It is widely recognized among state leaders and diplomats that personal relations play an important role in international politics. Recent work at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and sociology has highlighted the critical importance of face-to-face interactions in generating intention understanding and building trust. Yet, a key question remains as to why some leaders are able to ‘hit it off,’ generating a positive social bond, while other interactions ‘fall flat,’ or worse, are mired in negativity. To answer, we turn to micro-sociology – the study of everyday human interactions at the smallest scales – an approach that has theorized this question in other domains. Drawing directly from US sociologist Randall Collins, and related empirical studies on the determinants of social bonding, we develop a model of diplomatic social bonding that privileges interaction elements rather than the dispositional characteristics of the actors involved or the material environment in which the interaction takes place. We conclude with a discussion of how the study of interpersonal dyadic bonding interaction may move forward.

This article uses the concept of international practices to explore the distinctions between human rights and humanitarianism in the contemporary period and, in turn, uses this exploration to comment on the concept of international practices. First section proposes to advance the theoretical and empirical utility of the concept of practices by parsing it into the ‘problem’ that sets the story in motion, what counts as competent action, background knowledge, and meanings. Second section applies this framework to the relationship between human rights and humanitarianism. Beginning in the 1990s, they began responding to many of the same material realities, which unleashed two, interrelated, processes, but had different ways of understanding competent action, background knowledge, and meanings. They began to revise their practices not only in response to new challenges but also to how the other evolved, generating new distinctions. These points of distinction were structured by different kinds of suffering and informed their contrasting narratives of precarity in the case of humanitarianism, and progress in human rights. The conclusion considers how this discussion of human rights and humanitarianism redirects contemporary research on international practices.

To analyze how authority emerges, become institutionalized, and may be transformed, we are best served with a concept of authority that highlights its dynamic features, and that captures the multiplicity of actors involved in producing and sustaining it. Extant accounts tend to operate with a view of ‘solid’ authority, but such a concept of authority is mainly descriptive, not explanatory. A turn to the liquid features of authority is not only better suited to account for global authority, but also for those pockets of ‘solid’ authority that we can find in the global or international sphere. I develop an account of authority that draws selectively from some of Bourdieu’s core concepts and highlight the inherently relational aspect of authority. Authority, I submit, is based on actors’ search for recognition. Such a perspective is better able to account for how authority emerges and may stabilize as ‘solid,’ and also be transformed over time. I draw on examples from the World Health Organization and the UN Security Council to illustrate the argument.

In this article I consider what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘-ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’, where the particular of subjective, embodied experiences are foregrounded rather than erased in the theorising. What the postcolonial has to offer are ex-centred, post-Eurocentric sites for practices of situated critique. This casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key epistemological schemes with which these have been studied in international relations (IR), such as ‘norms’. In this perspective colonisation appears as a foundational shaper of these orders, to a degree and with effects still under-appraised in the discipline. The postcolonial perspective is thus deeply historical, or rather genealogical, in its dual concerns with, first, the genesis of norms, or the processes by which particular behaviours come to be taken to be ‘normal’. Second, it is centrally concerned with the power relations implicated in the (re)drawing of boundaries between the normal and the strange or the unacceptable. Together, these concerns effectively shift the analysis of the ideational processes underpinning international orders from ‘norms’ to the dynamic and power-laden mechanisms of ‘normalisation’. In addition, I show how theorising international politics from a postcolonial perspective has implications for IR’s conceptions of time, identity, and its relationship to difference, as well as agency.

When ontological insecurity looms, what comes next? Is chaos the sole alternative to the maintenance of established role-identities and routines? Or is there a more complex set of possible responses to the dread threat of ontological insecurity? The principal approach to ontological security in International Relations (IR) relies unduly on Giddens' account. Consequently, this approach fails to adequately capture both the variety of ways in which coherent and continuous identities can be maintained and the variety of ways in which the available cultural repertoire can support ontological security differently when challenged. Typically, ontological security is re-established, prior to collapse, through re-balancing of the cultural repertoire to give broader scope to an alternative cultural form and the qualitatively different practices it organizes. Due to misrecognition, this reorganization may proceed without disturbing the ontological security of states-in-interaction. Unconscious processes, encoded into cultural forms, are integral to such variable defenses against ontological insecurity. A re-conceptualization that regards Wendt's cultures of anarchy, and their qualitatively different modes of relating, as dynamically co-present within cultural repertoires, but with potentially variable weightings, complements this approach to ontological in/security.

