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Theoretical Framework
Abstract
An ethical reading of the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention) indicates the feasibility and normative worth of solidarisation, a process that propagates solidarist values within pluralist, statist power frameworks. It demonstrates the benefit of retaining statist arrangements and infusing them with a cosmopolitan impulse of human empowerment, co-creation and “humankindness”. Under solidarisation, sovereignty is subjected to ethical agitation by incremental solidarist reform. But sovereignty is not usurped; in fact it serves to temper and regulate solidarist progress. Pluralism, solidarism and solidarisation are ideas related to the English School of IR. This chapter offers an English School framework, using its historical continuum of realist international system, revolutionist cosmopolis and rationalist international society. Realism and revolutionism occupy the continuum’s extremes; rationalism is roughly equidistant therebetween. Each part of the continuum offers an imaginary of IR against which to assess “real world” developments. International society, an English School signature, is a pragmatic, cautious middle way: mindful of anarchy, the absence of world government, but conscious of the feasibility of propagating lesser (pluralist) or greater (solidarist) degrees of ethical progress. The chapter finds value in the innovative concept of solidarisation, and gauges the latter’s indicators, in preparation for the substantive analyses to come.
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This article explores the theoretical challenges for normatively progressive foreign policy following the rise of populist nationalism during the 2010s, using analytical concepts from the English School. It argues that populist nationalism exposes a problem of internal dissensus on the future trajectories of solidarist international society, within the Western states that have traditionally been its principal supporters. The ‘populist moment’ reveals problems of disconnection between domestic publics, the practices, and institutions of contemporary international society, and state actions that are premised in part on ethical regard for non-citizens. The article contends that, as an interface point between rooted communities and global ethical concerns, progressive foreign policy approaches have an important role to play in ameliorating these disconnections. However, these approaches must look beyond a simple ‘re-booting’ of liberal internationalism, focussing instead on building a path towards solidarist international society that is rooted in everyday-lived experiences, communities, and identities within the state. Building upon theorizations of good international citizenship, the article advances an alternative framework of good global statehood, which draws upon a coproduction methodology as a means of creating progressive foreign policies that are better attuned to pluralism and diversity across, but also within state borders.
Like all warfare, drone warfare is deeply gendered. This article explores how this military technology sediments or disrupts existing conceptualizations of women who kill in war. The article using the concept of motherhood as a narrative organizing trope and introduces a ‘fictional’ account of motherhood and drone warfare and data from a ‘real life’ account of a pregnant British Reaper operator. The article considers the way trauma experienced by Reaper drone crews is reported in a highly gendered manner, reflecting the way women’s violence is generally constructed as resulting from personal failures, lost love and irrational emotionality. This irrational emotionality is tied to a long history of medicalizing women’s bodies and psychologies because of their reproductive capacities and, specifically, their wombs – explored in this article under the historico-medical term of ‘hysteria’. The article argues that where barriers to women’s participation in warfare have, in the past, hinged upon their (argued) physical weakness, and where technology renders these barriers obsolete, there remains the tenacious myth that women are emotionally incapable of conducting lethal operations – a myth based on (mis)conceptions of the ‘naturalness’ of motherhood and the feminine capacity to give life.
This book provides an introduction to, and analysis of, the English School’s changing and often somewhat indistinct views on International Relations as they developed from the 1950s onwards. It focuses on key thinkers and texts and turning points and moves our understanding of the English School beyond the past work of the British Committee and the more recent work of Buzan et. al. to offer a comprehensive overview and interrogation from the leading lights of this arm of International Relations thought.
This volume is one of the cornerstones of the EISA's Trends in European IR Theory series complementing the volumes on International Political Theory, Liberalism, Realism, International Political Economy, the post-positivist tradition, and Feminism published for the centenary of IR as a discipline.
Cornelia Navari is Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the University of Buckingham, UK.
