The article deals with a pivotal conceptual distinction used in philosophical discussions about global justice. Cosmopolitans claim that arguing from the perspective of moral cosmopolitanism does not necessarily entail defending a global coercive political authority, or a ‘world-state’, and suggest that ambitious political and economic (social) goals implied in moral cosmopolitanism may be achieved via some kind of non-hierarchical, dispersed and/or decentralized institutional arrangements. I argue that insofar as moral cosmopolitans retain ‘strong’ moral claims, this is an untenable position, and that the goals of cosmopolitan justice, as explicated by its major proponents, require nothing less than a global state-like entity with coercive powers. My background ambition is to supplement some existing works questioning the notion of ‘governance without government’ with an argument that goes right to the conceptual heart of cosmopolitan thought. To embed my central theoretical argument in real-world developments, I draw on some recent scholarship regarding the nature of international organizations, European Union, or transnational democratization. Finally, I suggest that only after curbing moral aspirations in the first place can a more self-consciously moderate position be constructed, one that will carry practical and feasible implications for institutional design.

Academic discourse on global justice is at an all-time high. Within ethics and international law, scholars are undertaking new inquiries into age-old questions of building a just world order. Ethics – within political and moral philosophy – poses fundamental questions about responsibilities at the global level and produces a tightly reasoned set of frameworks regarding world order. International law, with its focus on legal norms and institutional arrangements, provides a path, as well as illuminates the obstacles, to implementing theories of the right or of the good. Yet despite the complementarity of these two projects, neither is drawing what it should from the other. The result is ethical scholarship that often avoids, or even misinterprets, the law; and law that marginalizes ethics even as it recognizes the importance of justice. The cost of this avoidance is a set of missed opportunities for both fields. This article seeks to help transform the limited dialogue between philosophers and international lawyers into a meaningful collaboration. Through a critical stocktaking of the contributions of the two disciplines, examining where they do and do not engage with the other, it offers an appraisal of the causes and costs of separation and an argument for an interdisciplinary approach.

According to principal-agent theory, states (the principals) delegate the implementation of a legalized agreement to an international organization (the agent). The conventional wisdom about states’ capacity to control international organizations is that differences among the member states impede control and consequently enhance the agent's autonomy, whereas agreement allows for effective control and limited autonomy. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, this article argues that conflicts among states need not always impede effective control. On the contrary: if an international organization comprises a sufficient number of policies, there are gains from the exchange of control over its portfolios that are of special sensitivity to different member states. As a result, international organizations exhibit informal spheres of national control, or national fiefdoms. The article demonstrates the theory's plausibility using the example of the European Union and other international organizations. It has implications for the literature on delegation and informal governance.

I argue that widely accepted just war theory precepts morally allow and require the assassination of politically powerful individuals under some circumstances instead of waging a just war or implementing any other policy such as non-targeted economic sanctions that would very likely severely harm more innocents. While all just war theory precepts permit just assassinations under certain circumstances, proportionality, necessity, and last resort make just assassinations required whenever they would cause severe harm to the fewest innocents. There are several implications of my argument. First, there are fewer circumstances when wars and other policies that foreseeably but unintentionally harm innocents are just than is commonly thought. Second, the realm of morally permissible violent and non-violent action for powerful individuals is more limited than many presume and politicians are more often morally liable to actions that would mitigate or end objectively unjust serious threats for which they are culpable, although this does not always include lethal force.

This article examines how the principles of complex systems can illuminate recurring mechanisms of change in theories of international relations. It applies the logic of complex systems to two specific puzzles in international politics – the problem of theorizing change in structural realism, and the dynamics of cross-border democratic diffusion. In the first case, by shifting the analysis of anarchy's consequences from state behavior to state attributes, complex systems can illustrate the sources of domestic and international transformations embedded in structural theories. This approach offers a way to think about democratization as a global process of interstate competition and socialization driven by the pressures of anarchy. In the second case, the principles of co-adaptation in complex systems can help reframe diffusion not as the unilinear spread of democracy but as the interplay of self-reinforcing and self-dampening dynamics, whose interaction shapes both actor expectations and democratic outcomes. In both cases, complex systems serve a limited but useful role; although not conducive to theory creation, the approach provides a useful analytical prism for examining patterns of change and continuity in global processes, and highlights concrete ways of improving models of transformations in international politics.

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.

