Authors:Brent J Steele Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. This paper responds to critics of Reinhold Niebuhr by exploring two themes important for locating his views on cruelty’s emergence in modern society. The first relates to his basic insight into the relationship between individual morality and group loyalty and solidarity. Niebuhr provides a sophisticated argument for such group dynamics in his work, issued in Moral Man, Immoral Society, as well as his essays on race. These also form the basis for his second thematic argument regarding cruelty, the role of ‘righteousness’ as it relates to security and insecurity. Niebuhr’s views on race, I argue, need to be considered more broadly as an example of his views on groups, power, and cruelty. The paper concludes with some modest proposals for thinking about combatting cruelty via Niebuhr’s counsel. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2021-01-25T09:12:29Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088221989745
Authors:David Clinton Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. The twentieth-century theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr frequently employed a formulation confounding to his readers, simultaneously appealing to the loftiest altruism as summed up in his identification of the “law of love” and compelling attention to the grittiest realism as encapsulated in his recognition of a universal struggle for power. This sharp contrast was no careless error on Niebuhr’s part, but rather an insistence on describing in the most sharply contrasting tones the paradoxical character of human nature. In his Christian Realist view fear and a consequent desire for power over others to protect oneself are inescapable components of human existence within history. The human need for community and refusal to be satisfied with anything less than devotion to the wellbeing of others unsullied by self-love are nevertheless also implanted in the human heart, which recognizes that reality extends beyond human history. Niebuhr demanded attention to both. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2021-01-22T06:13:26Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220985881
Authors:Joshua D King Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. Realism, constructivism, and liberal institutionalism share the assumption that states are rational and self-maximizing actors. While these theories disagree as to whether states prioritize military power or economic wealth, they converge around the notion that states pursue these goods rationally and predictably. Complaints against and threats of defection from prominent international security and trade regimes, including NATO and the EU, raise doubts about states’ rationality and predictability. Perhaps these theories’ shared assumption about rational action has become an impediment to understanding state behavior and institutional cooperation. To enrich and to expand the conversation within international political theory, my article turns to Rousseau’s international political thought. Rousseau anticipates central arguments in each of the major traditions of IR theory but locates political self-interest in the sub-rational passion amour propre rather than in reason itself. Rousseau exemplifies a more nuanced way to understand the irrational roots of political motivation and the limits of international order. My paper traces the international implications of amour propre through Rousseau’s key texts on international politics and turns to his “Letter to Philopolis” as a way to re-frame Rousseau’s account of political responsibility. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2021-01-13T06:31:43Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220983832
Authors:Elisabeth Forster, Isaac Taylor Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. Dominant normative theories of armed conflict orientate themselves around the ultimate goal of peace. Yet the deployment of these theories in the international sphere appears to have failed in advancing toward this goal. In this paper, we argue that one major reason for this failure is these theories’ use of essentially contested concepts—that is, concepts whose internally complex character results in no principled way of adjudicating between rival interpretations of them. This renders the theories susceptible to manipulation by international actors who are able to pursue bellicose policies under the cover of nominally pacific frameworks, and we show how this happened historically in a case study of the Korean War of 1950–1953. In order to better serve the goals of peace, we suggest, the rules of war should be reframed to simpler, but more restrictive, normative principles. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2021-01-08T06:54:50Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220985882
Authors:Liane Hartnett, Lucian Ashworth Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) is perhaps the best known North American theologian of the twentieth century. Over the course of his life he was a Christian socialist, pacifist, a staunch anti-communist, and an architect of vital-centre liberalism. Niebuhr wrote on themes as diverse as war, democracy, world order, political economy and race. So significant was Niebuhr’s intellectual influence that George Kennan once described him as ‘the father of us all’. Indeed, from the thought of Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King Jr. to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Hans Morgenthau to Kenneth Waltz, E.H. Carr to Jean Bethke Elshtain, Niebuhr has helped shape International Relations. Bringing together intellectual historians and international political theorists, this special issue asks whether Niebuhr’s thought remains relevant to our times' Can he help us think about democracy, power, race, the use of force, and cruelty in a moment when ethnonationalism appears ascendant and democracy in decline' Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-12-16T10:53:16Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220981093