This article develops an English School framework for analysing the emergence of new primary institutions in global international society, and applies this to the case of environmental stewardship. The article traces the impact that global environmentalism has had on the normative order of global international society, examines the creation of secondary institutions around this norm and identifies the ways in which these developments have become embedded in the constitution and behaviour of states. It assesses the ways in which environmental stewardship has interacted with the other primary institutions that compose global international society, changing some of the understandings and practices associated with them. The conclusions argue that environmental stewardship is likely to be a durable institution of global international society, and that it might be a harbinger of a more functional turn in its priorities.
Despite being one of three primary conceptual pillars of the English School, world society has been overshadowed by attention devoted to international society’s origins, agents, structure, expansion, institutions, regional development, and normative depth as captured by the pluralist–solidarist debate. Given empirical developments in world politics, however, world society has attracted incremental attention. This paper reads world society phenomenologically: initially, it does not exist independently of the intentionality and perception of agents. But programmatic initiative, normative diffusion, and cognitive commitments to worldly spaces spur the development of social relations and hence the emergence of world society in discrete issue areas. To illustrate, I draw upon cultural heritage, assaults on which have spurred construction of a global international architecture and associated practices to protect, conserve, and protect cultural heritage, while later developments have sought to (re)produce the very globality such practices presume.
Hønneland assesses current environmental discourses and applies this analysis to look at the relations between Russia and the West with regards to environment problems. It includes three in-depth case-studies on environmental problems, living marine resources, nuclear safety and air pollution.
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.
This profile offers an analysis of Extinction Rebellion (XR) from the vantage point of vanguardism. Vanguardism is a Leninist approach that marshals universal(isable) grievances to mobilise mass-constituencies. XR is used as a conduit through which to raise awareness of vanguardism’s environmental applications. XR is introduced before a theoretical framework for understanding vanguardism is offered. The article then discusses XR’s politics, before discussing its protest repertoire. It is found that whilst vanguardism is ordinarily associated with the left, XR contributes to its ‘greening’, taking the pursuit of uprising beyond the left.
The UN Development Programme introduced the human security concept in 1994 to address the diversity of challenges to people’s survival, livelihood, and dignity in seven key areas: personal, food, health, economic, political, community, and environmental security. A voluminous literature has since engaged its definitional parameters, theoretical implications, and practical applications. Yet neither dignity nor community security , defined in part to include cultural traditions and identities, have attracted much attention despite considerable human and community in securities caused by assaults on cultural heritage which, as emblematic of distinctive cultural identities, have downward effects on dignity. This article aims to correct that gap. It identifies and examines three security markers to ascertain and redress the sufferance of indignities and insecurities pertaining to heritage, dignity, and community security: ensuring use of heritage; promoting its transmission; and protecting and advancing cultural rights.
Environmentalism and Global International Society reveals how environmental values and ideas have transformed the normative structure of international relations. Falkner argues that environmental stewardship has become a universally accepted fundamental norm, or primary institution, of global international society. He traces the history of environmentalism's rise from a loose set of ideas originating in the nineteenth century to a globally applicable norm in the twentieth century, which has come to redefine international legitimacy and states' global responsibilities. He shows how this deep norm change came about as a result of the interplay between non-state and state actors, and how the new environmental norm has interacted with the existing primary institutions of global international society, most notably sovereignty and territoriality, diplomacy, international law, and the market. This book shifts the attention from the presentist focus in the study of global environmental politics to the longue durée of global norm change in the greening of international relations.
"White Borders is a searing indictment of the US immigration restrictions from Chinese Exclusion through the Trump presidency. This powerful and meticulously argued book reveals that while immigration crackdowns are justified as protecting jobs and workers, they’ve always been about saving and protecting the racist idea of a white America.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist
This chapter outlines the concepts of pluralism and solidarism and explains their place in English School theory. The first section explores their initial articulation by Hedley Bull and his worry that asserting solidarist universalism in a world defined primarily by pluralist coexistence might weaken restraints on the use of force. The second focuses on the way in which pluralism and solidarism mediate justifications of humanitarian intervention. The third section examines the use of pluralism and solidarism to theorize notions of world society and global order. The concepts employed in this context describe different types of international society, suggest progressive social learning as a guide to good international citizenship, and propose a growing global moral consciousness cultivated by increasing human inter-connectedness.
