Chapter 9 shows how John Rawls, in continuity with the Kantian perspective, frames a conception of international law as part of a law of peoples informed by the principles of positive international law. Rawls attempts to identify a common foundation of international law given the plurality of states and the plural ideologies they subscribe to, ranging from those of liberal democracy to those of Islamic law. To this end, in seeking to identify the conditions of a possible coexistence, he fleshes out the idea of “a just political society of well-ordered peoples.” More to the point, Rawls’s law of peoples sees in human rights a common standard which holds good independently of one’s ideological persuasion – be it natural law or Islamic law – and which can accordingly serve as a basis for membership in a just society of peoples. With this basic idea Rawls goes back to the crucial question of war, finding that any legitimation of war must be grounded in the guarantee of security, that is, in self-defense, or else in the exception of what he terms “supreme emergency.”