Foreign exile has often served as an important solution to high-stakes standoffs between opposition forces and beleaguered autocrats. I assess the moral status of autocratic exile, by focusing on the tension between exile's contribution to domestic peace and its threat to global deterrence against autocracy. I begin by contending that transitioning societies normally have the moral prerogative of accepting an exile arrangement for their autocrat, even though such an arrangement harms global deterrence against autocracy. I then suggest that, in the absence of clear evidence of majority opposition to an exile arrangement within the transitioning society, foreign countries who have been entangled in an autocrat's rule will normally have a decisive duty to facilitate his exile, despite exile's repercussions for global deterrence. I explain why such foreign entanglement, particularly on the part of affluent Western democracies, is inevitable in the case of kleptocrats. But I also show that the entanglement argument for exile extends even to murderous autocrats, whose crimes fall under the purview of the International Criminal Court. Countries entangled in a murderous autocrat's rule ought to prioritize their particular duties toward his victims over their general moral reasons to advance international criminal justice.

From climate change to disruptive technologies, policymakers constantly face new problems calling for unprecedented institutional solutions. Yet, we still poorly understand the inventive process leading to the emergence of new institutional forms. Existing theories argue that exogenous changes provide incentives and opportunities for institutional invention. However, they fail to explain how the inventive process endogenously structures their emergence. Drawing from complexity theory and Brian Arthur's work on technological inventions, we develop a structural theory recasting the process of inventing new institutions as the combination of pre-existing institutions. Building on three assumptions related to this combinatorial process, we argue that the distance between institutions shapes the emergence of new institutional forms and their regime's trajectory. Following the initial take-off in the number of institutional inventions at the creation of a regime, we expect the rate of institutional inventions over replications will slow down as nearby institutions are combined and accelerate as distant ones are combined. We illustrate these expectations by looking at three regimes: data privacy, climate governance, and investment protection. Together, they showcase how our combinatorial theory can help make sense of the emergence of unprecedented institutions and, more generally, the pace of unfolding complexity in various international regimes.

From Trump's America to Putin's Russia, from climate change denial to corona denial, so-called post-truth politics are experiencing a global rise. How can we understand and explain this phenomenon? In the attempt to answer this question, this article advances two core claims. First, it suggests that post-truth politics is (despite its name) marked not only by the denial of claims to objective truth, but also by the naturalization of one specific truth claim: namely, the cynical belief that self-interests are behind all public discourse. Second, it locates the social sources of this dogmatic cynicism in the global expansion of neoliberal competition.

Moral responsibility is a prominent concept used in political discourses and theoretical debates. Yet disagreement remains on how it could work in practice. When attempting to address global challenges such as global poverty, combating atrocities, or artificial intelligence, approaches often revert to retrospective accounts of responsibility that focus on non-compliance with regulatory frameworks. As a result, cases where prospective responsibility would be required often go unaddressed. In this article, we introduce an analytical conceptualization of responsibility that should help to guide the application of moral responsibility in such situations. In the first step, we develop a typology that distinguishes between four types of responsibility: ‘obligatory’, ‘structural’, ‘prescribed’, and ‘discursive’. Second, we identify responsibility gaps for each responsibility type. Third, we introduce different ethical principles from political theory that help to identify potential responsibility relations. We illustrate the utility of this framework with the example of climate change, where ethical principles beyond the contribution principle have already been applied. The paper facilitates new perspectives in political debates about how to allocate responsibility in light of global challenges and enhances theoretical debates in International Relations scholarship.

Does international law restrict the use of force by states in self-defense even when their survival is threatened? Should it? To answer these questions, I compare international law to domestic law and develop two ideal-types of emergency: in a ‘subject emergency’ law imposes absolute, justiciable limits on self-defense. In a ‘community emergency’ the sovereign, not law, determines what is necessary for the survival of the community and its legal system: sustaining the rule of law justifies its temporary retreat. I show that international law has elements of both ideal-types. It imposes some absolute limits on self-defense. However, international law also retreats, allowing the victim state to determine the (1) aims, (2) ad bellum proportionality, and (3) end of self-defense, as if armed threats triggered community emergencies. These three retreats serve the function of sustaining the rule of international law over the states at war. Retreats (1) and (3) also help sustain the rule of international law over the international community. That international law does and should not treat armed threats against states simply as subject emergencies, shows it can only sustain the rule of international law in an emergency by retreating. This is a negative litmus test for international law's ability to diffuse anarchy in International Relations.