In this 2004 book, Barry Buzan offers an extensive critique and reappraisal of the English school approach to International Relations. Starting on the neglected concept of world society and bringing together the international society tradition and the Wendtian mode of constructivism, Buzan offers a new theoretical framework that can be used to address globalisation as a complex political interplay among state and non-state actors. This approach forces English school theory to confront neglected questions about both its basic concepts and assumptions, and about the constitution of society in terms of what values are shared, how and why they are shared, and by whom. Buzan highlights the idea of primary institutions as the central contribution of English school theory and shows how this both differentiates English school theory from realism and neoliberal institutionalism, and how it can be used to generate distinctive comparative and historical accounts of international society.
This book summarises and critiques Extinction Rebellion (XR) as a social movement organisation, engaging with key issues surrounding its analysis, strategy and tactics. The authors suggest that XR have an underdeveloped and apolitical view of the kind of change necessary to address climate change, and suggest that while this enables the building of broad movements, it is also an obstacle to achieving the systemic change that they are aiming for.
The book analyses different forms of protest and the role of civil disobedience in their respective success or failure; democratic demands and practices; and activist engagement with the political economy of climate change. It engages with a range of theoretical perspectives that address law-breaking in protest and participatory forms of democracy including liberal political theory; anarchism and forms of historical materialism, and will be of interest to students and scholars across politics, international relations, sociology, policy studies and geography, as well as those interested in climate change politics and activism.
Oscar Berglund is Lecturer in International Public and Social Policy at the University of Bristol, UK.
Daniel Schmidt is a MSc graduate in Public Policy from the University of Bristol, UK.
This chapter engages with the EU’s contribution to solidarist change in international society in two perspectives. The first part focuses on the internal dynamics of European integration, the second on the EU’s potential to induce external change in the global international society. The analyses provide two major findings: First, against the criticism that the EU would ultimately fail to pursue a transformative agenda, the EU indeed is a solidarising force in international society. Second, solidarising processes must take into account existing pluralist structures. Hence, any solidarist change does also require pluralist re-enactment to some extent.
This chapter argues that the establishment and development of the UN and the ICC have shaped and changed the constitutive principles and reproducing practices of war (restricted and rationalized for common purposes), great power management (providing for concerted action) and international law (providing for collective enforcement). Furthermore, the UN and the ICC have played an important part in the evolution of a set of fundamental institutions which are constitutive of a solidarist international society as traditionally defined in the Grotian-solidarist theory and thought, namely, humanitarian intervention, international criminal jurisdiction and (various forms of) international trusteeship. These institutions involve practices which are potentially constitutive of international humanitarian government and collective enforcement, but they have also given rise to considerable turbulence as states and other actors try to balance pluralist and solidarist concerns as well as more immediate political interests in complex institutional settings.
Since the end of the Cold War, international organisations have assumed a greater importance on the world stage. The United Nations has played a key role in all of the major security issues during this period - increasingly called upon to address other global problems such as poverty and international crime - while the European Union has created a single currency and moved towards the adoption of a constitution. The growing significance of the World Trade Organisation and other economic institutions has led some to talk of the emergence of a structure of global governance; and international non-governmental organisations and social movements are now widely seen as forming a kind of global civil society that both challenges and participates in these developments.
