Belonging. The subject conjures up a realm of emotions. In today's world, where increasing numbers of people are on the move, whether voluntarily or forced, it captures the nostalgia one feels for a home left behind or the yearning one has for acceptance in a new community. It can produce feelings of joy or loss even from a distance, as when one follows political, sporting, or family events from afar. It encompasses sentiments of anguish, fear, and resentment when those who wish to belong are rejected or when those within a group feel threatened by those from without. For all the talk today of an interconnected, globalizing world where borders are “not just permeable, but . . . shot through with large holes,” most of us still expect our national borders—the borders of the state where we belong—to be impenetrable, except through the preapproved legal channels.

What comes to mind when we hear the word “drone”? For many of us, it is the image of a General Atomics MQ-1B Predator drone launching a Hellfire missile at a suspected militant target. But is this picture beginning to change? Should this picture change?

“Defining down sovereignty” refers to the normative thesis that sovereignty should not grant a state absolute protection against armed intervention in its internal affairs by other states, and that instead the international community should condition such immunity on states living up to particular standards. This essay suggests two modifications to this thesis. First, the international community should spell out the kinds of failures to protect civilians that can justify armed interventions by other states, as well as which agency has the authority to determine when such failures have occurred. In other words, the international community should determine how low to set the bar for intervention, and who makes the rules. Second, the international community needs to establish an additional international responsibility, namely, a responsibility to prevent international terrorism. The essay treats both of these modifications as shared international normative understandings; it does not attempt to translate these changes into international law.

One of the chief aspects of last December's landmark Paris Agreement on climate change was the acceptance of the notion that all states would make a “contribution” to the global effort to address climate change. These voluntary, nationally determined, non-binding pledges are the most visible feature of the reorientation of the international climate regime away from its previous emphasis on “top-down” international coordination, and toward a “bottom-up” architecture that provides greater national flexibility in order to induce broader participation. At the same time, however, the agreement to keep the rise in average global temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius indicates that there is a limit to the quantity of carbon that can be emitted to meet this temperature goal, raising the challenge of how to apportion this carbon “budget” among states. Can a fair distribution of the carbon budget be achieved amid voluntary contributions? This paper first discusses the tension between the top-down distribution that a carbon budget approach generally implies, and the bottom-up institutional elements of the new climate architecture. Second, it reviews the alternative ways in which considerations of fairness have been integrated into the design of the Paris Agreement, and the rise of “national circumstances” as the context for fairness. Finally, this paper points to the increased role for normative argumentation in this bottom-up world, where new norms embedded in the Paris Agreement, especially relating to increases in national ambition, take on greater importance in efforts to achieve an equitable response to climate change.

This article addresses the question what—if anything—we can and should expect from the practice of international criminal justice. It argues that neither retributive nor purely consequentialist, deterrence-based justifications give sufficient guidance as to what international criminal courts should aim to achieve. Instead, the legal theory of expressivism provides a more viable (but not unproblematic) guide. Contrary to other expressivist views, this article argues for the importance of the trial, not just the punishment, as a form of expressivist messaging. Specifically, we emphasize the communicative aspect of the judicial process. The final section, acknowledging the limited success of international criminal justice so far in terms of fulfilling its expressivist potential, diagnoses the main obstacles to, and opportunities for, expressivist messaging in the contemporary practice of international criminal justice.

On September 25, 2015, the world's leaders adopted a new suite of development goals—the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—that are to guide policymakers for the next decade and a half. On first inspection, the declaration is breathtaking in its scope and ambition. Constituted by a list of 17 goals and 169 targets, it is arguably the most comprehensive global agenda adopted since the UN Charter in 1945. Its thematic repertoire ranges from poverty, health, education, and inequality, to energy, infrastructure, climate change, marine resources, peace, security, and good governance. The UN Secretary-General welcomed the SDGs by praising their “universal, transformative, and integrated agenda” that heralded a “historic turning point for our world.”

Hans J. Morgenthau is generally considered to have been a political realist and the transmitter of continental Realpolitik into American letters. But he has also been claimed as an idealist, as a constructivist, and as an ethicist. Some of these claims make sense if we understand that Morgenthau was trained as a lawyer in the German historical tradition. Others can be made sense of if we understand that—self-consciously a “European”—he was continuously adapting his ideas to an American audience and, in the process, being socialized into an American experience. The essays in this roundtable illustrate the “Americanization” of Morgenthau.

During the past decade there has been a resurgence of interest in the concept of recognition in international theory. Once the narrow concern of social theorists, the concept of recognition is nowadays invoked in at least three different senses in order to explain three different things. First, it is commonly used to explain how states and their identities are shaped by interaction, and how the modern international system has emerged as a cumulated consequence of such patterns of interaction. In this context, the concept of recognition is used to explain how states are individuated and differentiated from each other, how the international system thereby becomes stratified along status lines, as well as why conflicts over status are possible or even inevitable. Second, although the concept of recognition has long enjoyed wide currency within international legal theory, where it is used to account for what makes states legal persons and equal members of international society, recent scholarship has done much to complicate this view by pointing out how practices of inclusion often have gone hand in hand with practices of exclusion, and how this has led to an informal stratification of international society. Third, the concept has most recently been invoked to suggest how the undesirable consequences of international anarchy can be mitigated or even avoided through mutual recognition between political communities.

