Current approaches for understanding and analyzing religion in international politics insufficiently incorporate the role of ethics in the practices of religious actors. Primordialist approaches essentialize religion, instrumental approaches consider it to be an epiphenomenon, and cosmopolitan approaches a priori downgrade alternative ethical constructs as insufficiently universalist. An approach to religion that begins with a constitutive understanding of religious belief and economic, social, and political practice as outlined in Weber’s Sociology of Religion, is more helpful. However, because Weber’s method insufficiently addresses ethical intentionality, the ‘neo-Weberian’ approach I advance here incorporates the concepts of ‘common good’ and ‘popular casuistry’ into socio-historical contextualization. This approach provides a way to understand and theorize how religious adherents connect religious guidelines to moral action that avoids the essentialization of religion which is often characteristic of other perspectives.

The ongoing Schmitt revival has extended Carl Schmitt's reach over the fields of international legal and political theory. Neo-Schmittians suggest that his international thought provides a new reading of the history of international law and order, which validates the explanatory power of his theoretical premises – the concept of the political, political decisionism, and concrete-order-thinking. Against this background, this article mounts a systematic reappraisal of Schmitt's international thought in a historical perspective. The argument is that his work requires re-contextualization as the intellectual product of an ultra-intense moment in Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. It inscribed Hitler's ‘spatial revolution’ into a full-scale reinterpretation of Europe's geopolitical history, grounded in land appropriations, which legitimized Nazi Germany's wars of conquest. Consequently, Schmitt's elevation of the early modern nomos as the model for civilized warfare – the ‘golden age’ of international law – against which American legal universalism can be portrayed as degenerated, is conceptually and empirically flawed. Schmitt devised a politically motivated set of theoretical premises to provide a historical counter-narrative against liberal normativism, which generated defective history. The reconstruction of this history reveals the explanatory limits of his theoretical vocabulary – friend/enemy binary, sovereignty-as-exception, nomos/universalism – for past and present analytical purposes. Schmitt's defective analytics and problematic history compromise the standing of his work for purposes of international theory.

The article explores the notion of liquid authority by examining the ways in which the central organizations in three transnational regulatory-governance regimes do or do not attempt to establish interpretive control over the norms that they issue: the International Accounting Standards Board, the International Organisation of Standardisation, and the Forest Stewardship Council. The need to ‘solidify’ their authority ranges across all of their regulatory functions; this article focusses on just one of those functions: interpretation. In focussing on how these regulators seek to exercise interpretive control, the article seeks to show how liquid authority can crystallize. Further, the article develops the notion of liquid authority by arguing that the establishment, exercise, and continual maintenance of authority in transnational regulatory regimes, which are characterized by liquid authority as they lack a formal, legal base, are fundamentally linked to the issue of legitimacy. It argues in turn that legitimacy, and thus authority, is endogenously produced, a fact which exogenous, normative assessments of legitimacy can overlook. The article argues that regulators play an active role in their own legitimation – in creating, exercising, and maintaining their legitimacy, and in turn their authority, and that their success or otherwise in doing so is linked in part to their functional effectiveness, but that transnational regulators face a legitimacy paradox: they depend in part on such effectiveness for their legitimacy. The article supplements the ‘anatomical’ analysis of liquid authority with an understanding of the physiology of legitimation.

Compassion is a key moral emotion of liberal modernity. Traditionally, it is seen as an unproblematic moral compass, both theoretically and ethico-politically. This applies especially in the case of humanitarian action, which hinges on the compassionate impulses of individuals – to care, to give and to act – in the face of distant suffering. The article takes a critical approach to compassion. It argues that humanitarian action is incomprehensible outside of a general theory of how compassion structures the encounter between the suffering object of relief and the caring public. It does this by elaborating a pragmatist and eclectic approach to compassion in which seemingly internal affective responses have a socio-political existence and are already enabled by productive power, in particular by socially circulated and embodied narrative frames. By engaging a representative sample of NGO imagery related to the 2010 post-earthquake response in Haiti, the article illustrates not only how specific narrative frames seek to both elicit and govern the ways of feeling compassion, but also how these aesthetic and emotional practices are ethico-politically problematic in portraying distant sufferers and facilitating action. As a result, the benevolent self-image of compassion becomes circumspect. The article concludes by exploring two alternative avenues for compassion and caring.

