This article re-examines Hobbesian sovereignty and Kropotkinian mutual aid under the extreme conditions of post-collapse life. It introduces the “scarred original position,” a concept in which actors do not enter as abstract individuals but as survivors marked by the memory of systemic catastrophe. This reframing alters the classical premises: Hobbes’s state of nature becomes a remembered possibility rather than an imminent experience, while Kropotkinian sociability is tempered by the historical fragility of reciprocity. For Hobbes, coherence is preserved through the creation of a “cold covenant”: a pre-emptive, deliberated, and ritualized act of instituting authority before crisis erupts. Historical memory replaces immediacy as the ground of fear, ensuring that sovereignty remains ontologically Hobbesian even when founded on foresight. Kropotkinian mutual aid, by contrast, retains coherence through its refusal of domination and its emphasis on reciprocity, though it must accept vulnerability and fragility as integral to its fidelity. In dialog, the two models show that both can maintain coherence under collapse, but only in scarred form. Hobbesian sovereignty is haunted by memories of failed Leviathans, while anarchist communitarianism is haunted by its precariousness. The scarred original position thus reveals that post-collapse political orders emerge not from pure beginnings but from inherited fears, solidarities, and traumas.

Rita Floyd’s The Duty to Secure provides a thoughtful and rigourous account of the ethics of responding to some of the world’s key global challenges. In this essay, I focus on two issues. The first concerns her discussion of the responsibility to protect (R2P) and claims that her theory of mandatory securitisation will help to refocus the struggling norm. The second concerns rising global authoritarianism and what this means for her theory.

Rita Floyd’s work on securitisation and the just war is original and creative, but the version of the just war she employs – the analytical approach to just war theory – limits the applicability of her ideas.

The Duty to Secure: From Just to Mandatory Securitization (2024) extends Just Securitization Theory (JST), originally developed in The Morality of Security: A Theory of Just Securitization (2019), with a theory of the moral obligation to use emergency measures to safe valuable referent objects from objective existential threats. Morally mandatory securitization includes prescriptions setting out when the duties to secure and to securitize apply, on who has such duties, and to whom . In this article, I defend the theory against five critics. All of these see value in and need for the general project of rethinking the ethics of securitization, but all disagree with some aspects. Including, the theory’s communitarian roots, the usage of revisionist just war theory to derive moral principles, and/or the attempt to refocus the responsibility to protect (RtoP) norm. I use the available space to defend my choices. I conclude by pointing out directions for future research on the ethics of securitization.

Immanuel Kant defines existence – in this article comprehended as the security of Self – as practical and objective rationality, as a category guided by a priori principles that metaphysically employ a categorical imperative to all humans. Friedrich Nietzsche defines existence as a dynamic, artistic process of creation, which can be shaped by a will to power to either overcome or exercise influence. Georg W. F. Hegel defines existence neither as Being nor as Non-Being, but as a continuous process of Becoming. Beyond binaries of to be or not to be, the question arises how can agency be created to maintain security of Self and Others and, utmost importantly, is there a moral duty for it? “The duty of other-securitization, as indeed the duty of self-securitization,” Floyd argues, “rests on a prior duty of politicization.”

One of four Reviews of the Ralph book

This paper represents an existing critique of Alexander Wendt’s theory of a ‘world state’ and invites responses to a new international theory. The argument is that Wendt’s account of the global identity formation of a ‘world state’ is paradoxical. It depicts the most authoritative agents in international politics as cyphers of a structural change that is one-sided and ultimately unifying rather than, as he implies, mutually constituted and defined by relentless struggle. This ‘agent–structure problem’ is addressed in this paper through a dialogue with Michael Oakeshott’s political philosophy. A more complex ideal type of a ‘world state’ is constructed and contrasted with Wendt’s. This frames an inquiry into the political rhetoric that drives a project of global reform between 2012 and 2022. A new theory of a ‘world state’ is elaborated with reference to: (i) the ‘foundations’ of agent-centred otherness in an international practice of the United Nations Security Council; and (ii) the structure to the moral judgements of a ‘We’. The theoretical conclusion is the logic of these events reveals the origins of a divisive conflict in an international practice which is irreconcilable with Wendt’s ‘progressive’ speculation about the uncontested future of global identity.