The witholding of equal public recognition of national, cultural and language identity often causes severe anguish to sub-state peoples and sometimes leads to war. For this reason, political philosophy has an important responsibility to think through the moral grounds and the appropriate means of recognition. This chapter draws a moral map of the recognitional debate, outlining three normative camps: nonrecognition, monorecognition, and recognitional pluralism. I argue for recognitional pluralism, in two steps. The first step establishes, contra nonrecognition, that nations, cultures and languages are recognition-worthy, and that this is so for two reasons: they give people access to cultural life-worlds, and they are sources of dignity. The second step builds the case for a pluralistic means of according public recognition. To do so, I argue, against monorecognition, that egalitarian recognition of life-world access and dignity is to be the driving principle. Within the pluralist camp, I argue for the principle of equal services, which implies that the state accords comparable cultural services to the cultural groups that share a state or territory. Examples of this can be found in equal language rights regimes, egalitarian public holiday systems, as well as in multinational federalism.

This introduction assesses a range of popular and scholarly attitudes toward the current state of American democracy, identifying in them a dominant theme of modern democratic theory, namely, an aversion to conflict. Just as John Rawls believed democratic societies to be perennially threatened by a “mortal conflict” between comprehensive doctrines and their “transcendent elements not admitting of compromise,” and so proposed a theory of liberal order aimed at preempting, containing, and resolving these conflicts, so contemporary critics perceive the intractable disagreements and polarizations of American political culture to be only corrosive and destabilizing. They propose strategies for achieving social cohesion grounded in a sense of national unity, shared history, or common identity more fundamental to difference. Many religious persons and traditions exhibit a similar aversion to conflict, believing it to indicate some form of sin, injustice, or moral error. I question this presumption that conflict is inherently vicious, ruinous, or violent, and begin to sketch an alternative view of conflict as basic to human creaturehood and potentially generative for social life.

To most contributors in this volume, international organizations (IOs) act both as agents of, and inhibitors of peaceful change. This leaves the task of identifying exactly how and why they foster or inhibit peaceful change to empirical analysis and mid-level theorizing. Yet, as Ian Hurd points out in his chapter, understanding the deep power politics at play in institutionalized peaceful change requires a higher level of theorizing. This concluding chapter takes stock of the collective findings in light of Hurd’s cautionary tale and suggests future avenues of research engaging with postpositivist, relational, and critical theories. It identifies three main areas in need of further theorizing: the agents, the stakes, and the processes of peaceful change. It argues that such further theorizing would not only shed light on transformative processes of maximalist peaceful change which are yet to be fully explored in this volume, but it would also help develop a more pluralistic research agenda.

Here I move from historical analysis to philosophical explication of the concept of liberty, and I introduce the main conceptual components of the idea of freedom I defend.

Here I examine the relation between freedom and value, both in the sense of a person’s own values and the inherent value of liberty itself. I then show the relation between liberty, so conceived, and democratic institutions and practices.

This introductory note provides an overview of the book’s original and timely framework with which to debunk Orientalism in how we read (Turkey’s) political history and present. The main argument is that political contestation is driven by shifting alliances for and against a more pluralistic society, not by forever polarized camps.

This chapter introduces an original and timely theoretical toolkit. The purpose: to challenge misleading readings of (Turkey’s) politics as driven by binary contests between “Islamists” vs. “secularists” or “Kurds vs. Turks.” Instead, it introduces an alternative “key”[1] to politics in and beyond Turkey that reads contestation as driven by shifting coalitions of pluralizers and anti-pluralists. This timely contribution to conversations in political science (e.g., comparative politics; political theory) is supplemented by an original analytical-descriptive framework inspired by complex systems thinking in the natural and management sciences. The approach offers a novel methodological framework for capturing causal complexity, in Turkey and other Muslim-majority settings, but also in any political system that is roiled by contending religious and secular nationalisms as well as actors who seek greater pluralism.

Although Milton’s relationship with Ireland will not be as active after 1653 as it had been in the previous fifteen years, Ireland does not entirely disappear from Milton’s work. Ireland is implied in “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” and in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Ireland also appears occasionally in Milton’s The History of Britain. Milton’s personal connections to Ireland grow after the Cromwellian conquest. More importantly, though, Milton has been a persistent presence in Ireland – not only as a literary figure, but also as a republican political theorist: He is cited by Irish Republicans in the eighteenth and twentienth centuries, and by Irish authors including W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, John McGahern, Eimear McBride, and more. At the same time, Milton’s insights into pre-Cromwellian Ireland represent a hidden potential for today’s post-Brexit Ireland.

Proposition 67 of Spinoza’s hyper-rationalistic Ethics proudly proclaims that: “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death.” Well, in this book I have thought a great deal about existential death, and a good bit about the “noth-ing of the nothing” that such death discloses. Still, I have probably thought of noth-ing less than of death, so Spinoza might have to count me “free” on a technicality. There are, at any rate, worse things than being freed on a technicality. One can be convicted on a technicality, for example, or even convicted by technicality. Indeed, the later Heidegger suggests that we have all been convicted by technicality, technicity, or technologicity, that is, by “the essence of technology.” According to his view of our late modern age of technological enframing, we have all been thrown by Western history into the prison city-state (or polis) of nihilistic technologicity.

This chapter focuses on three case studies from California that provide a laboratory for investigating value conflicts. One case involves feral goats and endemic plants on San Clemente Island. What initially presents as a textbook conflict between sentientism and biocentrism turns out to engage a host of other values. A second case concerns tule elk and cattle in Point Reyes National Seashore. A variety of values are in play, but the primary conflict is between an endangered species and a population of animals that humans use for food. The third case involves Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep and mountain lions. Both of these species have depleted populations and restricted ranges due to human action, and both are under intensive management. Their interests conflict and humans cannot remove themselves from the conflict.

This chapter returns to some central questions about value and valuing, including questions of intrinsic value and the distinction between values and preferences. It argues for value pluralism and discusses specifically prudential values, cultural values, aesthetic values, and natural values. Prudential values are those that relate to an agent’s own interests; cultural values are those that take artifacts or expressions as their objects; aesthetic values include beauty, but also other features such as the sublime; natural values are those that arise from nature’s autonomy. These and other values can conflict. Resources are available for resolving or reducing some value conflicts, but others are at least in practice unresolvable.

This chapter offers a ‘realist’ interpretation of the All-Affected Principle, as a democratic principle for distributing political inclusion. This interpretation aims to capture the AAP’s democratic appeal as a basis for political legitimacy in the pluralist institutional landscape of global governance practice. First, it is argued that the distinctive democratic value of the AAP derives from its concern with institutionally empowering those valuable dimensions of individuals’ political agency that are expressed through participation in the practical performance of global governance functions, alongside those expressed through deliberative or aggregative social ‘choice’ procedures. Second, it is argued that this interpretation of the normative point of the AAP supports a pluralist, rather than a cosmopolitan, institutional approach to democratic inclusion: the sites, types, and constituencies of inclusion should vary across institutional contexts, depending on their real-world consequences for the empowerment of individuals’ capacities to advance their interests through institutional collaboration with others. Third, the chapter elaborates the broader ‘realist’ conceptions of global democracy and political legitimacy that are implied by this interpretation of the AAP, and highlights some advantages and limitations of the realist account.