Building on the success of the previous edition (Versailles to Maastricht: International Organisation in the Twentieth Century), this book is a valuable introduction to the complex history of modern international organisation. David Armstrong, Lorna Lloyd and John Redmond:
- pay close attention to the League of Nations, the UN and the EU
- offer chapters on the new regionalism, global governance and international regimes and global civil society
- adopt a thematic and analytical approach to the subject
- provide a concise factual account of the rise of the international organisation
International society and world society are both essential concepts for the English School. Alongside “international system,” they form its tripartite analytical framework. International society and world society contribute a distinctive sociological element to international relations (IR) theory. International society addresses the development, nature, and purpose of rules, institutions, and behavioral norms among states. World society adds non-state actors and offers a perspective focused on individual human beings and the idea of a global human community. However, world society is far less thoroughly investigated than international society in classic English School literature. This chapter focuses first on both their roles within the overall theoretical schema of the English School, including the analytical and normative significance attached to each concept. Secondly, the major areas of contention will be considered. Thirdly, in the light of the growing significance of world society, it will clarify how and why it is that international society and world society are increasingly seen as connected.
The concept of world society has elicited sharp criticism for being too diffuse and amorphous owing to its synonymy with all transborder social relations, equability with humankind, or conflation with solidarist international society. To overcome these shortcomings, this article reconfigures world society by attaching otherwise unmoored social activity to an understanding of the world as comprised of shared social spaces. This spatialised reading foregrounds constellations of relations that have emerged in conjunction with discrete geographies – natural, economic, cyberspatial, cultural, anthropic – within which humans interact, and demonstrates that the world has become an actionable, political concept generative of activities peculiar to the space itself. A review of English School literature extracts four theses – purposive, plural, spatial, and stewardship – that invite conceptual reconstruction of world society. The article then addresses the discursive construction of cultural heritage as a worldly space populated with distinctive institutions and cognitive and normative commitments, and is followed by reflections on the added value of such an approach and directions for future research.
Personal experience has always been an explicit feature of feminist theorising. Making sense of one's own life has been seen as a way of making sense of the lives of others. The personal, the political, and the international are a seamless web. In this chapter I want to make some reflections, in a similar spirit, about self, profession and world politics. Instead of purporting to describe or explain the world 'out there', as is one's professional training, I want to reflect on the world 'in here'?as 'part of our innermost being' (Berger, 1966, p.140). This is academically and temperamentally a somewhat difficult thing to do. It is especially out of line with the traditions of several decades of strategic studies, which involved 'telling it as it is'?'it' begin a realist account of the purported state(s) of the world. As a profession, security specialists have not been particularly self-reflective. We have sometimes been invited to think the unthinkable, yet 'we' have been out of bounds. At what is thought to be a period of `intellectual crisis' in `security studies', `we' should not be. For most of us we are our last and most difficult frontier. Hence the personal nature of this paper, which attempts at the same time to confuse and clarify what it means to study `security' at the end of the twentieth century.
One view is that the Guld war foreshadows future conflicts, which may stem from competition over dwindling resources and use the environment as both target and tool.
Introduction Can communitarianism meet the ecological challenge? In keeping with the purposes of this volume, I interpret this challenge to mean, ‘Does communitarianism provide the appropriate insights, conceptual resources and norms to guide political communities along ecologically sustainable paths?’ This question admits of no straightforward answer because communitarians are an unruly bunch who defy simple political classification. Communitarians can be more easily identified in terms of what they are against rather than what they are for. We all know that communitarians are critical of cosmopolitanism (see Linklater, chapter 7 in this volume) and the Enlightenment idea of Universal Reason, but it is not always easy to find a common thread in their positive political prescriptions. Some are conservative or traditional while others are civic republicans. Some draw on Aristotle, others on Hegel. Some communitarians have a theoretical affinity with postmodernism while others find common cause with realism. There are also some interesting hybrids, such as liberal communitarians, liberal nationalists and Third Way ‘new communitarians’, who are keen on rebuilding social capital so we no longer go ‘bowling alone’. Despite this political diversity, it is possible to single out one preoccupation that does unite communitarians, and that is a special preoccupation with questions of identity and the significance of social bonds. It is this preoccupation that partly explains their critique of cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and the diversity of their political prescriptions, on the other (after all, there are many different ties that bind people together).
