Introduction

The last century has seen the creation of a fairer, more stable and prosperous state and international environment than so far ever seen in history, even when seen from the perspective of the citizen. Much of this has been based upon the growing mobility of people, ideas, capital, resources and technology. There has been a transformation since the nineteenth century, based upon a ‘complex configuration of industrialisation, rational state-building, and ideologies of progress …’ which led to a core–periphery system, and more recently to a more decentralised and polycentric world (Buzan and Lawson 2015: 1). That the subaltern positionality is essential in order to understand the conditions for emancipation, strongly supported by certain and probably powerful or influential elites, is widely assumed in critical, liberal and other reformist debates. For many, however, a legitimate reading of the progress seen over this period represents a Rostowian shift from tradition to modernity, spanning thinking associated with Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Rousseau, and on towards modern liberal democracy and global capital (Rostow 1960). It is seen by many thinkers, especially those sympathetic to political, normative, legal and economic strands of liberalism, as a form of meliorism: that the adoption and dissemination of positive peace requires social, state and international reform, as well as the development of the human condition (Malloy 2013: 467). Indeed, fifty years ago, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, now rarely mentioned, placed many of these problems at the forefront of liberal international and state policy (GA 1966).