International Political Theory

Situated within the wider post-secular turn in politics and international relations, this collection focuses not on religion per se, but rather explicitly on theology. Contributions to this volume highlight the political theological foundations of international theory and world politics, explicitly recasting theology and politics as symbiotic discourses with all the risks, promises and open questions this relation may involve. The overarching claim this volume makes is that all politics has theology embedded in it, both in the genealogical sense of carrying ineradicable traces of its theological origins, but also in the more ontological sense of being enacted by alternative configurations of the theologico-political. The book is unique in bringing together a diverse group of scholars, spanning knowledge areas as varied as IR, political theory, philosophy, theology, and history to investigate the complex interconnections between theology and world politics. It will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, international relations, intellectual history, and political theology.

As the majority perpetrators of sexual violence, it is plausible to see men as responsible for war rape not only as individuals, but also as collective bystanders, facilitators and beneficiaries. Following recent criticisms of individual legal and moral responsibility for rape as a war crime in international law, this article examines how we might think of war rape as a collective action in moral and sociological terms. First, it assesses existing moral arguments for the responsibility of men in groups for rape, primarily with reference to the work of Claudia Card, Larry May and Robert Strikwerda. Critiquing elements of these arguments, it explores the difficulties in talking about ‘men’ as a coherent group and in discussing ‘collectives’ themselves. Second, the article draws out the connection between accounts of moral responsibility and accounts of causal responsibility. Drawing on critiques of collective responsibility and the long-standing agency/structure problem, it argues that causal accounts focusing on structure pose a serious challenge to ideas of both individual and collective moral responsibility. The complexities of the relationship between moral and causal claims are illustrated through a discussion of Susan Brownmiller and Catharine MacKinnon’s influential perspectives on rape. The seeming paradox of responsibility is emphasised as a problem to be addressed by gender and feminist perspectives that seek to pursue both ethical and sociological inquiry into the workings of masculinity and the political means for undoing gendered wrongs.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa once wrote that ‘the village is larger than the city’ because you can see ‘more of the world from there’ than you can from anywhere else. In this small world, the familiar and intermittent sounds of bells dictate the time of our childhood; a stroll through its worn alleys makes us imagine the echo of our ancestors’ steps; the tired light coming from an old window suggests the lingering presence of lost loves. The village is larger than the city, and even than the modern metropolis, because, as Pessoa writes, in it ‘I am the size of what I see, and not the size of my height.’1 To be the size of what we see: there is an abyssal truth in these words. Within this form of life, the mantle of representation fits perfectly on the shoulders of existence. Here in the village, according to Pessoa, seeing and being coincide.

The contemporary world rests on a decisive reversal of these two experiences. Today the human is no longer the living being who has sight; if anything, she is the seeing creature who pictures life.

[DE] Die Rezeptionsgeschichte des Werks von Carl Schmitt lässt sich grob in zwei Etappen gliedern. Während zunächst seine Kritik an der liberalen Demokratie im Zentrum des Interesses stand, verlagerte sich der Fokus nach dem Ende des Kalten Krieges auf seine Philosophie der internationalen Beziehungen. In diesem Artikel wird gezeigt, dass auch Jürgen Habermas’ aufmerksame Lektüre von Schmitts Texten diesen Schritten weitgehend folgt. Statt einer naiven Verwendung und Übernahme Schmitt’scher Kategorien findet sich bei Habermas allerdings eine kritische Aneignung ihres explikativen Potenzials. Darüber hinaus zeigt er große Vorbehalte gegenüber zentralen Ideen des sogenannten »Kronjuristen des Dritten Reiches«. Dies betrifft insbesondere das in alternativen politischen Kreisen bis heute weit verbreitete Konzept des »Politischen«.
[EN] While initially criticism of liberal democracy was the aspect of Carl Schmitt’s work which received attention, since the end of the Cold War interest has shifted towards his philosophy of international relations. Throughout this article it is shown that to a large extent Jürgen Habermas’ attentive reading of certain Schmitt texts follows in these steps. Rather than naively using Schmitt’s categories, Habermas practices a critical appropriation of his explanatory potential. Nevertheless, he manifests enormous reservations regarding the elongated shadow cast by his ideas and, in particular, by his concept of the political which is so prevalent today in alternative political circles.

Action-­sentences about states, such as 'North Korea conducted a nuclear test', are ubiquitous in discourse about international relations. Although there has been a great deal of debate in IR about whether states are agents or actors, the question of how to interpret action-­sentences about states has been treated as secondary or epiphenomenal. This article focuses on our practices of speaking and writing about the state rather than the ontology of the state. It uses Hobbes' theory of attributed action to develop a typology of action-‐sentences and to analyze action-sentences about states. These sentences are not shorthand for action-­sentences about individuals, as proponents of the metaphorical interpretation suggest. Nor do they describe the actions of singular agents, as proponents of the literal interpretation suggest. The central argument is that action-­sentences about states are 'attributive', much like sentences about principals who act vicariously through agents: they identify the 'owners' of actions—the entities that are responsible for them—rather than the agents that perform the actions. Our practice of ascribing actions to states is not merely figurative, but nor does it presuppose that states are corporate agents.

