This contribution probes A Theory of Global Governance from a materialist perspective. I focus on three forms of materialisms that have played a significant role in social theory as well as International Relations theory: the materialisms of markets, of artefacts, and of embodied affects. Integrating these materialisms serves to unsettle the conceptualization of global governance and of the politics of authority, legitimacy, and contestation underpinning it. A materialist perspective moves the theory of global governance towards a focus on processes instead of institutions, allowing it to capture both the multiple forms of global governance and their increasingly rapidly shifting forms. The contribution is anchored in a discussion of the global governance of cyber-security.

IR scholars have made increasingly sophisticated use of historical analysis in the last two decades. To do so, they have appealed to theories or philosophies of history, tacitly or explicitly. However, the plurality of approaches to these theories has gone largely unsystematized. Nor have their implications been compared. Such historical–theoretic orientations concern the ‘problem of history’: the theoretical question of how to make the facts of the past coherently intelligible. We aim to make these assumptions explicit, and to contrast them systematically. In so doing, we show theories of history are necessary: IR-theoretic research unavoidably has tacit or overt historical–theoretic commitments. We locate the field’s current historical commitments in a typology, along two axes. Theories of history may be either familiar to the observer or unfamiliar. They may also be linear, having a long-term trajectory, nonlinear, lacking such directionality, or multilinear, proceeding along multiple trajectories. This comparative exercise both excavates the field’s sometimes-obscured commitments and shows some IR theorists unexpectedly share commitments, while others unexpectedly do not. We argue that better awareness of historical–theoretic reasoning, embedded in all IR uses and invocations of history, may encourage the discipline become more genuinely plural.

Assigning responsibility is increasingly common in world politics, from the United Nation's assertion that sovereignty entails a ‘responsibility to protect’ to the International Criminal Court's attempts to hold individuals responsible for international crimes. This development is welcome but problematic as the model of moral agency that our contemporary practices of responsibility are based on leads to a number of problematic consequences that impede efforts to make world politics more just. In particular, our contemporary practices of responsibility are excessively focused on the obligations of individual and collective actors, at the expense of enabling conditions, and on holding specific perpetrators accountable, neglecting the need for wider social transformations in response to mass violence and suffering. Alternative understandings of moral agency, which better serve international/global practices of responsibility, are possible and here I defend an understanding of moral agency based on the philosophy of John Dewey. The critical insights and practical possibilities of this alternative understanding of moral agency are explored with reference to international interventions in Sierra Leone and Uganda.

This paper analyses Jürgen Habermas’s claim that democracy and human rights are co-original and its implications for his international theory. A central argument in his theory, the co-originality thesis suggests that human rights and democracy are not only both fundamental and mutually supportive, but also ‘equi-primordial’ and internally related. Reconstructing Habermas’s argument as it has developed over two decades, I argue that his account of constitutional democracy has difficulties accounting for the enmeshment of constitutional and international human rights, while his three-tiered model of global governance, in the absence of democratic legitimation, amounts to a downgrade of the currently institutionalized practice of international human rights. Instead, I suggest that shifting the focus from ideal global institutions to actual processes of domestic contestation, through which groups appropriate and apply international legal norms in order to claim their rights, provides a plausible account of the practice of international human rights consistent with the co-originality thesis.

This article proposes an understanding of critical international theory (CIT) as an historical rather than philosophical mode of knowledge. To excavate this historical mode of theorizing it offers an alternative account of CIT’s intellectual sources. While most accounts of critical international theory tend to focus on inheritances from Kant, Marx and Gramsci, or allude in general terms to debts to the Frankfurt School and the Enlightenment, this is not always the case. Robert Cox, for example, has repeatedly professed intellectual debts to realism and historicism. The argument advanced here builds on Cox by situating CIT in a longer intellectual heritage that extends from Renaissance humanism and passes through Absolutist historiography before reaching Enlightenment civil histories, including Vico’s history of civil institutions. The critical element in this intellectual heritage was the formation of a secular political historicism critically disposed to metaphysical claims based on moral philosophies. By recovering this neglected inheritance of criticism, we can articulate not only a critical theory to rival problem-solving theories, but propose a conception of theory as a historical mode of knowledge that rivals philosophical modes yet remains critical by questioning prevailing intellectual assumptions in International Relations theory.