The insights of social psychology are not thoroughly integrated into international relations theory, yet social psychology has much to offer. Social psychology provides a conceptualization of a number of varieties of trust – moralistic, strategic, and generalized – and their opposites that implicitly drive the logic of major works of international relations. It also reveals the empirical presence of a number of different types of trusters who make different assumptions about the trustworthiness of others and consequently show markedly different propensities towards cooperation. The rough correspondence between these different ‘social orientations’ and the logics of the three approaches of structural realism, neoliberal institutionalism, and constructivism suggest that individuals carry a crude paradigm in their minds. Metatheoretically, the implication for international relations theory is that scholars capture a part but not the totality of world politics, the behavior of those who trust (or do not trust) in a particular way that matches the logic of their paradigms. Theoretically it suggests a research agenda at multiple levels of analysis, utilizing all of the types of trust and trusters. I review the work of others that offers some preliminary evidence for its plausibility, suggest some hypotheses of my own, and address potential theoretical objections.

This article proposes an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School theory of securitization in International Relations. In contrast to existing attempts to show how, suitably elaborated, this model can be ‘applied’ to various non-Western contexts, our anthropological strategy is to use the contingency of empirical materials (namely the Cuban Revolution and the political forms it instantiates) as a means for transforming the basic coordinates of the model itself. The argument involves two main steps. First we relativize the Copenhagen School model, showing the contingency of its premises. In its paradigmatic form, we argue, the model is liberal in that its abiding concern with states of emergency turns on an ontological distinction between political subjects (e.g. people) and political structures (e.g. state). By contrast, revolutionary politics in Cuba concertedly rescinds just this distinction, to bring about an alternative, non-liberal political ontology. We then go on to use the Cuban case to construct an alternative model of securitization, which we call revolutionary. On this model, the move of securitization pertains, not to a passage from ordinary politics into a realm of emergency, but to a deliberate ontological fusion of the two, such that rule and exception also become coterminous.

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.

This article defends a sentimentalist cosmopolitan approach to international ethics against the rationalist cosmopolitan claim that emotions ought to be subjugated by their master, reason, and in processes of ethical deliberation. It argues that emotions play an indispensable role in making moral judgements and help to motivate ethical actions. Drawing on elements of 18th century moral sentiment theory and recent advances in neuroscience and psychology, the article demonstrates that reason and emotion are intimately linked forms of reflective thought, that emotion is central to reason and, far from disrupting processes of ethical deliberation, may actually enhance our ability to make moral judgements. Focusing on the problem of global poverty, the article shows that a sentimentalist cosmopolitan ethic provides a holistic approach to moral dilemmas in world politics that is capable of identifying injustices, prescribing how we ought to respond to them, and motivating ethical action in response to the injustices we observe.

In this article, we begin to extend ontological security to third-image theorizing. We argue that the autobiographical conceptions of international agents, along with other stories told about international politics, constitute ‘the international’ as a system, society, community, or inhabitable realm beyond and between first- and second-image relations. To develop this point, we focus on the relationship between narrative, anxiety, and time. We contend that ontological security issues resound in the third image once we shift from treating the international realm as social agents' external environment to treating it as a collective project in its own right. Doing so highlights the promise of ontological security studies for further differentiating international fear and anxiety, for enabling novel explanations of international phenomena, and for elaborating third-image identity formation as a wide-ranging timing effort to surmount a dynamic, processual environment full of interconnected coordination challenges.

Globalization, foreign intervention, and failed states have drawn new attention to theoretical issues of how political orders and communities can be legitimately founded, and what it means for a people to be self-governing. In this article, I will challenge an argument in this debate saying that the founding of new political orders is always in some sense illegitimate insofar as it cannot be decided democratically. In opposition to this view, I will suggest that the founding of political orders is legitimate even from a democratic point of view when decided together by people within as well as beyond the boundaries inherent in the foundation. In case of persisting disagreement over boundary issues, political decisions can still derive democratic legitimacy from global procedures that are equally inclusive of everyone capable of contesting those decisions. Elaborating on the implications of this argument, I will also reject the notion that foreign interventions for establishing democracy are themselves necessarily illegitimate or undemocratic.