For nearly a century, it has been assumed that self-determination of the world's peoples through creation and territorial guarantee of independent, ethnically defined polities was central if not essential to Woodrow Wilson's vision for a peaceful world order. Nothing could be further from the truth, and failure to appreciate the integrative rather than fissiparous character of Wilson's vision has impoverished the international political imagination ever since--with disastrous consequences for peace and democracy worldwide.

Multiplicity claims to provide common ground for International Relations and, potentially, to appeal across the epistemological and theoretical spectra of the discipline. However, Multiplicity also challenges existing theories of the international, of international politics and, potentially, political theory more widely. Rosenberg’s conception of Multiplicity explicitly sought to break IR out of ‘the prison of political science’, to question the theoretical fundaments of the latter as well as the former discipline, and challenge the often-presumed hierarchy between them. Multiplicity therefore challenges IR scholars to identify and take possession of the ‘fact general to the social world’ that is the ‘deepest ontological premise’ of our discipline (and not of others). In doing so, multiplicity situates the international (a particular historical form of multiplicity) as the lens or heuristic through which the international can be used to explain or interpret various phenomena, rather than itself being the object to be interpreted or explained by or through those phenomena.

This Forum draws together scholars working in different ways and different settings to discuss how (and, indeed, whether) Multiplicity: 1) can become more deeply embedded in IR – does it indeed provide common ground? 2) helps IR scholars to widen the impact of our analyses beyond our disciplinary boundaries – and address the negative balance of ideational trade with cognate disciplines; and 3) has the potential to increase the impact of IR beyond academia – and what may need to be done to realise that potential? The Roundtable draws together scholars working in a variety of ways – ranging from political psychology, Constructivism and practice theory, critical theory, analysis of great power politics, Foreign Policy Analysis and Critical Security Studies – to explore what Multiplicity can do for and to (international) (political) (theory) as well as how it may affect the discipline of IR.

Neorealism is one of the most influential theories of international relations, and its first theorist, Kenneth Waltz, a giant of the discipline. But why did Waltz move from a rather traditional form of classical realist political theory in the 1950s to neorealism in the 1970s? A possible answer is that Waltz's Theory of International Politics was his attempt to reconceive classical realism in a liberal form. Classical realism paid a great deal of attention to decisionmaking and statesmanship, and concomitantly asserted a nostalgic, anti-liberal political ideology. Neorealism, by contrast, dismissed the issue of foreign policymaking and decisionmaking. This shift reflected Waltz's desire to reconcile his acceptance of classical realism's tenets with his political commitment to liberalism. To do so, Waltz incorporated cybernetics and systems theory into Theory of International Politics, which allowed him to develop a theory of international relations no longer burdened with the problem of decisionmaking.

The intimately local violence of torture is, simultaneously and increasingly, a global phenomenon. This paper explores a transnational convergence in the local morphologies of torture practices across time, space, and state-type through an inquiry into its global ontologies. Drawing on the insights of Actor-Network Theory, the papers introduces a material-semiotic mode of inquiry into violence in order to locate the (re)emergence and (re)convergence of torture practices within a hitherto unnoticed space of violence constituted by the circulation of violence-enabling knowledges, visual and textual inscriptions, human persons, and non-human material objects. This analysis is based on evidence gathered from interviews conducted with Syrian victims and perpetrators of torture, alongside primary and secondary sources detailing torture in other localities, which stresses the importance of tracing local instances of torture through to these material-semiotic networks of violence across borders. Concluding with a theory of the spatio-temporal oscillation of violent practices, which highlights the analytical limits of both the constructivist literature on norms and the decisionism of literatures on political exceptionalism, the paper argues that its mode of inquiry provides novel and important insights for comprehending the stubbornness of the “global crisis” in torture that Amnesty International has described for over forty years.

The 'structural injustice' framework is an increasingly influential way of thinking about historical injustice. Structural injustice theorists argue against repara-tions for historical injustice on the grounds that our focus should be on forward-looking responsibility for contemporary structural injustice. Through the use of a case study-the Caribbean Community (CARICOM's) 10-Point Plan for reparations from 2014-I argue that this reasoning is flawed. Backward-looking reparations can be justified on the basis of state liability over time. The value of backward-looking reparations is that they ensure that historical perpetrators do not evade their reparative obligations and that affected communities are taken seriously. However, I argue that this backward-looking approach should be supplemented by a forward-looking structural injustice approach and the 'social connection model' of responsibility, which can (a) expand the scope of responsible agents and forms of injustice that warrant repair and (b) explain how citizens living now can be expected to pay for crimes of the past.