Why have many regional organizations adopted common markets and customs unions? This article proposes a cognitive diffusion mechanism – termed frame diffusion – to explain convergent institutional choices across structurally diverse settings. Using Strang and Meyer’s (1993) notion of ‘theorization’ to combine foundational work on framing with the literature on diffusion, I argue that processes of theorization transform the experience of successful institutional innovators into abstract cognitive schemas, which link a particular understanding of a cooperation problem to specific institutional solutions. As policymakers in other contexts encounter similar cooperation problems, they adopt framed institutional solutions, which results in institutional convergence at the macro level. I further suggest that this process of frame diffusion is conditional on ideational affinities in social purpose between the innovating organization and other regional organizations. Where other organizations pursue a distinct social purpose, policymakers rely on alternative frames and thereby cement institutional variation. After developing this argument theoretically, I illustrate it in an exploratory comparison of institutional choice in three most different regional organizations: Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Common Market of the South, and the Southern African Development Community. The argument points to significant ‘blind spots’ and conceptual complementarity between prominent mechanisms of diffusion.

As commitment devices, international institutions encourage cooperation by imposing costs on members who do not live up to their commitments. However, the costs that institutions can impose are limited, so that their commitment capacity is weak. Institutions can also impose costs as a condition of membership, allowing them to serve as costly signals. A model of weak commitment and costly signaling leads to a number of hypotheses about patterns of cooperation, institutional membership, and states’ preferences over institutional design. For example, existing members of an institution should impose higher ex ante costs when a potential new member could either gain significant benefits from reneging on their commitments in the future, and when the new member expects to gain high benefits from future cooperation. These results are consistent with empirical work on institutions including peacekeeping and the World Trade Organization.

In traditional just war theory, legitimate authority is regarded as a necessary requirement for war to be just. This article challenges this requirement by arguing that a right to wage war can be derived from the right to self-defense and the justifiability of exercising political power to protect basic human rights. Arguments for the legitimate authority-requirement are then surveyed and rejected as insufficient to defend the principle's privileged status. It is argued that just war theory does not need the legitimate authority-requirement and may benefit from its removal.

Stories and representations of suffering are frequently central to attempts to arouse our emotions and initiate political action. Yet, the evocation of emotion and, in particular, empathy, remains politically ambivalent. It does not necessarily lead to the acknowledgement of political responsibility or to actions to address the historically-constituted roots of contemporary structural injustices. Moving beyond the legal, moral, and institutional boundaries of political responsibility, this article argues for greater recognition of its affective dimensions. In particular, it differentiates between a sentimental politics and testimonial empathy to better understand the affective dynamics of political responsibility. While the former finds close company with pity and a lack of acknowledged political responsibility, the latter offers an ethical–political orientation towards radical reflexivity and social transformation, situating experiences of injustice within wider networks of power, privilege, and agency. Drawing on the work of feminist, cultural, and social theorists, the article offers a critical conceptualisation of testimonial empathy and its limits. The article illustrates the insights offered by re-thinking political responsibility in terms of testimonial empathy through a close reading of a historical account of structural injustice – slavery in the United States – as written in Harriet A. Jacobs’ 1861 slave narrative.

The New Materialisms in IR scholarship seek to transcend the divide between matter and ideas, with among others such concepts as practices, or artifacts. This paper makes a start in developing a systematic methodology for the New Materialisms. It proposes Peirce’s semeiotics as one way to unpack how practices and artifacts are ideational and simultaneously material. Peircean semeiotics is a semeiotics of materialism, which creates room for material constitution and analyses practices and artifacts as signs. Peircean semeiotics acknowledges that many signs are objects and practices in the material world, and therefore underlie material constraints, while they also limit and enable the possibilities for action upon the world. Simultaneously though, as signs they convey a particular meaning to the people who surround them, not always by intent. Just as language, material things can signify by arbitrary social convention, but they can also signify by resembling the object they represent, or by being causally related to it. The linguistic model is thus incomplete to study the significative role of material reality. I will illustrate the use of Peircean semeiotics on an analysis of GDP as an inscription device and a complex sign.

This paper applies the concept of emergency powers to the crisis politics of international organizations (IOs). In the recent past, IOs like the UN Security Council, the WHO, and the EU have reacted to large-scale crises by resorting to assertive governance modes bending the limits of their competence and infringing on the rights of the rule-addressees. In contrast to rational and sociological institutionalist notions of mission creep, this paper submits that this practice constitutes ‘authority leaps’ which follow a distinct logic of exceptionalism: the expansion of executive discretion in both the horizontal (lowering of checks and balances) and the vertical (reduction of legal protection of subjects) dimension, justified by reference to political necessity. This ‘IO exceptionalism’, as argued here, represents a class of events which is observable across fundamentally different international institutions and issue areas. It is important not least because emergency politics tend to leave longer-term imprints on a polity’s authority structures. This article shows that the emergency powers of IOs have a tendency to normalize and become permanent features of the institution. Thus IO exceptionalism and its ratcheting up represent a mechanism of abrupt but sustainable authority expansion at the level of IOs.

