Even before the global financial crisis restored the International Monetary Fund's (‘IMF’ or ‘Fund’) political fortunes, the ‘monetary managers’ regained ground in supposedly hostile parts of the world, most notably in sub-Saharan Africa. To shed light on the Fund's appeal to governments that do not need its leverage to put dithering cabinets, unruly coalition partners, or restive opposition forces in line, this article examines the interplay between intergovernmental organisations (IGO) and the ‘master institutions’ of the anarchical society. It builds on classic English School inquiries into the ‘words and deeds’ of agents that define, maintain, and transform international societies; tracks collective efforts to harness international credit and debt; and probes bureaucratic obstinacy and great power management in the Fund's conduct in three member states that differ in terms of their borrowing habits, funding options, and creditor relations. It concludes that, in contrast to its reputation as a technocratic manager of cooperation or an imperial agent of contestation, the IMF's appeal lies in its willingness to act as a diplomatic champion of coexistence.

There has been widespread and vociferous condemnation of Somali piracy and several states have used force against the pirates. This reflects the prevailing view of pirates as belligerents and aggressors who act wrongly. In this article, I challenge this view by defending the conditional moral permissibility of piracy. More specifically, I first argue that piracy can be morally permissible when certain conditions are met. These are what I call the principles of ‘justa piratica’, that is, the principles of just piracy. Second, I claim that these conditions are likely to apply to some Somali pirates. Third, as a corollary, I argue that the case of piracy shows that one of the shibboleths of Just War Theory – that a war cannot be just on both sides – is mistaken.

Political cosmopolitanism comes in many different shapes and sizes. Despite its intellectual diversity, cosmopolitanism typically agrees on one crucial matter: any prospective global democracy is best envisioned not in terms of a hierarchical world state, but instead as a multilayered system of global governance resting on an unprecedented dispersion of decision-making authority. In discarding traditional ideas of world government, cosmopolitans typically succumb to a series of mistakes. First, they presuppose unfairly dismissive accounts of world government. Second, they misleadingly contrast their own multilayered and (allegedly) institutionally novel vision to early modern (for example, Hobbesian) ideas of sovereignty, or to Max Weber's influential definition of the modern state. They thus obscure the fact that the modern state's diverse manifestations can only be partly grasped by ideal-types drawn from either Hobbes or Weber. Consequently, they depend on straw person accounts of the modern state. Third, envisioning their proposals as building on the familiar ideal of institutional checks and balances, they misconstrue the contribution that checks and balances can make to global-level democracy. Their hostility to statist ideas about global democracy notwithstanding, their proposals sometimes mimic core attributes of traditional statehood, and they tend inadvertently to ‘bring the state back in’ to global democracy.

This article examines the financial reforms that have been undertaken through two perspectives on risk: that of Beck's world risk society and an alternative Foucauldian approach. The former argues that, catastrophes such as the recent financial crisis will induce a political shift towards a cosmopolitan form of statehood. Yet, the lack of radical reform since the financial crisis would suggest otherwise. The article therefore argues that what we are witnessing is best understood in terms of reflexive governance in which the various rationalities of risk are reassessed and strengthened in order to avoid a similar occurrence in the future. Moreover, in response to the uncertainty that surrounds such rare events, more intense forms of surveillance have been adopted with the objective of pre-empting any future crisis. Yet, for various reasons, the reforms remain rather limited and the new rationality of pre-emption is unlikely to prevent further crises from occurring in the future.

Ideas of smart power and Global Health Diplomacy have developed considerable prominence over the past decade in, respectively, the foreign policy and public health communities. Although in some respects separate, both suggest the potential for using health assistance to generate political as well as health benefits. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan provide an opportunity to examine these assertions at the ‘sharp end’. We consider both the health and wider strategic benefits of health assistance in these conflicts, as well as some of the ethical challenges involved. We conclude however that we should adopt the precautionary principle because: there is doubt over the quality of health services provided in such circumstances; concern over the wider effects of politicising health aid; and little proof that the claimed strategic benefits materialise in practice.