Authors:Liane Hartnett Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. Love has been long lauded for its salvific potential in U.S. anti-racist rhetoric. Yet, what does it mean to speak or act in love’s name to redress racism' Turning to the work of the North American public intellectual and theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), this essay explores his contribution to normative theory on love’s role in the work of racial justice. Niebuhr was a staunch supporter of civil rights, and many prominent figures of the movement such as James Cone, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., J. Deotis Roberts and Cornel West drew on his theology. Indeed, Niebuhr underscores love’s promise and perils in politics, and its potential to respond to racism via the work of critique, compassion, and coercion. Engaging with Niebuhr’s theology on love and justice, then, not only helps us recover a rich realist resource on racism, but also an ethic of realism as antiracism. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-12-14T07:59:43Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220979003
Authors:Lucian M Ashworth Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness is one of the key English-language texts in the post-war settlement literature of the early 1940s. This article analyses the book on three interconnected levels: the nature of the argument made by Niebuhr in the book, its place in the broader post-war settlement literature of the early 1940s, and its relevance to the current problems of right-wing populism and the climate crisis. While the main theme of the book is the necessity and impossibility of democracy, it shares with the work of Isaiah Bowman and David Mitrany a concern for the tension between the state and interdependence. The deepening of this tension since has helped keep Niebuhr relevant, although his initial distinction between the children of light and the children of darkness has been complicated by both populism and the climate crisis. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-12-14T07:59:13Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220979728
Authors:Eileen Hunt Botting Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. Against the background of the international political crises generated by the early phase of the French Revolution at Nootka Sound in 1790 and in Saint-Domingue in 1791, Mary Wollstonecraft developed a capacious political theory of the “rights of humanity.” She pushed beyond narrow post-revolutionary European constructions of “the rights of man” which ignored or excluded “the poor,” “Indians,” “African slaves,” and “women.” While closely following the international politics of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft developed the core arguments of A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Her key philosophical innovation was to publicly universalize the conceptual scope of rights, such that rights were no longer—implicitly or explicitly—solely the legal entitlement of propertied white European men, but rather the moral and political entitlement of the whole of humanity across nations. Yet she rhetorically contradicted and philosophically limited the cross-cultural universalism of her theory of equal rights by punctuating her arguments with Western Protestant and Orientalist stereotypes of Eastern despotism. Consequently, international politics and international prejudice shaped Wollstonecraft’s theory of equal rights and her application of it to peoples and cultures beyond those of Western Protestant Europe. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-12-14T07:58:18Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220978432
Authors:Vassilios Paipais Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. Reinhold Niebuhr is widely acknowledged as the father of Christian realism and a staunch critic of pacifism. In a famous exchange with his brother H. Richard in The Christian Century, Niebuhr defended the necessity of entering the fray of battle to combat evil as opposed to opting for non-violent detachment that ultimately usurps God’s authority to decide on final matters. Niebuhr, however, never endorsed an aggressive Just War doctrine. Striving to reconcile the Christian command of love with the harsh realities of power resulting from universal sinfulness, Niebuhr emphasised the necessity of negotiating the distance between the two extremes of a pendulum swinging from Christian pacifism to the endorsement of interventionist policies. Rather than this being an expression of the ambiguity of his moral convictions, this paper argues that it is a product of his sensitivity to applying contextual moral and political judgement as an exercise of theological responsibility. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-12-10T10:20:04Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220979001
