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In recent years, International Relations scholarship has looked back to the 19th century as a watershed epoch for the formation of the current international order and the development of ‘Standards of Civilization’ to legitimate that order. However, limited attention has been paid to the role played by society’s relationship with the natural world in constructing these civilizational standards. This article argues that the control and exploitation of nature as a standard of civilization developed in the 19th century to constitute membership in a civilized European international society. The standard dictated that civilized polities must both demonstrate internal territorial control and uphold external obligations towards other actors. In examining 19th-century political contestations over the Danube River as a natural highway between Europe and the near periphery, I demonstrate that in the eyes of Western Europe, Russia failed to uphold the taming of nature as a civilizational standard, contributing to the delegitimization of its authority over the Danube. In its place, the Western powers following the Crimean War created an international commission to manage the Danube delta — a rational and scientific body to rectify the troublesome absence of civilized authority. These civilizational assumptions underpin the 1856 Danube Commission as an early international organization, and through its success, continue to have implications for today’s international order.
This article argues that the study of political icons offers a new route to understanding the global condition. In particular, it provides a prism for analyzing political meaning work in the global public sphere from a cultural power perspective. Many contemporary icons originate in the global South, but are iconized in a global public sphere dominated by Western interpretive schemas and by Western media and political actors. This involves a twin dynamic of adaptation and self-celebration, where icons are adapted to dominant value sets and, as a result, become sites and occasions for celebrating these values. To understand this dynamic, this paper initiates a dialogue between postcolonial theory and the cultural sociology of Jeffrey Alexander and others. The potential for theoretical cross-fertilization across these distinct theoretical fields lies in a shared concern with cultural-political logics and the structuring capacities of values and meanings. This theoretical dialogue paves the way for two interrelated lines of analysis in the article. First, drawing on the cases of Malala Yousafzai, Neda Agha Soltan, and Mohamed Bouazizi, the article empirically illustrates the twin processes of adaptation and self-celebration. Second, it goes on to discuss some of the potential consequences of these dynamics. It focuses on two in particular: that adaptation and self-celebration often entail elements of simplification, reduction, and even erasure, and that the very acts of adaptation and embracing in many cases lead to counter-iconization and contestation over dominant meaning and symbolization.
This article examines the historical sociology that informs Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems . On the sociological side, it critically assesses Linklater’s use of Elias and Wight, arguing that his ‘higher level synthesis’ is internally incompatible. On the historical side, the article argues that the occlusion of the transnational interactions that, in great measure, drive historical development means that Linklater’s analysis is inadequate for its stated purpose: to chart the development of civilising processes within the Western state-systems.
During a recent period of field research in the town of Rethemnos, on the north coast of the island of Crete, a junior official of the local chamber of commerce asked me bluntly whether the Greeks were European or Oriental. When I tried to duck the question, which struck me as Hobson’s choice between two equally unattractive and essentialist alternatives, I was told rather crossly that I was just offering diplomatic niceties, and asked again what I really thought. Nothing would persuade my interlocutor that I was not simply being evasive: it was clear that he suspected me of believing Greeks to be Oriental and of being too embarrassed to admit it.
Torture is perhaps the most unequivocally banned practice in the world today. Yet within six weeks after September 11, articles began appearing suggesting that torture might be “required” in order to interrogate suspected terrorists about future possibilities of violence. The United States and some of its allies are using methods of questioning relating to the war on terrorism that could be described as torture or, at the very least, as inhuman and degrading. It is known that the United States sent some suspected terrorists to allied countries that are well known to engage in torture. And in terror’s wake, the use of such methods, at least under some conditions, has gained some prominent defenders. Torture: A Collection brings together leading lawyers, political theorists, social scientists, and public intellectuals to debate the advisability of maintaining the absolute ban and to reflect on what it says about our societies if we do--or do not--adhere to it in all circumstances. One important question is how we define torture at all. Are “cruel and inhumane” practices that result in profound physical or mental discomfort tolerable so long as they do not meet some definition of “torture”? And how much “transparency” do we really want with regard to interrogation practices? Is “don’t ask, don’t tell” an acceptable response to those who concern themselves about these practices? Addressing these questions and more, this book tackles one of the most controversial issues that we face today. The noted contributors include Ariel Dorfman, Elaine Scarry, Alan Dershowitz, Judge Richard Posner, Michael Walzer, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and other lawyers from both the United States and abroad.
