This article introduces reasonable force as ontological to the performance of late modern police power. It argues that policing emerged through reasonable force as an innovation of military power and as a supplement to legal power. The article tracks the development of reasonable force in late modern policing through to its emergence as a vanguard strategy of post-Cold War global governance. Police power, the article finds, has transformed traditional sovereign power relations to incorporate governmental power. It finds policing power to be an expansive reforming force that exhibits a dynamic capacity to provide relational coherence to multi-layered policing constellations from the local to the global.

This article proposes a typology of causal mechanisms whereby transnational relations of recognition constitute conflict actors in frozen conflicts. While the agency of an emerging conflict actor manifests itself in ‘struggles for recognition’ motivated by experiences of ‘disrespect’, responses from different significant others vary in terms of motivations and pathways (mechanisms of recognition). Adapting Honneth’s tripartite division, the typology distinguishes between four forms of recognition: thin cognitive recognition, ‘respect’/rights, ‘esteem’/difference, and ‘love’/empathy. Three transnational corrections are made in order to include transnational relations of recognition, non-state actors, and unstructured social-relational forms of international/transnational recognition. The typology is applied to the conflict of Western Sahara, which has been reshaped by the rise of internal Sahrawi pro-independence groups (based inside the territory annexed by Morocco) as an increasingly relevant conflict actor, with their identity shifting from victims to human rights activists to activists involved in an unsolved conflict. This identity and social-status formation has been the product of transnational recognition from three significant others: the annexing state (Morocco), the contested state-in-exile (SADR), and the international community. The overall effect of intermingling recognition processes, including various instrumental initiatives deprived of mutuality, has been increased struggle and conflict complexity rather than ‘recognitional peace’.

Many scholars in International Relations will register surprise and perhaps amusement at the recent 'discovery' of the state by sociologists. They could accurately claim, it has never been similarly neglected in their own discipline. International Relations is about states and the system of states. Classical realism relies on explicit understandings about what states are and their place in the international system.

I Am not concerned in this paper to discover what is peculiarly western about western conceptions of a world moral order, but merely to assemble some ideas about morality that recur in western thought - which may or may not be features of other civilizations as well. It is my ignorance of other civilizations that prevents me from undertaking the seductively neat task of deciding what is unique about western values, but it is the same ignorance that saves me from making the mistake of arriving at what is essentially western by subtracting from its history that which it shares with other cultures. “Western Values in International Relations” is a field that has been pioneered by Martin Wight in such a way as to stay the hand of a glossator, but it is the word “universal” in my title that distinguishes the present undertaking from Wight's work. His aim was to follow some lines of thought derived from domestic politics in the West into the field of diplomacy and international relations. My aim is to pursue them further, beyond international society to world society, and to take into moral account not merely the state and the order of states, but also the individual and certain actors and institutions in world politics whose concerns have been regarded conventionally as falling outside the domain of ‘diplomacy and international relations’.

J. A. Hobson died on April Fools’ Day in the first year of the Second World War. This, and a whimsical anecdote from A. J. P. Taylor, might appear to be enough to justify the portrayal of Hobson as an idealist. This paper critically assesses the work of J. A. Hobson and its relation to idealism as a category of international relations thought. An examination of Hobson’s writings on international relations shows that there are three distinct strands of thought, three modes of idealism. These modes of idealist thought differ on fundamental propositions about international relations as well as in their prescriptions for a reformed world order. In short, consideration of Hobson’s work destabilizes the monolithic category of idealism in international relations. Put another way, idealism blurs important distinctions in Hobson’s work.

As Maria Mälksoo and Bahar Rumelili's contributions in this Forum show, the concept of liminality has either been ignored or understudied in International Relations (IR) theory. To a certain extent, liminality suffers from the same ills as the condition it refers to, since liminal actors, by finding themselves simultaneously inside and outside structures, puzzle and challenge them. It has been shown that through the lens of liminality it is possible to read deeper into the social construction of identities on the international scene, into the question of ontological security, and into actors’ capacities of consolidating or subverting structural arrangements. When considering liminality for a particular case, its position as a concept within IR theory must be kept in mind. It challenges the linearity and neatness of many IR categories, and also, questions certain tendencies in IR theory that make it a rather self-referential system of concepts with the worrying capacity of developing a world entirely divorced from field realities; it is equally important to look at liminality as a way of seeing things which is inspired and informed by the fluctuating facts of social dynamics.

