Scholars have attempted to theorise the social structure of the international system from the perspective of the ‘middle powers’ for decades. However, scholars have struggled to agree on the essential dispositional characteristics of this category of actors, stunting theoretical progress. Drawing on sociological and literary approaches to the rhetoric of the ‘middle class’ in domestic societies, this article shifts the terms of this debate away from asking who the ‘middle powers’ are or what their ‘essence’ is, to ask what actors do with the term in practice. Combining this with and contributing to scholarship on hierarchy in international relations, I recast ‘middle powers’ as a category of practice and argue that one of the term's main uses is to differentiate certain status-anxious states – that hold no real prospect of achieving great power status – from ‘small states’ that occupy the lowest stratum of stratification within the ‘grading of powers’. Following an illustrative case study of Australian and Canadian attempts to establish the ‘middle power’ category in the 1940s, the article then outlines the contributions of the argument for the study of status and hierarchy in world politics.

What should happen to a concept as it loses real-world application? The concept of ‘middle power’ rose to prominence in the mid-20th century, establishing an influential practitioner–scholarly nexus over the next several decades. This prestigious history came at a cost, embedding three core assumptions into the concept: that middle powers are International in focus, Multilateral in method, and Good Citizens in conduct. While there have been significant attempts by scholars to reform the concept, middle power theory has proven inseparable from these assumptions. In this paper, we examine six middle power states (Canada, Australia, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, and Mexico) and show middle power theory no longer helps us distinguish or interpret these states. Changes in the international environment suggest this finding will endure. As such, we argue for the historicization of the concept of ‘middle power’. We conclude by identifying a series of analytical puzzles which researchers will need to address to develop an appropriate conceptual lexicon for theorizing this type of state in the 21st century.

From climate change to disruptive technologies, policymakers constantly face new problems calling for unprecedented institutional solutions. Yet, we still poorly understand the inventive process leading to the emergence of new institutional forms. Existing theories argue that exogenous changes provide incentives and opportunities for institutional invention. However, they fail to explain how the inventive process endogenously structures their emergence. Drawing from complexity theory and Brian Arthur's work on technological inventions, we develop a structural theory recasting the process of inventing new institutions as the combination of pre-existing institutions. Building on three assumptions related to this combinatorial process, we argue that the distance between institutions shapes the emergence of new institutional forms and their regime's trajectory. Following the initial take-off in the number of institutional inventions at the creation of a regime, we expect the rate of institutional inventions over replications will slow down as nearby institutions are combined and accelerate as distant ones are combined. We illustrate these expectations by looking at three regimes: data privacy, climate governance, and investment protection. Together, they showcase how our combinatorial theory can help make sense of the emergence of unprecedented institutions and, more generally, the pace of unfolding complexity in various international regimes.

From Trump's America to Putin's Russia, from climate change denial to corona denial, so-called post-truth politics are experiencing a global rise. How can we understand and explain this phenomenon? In the attempt to answer this question, this article advances two core claims. First, it suggests that post-truth politics is (despite its name) marked not only by the denial of claims to objective truth, but also by the naturalization of one specific truth claim: namely, the cynical belief that self-interests are behind all public discourse. Second, it locates the social sources of this dogmatic cynicism in the global expansion of neoliberal competition.

Moral responsibility is a prominent concept used in political discourses and theoretical debates. Yet disagreement remains on how it could work in practice. When attempting to address global challenges such as global poverty, combating atrocities, or artificial intelligence, approaches often revert to retrospective accounts of responsibility that focus on non-compliance with regulatory frameworks. As a result, cases where prospective responsibility would be required often go unaddressed. In this article, we introduce an analytical conceptualization of responsibility that should help to guide the application of moral responsibility in such situations. In the first step, we develop a typology that distinguishes between four types of responsibility: ‘obligatory’, ‘structural’, ‘prescribed’, and ‘discursive’. Second, we identify responsibility gaps for each responsibility type. Third, we introduce different ethical principles from political theory that help to identify potential responsibility relations. We illustrate the utility of this framework with the example of climate change, where ethical principles beyond the contribution principle have already been applied. The paper facilitates new perspectives in political debates about how to allocate responsibility in light of global challenges and enhances theoretical debates in International Relations scholarship.

Does international law restrict the use of force by states in self-defense even when their survival is threatened? Should it? To answer these questions, I compare international law to domestic law and develop two ideal-types of emergency: in a ‘subject emergency’ law imposes absolute, justiciable limits on self-defense. In a ‘community emergency’ the sovereign, not law, determines what is necessary for the survival of the community and its legal system: sustaining the rule of law justifies its temporary retreat. I show that international law has elements of both ideal-types. It imposes some absolute limits on self-defense. However, international law also retreats, allowing the victim state to determine the (1) aims, (2) ad bellum proportionality, and (3) end of self-defense, as if armed threats triggered community emergencies. These three retreats serve the function of sustaining the rule of international law over the states at war. Retreats (1) and (3) also help sustain the rule of international law over the international community. That international law does and should not treat armed threats against states simply as subject emergencies, shows it can only sustain the rule of international law in an emergency by retreating. This is a negative litmus test for international law's ability to diffuse anarchy in International Relations.