Commentary on the United Nations (UN) reform efforts of 2004–05 has broadly followed two different trajectories. International lawyers and political theorists have focused on the implications of reform for sovereignty as a fundamental principle of international law and international relations. International Relations (IR) scholars have discussed reform focusing on state power and the UN’s institutional authority. Against the background of these debates and drawing on Foucault’s political theory and related IR scholarship, this article argues that UN reform discourse indicates a biopolitical ‘reprogramming’ of contemporary sovereignty and global governance. The analysis ‘displaces’ the concerns with sovereignty, state power, and institutional authority by demonstrating that UN reform (also) constitutes the UN as a project of managing and regulating the global population through a variety of securitizing, economizing, and normalizing rationalities and techniques. The article illustrates this by pointing to the biopolitical rationales of reform conceptions of human security and collective security, and to (neo)liberal governmentalities of risk and responsibility, contractualism, benchmarking, and networks. It thereby challenges the conceptual and normative priority accorded to juridical sovereignty in international law, and to state- and institution-centric accounts in IR theorizations of UN-relayed global governance.

While IR’s Eurocentric limits are usually acknowledged, what those limits mean for theorizing about the international is seldom clarified. In The Global Transformation, Buzan and Lawson offer a ‘composite approach’ that goes some way towards addressing IR’s Eurocentrism, challenging existing myths about the emergence and evolution of the international system and society. This paper seeks to push the contribution made by Buzan and Lawson in two further directions: first, by underscoring the need to adopt a deeper understanding of Eurocentrism; and second, by highlighting how this understanding helps us recognize what is missing from IR theorizing – conceptions of the international by ‘others’ who also constitute the international. I illustrate this point by focussing on a landmark text on Ottoman history, Ortaylı’s The Longest Century of the Empire.

The article analyzes the contested concept of global health through the lens of orders of worth. Drawing on pragmatist political and social theory, especially the work of Boltanski and Thévenot, I conceptualize orders of worth as moral narratives that connect visions of universal humankind to ideas about moral worth and deficiency. They thereby differ from the self/other narrative of political identity that is emphasized in International Relations scholarship. Orders of worth do not pitch a particularistic identity against foreign identities, but tie collective identity to a higher common good. They provide tools for moral evaluation and the justification of hierarchy. I use this heuristic to reconstruct four main conceptions of health in global politics: The order of survival, the order of fairness, the order of production, and the order of spirit. Each of them articulates a distinct political identity, as ‘we species’, ‘we liberals’, ‘we bodies’ and ‘we souls’, and implies different notions of virtuous and selfish conduct in the global community. These orders are derived from scholarly writings and the policies of global health institutions. Finally, I discuss the nature of compromises between the four orders regarding contested issues such as health emergencies or digital medicine.

As emerging powers rise and established powers decline, international institutions come under pressure to adjust to new power realities. When and how do international institutions adapt to underlying global power shifts? We propose an (institutionalist) theory of strategic co-optation that differs from both (realist) accommodationist and (liberal) integrationist theories. Drawing on isolated treatments of strategic co-optation from other domains – domestic and international, autocratic and democratic, past and present – we develop a theory of strategic co-optation as a mode of institutional adaption to shifts in the global distribution of power. The theory specifies the concept, the conditions and the (unintended) consequences of strategic co-optation. We conceptualize co-optation as a specific form of adaptation where established powers trade institutional privileges for emerging powers' institutional support. We theorize the conditions under which emerging and established powers are (more or less) likely to strike a co-optation deal. In addition, we identify endogenous dynamics that may render co-optation precarious and thus subject to instabilities. While the ambition of this paper is primarily theoretical, we provide various empirical illustrations of how strategic co-optation is used to adapt international institutions to contemporary shifts in the global distribution of power.

How does the understanding of time and temporality in international relations (IR) shape the study of international politics? IR is centrally concerned with the study of issues such as armed conflict, but wars are events – a series of occurrences that only come into being through their relationship across time. The concept of time at work in the understanding of this event thus plays an inextricable role in the scholarship produced. IR shares an understanding of time that pervades (traditional) social science and is based on the Western notion of clock-time. This conception of time encourages a spatiotemporal model of the past that epistemologically privileges temporal understandings that value generalizable, time-invariant theory and discount temporal fluidity and context. These temporal commitments operate at a deep level, informing and shaping theory construction in important ways and de-emphasizing alternative approaches that may more accurately reflect the contingency of international events, discontinuities in political practice, and the radical shifts in international structures, which are often most in need of scholarly analysis. This article concludes that by treating temporality as a stand-alone issue, IR can better model and predict international political practices.