We show that without a few peculiar modeling choices that are not justified by the core assumptions of the theory, selectorate theory neither unambiguously predicts the democratic peace nor that leaders of more inclusive regimes will rely upon the provision of public goods to remain in office, though they may be more likely to provide club goods. We illustrate these claims using relatively simple models that incorporate the core assumptions of their theory, while avoiding modeling choices we believe to be less appropriate. We argue for a revised version of selectorate theory, one that continues to emphasize the importance of the size of the winning coalition, yet we believe it provides a more realistic picture of democratic politics.

Can the dissolution or transgression of sovereign authority – ‘failed states’, for example – be understood within a concept of sovereignty? Extant understandings provide a negative answer; approaches to sovereignty in International Relations and Political Theory conceptualize sovereignty as located in stable entities, generally states. Insofar as political societies face crises of authority, those crises arise from exogenous factors, not the structure of sovereignty. We argue that this is a restrictive notion of sovereignty. In its place, we offer a theorization that can account for the dissolution or transgression of sovereign orders, focusing on the possibility that sovereigns may not recognize their subjects as the originary structure of sovereignty. In our understanding, sovereignty is logically and temporally before sovereign power. Consequently, the possibility of dissolution is a structural condition of all sovereign orders. This enables us to theorize the relationship between sovereignty, sovereign power, and the law, and to apply this broader concept to analyze politics in ‘weak’ and ‘failed states’.

In a recent article Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot argued that attention to ‘practices’ could help IR scholars overcome ontological gaps and provide a new basis, on which the discipline could be established. Four such dichotomies are particularly salient: between the material and the meaningful, the rational and the practical, between agencies and structures, and between the forces of stability and of change. By failing to provide a theoretical basis for a synthesis, however, this project will fail. What a ‘practice’ is, and how ontological gaps should be understood, cannot be determined outside of the context of a theory. The article reviews theoretical attempts to deal with the dichotomies Adler and Pouliot identified and investigates the role of practices in the study of international relations.

The international system may be anarchic, but anarchy is neither fixed nor inevitable. We analyze collective choices between anarchy, a system of inefficient self-enforcement, and external enforcement, where punishment is delegated to a third party at some upfront cost. In equilibrium, external enforcement (establishing governments) prevails when interaction density is high, the costs of integration are low, and violations are difficult to predict, but anarchy (drawing borders) prevails when at least one of these conditions fail. We explore the implications of this theory for the causal role of anarchy in international relations theory, the integration and disintegration of political units, and the limits and possibilities of cooperation through international institutions.

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.

How should the geographic boundaries of democratic participation be set? This has been a notoriously difficult theoretical question, beset by paradoxes around determining democratic participants democratically. It also is seen as increasingly important in practical terms, amid deepening interdependence between states, immigration tensions, and suprastate regional integration. Numerous recent accounts have called for extending participation beyond the state. The case is generally made on intrinsic grounds: democracy demands it. Respect for individual autonomy is said to be violated when outsiders are deeply affected by decision processes, or subject to coercion from them, without being able to participate in them. Yet, familiar problems around restrictions on the autonomy of persistent democratic minorities remain in such accounts, and they could be magnified with expanded boundaries. An alternative approach is offered here, grounded in a rights-based instrumental justification for democracy. It sees participation as foundationally – though not solely – valuable as a means of promoting and protecting fundamental rights. It recommends extending participation boundaries to reinforce protections within regional and ultimately global institutions. Democratic participation would remain crucial at all levels, not principally as an expression of autonomy but to provide checks on power and promote accountability to individuals in multilevel polities.

The national resource privilege, which holds that states are allowed to control all the natural resources found in their territory, is a cornerstone of international politics. Supporters of the national resource privilege claim that without the privilege states would fail to be sovereign and self-determining entities which provide for the needs of their citizens. However, as this paper shows the case is not as simple as that. In fact, control over resources must be carefully unpacked. Doing so shows that states do not require full control over all resources found in their territory in order to be sovereign. Moreover, sovereignty and self-determination come with a set of responsibilities and duties attached. Based on these observations the paper will sketch the contours of an alternative resource governance scheme built around the idea of an International Court of the Environment.

This article examines Carr’s work in The Twenty Years’ Crisis and Conditions of Peace in the light of an analogy that Carr draws between his work and that of the American pragmatist philosopher, William James. The article argues that one gains a greater understanding of the internal workings of Carr’s most important IR works if one understands him as operating within the pragmatist tradition (as James understood it). A further aim of the paper is to investigate the evolution in Carr’s ethical commitment to peace in The Twenty Years' Crisis and Conditions of Peace as a product of a pragmatist perspective on global politics. The article concludes with a section on how pragmatist Realist ethics complements existing theories of Realist ethics in IR by reference to Richard Ned Lebow’s The Tragic Vision of Politics and Michael C. Williams’ The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations.

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.