Just who is throwing down the gauntlet here? Is political ecology a challenge for citizenship, or is citizenship a challenge for political ecology? Let’s take the first possibility. Challenging citizenship could mean a number of things, but in the first instance it is a discursive challenge. Citizenship occupies a disputed yet established discursive space in modern politics and there are four broadly accepted reference points. First, citizenship provides an account of political relationships – sometimes between members of a political entity, and sometimes between those members and the political entity itself. Second, the stress on political relationships is important, because if citizenship is to continue to mean anything after its encounter with political ecology, we must be able to distinguish it from other types of relationship such as friendship or family. Third, the political entity most often associated with contemporary citizenship is the nation state, and – fourth – the relationships in question are usually talked about in terms of rights and responsibilities. So the ‘ecological challenge’ to citizenship could relate to any of these items of the architecture of citizenship: who or what are to be members, what counts as ‘political’, the nature of the space within which citizenship relations take place, and the kinds of rights and responsibilities that citizenship might entail. The citizenship tent Even without a specifically ecological challenge, there is plenty of wriggle room in the citizenship tent for debate to take place.
This outstanding book is the first comprehensive introduction to the English School of International Relations. Written by leading ES scholar Barry Buzan, it expertly guides readers through the English School’s formative ideas, intellectual and historical roots, current controversies and future avenues of development.
Part One sets out the English School’s origins and development, explaining its central concepts and methodological tools, and placing it within the broader canon of IR theory. Part Two offers a detailed account of the historical, regional and social structural strands of the English School, explaining the important link between the school’s historical projects and its interest in a societal approach to international relations. Part Three explores the School’s responses to the enduring problems of order and justice, and highlights the changing balance between pluralist and solidarist institutions in the evolution of international society over the past five centuries. The book concludes with a discussion of the English School’s ongoing controversies and debates, and identifies opportunities for further research.
For students new to the topic this book will provide an accessible and balanced overview, whilst those already familiar with the ES will be prompted to look afresh at their own understanding of its significance and potentiality.
This book explores modern international society by drawing on the closely related disciplines diplomatic and military history, international legal studies, and international political theory. It analyses the most significant international issues to date, including peace and security, war and intervention, human rights, failed states, territories and boundaries, and democracy. It then considers the future of international society in the 21st century, and argues that the pluralist relationship of sovereign states is one that upholds freedom and respects human diversity.
The long-term moral consequences of a series of revolutions in technology and communications which have brought all human societies into a single global political and economic system remain unclear; Kant’s question of whether the ‘oceans make a community of nations impossible’ is relevant two centuries on (Kant 1965: 126). The global media have increased public awareness of suffering in other places, but distance continues to block the extension of solidarity and sympathy beyond the nation state. Global environmental problems have deepened awareness of the interdependence of the species, but it is not certain they will overcome the age-old effects of the ‘tyranny of distance’ on political loyalty. Will powerful cosmopolitan commitments develop because of global environment problems? What cosmopolitan ethic is most appropriate for a world facing serious environmental threats and challenges? Kant’s answer to his question about the effects of distance on moral and political community frames the present discussion. He pointed to the ambiguities of globalisation in his era. Advances in oceanic navigation created new possibilities ‘for doing evil and violence to some place on our globe’ (1965: 126). Observers in our time make a similar point when they argue that globalisation allows the most technologically advanced societies to damage the natural environment without great cost to themselves.
Several years ago I participated in a round table discussion on ‘Our Responsibilities Toward Future Generations’ at a small liberal arts college in the American midwest. One of my fellow discussants was a theologian, the other a state legislator. Despite our differences, we all agreed that we do not pay sufficient heed to the health and wellbeing of our distant descendants and that this represents a kind of moral myopia that calls for correction. Sometime during the discussion I turned to the state legislator – a thoughtful and sensitive man of enlightened outlook – and asked him point-blank why our elected representatives don’t pay much (if any) attention to the fate of future people, and still less to that of non-human creatures. ‘Because they don’t vote’, was his prompt reply. (He might have added that future people and animals don’t contribute money to political campaigns either.) That, in a nutshell, sums up one of the chief shortcomings of democracy, at least from an environmental or green perspective. I should perhaps qualify this by saying that I am talking about democracy as presently understood.
