Throughout the 20th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20th century, are almost completely missing in IR's intellectual and disciplinary histories, including histories of its main theoretical traditions. In this forum, leading historians and theorists of IR respond to the recent findings of the Leverhulme project on Women and the History of International Thought (WHIT), particularly its first two book-length publications on the centrality of women to early IR discourses and subsequent erasure from its history and conceptualization. The forum is introduced by members of the WHIT project. Collectively, the essays suggest the implications of the erasure and recovery of women's international thought are significant and wide-ranging.

Throughout the 20th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20th century, are almost completely missing in IR's intellectual and disciplinary histories, including histories of its main theoretical traditions. In this forum, leading historians and theorists of IR respond to the recent findings of the Leverhulme project on Women and the History of International Thought (WHIT), particularly its first two book-length publications on the centrality of women to early IR discourses and subsequent erasure from its history and conceptualization. The forum is introduced by members of the WHIT project. Collectively, the essays suggest the implications of the erasure and recovery of women's international thought are significant and wide-ranging.

Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science hypothesizes that all intentional phenomena, including both psychological and social facts, are macroscopic quantum mechanical processes. Whether right or wrong, the suggestion highlights the fact that the social sciences, including IR, have until very recently never systematically discussed the potential relevance to our work of the quantum revolution a century ago. According to Wendt, that has left social scientists today – positivists and interpretivists alike – operating from an implicit and impoverished 19th century worldview that cannot accommodate important facts about human subjectivity. This symposium features critiques of Wendt's vision from multiple perspectives and a response, for one of the first airings of the classical-quantum debate in an IR context.

The idea that international law and institutions represent cooperative means for resolving inter-state disputes is so common as to be almost taken for granted in International Relations scholarship. Global-governance scholars often use the terms international law and cooperation interchangeably and treat legalization as a subset of the broader category of inter-governmental cooperation. This paper highlights the methodological and substantive problems that follow from equating ‘global governance’ with ‘international cooperation’ and suggests an alternative. The traditional model applies liberal political theory to the study of international institutions and interprets global governance as the realization of shared interests. It deflects research away from questions about trade-offs and winners or losers. In place of cooperation theory, I outline an overtly political methodology that assumes that governance – global or otherwise – necessarily favors some interests over others. In scholarship, the difference is evident in research methods, normative interpretation, and policy recommendations, as research is reoriented toward understanding how international institutions redistribute inequalities of wealth and power.

Cristina Masters (CM): The articles in this forum speak to how influential and inspiring your work is for scholars in the discipline of International Relations (IR), not least feminist scholars. Particularly, I think, for encouraging us to (re)think and (re)work with deeply familiar ‘things’ in deeply unusual – yet troublingly fecund – ways. Blood, for example, comes up quite frequently in your writing on methodology, even though it appears, as you say, an ‘unlikely candidate for methodological use’. What is so promising about blood for making sense of global politics?

Feminist International Relations (IR) theory is haunted by a radical feminist ghost. From Enloe's suggestion that the personal is both political and international, often seen as the foundation of feminist IR, feminist IR scholarship has been built on the intellectual contributions of a body of theory it has long left for dead. Though Enloe's sentiment directly references the Hanisch's radical feminist rallying call, there is little direct engagement with the radical feminist thinkers who popularised the sentiment in IR. Rather, since its inception, the field has been built on radical feminist thought it has left for dead. This has left feminist IR troubled by its radical feminist roots and the conceptual baggage that feminist IR has unreflectively carried from second-wave feminism into its contemporary scholarship. By returning to the roots of radical feminism we believe IR can gain valuable insights regarding the system of sex-class oppression, the central role of heterosexuality in maintaining this system, and the feminist case for revolutionary political action in order to dismantle it.

While the study of games and gaming has increased in International Relations in recent years, a corresponding exploration of play has yet to be developed in the field. While play features in several key areas – including game theory, videogames and popular culture, and pedagogical role-plays and simulations – little work has been done to analyse its presence in, and potentials for, the discipline. The aim of this article is to introduce the study of play to IR. It does this by demonstrating that play is political, and that it is at work across the global arena. Drawing on the deconstructive tradition associated with Jacques Derrida, its core contribution is a theorisation of play. The central argument developed is that play is (auto)deconstructive. By this I mean (1) that play precipitates an unravelling of any attempt at its conceptualisation, and (2) that this illustrates the value of a deconstructive approach to international theory. This claim is substantiated through an analysis of four key binary oppositions derived from Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens. Having shown how play powerfully deconstructs its own conceptual foundations, I argue that a playful approach offers a robust challenge to entrenched assumptions in international theory.

