My aim in this essay is to advance discussion of how to justify the sacrifices that reforms combating global poverty might entail for the world’s better-off. I begin from the assumption that we should not try to motivate such sacrifices solely through the hope that they will produce significant poverty gains. Instead, we should also explore whether the affluent actually have compelling moral claims to the goods that they might be asked to relinquish as part of certain global reforms. This alternative strategy forms the background for my discussion of two influential global reform proposals. The first proposal is to tax the natural resource wealth enjoyed by various affluent countries in order to ameliorate global poverty. The second proposal is to prohibit the resource corporations based in affluent democracies from purchasing natural resources controlled by extreme kleptocrats. I argue that once we examine the relationship between these proposals from a sacrifice-sensitive perspective, we find that they genuinely conflict with each other, and that there are sacrifice-related reasons to put aside the canonical proposal for a global redistribution of natural resource wealth.

Michael Zürn's A Theory of Global Governance is a major theoretical statement. The first section of this essay summarizes Zürn's argument, pointing out that his Global Politics Paradigm views contestation as generated endogenously from the dilemmas and contradictions of reflexive authority relationships. Authoritative international institutions, he maintains, have difficulty maintaining their legitimacy in a world suffused with democratic values. The second section systematically compares Zürn's Global Politics Paradigm with both Realism and Cooperation Theory, arguing that the three paradigms have different scope conditions and are therefore as much complementary as competitive. The third section questions the relevance of Zürn's argument to contemporary reality. Great power conflict and authoritarian populism in formerly democratic countries generate existential threats to multilateralism and global institutions that are more serious than Zürn's legitimacy deficits.

This paper examines the emergence of the corporeal turn in International Relations (IR) research on war. It argues that a lack of a sustained ontological investigation leaves open two theoretical gaps, which impedes the development of an embodied theory of war: (1) the core concept of a body and its linkages with war are underdeveloped, and (2) existing research on the embodiment of war slips into discursivism or empiricism. The paper invites the corporeal turn scholarship to bring ontology to the forefront of IR war research and to expand a pool of theoretical resources for analyzing the corporeality of war by turning to existential phenomenology. With the phenomenological concept of the lived body placed at the heart of war ontology, war is conceived as a complex social institution with the generative powers born out of the capacity of the violent politics of injury to disrupt the lived bodies' sense-making and agential capacities, on the one hand, and the potential of individuals and communities to reclaim their interpretive integrity and agency through embodied everyday practices, on the other.

This article is concerned with the debate about interdisciplinary methods in international law, in particular the turn to International Relations. It finds the historical critique of Martti Koskenniemi grounded in a more methodological issue: the turn toward a redefinition of norm properties impedes on the critical discursive quality of law. Shaping this historical critique into a research question that allows for meaningful engagement, the article discusses Koskenniemi’s charges drawing on recent constructivist scholarship. Giving an account of what it means to be ‘obliged’ to obey the law, this article defends the coherence of Koskenniemi’s position and suggests that we should take the critique of the interdisciplinary project between law and International Relations seriously. While it agrees that a significant part of the discourse fails to appreciate the particularities of the law, it suggests that understanding legal obligations requires taking the institutional autonomy of the law into account. Respecting this autonomy, in turn, points to a multi- instead of an interdisciplinary project. The reflexive formalist conception of the law that this article advocates captures the obligating nature of the law, independent of the normative content of particular rules.

This response to my critics discusses four claims that are central for A Theory of Global Governance. The first claim is that observing a high level of conflict and contestation in world politics is not proof of the unimportance of global governance, since many of the current conflicts and contestations are about international institutions. The second claim is that the 1990s saw a rise of trans- and international authority beyond the nation-state that is essential for the rise of a global political system. Third, a global system of loosely coupled spheres of authority relies on ‘critical deference’ (reflexive authority) but also contains numerous elements of coercion. And fourth, a technocratic legitimation of intrusive international authorities cannot build on emotions or a sense of belonging. This deficit creates a political opportunity structure that allows for the rise of a myriad of dissenters. The relative importance of them depends on the availability of resources for mobilization and not on the quality of reasons for resistance.

Part II responds to some of my critics' substantive concerns about QMASS. However, to sharpen that discussion I first introduce the idea of classical and quantum physical instantiation tests or ‘PITs’. PITs are a thought experiment taking advantage of the causal closure of physics. To encourage critical self-reflection on the usually tacit ontological assumptions of our theories, PITs invite social scientists to translate their mostly qualitative, folk psychological arguments into physical descriptions, meeting classical and quantum constraints respectively, to see which feels more appropriate to the case at hand. With this diagnostic tool in hand, the paper addresses criticisms of QMASS in five areas: (1) the threat of physics reductionism; (2) the potential for epistemic repression stemming from the realist nature of QMASS’ argument; (3) doubts that a quantum approach can support a genuine notion of human freedom; (4) the place of ethics and normativity in social and international life; and (5) implications for graduate methods training and quantum pedagogy more generally.

