‘Naming and shaming’ those accused of abuse and misconduct is one of the most common strategies of transnational activists. Yet both qualitative and quantitative studies show that the policy and behavioural effects of naming and shaming are often contradictory. Named and shamed actors do respond at least partially by adjusting their policies and behaviour to some extent, but the actions challenged publicly as human rights violations may not cease and can even become more widespread. This ambivalent outcome is usually explained by the uneven capacity of the target to reform or by its ‘strategic’ response to escape the consequences of naming and shaming. By contrast, I show that naming and shaming can be brought to a standstill when the frame used by transnational activists is ambiguous. I trace the role of framing ambiguity during the Human Rights Watch (HRW) ‘naming and shaming’ campaigns against the Israel Defence Force (IDF) in the course of the July–August 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war (Lebanon war), and the December 2008–January 2009 Israel-Hamas war (Gaza war). I argue that HRW's use of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as a frame led to an argumentative deadlock (frame implication contest). This legal frame, and the process of legal framing, did genuinely constrain the IDF, affecting its operations and behaviour. However, the ambiguity of the frame also provided the IDF with a range of material and ideational assets that gave it scope to claim that its actions were actually in conformity with applicable law, and to justify continuing to use force in densely populated areas.

Disease is a transnational phenomenon which pays no heed to territorial state boundaries; yet it rarely features in the discussion of International Relations. It is important that the discipline should address the issue of disease and more broadly, health, not simply to facilitate containment of disease transmission across international borders but also because central notions of justice, equity, efficiency and order are involved.

From the ‘long’ sixteenth century the Ottoman regencies of North Africa operated as major centres of piracy and privateering across the Mediterranean Sea. Though deemed by emerging European powers to be an expression of the ‘barbarian’ status of Muslim and Ottoman rulers and peoples, piracy, and corsairing in fact played a major role in the development of the ‘primary’ or ‘master’ institutions of international society such as sovereignty, war, or international law. Far from representing a ‘barbarian’ challenge to the European ‘standard of civilization’, piracy and privateering in the modern Mediterranean acted as contradictory vehicles in the affirmation of that very standard.

This article explores how Barbary piracy, privateering, and corsairing acted as ‘derivative’ primary institutions of international society. Drawing on recent ‘revisionist’ accounts of the expansion of international society, it argues that piracy and corsairing simultaneously contributed to the construction of law and sovereignty across the Mediterranean littoral whilst also prompting successive wars and treaties aimed at outlawing such practices. The cumulative effect of these complex historical experiences indicates that primary institutions of international society owe much more to ‘barbarism’ and ‘illegality’, an indeed to international stratification uneven development, than is commonly acknowledged.

A novel form of international order was developed in the nineteenth century by international administrative unions such as the International Telegraph Union and the Universal Postal Union. This administrative internationalism posed a striking alternative to the international society of great powers, sovereignty, and forms of imperial domination, for the members of administrative unions included not only sovereign states but also semi-sovereigns, vassals, and colonies. Members were equal and bound identically to the union treaty and its international administrative law. This article examines the structure of unions and their politics of membership in the nineteenth century, and engages theories of global governance to argue that early administrative unions present a mode of international order different from theories of both global networks and the international system of neorealism.

Scholarship on global environmental assessments call for these organisations to become more reflexive to address challenges around participation, inclusivity of perspectives, and responsivity to the policy domains they inform. However, there has been less call for reflexivity in IPCC scholarship or closer examination of how routine concepts condition scholarly understanding by focusing on science and politics over other social dynamics. In this article, I suggest that scholarly reflexivity could advance new analytical approaches that provide practical insights for changing organisational structures. Through reflecting on my understanding of the IPCC, I develop actors, activities, and forms of authority as a new analytical framework for studying international organisations and knowledge bodies. Through its application, I describe the social order of the IPCC within and between the panel, the bureau, the technical support units, the secretariat and the authors, which is revealing of which actors, on the basis of what authority, have symbolic power over the writing of climate change. The fine-grained analysis of organisations enabled by this analytical framework reveals how dominance can and is being remade through intergovernmental relations and potentially, identifies avenues that managers of these bodies can pursue to challenge it.

