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 government’s targeting of homosexuality in May 2001, following years of ‘turning a blind eye’ to Cairo’s gay scene, is studied here in terms of the links between the sphere of interpersonal relations and notions of national security within international relations. The persecution of men for alleged same-sex relations not only filled newspaper columns and created a spectacle to divert people’s attention away from the government’s failings. More importantly, the event represented an opportunity for government officials, the media and other civil society activists – both within Egypt and abroad – to ‘perform’ a discourse of national security through which national sovereignty was (re)produced and political order was maintained. However, this national security threat was not only posed by the external threat of Western governments, international NGOs and other transnational actors concerned with respect for human rights within Egypt. More importantly, this threat was constructed as originating with those people failing to conform to the ‘norm’ of heterosexual relationships.

Kelsen and Schmitt, two leading legal theorists of the twentieth century, constitute a powerful pair that sheds light on the intertwining of politics and law in the phenomenon of sovereignty. Although their conceptions of sovereignty are far apart, they are interconnected as different ways of making sense of the same social phenomenon, or what I call the ‘practice of sovereignty’, whereby an ultimately unauthorised authority continuously authorises itself as the authority and the rest by and large accept this, acquiesce in this, or are made to do so. Having clarified their differences and interconnection, I explore some of the implications of the two writers’ differing conceptions of sovereignty and of the practice of sovereignty that underlie them.

The author argues that the international context provides an apparent environment for the individual experiencing of the state as a distinctive unitary and cohesive actor with its own intentionality and personhood, social relations and coercive resources, manifested not only by actions and force, but also through symbols, figure of speeches and other allusive forms capable of affecting human identity. As a direct personal observation, individual experiencing of states contains an inner, phenomenological plan, though it is not a solipsistic process and depends on people’s shared meanings. Conventional perception of states as anthropomorphic actors regards relations between states as social or interpersonal relations, thus causal attribution and social expectations affect individual experience of states. Being primarily a common-sense phenomenon, individual experiencing of states has a wide-ranging effect on both ‘conventional’ and ‘conceptual’ understanding of international relations. In perception and explanation of international politics, real political developments are often overshadowed by observable, experiential, common-sense causations.

The US, China and Japan are often portrayed as three giant states dominating the region of East Asia in perpetual potential conflict. This article proposes that such assessments should be tempered in the light of changing regional and global dynamics and, in particular, in view of the growing centrality of the region of East Asia itself for foreign policy agendas. Adopting a framework underpinned by the concept of strategic regionalism, this article focuses upon the developing collective identification of region, and assesses the possibility for joint leadership in East Asia.

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.

The prevailing scholarly orthodoxy regarding recent diplomatic initiatives in the Asia-Pacific assumes that East Asia is evolving into a distinctive regional community. The orthodoxy attributes this development to the growing influence of the diplomatic practices espoused by the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN) and its related institutions. However, a paradox remains, namely: despite the failure of ASEAN’s distinctive practice to fulfil its rhetorical promise in Southeast Asia both immediately prior to and in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, it is nevertheless considered sufficient to validate the projection of ASEAN defined norms onto a wider Pacific canvas. This study analyses how an academic preference for constructivism has misinterpreted the growth in official rhetoric extolling East Asian regionalism since 1997 in a way that has helped produce and reinforce this paradox. By contrast, we contend that government declarations of a developing East Asian identity actually serve to obscure the continuation of traditional interstate relations and do not herald any wider, let alone inexorable, movement towards an integrated regional community.