Stories and representations of suffering are frequently central to attempts to arouse our emotions and initiate political action. Yet, the evocation of emotion and, in particular, empathy, remains politically ambivalent. It does not necessarily lead to the acknowledgement of political responsibility or to actions to address the historically-constituted roots of contemporary structural injustices. Moving beyond the legal, moral, and institutional boundaries of political responsibility, this article argues for greater recognition of its affective dimensions. In particular, it differentiates between a sentimental politics and testimonial empathy to better understand the affective dynamics of political responsibility. While the former finds close company with pity and a lack of acknowledged political responsibility, the latter offers an ethical–political orientation towards radical reflexivity and social transformation, situating experiences of injustice within wider networks of power, privilege, and agency. Drawing on the work of feminist, cultural, and social theorists, the article offers a critical conceptualisation of testimonial empathy and its limits. The article illustrates the insights offered by re-thinking political responsibility in terms of testimonial empathy through a close reading of a historical account of structural injustice – slavery in the United States – as written in Harriet A. Jacobs’ 1861 slave narrative.

How does rhetoric work in the pursuit of political projects in international relations? This article analyzes how rhetoric-wielding political actors engage in reasoning to bolster their position by drawing upon norms that underwrite interactions, and audiences as scorekeepers evaluate the reasoning by making a series of inferences. I call this mechanism rhetorical reasoning. Building on the existing classification of norms in constructivist international relations (IR) and utilizing three distinct norm types – instrumental, institutional, and moral – I show the different processes through which political actors deploy rhetoric to legitimize and justify political projects and the distinct logics through which scorekeepers make inferences and evaluate the project. This article contributes to IR theories of argumentation by providing a sharp conceptualization of political rhetoric and actor–audience relationships in the game. I illustrate the mechanism of rhetorical reasoning using Brazil's UN peace enforcement operation in Haiti in 2004 to give empirical evidence for the role of institutional norm type in patterns of rhetorical reasoning and contestations in international politics. Paying attention to political rhetoric in the actor–scorekeepers' relationships in this way clarifies important issues regarding the varieties of political projects and the different role of normativity in the game.

This article examines whether discovery could, contrary to common philosophical opinion, be taken seriously as a ground of territorial rights. I focus on the discovery of uninhabitable lands such as found in the Arctic. After surveying the role of discovery in Roman private law and modern international law, I turn to Locke's well-known theory or original acquisition. I argue that many of the justifications that do the work in Locke's theory also apply to discovery. I then discuss some of the many reasons why discovery may seem unpromising as a ground of original acquisition. I close by arguing that if there is a bridge mechanism by which property can legitimately transform into territory and if, at least in some circumstances, discovery can produce property rights, then it would follow that in some circumstances discovery could also produce territorial rights.

Katzenstein and Seybert's Protean Power offers a fresh perspective on the concept of power in international relations (IR) theory. Standard IR theory defines power as control power, which exists in the world of calculable risk. But IR must also grapple with protean power, which exists in the world of incalculable uncertainty. In this symposium, scholars representing a variety of theoretical perspectives evaluate the concept of protean power as it stands now and as it should develop in the future.

This introductory article to the symposium first presents and then critiques the protean power concept of the Katzenstein and Seybert volume. Although the volume underestimates the value of rational choice models to explain some cases of protean power, it rightly demonstrates that our conventional theoretical toolkit insufficiently anticipates many such disruptions. Drawing on the examples of post-World War I veterans' movements and India's 1998 decision to test nuclear weapons, I argue that the protean power research agenda should focus on the reciprocal relationship between radical uncertainty and psychological and behavioral rigidity.

Human experience of control is an illusion; all forms of power are a special, transient, and unstable case of protean power. Taking risks is governed by critical uncertainty less because of our lack of perfect knowledge than because the world is physically and socially indeterminate. Power, thus, lies not only in agents' potential to dominate each other, but also in acting in concert to turn propensities into reality. Radical uncertainty is, therefore, not necessarily bad news. Whether protean power endangers or protects humanity depends less on calculating risks than on agents practicing common humanity values. I revise Katzenstein's and Seybert's concepts accordingly and illustrate by discussing Artificial Intelligence's challenges to humanity.

The ongoing crisis in mainstream economics has opened the door to recognition of true uncertainty. Economists are increasingly embracing uncertainty and tracing its implications for responsible economic practice and policy design that foregrounds rather than dismisses the limits to knowledge. Protean Power (PP) promotes a similar shift in international relations. PP advances a key distinction between operational and radical uncertainty. We argue that a complementary and perhaps more productive way to theorize the epistemic insufficiency facing agents as they map and implement strategies is to distinguish between ‘reparable’ and ‘irreparable’ ignorance, which leads to ‘Hirschmanian’ pragmatism.

This paper probes the attempt to use power analysis to link three domains: ontology, explanation, and the strategy of political actors. It shows how Katzenstein and Seybert develop an open social ontology that serves as the backdrop for explanations that need to be causal but indeterminate, and a cautious political practice. It exposes tensions in two important links. First, the open ontology becomes retranslated as an explanatory cause. Second, the call for being cautious because of ‘unknown unknowns’ may just as well invite strategies of doubling down in control power.

This contribution argues that the concept of protean power opens a space to think about the limits of control and knowledge about catastrophic possibilities such as nuclear war. To do so, it offers the first distinctive definition of nuclear luck, which has long been acknowledged by policy and military leaders but remains unaccounted for in scholarship. It further shows that the nuclear realm is defined by two key unknowables. However, it argues that protean power perpetuates a survivability bias which has characterized scholarship so far, before suggesting ways to overcome that bias and modify scholarly ethos to acknowledge such catastrophic possibilities.

The omnipresence of radical uncertainty asks for a concept of causality that moves beyond the notion of predicted probabilities. Protean power is a most important contribution to move International Relations research in this direction. Yet, some of the key components need further grounding in existing concepts and debates. First, protean power should include the notion of directionality in order to be power. Second, it should allow for an analysis of the different forms of relation between protean power and different types of uncertainties. And it should focus on features of the power relationship instead of the context in which it takes place to be able to transfer it to contexts other than uncertainty.

This paper restates the central point of Protean Power, pushes the analysis forward by engaging each of the commentators, and concludes by underlining the importance of uncertainty and potentialities and mapping some of the areas that need further attention.