This article introduces the concept of ‘utile forms’ and analyses the effects of these forms in imperial rule and contemporary counterinsurgency. Utile forms are media that enable bureaucracies to disseminate specialised knowledges to officials operating in the field. Examples include smart cards, field manuals, and handheld biometric devices. We argue that utile forms have significant social and political effects irrespective of the ‘truth value’ of the knowledge they contain. We analyse these effects in terms of world-ordering and world-making properties: utile forms both embody a particular worldview or ideology (world-ordering) and they facilitate official attempts to remake the world in accordance with this vision (world-making). We draw on examples of utile forms from British India and more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The article concludes by reflecting on the relations between truth, knowledge, and power in times of war and imperialism.

National diplomacy is challenged by the rise of non-state actors from transnational companies to non-governmental organisations. In trying to explain these challenges, scholars tend to either focus on a specific new actor or argue that states will remain the dominant diplomatic players. This article develops an alternative Bourdieu-inspired framework addressing symbolic power. It conceptualises diplomacy in terms of a social field with agents (field incumbents and newcomers alike) who co-construct and reproduce the field by struggling for dominant positions. The framework is applied to the EU's new diplomatic service (the European External Action Service, EEAS), which is one of the most important foreign policy inventions in Europe to date. I show that the EEAS does not challenge national diplomacy in a material sense – but at a symbolic level. The EEAS questions the state's meta-capital, that is, its monopoly of symbolic power and this explains the counter-strategies adopted by national foreign services. The struggles to define the ‘genuine’ diplomat reveal a rupture in the European diplomatic field, pointing towards a transformation of European statehood and the emergence of a hybrid form of diplomacy. A focus on symbolic power opens up new avenues for the study of transformations of authority in world politics.

This article seeks to add to the exploration and development of Imperial History's contribution to the discipline of International Relations (IR). Focusing on British perceptions of Afghanistan in the period preceding the first Anglo-Afghan war the article considers colonial knowledge as a source of identity construction, but in a manner that avoids deploying anachronistic concepts, in this case that of the Afghan ‘state’. This approach, which draws on the insights brought to IR by historical sociology, shows that engaging with Imperial History within IR can encourage a more reflexive attitude to core disciplinary categories. This not only reveals alternative approaches to the construction of specific political communities but it also allows for a more historicist mode in the use of history by IR as a discipline. Furthermore, by moving away from material based purely on diplomatic history, Afghanistan's imperial encounter can be recovered from the dominance of ‘Great Game’ narratives, offering an account that is more appreciative of the Afghanistan context.

At the outset of the twenty-first century, the world is facing a range of problems, including environmental, economic, and security risks, that increasingly challenge the logic of nation-state governance. While American and European models of International Relations and global governance, such as the Westphalian system of states and the Washington Consensus, have come under attack from poststructuralist thinkers, political philosophers from China and Taiwan have tried to reconceptualise the world of the twenty-first century from their own perspectives. This article examines current streams of Chinese International Relations theorising and confronts them with the case of territorial disputes in the East China Sea. The article analyses the arguments by Chinese realists, ‘worldists’, and procedural constructivists, showing how Chinese scholars creatively revive pre-modern Chinese political theory in attempts to provide new ways in which International Relations scholars might view the world, or: ‘all-under-heaven’. I argue that these contributions will progressively challenge conventional theories of International Relations, while at the same time contending that so-called non-Western theorising, if it is to contribute to IRT, will require additional rigorous empirical grounding, a critical perspective on its entanglement with nationalist political discourses in East Asian societies, and the willingness to incorporate existing theories.

The European Union's (EU) trade and development ‘partnership’ with the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries has long interested scholars of North-South relations. Historically, the theoretical literature on ACP-EU ties has been characterised by liberal institutionalist accounts of interdependence and critical assessments of Europe's neo-colonialism. In the timeframe of the Cotonou Agreement (2000–20), this division has expressed itself in relation to liberal assessments of Europe's pursuit of pro-poor market reforms in the Post-Washington Consensus and critical accounts of Europe's neoliberal ‘development’ agenda. This article argues that a moral political economy offers an innovative lens for the latter critical assessment of ACP-EU ties. With a constructivist focus on Europe's normative ‘development’ agenda, a moral economy standpoint may draw attention to the EU's role in (re)embedding poverty through recourse to legitimating ethical discourse. This is seen to enable the critical school to more closely consider ideational/discursive power in response to contemporary liberal institutionalist accounts. The article focuses on the European Investment Bank (EIB) and its activities in ACP countries – with particular focus on the Bank's Investment Facility (IF) – as an exemplar of the disjuncture between norms and outcomes.

