Jonathan Havercroft

Using Historical Simulations to Teach Political Theory

As teachers of political theory, our goal is not merely to help students understand the abstract reasoning behind key ideas and texts of our discipline. We also wish to convey the historical contexts that informed these ideas and texts, including the political aims of their authors. But the traditional lecture-and-discussion approach tends to obscure the historical and political dimensions of political theory. Reacting to the Past historical simulations provide a powerful tool for remedying these shortcomings. The simulations foster three kinds of lessons that are difficult to impart with more traditional approaches. First, they help students see the intimate and reciprocal connections between politics, history, and political philosophy. Second, the simulations bring to light the inherently political dimensions of interpreting key political ideas. Finally, drawing upon the ideas of Hannah Arendt, we argue that the simulations educate students about the nature of freedom and political action.

Taking sovereignty out of this world: space weapons and empire of the future

Programs to deploy weapons in orbital space have important implications for international relations. In this paper, we analyze the constitutive logic of three modes of space weaponization currently being pursued by the United States – space-based missile defense, space control, and force application from orbital space. We show that these technologies of killing, when bundled together, constitute a new form of centralized sovereign power in a context of de-territorialized sovereignty. This is a new type of international political society, which we call empire of the future, distinct from and more ominous than the de-centralized form of Empire theorized by Hardt and Negri and the modern expression of classical hegemony now widely debated in discussions of putative American empire.

Was Westphalia 'All That'? Hobbes, Bellarmine, and the Norm of Non-Intervention

Scholars such as Stephen Krasner, Nicholas Onuf, Justin Rosenberg and Benno Teschke have called into question the significance of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 as the date when the international system formed. One of their primary arguments is that the non-intervention norm typically associated with Westphalian notions of sovereignty developed much later (scholars typically offer the late 18th century or early 19th century as the period when this norm developed). This paper will examine the early 17th century debates over the right of the Pope to depose monarchs in the defense of spiritual matters. Part III and Part IV of Hobbes’ Leviathan will be read in its intellectual context to see how his theory of sovereignty was partially developed to support a theory of non-intervention – at least with respect to the Holy Roman Empire and the Papal states. This reading leads to two important contributions to current political science debates. First, it refutes the growing consensus that non-intervention developed as an aspect of sovereignty only in the late 18th and early 19th century. Instead, I argue that non-intervention was one of the principle reasons early theorists of sovereignty developed and defended the concept. Second, the paper addresses current attempts to assert a right of humanitarian intervention – i.e. Responsibility To Protect norms, the establishment of the International Criminal Court, NATO’s 1999 Kosovo campaign, and Russia’s 2008 intervention in Georgia. By exploring similarities between these recent debates and those between Bellarmine and Hobbes in the 17th century, I offer a fresh perspective on what is at stake in current claims to international community.

Introduction: Symposium on Antje Wiener’s A Theory of Contestation

Antje Wiener’s A Theory of Contestation makes an important intervention into the field of international norms. Norms have formed a central part of the social constructivist research agenda in international relations and international law since the pioneeringworks of Kratochwil andOnuf in the early 1990s. Social constructivism initially developed as a new theoretical approach to the study of international politics. While more traditional approaches to studying international relations, such as liberalism and realism, focused on the role that material forces, such as natural resources, economic power, and military capabilities, played in the behavior of international actors, social constructivists argued that beliefs, identities, and other non-material forces determined the behavior of international actors. Norms play a key role in social constructivist theory, specifying the expected behavior and the rights and obligations of states in the international system. Early research on norms demonstrated that social expectations of appropriate conduct (the “logic of appropriateness”) could shape state behavior in ways that cut against a state’s material interest (the “logic of consequentialism”). Much of the academic debate about norms has focused on demonstrating that international norms exist and, determining under what conditions states comply with or violate them. As Wiener notes in the introduction to A Theory of Contestation, this focus leaves two key unresolved problems. First, conventional constructivist accounts of norms rely upon the social expectations of the international community to do most of the heavy theoretical lifting. But if the international community creates norms that guide state behavior, then, Wiener observes, “the norm-generative prac-