Authors:Jeremy Moses Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. This article considers the role that might be played by the political thought of Reinhold Niebuhr in contemporary debates over pacifism. It begins with an overview of Niebuhr’s changing position on pacifism, showing how his early commitment to anti-war principles gradually faded over time and was replaced with a pragmatic approach to just war thinking in his later life. The article then considers whether this drift away from pacifism necessarily means that there is nothing in Niebuhrian Christian realism for contemporary pacifist thought. Drawing on Niebuhr’s critique of perfectionist liberalism, it argues that an imperfect and non-absolute pacifism that accepts the permanent possibility of political violence but refuses to offer moral endorsement to such violence can offer a viable political position in current debates on war and peace, particularly in opposition to just war approaches. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-12-04T01:00:43Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220978996
Authors:Hugo Canihac Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. This paper reconstructs the political thought of the Scottish legal philosopher, and eventually MEP, Sir Neil MacCormick (1941–2009), the founder of “constitutional pluralism,” one of the most influential legal theories of the European union today. It argues that his legal theory is underpinned by a coherent and original political theory of post-sovereignty. But, contrary to many current interpretations, this article argues that normatively, constitutional pluralism is not a purely liberal theory. Neither is it inherently illiberal, as has been contended. Instead, this article spells out the hybrid institutional design imagined by N. MacCormick and inspired by the thought of D. Hume, as well as the lineaments of an ethical theory of post-sovereignty he developed. So doing, while I will argue that it ultimately leads to a kind of republican cosmopolitanism, the political theory of constitutional pluralism is shown to open up an important, if not fully developed, avenue to escape some shortcoming commonly associated with post-sovereignty. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-11-26T05:59:06Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220975812
Authors:Jason Dockstader, Rojîn Mûkrîyan Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. Recently, some have read Turkish political developments from the perspective of Carl Schmitt’s political theory. This paper aims to modify aspects of these readings and offer in response a Schmittian answer to the Kurdish question. By applying Schmitt’s conceptual framework, this paper argues that the Kurds, especially in their struggles for autonomy and independence, can be viewed as fulfilling Schmitt’s criterion for tellurian partisanship and forming an at least nascent constituent power. We argue that Turks and Kurds are enemies in Schmitt’s explicitly political sense. They constitute a threat to each other’s political existence. The Kurds exhibit the behavior of a Schmittian people or nation. They fight, against Turks, for their political existence. They aim to govern themselves, and so instantiate the de facto attributes of state sovereignty. They thus seek to constitute themselves as a free and independent people, thereby achieving a genuine political existence in the Schmittian sense. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-10-29T10:32:52Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220966345
Authors:Nicholas Michelsen Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. This article argues that ‘Critical International Relations’, often counterpoised to ‘mainstream IR’, has come to function as a major theoretical category in its own right. It argues that critique involves ‘minor theorising’, defined as the practice of disturbing settled theoretical assumptions in the discipline. The article examines the role and significance of ‘minor theories’ in the context of ongoing debates about Critical IR. It argues that critique is defined by context, and is politically and ethically ambiguous. The article concludes that the scope for critique could be advanced if the terms ‘Critical IR’ and ‘Critical IR Scholar’ are dropped from scholarly parlance. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-10-07T06:16:56Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220956680
Authors:Sophia Dingli Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. This article examines the conceptualisations of peace and its preconditions manifested in the critical turn in peace theory: bottom-up approaches which begin with particular contexts and postulate diverse local actors as integral to the process of peace-building. This article argues that the turn is at an impasse and is unable to address the crucial charge that its conceptualisation of peace is inconsistent. To explain the persistence of inconsistency and to move us forward, the article analyses, evaluates and responds to the turn through the lens of Nicholas Rengger’s work on the anti-Pelagian imagination in political theory. This is defined as a tendency to begin theorising from non-utopian, anti-perfectionist and sceptical assumptions. Through this examination the article argues that the critical turn is anti-Pelagian but not consistently so because it often gives way to perfectionism, adopts naïve readings of institutions and postulates demanding conceptions of political agency and practice. This inconsistency with its own philosophical premises makes the turn’s conceptualisation of peace and its preconditions incoherent. Finally, the article sketches an alternative account of peace which draws upon a number of anti-Pelagian scholars and mobilises Rengger’s particular defense of anti-Pelagianism. The suggested alternative, the article argues, provides us with a more coherent theory of peace and a way out of existing dead ends. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-08-25T04:26:28Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220951592