This article reads Carr through the lens of Spinoza's ethics, and Spinoza through the prism of Carr's IR Theory. The argument of the piece is that there are significant parallels in the ethical projects of both writers, which upon further examination reveal important aspects of global political life and the nature and limits of ethics in International Relations. The close, critical examination of Spinoza ad Carr undertaken in this article also sheds light on the most controversial aspect of Carr's career, his advocacy of appeasement in Nazi Germany.

As is often the case when a concept gets a new lease of life in the newspapers there has been a resurrection of interest in recent times in the concept of ‘reconstruction’. The current American administration has now undertaken not one but two major wars that have resulted in the need for reconstruction since 2001 when George W. Bush took up office in the White House. In the previous few years there were major reconstruction efforts undertaken in Bosnia (after the 1995 Dayton Accords) and in Kosovo (after the war of 1999), to name but the most obvious. Historians have to some extent taken up this cue and have been producing edited books and even full length monographs on the ‘lessons’ that we might learn from historical reconstruction efforts. There has also been a great use of conscious historical analogy by President George W. Bush. One classic example of the recent past by President Bush in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute elicited an indignant response from a number of historians in the Financial Times on the dangers of historical analogy.

This article focuses on two questions regarding the movement of persons across international borders: (1) do states have a right to unilaterally control their borders; and (2) if they do, are migration arrangements simply immune to moral considerations? Unlike open borders theorists, I answer the first question in the affirmative. However, I answer the second question in the negative. More specifically, I argue that states have a negative duty to exclude prospective immigrants whose departure could be expected to contribute to severe deprivation in their countries of origin. Countries have a right to unilaterally control their borders, but their exercise of this right is constrained by the demands of morality.

This article aims to specifically contribute to debates concerning dissent within the scholarship of International Relations (IR), through elaborating the constructive qualities of resistance. Composite and fruitful stories concerning resistance against power have flourished in studies of the ‘global’. Still, there has been a trend in IR to embrace resistance as a sense of opposition and it has been primarily described in terms of, ‘“counter”, “contradict”, “social change”, “reject”, “challenge”, ‘opposition”, “subversive”, and “damage and/or disrupt”’.1 This article adds to the literature on resistance's productive dimensions by drawing upon the case of the #MeToo campaign in Japan. The #MeToo movement in Japan should not only be viewed as a ‘non-cooperative’ form of resistance – that is, resistance that breaks norms, rules, laws, regulations and order, typically in public and in confrontative ways; rather, the #MeToo movement should be regarded as a ‘constructive’ form of resistance, which produced new resistance figures, movements, narratives as well as established new expressions of resistance. It may be perceived as a contagious form of resistance, which operated through reiterations, doublings, and re-experiences. The campaign provides a significant example of how discourses move transnationally through the force of repetition.

I doubt whether the history of mankind is yet complete enough, if ever it can be so, to furnish grounds for a sure theory on the internal causes which necessarily affect the fortune of a state. I am far from denying the operation of such causes: but they are infinitely uncertain, and much more obscure, and much more difficult to trace, than the foreign causes that tend to raise, to depress, and sometimes to overwhelm a community.

Edmund Burke

Radical changes in the international arena in recent years have shattered many of the time-worn accounts of political order on the European continent. As the axis along which international politics evolves continues to shift, not only are states and international institutions being re-ordered into a new hierarchy of power, authority and influence but the changes are also affecting the organization of international political space. In the process, many traditional features of the international political arena are becoming outdated. In particular, (in)security, a central concern of states since early modernity, is giving way to economic growth, integration, cooperation and interdependence. Whereas ‘bipolarity’ used to describe the structure of Europe ‘hegemony’ and ‘hierarchy’ are now more accurate terms for analyzing the distribution of power on the continent.

According to many of its proponents, the proposition that democracies do not fight each other is ‘as close as anything we have to an empirical law’. However, there have been several incidents among solidified liberal democracies where force was threatened or even used. Since these inter-democratic militarised interstate disputes (MIDs) almost always took place in the context of fisheries disputes, we examine two of these conflicts in detail: the cod wars between Iceland and Britain between the 1950s and the 1970s and the turbot war between Canada and Spain. We ask why these fisheries conflicts became militarised in the first place but did not escalate further. In both cases it was actually the presumed impossibility of a more violent escalation which led the parties to use force in the first place. Moreover, the (limited) use of force was almost always accompanied by the efforts of the parties involved to achieve some formalisation of international rules in the context of expanding regimes. Having demonstrated how some of the more prominent causal mechanisms stipulated by democratic peace theorists fail to convincingly account of these cases, we refrain from concluding that any of this falsifies the democratic peace proposition. However, in conclusion we do call into question the premises of the falsificationist methodology underlying much of the democratic peace debate on both theoretical and metholdological grounds. Reframing the democratic peace proposition in terms of a large-scale process of descuritisation, we contend, allows us to understand better how democratic interstate interaction remains inherently conflictive and possibly still subject to process of resecuritisation.

