In this article, we approach world politics through the lens of its manifold practices, which we define as competent performances. Studying International Relations (IR) from the perspective of international practices promises three key advances. First, by focusing on practices in IR, we can understand both IR theory and international politics better or differently. World politics can be conceived as structured by practices, which give meaning to international action, make possible strategic interaction, and are reproduced, changed, and reinforced by international action and interaction. This focus helps broaden the ontology of world politics, serves as a focal point around which debates in IR theory can be structured, and can be used as a unit of analysis that transcends traditional understandings of ‘levels of analysis’. We illustrate what an international practice is by revisiting Thomas Schelling's seminal works on bargaining. Second, with the help of illustrations of deterrence and arms control during the Cold War and of post-Cold War practices such as cooperative security, we show how practices constitute strategic interaction and bargaining more generally. Finally, a practice perspective opens an exciting and innovative research agenda, which suggests new research questions and puzzles, and revisits central concepts of our discipline, including power, history, and strategy.

This article examines the question of whether international markets in allowances conferring the right to emit greenhouse gases are consistent with a cosmopolitan approach to global and intergenerational justice. After placing emissions trading within the context of both climate change policy and cosmopolitan political theory, three normative objections are examined to the use of emissions trading to mitigate the threat of dangerous climate change. Each objection arises from a different application of cosmopolitan thinking: (i) the potentially corrosive impact of greater use of emissions allowances markets on the environmental values of successive generations of atmospheric users; (ii) the awkward relationship between emissions markets and the norms of procedural justice endorsed by all prominent cosmopolitans; and (iii) the injustice expressed by policy instruments that commodify the atmosphere. It is argued that, while each objection should prompt some care in the construction and implementation of emissions trading schemes to guarantee their legitimacy among existing and future users of the atmosphere, they do not generate a decisive normative challenge to the use of markets, properly defined and regulated, to slow global warming.

How do individual actors figure out what to do? This article advocates a departure from carving up research on this key question about political agency into narrow scholarly categories. Such categories, especially what has to become framed as incompatible logics of action in International Relations Theory, may make for neat and tidy scholarly boxes. But they miss the winding roads through which actors come to embark on a course of action. In order to overcome this shortcoming, I start with uncovering an important clue on which authors adhering to different logics of action converge; political agency has a lot to do with making judgements. I proceed with conceptualizing political judgement broadly in terms of subsuming particulars and universals. I follow-up with outlining a map for empirical research on judgement that helps us follow the actors in how they figure out what to do (the agent's logics of action) rather than superimposing our narrow scholarly categories on their reasoning (a scholarly logic of action). Scrutinizing the usefulness of this map, finally, I analyse McNamara's exercise of political agency during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The findings underline my overall argument: the inclusive conceptualization of political judgement, coupled with the balance of theoretical and empirical inquiry that the research map facilitates, improves on our understandings of how actors figure out what to do.

In our daily lives few things are as important to us as being treated with respect. Yet in International Relations (IR), we regularly assume that actors follow just their material interests or the social norms appropriate for their identity, without caring if the treatment they get matches their own sense of importance and worth. Drawing mostly on insights from moral philosophy and social psychology this article argues that even in international relations social respect can be a significant goal, both for instrumental reasons and as an end in itself. In fact, as long as we ignore this dimension of international politics we will be unable to fully explain major features, specifically the intensity and duration of many cross-border conflicts. To show the perspectives which systematic research on respect may open for IR, this article presents a theoretical overview of the chief factors that shape the reactions to respectful or disrespectful behavior.

This article defends a sentimentalist cosmopolitan approach to international ethics against the rationalist cosmopolitan claim that emotions ought to be subjugated by their master, reason, and in processes of ethical deliberation. It argues that emotions play an indispensable role in making moral judgements and help to motivate ethical actions. Drawing on elements of 18th century moral sentiment theory and recent advances in neuroscience and psychology, the article demonstrates that reason and emotion are intimately linked forms of reflective thought, that emotion is central to reason and, far from disrupting processes of ethical deliberation, may actually enhance our ability to make moral judgements. Focusing on the problem of global poverty, the article shows that a sentimentalist cosmopolitan ethic provides a holistic approach to moral dilemmas in world politics that is capable of identifying injustices, prescribing how we ought to respond to them, and motivating ethical action in response to the injustices we observe.