Ecological citizenship cannot be fully articulated in either liberal or civic republican terms. It is, rather, an example and an inflection of ‘post‐cosmopolitan’ citizenship. Ecological citizenship focuses on duties as well as rights, and its conception of political space is not the state or the municipality, or the ideal speech community of cosmopolitanism, but the ‘ecological footprint’.
Ecological citizenship contrasts with fiscal incentives as a way of encouraging people to act more sustainably, in the belief that the former is more compatible with the long‐term and deeper shifts of attitude and behaviour that sustainability requires. This book offers an original account of the relationship between liberalism and sustainability, arguing that the former's commitment to a plurality of conceptions of the good entails a commitment to so‐called ‘strong’ forms of the latter.
How to make an ecological citizen? The potential of formal high school citizenship education programmes is examined through a case study of the recent implementation of the compulsory citizenship curriculum in the UK.
This book provides an introduction to the analysis of global political order - how patterns of governance and institutionalization in world politics have already changed; what the most important challenges are; and what the way forward might look like. The first section develops three analytical frameworks: a world of sovereign states capable of only limited cooperation; a world of ever-denser international institutions embodying the idea of an international community; and a world in which global governance moves beyond the state and into the realms of markets, civil society, and networks. Part II examines five of the most important issues facing contemporary international society: nationalism and the politics of identity; human rights and democracy; war, violence, and collective security; the ecological challenge; and the management of economic globalization in a highly unequal world. Part III considers the idea of an emerging multi-regional system; and the picture of global order built around US empire. The conclusion looks at the normative implications. If international society has indeed been changing in the ways discussed in this book, what ought we to do? And, still more crucially, who is the 'we' that is to be at the centre of this drive to create a morally better world? This book is concerned with the fate of international society in an era of globalization and the ability of the inherited society of sovereign states to provide a practically viable and normatively acceptable framework for global political order. It lays particular emphasis on the different forms of global inequality and the problems of legitimacy that these create, and on the challenges posed by cultural diversity and value conflict.
The literature on international societies has widely recognised that the EU has formed a regional international society that has transcended the rules of Westphalian statecentred pluralism. However, the analysis of the consequences of this transcendence for global international society has so far been limited. For the most part, such studies have focused on the EU as a normative power, and even within that literature, there is much more attention given to the question of whether the EU acts as a normative power rather than to the consequences of its actions. This is intriguing given that Ian Manners, who originally coined the term, thought of the EU's ability to fundamentally transform the pluralist international society as the ultimate litmus test of normative power. In this paper, we want to explore this question further. Our argument is that the EU contributes to a solidarisation of international society, and we will show this in relation to two cases, human rights and regionalisation. However, we will also argue that this contribution is not unambiguous. Instead, it is characterised by internal contradictions and tensions.
Ecological crises have never been higher on the international political agenda. However, ecological thought and international relations theory have developed as separate disciplines. This ground-breaking study looks at the relationship between ecological thought and international relations theory arguing that there are shared concerns: peace, co-operation and security. The authors ask what ecological crisis can teach IR theorists as well as what ecological perspectives have been adopted by governments and international NGOs.
Across the whole of our modern world, territory is directly linked to sovereignty to mould politics into a fundamentally state-centric social process, so much so that conflicts not involving the state are often seen as outside politics as generally conceived. The State's "capture' of politics, and much else besides, in the modern world is premissed upon territoriality. When we look at the 20th-century state in the core of the modern world-system we are immediately impressed by the sheer magnitude of functions it has acquired. They can be reduced to just four basic tasks: states wage war, they manage the economy, they give national identity, and they provide social services. As strategies of territoriality these amount to containment of power, wealth, culture and society. -from Author