Deliberation has not only epistemic and moral value, it also has transformative value. Even if deliberation faces the problem of indeterminacy, it is assumed to have explanatory power. This article spells out why this is so and suggests a way to establish the causing effect of deliberation. It outlines a reason-based (RB) model of political decision-making applicable also to international affairs. By specifying a theory of argumentation on collective decision-making, we get to the nuts and bolts of deliberative decision-making, which, when supported by institutional powers, ensures a justified and well-grounded decision. The model contains a set of rules of inference and offers ‘mechanismic’ accounts of social events. It allows for explanations, but not predictions. The RB model conceives of decision-making as consisting of three sequences: claims-making, justification, and learning, each containing a set of explanatory mechanisms: values referring to conceptions of the common good, mandatory norms concerning the right thing to do, and evidence to the fact that non-compliance is wrong. The explanatory potential of this scheme is exemplified with reference to agreement making in the European Union. Some actors changed opinion voluntarily with regard to empowering the European parliament.

Within the political-economy of the social sciences, Area Studies (AS) is supposed to supply contextually-informed knowledge on (non-Western) areas to the other social sciences, in exchange for theory to guide further empirical investigations. Based on this assumption, there are regular calls for greater engagement with AS to counteract the shortcomings of International Relations’ (IR) knowledge-base on many areas, perspectives, and practices of the international. However, there has been little work empirically detailing knowledge-exchange practices between IR and AS, so it remains an open question if the relationship functions as an exchange of ‘international’ theory-for-‘area’ empirics. This paper provides a macro-sociological analysis of the practices of IR–AS knowledge-exchange. By focusing on citation practice, it moves beyond accounts that treat the two disciplines as ‘black boxes’, to trace which parts of the ‘dividing discipline’ of IR are active in exchanging knowledge with which ‘area’ scholarships. Hence, it asks: Are there ‘area’ blindspots in IR's knowledge-production? And, what type of IR theory is exported to AS? This analysis informs an assessment of whether AS represents a significant resource for IR in its efforts to, one, better inform its knowledge-production about ‘other’ areas of the international, and two, assert its disciplinary-relevance within the academy.

The proliferation, globalization, and fragmentation of law in world politics have fostered an attempt to re-integrate International Law (IL) and International Relations (IR) scholarship, but so far the contribution of realist theory to this interdisciplinary perspective has been meagre. Combining intellectual history, the jurisprudence of IL and IR theory, this article provides an analysis of John H. Herz’s classical realism and its perspective on international law. In retrieving this vision, the article emphasizes the political and intellectual context from which Herz’s realism developed: the study of public law in Germany during the interwar period and in particular the contribution of Hans Kelsen and the pure theory of law to the study of international law. Herz was deeply inspired by Kelsen but he criticized the pure theory for ignoring the sociological foundations of law. Following his emigration to the United States, Herz embraced realism but without disregarding international law. Indeed, his mature, globally oriented realism offers a balanced, fruitful perspective for thinking about the relationship between politics and law that is deeply relevant for contemporary theory: it challenges modern, law-blind variants of realism and holds considerable potential for contributing to the approaches that have most successfully studied the law–politics nexus.

International cooperation often requires costly policy adjustments. States may worry, however, that such adjustments weaken their outside options, and thus reduce their bargaining power. How does uncertainty about the effects of policy adjustments on outside options influence the depth of cooperation that states can achieve? My game-theoretic analysis shows that uncertainty about outside options is an obstacle to deep cooperation. If states agree on deep cooperation, they have to compensate vulnerable states with weak outside options for their losses. Under uncertainty, states that are not vulnerable have an incentive to falsely claim that they are vulnerable (i) to avoid a side payment or (ii) to obtain compensation for being vulnerable. The result holds even if the added value of deep cooperation would be large enough to fully compensate the losers. In equilibrium, the more vulnerable state sometimes offers a side payment to the less vulnerable one. More broadly, the analysis reveals a new international cooperation problem and provides a new rationale for costly signaling mechanisms and delegation to international organizations.

This article focusses on the concept of decision and its significance for identity politics. Constructivist scholarship established long ago that identity and foreign policy are mutually constitutive and that difference and othering are key for the production of identities. As a consequence, constructivist literature on EU foreign policy has focussed on the role of specific others and explored how interaction with them shapes the EU’s identity. Our article turns the attention back inside and looks at the hegemonic struggles around the purpose and meaning of the European project. By analyzing the EU’s reaction to the Libyan events in 2011, we demonstrate how a major international crisis dislocates the identities involved and unleashes a struggle for hegemony between conflicting discursive articulations. Eventually this conflict is resolved through a political decision, which reconfigures the entire ‘global’ outlook on Europe and its role in the world. By defining decision along poststructuralist lines, as distinct from the conventional literature on decision-making, we demonstrate that the use of this conceptual prism helps deepen our understanding of how othering and bordering work to produce and reshape identities. By doing that, we seek to contribute to a better understanding of how identities change in time.