What is the English School of International Relations and why is there increasing interest in it? Linklater and Suganami provide a comprehensive account of this distinctive approach to the study of world politics which highlights coexistence and cooperation, as well as conflict, in the relations between sovereign states. In the first book-length volume of its kind, the authors present a comprehensive discussion of the rise and development of the English School, its principal research agenda, and its epistemological and methodological foundations. The authors further consider the English School's position on progress in world politics, its relationship with Kantian thought, its conception of a sociology of states-systems and its approach to good international citizenship as a means of reducing harm in world politics. Lucidly written and unprecedented in its coverage, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in international relations and politics worldwide.
Institutional and political developments since the end of the Cold War have led to a revival of public interest in, and anxiety about, international law. Liberal international law is appealed to as offering a means of constraining power and as representing universal values. This book brings together scholars who draw on jurisprudence, philosophy, legal history and political theory to analyse the stakes of this turn towards international law. Contributors explore the history of relations between international law and those it defines as other - other traditions, other logics, other forces, and other groups. They explore the archive of international law as a record of attempts by scholars, bureaucrats, decision-makers and legal professionals to think about what happens to law at the limits of modern political organisation. The result is a rich array of responses to the question of what it means to speak and write about international law in our time.
In 1871 Japan sent a high-ranking delegation to the USA and Europe, to negotiate treaties and trading agreements and to investigate how it might modernise its political and economic institutions. Led by the Foreign Minister Prince Tomomi Iwakura, the 'embassy' of politicians, courtiers and officials travelled extensively around the USA for eight months, before spending a further year examining the British manufacturing industry, German armaments and French culture. The Iwakura Embassy helped change the course of Japanese history, for the official report of this journey, compiled by Prince Iwakura's personal secretary, the Confucian scholar Kunitake Kume, was to play a key role in Japan's transformation into a modern industrial nation. The report was translated into English in five large volumes in 2002. This carefully prepared abridgement makes it accessible to a wider range of scholars and students, and to all who are interested in the remarkable rise of modern Japan.
Many sociologists have drawn attention to the puzzling absence of a detailed discussion of religion in Elias’s investigation of the European civilizing process. Elias did not develop a sociology of religion, but he did not overlook the importance of beliefs in the ‘spirit world’ in the history of human societies. In his writings such convictions were described as fantasy images that could be contrasted with ‘reality-congruent’ knowledge claims. Elias placed fantasy–reality balances, whether religious or secular, at the centre of the analysis of how societies have dealt with collective fears that arise in response to largely uncontrolled conditions. He located religious orientations within a broader framework of analysis regarding fantasy–reality balances in the first human groups and in current state-organized societies. Elias stressed how balances changed in ‘civilized’ societies with the rise of the natural sciences. But his writings emphasized the continuing influence of fantasy images in technologically sophisticated societies, particularly in the context of national and international power struggles. His analysis of how fantasy images acquired considerable influence under conditions of fear is important for studies of social responses to global challenges including climate change. Connections with Weber’s sociology of religion point the way to theoretically informed empirical research on balances between fantasy and reality-congruence in a tumultuous and unpredictable era.
In this chapter, I show how the antithetical relationship between civilisation and terrorism continued in the form of established-outsider relations between British elites and rebellious Irish groups that were seeking emancipatory change.
Westerners on both the left and right overwhelmingly conflate globalisation with Westernisation and presume that the global economy is a pure Western-creation. Taking on the traditional Eurocentric Big Bang theory, or the 'expansion of the West' narrative, this book reveals the multicultural origins of globalisation and the global economy, not so as to marginalise the West but to show how it has long been embedded in complex interconnections and co-constitutive interactions with non-Western actors/agents and processes. The central empirical theme is the role of Indian structural power that was derived from Indian cotton textile exports. Indian structural power organised the first (historical-capitalist) global economy between 1500 and c.1850 and performed a vital, albeit indirect, role in the making of Western empire, industrialisation and the second (modern-capitalist) global economy. These textiles underpinned the complex inter-relations between Africa, West/Central/East/Southeast Asia, the Americas and Europe that collectively drove global economic development forward.
