This article develops a ‘spatio-political’ structural typology of (national and international) political systems, based on the arrangement of homogeneous or heterogeneous political centers and peripheries in layered political spaces. I then apply this typology to Eurocentric political systems from the high middle ages to today. Rather than see no fundamental change across nearly a millennium (the system remained anarchic) or a singular modern transition (with several centuries of fundamental structural continuity on either side), I depict a series of partial structural transformations on time scales of a century or two. I also recurrently step back to consider the nature and significance of such structural models; why and how they explain. International systems, I try to show, do not have just one or even only a few simple structures; their parts are arranged (structured) in varied and often complex ways. Structural change therefore is common and typically arises through the interaction and accumulation of changes in intertwined elements of interconnected systems (not from radical innovations or dramatic changes in core principles). And structural models, I argue, explain both continuity and change not by identifying causes (or mechanisms) but through configurations; the organization of the parts of a system into a complex whole.

Contemporary global governance takes place not only throughs formal inter-governmental organizations and treaties, but increasingly through diverse institutional forms including informal inter-governmental organizations, trans-governmental networks, and transnational public–private partnerships. Although these forms differ in many ways, they are all what we call ‘low-cost institutions’ (LCIs): the costs of creating, operating, changing, and exiting them, and the sovereignty costs they impose, are substantially lower on average than those of treaty-based institutions. LCIs also provide substantive and political governance benefits based on their low costs, including reduced risk, malleability, and flexibility, as well as many of the general cooperation benefits provided by all types of institutions. LCIs are poorly-suited for creating and enforcing binding commitments, but can perform many other governance functions, alone and as complements to treaty-based institutions. We argue that the availability of LCIs changes the cost–benefit logic of institutional choice in a densely institutionalized international system, making the creation of new institutions, which existing research sees as the ‘last resort’, more likely. In addition, LCIs empower executive, bureaucratic, and societal actors, incentivizing those actors to favor creating LCIs rather than treaty-based institutions. The availability of LCIs affects global governance in multiple ways. It reduces the status quo bias of governance, changes its institutional and actor composition, enables (modest) cooperation in times of polarization and gridlock, creates beneficial institutional divisions of labor, and expands governance options. At the same time, the proliferation of LCIs reduces the focality of incumbent institutions, increasing the complexity of governance.

Transnational altruism comes in many forms, prominently among them private giving through charitable NGOs. This paper focuses on the altruistic actions of those giving to charitable organizations and especially on the subsequent altruistic choices of those second-order, donor-organizations. Leaving choices about how donated money should be used exclusively in the hands of donors is morally problematic in various ways. This is why transnational relationships that involve private giving from rich to poor should be democratized. We propose thus a new moral principle for guiding altruistic behavior: democratic altruism. We develop our argument by focusing on the moral powers and formative agency that donors exercise through their charitable behavior, in particular through their choice to support particular types of aid or organizations. We argue that if and when donors give, they should do so in a way that allows the poor to exercise formative agency as well, in decisions over how donated resources should be used on the ground.

This paper brings the notion of translation into dialogue with the growing literature on international hierarchies and the historical origins of the modern international order. Leveraging on the writings of Karl Marx, I draw parallels between the exchange of commodities and the translation of linguistic signs in order to unmask the inequalities and asymmetries that pervade the practice of translation. I then deploy these theoretical insights to illuminate the global constitution of the modern international order. In this Marx-inspired reading, the modern international order is cast as the ‘universal equivalent’ that has crystallized out of the asymmetries and contradictions that pervaded the global political economy of conceptual exchange in the long 19th century. As universal equivalent, the modern international order effectively functions as the socially recognized ‘metalanguage’ that undergirds the miracle of global translatability and makes international/interlingual relations possible on a global scale. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the analysis for the future of international/interlingual hierarchies and world order.