IR scholarship has recently seen a burgeoning interest in the right-wing populist politics of security, showing that it tends to align with the international ultraconservative mobilisation against ‘gender ideology’. In contrast, this article investigates how local feminist actors can resist right-wing populist constructions of (in)security by introducing counter-populist discourses and aesthetics of security. I analyse the case of Poland, which presents two competing populist performances of (in)security: the Independence March organised by right-wing groups on Poland's Independence Day and the Women's Strike protests against the near-total ban on abortion. The article draws on Judith Butler's theory of the performative politics of public assembly, which elucidates how the political subject of ‘the people’ can emerge as bodies come together to make security demands through both verbal and non-verbal acts. I argue that the feminist movement used the vehicle of populist performance to subvert the exclusionary constructions of (in)security by right-wing populists. In the process, it introduced a different conception of security in the struggle for a ‘livable life’. The study expands the understanding of the relationship between populism, security and feminism in IR by exploring how the populist politics of security is differently enacted by everyday agents in local contexts.

International organisations (IOs) are said to command growing levels of authority. But in studying this phenomenon, scholars predominantly focus on the formal capacities member states assign to IOs. Much less attention is paid to the effects of IO authority, that is, how authority is exerted in practice and what it does within the affected societies. Based on a case study of the African Union's (AU) anti-coup regime, I make the case for a ‘bottom-up’ approach to IO authority, focusing on its localised enactment and effects. Analysing the AU's authority through a governmentality lens and drawing on several months of field research, I show that the AU's authority to govern coups is indeed effective: in commanding the re-establishment of constitutional order, the AU prescribes a particular imaginary of political order to resolve conflict and shapes the conduct of political actors in affected states by inscribing them into this order. But rather than operating in a top-down, direct way, the AU's authority is enacted in a distant, diffuse manner. Although based on formal powers assigned to the AU, neither the way this authority is exercised nor its effects can be inferred merely from these formal powers.

Human rights violations committed by international organisations (IOs) have raised demands that IOs should be held accountable for their decisions, policies, and actions. However, traditional forms of accountability have often failed in the context of global governance. This article introduces pluralist accountability as a form of accountability whereby third parties hold IOs and their implementing partners accountable for human rights violations. In pluralist accountability, third parties set the standards for IOs’ actions in relation to human rights, review their behaviour and impose normative or material sanctions in case of misbehaviour. The article further reveals two conditions that foster the development of pluralist accountability, namely the competition among third parties and the degree of vulnerability of the implementing actors or the mandating authority with regard to human rights demands. This argument is illustrated with empirical insights from peace operations in Bosnia and Kosovo, which were accused of human trafficking and the violation of the rights of detainees.

The voluminous literature on recent transitions to democracy has generally lacked an analysis from the perspective of international law. This article explores four aspects of efforts to promote a normative ‘democratic entitlement’. First, it reviews the ways in which notions of democratic legitimacy have infiltrated virtually every aspect of international legal discourse. Second, it explores how a normative legitimacy standard may alter foundational doctrines of international law, such as non-intervention and the recognition of states and governments. Third, it reviews arguments against the emergence of ‘democratic entitlement’. These arguments both take issue with the sources of law relied upon by the entitlement's proponents, and ask whether the substantive and procedural aspects of democracy implicit in the democratic entitlement thesis are conceptually coherent. Finally, the article explores the ways in which a legal analysis of democratization confronts questions not addressed by the methodologies of other disciplines.

This article considers some implications of the Moldovan conflict from 1991 to the present for thinking about International Relations (IR) and conflict theory, as well as more specifically about the complexities of the conflict itself. This encompasses an examination of the roles of key external actors, and particularly of the Russian Republic and of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as well as a subjective view of the role of the internal actors and their aims. The analysis is based on an on-going involvement in a ‘problem-solving’ exercise in the area.