Edward Keene argues that the conventional idea of an 'anarchical society' of equal and independent sovereign states is an inadequate description of order in modern world politics. International political and legal order has always been dedicated to two distinct goals: to try to promote the toleration of different ways of life, while advocating the adoption of one specific way, that it labels 'civilization'. The nineteenth-century solution to this contradiction was to restrict the promotion of civilization to the world beyond Europe. That discriminatory way of thinking has now broken down, with the result that a single, global order is supposed to apply to everyone, but opinion is still very much divided as to what the ultimate purpose of this global order should be, and how its political and legal structure should be organised.
Paul Keal examines the historical role of international law and political theory in justifying the dispossession of indigenous peoples as part of the expansion of international society. He argues that, paradoxically, law and political theory can now underpin the recovery of indigenous rights. At the heart of contemporary struggles is the core right of self-determination, and Keal argues for recognition of indigenous peoples as 'peoples' with the right of self-determination in constitutional and international law, and for adoption of the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the General Assembly. He asks whether the theory of international society can accommodate indigenous peoples and considers the political arrangements needed for states to satisfy indigenous claims. The book also questions the moral legitimacy of international society and examines notions of collective guilt and responsibility.
John Hobson challenges the ethnocentric bias of mainstream accounts of the Rise of the West. It is often assumed that since Ancient Greek times Europeans have pioneered their own development, and that the East has been a passive by-stander in the story of progressive world history. Hobson argues that there were two processes that enabled the Rise of the 'Oriental West'. First, each major developmental turning point in Europe was informed in large part by the assimilation of Eastern inventions (e.g. ideas, technologies and institutions) which diffused from the more advanced East across the Eastern-led global economy between 500–1800. Second, the construction of European identity after 1453 led to imperialism, through which Europeans appropriated many Eastern resources (land, labour and markets). Hobson's book thus propels the hitherto marginalised Eastern peoples to the forefront of the story of progress in world history.
The article offers an interpretivist analysis of China’s coexistence approach to developing the Responsibility to Protect norm concerning atrocity crimes against civilians. The English school’s concept of great power legitimacy through coexistence is a central characteristic of its international society description of the international realm. The article uses an interpretivist approach to show how China’s coexistence foreign policy tradition was challenged by the liberal internationalist agenda of a Responsibility to Protect norm on atrocity crimes against civilians. The emergence of an alternative Chinese Responsibility to Protect concept coupling a state-centric and a people-centric approach with its focus on political and economic capacity-building of existing domestic institutions allowed China to position itself as a legitimate lifeline of liberal international institutions. The article shows how an illiberal state can become a prominent upholder of central institutions of the post-World War II liberal international order.
Borderlands are like a magnifying glass on some of the world’s most entrenched security challenges. In unstable regions, border areas attract violent non-state groups, ranging from rebels and paramilitaries to criminal organizations, who exploit central government neglect. These groups compete for territorial control, cooperate in illicit cross-border activities, and provide a substitute for the governance functions usually associated with the state. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with more than six hundred interviews in and on the shared borderlands of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela—where conflict is rife and crime thriving—this book provides exclusive firsthand insights into these war-torn spaces. It reveals how dynamic interactions among violent non-state groups produce a complex security landscape with ramifications for order and governance both locally and beyond. These interactions create not only physical violence but also less visible forms of insecurity. When groups fight each other, community members are exposed to violence but can follow the rules imposed by the opposing actors. Unstable short-term arrangements among violent non-state groups fuel mistrust and uncertainty among communities, eroding their social fabric. Where violent non-state groups engage in relatively stable long-term arrangements, “shadow citizenship” arises: a mutually reinforcing relationship between violent non-state groups that provide public goods and services, and communities that consent to their illicit authority. Contrary to state-centric views that consider borderlands uniformly violent spaces, the transnational borderland lens adopted in the book demonstrates how the geography and political economy of these borderlands intensify these multifaceted security impacts.
