference to how states respond to international crises. Arbour seems to misunderstand that the problems facing R2P have always been those of ‘will’ and not law – and this must be understood as a political rather than legal problem.