This paper examines how Britain, through ‘gunboat diplomacy’ campaigns against so-called Arab pirates, overran the pre-existing Gulf suzerain system and became the predominant power in its waters. By filling a gap in the classical English School ‘international society’ expansion thesis, this article describes how and when political and ideational shifts in the Gulf allowed sovereignty to manifest into its present dynastic form. It argues British imposition of rules, norms, and institutions through a series of nineteenth-century Anglo-Arab treaties against Arab ‘pirates’ broke traditional conditions of divisible sheikhly authority to embed a new telos of sovereign indivisibility, facilitating indirect colonisation. Colonialism as an overlooked primary institution in the classical international society expansion story reinforced political inequality to create dynasticism to simplify colonial statecraft. The 1836 Restrictive Line was a central institution introduced by Britain to manage the transition from divisible to indivisible authority. Drawing from colonial archives, the paper argues that British control over cross-coastal movements through a Restrictive Line reinforced domestic sovereignty of British treaty signatories while weakening agency of maritime sheikhs outside the Anglo-Arab treaties framework. This unsettled traditional structures, transforming maritime tribal confederacies from participation to compliance and reconfiguring Gulf coastal security imperatives for treaty-signatory sheikhs from sea to desert.

Many are now discussing the possible demise of the so called ‘liberal international order’, but how can we know whether any international order is changing? This article argues for understanding order as maintained by institutions of international society and further theorises the role those institutions play in the stability or transformation of international order. To usefully put institutional analysis to work, this article, first, models the stylised evolution of a primary institution. Second, it illustrates this evolution with a discussion of the historical institution of trusteeship in order to historicise adaptation and transformation in international order. Finally, this leads to a generalised idea of how institutional analysis can be employed to study stability and transformation in international order. Beyond making a contribution to the wider debates about the possible demise of the current international order, this piece also fills a gap in English School theory, which is quite silent on the question of when international society furthers transformation, and when it furthers stability. Accepting the view of history that the future is contingent on today’s events, this study suggests possible points where push comes to shove for change and continuity in international order more generally.

Drawing on recent debates in English School (ES) theory, this article develops an analytical framework for examining how states use multilateral institutions, or what ES theorists call ‘secondary institutions’, to reshape ‘primary institutions’, i.e. fundamental practices in international society. The framework highlights the role of states’ agency in international institutional change by shedding light on strategies that they employ to bring about changes in primary institutions. It posits that, although they can seek to directly remould primary institutions, states in practice often seek to bring about primary institutional changes through existing or newly formed secondary institutions and that this is especially the case at the level of regional international societies (RISs). The article demonstrates the utility of the framework by using it to analyse the case of Russia’s peacekeeping policy in the post-Soviet regional international society (PSRIS), focusing on its efforts to institutionalise the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) as an alternative ‘peacekeeping’ actor.

Property has a ubiquitous presence in international practice, but its implications for theorizing world order are not adequately explored. I remedy this by showing how property constitutes the core concepts of anarchy and sovereignty in international relations (IR) as overlapping spaces of right-based governance. I develop my account of a property-based world order in relation to the work of John Locke. Locke is generally overlooked as a core IR thinker, with the unfortunate consequence that anarchy and sovereignty are conceptualized as polar opposites under the enduring shadow of Hobbes. Even prominent critics of Hobbesian anarchy rely on Hobbesian notions of sovereignty, resulting in minimalist conceptions of international society and international ethics. To counter these Hobbesian legacies, I turn to Locke's limited, plural, and fluid accounts of anarchy and sovereignty and show how they are grounded in a normative notion of property that mutually constitutes them. This provides an alternative to the Hobbesian absolutist conceptions of anarchy and sovereignty that many IR theorists still operate with. The result is a distinctly normative vision for IR that condemns the twin evils of conquest and tyranny.