How do individual actors figure out what to do? This article advocates a departure from carving up research on this key question about political agency into narrow scholarly categories. Such categories, especially what has to become framed as incompatible logics of action in International Relations Theory, may make for neat and tidy scholarly boxes. But they miss the winding roads through which actors come to embark on a course of action. In order to overcome this shortcoming, I start with uncovering an important clue on which authors adhering to different logics of action converge; political agency has a lot to do with making judgements. I proceed with conceptualizing political judgement broadly in terms of subsuming particulars and universals. I follow-up with outlining a map for empirical research on judgement that helps us follow the actors in how they figure out what to do (the agent's logics of action) rather than superimposing our narrow scholarly categories on their reasoning (a scholarly logic of action). Scrutinizing the usefulness of this map, finally, I analyse McNamara's exercise of political agency during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The findings underline my overall argument: the inclusive conceptualization of political judgement, coupled with the balance of theoretical and empirical inquiry that the research map facilitates, improves on our understandings of how actors figure out what to do.

This article appeals to classical realism for new insights into the role emotions play in shifting the terrain of political allegiance in global politics. Although undetected in readings emphasizing rational statecraft, realists such as Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr were centrally concerned with human emotions and their political impact. While following the intellectual currents of their time in regarding emotions as fixed impulses, these realists’ deep appreciation for the contingencies of history also led them to cast emotions as socially conditioned mechanisms of adaptation. By revisiting the texts of classical realism, this paper develops a fresh account of how emotion responds to and engenders change in the social world – in particular, change in the location of political allegiances. I then show how Morgenthau and Niebuhr applied these ideas not only to the nation-state but also to the most vexing transnational phenomena of their time – communism and liberal internationalism. In conclusion, the paper speculates that these reflections on dynamic allegiances at the transnational level offer realists and other international relation theorists insight into the emotional appeal, adaptability, and organizational complexity of contemporary non-state movements and actors.

Most Realists today oppose far-reaching global reform on the grounds that it represents unrealistic and potentially irresponsible ‘utopianism’. An earlier generation of mid-century Realists, however, not only supported serious efforts at radical international reform but also developed a theoretically impressive model for how to bring it about. They considered the possibility of post-national political orders and ultimately a world state as desirable long-term goals, but only if reformers could simultaneously generate the thick societal background (or what they called ‘supranational society’) required by any viable order ‘beyond the nation state’. As they fail to engage constructively with proposals for global reform, present-day Realists betray their own intellectual tradition. By reconsidering the subterranean legacy of Realist reformism as advanced by mid-century international thinkers (e.g. E.H. Carr, John Herz, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Frederick Schuman), the essay provides a revisionist reading of the history of twentieth-century international theory, while also highlighting its significance for ongoing debates about global reform.

Scholars of global governance have made much use of the public–private distinction in their exploration of the power of non-state actors and the constitution of authority beyond the state. But is this distinction analytically adequate? We subject the public–private distinction to analytical scrutiny and argue that it does not hold when analysing phenomena beyond the domestic setting. State actors are universal at the domestic level, but they are particularistic at the global level, being responsible primarily to its territorially defined constituency. The difference between public and private actors qua participants in global governance is thus overstated. We differentiate between public as a category of analysis and a category of practice. As a category of analysis, public denotes a particular configuration of accountability and capacity, which can, in principle, be found at the global level. As a category of practice, public is a claim to universality and responsibility that different types of actors use to legitimize what they do. We illustrate the added value of this conceptualization through a discussion of possibly emerging global public actors, and of how actors’ claim to ‘publicness’ in an incomplete public sphere serves to conceal their particularistic character, thereby undermining ‘publicness’ at the global level.

Can concerns for one’s reputation cause non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to alter their behavior to the detriment of achieving their policy goals? To answer this question, we explore the relationship between NGOs and their donors. Our theoretical model reveals that reputation can be a key piece of information in the decision to fund an NGO’s activities. Reputation can become so important to the NGO’s survival that it interferes with the long-term policy goals of the organization. As such, reputations can become a double-edged sword, simultaneously providing the information donors seek while constraining NGOs from realizing policy goals. We apply this logic to the problem of NGO accountability, which has received increasing attention in recent years, and demonstrate that the tools used by donors to improve accountability can trigger unintended consequences. We illustrate this strategic dynamic with two types of NGO activity: water improvement and international crisis mediation.

