Towards a minimal conception of Transitional Justice

Transitional Justice (TJ) focuses on the processes of dealing with the legacy of large-scale past abuses (in the aftermath of traumatic experiences such as war or authoritarianism) with the aim of fostering domestic justice and creating the basis for a sustainable peace. TJ however also entails the problem of how a torn society may be able to become a self-determining member of a just international order. This paper presents a minimal conception of TJ, which departs from Rawls' conception of normative stability of the international order, which suggests disentangling the two goals of fostering democracy within torn societies and TJ itself. The scope of TJ is therefore limited to enabling these societies to create minimal internal conditions for joining a just international order on equal footing. This paper makes an original contribution to two different debates, namely normative research on TJ, and post-Rawlsian literature in general. First, it provides a new direction for normative theorizing about TJ which takes both its domestic and international dimensions seriously into consideration. Second, it extends Rawls' political liberal outlook to an area where it is not usually understood to apply.

Narrative and nuclear weapons politics: the entelechial force of the nuclear origin myth

This paper contributes a novel way to theorise the power of narratives of nuclear weapons politics through Kenneth Burke's concept of entelechy: the means of stating a things essence through narrating its beginning or end. The paper argues that the Manhattan Project functions narratively in nuclear discourse as an origin myth, so that the repeated telling of atomic creation over time frames the possibilities of nuclear politics today. By linking Burke's work on entelechy with literature on narrative and eschatology, the paper develops a theoretical grounding for understanding the interconnection of the nuclear past, present, and future. The paper supports its argument by conducting a wide-ranging survey of academic and popular accounts of the development of the atomic weapon in the US Manhattan Project. It reveals a dominant narrative across these accounts that contains three core tropes: the nuclear weapon as the inevitable and perfected culmination of humankind's tendency towards violence; the Manhattan Project as a race against time; and the nuclear weapon as a product of a fetishized masculine brilliance.

Representants and international orders

The paper introduces a new explanation of international order that focuses on representants. Representants are practices, artifacts, and language that stand in for the international system's units in international fora. They are crucial for International Relations (IR), given that IR deal with a macro-realm that can never be fully present, but needs to be made concrete in specific localities. Representants have four interrelated effects: (1) they define the units of the international system; (2) they legitimize them; (3) they provide them with differential degrees of power; and (4) they serve as tools for governing. When representants are seriously challenged, orders are in crisis; when new representants emerge, a new order has taken hold. The paper develops a mechanism of change emerging from struggles over representants. It studies the transition from the medieval order of universal monarchy to an order of divine right absolutism. Representants, such as gothic cathedrals, the mass, and coronation rituals maintained the medieval hierarchical order with the pope/emperor at the apex. The Reformation provided the last step in kings' challenge to the medieval order. Kings adapted existing representants, so that they would portray the independence of kings from the papacy/emperor, and simultaneously position kings above feudal lords.

The everyday emotional lives of aid workers: how humanitarian anxiety gets in the way of meaningful local participation

Participatory approaches to humanitarianism, peacebuilding, and international development promise to listen to the voices of local aid beneficiaries. However, aid workers often listen to these voices through reductive narratives of aid beneficiaries, ventriloquizing their voice and inhibiting meaningful participation. Why do aid workers – despite humane intentions – continue to rely on reductive narratives? This paper inquires how the everyday emotional lives of aid workers make reductive narratives persist. Based on 65 semi-structured interviews in Singapore, Jakarta, and Aceh, and 40 aid worker books and blogs, I show how aid workers regularly experience emotional anxieties that question their complicity in the suffering of others and their powerlessness to do anything about it. Reductive narratives resonate and persist because they allow aid workers to cope with these anxieties. I illustrate the emotional resonance of three reductive narratives – civilizing; romanticized; and impersonal narratives – in three common practices of local participation in aid work: professionalized standards; visiting the field; and hiring locals. Given the emotional origins of reductive narratives, rational critique is insufficient for reforming or decolonizing aid work. Rather, change must also involve engaging the underlying emotions of aid workers.

