international anarchy
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There is a consensus on war: violent conflicts are out. But they continue to happen. One likes to exclude violent conflicts and to avoid them. But they could happen. Avoidance of wars appears not be sufficient. International relations presuppose an international anarchy. Anarchy does not exclude wars, but reduces them to exceptions. The present essay attempts to argue in favour of a categorical exclusion of violent conflicts which easily could destroy vital conditions of human survival.

International relations encompass three aspects: international anarchy, with sovereign states recognizing no political superior; routine interactions in diplomatic, legal, and commercial institutions; and moral solidarity, with cultural and psychological links more profound than those of politics and economics. Thinkers who underscore international anarchy regard the idea of international society as fictional. Hobbes, for example, maintains that the only remedy for anarchical competition is to make a contract for a ruler or an assembly to take power and act to ensure security. Grotius and other thinkers who emphasize the extensive informal, legal, and customary interactions in international affairs highlight humanity’s sociability and its potential for constitutionalism and the rule of law. Kant and others anticipate the vindication of humanity’s potential for peace through the deepening of the material and moral interdependence of people around the world. This may come about through uniformity of independent states in standards of virtue and legitimacy or through the political and moral unification of humanity.

The establishment and maintenance of any existing �world order� is primarily based on a general aversion to international war and does not depend on the United States. This perspective disputes two explanations that rely heavily on American activities. One contends that the United States, aided perhaps by the attention- arresting fear of nuclear weapons, was necessary to provide worldwide security and thus to order the world. The other contends that the United States was instrumental, indeed vital, in constructing international institutions, conventions, and norms, in advancing economic development, and in expanding democracy, and that these processes have crucially helped to establish and maintain a degree of international peace. This article traces the rise of an aversion to international war and argues that this, not US efforts, should be seen as the primary causative or facilitating independent variable in the decline of international war. This perspective also suggests that world order can survive, or work around, challenges that might be thrown at it by the United States or anyone else, that fears that a rising China or an assertive Russia will upset the order are overdrawn, that there is scarcely any need for the maintenance of a large military force in being, and that, under the right conditions, international anarchy, could well be a desirable state.

Russian meddling in the 2016 elections in the United States sparked debates in liberal democracies about how to counter foreign election interference. These debates reveal the seriousness of the threat and the complexity of responses to it, including how to protect voting systems and what actions social media companies should take against disinformation. This chapter argues that international anarchy changes in ways that leading theories of international relations do not capture. The chapter develops the concept of “open-source anarchy” to understand how anarchy changed after the Cold War and to analyze why foreign election interference has gained prominence during the second decade of the twenty-first century. In open-source anarchy, changes in the structure of material power, technologies, and ideas permit less powerful states and nonstate actors to affect more directly and significantly how anarchy functions. The concept helps explain how Russia exploited the internet and social media to interfere in elections in the United States—the world’s leading democracy, foremost source of technological innovation, and most powerful country. Open-source anarchy also illuminates the struggles that the United States and other democracies have experienced in preventing, protecting against, and responding to foreign election interference.

Can international anarchy be stabilized, if not globally, then at least regionally? Those scholars who give a positive answer usually refer to the North Atlantic community which can be categorized as an international society from the viewpoint of the English school. The emergence of such a community outside the West is traditionally considered hardly possible. However, this article argues that it may already be emerging in Eurasia, with Russia and China being the key drivers of this trend. In the past few years, these two powers have put forward a number of major initiatives aimed at developing transport networks and logistics, and deepening economic and institutional ties between different parts of the continent. These include but are not limited to Eurasian Economic Union, supported by Russia, and China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Together, Moscow and Beijing began to form a new platform for security and economic cooperation “from Kaliningrad to Shanghai”—the community of Greater Eurasia. Based on the analysis of the geopolitical logic of these initiatives, this article suggests that a new, non-Western international society may be forming in Eurasia among the states with different political systems and cultures, but common geopolitical aims and fears.

This chapter assesses why international legal obligations are (or are not) complied with, and how they are (or are not) enforced. It begins by drawing a distinction between laws and norms. The chapter then examines the main explanations for international law compliance put forward by both international law and international relations scholars. These may be broadly grouped into two categories: instrumentalist explanations and normative explanations. The chapter also discusses the concept of state responsibility—that is, the body of rules governing when and how states may be held liable for violations of international law. International law-enforcement is indelibly shaped by the condition of international anarchy. According to the concept of self-help, an injured state may, under certain circumstances, unilaterally take countermeasures against the guilty party. Such measures may include sanctions, though these may also be ordered by the UN Security Council as a collective security measure. The international legal system also increasingly makes use of judicial procedures that approximate those found within states. In this connection, the chapter considers the role of courts and tribunals in adjudicating disputes and promoting compliance with international law.

What is the basis for the Schmittian claim that Kelsen’s theory of law, state, and international legal order is quintessentially idealistic? Why are we lured into believing that an ever more centralised legal mechanism at the global level is just another liberal international lawyer’s dream? Against the backdrop of Kelsen’s Freudian moment (first image), the chapter tests the jurist’s international relations thinking against Kenneth Waltz’s second and third images. It is shown that Kelsen is a hard-edged political realist who doesn’t believe in the democratic peace thesis; nor is he convinced that the fact of nationalism can be wished away when thinking about what might lead the way for global governance or a world state. The ‘other’ Kelsen is as realistic about the dynamics of international anarchy as about the dynamics of life, society, and politics in general: there’s no escaping the fact that, as long as there is no centralised force monopoly with teeth sitting on top of nations, there will be war.

This chapter traces three different conceptions of peaceful change in Western Europe since 1945 and discusses their implications for understanding peaceful change in that region today. The first is Hobbesian. Corresponding to a largely realist understanding, Hobbesians view peaceful change in Western Europe as a byproduct of balancing and hegemony in the Cold War. The second is Lockean. Corresponding to a largely liberal understanding of peaceful change, the Lockean perspective views such change in the region as the product of liberal democratic states responding rationally to the challenges of international anarchy by institutionalizing the region. The third is Kantian. Corresponding to a largely constructivist understanding, Kantians view peaceful change in Europe as the construction of a civil league of nations exercising “normative power Europe” inside and outside the region.

Abstract Humans in the twenty-first century live under the specter of anthropogenic existential threats to human civilization and survival. What is the significance of humanity’s capacity for self-destruction to the meaning of “security” and “survival” in international politics? The argument is that it constitutes a material “revolution” in international politics—that is, the growing spectrum of anthropogenic existential threats represents a radical transformation in the material context of international politics that turns established truths about security and survival on their heads. The paper develops a theoretical framework based in historical security materialism, especially the theoretical proposition that the material circumstances of the “forces of destruction” determine the security viability of different “modes of protection”, political “units” and “structures”, and “security ideologies” in international politics. The argument seeks to demonstrate the growing disjuncture (or “contradiction”) between the material context of anthropogenic existential threats (“forces of destruction”); and the security practices of war, the use of military force, and the balance-of-power (“modes of protection”); the political units of nation-states and structure of international anarchy (“political superstructure”); and the primacy of “national security” and doctrines of “self-help” and “power politics” in international politics (“security ideologies”). Specifically, humanityapos;s survival interdependence with respect to anthropogenic existential threats calls into question the centrality of national security and survival in international politics. In an age of existential threats, “security” is better understood as about the survival of humanity.