This talk starts from the presumption that the quantum challenge, as a set of philosophical questions, was a dialogue far beyond the discipline of physics. Quantum sociologist Gabriel Tarde, and philosophers Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, amongst others, were active participants in the debates over causality, time, and action at a distance, as well as the grander metaphysical questions about life raised by Bohr and Schrödinger in particular. Following Bohr and Tarde, I argue that quantum phenomena are not constrained to the subatomic, but in fact are essential components of human social and political relations.
Mostly ignored until recently, the panpsychist traditions that emerged from these early interdisciplinary debates over quantum are essential to understanding the character of contemporary terrorism, and more broadly global politics in an age of non-scalable events. By non-scalable I mean that the measurement of the brute materiality of an event does not in any predictable way translate into its effect. In our age, apocalyptic crises barely register, and statistically insignificant events shake the entire international order. In fact, International Relations theory has, from its beginning, endeavored to explain ‘spooky action at a distance’, as the relations of the international are by definition both in a no-space of the international, and habituated into the local practices and places of diplomacy, deterrence, and war. While the entangled and non-locality of global politics has always been true, I argue that media and quantum savvy organizations like ISIS succeed precisely because of their ability to leverage this characteristic of global life.
Given the difficulty of theorizing such events, it is necessary to revise Benedict Anderson’s model of the imagined community as an imaginary space of shared continuity and simultaneity in favor of a quantum-inflected notion of virtual entanglement. Here, the ‘community’ is created by the non-spatial but still real acceleration of distrust for the world, and those bearing the marks of racialized difference. Events like those that erupted in Paris, France and San Bernardino, California are only the most recent examples. The latter event had no explicit connection to ISIS, and yet this spectacular violence is an undeniable asset to the atmosphere of terror that ISIS requires to increase its international significance. In fact, no amount of discourse about the non-connection of San Bernardino to ISIS was sufficient to disentangle them. Events such as those in France and California do not operate in a three dimensional space in which we can measure something like speed or mass. Instead, contemporary terrorism takes place in an affective dimension where space/time is often irrelevant to the intensity of the consequences of an event. When a pineapple soda can becomes a ‘bomb’ and takes down a Russian airliner, the everyday objects around us provoke a sense of metaphysical doubt or skepticism most commonly known as horror. Therefore, International Relations needs a quantum turn so that we can understand the very real consequences of events and things whose capacities defy both physical and casual explanation, but far exceed constructivist concepts of discourse or ideas. Link to talk https://youtu.be/-71newlDkhI?t=13m17s

This paper is an attempt to give and account of human rights. It shows that this account makes sense of, and reconciles, two competing views concerning who is entitled to refugee hood - and then tries to draw some implications from this account for the question of whether freedom of movement is a human right. Borrowing Adam Hosain's distinction between 'pass-through' freedom of movement and 'settlement' freedom of movement, it argues that there is a compelling case for the former but not the latter.

The way in which societies institutionalize “collective memory” is one of the most important aspects of contemporary politics, feeding directly into the constitution of individual and communal identities, and creating sources of discord and dialogue. This essay explores some of the most significant issues at stake in debates over the political uses of the past. I suggest that it is important to distinguish between three modes of historical consciousness, memory, mythology, and critical history. I then offer a critique of Avishai Margalit’s "The Ethics of Memory" (2002), arguing that in failing to allow space for “acknowledging” the plurality of communal myths his strong communitarian conception of mnemonic ethics leaves room for the perpetuation of asymmetric power relations and the imposition of hegemonic identities. Developing this line of thought, the essay then explores some of the ways in which agonistic democratic theorists might think through the relationship between past and present, myth and history. I argue that it is necessary to avoid procedures and institutions that entrench diverse identities while simultaneously establishing conditions in which different communities can freely propound their historical identity-constitutive claims.

This is the table of contents of my forthcoming book, Political Theology of International Order, Oxford University Press, 2020. It investigates presuppositions of international order that originate in medieval theology. The main argument is that international order understood in terms of individuals—either states or human beings—and artificial relations, established by the operation of an impersonal mechanism or the adoption of positive rules, is a worldly application of a theological pattern. The book uncovers these presuppositions as they emerged in a medieval dispute about the nature of God and the extent of his power and its traces their assimilation into modern politics and law.