Conceptualizing interstate cooperation

There seems to exist a general consensus on how to conceptualize cooperation in the field of international relations (IR). We argue that this impression is deceptive. In practice, scholars working on the causes of international cooperation have come to implicitly employ various understandings of what cooperation is. Yet, an explicit debate about the discipline's conceptual foundations never materialized, and whatever discussion occurred did so only latently and without much dialog across theoretical traditions. In this paper, we develop an updated conceptual framework by exploring the nature of these differing understandings and situating them within broader theoretical conversations about the role of cooperation in IR. Drawing on an array of studies in IR and philosophy, our framework distinguishes between three distinct types of cooperative state interactions – cooperation through tacit policy coordination (‘minimal’ cooperation), cooperation through explicit policy coordination (‘thin’ cooperation), and cooperation based on joint action (‘thick’ cooperation). The framework contributes to better theorization about cooperation in two main ways: it allows scholars across theoretical traditions to identify important sources of disagreement and previously unnoticed theoretical common ground; and the conceptual disaggregation it provides grants scholars crucial theoretical leverage by enabling type-specific causal theorization.

Global libertarianism: how much public morality does international human rights law allow?

International human rights specialists and libertarian philosophers have rarely pursued meaningful exchanges, but this paper probes some of their common ground. In recent years, leading international monitoring bodies have developed a principle described here as the ‘Libertarian Principle of Human Rights’ (LPHR). It runs as follows: Governments cannot legitimately recite public morals as a sufficient justification to limit individual human rights. That principle might seem obvious in many societies today, but throughout history, including the history of liberalism, any notion that certain individual interests must trump religious or customary beliefs has stood as the rare exception. The seemingly Western and secular suggestion of a libertarian principle inherent within human rights may seem at odds with the view that human rights ought to reflect diverse cultural traditions; however, LPHR underscores an anti-authoritarianism, which, it is argued, must form part of any serious conception of human rights. LPHR can be substantiated even for highly controversial rights, such as LGBTQ+ rights, suggesting that it applies a fortiori to more settled rights.

The false promise of global IR: exposing the paradox of dependent development

Concerned about the continued dominance of Western International Relations (IR) theories, the global IR community has proposed various measures to address disciplinary hierarchies through encouraging dialogue and pluralism. By investigating the pedagogical preferences of instructors from 45 countries, this paper questions the global IR initiative's emancipatory potential, arguing that disciplinary practices in IR resemble those of dependent development. The study develops a new typology of IR theoretical (IRT) scholarship and examines the readings assigned in 151 IRT syllabi worldwide for evidence of similarity, replication, and assimilation. The findings show that mainstream core IRTs dominate syllabi globally, regardless of region, language of instruction, or instructors' educational/linguistic backgrounds. This domination extends to periphery scholars not using their own local products. Even when they do seek alternative approaches, they prefer to import core alternatives, that is, critical traditions, rather than homegrown IRTs. Finally, the results show that even in syllabi taught in local languages the readings remain dominated by core IRT works. These findings expose a structural defect in the current cry for global IR, by revealing the system's dependent development paradox. The paper concludes with suggestions for creating a symmetric interdependent structure, in the aim of achieving a genuine globalization of IR.

Walter Lippmann, emotion, and the history of international theory

The recent ‘emotion turn’ in international theory is widely viewed as a cutting-edge development which pushes the field in fundamentally new directions. Challenging this narrative, this essay returns to the historical works of Walter Lippmann to show how thinking about emotions has been central to international theory for far longer than currently appreciated. Deeply troubled by his experience with propaganda during the First World War, Lippmann spent the next several decades thinking about the relationship between emotion, mass politics, and the challenges of foreign policy in the modern world. The result was a sophisticated account of the role of emotional stereotypes and symbols in mobilizing democratic publics to international action. I argue that a return to Lippmann's ideas offers two advantages. First, it shows his thinking on emotion and mass politics formed an important influence for key disciplinary figures like Angell, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Waltz. Second, it shows why the relationship between emotion and democracy should be understood as a vital concern for international theory. Vacillating between scepticism and hope, Lippmann's view of democracy highlights a series of challenges in modern mass politics – disinformation, the unintended consequences of emotional symbols, and responsibility for the public's emotional excesses – which bear directly on democracies' ability to engage the world.