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In his chapter on the rise of terrorism, the author points to two principal challenges to international society: first, terrorism challenges the state's monopoly of legitimate violence (which is also being eroded in a number of other ways); and second, the reaction that Al‐Qaeda has drawn from the USA threatens to create as significant a problem for international society as terrorism itself. The author opens his discussion with a brief survey of the nature of terrorism and the position it has held in the thought of the English School of International Relations: with only one or two minor exceptions, English School writers tended not to incorporate terrorism into their study despite the proliferation of terrorist incidents in the 1970s, and Hedley Bull identified terrorism as simply one of several types of ‘private international violence’. The author suggests two reasons for this apparent oversight: the School's state‐centrism and its resistance to presentism. After discussing the changing nature of terrorism in both its non‐state and state varieties, he moves on to address how terrorism poses a threat to contemporary international order, focusing in particular on terrorism as a breakdown of the state's monopoly on legitimate violence that is essential for the proper functioning of international society. The last part of the chapter describes the rise of the ‘new terrorism’ – which is characterized by religious motivation, greater lethality of attacks, greater technological and operational competence, and the desire to obtain weapons of mass destruction – and its impact on international society, and concludes by arguing that US attempts to tackle terrorism by undermining the basic principles of international society may only help to exacerbate the problem by casting further doubt on the relevance and legitimacy of international order.

Questions the optimism for international relations cited in the 1975 Handbook of Political Science. Unprecedented global change has divided international relations, and optimism for consensus has eroded. Through a diversity of viewpoints, feminism provides optimism for the broadening of theory and of empirical base. Using a post‐positivist methodology, feminism challenges ethnocentrism and state‐centrism, and rejects universalism and claims of objectivity. Feminism's appreciation of difference provides realistic optimism for the future of international relations.

Provides an account of the transformation of policy‐making. From the top‐down state‐centric approach and from the bottom‐up grassroots popularism of the 60s and 70s, policy‐making now reflects an increasing emphasis on the importance of ideas and institutions. How can we understand this shift in emphasis? Offers an account of the contracting approach, on the basis of the growing need for efficiency in public policy, credibility and reputation maintenance, and the rediscovery of the importance of institutions. Theoretical implications of the contracting approach are outlined.

This chapter takes issue with a traditional approach that has tried, unsuccessfully, to separate order from justice. It argues that a solidarist consciousness has been developed, arising from a wide range of social, political, economic, and technological forces. These developments make a retreat to pluralist state‐based conceptions of international order and justice impossible. Yet the chapter acknowledges, too, that attempts to move towards promoting some conception of global justice are still constrained because these attempts have to be made in the context of a global political order that remains heavily structured around inherited pluralist mechanisms that reflect various types of inequality.

The authors focus on the European Union both as a regional organization with distinctive norms and practices, and as a grouping of states that reflect specific individual traditions and views. The chapter describes two core paradigms: the national and the post‐national. The national paradigm is recognizably realist and state‐centric in approach. It suggests that the focus of external behaviour should be the promotion of order via traditional power‐political means and for traditional state‐based normative ends. The post‐national paradigm, however, reflects a more cosmopolitan understanding of global society in which Europe's institutional and substantive understanding of justice questions can be reflected in its policies beyond EU borders. These propositions are tested in three issue areas. The authors conclude that while the EU may have the capacity to shape an order/justice agenda beyond its borders, its members have not yet agreed what that agenda should be.

MacFarlane argues that Russian perspectives on order and justice are deeply rooted and are basically inconsistent with liberal thinking. These perspectives strongly reflect the country's geographical and historical experiences. The leaders of the country have generally ignored solidarist ends and have remained wedded to the promotion of a state‐based order in which multipolarity prevails, multilateralism is to be avoided, and the Russian loss of status is recovered along with its material power. Russian leaders remain concerned with interstate justice in the context of a re‐established domestic and Russian‐led regional order.

Insofar as a just war is fought ultimately for a just and lasting peace, just war theory should engage with various issues concerning how such a peace is to be understood and secured. The nature of global conflict today demonstrates that it is impossible to conceptualise and pursue such a peace through the traditional state-centric paradigm of security. The development of a “human security” perspective is explained in this chapter, which goes on to present a case for a human right to peace. The question is then raised as to how such theoretical innovations may relate to just war theory. It is argued that, suitably modified, the theory can be rendered compatible with such a right. Two important features of this revised theory are, firstly, the need for an account of jus post bellum to indicate certain conditions of, and requirements for, the post-conflict consolidation of the right to peace; secondly, the insistence that only a cosmopolitan perspective can satisfactorily combine the justification of war with the primacy of human security and the right to peace.

This introduction sets out the central premises of the book and the reasons why the Court is of interest for scholarship. It makes a caveat as to the use of the term ‘State-centric’ in the book, and outlines its structure. It does so whilst outlining the approach.

The Anarchical Society with its state-centric conceptualization of world politics may appear ill equipped to account for the increasing influence of non-state actors. However, despite this state-centrism, this chapter argues that Bull’s concept of international society constitutes a useful interpretative framework to account for the discourse and practice of such actors. The essay focuses on the organization Islamic State, which offers an example of how a non-state armed actor can challenge and confront international society, while at the same time engage with and mimic its discursive and material practices. The use of international society’s vocabulary, practices, and institutions constitutes for IS a way to attempt to elevate its status from informal organization to state. However, once established as a para-state entity, IS has engaged in norm contestation whereby it has confronted the Western-centric conception of order of international society and countered it with the ideal of a ‘caliphate’.