‘Naming and shaming’ those accused of abuse and misconduct is one of the most common strategies of transnational activists. Yet both qualitative and quantitative studies show that the policy and behavioural effects of naming and shaming are often contradictory. Named and shamed actors do respond at least partially by adjusting their policies and behaviour to some extent, but the actions challenged publicly as human rights violations may not cease and can even become more widespread. This ambivalent outcome is usually explained by the uneven capacity of the target to reform or by its ‘strategic’ response to escape the consequences of naming and shaming. By contrast, I show that naming and shaming can be brought to a standstill when the frame used by transnational activists is ambiguous. I trace the role of framing ambiguity during the Human Rights Watch (HRW) ‘naming and shaming’ campaigns against the Israel Defence Force (IDF) in the course of the July–August 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war (Lebanon war), and the December 2008–January 2009 Israel-Hamas war (Gaza war). I argue that HRW's use of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as a frame led to an argumentative deadlock (frame implication contest). This legal frame, and the process of legal framing, did genuinely constrain the IDF, affecting its operations and behaviour. However, the ambiguity of the frame also provided the IDF with a range of material and ideational assets that gave it scope to claim that its actions were actually in conformity with applicable law, and to justify continuing to use force in densely populated areas.

Over the past decade, there have been increased attempts to understand the contributing factors to the relationship between healthy populations (that is, populations that have long life expectancy from birth), the prevention of conflict, and governance regimes that enable ‘healthy nations’ to survive and thrive. These studies have been largely informed by longitudinal studies on the positive relationship between regime type, provision of health care, and conflict prevention. This article examines what insights a comparison of postconflict countries in a regional setting may provide to challenge or indeed extend the findings advanced so far in the literature on the relationship between regime type and health insecurity. The Southeast Asian experience confirms the obvious – that the cessation of armed conflict is related to improved health outcomes. However, it challenges presumptions that democratisation plays a significant role in shaping this relationship.

An emerging task in world politics is to cope with human-induced global risks in domains such as environment, economy, security, and health. Current global governance institutions are largely incapable of tackling global risks and applying deductive policy models, which is why new modes of interaction may become essential. In this article I argue that through focused discourses, key peculiarities of global risks, namely complexity, scientific uncertainty and sociopolitical ambiguity, may be identified and understood. To this end, distinctively discursive and pragmatic learning processes can be developed. Different forms of deliberation and participation help develop processes that meet the challenges, problems, and conflicts that result from the key peculiarities of global risks. Hence, the article establishes a causal link between key peculiarities of global risks and postnational discourses. I discuss the varying forms of deliberation and participation (epistemic institutions, associational policy making, and transnational public deliberation and participation) of three discourses that produce institutional problem solving capacity in global risk governance. To this end, this article links theory and practice as well as normative conceptualisation and institutional feasibility.

The principle of non-combatant immunity protects non-combatants against intentional attacks in war. It is the most widely endorsed and deeply held moral constraint on the conduct of war. And yet it is difficult to justify. Recent developments in just war theory have undermined the canonical argument in its favour – Michael Walzer's, in Just and Unjust Wars. Some now deny that non-combatant immunity has principled foundations, arguing instead that it is entirely explained by a different principle: that of necessity. In war, as in ordinary life, harms to others can be justified only if they are necessary. Attacking non-combatants, the argument goes, is never necessary, so never justified. Although often repeated, this argument has never been explored in depth. In this article, I evaluate the necessity-based argument for non-combatant immunity, drawing together theoretical analysis and empirical research on anti-civilian tactics in interstate warfare, counterinsurgency, and terrorism.

