Property has a ubiquitous presence in international practice, but its implications for theorizing world order are not adequately explored. I remedy this by showing how property constitutes the core concepts of anarchy and sovereignty in international relations (IR) as overlapping spaces of right-based governance. I develop my account of a property-based world order in relation to the work of John Locke. Locke is generally overlooked as a core IR thinker, with the unfortunate consequence that anarchy and sovereignty are conceptualized as polar opposites under the enduring shadow of Hobbes. Even prominent critics of Hobbesian anarchy rely on Hobbesian notions of sovereignty, resulting in minimalist conceptions of international society and international ethics. To counter these Hobbesian legacies, I turn to Locke's limited, plural, and fluid accounts of anarchy and sovereignty and show how they are grounded in a normative notion of property that mutually constitutes them. This provides an alternative to the Hobbesian absolutist conceptions of anarchy and sovereignty that many IR theorists still operate with. The result is a distinctly normative vision for IR that condemns the twin evils of conquest and tyranny.

This article tackles the issue of offshore tax sheltering from the perspective of normative political realism. Tax sheltering is a pressing contemporary policy challenge, with hundreds of billions in private assets protected in offshore trusts and shell companies. Indeed, tax sheltering produces a variety of empirical dilemmas that render it a distinctive challenge for global governance. Therefore, it is crucial for normative political theorists to confront this problem. A realist approach offers three distinct advantages, elaborated in the three subsequent sections of the article. First, it relaxes the theoretical burden by starting from the real practice of tax evasion rather than from an abstract theory of equality or justice. Second, this approach recognizes that sheltering is a political harm: a threat to the very maintenance of order, not just a problem of inequality or injustice. If politicians fail at such polity maintenance, realism's ethic of responsibility provides clear political reasons why they should be held accountable. Third, realism's focus on power and its acceptance of coercion open up new strategies for addressing the problem that would not be allowed by theories with a stronger emphasis on consensus.

This article uses the concept of international practices to explore the distinctions between human rights and humanitarianism in the contemporary period and, in turn, uses this exploration to comment on the concept of international practices. First section proposes to advance the theoretical and empirical utility of the concept of practices by parsing it into the ‘problem’ that sets the story in motion, what counts as competent action, background knowledge, and meanings. Second section applies this framework to the relationship between human rights and humanitarianism. Beginning in the 1990s, they began responding to many of the same material realities, which unleashed two, interrelated, processes, but had different ways of understanding competent action, background knowledge, and meanings. They began to revise their practices not only in response to new challenges but also to how the other evolved, generating new distinctions. These points of distinction were structured by different kinds of suffering and informed their contrasting narratives of precarity in the case of humanitarianism, and progress in human rights. The conclusion considers how this discussion of human rights and humanitarianism redirects contemporary research on international practices.

This article argues that paternalism is an organizing principle of the international humanitarian order. The international community is increasingly organized to preserve, protect, and promote human life, reflecting an ethics of care and impulse to intervene for the greater good. This mixture of care and control is captured by the concept of paternalism, which Gerald Dworkin famously defined as ‘the interference with a person’s liberty of action justified by reasons referring exclusively to the welfare, good, happiness, needs, interests or values of the person being coerced’. Paternalism is either present or dormant in many (if not nearly all) interventions that are designed for the betterment of people and the good of humanity. This article has four goals: 1) to reassess and examine the analytical power of this much maligned and misunderstood concept; 2) to consider the dimensions upon which paternalism varies in order to develop the concept’s value for empirical analysis; 3) to speculate how and why paternalism’s form has moved from ‘strong’ to ‘weak’ over the last hundred years; and, 4) to consider whether, why, and when paternalism might be legitimate.

The legality and legitimacy of the Iraq war in 2003 has been widely discussed before, during and after the hostilities. Though hardly anyone questions the lack of a legal basis for the military operation in Iraq, it has been argued that other grounds could have justified the undertaking of military action. The political support of the Dutch government for the American-led invasion in Iraq needs to be understood along these lines. This contribution focuses on the legal and intellectual trends that can be observed preceding the support given to the 2003 war. These trends could be summarised as a move from legality towards legitimacy, from positive law to morality, broadly understood. The support of the Dutch government for the war can be interpreted as a reflection of a certain discontent with existing international law and of changing attitudes vis-à-vis the international order. The following questions will be raised in this contribution: What was really relevant in this context: the international legal order of the Charter of the United Nations or some other international order dominated by certain values other than the ones embedded in the Charter? Moreover, what kind of a war was the invasion of Iraq: a legal war on the basis of international law broadly understood or an ethical war in accordance with the criteria of the just war tradition? These questions will be dealt with from the Dutch constitutional perspective and from the perspective of ethics.

This article defends a sentimentalist cosmopolitan approach to international ethics against the rationalist cosmopolitan claim that emotions ought to be subjugated by their master, reason, and in processes of ethical deliberation. It argues that emotions play an indispensable role in making moral judgements and help to motivate ethical actions. Drawing on elements of 18th century moral sentiment theory and recent advances in neuroscience and psychology, the article demonstrates that reason and emotion are intimately linked forms of reflective thought, that emotion is central to reason and, far from disrupting processes of ethical deliberation, may actually enhance our ability to make moral judgements. Focusing on the problem of global poverty, the article shows that a sentimentalist cosmopolitan ethic provides a holistic approach to moral dilemmas in world politics that is capable of identifying injustices, prescribing how we ought to respond to them, and motivating ethical action in response to the injustices we observe.