The language of human rights, along with much else in international relations, presently exhibits the features of globalisation and fragmentation. Globalisation in that human rights is used throughout the world at many levels to discuss moral approval and condemnation. Fragmentation in that human rights means different things to different people, and may well be used in contradictory ways by agents of social change. Yet most advocates of human rights wish to retain the adjective ‘universal’ along with a sense of the moral objectivity of human rights. This article suggests that a better way to ensure human rights universalism is to think of the concept as a tool, not an objectively existing moral standard or entity.

Critical cosmopolitan orientation has usually been embedded in a non-geocentric physical (NGP) cosmology that locates the human drama on the surface of planet Earth within wide scales of time and space. Although neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for critical cosmopolitanism, NGP cosmology provides a contrast to the underpinnings of centric cosmologies, such as those of Aristotle, which see the world as revolving around a particular observer, theorist and/or communal identity. NGP cosmology makes it plausible to envisage all humans as part of the same species. The connection works also through homology and analogy. An astronomic theory can be isomorphic with an ethico-political theory, that is, a structure-preserving mapping from one to the other is possible. Key cosmopolitan theorists have situated morality within a cosmic framework. However, the ethico-political implications of the NGP cosmology are ambiguous. Nietzsche was among the first to articulate its sceptical and nihilist implications. Various reactions have encouraged territorial nationalism and geopolitics. I suggest that critical cosmopolitical orientation should now be grounded on the notion of cosmic evolution, which is not only contextual, historical, pluralist and open-ended but also suggests that humanity is not a mere accident of the cosmos.

Almost no historian of the Second World War nowadays fails to acknowledge the important role of signals intelligence (SIGINT). By contrast, most histories of postwar international relations omit – without explanation – all reference to SIGINT. Neglect of this and other aspects of intelligence has significantly distorted the study of the Cold War. A new generation of scholars, however, has begun to challenge this neglect. The article seeks to show how recent research on intelligence is changing our understanding of the early Cold War.

Raymond Cohen ends his ‘reappraisal’ of the democratic-peace proposition by calling it ‘a formula that looks to be the product of both conceptual imprecision and wishful thinking’. Fortunately for the proposition, however, Professor Cohen's glass house is too fragile for him to be safe in throwing stones. Although he raises important issues, the substance of his critique violates some elementary rules of evidence and logic required for any scholarly endeavour, whether historical or social scientific. Specifically, those rules are: (1) Define your terms clearly and consistently; (2) Know your data base—in this case, know your history; (3) Look for probabilities (not mere existence or non-existence) where probabilities are specified theoretically; (4) Observe the other principles of logic.

Discussion in international relations often centres on a wide variety of norms, such as sustainable development, global governance, human security, and the responsibility to protect. A significant amount of work focuses on not only the theoretical and policy development of these norms but also the role of various norm entrepreneurs in promoting norm emergence and diffusion. Yet there are still knowledge gaps regarding the norm entrepreneurship role of international commissions that engage in the early stage of the emergence of these norms and their processes. This article elucidates the process of creation of normative ideas by analysing the role of international commissions as norm entrepreneurs, utilising a case study of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which proposed the normative idea of the responsibility to protect (R2P) in 2001. The theoretical contribution of this article is to expand the understanding of norm entrepreneurship by adding international commissions to the universe of norm entrepreneurs and illuminating their strategies for constructing normative ideas. Empirically, it explores the role and activities of the ICISS in creating the normative idea of R2P, which contrasts the existing literature that has only focused on the development of R2P after the Commission has finished its work.