A major problem in managing and ultimately resolving many environmental issues, transboundary and global in particular, is how to tackle the fundamental questions of distributive justice and fairness involved. Little systematic reflection and research have been devoted to these issues. The problem of acid rain is a prime example. Strategies to abate acid rain must, among other requirements, be viewed as fair and just if they are to be politically accepted, implemented and honoured in the long term. Research and actual negotiations in this area to date have, by contrast, focused almost exclusively on the generation and analysis of emission reduction strategies which are effective in economic and, more recently, environmental terms.

This article argues that the end of the Cold War can be told as a story of the development of trust. Despite its centrality as a political concept, trust has only recently received focused attention in the field of international relations. Development of trust cannot be reduced to changing relationships of power or redefinitions of interests but requires communicative elements. The argument is demonstrated through a comparison of German–Soviet and Japanese–Soviet relations at the end of the Cold War. The key point is that trust and the lack of it, respectively, were a major factor in the profound transformation of the former relationship and led to stalemate in the latter.

What is a Classical Realist analysis of climate ethics and politics? Classical Realist ethical analysis differs from ideal normative theory in that it addresses state decision-makers rather than individuals, assumes highly imperfect compliance with the demands of justice, and is concerned with feasibility and transition rather than end-states. Classical Realists urge leaders to prioritise state security over private moral concerns, to assess rival policies against their likely consequences and to seek the ‘lesser evil’ among feasible choices. But how does Realism respond when the prudent pursuit of state security risks rendering much of the planet uninhabitable? In the 1950s, the development of the hydrogen bomb created just such a dilemma as status quo politics now carried a significant risk of thermonuclear omnicide. In response, Hans Morgenthau argued that states should manage systemic risk by working in concert to safeguard expanded, collective national interests. The Classical Realist mode of thought suggests an analogous response to systemic climate risks: states’ conceptions of national interest must expand to include cooperative system-preservation alongside traditional security concerns. Classical Realist arguments might then be mobilised to overcome resistance from vested interests and to support state-directed low carbon innovation, adaptation and mitigation agreements that prioritise ambition over distributional justice.

The Trump presidency ushered in a heightened sense of ontological insecurity in the US, based on a national self-narrative that portrayed an emasculated America. Trump promised to return the US to primacy by pursuing policies and practices that focused on border protection, militarisation, and the vilification of external others, while amplifying racial tensions within the country. From caging immigrant children at the border, to an enabling of white supremacy and the Capitol riots, Trump's presidency was broadly seen as aberration in the self-narrative of America as a tolerant, democratic nation. In this article, I am interested in how gendered bordering practices inform ontological (in)security in Trump's narrative of the nation, domestic and external policy, and discourses. While Trump's electoral loss to Biden in 2020 has been described as a ‘return to normal’, this article instead considers how Trump's presidency exhibited lines of continuity when examined through a gender lens. Understanding how masculinism informs ideas of ontological security reveals how notions of gendered bordering, hierarchy, and ordering have been persistent threads in US politics, rather than simply an anomaly under Trump. This suggests greater potential to read ontological security in more complex terms through gendered bordering practices.

The central aims of this article are twofold: first to debate whether or not women’s human rights can underpin a universal feminist project; second to defend women’s human rights as a useful political tool that can be used to challenge injustice and discrimination against women. The first section of the article briefly sets out the universality/particularity debate in both human rights theory and in feminist theory. This serves as a point of departure for the subsequent discussion of universality and particularity in relation to women’s human rights specifically. Section one of the article is entitled ‘debating’ women’s human rights as a universal feminist project, because this is, indeed, a matter of dispute (as evidenced by the contributions to this forum). That women’s human rights are universal is contested by some feminists although the reasons for their scepticism are quite different from those advanced by ultra-conservatives and religious fundamentalists.