Contemporary International Political Theory Research Articles

Neo-Kantian Cosmopolitanism and International Law: Modest Practicality?

AbstractThis article explores the practical approach to global justice advocated by the cosmopolitan political theorists Pogge, Beitz and Buchanan. Using a comparative exposition it outlines their reliance on international law and on human rights law in particular. The essay explores the neo-Kantian influence on the practical approach and offers an original critique of this trend in contemporary international political theory.

Michael Walzer y la justicia global

The aim of the article is to present Michael Walzer’s conception of global justice, which is one of the few conceptions suggested by contemporary political philosophy that proposes an order that might be regarded as an interstate order. Despite globalization, interdependence and widening of the transnational political sphere, Walzer still regards States as the most important political units within the international system and considers that they have a moral signicance derived from the political communities they claim to represent. Walzer’s political conception of global justice is opposed to dominant cosmopolitan analysis within contemporary international political theory, which consider that legitimacy of the States depends on their capacity of making possible human autonomy.

Realism and the Kantian Tradition: A Revisionist Account

In contemporary international political theory, ‘Cosmopolitanism’ is typically juxtaposed to ‘Realism’, with many varieties of the former building on Kantian moral and political ideals, and the latter presumably rejecting Kant and his aspiration for far-reaching global reform. In agreement with a growing body of scholarship that seeks to challenge conventional views of Realism, this essay attends to the surprisingly complex views of the Kantian legacy (including Hans Kelsen, perhaps the most important neo-Kantian international thinker in the last century) within its ranks. Not all Realists have been unambiguously critical of Kant, and when in fact they have criticized him, they have done so for many different reasons. First-generation Realists (e.g. E. H. Carr, John Herz, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, Frederick Schuman and Georg Schwarzenberger) offered an ambivalent reading of Kantianism consistent with their endorsement of the ultimate desirability of major alterations to the global status quo, whereas second-generation Realists (i.e. Henry Kissinger and Kenneth Waltz) tended to read Kant so as to transform him into a forerunner of their own anti-reformist and institutionally conservative versions of Realism. An examination of Realism’s rendezvous with Kantianism not only helps draw a more differentiated portrayal of Realism than is still found in much scholarship, but it also helps us understand how Realism dramatically changed within a relatively short space of time during the immediate postwar decades. It also points to some important potential starting points for a more fruitful exchange between Cosmopolitans and Realists.

What is International Human Rights Law? Three Applications of a Distributive Account

The standard normative account of international human rights law is that its overarching mission is to protect universal features of what it means to be a human being from the exercise of sovereign power. This article offers an alternative account of the field, one that locates its normative dimensions in its capacity to speak to distributive injustices produced by how international law brings legal order to international political reality. On this account, human rights possess international legal significance not because they correspond to abstract conceptions of what it means to be human but because they monitor the distributive justice of the structure and operation of the international legal order itself. This account both draws on and departs from cosmopolitan conceptions of distributive justice in contemporary international political theory. It sheds normative light on why some human rights merit international legal protection despite the fact that they might lack some of the properties required by a universal account of the field. It illustrates these claims by describing how indigenous rights, minority rights, and rights to international cooperation and assistance mitigate some of the adverse consequences of how international law distributes sovereign power among a variety of legal actors it recognizes as states.

Tragedy, ‘Tragic Choices’ and Contemporary International Political Theory

The essence of the tragic vision of the world is that human action sometimes, perhaps often, involves a choice between two radically incompatible but equally undesirable outcomes: that whatever we do in a given situation we will be, from one perspective, acting wrongly. This account of the human condition may be particularly germane to realist thought, but the absence of a sense of the tragic can be employed to critique many other areas of international political theory. Analytical political theory in general rejects the tragic vision, and a great deal of modern writing on humanitarian intervention and global distributive justice similarly refuses to accept that sometimes there are no unambiguously right answers; that to act is, necessarily, to do wrong. The unwillingness to admit the tragic dimension of human existence is not simply intellectually harmful but also politically debilitating.

Does Clausewitz Apply to Criminal-States and Gangs?

Criminal-States and Criminal-Soldiers present unique problems for contemporary international political theory. This essay examines the applicability of the theory of war developed by Carl von Clausewitz to Criminal-States and Criminal-Soldiers. As modified by Aristotle's idea of justice as the basis for the political community, this essay proposes that Clausewitz's famous connection between politics and war holds where such states and soldiers evince political behavior. Some contrasting implications for states and state leaders are examined when such entities evince — and do not evince — political behavior.