This essay examines the idea of the pluriverse as one response to recent calls for the decolonization of international and global ethics. It argues that taking pluriversality seriously challenges prevailing understandings of global ethics as the acquisition and application of moral expertise. Instead of aiming to know the meaning of global justice and then apply it to particular contexts, a pluriversal ethics addresses the question of how to cultivate a practical ethic of coexistence and collaboration with others in an ontologically plural and radically hierarchical world.

A surge in academic interest in the interaction of international law with international politics has recently raised the profile of the rule of law in global politics. The idea of an ‘international rule of law’ is central to many accounts of international order, and to both political science and legal scholarship. Despite its popularity, the concept is rarely defined or examined. This article considers the theory and practice of the international rule of law. It shows first that the international rule of law cannot be deduced from the conventional Anglo-American version of the rule of law in domestic legal theory, as sketched by Joseph Raz and others. It then considers two competing versions of a distinctly international concept of the rule of law, one based on a positivist theory of compliance and the other on a structurationist theory of practice. The former is more common in legal and political scholarship but the latter accounts better for the political power of international law in relation to states.

In categorizing international hierarchies, theorists often emphasize some balance between levels of consent and coercion. I show that emphasis on these terms is conceptually problematic. Borrowing insights from republican political theory, I argue that we can better distinguish hierarchies on the basis of whether they feature domination. Under domination the subordinate’s freedom of choice is contingent upon the predilections of the superordinate state, which can assert its supremacy whenever and possibly, however, it may please. Moreover, subordinate states cannot unilaterally and peacefully withdraw from the hierarchy. By contrast, in hierarchies of non-domination the superordinate state enjoys the ‘powers of attorney’ with which it might be permitted to practice coercion in order to advance an agreed-upon goal. The contract underpinning this type of hierarchy also allows for the unilateral and peaceful termination by the subordinate, either through withdrawal or expiry. I demonstrate the applicability of this conceptual framework by examining Soviet and American relations with Central-Eastern and Western Europe, respectively, during the Cold War.

The article deals with a pivotal conceptual distinction used in philosophical discussions about global justice. Cosmopolitans claim that arguing from the perspective of moral cosmopolitanism does not necessarily entail defending a global coercive political authority, or a ‘world-state’, and suggest that ambitious political and economic (social) goals implied in moral cosmopolitanism may be achieved via some kind of non-hierarchical, dispersed and/or decentralized institutional arrangements. I argue that insofar as moral cosmopolitans retain ‘strong’ moral claims, this is an untenable position, and that the goals of cosmopolitan justice, as explicated by its major proponents, require nothing less than a global state-like entity with coercive powers. My background ambition is to supplement some existing works questioning the notion of ‘governance without government’ with an argument that goes right to the conceptual heart of cosmopolitan thought. To embed my central theoretical argument in real-world developments, I draw on some recent scholarship regarding the nature of international organizations, European Union, or transnational democratization. Finally, I suggest that only after curbing moral aspirations in the first place can a more self-consciously moderate position be constructed, one that will carry practical and feasible implications for institutional design.

States rarely declare war. For many international law scholars, just war theorists, and moral philosophers, the declaration of war is a moribund tradition that serves no important purpose. When declarations of war are defended, the argument is situated in the war powers debate about executive authority. In contrast, I argue that declaring war – making conditional and reasoned moral demands – continues to be an important requirement for just wars. States should declare war because states should make explicit (formal) moral demands before fighting. Declaring war is procedurally important because it ensures that a state makes a formal moral case, showing respect to innocent third parties whose interests are affected and providing targets the right to confront their accusers and hear evidence. While not a panacea, requiring declarations is a significant improvement on the ad hoc politics of wartime justification that plagues wars such as Iraq. Further, declarations, as ultimatums, are the only reasonable interpretation of the ‘last resort’ requirement in just war theory. A final section extends the argument to contemporary wars against non-state actors, showing that a politics of recognition underlying declarations of war may prove especially fruitful today.