While scholars within the English School have increasingly approached the traditionally liberal concept of solidarism in a normatively agnostic fashion, the idea of an ‘illiberal solidarism’ and historical manifestations thereof remain underexplored. One notable case in point surrounds the peculiar body of Italian interwar international thought, herein referred to as ‘international Fascism’. By discerning a synchronic outline of international Fascism, alongside the manner by which this project mutated and ultimately failed as it transformed from a vision theorised in the abstract to a practical initiative under the auspices of the Fascist regime, this article offers historical and theoretical insights into the realisability of illiberal forms of solidarism. Combining this historical account with theoretical insights derived from Reus-Smit's study on international order under conditions of cultural diversity, this article argues that the realisation of some form of solidarism necessitates the acceptance of a substantive pluralist component. Yet messianic illiberal visions that endeavour to retain the states-system, while simultaneously asserting the superiority of one community or a highly exclusionary vision of the ‘good life’, ostensibly lack the capacity to reconcile the contradictions inherent in efforts to universalise such projects.

In the English School, the relationship between international and world society has recently received increasing attention – conceptually and empirically. Adding to this developing literature, we study how world societal actors not only serve as normative counterpoints to international society or function as norm-entrepreneurs, but decisively contribute to its reproduction. Going beyond the common preoccupation with actor types, we focus on practices that are performed on the international stage. We examine the role which world sport events, especially FIFA's World Cup and the infrastructure of football, play for international society. Building on Wight, we conceptualize world sport events as a (world societal actor driven) derivative primary institution of international society, which is embedded within the particularly hybrid master primary institution of sites and festivals. We find that world sport events allow for the ludic and festive reproduction of key primary institutions (like sovereignty, territoriality, and nationalism), while they highlight how members of international society compete on the basis of shared norms and values. Naturalizing world order as international order, they make international society emotionally experienceable as feasible and desirable at a global level. In performing world sport events, world societal actors uphold rather than challenge international society.

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in how International Relations theory can contribute to our understanding of the impact of technology on global politics, underpinned mainly by an engagement with Science and Technology Studies (STS). However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which international society shapes technology. Building on sociological and historical studies of science and technology, this article outlines one way through which international society has constituted technology by developing a synthetic account of the emergence of technological advancement as a ‘standard of civilisation’ in the nineteenth century that differentiated the ‘society of civilised states’ from non-European societies, with a particular focus on China and India. In doing so, this article also highlights how this process has had a powerful and enduring influence on Chinese and Indian conceptions about science and technology. Thus, by shifting the focus from how technology shapes global politics to how international society shapes technology, this article provides new insights into the relationship between technology, power, and modernity in an interdisciplinary context. It also offers a new way of thinking about the complex dynamics of today's global politics of technology.

As it has been written, the history of humanitarian intervention is all too Whiggish and all too white. By conceptualising humanitarian intervention in the way that they do, orthodox histories should be seen as entangled in debates about the origins of human rights but also, perhaps more crucially, debates about the various formations and reinventions of human rights. Alternative codifications of rights reveal the historical possibility of a Southern practice of what we would almost certainly call ‘humanitarian intervention’. The record of a radical Third World practice to save strangers from the atrocities of colonialism and extreme racism is also a record of Western states playing staunchly sovereigntist roles, of the West's late devotion to Westphalia. To sketch out such a counterhistory is to argue the following: at a threshold moment in the international-political life of the Responsibility to Protect, it is the terms, range, and domain of the intervention debate that must be re-formulated and re-evaluated.

Refugees are often considered as a source of disorder if not fundamental threat to international society. In contrast, and drawing from an English School approach, this article argues that the figure of the refugee is foundational to the constitution of both modern international society and its agent, the sovereign territorial state; hence refugee protection represents a primary institution of international society. Starting with conceptual and methodological considerations for studying primary institutions, the article then highlights the longstanding and widespread state practice of granting asylum. It is shown that on the one hand, the figure of the refugee serves to consolidate and naturalise the nation/state/territory trinity underpinning the modern state system; and on the other hand, protecting refugees plays a central role in the construction of statist self-identities as liberal, humanitarian, and altruistic agents. The last section of the article turns to the politics of contestation of refugee protection, examining domestic, regional, and international reactions to ‘anti-refugee’ policies in the United States, Hungary, and Australia. The considerable amount of criticism generated by these restrictive policies, it is argued, evidence the enduring importance and relevance of refugee protection in (and for) international society.