The study of global politics is frequently organized around fields, but the boundaries of these fields are little understood. We explore the relationship between two proximate fields, human rights (HR) and democracy promotion (DP), in order to understand the emergence and maintenance of field boundaries. The two fields are closely linked in international law and practice, yet they have remained largely separate as fields of action, despite vast changes in global politics over four decades. The disjuncture has been largely maintained by HR organizations who police the boundary to keep DP out. We identify differences in anchoring norms as the key factor driving boundary maintenance. Actors in the two fields hold different foundational ideas about how to protect and advance rights, norms that we describe as cosmopolitan and statist. This account is superior to alternate explanations that emphasize functional demands or resource flows, and complements historical institutionalist accounts. Our research offers a theoretical contribution to the study of fields and practical insight into two important areas of global practice. Our qualitative research is supplemented by digital annotations, supported by the Qualitative Data Repository.

Throughout the 20th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20th century, are almost completely missing in IR's intellectual and disciplinary histories, including histories of its main theoretical traditions. In this forum, leading historians and theorists of IR respond to the recent findings of the Leverhulme project on Women and the History of International Thought (WHIT), particularly its first two book-length publications on the centrality of women to early IR discourses and subsequent erasure from its history and conceptualization. The forum is introduced by members of the WHIT project. Collectively, the essays suggest the implications of the erasure and recovery of women's international thought are significant and wide-ranging.

The return of authoritarian great powers, the slowing of the democratic wave, and outright reversion to authoritarian rule pose important questions for international theory. What are the implications of an international system populated with more autocracies? This question was posed by a diverse array of social scientists, public intellectuals, and policy analysts in response to the autocratic wave in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. We show that a series of conversations emanating from quite diverse intellectual priors – from Christian realists to international lawyers and disaffected Marxists – converged on the risks these autocratic regimes posed to democratic regimes and the international order they sought to forge. These risks included unconstrained rulers, an inability to sustain international commitments and political processes that undermined rational deliberation at home and spread disinformation abroad. The reading of this work suggests an under-appreciated strand of liberal international relations theory, and these debates have direct implications for liberal arguments about the democratic peace. Rather than theorizing why democracies avoid war, they underscore the importance of understanding why authoritarian and democratic countries are particularly prone to conflict.

This article explores the theoretical challenges for normatively progressive foreign policy following the rise of populist nationalism during the 2010s, using analytical concepts from the English School. It argues that populist nationalism exposes a problem of internal dissensus on the future trajectories of solidarist international society, within the Western states that have traditionally been its principal supporters. The ‘populist moment’ reveals problems of disconnection between domestic publics, the practices, and institutions of contemporary international society, and state actions that are premised in part on ethical regard for non-citizens. The article contends that, as an interface point between rooted communities and global ethical concerns, progressive foreign policy approaches have an important role to play in ameliorating these disconnections. However, these approaches must look beyond a simple ‘re-booting’ of liberal internationalism, focussing instead on building a path towards solidarist international society that is rooted in everyday-lived experiences, communities, and identities within the state. Building upon theorizations of good international citizenship, the article advances an alternative framework of good global statehood, which draws upon a coproduction methodology as a means of creating progressive foreign policies that are better attuned to pluralism and diversity across, but also within state borders.

This article analyses the disregarded notion of the ius legationis (right of legation), revisiting historical debates in diplomatic theory and law over who possesses or ought to have this right. By examining how the ius legationis manifested into a volitional or subjectional or natural right, we argue that this renders it not merely a legal issue, but a highly political and ethical question that is of direct relevance to contemporary international relations. In an era where inclusivity is rhetorically promoted at the United Nations, we suggest that a rekindled right to diplomacy (R2D) – conceiving diplomacy as a right that is claimed but also contested – can shed light onto inequalities of representation and the role international law can play in remedying asymmetries and ethicizing the practice of diplomacy. Beyond its primary normative contribution, we argue that the R2D can also provide an analytical framework to understand UN's efforts at institutionalizing diplomatic pluralism, its logics of inclusion and exclusion, as well as the struggles of diverse groups to obtain accreditation, consultative status, and negotiation ability within multilateral diplomacy.

This article introduces an innovative theoretical conception of the corporate agency of international organizations (IOs). Existing rationalist and constructivist accounts attribute IO agency to the influence of intra-organizational agents. Drawing on general conceptions of corporate agency in International Relations, sociology, and philosophy, we elucidate how IOs can develop corporate agency, even if the member states prepare and adopt all organizational decisions themselves. In line with recent studies on international political authority, we replace the IO-as-bureaucracy model with the more comprehensive concept of IOs-as-governors. To establish the micro-foundations of IO agency, we adopt a bottom-up perspective and outline how, and under which conditions, IO agency arises from the interaction of constituent actors. Irrespective of any specific institutional design, IOs become actors in their own right whenever they gain action capability and autonomy. They acquire action capability whenever their members pool governance resources like the right to regulate certain activities or to manage common funds and authorize IOs to deploy these resources. IOs gain autonomy whenever they affect organizational decisions. Both dimensions of IO agency are variable and open to empirical enquiry. To illustrate our argument, we refer to the United Nations Security Council and other IOs with member-driven decision processes.