Is territory a trap? Does the concept of territory trap us into false assumptions of internally homogeneous, externally bounded political communities that exercise uniform sovereignty across their domain? Against the background of debates about territory and the territorial state in international relations, this symposium brings together five contributions in political theory that advance a nuanced and systemic understanding of what territory is. Taken together, they indicate that there is much to the territorial paradigm beyond the modern, sovereign, and territorial state model. There are diverse conceptions of territory, which may be relevant across different legal and political orders. The various conceptual analyses of territory in this symposium suggest that the sovereign state model is only one way in which a sovereign political authority can be territorial. These essays provide the conceptual tools to formulate (and subsequently test) the hypothesis that the transformations in statehood may not be best described in terms of the rise and decline of territorial sovereignty, but as moves from one model of territorially bounded political authority to another. In political theory, it is only in recent years that this foundational concept has received sustained attention from political theorists. This symposium aims to take forward this welcome theoretical development.

In this forum five scholars bring their particular postcolonial perspectives to bear upon the constructivist concept of norms. Charlotte Epstein introduces the forum by considering 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’; and how 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 her contribution Ayze Zarakol argues that the constructivist paradigm of ‘norm diffusion’ commits two fallacies: first, it mishandles the causal explanation because it conflates internalisation, socialisation and compliance. Second it reproduces existing international social hierarchies by treating (bad) non-compliance by non-Western actors as endogenously driven, and (good) compliance as the result of external Western stimuli. She uses Erving Goffman’s concept of stigmatisation to show how our understanding of norm diffusion in the international order – or lack thereof – can be improved. Julia Gallagher’s article examines the norm of good governance as acted out by the World Bank in its policies towards African countries. She uses psychoanalytic object relations theory to show how the Bank employs good governance to structure the world into good and bad objects, thereby overcoming internal ambiguity and creating an idealised self-image. Robbie Shlliam’s contribution challenges constructivism to attend to calls for epistemic justice regarding the delineation of interpretive communities to the ostensibly “moderns”. He does so by explicating the understandings of slavery provided by knowledge traditions inhabited by descendants of enslaved Africans. Vivienne Jabri’s article mobilises Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon in a critical engagement with constructivist readings of postcolonial agency in the normative ordering of the international. She argues that a postcolonial reading of the international must account for both the discursive and material presence of the postcolonial subject, a presence at once both constituted and constituting of the international.

Emotions play an increasingly important role in international relations research. This essay briefly surveys the development of the respective debates and then offers a path forward. The key challenge, we argue, is to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political. We further suggest that this is done best by exploring insights from two seemingly incompatible scholarly tendencies: macro theoretical approaches that develop generalizable propositions about political emotions and, in contrast, micro approaches that investigate how specific emotions function in specific circumstances. Applying this framework we then identify four realms that are central to appreciating the political significance of emotions: (1) the importance of definitions; (2) the role of the body; (3) questions of representation; and (4) the intertwining of emotions and power. Taken together, these building blocks reveal how emotions permeate world politics in complex and interwoven ways and also, once taken seriously, challenge many entrenched assumptions of international relations scholarship.

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.

Contrary to what is often assumed, norm-internalisation does not always lead to compliance. Normative judgements may be simultaneously internalised and outwardly rejected. Non-compliance is at times a result of hyper-awareness of the particular origin of norms, rather than an unwillingness of the would-be-recipients to do ‘good’ deeds, or their inability to understand what is ‘good’. Such is often the case for non-Western states, as I demonstrate in this article by utilising the sociological concepts of stigma and stigmatisation. In its inability to acknowledge this dynamic, which has its roots in the colonial past of the international order, the constructivist model of norm-diffusion commits two errors. On the one hand, it falls short as a causal explanation, conflating internalisation with socialisation, and socialisation with compliance. On the other hand, it reproduces existing hierarchies in the international system, treating only non-compliance as endogenously driven, but compliance as a result of external stimuli. As there is a great deal of correlation between non-compliance and political geography, such a depiction, coupled with the fact that most norms under scrutiny are ‘good’ norms, once again casts non-Western states as having agency only when they commit ‘bad’ deeds.

Can one use emotion at anything other than the individual level of analysis? Emotion happens in biological bodies, not in the space between them, and this implies that group emotion is nothing but a collection of individuals experiencing the same emotion. This article contends that group-level emotion is powerful, pervasive, and irreducible to individuals. People do not merely associate with groups (or states), they can become those groups through shared culture, interaction, contagion, and common group interest. Bodies produce emotion that identities experience: group-level emotion can be stronger than, and different from, emotion experienced as an individual; group members share, validate, and police each others’ feelings; and these feelings structure relations within and between groups in international politics. Emotion goes with identity.

Emotions are a ubiquitous intersubjective element of world politics. Yet, passions are often treated as fleeting, private, reactive, and not amenable to systematic analysis. Institutionalization links the private and individual to the collective and political. Passions may become enduring through institutionalization, and thus, as much as characterizing private reactions to external phenomena, emotions structure the social world. To illustrate this argument, I describe how fear and empathy may be institutionalized, discuss the relationship between these emotions, and suggest how empathy may be both a mirror and potential antidote to individual and institutionalized fear.

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.