This book seeks to explain why different systems of sovereign states have built different types of fundamental institutions to govern interstate relations. Why, for example, did the ancient Greeks operate a successful system of third-party arbitration, while international society today rests on a combination of international law and multilateral diplomacy? Why did the city-states of Renaissance Italy develop a system of oratorical diplomacy, while the states of absolutist Europe relied on naturalist international law and "old diplomacy"? Conventional explanations of basic institutional practices have difficulty accounting for such variation. Christian Reus-Smit addresses this problem by presenting an alternative, "constructivist" theory of international institutional development, one that emphasizes the relationship between the social identity of the state and the nature and origin of basic institutional practices. Reus-Smit argues that international societies are shaped by deep constitutional structures that are based on prevailing beliefs about the moral purpose of the state, the organizing principle of sovereignty, and the norm of procedural justice. These structures inform the imaginations of institutional architects as they develop and adjust institutional arrangements between states. As he shows with detailed reference to ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, absolutist Europe, and the modern world, different cultural and historical contexts lead to profoundly different constitutional structures and institutional practices. The first major study of its kind, this book is a significant addition to our theoretical and empirical understanding of international relations, past and present.

Politics and law appear deeply entwined in contemporary international relations. Yet existing perspectives struggle to understand the complex interplay between these aspects of international life. In this path-breaking volume, a group of leading international relations scholars and legal theorists advance a new constructivist perspective on the politics of international law. They reconceive politics as a field of human action that stands at the intersection of issues of identity, purpose, ethics, and strategy, and define law as an historically contingent institutional expression of such politics. They explain how liberal politics has conditioned modern international law and how law â€~feeds back' to constitute international relations and world politics. This new perspective on the politics of international law is illustrated through detailed case-studies of the use of force, climate change, landmines, migrant rights, the International Criminal Court, the Kosovo bombing campaign, international financial institutions, and global governance.

We live today in the first global system of sovereign states in history, encompassing all of the world's polities, peoples, religions and civilizations. Christian Reus-Smit presents a new account of how this system came to be, one in which struggles for individual rights play a central role. The international system expanded from its original European core in five great waves, each involving the fragmentation of one or more empires into a host of successor sovereign states. In the most important, associated with the Westphalian settlement, the independence of Latin America, and post-1945 decolonization, the mobilization of new ideas about individual rights challenged imperial legitimacy, and when empires failed to recognize these new rights, subject peoples sought sovereign independence. Combining theoretical innovation with detailed historical case studies, this book advances a new understanding of human rights and world politics, with individual rights deeply implicated in the making of the global sovereign order.

This book argues that the effectiveness of the state apparatus is one of the crucial variables determining human rights conditions, and that state weakness and failure is responsible for much of the human rights abuses we see today. Weak states are unable to control their own agents or to police abuses by private actors, resulting in less accountability and more abuse. By contrast, stronger states have greater capacities to protect human rights; even strong authoritarian states tend to have better human rights conditions than weak ones. The first two chapters of the book develop the theoretical connections between international law, sovereignty, states and rights, and the consequences of state failure for these relationships. The empirical chapters (Chapters 3-6) test the validity of these theoretical claims, employing a multi-method approach that combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Englehart uses case studies of Afghanistan, Burma/Myanmar and the Indian state of Bihar to analyze types and patterns of state failure, based on analysis of NGO reports, archival research, primary and secondary texts, and interviews and field research. Examining what happens to human rights when states fail, the book concludes with implications for scholars and activists concerned with human rights. This book will be of great use to scholars of international relations, comparative politics, human rights law and state sovereignty.

Some of our most fundamental moral rules are violated by the practices of torture and war. If one examines the concrete forms these practices take, can the exceptions to the rules necessary to either torture or war be justified? Fighting Hurt brings together key essays by Henry Shue on the issue of torture, and relatedly, the moral challenges surrounding the initiation and conduct of war, and features a new introduction outlining the argument of the essays, putting them into context, and describing how and in what ways his position has modified over time. The first six chapters marshal arguments that have been refined over 35 years for the conclusion that torture can never be justified in any actual circumstances whatsoever. The practice of torture has nothing significant in common with the ticking bomb scenario often used in its defence, and weak U.S. statutes have loop-holes for psychological torture of the kind now favoured by CIA in the 'war against terrorism'. The other sixteen chapters maintain that for as long as wars are in fact fought, it is morally urgent to limit specific destructive practices that cannot be prohibited. Two possible exceptions to the UN Charter's prohibition on all but defensive wars, humanitarian military intervention and preventive war to eliminate WMD, are evaluated; and one possible exception to the principle of discrimination, Michael Walzer's 'supreme emergency', is sharply criticized. Two other fundamental issues about the rules for the conduct of war receive extensive controversial treatment. The first is the rules to limit the bombing of dual-use infrastructure, with a focus on alternative interpretations of the principle of proportionality that limits 'collateral damage'. The second is the moral status of the laws of war as embodied in International Humanitarian Law. It is argued that the current philosophical critique of IHL by Jeff McMahan focused on individual moral liability to attack is an intellectual dead-end and that the morally best rules are international laws that are the same for all fighters. Examining real cases, including U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991, the Clinton Administration decision not to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, and CIA torture after 9/11 and its alternatives, this book is highly accessible to general readers who are interested in the ethical status of American political life, especially foreign policy.

Vol. 142, 1910, includes also an account of the banquets of the Chamber from 1769 to 1910

In Role Compatibility as Socialization, Dorothée Vandamme examines Pakistan’s socialization process in terms of role compatibility in the 2008-2018 period. Adopting an Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) method of analysis, Vandamme builds on role theory to develop a theory of socialization as role compatibility to explain the dynamics of Pakistan’s (dys)functioning position and its status-seeking process as a fully functioning member of the international system. Specifically, she focuses on how Pakistani civilian and military leaders define their country’s positioning towards India, the United States and China. In doing so, she traces the link between domestic role contestation at the country’s inception and the resulting domination of the military’s conception of their country, state identity, how it projects itself externally and how it is received by others. Departing from strictly structural or agent-oriented explanations, Vandamme expertly demonstrates Pakistan’s perceived role compatibility with significant others and underlines the causality between state identity, foreign policy behavior and socialization. Role Compatibility as Socialization will be of interest to graduate students and researchers who work on and with role theory and socialization theory, and for those with a research interest on South Asia.