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This chapter explores the question: What does it mean to care for others in international relations? Sara Ruddick, Fiona Robinson, and others have outlined international relations theories based upon care ethics, but their accounts are fairly general and say little about the rights and policies necessary for establishing caring relations among people across the world. The first half of this chapter develops a human rights framework based upon human beings' universal duty to care for others. The chapter argues that this framework avoids the central shortcomings of other international rights frameworks, and more generally provides a standard of justice that should be reasonably acceptable to people from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. The second half of the chapter outlines some specific strategies and policies for enforcing human rights abroad and caring for distant others. In the last section, the chapter discusses the conditions under which care theory might justify the use of military force, especially for the sake of intervening into other countries for humanitarian purposes.

This short introduction describes the approach taken by the book and gives a brief outline of its contents. The story is about wars and military occupation, and the ideas underlying them, and the search for these ideas is carried out in the domain of the laws of war by addressing the challenge posed by a particular principle in these laws: the distinction between combatant and non-combatant, a concept which has been recognized as the fundamental principle upon which the entire notion of ‘humanity in warfare’ rests (and has also been acknowledged as the most fragile). The forces underpinning this distinction (more precisely, a distinction between the lawful and unlawful combatant) are explored by presenting three ideologies, each representing a distinct political tradition of war, and each rooted in incommensurable conceptions of the good life; the overall argument of the book is that this incommensurability lay at the source of the failure fully to resolve the problem of distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants between 1874 and 1949. The book makes use of concepts and methods borrowed from a range of intellectual disciplines: political thought, history, and the ‘classical’ traditions of international theory. In the case of the latter, it examines the influence of key thinkers on war, such as Machiavelli, Grotius, and Rousseau, but differs from this orthodox approach in two ways: first, it is not seeking to ascertain the ‘true’ meaning of their philosophies, but rather to find how their political thoughts were interpreted and shaped by later generations; second, the examination is not restricted to abstract theorists and philosophers but is centrally concerned with paradigms constructed by practitioners of war, both professional and civilian.

Starts by outlining the three broad ways that there are of thinking about the contribution of the English School of International Relations and international society approach to the study of contemporary international relations. The first way is to follow Barry Buzan in arguing that the English School is an ‘underexploited resource’ and that ‘the time is ripe to develop and apply its historicist, and methodologically pluralist approach’ to the subject; the second, at the other end of the spectrum, calls for the School's closure, or indeed, argues that it no longer exists because it has been too much distorted by contemporary proponents who have eschewed some of its foundational ideas – such as the centrality of states, and the importance of power politics; the third perspective is somewhere between these two, and has arisen as a result of the increased dialogue between English School ideas and other theoretical perspectives – most notably realism and constructivism, which call for the further refinement of English School thinking to give it a theory that is capable of identifying the motors for change and lines of causation in world politics. The primary purpose of this book is to assess these three positions and question the utility of the English School and international society approach to world politics, and to contribute to the development of English School thinking by opening up avenues for theoretical dialogue with other perspectives and suggesting new lines of theoretically informed empirical analysis. Two further sections of the introduction look at international relations theory after the cold war, and discuss the central question of the relationship between the English School and the concept of international society. The final section summarizes the ground covered in each chapter of the book.

The author outlines and assesses the contribution the English School of International Relations to theory in the study of world politics by discussing in turn each of three aspects of theorizing: ‘explanatory’, ‘normative’, and ‘international’. Explanatory theory aims to help understanding of how it is that the realm of world politics works out the ways it appears to do, while normative theory elucidates the steps through which some fundamental normative presuppositions lead to conclusions regarding what should be done in world politics. The author uses the term ‘international theory’ in Martin Wight's specific sense of the term as ‘a tradition of speculation about relations between states, a tradition imagined as the twin of speculation about the state to which the name “political theory” is appropriated’. As the discussion progresses, some other senses of the word ‘theory’ are also brought to attention to elucidate the activities of the English School. In sum, the author argues that the English School's explanatory theory is woefully underdeveloped, its normative theory is in need of further reflection, while its international theory offers a useful way of interpreting world politics.

Sir Harold Nicolson’s philosophy of international relations is well summed up by the term ‘liberal realism’, a fusion of two key approaches to the resolution of international problems: realism and idealism. It has its origins in ancient Greek and Roman political thought and history, notably, the writings of Aristotle and Thucydides. It also owes much to the contributions to international theory of Grotius and Kant. The liberal realist outlook closely resembles the conception of a via media. Notwithstanding this, it represents one man’s distinctive theorizing (born of his background, education, and experience) about the main issues of international relations.

This chapter summarizes the causes of informal groups of states and their effects on Security Council governance. It argues that those informal settings are changing the role of the UN Security Council in the international system. The functions of diplomatic problem-solving and its collective legitimization have become separate from one another. This has implications for the understanding of power, legitimacy, and change in the theory of international relations.