This chapter focuses on the reflections on empire, nation, and race produced by three classically trained and rather atypical Afrikaner intellectuals: J. H. Hofmeyr, T. J. Haarhoff, and Martin Versfeld. The background of these three men in the thought and history of the Greeks and Romans allowed them to formulate distinctive outlooks concerning empire, nationalism, and, to a lesser extent, race. Their work may be understood as a ‘competing discourse’ on the official analogy frequently drawn between Roman and British Imperialism,

Just war theory is a prominent topic of debate today in international law, relations and humanitarian efforts, but almost no thought has been developed on the topic of a just peace. The "father of international law," Hugo Grotius, developed the theory of just war that has influenced the modern understanding use of the term in the modern United Nations and other multilateral organizations. He was, however, far from the first philosopher to contemplate the validity of a humanitarian invasion. St. Augustine is attributed with the founding of the theory in the Western world, and St. Thomas Aquinas with its codification. This essay argues that nearly one thousand years before these two Roman giants, Confucian philosopher Mencius developed an understanding of just war, though its differences from our current understanding should prevent us from referring to it as such. Instead, it should be regarded as a theory of just peace, and its tenets should be carefully considered in the context of both modern China and modern international relations as a whole.

The United Nations as a quintessential " universal " International Organisation, was established in 1945 to save succeeding generations from the scourge of another catastrophic world war, which till date, it has successfully precluded. However, the United Nations risk being an irrelevant body in the nearest future as it has failed to carry out a comprehensive reform of its obsolete structural organs, precisely, the Security Council that is the mandated guardian of international peace and security. That it might become more effective, legitimate, credible, representative, democratic, transparent, flexible and accountable as the executive organ of the United Nations, there is an urgent need to revamp the outdated Council in order to reflect the international reality of the 21 st century as well as deal with the new security challenges arising. This paper therefore revisits the discourse on the overhaul of the septuagenarian United Nations, with a focus on the enlargement, democratisation and, the working methods of the Security Council. My finding was that the long awaited reform of the archaic Security Council is not likely to happen anytime soon owing to the five permanent members lack of political alacrity, the impasse in the General Assembly and, the contradicting proposals on substantive Security Council reform. The research methodology for this study included the historical and analytical approaches as well as the qualitative method of data collection.

It is only in the early decades of the twentieth century that the “Hobbesian state of nature” and the “discourse of anarchy” came to be seen as virtually synonymous. In examining Hobbes’ international state of nature, this article rejects two common views. In one, International Relations is seen as a warlike “Hobbesian” anarchy, and in the other, Hobbes is regarded as the progenitor of Realism. Far from defending anarchy of states, Hobbes in fact constructs a largely ameliorative international arena.

This essay offers a critical reexamination of the works of Friedrich List by placing them in the context of nineteenth-century imperial economies. I argue that List’s theory of the national economy is characterised by a major ambivalence, as it incorporates both imperial and anti-imperial elements. On the one hand, List pitted his national principle against the British imperialism of free trade and the relations of dependency it heralded for late developers like Germany. On the other hand, his economic nationalism aimed less at dismantling imperial core-periphery relations as a whole than at reproducing these relations domestically and expanding them globally. I explain this ambivalence with reference to List’s designation of imperial Britain as the prime example of successful economic development and a model to be emulated by late industrialisers. List thereby fashioned his ideas on national development out of the historical experience of an empire whereby he internalised its economic logic and discourse of the civilising mission. Consequently, List’s national economy culminated in an early vision of the global north-south relations, in which the global industrial-financial core would expand to include France, Germany, and the Unites States, while the rest of the world would be reduced to quasi-colonial agrarian hinterlands.

One of the most problematic aspects of the 'Harvard School' of liberal international theory is its failure to fulfil its own methodological ideals.  Although Harvard School liberals subscribe to a nomothetic model of explanation, in practice they employ their theories as heuristic resources.  Given this practice, we should expect them neither to develop candidate causal generalizations nor to be value-neutral: their explanatory insights are underpinned by value-laden choices about which questions to address and what concepts to employ.  A key question for liberal theorists, therefore, is how a theory may be simultaneously explanatory and value-oriented.  The difficulties inherent in resolving this problem are manifested in Ikenberry's writing: whilst his work on constitutionalism in international politics partially fulfils the requirements of a more satisfactory liberal explanatory theory, his recent attempts to develop prescriptions for US foreign policy reproduce, in a new form, key failings of Harvard School realism.

Immanuel Kant is recognized as one of the first philosophers who wrote systematically about global justice and world peace. In the current debate on global justice he is mostly appealed to by critics of extensive duties of global justice. However, I show in this paper that an analysis of Kant’s late work on rights and justice provides ample resources for disagreeing with those who take Kant to call for only modest changes in global politics. Kant’s comments in the Doctrine of Right clarify that he thinks we need a coercively enforced global civil condition. But his work also contains ideas that imply that within such a global legal order there must be no extreme forms of poverty and inequality, and that the current holdings of states are by no means conclusive possessions without confirmation by the global legal order we have a duty to establish. Thus, this paper challenges the prevailing interpretation of Kant as a conservative thinker about global justice that is held, for instance, by the leading contemporary liberal thinkers such as John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, and Ronald Dworkin.