Causation, complexity, and the concert: the pragmatics of causal explanation in international relations

A causal explanation provides information about the causal history of whatever is being explained. However, most causal histories extend back almost infinitely and can be described in almost infinite detail. Causal explanations therefore involve choices about which elements of causal histories to pick out. These choices are pragmatic: they reflect our explanatory interests. When adjudicating between competing causal explanations, we must therefore consider not only questions of epistemic adequacy (whether we have good grounds for identifying certain factors as causes) but also questions of pragmatic adequacy (whether the aspects of the causal history picked out are salient to our explanatory interests). Recognizing that causal explanations differ pragmatically as well as epistemically is crucial for identifying what is at stake in competing explanations of the relative peacefulness of the nineteenth-century Concert system. It is also crucial for understanding how explanations of past events can inform policy prescription

Critique in a time of liberal world order

The dominance of liberalism in world politics today is widely interpreted as attesting to its universal validity. This claim provides the basis for a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate criticism — the former operating within a broadly liberal framework and the latter questioning the universal validity of that framework. This special issue brings together critiques of liberalism in the second register. The introduction sets out the two competing notions of critical analysis and argues that, far from being ‘illegitimate’, it is this second concept of critique that ensures that liberalism does not betray its core promise of replacing might with right in a time of liberal world order

The interaction of interests and norms in international democracy promotion

The existing research on international democracy promotion is characterised by a peculiar tension. On the one hand, many scholars agree that democracy promotion, since 1990, has indeed become a significant aim guiding the foreign and development policies of North-Western democracies. On the other hand, there is a far-reaching consensus that this normative goal is regularly ignored once it collides with economic and/or security interests. This article challenges the notion that we can understand the motives and drivers behind democracy promotion by assuming that interests and norms represent two neatly separated and clearly ranked types of factors. It argues that democracy promotion policies are the result of a complex interaction of interests and norms. After first developing this argument theoretically, the article presents results from a comparative research project on US and German democracy promotion that support this claim

The West: a securitising community?

The primary objective of this article is to theorise transformations of Western order in a manner that does not presuppose a fixed understanding of 'the West' as a pre-constituted political space, ready-made and waiting for social scientific enquiry. We argue that the Copenhagen School's understanding of securitisation dynamics provides an adequate methodological starting point for such an endeavour. Rather than taking for granted the existence of a Western 'security community', we thus focus on the performative effects of a security semantics in which 'the West' figures as the threatened, yet notoriously vague referent object that has to be defended against alleged challenges. The empirical part of the article reconstructs such securitisation dynamics in three different fields: the implications of representing China's rise as a challenge to Western order, the effects of the transformation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) towards a global security actor, and the consequences of extraordinary renditions and practices of torture for the normative infrastructure of 'the West'. We conclude that Western securitisation dynamics can be understood as a discursive shift away from a legally enshrined culture of restraint and towards more assertive forms of self-authorisation