As the so-called liberal international order has come under duress, the problem of ‘peaceful change’ has reappeared on the agenda of International Relations (IR), mainly in a realist guise drawing upon E.H. Carr and Robert Gilpin's renditions of the problem. Making a conceptual archaeological intervention, this paper recovers long-neglected multidisciplinary debates on ‘peaceful change’ taking place in the tumultuous interwar period. It concurs that peaceful change is an IR problem par excellence, central to academic debates in the burgeoning interwar discipline, but also a more complex conceptual figure than posterity portrays it. The paper explores the debates between negative and positive conceptions of peaceful change, between political, legal-institutional and communitarian mechanisms of peaceful change, and different policies of peaceful change, particularly its troubled relationship to appeasement. The paper concludes that the interwar debate on peaceful change, while highly embedded in its context, does offer IR an alternative and more aspirational perspective on the problem of power and order transitions.

Many political theorists, philosophers, and International Relations scholars argue that states are ‘corporate moral agents’, which can be held responsible in many of the same ways as individual moral agents. States can have debts, contractual obligations, reparative obligations, and duties. Should states also be subject to criminal responsibility and punishment? Thus far, the debate about state crime has focused on two general problems with corporate crime: whether corporate entities can have intentions (or mens rea); and whether it is possible to punish them. In this paper, I identify two problems with extending corporate criminal responsibility to the state. First, since there is no ‘international corporate law’ that regulates the internal structures of states, many states fail to meet the conditions for corporate agency (and hence for criminal responsibility). Second, since the most serious international crimes are not subject to a statute of limitations, the argument for state crime paves the way for forms of ‘historical punishment’ that few of its proponents would accept. Finally, I argue that it is unnecessary to hold states criminally responsible, and that state responsibility ought to be understood as reparative rather than punitive.

This paper contributes to recent revisions to the English School (ES) which have sought to redress its Eurocentrism. It argues that, despite providing necessary accounts of non-Western international societies and the agency of non-European polities in the expansion of global international society, there remains a gap in capturing the agency of postcolonial states in contributing to order negotiation and management in contemporary international order. It proposes a social role negotiation framework to address the gap, which it situates within a holistic conceptual framework that supplements an ES understanding of international order between states with a world-system perspective on how states are embedded within global capitalism, and a neo-Gramscian focus on social forces as the key agents contesting and shaping states' foreign policy orientation. It highlights two major types of postcolonial state agency within international order: contesting and limiting great powers' legitimate exercise of power; and establishing responsibilities towards building and managing order vis-a-vis great powers. The paper illustrates the utility of the social roles framework with the example of ASEAN in Southeast Asian and Asia-Pacific order.

Questions of consciousness pervade the social sciences. Yet, despite persistent tendencies to anthropomorphize states, most International Relations scholarship implicitly adopts the position that humans are conscious and states are not. Recognizing that scholarly disagreement over fundamental issues prevents answering definitively whether states are truly conscious, I instead demonstrate how scholars of multiple dispositions can incorporate a pragmatic notion of state consciousness into their theorizing. Drawing on recent work from Eric Schwitzgebel and original supplementary arguments, I demonstrate that states are not only complex informationally integrated systems with emergent properties, but they also exhibit seemingly genuine responses to qualia that are irreducible to individuals within them. Though knowing whether states possess an emergent ‘stream’ of consciousness indiscernible to their inhabitants may not yet be possible, I argue that a pragmatic notion of state consciousness can contribute to a more complete understanding of state personhood, as well as a revised model of the international system useful to multiple important theoretical debates. In the article's final section, I apply this model to debate over the levels of analysis at which scholarship applies ontological security theory. I suggest the possibility of emergent state-level ontological insecurity that need not be understood via problematic reduction to individuals.

Within the political-economy of the social sciences, Area Studies (AS) is supposed to supply contextually-informed knowledge on (non-Western) areas to the other social sciences, in exchange for theory to guide further empirical investigations. Based on this assumption, there are regular calls for greater engagement with AS to counteract the shortcomings of International Relations’ (IR) knowledge-base on many areas, perspectives, and practices of the international. However, there has been little work empirically detailing knowledge-exchange practices between IR and AS, so it remains an open question if the relationship functions as an exchange of ‘international’ theory-for-‘area’ empirics. This paper provides a macro-sociological analysis of the practices of IR–AS knowledge-exchange. By focusing on citation practice, it moves beyond accounts that treat the two disciplines as ‘black boxes’, to trace which parts of the ‘dividing discipline’ of IR are active in exchanging knowledge with which ‘area’ scholarships. Hence, it asks: Are there ‘area’ blindspots in IR's knowledge-production? And, what type of IR theory is exported to AS? This analysis informs an assessment of whether AS represents a significant resource for IR in its efforts to, one, better inform its knowledge-production about ‘other’ areas of the international, and two, assert its disciplinary-relevance within the academy.

