In a post-Cold War era characterised by globalisation and deep interdependence, the actions of national governments increasingly have an effect beyond their own territorial borders. Moreover, key agents of global governance – international organisations and their bureaucracies, non-state actors and private agents – exercise pervasive forms of authority. Due to these shifts, it is widely noted that world politics suffers from a democratic deficit. This article contributes to work on global democracy by looking at the role of international courts. Building upon an original dataset covering the 24 international courts in existence since the end of the Second World War, we argue that international courts are able to advance democratic values and shape democratic practices beyond the state. They can do so by fostering equal participation, accountability, and public justification that link individuals directly with sites of transnational authority. We contend that the ability of international courts to promote these values is conditioned by institutional design choices concerning access rules, review powers, and provisions regarding judicial reason-giving. We canvass these design features of different international courts and assess the promises and pitfalls for global democratisation. We conclude by linking our analysis of international courts and global democratisation with debates about the legitimation and politicisation of global governance at large.

This article considers what the nineteenth century can tell us about the nature of great power management under conditions of ambiguity in relation to the holders of great power status. It charts the development of an institutionalised role for the great powers as managers of international society but with a specific focus on the mutual recognition, and conferral, of status. Such a focus highlights the changing, and sometimes competing, perceptions of not only which states should be thought of as great powers, but also therefore whether the power structure of international society remained multipolar or shifted towards bipolarity or even unipolarity. The article argues that a ‘golden age’ of great power management existed during a period in which perceptions of great power status were in fact more fluid than the standard literature accounts for. This means that predictions surrounding the imminent demise of the social institution of great power management under an increasingly ambiguous interstate order today may well be misplaced.

This article responds to critics of Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2016). It provides a rejoinder to challenges to the attempted synthesis of process sociology and the English School analysis of international society. It rebuts the postcolonial contention that the process-sociological analysis of the impact of the European ‘civilizing process’ on the modern states-system is Eurocentric. The article explains how process sociology contributes to the postcolonial critique of ‘civilization’. It concludes by arguing that their combined strengths of the two perspectives can inform the comparative study of Western and non-Western ‘civilizing processes’ and support the development of a more ‘global IR’.

Amidst calls for containing an assertive Russia, politicians and pundits have been debating whether Ukraine should serve as a ‘buffer zone’ between the Russian and Western spheres of influence. These debates provide an opportunity to revisit the long and varied history of major powers’ efforts to manage buffer zones. We draw on this history to learn the conditions under which buffer zones succeed or fail to stabilise regions, how buffers are most successfully managed, and when alternative arrangements for borderlands work better.

Intervention comprises one of the most contentious issues in International Relations. This controversy results from the way normative understanding is structured around two key, but mutually exclusive, taboos: the moral expectation to respond in cases of humanitarian need and the protection of state sovereignty. In examining this dilemma, this article asks: what happens to the construction of rhetorical strategy, where that strategy seeks to justify intervention (or not), within a binary normative environment? It is argued that actors can only successfully construct a rhetorical case by engaging in, what is termed here, normative invalidation. In a binary situation, actors cannot adhere to both taboos. These taboos are so compelling, however, that actors must necessarily invalidate or neutralise any taboo not adhered to. This is discussed in relation to the Strategic Narratives paradigm and comparative case studies on the presidential rhetoric of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

This article asks when, how, and why states started to use the concept of international community in the shared language of diplomacy and international law. It argues that the concept was accepted to the interstate language as a result of debates over international institutions, which were to acquire a universal character, at the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907. The article suggests that conceptual changes in interstate language should be understood as products of rhetorical power struggles, in which some arguments lose the battle while others prevail, some concepts are discarded while others modified. The article suggests a model of conceptual change that explains an innovation in interstate language. First, it draws attention to collective assertive speech acts at diplomatic events that signal changes in international politics. Second, it examines whether such acts implicate conceptual innovations. Third, it posits that the composition of epistemic community assembled at the Hague determines the nature of conceptual innovation. Fourth, it demonstrates how rhetorical interventions into debates at the conference introduce and mould relevant concepts. Fifth, it illuminates how contextualisation of the conference interventions in professional debates helps us understand the polemical nature of arguments and the scope of conceptual innovation.

This article discusses the advantages of a pragmatist theory of global democracy for understanding the political relevance of new phenomena such as the emergence of forms of private authority and transnational movements in tackling with global issues. The article shows in particular that the pragmatist notion of ‘publics’ offers promising insights and proves particularly promising for completing the transition from methodological nationalism to methodological cosmopolitanism that is required to understand new normative practices developing at the global level and to inquire into their conditions of validity. After having presented a basic outline of the pragmatist theory of democracy, I discuss the contribution of pragmatism to the critique of methodological nationalism and proceed then to examine and reject two alternative approaches to global politics – transnational public sphere theory and global representation theory – showing why they fail to overcome methodological nationalism. The last two sections explore private entrepreneurial authority in contexts of global governance and shows that pragmatism succeeds in explaining their political role, while the other two approaches fail.

How China assumes its position of superpower is one of the most important questions regarding global order in the twenty-first century. While considerable and sustained attention has been paid to China’s growing economic and military might, work examining how China is attempting, if at all, to influence the ecosystem of global norms is in its earlier stages. In this article we examine China’s actions in an important venue for the development of global norms, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Using a unique dataset that captures how other countries move into or out of alignment with China on UNGA resolutions that are repeated over time, we find statistical evidence that China used diplomatic and economic means in an attempt to subtly alter international norms. We further illustrate these findings by examining four states that made substantive moves toward China on resolutions concerning national sovereignty, democracy, international order, non-interference, and human rights.

The rise of China has sparked a debate about the economic and political consequences for the global economy of the internationalisation of the renminbi. We argue that the dominant focus of this literature – primarily the external conditions and requirements for a national currency to become an international currency – misspecifies the connections between the international and domestic requirements for currency internationalisation, as well as the potential to become the dominant international reserve currency. We correct this oversight by developing an integrated theoretical framework that highlights the domestic adjustment costs which a state must accommodate before its currency can carry the weight of internationalisation. These costs constitute a critical element of an international currency’s ‘political economy’, and they force states to negotiate contentious social trade-offs among competing domestic claims on finite public resources in a sustainable manner. Our analysis suggests that the likelihood of China being able to successfully negotiate the social costs associated with running a fully internationalised currency is currently very low, precisely because this will place unacceptable pressure on groups benefiting from the economic and political status quo. This further suggests that the American dollar will remain unchallenged as the global economy’s pre-eminent international currency for the foreseeable future.