This Introduction begins by outlining what is meant by international relations. It then tells the story of how and why the academic study of international relations emerged in the early twentieth century before considering the need to ‘globalise’ the study of international relations – to make it an academic discipline more open to non-Western perspectives. It sketches the changing agenda of international relations, a shift that some scholars describe as a transition from international relations to world politics or from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘new’ agenda. Although there is little doubt that, as political reality has changed, new theoretical tools have become necessary to grasp it, we should not assume that the myriad changes in our world have rendered the ‘traditional’ agenda obsolete. As we shall see, the ‘new’ agenda supplements, but does not supplant, the ‘traditional’ agenda. It is now more important than ever to consider the relationships between ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ agendas, and to globalise IR.

The book of Amos has often been seen as a key text promoting social justice, through its condemnation of social injustice. Literary study of the text reveals five sections: chapters 1–2, 3–4, 5–6, 7:1–9:6, 9:7–15. Redaction-critical study indicates that the text developed from an earliest eighth-century text into the final form produced in the post-exilic period. Chapters 1–2 contain a series of Oracles Against the Nations, while 7:1–9:4 contains a series of visions. Between them are prophetic words of judgment. The final 9:7–15 contains words of promised future blessing. Key themes include YHWH’s announcing of judgment of the people because of the exploitation of the poor and weak by the rich and powerful, and calls to seek YHWH and live. There are Closer Look sections (Zion; Oracles Against the Nations; The Nazirites; Justice in the Gate; Justice and Righteousness; Woe Oracles; The Prophets, the Cult, and Sacrifice; The Prophets as Intercessors; Seers and Prophets). There are also Bridging the Horizons sections (Atrocities and War Crimes, and on Martin Luther King Jr.)

Many responses to the resurgence of “majority nationalism” assume that that there is nothing normatively significant to the claims of national majorities. They accordingly seek to blunt the force those claims – or simply redescribe them in ways that do not account for majority nationalists’ central commitments or concerns. The very arguments used to ground minority rights in Kymlicka’s works appear to equally justify at least some majority cultural rights. Where a group possesses majority status by reasonably benign means and yet faces threats to its culture through the operation of, for example, globalization, Kymlickean arguments for minority rights grounded in cultural vulnerability equally justify majority cultural rights. In “Nationhood, Multiculturalism, and the Ethics of Membership,” Kymlicka presents justice-based reasons to think that majority rights claims should nonetheless be neutralized. Yet his arguments assume that majority and minority rights claims will only be made within the boundaries of a nation-state and that rights recognition in those circumstances will be a “zero sum” game. This assumption too is unwarranted in a globalized world. The issue of majority rights claims is at least more complicated than what Kymlicka allows.

Chapter 5 explores how Australia’s participation in the Children’s Overseas Reception Board scheme reinforced imperial ties and was seen as vital to Australia’s contribution to the war effort. Britain’s children were seen as Australia’s children, and the Australian government at the time enthusiastically embraced the scheme. But the scheme did this by more than simply accepting children – it was overtly racialised. Even before children departed, they were meticulously screened to establish who was eligible for the scheme. The unanimous support for the scheme was, I argue, premised on the narrative of emotions evoked by child evacuation and was framed by the constructed emotional bonds between the family of nations that connected countries to the values and aspirations of the British Empire.

This chapter offers a theoretical overview of the modern world system: a system ordered by states rather than nations. The normative acceptance of the unit and design of the state internal to this, the interstate system, proscribes that people should live sedentarized lives within clearly demarcated state borders, governed by statebearing nations ruling over them. Sesame Street’s adaptation of the interstate system, in turn, meant that Israeli citizens (Jewish and Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel) were bound to their street-state, Rechov Sumsum, and later, Sippuray Sumsum, and Palestinian citizens (Palestinians citizens of the non-state institution of the Palestinian Authority), to Shara’a Simsim, and later, Hikayat Simsim. If citizens crossed one-street-state into the other, the assumption was that they would necessarily return “home” to their own bordered street-state.

In the aftermath of World War I, some politicians, scholars, and lawyers argued that peoples and nations (as distinct from states) ought to be subjects of international law and bear rights within the international order. However, the principle of “national self-determination” at the center of the rhetorical reconstruction of the postwar international order irrevocably confounded law and politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Treaties were signed guaranteeing the protection of minorities within the newly created states of Eastern Europe. But just who were those minorities? Would a Polish speaker who self-identified as German be considered a Polish or a German national? What about those who were both German and Pole? Similarly, as the League placed the former German colonial territories into Mandates, just what would the nationality of the inhabitants be? The problems of nationality continued to be unresolvable and the dream of having sovereign nations rather than states fell rapidly into disrepute with the annexation of Czechoslovakia and the onset of World War II.

The sudden changes and new problems of the Anthropocene, viewed through evolutionary theory, highlight issues of social fitness: who is benefited by an institution? Anthropocene growth – in economy, population, waste, and inequality – fostered midcentury social confrontations and ideological conflict. Capitalism, now paired with empire, won global dominion. Further institutional change led, after two great wars, to contesting racial categorization, emancipating large and small nations, and demanding post-imperial regulation of economic inequality. Should institutions respond to social and environmental needs – or regulate themselves? The chapter contrasts theories: social evolution in trade unions and cultural evolution as applied to an urban ethnic community. Neoliberal visionaries proposed a postwar solution, treating markets as devices for governing not only economic but social behavior. From 1980, authorities in the USA, UK, and IMF encouraged divergence in wealth holdings and opposed regulation of private firms. With Soviet collapse and Chinese reforms, neoliberalism led the world economy, placing social inequality and ecological degradation as low priorities.

This chapter draws attention to the centrality of gender in liberal cultural diversity regimes. It shows that the construction of nations and other cultural groups centrally relies on gender: by helping to generate a sense of familiarity among national/cultural strangers; by serving as a means by which cultural boundaries are drawn between the national/cultural Self and foreign Others; and by assigning women the primary role in the intergenerational transmission of national or ethnic culture. The chapter then challenges claims about a major cultural cleavage on gender equality between 'the West' and 'Islam' by drawing attention to the rise of a transnational constellation of self-identified Western actors that mobilize against gender equality in the name of 'Western' or 'European' civilization. Gender has undeniably become central in mobilizing actors against liberalism. The chapter helps illustrate the editors’ argument that diversity regimes always create social hierarchies, in this case gender hierarchy.