Rebooting Global International Society

This book asks if it is time to “reboot” the fundamental institutions of global international society. The volume revisits Hedley Bull’s seminal contribution The Anarchical Society by exploring the interconnected nature of change, contestation and resilience for maintaining order in today’s uncertain and complex environment. The volume adds to Bull’s theorizing by recognizing that order demands change, that contestation should be welcomed, and that resilience is anchored in local and agent-led forms of ordering. The contributors to Part One of the book focus on theoretical and conceptual issues related to order in the global international society, whilst the contributors to Part Two of the book focus on the primary institutions as listed by Hedley Bull with the addition of a chapter on the market adding a distinctive commentary on new and important dynamics of change, contestation and resilience of the existing institutions.

The Globalization of International Society re-examines the development of today's society of sovereign states, drawing on a wealth of new scholarship to challenge the landmark account presented in Bull and Watson's classic work, The Expansion of International Society (OUP, 1984). For Bull and Watson, international society originated in Europe, and expanded as successive waves of new states were integrated into a rule-governed order. International society, on their view, was thus a European cultural artefact - a claim that is at odds with recent scholarship in history, politics, and related fields of research. Bringing together leading scholars from Asia, Australia, Europe, and the United States, this book provides an alternative account: it draws out the diversity of polities that existed at around c1500; it shows how interacting identities, political orders, and economic forces were intensifying within and across regions; it details the tangled dynamics that helped to globalize the European conception of a pluralist international society, through patterns of warfare and between East and West. The Globalization of International Society examines the institutional contours of contemporary international society, with its unique blend of universal sovereignty and global law, and its forms of hierarchy that coexist with commitments to international human rights. The book explores the multiple forms of contestation that challenge international society today: contests over the limits of sovereignty in relation to cosmopolitan conceptions of responsibility, disputes over global governance, concerns about persistent economic, racial, and gender-based patterns of disadvantage, and lastly the threat to the established order opened up by the disruptive power of digital communications.

This book examines the ongoing power transition and its ramifications for world order from an international society perspective. In that perspective, the outcome of big changes in the distribution of power is a matter of socialization rather than structural determination or the resilience of the so-called Liberal world order. Consequently, the key question of this book is how the ongoing power transition affects, and is affected by, the social institutions of world order including sovereignty, the balance of power, international law, diplomacy, trade, humanitarian intervention, national self-determination, and environmental stewardship. The guiding theoretical assumption of the book is that power transition stimulates fundamental institutional change rather than major conflict or a breakdown of international order, while international organizations are key arenas for the realization and negotiation of such changes, not the victims of hegemonic retreat. The argument is pursued in sections on rising and declining powers (Anglo-America, Russia, China and the EU, among others), consequences for the fundamental social institutions and changes in international organizations, globally and regionally. In combination, the chapters reveal the contours of the coming world order.

This book examines how the United States adopted and contributed to the practices of international society—the habits and practices states use to regulate their relations—during the nineteenth century. Expert contributors consider America’s "entry" into international society and how independence forced it to enter into diplomatic relations with European states and start a permanent engagement with a society of states. Individual chapters focus on U.S. perceptions of the international order and its place within it, the U.S. position on international issues of that period, and how America’s perceptions and positions affected or were affected by the habits, practices, and institutions of international society. This volume will serve as an invaluable text for undergraduate courses focusing on international relations theory and U.S. foreign policy. It will also appeal to established scholars in international relations, diplomacy, and international history and historical sociology.

Aimed at readers interested in constructing a less West-centric, more global discipline of International Relations, this book provides a concise, thorough introduction to the thought and practice of international relations from premodern India, China and the Islamic world, and how it relates to modern IR.

The Aarhus Convention on access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice in environmental matters has been celebrated as a pioneering international environmental agreement. Given that a quarter-century has passed since Aarhus was opened for signature, now is an opportune moment to revisit it from a fresh perspective. Marking this anniversary, this book explores Aarhus from the vista of the English School of International Relations, an ethically-minded perspective used to gauge the prevalence of state-oriented and human-oriented progress from the Convention's rationales and realities. It firstly considers Aarhus' propagation, investigating the legal, diplomatic and geopolitical contexts enabling its emergence. It secondly investigates Aarhus' germination, with reference to its trinity of procedural rights. Thirdly, the book examines the Convention's growth, in terms of the development of its organisational infrastructure. The chief finding is that Aarhus demonstrates, in environmental contexts, the feasibility and benefit of fostering 'humankind' solidarist progress, rooted in moral cosmopolitanism, within the existing power arrangements of a sovereignty-based pluralism. Pluralist concerns for diversity and international order are found to be a precondition for more ethically ambitious solidarist endeavours. These observations reinforce the logic of solidarisation, an English School innovation that presents sovereignty as (a) being ethically matured by solidarism whilst (b) delimiting solidarism within the threshold of states' tolerance.

Barry Buzan proposes a new approach to making International Relations a truly global discipline that transcends both Eurocentrism and comparative civilisations. He narrates the story of humankind as a whole across three eras, using its material conditions and social structures to show how global society has evolved. Deploying the English School's idea of primary institutions and setting their story across three domains - interpolity, transnational and interhuman - this book conveys a living historical sense of the human story whilst avoiding the overabstraction of many social science grand theories. Buzan sharpens the familiar story of three main eras in human history with the novel idea that these eras are separated by turbulent periods of transition. This device enables a radical retelling of how modernity emerged from the late 18th century. He shows how the concept of 'global society' can build bridges connecting International Relations, Global Historical Sociology and Global/World History.

A clear and wide-ranging introduction to the analysis of global political order. The book offers engaging answers to the key questions of contemporary world politics. A landmark study.