Hannah Arendt is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most powerful political theorists. The purpose of this book is to make an innovative contribution to the newly emerging literature connecting Arendt to international political theory and debates surrounding globalization. In recent years the work of Arendt has gathered increasing interest from scholars in the field of international political theory because of its potential relevance for understanding international affairs. Focusing on the central theme of evil in Arendt’s work, this book weaves together elements of Arendt’s theory in order to engage with four major problems connected with contemporary globalization: genocide and crimes against humanity; global poverty and radical economic inequality; global refugees, displaced persons, and the ‘stateless’; and the destructive domination of the public realm by predatory neoliberal economic globalization. Hayden shows that a key constellation of her concepts—the right to have rights, superfluousness, thoughtlessness, plurality, freedom, and power—can help us to understand and address some of the central problems involving political evil in our global age. In doing so, this book takes Arendtian scholarship and international political theory into provocative new directions. Political Evil in a Global Age will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of politics, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies.

This book offers original essays on the subject of evil in international relations. It considers questions of moral agency associated with the perpetration of evil acts by individuals and groups in the international sphere, and the range of ethical responses the international community has available to it in the aftermath of large-scale evils.

Hannah Arendt and Cosmopolitanism presents the first comprehensive study of Hannah Arendt's cosmopolitanism. Challenging the common belief that cosmopolitanism is a negligible or incompatible element of Arendt's thought, it unpacks various key elements of her philosophy such as her critique of human rights, the defence of the “right to have rights” as a right to belong to a particular political community, the scepticism towards the establishment of a world government as a solution to the problem of statelessness, and the importance she attached to the passport. Through this the text argues that Arendt is a theorist of cosmopolitanism in her own right, by reconstructing as systematically as possible an issue that is relatively neglected in the secondary literature. Taraborrelli shows how Arendt anticipates and develops cosmopolitanism in four main forms - moral, political-institutional, judicial, cultural - and how in her thought there is no insuperable contradiction between cosmopolitanism and belonging to a political community, or between cosmopolitanism and the conditions of political action.

This special issue is animated by the necessary entanglement of theory and history, the cortical relationship between theory and practice, and the transboundary relations that help to constitute systems of thought and practice.

This book seeks to reimagine why and how to confront mass atrocities in world politics. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s conception of evil, it interprets and understands mass atrocities as ‘evil’ in an ‘Arendtian’ sense, that is, as crimes against human plurality and, thus, crimes against humanity itself. This understanding of mass atrocities paves the way for reframing responses to mass atrocities as attempts to confront evil. In doing so, the book focuses on military intervention under the banner of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and judicial intervention by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and reframes them as tools to protect human plurality from evil. Furthermore, the book looks at the place and the role of R2P and the ICC in the changing landscape of world order. It argues that the protection of humanity from evil can serve as a legitimate Grundnorm (basic norm) around which a global constitutional order in an inherently pluralistic world can be constructed.

Deliberately eschewing disciplinary and temporal boundaries, this volume makes a major contribution to the de-traditionalization of political thinking within the discourses of international relations. Collecting the works of twenty-five theorists, this Ashgate Research Companion engages some of the most pressing aspects of political thinking in world politics today. The authors explore theoretical constitutions, critiques, and affirmations of uniquely modern forms of power, past and present. Among the themes and dynamics examined are textual appropriation and representation, materiality and capital formation, geopolitical dimensions of ecological crises, connections between representations of violence and securitization, subjectivity and genderization, counter-globalization politics, constructivism, biopolitics, post-colonial politics and theory, as well as the political prospects of emerging civic and cosmopolitan orders in a time of national, religious, and secular polarization. Radically different in their approaches, the authors critically assess the discourses of IR as interpretive frames that are indebted to the historical formation of concepts, and to particular negotiations of power that inform the main methodological practices usually granted primacy in the field. Students as well as seasoned scholars seeking to challenge accepted theoretical frameworks will find in these chapters fresh insights into contemporary world-political problems and new resources for their critical interrogation.

Globalization has been contested in recent times. Among the critical perspectives is cosmopolitanism. Yet, with the exception of normative theory, international relations as a field has ignored cosmopolitan thinking. This book redresses this gap and develops a dialogue between cosmopolitanism and international relations. The dialogue is structured around three debates between non-universalist theories of international relations and contemporary cosmopolitan thought. The theories chosen are realism, (post-)Marxism and postmodernism. All three criticize liberalism in the international domain, and, therefore, cosmopolitanism as an offshoot of liberalism. In the light of each school's respective critique of universalism, the book suggests both the importance and difficulty of the cosmopolitan perspective in the contemporary world. Beardsworth emphasizes the need for global leadership at nation-state level, re-embedding of the world economy, a cosmopolitan politics of the lesser violence, and cosmopolitan political judgement. He also suggests research agendas to situate further contemporary cosmopolitanism in international relations theory. This book will appeal to all students of political theory and international relations, especially those who are seeking more articulation of the main issues between cosmopolitanism and its critics in international relations.

This book examines the international political order in the post-Cold War era, arguing that this order has become progressively more punitive. This is seen as resulting from both a human-rights regime that emphasizes legal norms and the aggressive policies of the United States and its allies in the ‘War on Terror’. While punishment can play a key role in creating justice in a political system, serious flaws in the current global order militate against punishment-enforcing global norms. The book argues for the necessary presence of three key concepts - justice, authority and agency - if punishment is to function effectively, and explores four practices in the current international system: intervention, sanctions, counter- terrorism policy, and war crimes tribunals. It concludes by suggesting ways to revise the current global political structure in order to enable punitive practices to play a more central role in creating a just world order. This book will be of much interest to students of International Law, Political Science and International Relations.

This book examines the contention that, in an era where the relevance of the literary novel is compromised, the novel remains an important means of exploring and interrogating societies and culture. It answers the question of what we lose with the loss of the novel as an important public space for discourse. It does so through readings of a selection of Don DeLillo’s later novels, together with the political philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou in their engagement with contemporary history. DeLillo explores in his fiction the profound cultural and socio-political changes and historical events which affect people. His literary interest is the status of the individual in changing times. On a personal level, his concern is the writer in an epoch where the novel is challenged by crises of diminished relevance in a techno-media culture and the emergence of radical forms of censorship that target literature and its producers. This book will appeal to students of DeLillo’s novels, researchers in the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and contemporary history, and students of Badiou and Arendt. Arendt’s political theories are currently undergoing a renaissance of interest, given current global politics.

Rise of the International brings together scholars of International Relations and History to capture the emergence and development of the thought, the relations, and the systems that have come to be called international in western discourse.