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The environment has emerged as a key issue in global politics since the early 1970s, and the issues that comprise the ‘environmental crisis’ are widely regarded to have had significant impacts on international politics. At the same time, the international society or English School of International Relations tradition has rarely had much explicit to say regarding the implications of environmental degradation for International Relations, although at a first look, it is a surprise that English School authors have not looked to environmental politics for sources of support for their arguments. This chapter attempts to elaborate how such an engagement between international environmental politics and the English School might develop. It begins with an elaboration of Hedley Bull's (1977) passage on the environment in The Anarchical Society, and then proceeds through a discussion of contemporary accounts of ‘global environmental governance’, in terms of programmatic reform, international regimes, multilevel governance, deterritorialization, and corporate governance and governance from below. The conclusion reached is that despite a superficial attraction, discussions of global environmental governance undermine the image of international society in English School accounts in two principal ways: first, they show that thinking about international society (its norms, the tensions and conversation between the three traditions in English School, and so on) is limited by the lack of understanding of the specifically capitalist character of the states‐system; and second, they show that the image given in Bull – that any alternatives to the states‐system tend to founder on the claim that states will not voluntarily cede their authority – is misplaced, for practices of global governance are emerging in the environmental field that operate outside the states‐system but where states have never given permission in the manner envisaged by Bull and others to be necessary.

Globalization means that political control moves into the international system. Transnational democracy can follow suit, through democratization of the discourses that pervade and coordinate international politics. Transnational networks of non‐governmental organizations are important.

This chapter explains the book's threefold goal. First, it reveals a paradigm change in creating and using international courts (ICs), leading to the creation of the new international judicial architecture. Second, the book conceptualizes how new-style ICs affect domestic and international politics across countries, courts, cases, and issues. An international court's political influence comes from its authority to say what the law means for the case at hand, its jurisdiction to name violations of international law, and its ability to specify remedies that follow from international legal violations. Finally, the book aims to create nonutopian and thus more realistic expectations for ICs. This research builds on theories developed in the study of domestic courts and uses the presence of similarly designed ICs, of cross-time design changes, and variations in the influence of the same ICs across countries.

This chapter discusses how the argument about the systemic sources of conflict is far more problematic, even in principle, than many people seem prepared to admit. It further argues that there are ways in which systemic forces can play a stabilizing role. The chapter begins by outlining the kind of thinking that lies behind the view that a system based on power is not inherently unstable—or, more precisely, the basis for the view that realist policies, policies that make sense in terms of the basic logic of the system, actually make for a relatively stable international order. It then examines some key arguments on the other side, especially fundamental arguments about the way an anarchic system is supposed to work. The final section looks at policy arguments, and especially at what they can tell us about the fundamental assumptions that lie at the heart of the realist understanding of international politics.

This chapter first examines neoliberalism as a contested concept. It then traces how it has come to be embedded within the globalization process; deconstructs the concept into its different subcategories and dimensions; identifies some of the key actors who have co-opted neoliberalism into their own frames of references, strategies and tactics; and concludes by suggesting some of the forms that arguably might be expected to characterize its evolution in the medium term. It shows that the evolution of neoliberalism over the past thirty years has transformed it from a relatively dogmatic, enforced, pseudo-laissez faire doctrine into a kind of common sense for the 21st century. Embedded neoliberalism involves an acceptance that we live in a multi-level, more open, and market-like globalizing world, in which informal and negotiated policy processes do not merely complement relations among nation-states but constitute a complex, fungible, pluralized political game that is drawing in ever more actors.

This chapter argues that, to get at the issue of international order, one must first deal with the theoretical question of how politics works in the highly stylized world associated with the term anarchy—a world where security and thus power are the only things that matter, a world in which no effective international society can be said to exist. The workings of such an idealized world are worth examining not because the real world necessarily works the same way, but simply because that sort of analysis is a necessary point of departure for thinking about real world problems. Only when one understands how a highly stylized world of this sort works can questions about the role of various factors—international law, for example, or economic interdependence—be posed in any meaningful way. If the goal is to understand what difference those factors make—that is, whether they contribute to order—one needs to start with a certain preexisting frame of reference, one that only theoretical analysis can provide.

This chapter develops theoretical perspectives on how the practice of interpretation makes international law. It first rejects orthodox legal positivism’s assumption that law can be found in the norm text and illustrates how semantic change challenges the normative construction according to which subjects can only be bound with their consent. Once they make a commitment, the content of such a commitment is no longer in their hands alone. The chapter identifies shortcomings of theoretical approaches that have shifted their attention towards lawmaking in communicative practices and connects to developments in linguistic theory as well as sociology to introduce a concept of practice that supersedes old divides. The chapter cuts to the core of semantic struggles in law by discussing the exercise of power and authority in legal interpretation and closes by introducing the main actors in international legal discourse.

This chapter inquires first into the domestic foundations of power. For Krasner the Hartzian view of liberalism is coherent and unitary. This is at odds with much of Louis Hartz’s own writings, which historicized the liberal tradition of the United States through a careful examination of its manifestations in subnational, international-comparative, and global contexts. Krasner’s coherence perspective overlooks the creativity of productive power that exploits the structural, racial, and institutional political divisions of America. The chapter also engages Krasner’s argument that rulers, not states, are the basic unit of international politics. For Krasner, actor preferences are uniform at all times and in all places, and rulers are intent on maximizing their individual power. Rather than stipulating the existence of a Homo politicus in a world of rational and autonomous rulers, we should stretch our conceptual categories to conceive of a world of rulers constituted by structures, embedded in institutions and seeking to exercise productive power. The chapter’s final section draws out the implications of these two arguments about contested and multiple traditions and constituted and embedded rulers. We are better served by capacious rather than sparse concepts. Intellectual capaciousness gives us purchase to formulate interesting and novel questions that encompass both actor-centric and relational perspectives. Capacious concepts allow us to escape the strong clutches of paradigmatic thinking and the comfortable cocoon of the like-minded. Working at the interstices of paradigms, with luck and hard work, we can reimagine the world in novel ways.

This chapter looks at the domestic rule of law and its uneasy translation to international politics. The central claim is this: the domestic rule of law is in effect when there exists a set of stable public laws binding in theory and practice on both citizens and the state. There are two main lines of debate in existing literature on the domestic rule of law. The first asks whether individual human rights and collective social welfare are effects of the rule of law or constitutive of it. The second debate involves how the rule of law can be distinguished from rule by law, in which the state uses the framework of law instrumentally to legitimate and reinforce its domination. Three claims about the rule of law are constant across these debates: that rules should be public and stable, that rules should apply to the government as well as the citizens, and that the rules should be applied equally across cases. None of these translates easily to the realm of international law. Thus, domestic rule of law provides an unsuitable model for an international equivalent.

This research turns on concepts that are central to international politics—polarity, intervention, cooperation—but ones that remain loosely defined in the literature. This chapter addresses the following questions: What does unipolarity mean, and why does the distribution of power matter? What is an intervention? When does a particular use of force constitute an intervention? How do we know whether a particular coalition is multilateral or whether it is stacked with states that provide more window dressing than any real decision-making influence?

This introductory chapter discusses the question of qualifying cosmopolitanism. It discusses concepts such as cosmopolitanism, ethical cosmopolitanism, and contemporary international politics. It also presents a new term, ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’, which is examined throughout the book. An overview of the following chapters is provided as well.