Can the dissolution or transgression of sovereign authority – ‘failed states’, for example – be understood within a concept of sovereignty? Extant understandings provide a negative answer; approaches to sovereignty in International Relations and Political Theory conceptualize sovereignty as located in stable entities, generally states. Insofar as political societies face crises of authority, those crises arise from exogenous factors, not the structure of sovereignty. We argue that this is a restrictive notion of sovereignty. In its place, we offer a theorization that can account for the dissolution or transgression of sovereign orders, focusing on the possibility that sovereigns may not recognize their subjects as the originary structure of sovereignty. In our understanding, sovereignty is logically and temporally before sovereign power. Consequently, the possibility of dissolution is a structural condition of all sovereign orders. This enables us to theorize the relationship between sovereignty, sovereign power, and the law, and to apply this broader concept to analyze politics in ‘weak’ and ‘failed states’.

How should the geographic boundaries of democratic participation be set? This has been a notoriously difficult theoretical question, beset by paradoxes around determining democratic participants democratically. It also is seen as increasingly important in practical terms, amid deepening interdependence between states, immigration tensions, and suprastate regional integration. Numerous recent accounts have called for extending participation beyond the state. The case is generally made on intrinsic grounds: democracy demands it. Respect for individual autonomy is said to be violated when outsiders are deeply affected by decision processes, or subject to coercion from them, without being able to participate in them. Yet, familiar problems around restrictions on the autonomy of persistent democratic minorities remain in such accounts, and they could be magnified with expanded boundaries. An alternative approach is offered here, grounded in a rights-based instrumental justification for democracy. It sees participation as foundationally – though not solely – valuable as a means of promoting and protecting fundamental rights. It recommends extending participation boundaries to reinforce protections within regional and ultimately global institutions. Democratic participation would remain crucial at all levels, not principally as an expression of autonomy but to provide checks on power and promote accountability to individuals in multilevel polities.

Compassion is a key moral emotion of liberal modernity. Traditionally, it is seen as an unproblematic moral compass, both theoretically and ethico-politically. This applies especially in the case of humanitarian action, which hinges on the compassionate impulses of individuals – to care, to give and to act – in the face of distant suffering. The article takes a critical approach to compassion. It argues that humanitarian action is incomprehensible outside of a general theory of how compassion structures the encounter between the suffering object of relief and the caring public. It does this by elaborating a pragmatist and eclectic approach to compassion in which seemingly internal affective responses have a socio-political existence and are already enabled by productive power, in particular by socially circulated and embodied narrative frames. By engaging a representative sample of NGO imagery related to the 2010 post-earthquake response in Haiti, the article illustrates not only how specific narrative frames seek to both elicit and govern the ways of feeling compassion, but also how these aesthetic and emotional practices are ethico-politically problematic in portraying distant sufferers and facilitating action. As a result, the benevolent self-image of compassion becomes circumspect. The article concludes by exploring two alternative avenues for compassion and caring.

In this forum five scholars bring their particular postcolonial perspectives to bear upon the constructivist concept of norms. Charlotte Epstein introduces the forum by considering what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’; and how this casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key epistemological schemes with which these have been studied in International Relations (IR), such as norms. In her contribution Ayze Zarakol argues that the constructivist paradigm of ‘norm diffusion’ commits two fallacies: first, it mishandles the causal explanation because it conflates internalisation, socialisation and compliance. Second it reproduces existing international social hierarchies by treating (bad) non-compliance by non-Western actors as endogenously driven, and (good) compliance as the result of external Western stimuli. She uses Erving Goffman’s concept of stigmatisation to show how our understanding of norm diffusion in the international order – or lack thereof – can be improved. Julia Gallagher’s article examines the norm of good governance as acted out by the World Bank in its policies towards African countries. She uses psychoanalytic object relations theory to show how the Bank employs good governance to structure the world into good and bad objects, thereby overcoming internal ambiguity and creating an idealised self-image. Robbie Shlliam’s contribution challenges constructivism to attend to calls for epistemic justice regarding the delineation of interpretive communities to the ostensibly “moderns”. He does so by explicating the understandings of slavery provided by knowledge traditions inhabited by descendants of enslaved Africans. Vivienne Jabri’s article mobilises Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon in a critical engagement with constructivist readings of postcolonial agency in the normative ordering of the international. She argues that a postcolonial reading of the international must account for both the discursive and material presence of the postcolonial subject, a presence at once both constituted and constituting of the international.