Editorial: The end of ‘the West’ and the future of global constitutionalism

A century after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and more than 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ‘Eastern Block’, we may now to be witnessing the collapse of the American Republic and the Western order it created and led after WWII. Whether NATO, the EU and the string of alliances the United States has built across Asia will continue to exist in three or fi ve years is by no means a foregone conclusion, but it has become an open question. 1 2016 was the year that Americans elected the populist authoritarian nationalist Donald J Trump as the forty-fi fth President of the United States and the British voted in favour of ‘Brexit’. The US/British alliance that underwrote the global order after WWII may well remain an alliance: the fi rst foreign leader the new President received was Theresa May, although only after meeting with Nigel Farage, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) leader. However, both they and their erstwhile partners in that alliance are now playing a leading role in the unravelling of the order that they built and supported. Thus, Trump has dismissed the United Nations (UN) as a ‘social club’ and threatened to cut down US contributions, originally characterised NATO as obsolete, and stated that he would be neither surprised nor concerned if the European Union (EU) disintegrated. Furthermore he threatens to upend the global trade order, burying the Trans-Pacifi c Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and ending negotiations surrounding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), threatening the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), at least in his pronouncements, showing no indication to take seriously World Trade Organization (WTO) obligations. Meanwhile under

Soul-Blindness, Police Orders and Black Lives Matter Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Rancière

What does it mean to see someone as human, as a member of humankind? What kind of call for justice is it to demand that a group be seen as human beings? This article explores a fundamental kind of injustice: one of perception and how we respond to our perceptions. Drawing on Cavell, Wittgenstein and Rancière, we elucidate “soul blindness” as a distinct and basic form of injustice. Rancière’s police orders and Cavell’s soul blindness are mutually constitutive; the undoing of police orders entails a politics of soul dawning. Soul dawning entails acknowledging the humanity of others without erasing difference. In the concluding section, we consider white obliviousness to the Black Lives Matters (BLM) movement as a case of soul blindness. Part of the political import of BLM is its capacity to illustrate how practices of soul blindness in the United States constitute whiteness in a racialized police order.

Challenges of an Agonistic Constructivism for International Relations

In keeping with the bifocal approach two steps are to be reflected by research that seeks to analyse the legitimacy gap. The first step consists of identifying organizing principles in a selected sector of global governance, and the second step assesses how to “fill” the legitimacy gap through regular contestation. The crucial aspect of this bifocal approach lies in linking the normative meta-organising principle of contestedness with the practice of contestation. . . .

Anarchy and International Relations theory: A reconsideration

In this introduction to the Special Issue, we undertake a little ground clearing in order to make room in International Relations for thinking differently about anarchy and world politics. Anarchy’s roots in, and association with, social contract theory and the state of nature has unduly narrowed how we might understand the concept and its potential in International Relations. Indeed, such is the consensus in this regard that anarchy is remarkably uncontested, considering its centrality to the field. Looking around, both inside and outside International Relations, for alternative accounts, we find ample materials for helping us think anew about the nature of and possibilities for politics in anarchy. In the second part of the introduction, we show how our contributors develop and expand on these resources and what we hope the Special Issue brings to International Relations.

Book Review: Reasoning: A Social Picture, by Anthony Simon LadenReasoning: A Social Picture, by LadenAnthony Simon. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012. pp. 283.

clear with respect to the alleged neutralists who would disable the state in both its regulatory and its advocacy role. In two early footnotes, he mentions Bruce Ackerman, Ronald Dworkin, and Alexander Meiklejohn, but they are the only names he associates with neutralism, and none have come close to subscribing to the view that the state in its expressive mode cannot take positions about equality in the service of what Brettschneider accurately calls “value democracy.” One does occasionally find traces of strong neutrality in some libertarian positions, but only as part of a larger view that the state should not do much at all, no less take positions (and spend money) on contested matters of philosophy and social policy. But within the domain of modern non-libertarian liberalism, it is difficult to locate supporters of the view that an alleged neutralism is a barrier to active governmental non-restrictive support for egalitarian positions. There are interesting empirical questions to be asked about the consequences of non-governmental hate speech and governmental anti-hate advocacy, but in a work of political theory it is no fault of Brettschneider’s to have elided them. Still, we are prompted to ask whether hate speech is as inconsequential as some supporters of the American approach would have it, and whether governmental anti-hate advocacy, funding, and education is as likely consequential as Brettschneider and others appear to assume. In a world of seeming increasing distrust of government and of increasingly powerful nongovernmental actors, relying on governmental opposition to counter the effects of hate speech may be an overly optimistic approach. But on these matters we need more assistance from sociologists, public opinion specialists, and social psychologists than one generally finds in the legal, philosophical, or political theory literature. That is too bad, but in no way Brettschneider’s problem. His conclusions may fit closer to existing American doctrine and policy than he fully acknowledges, but he offers a defense of that doctrine and policy that represents a substantial obstacle for anyone disagreeing with his positions or those doctrines and policies to overcome.