Is there a ‘democratic deficit’ in global politics? If so, which changes in institutions and practices can mitigate it? Empirically oriented scholars who ask such questions often use as a yardstick the normative principle that people significantly affected by a decision should be able to take part in reaching that decision. This ‘all-affected principle’ is also endorsed by prominent political theorists. However, its most logically consistent interpretation seems so demanding that it casts doubt on the principle’s usefulness to guide the assessment of real-world situations, since it appears to require that virtually everyone in the world should have a say on any proposal or any proposal for proposals. The argument presented here intends to rescue the principle as a tool for empirical assessments of real-world situations by stressing its role in comparative judgments and especially by showing that its implications are not too expansive and/or indeterminate, once we take into account that certain types of prior decisions significantly restrict the agenda of other decisions in a systematic way. The theoretical guidance for empirical research offered in the first part of the article is then illustrated with an application to global child labor policies.

This article develops a reason-based social foundation of new forms of authority, which often are liquid and sectorally limited. The recognition of authority hinges, in this view, on reflexive actors who are aware of their own limits of rationality regarding the lack of either information or a perspective that allows for the pursuit of common goods. In such a reflexive concept of authority, authority takers tend to monitor the authorities closely, and the internalization of the subordinate role is not a necessary part of it. Reflexive authority is embedded in the acceptance of a knowledge order that reproduces the authority relationship. In spite of a tendency toward institutionalization, reflexive authority often comes in a liquid state of aggregation, and almost always with a restricted functional scope. Moreover, this new set-up of authority creates social dynamics that add to liquidity. First, the encompassing constitutionalized rule with majoritarian decision making as major source of legitimacy is increasingly undermined by loosely coupled spheres of specialized authorities, which are most often justified on the basis of expertise. We can observe both the rise of international authorities in the absence of coordination between them, and the rise of similar authorities within the nation state that escape control of the democratic core institutions. As a result, authority gets fragmented and different authorities need to adjust to each other. The second implication of the argument is that democratic legitimation narratives become rare, leading to an ongoing legitimatory contestation of authorities. Both these processes make authority even more liquid.

Effective argumentation in international politics is widely conceived as a matter of persuasion. In particular, the ‘logic of arguing’ ascribes explanatory power to the ‘better argument’ and promises to illuminate the conditions of legitimate normative change. This article exposes the self-defeating implications of the Habermasian symbiosis between the normative and the empirical force of arguments. Since genuine persuasion is neither observable nor knowable, its analysis critically depends on what scholars consider to be the better argument. Seemingly, objective criteria such as universality only camouflage such moral reification. The paradoxical consequence of an explanatory concept of arguing is that moral discourse is no longer conceptualized as an open-ended process of contestation and normative change, but has recently been recast as a governance mechanism ensuring the compliance of international actors with pre-defined norms. This dilemma can be avoided through a positivist reification of valid norms, as in socialization research, or by adopting a critical and emancipatory focus on the obstacles to true persuasion. Still, both solutions remain dependent on the ‘persuasion vs. coercion’ problem that forestalls an insight into successful justificatory practices other than rational communication. The conclusion therefore pleas for a pragmatic abstention from better arguments and points to the insights to be gained from pragmatist norms research in sociology.

While the strategic objectives of those who organize suicide terrorism may be explained in rationalist terms, the choice of those who volunteer to be candidates for death is far more problematic, given the high premium, at least within international relations theory, on survival as the ultimate rational end. The rational choice model also makes it difficult to take language or emotion into account as factors in constituting the meaning of the act. This article begins with an observation: In Western discourse the acts of human bombs tend to be referred to as ‘suicide terrorism’ or ‘suicide bombings’; by contrast the terminology of ‘martyrdom operations’ is more prevalent in the Arab and Muslim Middle East, or among Islamists in the West. The first section of the paper examines the importance of context for understanding the rationality of an action. The second explores ‘martyrdom’ and ‘suicide’ as two distinct frameworks for giving meaning to an act of voluntary death in the post-9/11 world, and the emotional dynamics that link these two ‘games’ to a larger structural logic. The third section further develops the structural logic that emerges from the interaction of the two. The conclusions analyse the significance of this argument for rethinking both the structural dynamics of this international context, as well as the theoretical model of games.

