States have recently agreed that there is a responsibility to protect populations threatened by genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The international community, however, often lacks the resources and willingness to carry out a key part of this responsibility, that is, to undertake humanitarian intervention effectively when required. One potential solution to this problem is to outsource intervention to private military and security companies. In this article, I consider this option. In particular, I present a largely consequentialist argument which asserts that, when two conditions are met, using these companies to bolster the capacity to undertake humanitarian intervention might be morally justifiable overall.

Many who discuss global democracy think in terms of a Reform-Act model of democracy, with the ideal being ‘one person one vote for all affected by the decisions’ as in, for example, a second popularly apportioned chamber of United Nations. Politically, that is dismissed as wildly unrealistic. Remember, however, the Reform Acts came very late in process of democratization domestically. Among early steps that eventually led to full democratization of that sort domestically were: (a) limiting the arbitrary rule on the part of the sovereign; and (b) making the sovereign accountable to others (initially a limited set of others, which then expanded). Globally, there are moves afoot in both those directions. Crucially, once those pieces are in place, the circle of accountability basically only ever expands and virtually never contracts.

The past few decades have witnessed a renewed interest in the work of Carl Schmitt. Scholars from various disciplines have claimed that Schmitt’s critique of universalism, together with his analysis of irregular warfare, provides useful lenses to make sense of the post 9/11 world. In this article, I will critically assess whether Schmitt’s work is indeed useful for understanding the post 9/11 world. To that end, I will concentrate on one of the core arguments put forward by Schmitt: that the laws of armed conflict are unable to regulate irregular warfare, including acts of terrorism. In order to determine the validity of Schmitt’s arguments, I will focus on one of the instruments used in contemporary counter-terrorism policies: the deliberate killing of specific individuals who are regarded as a security threat (‘targeted killing’). Based on an analysis of US and Israeli practice, the article argues that using Schmitt’s work as an analytical tool yields mixed results. While his analysis of irregular warfare remains relevant for contemporary conflicts, his denouncement of universalism blinds us to the transformational potential of international law.

This article has two core objectives: first to challenge the conventional understanding of liberal international theory (which we do by focussing specifically on classical liberalism) and second, to develop much further postcolonialism’s conception of Eurocentrism. These twin objectives come together insofar as we argue that classical liberalism does not always stand for anti-imperialism/non-interventionism given that significant parts of it were Eurocentric and pro-imperialist. But we also argue that in those cases where liberals rejected imperialism they did so not out of a commitment to cultural pluralism, as we are conventionally told, but as a function of either a specific Eurocentric or a scientific racist stance. This, in turn, means that Eurocentrism can be reduced neither to scientific racism nor to imperialism. Thus while we draw on postcolonialism and its critique of liberalism as Eurocentric, we find its conception of Eurocentrism (and hence its vision of liberalism) to be overly reductive. Instead we differentiate four variants of ‘polymorphous Eurocentrism’ while revealing how two of these rejected imperialism and two supported it. And by revealing how classical liberalism was embedded within these variants of Eurocentrism so we recast the conventional interpretation. In doing so, we bring to light the ‘protean career of polymorphous liberalism’ as it crystallizes in either imperialist or anti-imperialist forms as a function of the different variants of Eurocentrism within which it is embedded. Finally, because two of these variants underpin modern liberalism (as discussed in the Conclusions) so we challenge international relations scholars to rethink their conventional understanding of both classical- and modern-liberalism, as much as we challenge postcolonialists to rethink their conception of Eurocentrism.

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.

I examine enforcement and capacity building in international cooperation. In a game-theoretic model, a wealthy donor gives foreign aid in exchange for policy implementation by a poor recipient. The recipient has limited capacity to comply with international agreements, so the donor is not sure if cooperation failure is caused by willful disobedience or unintended error. I show that if perceived cooperation failure prompts reciprocal suspension of cooperation, the donor and recipient have a common preference for capacity building. But when the donor can request compensation for perceived cooperation failure, it only chooses to build capacity if cooperation is otherwise impossible. Consequently, the choice of enforcement mechanism shapes capacity building. This result lays a foundation for a genuine synthesis between the enforcement and managerialist schools of compliance. It generates falsifiable hypotheses and explains why reciprocal enforcement, which unfortunately inflicts collateral damage on the victim, is often considered legitimate.

The proliferation, globalization, and fragmentation of law in world politics have fostered an attempt to re-integrate International Law (IL) and International Relations (IR) scholarship, but so far the contribution of realist theory to this interdisciplinary perspective has been meagre. Combining intellectual history, the jurisprudence of IL and IR theory, this article provides an analysis of John H. Herz’s classical realism and its perspective on international law. In retrieving this vision, the article emphasizes the political and intellectual context from which Herz’s realism developed: the study of public law in Germany during the interwar period and in particular the contribution of Hans Kelsen and the pure theory of law to the study of international law. Herz was deeply inspired by Kelsen but he criticized the pure theory for ignoring the sociological foundations of law. Following his emigration to the United States, Herz embraced realism but without disregarding international law. Indeed, his mature, globally oriented realism offers a balanced, fruitful perspective for thinking about the relationship between politics and law that is deeply relevant for contemporary theory: it challenges modern, law-blind variants of realism and holds considerable potential for contributing to the approaches that have most successfully studied the law–politics nexus.

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.

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.

Recent revelations of Iran’s hitherto undisclosed uranium enrichment programs have once again incited western fears that Tehran seeks nuclear weapons’ capability. Their fears seem motivated by more than the concern for compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Rather, they seem strongly connected to the western moral assumptions about what kind of government or people can be trusted with a nuclear arsenal. In this paper, I critically examine the western assumptions of the immorality of contemporary nuclear proliferation from an international ethical stance that otherwise might be expected to give it unequivocal support – the stance of Kantian nonideal theory. In contrast to the uses of Kant that were prominent during the Cold War, I advance and apply a sketch of a Kantian nonideal theory that specifies the conditions (although strict conditions) under which nuclear proliferation for states like Iran is morally permissible even though the NPT forbids it.