Conventional understandings of security cooperation are rooted in the state-centric and materialist assumptions dominant in the Cold War and subscribe to the dictum of the Reagan years, ‘trust but verify’. In today's more complex setting, however, governance arrangements with the most potential to address constantly mutating security threats, such as the concern over nuclear terrorism, may not be those solely designed to ensure compliance, but rather those that are better equipped to identify and solve new problems. This article draws on a burgeoning literature on ‘new’ or ‘experimental’ governance and advances an analytical framework to consider the extent to which states and other actors might be turning toward an alternative set of mechanisms that rely more heavily on non-binding standards and recommendations, peer review, increased participation, and experimentation to generate new knowledge about the challenges they face, even in the ‘hard’ case of security cooperation. It then explores this potential reorientation in two separate, but complementary cases that have emerged as key tools in preventing illicit nuclear proliferation: the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF), which seeks to bolster states' counter-financing of terrorism systems, and the UNSC Resolution 1540 Committee, which guides efforts to fill the governance gaps in the nuclear non-proliferation regime. Although both cases on paper contain more traditional enforcement components, in practice they rely increasingly on experimental governance. The article concludes with an evaluation of the promise and limits of an experimentalist framework in understanding the evolution of governance arrangements in response to a more complex security environment and suggests potential avenues for future research.

Scholarship has traditionally portrayed transnational NGOs (TNGOs) as ‘principled’ actors animated by global norms to advance human rights, sustainable development, humanitarian relief, environmental stewardship, and conflict resolution. However, scholarship has also identified instances in which TNGOs appear to act ‘instrumentally’ by engaging in resource-maximising behaviour seemingly inconsistent with their principled nature. Moreover, prior scholarship addressing this puzzle has been constrained by the limitations of small-n case studies examining relatively narrow subsectors of the TNGO community. Addressing these limitations, we reexamine the logic of TNGO behaviour in light of findings from an interdisciplinary, mixed-method research initiative consisting of in-depth, face-to-face interviews with a diverse sample of 152 top organisational leaders from all major sectors of TNGO activity. Using an inductive approach to discover how TNGO leaders understand their own behaviour, we introduce the heuristic of ‘principled instrumentalism’ and specify our framework with a formal model.

This article explores L. T. Hobhouse's transformation of liberal internationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. It argues that Hobhouse's thought contributes to understanding dilemmas within the frame of liberal internationalism and the emergence of international functionalism. Using a philosophical approach, Hobhouse tackled international concerns throughout his life, alongside J. A. Hobson, Gilbert Murray, James Bryce, H. N. Brailsford, Norman Angell, and G. L. Dickinson. He restated a belief in human progress and association in ever-greater circles. But he noted, contra former hopes, that nationalism furthered democracy only briefly, and that liberal democracy remained incapable of bringing about effective international cooperation and moral universalism. In order to resolve this impasse, Hobhouse suggested substituting political with economic democracy on an international scale. The aim was to create an international functional organisation consisting of vocational and civic associations and states, which would allow individuals to entertain multiple, overlapping, and transnational loyalties. He thus anticipated proposals for global reform that became increasingly popular after the end of World War II. However, in spite of his concern with domestic social equality and his borrowing from international socialism, Hobhouse failed to qualify his internationalism with an analogous interest in equality.

Academics and policymakers often argue that global health policy greatly affects and influences national health systems because these policies transfer and implant ‘best practice’ norms and accountability techniques into local health systems. On the whole these arguments about the ‘diffusion of norms’ have merit since there is considerable evidence to suggest the existence of a positive correlation between global norms and national behaviour. Nevertheless, this article argues that traditional analytical frameworks to explain norm diffusion underplay the fact that norms are significantly ‘glocalised’ by national actors and further discount the role that national leadership plays in strengthening health systems. In response, this article presents a ten-year comparative paired study of the participatory governance mechanisms of the South African health system and its health strengthening measures. In doing so, the role of the national government in their relations with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (GFATM) will be examined and how key ‘partnership’ norms were amalgamated into health governance mechanisms. It will be argued that although global policy plays an important guiding role, health norms are never transcribed straightforwardly and a central element to successful health governance remains vested in the nation and the leadership role it exerts.