This article considers the question of whether and to what degree citizens are responsible collectively for the actions of their state. In contrast to current accounts of collective responsibility, which focus on causality or affect as means for transmitting responsibility, the article develops an alternative account, the ‘authorized state’ model. This model, drawn from core intuitions of the social contract tradition, sees collective responsibility as being transmitted through the state as the agent or representative of its citizens. Having developed this model as an ideal type, the article then assesses under what circumstances the model is most applicable. The article finally applies the model to the US war in Iraq to assess the collective responsibility of US citizens for the outcomes of that war.

Current economic and political developments spotlight the relationship between domestic and global governance and the impact of globalization on both. A key question is whether a sovereign state system, democratic governments, and an integrated global marketplace can coexist. The paper assesses analytic materialist arguments for their incompatibility and the key assumptions on which they rest. The paper describes the extant pressures operating to limit each of the three: how sovereignty and democracy work to constrain globalization, how globalization and sovereignty generate a democratic deficit, and how globalization and democracy lead to limitations upon, and even the transcendence of, sovereignty. How to make the three compatible, and failing that, which facet to restrain, characterizes political contestation in a globalizing age. Global and domestic governance reflect the need to reconcile the combined implications of globalization, sovereignty, and democracy, and to do so by restraining, limiting, or transforming one or more of these features.

The aim of this article is to provide a postcolonial reading of norms in international politics. Focusing specifically on the question of postcolonial agency, the article argues that the constructivist literature provides a distinctive spatial and temporal ordering of the ‘international’ that on the one hand can be seen to attribute agency to the postcolonial subject, while on the other can easily be interpreted as denying a presence for this subject. An alternative reading suggests that postcolonial agency is not only constituted by the international and its normative construction, but is also constituting, having the capacity to variously subvert and transform, but within limits. While some constructivist thinkers, primary among them being Christian Reus-Smit, recognise the normative order of the international as historically contested terrain, and where such contestation testifies to the role of the postcolonial world, how this role is articulated, and in what terms it is understood pose distinct challenges for understandings of agency and the constitution of the international. Focusing on Homi Bhabha and Franz Fanon, the article looks to how postcolonial thought can be mobilised to respond to this challenge, and to point to an alternative conception of the transformative potential of postcolonial agency. The turn to Bhabha and Fanon reveals such potential in both discursive and material terms so that where Bhabha can be said to frame agency and the terrain of the international in hybrid ideational terms, complementing Reus-Smit’s understanding of what can be termed the ‘postcolonial international’, Fanon’s more radical materialist ontology envisages agency in terms of embodied presence. This mobilisation of postcolonial thought provides the theoretical tools for conceptualising postcolonial subjectivity and articulations of agency in relation to the international and its constitution.

In the past two decades, calls for International Relations (IR) to ‘turn’ have multiplied. Having reflected on Philosophy's own linguistic turn in the 1980s and 1990s, IR appears today in the midst of taking – almost simultaneously – a range of different turns, from the aesthetic to the affective, from the historical to the practice, from the new material to the queer. This paper seeks to make sense of this puzzling development. Building on Bourdieu's sociology of science, we argue that although the turns ostensibly bring about (or resuscitate) ambitious philosophical, ontological, and epistemological questions to challenge what is deemed to constitute the ‘mainstream’ of IR, their impact is more likely to be felt at the ‘margins’ of the discipline. From this perspective, claiming a turn constitutes a position-enhancing move for scholars seeking to accumulate social capital, understood as scientific authority, and become ‘established heretics’ within the intellectual subfield of critical IR. We therefore expect the proliferation of turns to reshape more substantively what it means to do critical IR, rather than turning the whole discipline on its head.

This article shows that Andrew Moravcsik’s ‘nonideological’ formulation of a liberal theory of international relations is itself deeply ideological – both in terms of his own criteria and in terms of a broader conception of ideology. The source of this outcome lies in Moravcsik’s mistaken conception of ideology. While ideological knowledge is indeed particular rather than general, it shares this feature with all political knowledge. In the political sphere, it is therefore not general knowledge that transcends the limits of ideology but rather an explicit engagement with these limits. A nonideological study of liberalism would thus require an historical account of the origins and development of liberalism in the context of its struggle with internal and external competitors. While such a study would not constitute a liberal theory of international relations in general, it would provide a general theory of liberal international relations – and would thus be highly relevant in the context of a liberal world order.