This article explains the emergence and institutionalization of the US’s targeted killing practices as a case of norm transformation. I argue that international and domestic US prohibitions on assassination have not disappeared, but have changed as a result of practitioner-led changes in the conventions, technologies, and bureaucratic structures governing the use of force in counterterrorism activities. After discussing the limits of alternative explanations, and drawing inspiration from practice theory, pragmatist social theory, and relational sociology, I posit three causal mechanisms as responsible for the transformation: convention reorientation, which was the redefinition of targeted killing to distinguish it from assassination; technological revision, which was the development and use of unmanned aerial vehicles (“drones”) to bypass normative and strategic concerns over precision; and network synthesis, which was the support of the Bush administration and especially of the Obama administration, overruling dissenters from within the Central Intelligence Agency (who were often very highly placed). I trace the processes by which these mechanisms operated and interacted in simultaneous and mutually reinforcing ways from the start of the millennium until now. Finally, I discuss some of the ways in which this contributes to institutional analysis and the study of norm change more generally, and, in particular, how it considers the role of technology and the reciprocity of means and ends.
The role of symbols in world politics remains on the margins of the study of international relations. There has been no systematic discussion of how to promote theoretically informed empirical analyses of their role in earlier epochs and in the current era. This article defends a long-term perspective on symbols that emphasises their relationship with the overall historical trend towards societies of greater magnitude and destructive power. It advances a preliminary classification of analytically distinguishable core symbols in order to support future inquiries into symbols in state-organised societies and symbols that have been central to attempts to create wider solidarities. A long-term perspective on symbolic realms is important in order to understand the relationship between ‘national’ and ‘cosmopolitan symbols’ in the current era. Current challenges in the symbolic sphere illustrate more general trends in human societies, namely, problems in constructing wider symbolic frameworks that permit closer cooperation between groups in the context of increasing levels of interconnectedness.
The debate on waterboarding and the wider debate on torture remains fiercely contested. President Trump and large sections of the US public continue to support the use of waterboarding and other so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ as part of the ‘War on Terror’, thus putting the anti-torture norm under pressure. This article demonstrates that the re-imagining of waterboarding as ‘torture-lite’ is contradicted by the long history of waterboarding itself. Examining pre-modern uses and descriptions of torture and waterboarding, this article highlights that the post-2001 identification of waterboarding as a relatively benign interrogation technique radically inverts a norm that has predominated for over 600 years. This historical norm unequivocally identifies waterboarding not only as torture but as severe torture. The article highlights the value of historically contextualizing attitudes to torture, reviews how and why waterboarding was downgraded by the Bush Administration, reveals the earliest explicit description of waterboarding from 1384, and argues that the twenty-first-century re-imagining of waterboarding as torture-lite is indicative of the fragility of the anti-torture norm.
The term wenming (civility/cultured), since ancient times, had served as a means for differentiating Chinese from barbarians. Yet, around 1900, when the empire was about to decline, China itself was classified as barbaric, sick, and backward, with the West, in contrast, regarded as as healthy and progressive. Wenming was reintroduced via Japan/Japanese, imbuing the meaning of progress and civilization. Together with science (kexue) and hygiene (weisheng), terms which equally had been reintroduced with new meanings via Japanese, civility became an instrument to fight for a new political and institutional order in China. This chapter looks at the crossroads of transforming processes of emotion and body practices. Tracing the concurrences of semi-colonial processes, political decisions, and intellectual voices, this chapter oscillates between indigenous Chinese genealogies of these terms and concepts, and newly appropriated emotion and body practices in the name of ‘civility’, ‘science’, and ‘hygiene’.