As the origin story of the present world political order the globalization of international society serves as a unifying frame for the discipline of international relations. This paper considers the consequences of the shift from the ‘expansion’ to the ‘globalization’ of international society in relation to two main texts: Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society and Tim Dunne and Christian Reus-Smit's The Globalization of International Society. The analysis shows that Bull's conception of world order depends on a key distinction between aggregate and system which marks the difference between an aggregate of local political orders and a systematically unified world political order (a global international system). Because recent histories of the globalization of international society remain guided by Bull's distinction, they are unable to explain this transition in historical terms without transforming the global international order from the explanandum of the globalization of international society to its explanans. As a result, global histories of the globalization of international society grant a global international system a structural permanence the original expansion story was meant to contest. In doing so they change profoundly the kind of questions that can be asked regarding the origins, character, and future of political order on earth.

The study of global politics is frequently organized around fields, but the boundaries of these fields are little understood. We explore the relationship between two proximate fields, human rights (HR) and democracy promotion (DP), in order to understand the emergence and maintenance of field boundaries. The two fields are closely linked in international law and practice, yet they have remained largely separate as fields of action, despite vast changes in global politics over four decades. The disjuncture has been largely maintained by HR organizations who police the boundary to keep DP out. We identify differences in anchoring norms as the key factor driving boundary maintenance. Actors in the two fields hold different foundational ideas about how to protect and advance rights, norms that we describe as cosmopolitan and statist. This account is superior to alternate explanations that emphasize functional demands or resource flows, and complements historical institutionalist accounts. Our research offers a theoretical contribution to the study of fields and practical insight into two important areas of global practice. Our qualitative research is supplemented by digital annotations, supported by the Qualitative Data Repository.

While ontological security (OS) studies have gone through a recent evolution, shifting toward psychoanalytic and existential accounts of anxiety, this article argues there remains a deficient engagement with the affective environments within which actors operate. Specifically, focusing on shared emotions/affect allows for a thicker account of the mechanisms of OS – including the constitutive forces underpinning society/societal trust, the role/power of signifiers and narratives, and the basis upon which actors promote social change. Accordingly, it suggests Durkheim's social theory, his broader concept of ‘religion’ as an affective community constituted by faith in a moral order entwined with the sacred, offers a viable pathway to develop these insights and develop a new basis for the mechanisms of OS. The drive for OS thus becomes reconfigured as an effort to act faithfully toward a dynamic moral order, while ontological insecurity emerges from the unbearable lightness of being experienced within moral disorder. Following Durkheim's preliminary argument on nationalism representing the continuation of religion, we can then revise how/why nations are integral to OS and International Relations. Specifically, we can view foreign policy as informed by debates around how to act faithfully toward the moral order – a process interrelated with revitalization and renewal of the sacred.

The return of authoritarian great powers, the slowing of the democratic wave, and outright reversion to authoritarian rule pose important questions for international theory. What are the implications of an international system populated with more autocracies? This question was posed by a diverse array of social scientists, public intellectuals, and policy analysts in response to the autocratic wave in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. We show that a series of conversations emanating from quite diverse intellectual priors – from Christian realists to international lawyers and disaffected Marxists – converged on the risks these autocratic regimes posed to democratic regimes and the international order they sought to forge. These risks included unconstrained rulers, an inability to sustain international commitments and political processes that undermined rational deliberation at home and spread disinformation abroad. The reading of this work suggests an under-appreciated strand of liberal international relations theory, and these debates have direct implications for liberal arguments about the democratic peace. Rather than theorizing why democracies avoid war, they underscore the importance of understanding why authoritarian and democratic countries are particularly prone to conflict.