In 2015, the world's first self-defined feminist government was formed in Sweden with the explicit ambition of pursuing a feminist foreign policy. This essay seeks to unpack and highlight some of the substance and plausible future directions of a feminist foreign policy. The overarching ambition is three-fold: (1) to probe the normative contents of feminist foreign policy in theory and in practice; (2) to identify a number of potential challenges and ethical dilemmas that are detrimental to gender-sensitive global politics; and (3) to advance a research agenda that can deepen the normative and ethical notions of a feminist foreign policy. Sweden's feminist foreign policy is still in the making. Its conduct is mostly incremental and focused on international agenda setting and normative entrepreneurship, which is guided by an ethically informed framework of cosmopolitanism and human rights. Yet, this essay argues that this reorientation is distinct for two reasons: First, by adopting the “F-word” it elevates politics from a broadly consensual orientation of gender mainstreaming towards more controversial politics, which explicitly seeks to renegotiate and challenge power hierarchies and gendered institutions that hitherto defined global institutions and foreign and security policies. Second, it contains a normative reorientation of foreign policy, which is guided by an ethically informed framework based on broad cosmopolitan norms of global justice and peace. The article concludes by advancing a research agenda that draws upon feminist IR theory and enhances the ethical and transformative contents of the English School by making it more gender-sensitive and appropriate for the study of feminist foreign policy.

It is generally agreed by most observers that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have fallen short of achieving gender equality and women's empowerment. Today, women continue to be more likely than men to live in poverty, and more than 18 million girls in sub-Saharan Africa are out of school. One of the crucial reasons for the failure of the MDGs in relation to women was their inability to address the deeply entrenched and interlocking factors that perpetuate women's disadvantage. The new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as articulated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, constitute an improvement over the MDGs. Goal 5, which enshrines the stand-alone goal on gender equality, is comprised of nine specific targets, including the elimination of gender-based violence and access to reproductive health. In addition, gender equality is mainstreamed into numerous others goals. Given that the global community is now poised to implement the SDGs, the challenge is how best to integrate a transformative approach into the planning, implementation, and delivery of the specific targets so that the SDGs contribute to achieving gender equality and women's empowerment.

Shortly after finishing his Habilitation at the University of Geneva in 1934, Hans Morgenthau typed a lengthy manuscript entitled Über den Sinn der Wissenschaft in dieser Zeit und über die Bestimmung des Menschen (On the Purpose of Science in These Times and on Human Destiny). Underappreciated and little known in the ever-growing literature on Morgenthau and classical realism at large, this manuscript provided the foundation for a series of publications throughout his life in which he ferociously and even polemically defended a normative role for “science” (Wissenschaft) in modern societies against the backdrop of the rise of behavioralism. Most famous among them is certainly Morgenthau's first book in the United States, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (see Hartmut Behr in this forum). Indeed, forty years after Morgenthau had penned this manuscript in Geneva, he based the first part of Science: Servant or Master on it, indicating that he “never went much beyond what he had basically said and formulated” during his time in Europe.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were established following the UN Millennium Declaration, which was approved by the UN General Assembly in September 2000. Described by some as the “world's biggest promise,” they set out a series of time-bound targets to be achieved by the international community by 2015, including a halving of extreme poverty, a two-third reduction in child mortality, a three-quarter reduction in maternal mortality, and universal primary education. The MDGs were, however, often criticized for having a “blind spot” with regard to inequality and social injustice. Worse, they may even have contributed to entrenched inequalities through perverse incentives. As some have argued, in order to achieve progress toward the MDG targets at the national level, governments focused their attention on the “easy to reach” populations and ignored more marginalized, vulnerable groups. The aim of this essay is to examine the extent to which this widespread criticism has been successfully addressed in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), approved by the UN General Assembly in September 2015.

What interests do states have in assisting and protecting vulnerable populations beyond their borders? While some political leaders and commentators promote a circumscribed understanding of the national interest that rules out accepting substantial risks and costs for the sake of the distant vulnerable, others endorse an “enlightened” conception of the national interest that recognizes the long-term utility to be gained by helping them. However, while this notion of “enlightened” self-interest gives states reason to act in some instances, it fails to prompt action in other cases where the suffering of strangers is less strategically important. Some leaders and commentators have responded to this problem by reaching for some other, less material conception of the national interest to justify assisting the distant vulnerable, but they have often struggled to find the language they need. This article finds a solution in the debates about self-interest waged in seventeenth-century Europe. Dissatisfied both with Hobbes's narrow understanding of self-interest and Pufendorf's more “enlightened” understanding, Leibniz defended a more generous and “disinterested” conception, grounded not in considerations of material utility but in the pleasure to be derived from helping those in need. This article demonstrates two ways in which this “disinterested” conception of self-interest can be of use today. First, it provides resources for explaining why states already sometimes act in “disinterested” and altruistic ways. Second, it provides leaders with a tool for persuading people to help the distant vulnerable, even when it appears to be in neither their narrow nor their “enlightened” interests to do so.

Hans Morgenthau's Scientific Man vs. Power Politics appeared in 1946, one year after he received tenure at the University of Chicago. Thus, the monograph demarcates the beginning of Morgenthau's career in the United States, to which he had emigrated nine years earlier. Three main aspects seem important for understanding this work. The first is Morgenthau's bewilderment about American political culture and, as he perceived it, its cheerful optimism about the betterment of politics, society, and humanity in general. The second aspect is the nature of the argument: Scientific Man is a dogmatic tract, an attempt to hammer home certain philosophical positions—positions that were largely unpopular in the U.S. social sciences in the 1940s (and later)—rather than a reflective scholarly elaboration of certain philosophical commitments. The third is Morgenthau's place between two academic cultures: Morgenthau's language in his American writings partly stems from, but also tries to leave behind, his European academic socialization. The monograph thus reflects the author's peculiar situation, as he inhabits two sometimes crucially different semantic and cultural contexts, but fails to bridge or broker them.