Many states partially relinquish sovereignty in return for physical protection from a more powerful state. Mainstream theory on international hierarchies holds that such decisions are based on rational assessments of the relative qualities of the political order being offered. Such assessments, however, are bound to be contingent, and as such a reflection of the power to shape understandings of reality. Through a study of the remarkably persistent US-led security hierarchy in East Asia, this article puts forward the concept of the ‘epistemic community’ as a general explanation of how such understandings are shaped and, hence, why states accept subordinate positions in international hierarchies. The article conceptualises a transnational and multidisciplinary network of experts on international security – ‘The Asia-Pacific Epistemic Community’ – and demonstrates how it operates to convince East Asian policymakers that the current US-led social order is the best choice for maintaining regional ‘stability’.

The past few decades have witnessed a fundamental change in the perception of threats to the security of states and individuals. Issues of security are no longer primarily framed in terms of threats posed by an identifiable, conventional enemy. Instead, post-Cold War security policies have emphasised the global and radically uncertain nature of threats such as environmental degradation, terrorism and financial risks. What are the implications of this transformation for one of the constitutive principles of international society: state sovereignty? Existing literature has provided two possible answers to this question. The first focuses on the alleged need for states to seek international cooperation and to relax claims of national sovereignty. In Ulrich Beck's terminology, this would amount to a transformation of sovereign states into ‘cosmopolitan states’. The second takes the opposite position: in response to uncertain threats states rely on their sovereign prerogatives to take exceptional measures and set aside provisions of positive law. In Beck's terminology, this would amount to the creation of a ‘surveillance state’. None of these two answers, however, does justice to the complex relation between sovereignty, power and (international) law. As this article will show, the invocation of radical uncertainty has led to a transformation in sovereignty that cannot be captured in terms of the cosmopolitan/surveillance dichotomy. What is at stake is a more fundamental transformation of the way in which sovereignty is used to counter threats. Based on a study of the UN Counterterrorism Committee, this article demonstrates how state sovereignty is used as a governmental technology that aims to create proactive, responsible subjects.

Conflict across African states has often been linked to ethnic-based biases in government, and exclusive policies. However, the domestic politics of developing states, and the elites who contest for power therein, have often been overlooked when explaining the patterns and risk of disorder and violence. We consider how African leaders practice politics in whom to represent, and at what level. These choices have consequences as how regimes accommodate political elites creates different competitive conditions which, in turn, create incentives and opportunities for political violence. Using a dataset on cabinet appointments over twenty years, we find that high levels of elite political inclusion and mal-apportionment in positions is consistently associated with increases in non-state violence. Power distribution levels among those groups included in senior positions account for more political violence than that which stems from exclusive politics.

Global democratization rose to the international agenda in the past year as the three peak global economic associations all came under attack. In Seattle, at the meeting of the new World Trade Organization, and in Washington at the meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a diverse collection of labour unions and environmentalists from the industrial North and trade and finance ministers from the developing countries of the South each launched sharply critical barbs. The critics successfully disrupted the WTO meeting that had been designed to launch (and celebrate) a ‘Millennium Round’ of further reductions of barriers to global trade. The aims of the critics were very different, but together they derailed the entire proceedings and exposed important differences in priority among the developed states, and particularly the US and Europe. Charlene Barshefsky, the US Trade Representative and the meeting's chair, later conceded, ‘We needed a process which had a greater degree of internal transparency and inclusion to accommodate a larger and more diverse membership’.Quoted from Martin Khor, ‘Take Care, the WTO Majority is Tired of Being Manipulated’, International Herald Tribune, 21 December, 1999. This highly-regarded trade-o-crat had come to recognize that the eminently oligarchic WTO needed some democratization (as yet undefined).

Why have non-Western powers, such as China, pursued a grand strategy of commercial integration into the liberal system? In developing a general theory of competitive pressure, this article builds upon a growing body of literature that seeks to develop a liberal systemic theory. Powerful network externalities – system-level pressures and incentives – have emerged as a by-product of the highly integrated liberal core. Outsiders have been moved by an interest in accessing these network benefits as well as a fear of falling behind in the struggle for relative power. In a plausibility probe, the article explores China's decision to join the world.