A recent wave of scholarship attests that the liberal world order is under threat. Although there is disagreement about the underlying reasons for this diagnosis, there are few attempts to further our understanding of how the liberal order can be reinvigorated. This paper probes the potential of blockchain technology to promote international cooperation. Blockchain technology is a data structure that enables global governance stakeholders to establish decentralized governance systems which provide high-powered incentives for enhanced cooperation. By outlining the contours of a blockchain-based global governance system for climate policy, the paper illustrates that blockchain technology holds theoretical promise to foster cooperation in three ways: leveraging new sources of information through blockchain-based prediction markets; allaying coordinating problems through reducing the cost of transactions for side payments; and allowing states and other global governance actors to make more credible commitments given guaranteed execution of blockchain-enabled smart contracts. By empowering local knowledge holders and non-state actors that traditionally lacked the means to coordinate efforts to influence global politics, blockchain technology also promises to advance an international order based on liberal values. In actuality, however, emerging blockchain-based global governance systems will fall short of the libertarian ideal of ‘fully-automated liberalism’ as their design and operation will remain under the shadow of power.

As global governance institutions appear increasingly contested by state and non-state actors alike, understanding their origin, operation, and impact is becoming ever more urgent. This symposium uses Michael Zürn's A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation (OUP, 2018) as a springboard to explore the state of global governance theory. A Theory opens new terrain and advances bold and original arguments, including the contention that global governance is itself best understood as a political system. It analyzes a cycle from rising authority beyond the state through the 20th century, to ensuing legitimation problems toward the century's end, to the politicization and contestation triggered by such problems. A book of such ambition inevitably elicits queries within diverse international relations research communities. This symposium features seven articles from diverse traditions in engagement with A Theory's understanding of global contestation, authority, and legitimacy. These are followed by a response from Zürn. An introduction situates A Theory within extant research on global governance, highlights its endogenous theory of global politics, and identifies the stakes of deepening research on the sources of global authority, contestation, and political legitimation.

I challenge a recent trend in just war theory – that civilians might be complicit with terrorists and lose non-combatant immunity – by reversing the gun sights and asking whether colonizing populations complicit with empire might compromise their non-combatant status. Employing colonial settlers as a thought experiment, I demonstrate the logic of expanded civilian culpability that has been proposed in the wake of the War on Terror would be unacceptable in other scenarios, and that these revisionist proposals are in service of ends incompatible with just war. In the process, I identify an important ambiguity regarding the performativity of non-combatant status, and show how this is used to aggressively expand civilian culpability for violence.

This cross-disciplinary symposium on Friedrich Kratochwil's The Status of Law in International Society engages with the interconnections between social knowledge (theory) and action (practice). Each contributor reflects critically on one of Kratochwil's nine meditations. These co-meditations cover not only Kratochwil's work, but they deepen discussions on the role of legal norms in international society, the practice turn, pragmatism, the production of knowledge, and human action. Kratochwil's reply to his co-meditators pushes the limits of prevailing thought on praxis. As a whole, the symposium exemplifies how we find ourselves always in the midst of theory and practice.

At a point when global governance appears to be at a crossroad, caught between globalizing and national populist forces, International Relations theorists are deeply immersed in debating what brought the world to this point. This contribution enlists Michael Zürn's A Theory of Global Governance (2018) to explore the state of global governance theory through a focus on three substantive themes: authority, legitimacy, and contestation in global governance. It identifies the current state of theorizing on each theme, situates Zürn's claims within these literatures, and previews counterpoints from a variety of theoretical perspectives.