Authors:Laura Zanotti Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. This article explores the relevance of ontological assumptions for justifications of agency and ethics. It critiques Kantian ethics for being based upon an ontological imaginary that starts from the substantialism of Newtonian physics. Substantialism shapes Western political philosophy’s view about who we are as subjects and how the world works. In this ontological imaginary, validation of ethics is based upon universality and abstractions. Furthermore, Kantian ethics underscores an anthropocentric and theocratic vision of how to govern societies. I argue Kantian criteria are not only insufficient to make good choices but are also conducive to wrong ones, since they elicit self-appeasement in international intervention, and contribute to the conceptual repertoire of coloniality. I propose that an ontology of entanglements opens possibilities for overcoming the shortcomings of an ethos based upon abstractions and possibly for correcting some of its moral failures. In a quantum ontological imaginary, the validation of ethical choices relies instead upon the exploration of the apparatuses we deploy, as well as upon careful situational evaluation. Specific practices, rather than an abstract humanity, are the referents for devising such ethos. This position, I argue, resonates with the critical project of decoloniality and its acknowledgment of the political salience of ontological imaginaries. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-08-19T05:22:47Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220946777
Authors:Kevin Blachford Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. The balance of power is fundamental to the discipline of international relations, but its accuracy in explaining the historical record has been disputed. For international relations, balance of power theory represents a distinct approach which details the behaviour of states to counter hegemonic threats within an anarchic system. This article reimagines the balance of power tradition by highlighting its early modern foundations. Through providing a historical contextualization of the balance of power, this article shows how republican thinkers sought to balance against concentrations of power in order to safeguard political liberty. Early modern republics grappled with the challenge of maintaining a division of power within the polis in a co-constitutive relationship with the international. A republican polis could not secure liberty if under external domination or if the polis itself expanded to imperial proportions. Imperial expansion and the martial politics this entailed have traditionally been understood as incompatible to the safeguarding of political liberty. Recognizing this republican influence can uncover the co-constitutive connections between the internal power dynamics of the polis and the international sphere. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-07-21T10:56:46Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220942876
Authors:David Williams Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. John Stuart Mill’s justification for British rule in India is well known. Less well known and discussed are Mill’s extensive writings on the practice of British rule in India. A close engagement with Mill’s writings on this issue shows Mill was a much more uncertain and anxious imperialist than he is often presented to be. Mill was acutely aware of the difficulties presented by the imperial context in India, he identified a number of very demanding conditions that would have to be met if Britain’s imperial mission was to be successful, and he was very troubled by the dangers posed to this mission from politics in Britain. Toward the end of his life, Mill become much more pessimistic about the progressive possibilities of British colonialism, in part because of what he thought had happened after the transfer of British rule from the East India Company to the British state. A focus on Mill’s arguments about the practice of British rule in India goes some way to providing a more nuanced account of what Mill thought about colonialism. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-02-08T06:03:32Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088220903349
Authors:Shinkyu Lee Abstract: Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. How political communities should be constituted is at the center of Hannah Arendt’s engagement with two ancient sources of law: the Greek nomos and the Roman lex. Recent scholarship suggests that Arendt treats nomos as imperative and exclusive while lex has a relationship-establishing dimension and that for an inclusive form of polity, she favors lex over nomos. This article argues, however, that Arendt’s appreciation occurs within a general context of more reservations about Rome than Roman-centric interpretations admit. Her writings show that lex could not accommodate the agonistic spirit and Homeric impartiality that helped the Greeks achieve human greatness and surpassing excellence. Arendt also points out that Roman peace alliances occurred at the expense of disclosive competition among equals and assumed some form of domination. Indeed, although Arendt appreciates lex’s relationship-establishing aspect, she is undoubtedly critical of anti-political practices accompanying lex, manifested when the Romans required enemies’ submission to terms of peace the Romans themselves set. In the end, Arendt’s statements regarding nomos and lex highlight the fundamental challenge in free politics: balancing the internal demand of agonistic action with the external need to expand lasting ties. Citation: Journal of International Political Theory PubDate: 2020-01-02T01:01:03Z DOI: 10.1177/1755088219898237
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