In this article I consider what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘-ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’, where the particular of subjective, embodied experiences are foregrounded rather than erased in the theorising. What the postcolonial has to offer are ex-centred, post-Eurocentric sites for practices of situated critique. This casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key epistemological schemes with which these have been studied in international relations (IR), such as ‘norms’. In this perspective colonisation appears as a foundational shaper of these orders, to a degree and with effects still under-appraised in the discipline. The postcolonial perspective is thus deeply historical, or rather genealogical, in its dual concerns with, first, the genesis of norms, or the processes by which particular behaviours come to be taken to be ‘normal’. Second, it is centrally concerned with the power relations implicated in the (re)drawing of boundaries between the normal and the strange or the unacceptable. Together, these concerns effectively shift the analysis of the ideational processes underpinning international orders from ‘norms’ to the dynamic and power-laden mechanisms of ‘normalisation’. In addition, I show how theorising international politics from a postcolonial perspective has implications for IR’s conceptions of time, identity, and its relationship to difference, as well as agency.

Contrary to what is often assumed, norm-internalisation does not always lead to compliance. Normative judgements may be simultaneously internalised and outwardly rejected. Non-compliance is at times a result of hyper-awareness of the particular origin of norms, rather than an unwillingness of the would-be-recipients to do ‘good’ deeds, or their inability to understand what is ‘good’. Such is often the case for non-Western states, as I demonstrate in this article by utilising the sociological concepts of stigma and stigmatisation. In its inability to acknowledge this dynamic, which has its roots in the colonial past of the international order, the constructivist model of norm-diffusion commits two errors. On the one hand, it falls short as a causal explanation, conflating internalisation with socialisation, and socialisation with compliance. On the other hand, it reproduces existing hierarchies in the international system, treating only non-compliance as endogenously driven, but compliance as a result of external stimuli. As there is a great deal of correlation between non-compliance and political geography, such a depiction, coupled with the fact that most norms under scrutiny are ‘good’ norms, once again casts non-Western states as having agency only when they commit ‘bad’ deeds.

This article explores norms as idealizations, in an attempt to grasp their significance as projects for international organizations. We can think about norms as ‘standards of proper behaviour’. In this sense they are somehow natural, things to be taken for granted, noticed only really when they are absent. We can also think about norms as ‘understandings about what is good and appropriate’. In this sense, norms embody a stronger sense of virtue and an ability to enable progress or improvement. Norms become ideal when they are able to conflate what is good with what is appropriate, standard, or proper. It is when the good becomes ‘natural’ that a norm appears immanent and non-contestable, and so acquires an idealized form.45 Along with the other articles in this special issue, I will attempt to challenge some of the complacency surrounding the apparent naturalness and universality of norms employed in international relations.

Constructivism has inherited a hermeneutic tension from the sociology of knowledge tradition regarding a strong ontological proposition that all social beings interpret their reality and a qualified epistemological proposition that some social beings are better able to interpret the reality of others. This article focuses on the politics of knowledge production that arise from this tension, namely that a privileged group, the ‘scholastic caste’, possesses the power to de-value the explanations of ‘lay’ groups’ experiences by deeming them to be insufficiently ‘scientific’. The article explores these politics by addressing the meaning of the abolition of and emancipation from Atlantic slavery, a case study popularly used in constructivist literature. Noting the absence of engagement by constructivists with the ‘lay’ interpretations of enslaved Africans and their descendants, the article explores a hermeneutical position developed by the Jamaican sociologist and novelist, Erna Brodber, which directly addresses these tensions.

The aim of this article is to provide a postcolonial reading of norms in international politics. Focusing specifically on the question of postcolonial agency, the article argues that the constructivist literature provides a distinctive spatial and temporal ordering of the ‘international’ that on the one hand can be seen to attribute agency to the postcolonial subject, while on the other can easily be interpreted as denying a presence for this subject. An alternative reading suggests that postcolonial agency is not only constituted by the international and its normative construction, but is also constituting, having the capacity to variously subvert and transform, but within limits. While some constructivist thinkers, primary among them being Christian Reus-Smit, recognise the normative order of the international as historically contested terrain, and where such contestation testifies to the role of the postcolonial world, how this role is articulated, and in what terms it is understood pose distinct challenges for understandings of agency and the constitution of the international. Focusing on Homi Bhabha and Franz Fanon, the article looks to how postcolonial thought can be mobilised to respond to this challenge, and to point to an alternative conception of the transformative potential of postcolonial agency. The turn to Bhabha and Fanon reveals such potential in both discursive and material terms so that where Bhabha can be said to frame agency and the terrain of the international in hybrid ideational terms, complementing Reus-Smit’s understanding of what can be termed the ‘postcolonial international’, Fanon’s more radical materialist ontology envisages agency in terms of embodied presence. This mobilisation of postcolonial thought provides the theoretical tools for conceptualising postcolonial subjectivity and articulations of agency in relation to the international and its constitution.