States rarely declare war. For many international law scholars, just war theorists, and moral philosophers, the declaration of war is a moribund tradition that serves no important purpose. When declarations of war are defended, the argument is situated in the war powers debate about executive authority. In contrast, I argue that declaring war – making conditional and reasoned moral demands – continues to be an important requirement for just wars. States should declare war because states should make explicit (formal) moral demands before fighting. Declaring war is procedurally important because it ensures that a state makes a formal moral case, showing respect to innocent third parties whose interests are affected and providing targets the right to confront their accusers and hear evidence. While not a panacea, requiring declarations is a significant improvement on the ad hoc politics of wartime justification that plagues wars such as Iraq. Further, declarations, as ultimatums, are the only reasonable interpretation of the ‘last resort’ requirement in just war theory. A final section extends the argument to contemporary wars against non-state actors, showing that a politics of recognition underlying declarations of war may prove especially fruitful today.

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.

In categorizing international hierarchies, theorists often emphasize some balance between levels of consent and coercion. I show that emphasis on these terms is conceptually problematic. Borrowing insights from republican political theory, I argue that we can better distinguish hierarchies on the basis of whether they feature domination. Under domination the subordinate’s freedom of choice is contingent upon the predilections of the superordinate state, which can assert its supremacy whenever and possibly, however, it may please. Moreover, subordinate states cannot unilaterally and peacefully withdraw from the hierarchy. By contrast, in hierarchies of non-domination the superordinate state enjoys the ‘powers of attorney’ with which it might be permitted to practice coercion in order to advance an agreed-upon goal. The contract underpinning this type of hierarchy also allows for the unilateral and peaceful termination by the subordinate, either through withdrawal or expiry. I demonstrate the applicability of this conceptual framework by examining Soviet and American relations with Central-Eastern and Western Europe, respectively, during the Cold War.

Recognition plays a multifaceted role in international theory. In rarely communicating literatures, the term is invoked to explain creation of new states and international structures; policy choices by state and non-state actors; and normative justifiability, or lack thereof, of foreign and international politics. The purpose of this symposium is to open new possibilities for imagining and studying recognition in international politics by drawing together different strands of research in this area. More specifically, the forum brings new attention to controversies on the creation of states, which has traditionally been a preserve for discussion in International Law, by invoking social theories of recognition that have developed as part of International Relations more recently. It is suggested that broadening imagination across legal and social approaches to recognition provides the resources needed for theories with this object to be of maximal relevance to political practice.

How does the scope of costless threats convey information about resolve to adversaries? Analysis of a model similar to Fearon demonstrates that higher demands increase perceptions of a state’s resolve to fight for more favorable outcomes when bargaining is such that both sides share in the benefits of avoiding conflict, in contrast to the ultimatum game, and making a credible high demand does not lead to a favorable outcome with certainty. Interestingly, compromise offers will be made even though they increase an adversary’s perception that the compromising state would be willing to make an even greater concession. In contrast to many other signaling mechanisms described in the literature, signaling of this sort does not depend on risking war and often reduces the probability of conflict.

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.

The argument that reputational concerns promote compliance is at the center of the literature of international cooperation. In this paper, we study how reputational sanctions affect compliance when domestic parties carry their own reputations in international negotiations. We showed that the prospect of international cooperation varies a lot depending on who sits at the negotiation table, how partisan preferences for compliance are different, and how much international audiences discriminate between different types of noncompliance. We illustrate implications of our model using episodes from the negotiations between the United States and North Korea over North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

Recent conflicts and crises in international relations have tested the ethical commitments of many cosmopolitans. However, this article argues that cosmopolitanism can be morally compelling and practically useful if it is conceived pragmatically as a set of ideals that guide interactions concerning cross-border problems. It argues that a will to believe in cosmopolitanism can be rationally justified by historical achievements and present tendencies in social conditions. Cosmopolitan beliefs are warranted, first, by demonstrating the empirical relevance of cosmopolitan ethics as a ‘living option’ in a new era of interaction and interdependence. Second, a pragmatic reorientation of cosmopolitan theory is conducted to widen the basis for identifying cosmopolitan action and permit a reconstruction of its ideals appropriate to today's pluralistic world. Finally, cosmopolitan ideals of equality, critical intelligence, and intercultural dialogue are developed as guides to addressing cross-border problems, drawing on the issue of climate change to illustrate how they become operative. A pragmatic faith in these ideals is thus justified by empirical hypotheses concerning the historical tendencies and latent potentialities of human experience, rather than metaphysical premises attached to a supernatural force or universal Reason.