This article takes the challenges of global governance and legitimacy seriously and looks at new ways in which international organizations (IOs) have attempted to ‘govern’ without explicit legal or regulatory directives. Specifically, we explore the growth of global performance indicators as a form of social control that appears to have certain advantages even as states and civil society actors push back against international regulatory authority. This article discusses the ways in which Michael Zürn's diagnosis of governance dilemmas helps to explain the rise of such ranking systems. These play into favored paradigms that give information and market performance greater social acceptance than rules, laws, and directives designed by international organizations. We discuss how and why these schemes can constitute governance systems, and some of the evidence regarding their effects on actors’ behaviors. Zürn's book provides a useful context for understanding the rise and effectiveness of Governance by Other Means: systems that ‘inform’ and provoke competition among states, shaping outcomes without directly legislating performance.

Differentiation is a foundational premise in the study of middle powers, as evident in the way that the relevant literature distinguishes these states from the great powers and smaller states. Despite the underlying assumption of differentiation, the middle power literature has rarely engaged theoretically with the concept. This paper seeks to make more explicit this basis of differentiation in the study of middle powers, by advancing a new framework for middle power behavior that draws on differentiation theory. The framework makes the case that it is the differentiated structure in international politics – a departure from the dominant neorealist understanding of structure – that enables the behavior of middle powers. The effects of this differentiated structure are activated by the relative, relational, and social power politics that middle powers engage in, in a particular time and place. Through this process, middle powers are able to leverage their ‘middlepowerness’ in international politics by weakening stratification particularly where the great powers are concerned, and strengthening functional differentiation through taking on key and distinctive roles. By putting differentiation at the core of a framework for middle power behavior, the paper strives to make a constructive contribution to the theorizing of middle powers.

What are the moral costs of democratic trade with dictatorships, and what action these costs demand of our elected governments? This article develops as a Rousseauian answer the idea that democracies ought to boycott corrupt dictatorships and establish themselves collectively as an autarkic bloc, in order to reform not others but themselves. I articulate the basis for this democratic disengagement, first through a reconstruction of Rousseau's social contract, as seeking to replace corrupt dependence with egalitarian interdependence between citizens. I then examine the potential for egalitarian interdependence between democracies that treat their citizens equally as collectively sovereign, contrasted with corrupting cooperation between democracies and dictatorships, which distorts democracies’ values, specifically by making them complicit in despots’ theft of their peoples’ resources. Ending this corruption requires disengagement, elaborated here first against liberal objections and then against skeptic criticism.

The question of change has emerged as one of the main conceptual and empirical challenges for International Relations' practice turn. In the context of international law, such a challenge is brought into particularly stark relief due to the significant development of legal meaning through more informal, interpretive avenues, including through the judgments of international courts. This paper develops a framework for theorizing how interpretive legal practices generate normative content change in international law. Specifically, it uses the example of the development of international criminal law through the decisions of international criminal courts to analyze how legal interpretation can lead to normative change in practice. Drawing on interviews conducted with judges and legal officers at the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), I analyze how a community of legal practice centered around these courts was able to construct and alter legal meaning in international criminal law, and how such a potential for change was curbed by understandings of the interpretive process and the role of international courts dominant among international lawyers.

Research on norms in International Relations (IR) includes various concepts related to how norms influence actions. These approaches focus on the decision-making process, and largely neglect the operationalization of norms. This omission leads to an analytical gap: a lack of attention to how the substance of abstract norms is transformed and constructed in the operationalization process. This article draws on the Foucauldian theme of governmentality to introduce a novel perspective on operationalizing norms. It focusses in particular on the role of techniques as understudied parts inherent to the reflexive processes of operationalization and meaning production. The article thereby contests the prevalence of fundamental norms in conventional IR theory. It demonstrates, instead, that global governance techniques do not simply translate rationalities into practice, but construct their very own normativities. These theoretical reflections are illustrated by analysing the operationalization of norms through indicators in the case of the European Union’s human rights policy.

Assumptions regarding space and spatiality exist in all major theoretical traditions in international relations, from realism to constructivism, but the mutual constitution of space and social interaction in the study of world politics requires further conceptual development in its own right. This article suggests a preliminary research agenda for the study of space and social relations in IR by lending insight from Georg Simmel’s classical sociology of space. Simmel’s approach offers scholars of contemporary world politics an innovative conceptualization of the relations between physical and symbolic space (‘the physical-symbolic axis’) and between space and time (‘the spatio-temporal axis’); and a set of practical analytical tools to apply in IR research by defining the foundational qualities of space (exclusivity, divisibility, containment, positioning, and mobility) and suggesting a typology of distinct sociospatial formations: organized space, governed space, fixed space, and empty space. The article discusses the potential of Simmel’s nuanced relational approach to contribute to the contemporary study of world politics, and demonstrates its utility in two particular areas of research: the study of unbundled sovereignty and mobility in late modernity; and the study of empty spaces in IR.