This chapter suggests paths along which the futures of international relations as subject matter and International Relations as an academic discipline may develop. First, it stresses that the division between the ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ or ‘non-traditional’ agenda is intended as a device to facilitate learning for new students of international relations. Second, it outlines how novel intellectual developments in the field are shaping its future trajectory, with a specific focus on the continued development of a ‘Global IR’; IR’s increasing intellectual engagement with the sociology of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and STEM subjects as sources of conceptual innovation; and recent attempts to define the International as a condition of interactive multiplicity in an effort to clarify its distinctive contribution to the wider social sciences. Finally, the chapter notes that thinking about the future itself is becoming increasingly central to the discipline, with methods of counterfactual analysis, social imaginaries of future histories and utopian idealisations emerging as important theoretical and political projects.

This chapter gives an overview of the theory and practice of global climate politics. First, it provides a brief history of the politics of climate change as they play out in the international negotiations on the issue overseen by the United Nations . Second, it looks at the formal organisational and institutional structures that exist to manage the international community’s response to climate change. Third, it reviews the ways in which different theories of International Relations have been applied to climate change, assessing both their potential and their limitations. Finally, the conclusion offers some thoughts on the evolving nature of the ‘global’ governance of climate change.

Global policymaking is fundamentally political: the assumption that “if only people could agree, then we would live in a better world” makes for a deeply problematic starting point for the analysis of global governance. Any collective course of action is bound to favor some groups more than others, and to embody a particular vision of the common good at the expense of alternative perspectives. Focusing on social conflict as the engine of global governance helps us to bring politics to the fore, not as a hindrance but as the natural condition of society – global or otherwise. In any policymaking process, power dynamics and unequal participation ultimately remain; however, inclusive contemporary global practices claim to be. Likewise, the competing value systems and ideologies that structure global policymaking can never be fully arbitrated by objective and neutral means. We connect our framework and cases to the broader politics of global governance, identifying two basic cleavages between globalists and sovereigntists, on one hand, and between issue-specific Leftist versus Rightist positions. This impressionistic overview has the advantage of showing how global policymaking, far from floating in a political void, is in fact embedded in a broader fabric of social conflict.

Chapter 1 – The Humanisation of Global Politics – provides an overview of the books central claim of a growing humanisation of global politics. Humanisation denotes the growing reference to and the appearance of the individual human being in global politics. The chapter describes the apperance of the individual human being in global politics with reference to the three discourses on prosecution, protection, and killing the individual human being which the book studies. The chapter presents the research questions and the three arguments the book makes. The chapter also presents the books's contribution, and outlines the abductive research logic and the interdisciplinary approach as well as the books interpretative methodolgy. Finally, the chapter gives an overview of the books structure and the chapters of the book.

Chapter 8, The Individual Human Being as a Category – A Conclusion and an Outlook, returns to theory. To this end, the chapter weaves together the results of the case studies and the theoretical and methodological considerations. The chapter, serving as a conclusion to the book, simultaneously summarises the book, revisits the issue of interdisciplinarity, and presents its results. It also discusses the book’s contribution and value added. Most importantly, it demonstrates how the results of the empirical case studies are relevant for IR theory and what implications for IR theory, IL scholarship, and the study of global politics can be derived from these results. Finally, the chapter outlines future research based on the book’s results.

If Underworld was primarily responsible for bringing DeLillo into worldwide critical consideration, his new global audiences have not stopped reading him. Once the darling of a coterie of American academics, DeLillo now belongs to the world.

Discusses the book’s findings and sums up lessons of the study for the conduct of international politics. Argues that human rights work has contributed significant, politically embedded global resources for justice-seeking. The resources as they now exist support active transnational concern for individuals in diverse circumstances, offer a language of appeals for issues related to justice, and inspire the search for more justice in global politics.

This introductory chapter surveys the revisionist historiography on the history of human rights. It asks whether postcolonial actors were in fact engaged in human rights activity in their embryonic efforts to establish welfare states; in initiatives to ensure oversight and some means of remedy for citizens; and in land redistribution plans and women’s advancement. In doing so, they commonly invoked other rights traditions and languages – national rights, indigenous rights, treaty rights, civil and political rights, and so on—in justifying political reform. Rather than assume a stable meaning of human rights and “discover” these phenomena decades later, we ask: how did various rights languages intersect and morph through social and political contests and transitions? When, and how, did human rights language find form in the substance of policy, advocacy, or political transformation? Recent research has been largely confined to the Atlantic world with diffusionist assumptions of non-Europeans learning human rights from their colonial administrators or the UN; this book is a contribution to globalizing the history of human rights in the age of decolonization.

In this chapter, I show that the combination of competition and rent-seeking can explain greater willingness to give up sovereignty in the modern world. The chapter uses two strategies. First, using data concerning sovereignty from the Varieties of Democracy data set, I demonstrate that the interaction between contestation and rent-seeking is associated with lower levels of autonomy in a global sample from 1946 to 2009. The chapter then explores why some of the post-Soviet states have been more prepared to integrate with Russia, giving up sovereignty. Regime types associated with higher levels of contestation over rents, such Personalist authoritarian regimes, are more likely to join Russian organizations or sign agreements of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Regimes that manage elite contestation more effectively, such as Party regimes, do not give up as much sovereignty. Similarly, nonauthoritarian regimes that manage rent-seeking more effectively also give up less sovereignty.

Environmental issues are now firmly on the global political agenda. Major UN summits and even meetings of the G8 most powerful economies in the world often feature environmental issues, especially climate change. We have now had nearly fifty years of international environmental diplomacy, such that unsurprisingly ‘the environment’ is part of everyday parlance in the practice and teaching of global politics. The same cannot be said for Green politics and perspectives on key global issues coming from more radical Green positions. Despite the potential contributions of Green thinking to an understanding and explanation of the underlying causes and potential solutions to the multiple crises engulfing global politics around war, poverty and social inequality or climate change, Green perspectives on global politics issues have rarely been articulated or brought together and have yet to gain traction. In a modest way, this book seeks to remedy that.