In the past two decades, calls for International Relations (IR) to ‘turn’ have multiplied. Having reflected on Philosophy's own linguistic turn in the 1980s and 1990s, IR appears today in the midst of taking – almost simultaneously – a range of different turns, from the aesthetic to the affective, from the historical to the practice, from the new material to the queer. This paper seeks to make sense of this puzzling development. Building on Bourdieu's sociology of science, we argue that although the turns ostensibly bring about (or resuscitate) ambitious philosophical, ontological, and epistemological questions to challenge what is deemed to constitute the ‘mainstream’ of IR, their impact is more likely to be felt at the ‘margins’ of the discipline. From this perspective, claiming a turn constitutes a position-enhancing move for scholars seeking to accumulate social capital, understood as scientific authority, and become ‘established heretics’ within the intellectual subfield of critical IR. We therefore expect the proliferation of turns to reshape more substantively what it means to do critical IR, rather than turning the whole discipline on its head.

This foreword frames the Symposium in two ways. It summarises the core themes running through the nine ‘meditations’ in The Status of Law in World Society. Moreover, it places these themes in the wider context of Kratochwil's critical engagement with how we pursue knowledge of and in the social world and translate this knowledge into action. Ultimately, also his pragmatic approach cannot escape the tensions between theory and practice. Instead, we are in the midst of both.

Michael Zürn's A Theory of Global Governance is a major theoretical statement. The first section of this essay summarizes Zürn's argument, pointing out that his Global Politics Paradigm views contestation as generated endogenously from the dilemmas and contradictions of reflexive authority relationships. Authoritative international institutions, he maintains, have difficulty maintaining their legitimacy in a world suffused with democratic values. The second section systematically compares Zürn's Global Politics Paradigm with both Realism and Cooperation Theory, arguing that the three paradigms have different scope conditions and are therefore as much complementary as competitive. The third section questions the relevance of Zürn's argument to contemporary reality. Great power conflict and authoritarian populism in formerly democratic countries generate existential threats to multilateralism and global institutions that are more serious than Zürn's legitimacy deficits.

When leaders meet in person, they perform a wide range of interaction rituals. They dress for the occasion, greet each other and shake hands, exchange pleasantries and gifts, arrive at the meeting venue and have themselves seated according to protocol, and so on. What do they make of the performance of such rituals? In this paper, I argue that leaders often take advantage of or outright flout what the sociologist Erving Goffman calls the prevailing ‘ceremonial idiom’ of an interaction – that is the intersubjective understanding they share on what rituals to perform and how to perform them – to realize a number of political and personal objectives, with larger international consequences. The ‘ceremonial idiom’ is deliberately transgressed and a counterpart's ‘face’ threatened – overtly but more often subtly – to achieve what are commonly known as ‘one-upmanship’ and ‘putdowns’ in interpersonal contact. Empirically, I demonstrate my argument with over two dozen episodes of face-to-face diplomacy across six categories of interaction rituals: the identity of leaders, gestural, spatial–physical, task-embedded, linguistic, and communication rules. I also outline several directions for future research.

How have the structures of state systems varied over time and space? We outline a game theoretic model of the decision by political units to accept offers of graded sovereignty from imperial centers. We conceptualize four types of sovereign bargains – tributary, informal extractive, suzerain, and departmental – as a function of whether a polity has external sovereignty and whether resources flow from the subordinate polity to the imperial center through transfers or direct extraction. We then specify the payoffs for these bargains and theorize how increasing interaction capacity and international competition shape the structure of state systems. We show how increasing interaction capacity is related to the transition from transfers to extraction while international competition plays a role only when interaction capacity is already high. We demonstrate the applicability of our model with case studies from low- and high-density environments during the early modern period, respectively: (1) The Oyo Empire of western Africa; (2) Mysore of south Asia.

A Theory of Global Governance is a long awaited book that finally theorizes the increasing authority of international institutions and the conflicts emerging from it. With its focus on reflexive deference as a basis for international authority it covers important elements of global governance but also leaves some critical blind spots regarding the forms of super- and subordination. In our engagement with Michael Zürn's book we propose to conceptualize international authority as a subcategory of international rule instead of its essence and to investigate various forms of rule by way of analyzing the resistance they provoke instead of institutionalized mandates.