This book fundamentally reinterprets the history of international human rights in the post-1945 era by documenting how pivotal the Global South was for their breakthrough. In stark contrast to other contemporary human rights historians who have focused almost exclusively on the 1940s and the 1970s - heavily privileging Western agency - Steven L. B. Jensen convincingly argues that it was in the 1960s that universal human rights had their breakthrough. This is a ground-breaking work that places race and religion at the center of these developments and focuses on a core group of states who led the human rights breakthrough, namely Jamaica, Liberia, Ghana, and the Philippines. They transformed the norms upon which the international community today is built. Their efforts in the 1960s post-colonial moment laid the foundation - in profound and surprising ways - for the so-called human rights revolution in the 1970s, when Western activists and states began to embrace human rights.
Sontag discusses war and atrocity imagry. "The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images". Meaning and response to a photo depends on words. Photos are useful against an unpopular war but "absent such a protest, the same antiwar photograph may be read as showing pathos, or heroism." Photos help us remember, but not understand. "Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us." "Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged image". Images are meant to invite reflection and consideration but "cannot dictate a course of action".
American enthusiasm for promoting democracy has waned since the longer term consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq became apparent. The neo-cons misplaced confidence in the superiority of their ideals appeared to blind them to lessons from history. Indeed, they might have been more cautious about encouraging electoral transfers of power had they studied experiences following the post-colonial imposition of democracy. This paper draws out some of those lessons, arguing that examples of newly independent sub Saharan African nations highlighted the lag between the notion of universal suffrage and levels of mutual interdependence that enable stable and secure transitions of power. The lag legacy continues to cast a considerable shadow over sub Saharan African politics resulting in elections being accompanied by killings in the pursuit of power by plebiscite. Despite complicity in the roots of these political problems Western governments and international institutions continue with their 'hopeful prognosis'. Rather than confront underlying failings, blame is localised, directed at corruption and 'big men'. Such targeting fails to understand that these factors are indicative of wider problems requiring deeper rooted exploration and consideration. Hence figurational insights are applied in order to gain a broader understanding of long term social processes and activities that result in failures to entrench democracy within political arrangements. Particular attention is placed upon interweaving balances of power, competition and cooperation and we/I which are applied to a number of case studies including South Sudan, Nigeria and Kenya.
This article provides an ‘engaged’ introduction to this forum on Andrew Linklater’s recently published book, Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems . I call this ‘engaged’ because I seek to adjudicate between the critics and Linklater’s book in the hope of building a bridge over troubled water. Given that the key word that underpins many of this forum’s contributions is Eurocentrism, I explore whether, and if so to what extent, Linklater’s book is Eurocentric. While I too identify various Eurocentric cues, I also provide various defences for Linklater. In particular, the final section advances two definitions of Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism. Although I identify elements of ‘Eurocentrism I’ (the elision of non-Western agency and reification of the West) in his book, Linklater might respond to the principal forum complaint that he accords little or no role to non-Western actors and processes in the Western or global civilizing process by appealing to an alternative anti-Eurocentric approach: ‘anti-Eurocentrism II’ (which focuses squarely on Western imperial power and ignores or heavily downplays non-Western agency). I close by critiquing his left-liberal cosmopolitan politics, arguing that his Eurocentric-universalist normative posture cannot create the kind of peaceful and harmonious world that he (and Kant) so desires.
This article reviews Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems . Focusing upon the book’s explanation of the ‘European civilizing process’ in the modern era, it suggests that the account is limited by ‘civilizational isolationism’ and ‘metrocentric diffusion’. These analytic operations serve to minimise the agency and contributions of non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial actors to the global civilizing process. The occlusion of such agency and contributions, however, are not specific to this work, but reflect broader limitations in historical sociology writ large.
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’.
One of the most important developments in world politics in the last decade has been the spread of the idea that state sovereignty comes with responsibilities as well as privileges, and that there exists a global responsibility to protect people threatened by mass atrocities. The principle of the Responsibility to Protect is an acknowledgment by all who live in zones of safety of a duty of care towards those in zones of danger. Thakur and Maley argue that this principle has not been discussed sufficiently in the context of international and political theory, in particular the nature and foundations of political and international order and the strength and legitimacy of the state. The book brings together a range of authors to discuss the different ways in which the Responsibility to Protect can be theorised, using case studies to locate the idea within wider traditions of moral responsibilities in international relations.