This chapter examines the effect of international trade on labor conditions around the world. Evidence developed in the chapter shows that open trade policies improve working conditions by raising per capita income, as international trade theory predicts. Countries with open trade policies also have superior labor rights, and labor rights improve over time in countries that adopt open trade policies. In the short run, trade clearly enhances the working conditions of workers in export industries (including those working in export processing zones) but threatens the conditions of workers whose companies compete with imports. The evidence shows that with the passage of time, all workers benefit by moving into more productive employment settings. The evidence in this chapter implies that trade sanctions are likely to worsen labor conditions in target countries.

Sir Harold Nicolson was seen during his lifetime, and has been regarded since his death, as a gifted authority on diplomacy. He was also the twentieth-century heir to a tradition of Western diplomatic theorists who espoused diplomatic values deriving from ancient Greek and Roman political theory and history. As an international relations thinker, Nicolson had much in common with the scholars of the English School (e.g., the conception of an international society). While his international thought contains elements of realism and idealism, Nicolson made a unique contribution to international theory through his liberal realism—an amalgam of realist and idealist outlooks on international affairs. It constituted a coherent approach to the central questions of international order, diplomacy, European integration, world government, and universal peace.

Sir Harold Nicolson’s writings on diplomacy represent the twentieth century’s most eloquent expression by a diplomatic practitioner of classic Western European diplomatic theory. He was firmly within the tradition of the great diplomatic theorists, Callières and Wicquefort. Yet his interests went well beyond diplomacy. Nicolson’s approach to international relations and his outlook on international society, which have many similarities with the writings of the members of the English School, constitute a well-grounded contribution to international theory. He combined an understanding of ancient Greek and Roman political philosophy and history, Kantian thinking, and the concepts of idealism and realism with extensive diplomatic and political experience to forge a distinctive theory of international relations—liberal realism. Nicolson tested its assumptions and principles in addressing the major questions of international order, inter-war European security, a united Europe, and the possibility of eventual global peace.

The Introduction opens with an observation that the last twenty years have witnessed new or lingering demands for statehood in different areas of the world. Even as many of these claims have given rise to major conflicts and international controversies, the criteria for recognition of new states have elicited little systematic scholarship. International lawyers study recognition through the abstract prism of long‐standing debates about its legal theory, and international relations scholars tend to ignore the subject altogether. This book views recognition as an indispensable precondition for a political community's status as a sovereign state in international relations and law. It offers a comprehensive analysis of recognition of new states by investigating its historical practice, employing the classical interpretive approach of the English School. The rest of this chapter outlines the central argument of the book, which ties the past 200 years of state recognition to the idea of self‐determination of peoples.

This is the third of three chapters that set out the differing contexts through which the dilemma in the laws of war over the distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants can be viewed, and explores a range of intellectual approaches to the laws of war and war itself, assessing their relative methodological value and limitations. Previous chapters have illustrated that there existed at all levels a profound disagreement about the classes of people who were permitted to engage in political violence in times of war, and by narrowing the scope of inquiry to this one aspect (lawful versus unlawful combatants) of the laws of war, these chapters have also shown that there were strong normative elements to this lack of accord. Starting with this chapter, the remainder of the book argues that these normative elements were expressions of profound ideological clashes among three contending philosophies of war: martial, Grotian, and republican. From a methodological perspective, the explanation for the failed attempt to construct a distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants will be seen to lie in incommensurable normative frameworks of war, rather than in the specialized analytical tools of legal theory, diplomatic and archival history, and international relations theory. This chapter first assesses both the intellectual contributions and limitations of the legal, historical and international relations approaches before defining the three distinct traditions of war (martial, Grotian, and republican), and highlighting their explanatory value.

This introductory chapter criticizes the amateurish way in which history is used to corroborate International Relations theory, in particular Realism. Conversely, it criticizes conventional historiography for its neglect of political theory. A case in point is the constructivist insight that political structures are created through political discourse. The political discourse underlying present-day political structures is so ubiquitous as to render those structures largely immune to manipulation. But since to most people the everyday political discourse of past eras is now unfamiliar, historians feel free, indeed obliged, to describe past political structures using the political concepts and assumptions of our own day. What they fail to realize is that unlike present-day political structures the political structures of past ages do change when anachronistic terminology is used to describe them: they come to look more like our own than they were.

This chapter discusses the groundwork for constructing a qualified ethical cosmopolitan position. It maintains that normative International Relations (IR) theory must respond to the attempts to challenge the very nature of morality. The chapter distinguishes between two distinct aspects of any moral perspective, namely: the understanding of the moral agent upon which it relies, and the ‘sphere of equal moral standing’ that it allows.

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.