This article examines international criminalization, the process by which particular acts come to be established as international crimes in world politics. While international legal scholars suggest international criminalization constitutes a legal process that centres on international legal codification, this article argues, by drawing upon the insights of constructivist International Relations scholarship, that it is better conceived as a social process. More specifically, the process of international criminalization involves the development of an international social consensus on international criminality, which takes hold in international society following diplomatic negotiations between social actors. Furthermore, international criminalization embraces a two-stage process that requires, firstly, the emergence of an international criminal norm and secondly, the translation of that norm into an international legal proscription. Using these conceptual insights, the article analyses, through a close analysis of international archival documents, the historical emergence of genocide, in order to demonstrate how its proposed conceptualization of international criminalization can better explain how and why this act was specifically established as an international crime. In doing so, the article offers an alternative account of genocide's criminalization which, unlike the existing literature, goes some way towards uncovering the processes of social construction that informed its establishment as an international crime.

This article contributes to the debate about the future of just war thinking, which has been challenged by the emerging school of just peace. Just peace thinkers hope that by foregrounding nonviolent means just war reasoning will become obsolete. Recently, the German Catholic Bishops have argued that the traditional understanding of just war contributed to their predecessors' silence on the Second World War. Grounded in just peace thinking, their argument implies that had the new framework been in place at the time, it would have been easier for their predecessors to oppose Hitler's war. In this article, I defend traditional just war thinking as encountered in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, just war thinking was part of an encompassing ethics of war and peace. In fact, peace was the primary goal. Grounded in Aquinas's understanding of virtue, I argue that there is a place for just peace scholarship within the just war framework. The tools of nonviolence should be seen as an important complement to the justifiable use of armed force.

Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science hypothesizes that all intentional phenomena, including both psychological and social facts, are macroscopic quantum mechanical processes. Whether right or wrong, the suggestion highlights the fact that the social sciences, including IR, have until very recently never systematically discussed the potential relevance to our work of the quantum revolution a century ago. According to Wendt, that has left social scientists today – positivists and interpretivists alike – operating from an implicit and impoverished 19th century worldview that cannot accommodate important facts about human subjectivity. This symposium features critiques of Wendt's vision from multiple perspectives and a response, for one of the first airings of the classical-quantum debate in an IR context.

How burdens of proof are allocated in science has an important bearing on how new knowledge develops. Usually, the burden is on new theories to prove their worth relative to a default, baseline of knowledge that is considered established and secure. However, in the case of classical vs. quantum social science matters are not that simple because the long-standing classical default has itself already failed to pass crucial tests, which has spurred the search for quantum solutions instead. Part I of this paper, therefore, tries to ‘re-balance’ the burdens of proof with Quantum Mind and Social Science’ critics, by highlighting two significant limits to date of classical thinking about the mind and society: the philosophical problem of finding a place for consciousness in the universe, and the scientific problem of explaining the Kahneman–Tversky anomalies in psychology. Acknowledging these outstanding problems does not equalize the burdens of proof, but it does mean that as we head into the more substantive discussion in Part II there is no secure default position. Just burdens of proof all around.

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.

In putting Wendt's recent Quantum Mind in a larger context both of his own disciplinary engagement and some larger philosophical issues, I try to avoid a hasty dismissal, since the book seems at first blush to offer a ‘theory of everything’, or an uncritical acceptance, since the desire to know what makes the world hand together has always been part of the knowledge game. As to the first problem, I find it rather odd that Wendt spends little time in justifying his particular take on quantum theory, which is far from uncontroversial. Second, I attempt to understand why he has given up on the profession trying now to solve puzzles in the field by claiming that ‘quantum consciousness theory’ provides us with an ‘ace up the sleeve’. But the fact that wave collapse plays havoc with our traditional notions of cause, location, and mass, does not without further ado entitle us to claim that all or most problems in social science dealing with issues of validity and meaning of our concepts (rather than ‘truth/falsity’, as decided by making existential assertions) have been solved by quantum mechanics.

Transitional Justice (TJ) focuses on the processes of dealing with the legacy of large-scale past abuses (in the aftermath of traumatic experiences such as war or authoritarianism) with the aim of fostering domestic justice and creating the basis for a sustainable peace. TJ however also entails the problem of how a torn society may be able to become a self-determining member of a just international order. This paper presents a minimal conception of TJ, which departs from Rawls' conception of normative stability of the international order, which suggests disentangling the two goals of fostering democracy within torn societies and TJ itself. The scope of TJ is therefore limited to enabling these societies to create minimal internal conditions for joining a just international order on equal footing. This paper makes an original contribution to two different debates, namely normative research on TJ, and post-Rawlsian literature in general. First, it provides a new direction for normative theorizing about TJ which takes both its domestic and international dimensions seriously into consideration. Second, it extends Rawls' political liberal outlook to an area where it is not usually understood to apply.