This article examines the role of spatial shape in the justification, practice, and study of territorial claims, focusing in particular on the concepts of contiguity and compactness. A territory is contiguous if all parts are connected to all other parts, and a territory is compact if all its parts are closely joined or densely packed spatially. Shaping territories to be contiguous and compact is often implicitly taken to be a worthwhile goal, in both empirical and normative assessments of territorial claims. This article focuses directly on these two concepts, taking a novel approach to the study of territory by raising questions about these foundational, but often unexamined, background assumptions. Interrogating territorial shape thus provides a useful means of examining arguments about the justice or legitimacy of the territorial rights attributed to states or peoples. The contingent origins of the concepts of contiguity and compactness suggest that evaluations of territorial shape have sometimes been based on an implicit affective ‘feel’ or emotional reaction as much as on logical or empirical argument. This conclusion allows us to rethink some of our unstated assumptions about the shapes of states and other political territories, and thus to reconsider the justice or legitimacy attributed to those claims.

Despite the broad consensus on the value of political legitimacy in global politics, there is still little agreement on what the specific regulative content of the principles of legitimacy ought to be. Two main paths have thus far been taken in the theoretical literature to respond to the legitimacy deficit in the global domain: one via the ideal of democracy, another via the ideal of justice. However, both have run into problems. The overall purpose of this paper is to examine these two paths in the endeavour to explore the possibilities of a third path, which investigates global political legitimacy (GPL) as a value that is at a basic level distinct from democracy and justice. The paper aims to fulfil two tasks. The conceptual task consists in identifying some characteristics of the concept of GPL that makes it distinct from political legitimacy generally, as well as showing its usefulness for normative theorizing. The normative task is twofold: first, to demonstrate that the value of GPL is reducible neither to democracy nor to justice; and second, to develop the contours of a dual account of GPL, in which both justice and democracy play essential roles.

This article introduces an intercultural theory of international relations based on three distinctive ways of establishing self-worth: honor, face, and dignity. In each culture of self-worth, concerns with status and humiliation intervene differently in producing political outcomes. The theory explains important variation in the way states and nations relate to members of their own culture of self-worth, as well as members of other such cultures.

The use of evolutionary theory for explaining human warfare is an expanding area of inquiry, but it remains obstructed by two important hurdles. One is that there is ambiguity about how to build an evolutionary theory of human warfare. The second is that there is ambiguity about how to interpret existing evidence relating to the evolution of warfare. This paper addresses these problems, first by outlining an evolutionary theory of human warfare, and second by investigating the veracity of four common claims made against the use of evolutionary theory for explaining warfare. These claims are: (1) ancestral warfare was not frequent or intense enough to have selected for psychological adaptations in humans for warfare; (2) the existence of peaceful societies falsifies the claim that humans possess adaptations for fighting; (3) if psychological adaptations for warfare exist, then war is an inevitable and universal component of the human condition; (4) modern warfare and international politics is so qualitatively different from ancestral politics that any adaptations for the latter are inoperative or irrelevant today. By outlining an evolutionary theory of war and clarifying key misunderstandings regarding this approach, international relations scholars are better positioned to understand, engage, and contribute to emerging scholarship on human warfare across the social and evolutionary sciences.

States have rights to unilaterally determine their own immigration policies under international law and few international institutions regulate states’ decision-making about immigration. As a result, states have extensive discretion over immigration policy. In this paper, I argue that states should join international migration institutions that would constrain their discretion over immigration. Immigration restrictions are morally risky. When states restrict immigration, they risk unjustly harming foreigners and restricting their freedom. Furthermore, biases and epistemic defects pervasively influence states’ decision-making about immigration policy. States should transfer some of their decision-making authority over immigration to more reliable institutions in order to mitigate the risks that they will unjustly restrict immigration. International institutions that include the interests of potential immigrants would be more reliable with respect to immigration policy than unilateral state decision-making. Thus, states should subject their immigration policies to international control.

While considerable attention is being accorded to emotions in International Relations, this article seeks to integrate empathy into these interdisciplinary debates. It counters the dominant assumption that empathy tends to be largely benign and beneficial by conceptualizing a typology of the costs of empathy. The dimensions of costs addressed are epistemological, cognitive, emotional, material, and embodied. I argue that these costs are frequently tangible for those who make the ethical-political choice to engage in empathy in situations of conflict and political violence. Drawing on social psychology approaches, empathy is located within a framework of collective narratives, emotions, and social structures shaped by both micro- and macro-political processes. A model of empathy, which acknowledges social influences and the psychological mechanisms through which these influences may be mediated, contributes to a deeper understanding of how politics, psychology, and culture shape empathy and, crucially, helps understand the conditions which may affect the successes, limitations, and failures of empathy in the (international) political sphere. The article offers empirical illustrations of the costs of empathy drawing on examples from Israel and Palestine.