The Lisbon Treaty from 2009 introduced the possibility for individual member states to withdraw from the European Union (EU) on the basis of a unilateral decision. In June 2016 the United Kingdom decided to leave the EU invoking article 50 of the treaty. But is withdrawal democratically legitimate? In fact, the all-affected principle suggests that it is undemocratic for subunits to leave larger political units when it adversely affects other citizens without including them in the decision. However, it is unclear what the currency of this affectedness is and, hence, why withdrawal would be undemocratic. We argue that it is the effect of withdrawal on the status of citizens as free and equal that is decisive and that explains why unilateral withdrawal of subunits from larger units is democratically illegitimate. Moreover, on the ‘all-affected status principle’ that we develop, even multilaterally agreed withdrawal is undemocratic because the latter diminishes the future ability of citizens to make decisions together regarding issues that affect their status as free and equal. On this basis, we conclude that it is undemocratic for a member state such as the United Kingdom to withdraw from the EU.

‘Why did they do that?’ is one of the most common questions in International Relations. However, we cannot access other people’s reasons for action the same way that we perceive our own; we cannot introspect the reasons of other actors. This paper provides a unifying framework that delineates different types of knowledge claims regarding reason attribution. There are three possible methodological responses: (1) assume a possible reason and explain behavior in terms of that reason; (2) avoid the direct attribution of reason to individuals and locate explanatory leverage at an analytical level beyond the individual actor reason; and (3) use empirical evidence to adjudicate between possible reasons. Excessive skepticism of evidence of reasons lessens our understanding of the causes of action. When using empirical evidence, contrary to existing arguments, the paper shows that private settings do not systematically favor the true revelation of reasons. The paper also proposes a general principle, consilience, that allows evaluation of empirical claims of reason attribution that subsumes several existing methodological considerations, organizes them, and gives a consistent means of choosing between alternative reason attributions.

This article explores norms as idealizations, in an attempt to grasp their significance as projects for international organizations. We can think about norms as ‘standards of proper behaviour’. In this sense they are somehow natural, things to be taken for granted, noticed only really when they are absent. We can also think about norms as ‘understandings about what is good and appropriate’. In this sense, norms embody a stronger sense of virtue and an ability to enable progress or improvement. Norms become ideal when they are able to conflate what is good with what is appropriate, standard, or proper. It is when the good becomes ‘natural’ that a norm appears immanent and non-contestable, and so acquires an idealized form.45 Along with the other articles in this special issue, I will attempt to challenge some of the complacency surrounding the apparent naturalness and universality of norms employed in international relations.

Kratochwil's magnificent The Status of Law in World Society's first meditation, a philosophical discursus masquerading as a meditation about meditation, addresses how International Law and International Relations deal so differently with their common concerns. Kratochwil treats these concerns with his usual cogency. Yet, critical links are missing. How do we get from speaking as a normative practice to the status of law in today's world? How does language (even more than law) go from an ‘agency-related notion’ to ‘a pervasive force penetrating all social relations’? The bewitchment of the world through language is ontology's greatest mystery, worthy of endless meditation.

Considering the recent ‘temporal turn’ in International Relations scholarship, this article proposes that space and time are concepts that ‘thicken’ one another in several ways, with significant implications for understanding foreign policy and world politics. In the discourse of security and governance, space–time frames work together to facilitate and legitimize certain policies, actions, and reactions, and imply distinct perspectives on ethics. Drawing on the examples of United States (US) drone use, reactions to the event that has become known as ‘Benghazi’, and fears of the global spread of disease, this study investigates how temporal and spatial framings conceptualize effective and ethical security and governance. Arguing that space–time frames take shape from the resonance of political, theoretical, and cultural texts, four frames are elaborated including ‘space–time liberations’, ‘space–time oppressions’, ‘space–time strategics’, and ‘space–time reflexivities’. The article concludes by suggesting that contradictions and tensions between the frames along with postcolonial and decolonial perspectives can be leveraged to interrogate and displace dominant notions of pace and space in the practice and study of world politics, and that this is a form of scholarly and political reflexivity.

Alexander Wendt claims that quantum physics explains deep mysteries about human consciousness and offers a radical new understanding of human behavior and social interaction. However, the claims rest on flawed interpretations of quantum theory, fringe literatures and metaphorical, almost mystical uses of quantum concepts and buzzwords. He fails to provide any account of human conflict, and defends an almost theological view of the importance of humanity in the universe that is incompatible with a scientific perspective.