Political Theory

Situated at the intersection of democratic theory and international studies, Accountability and Democracy provides an in-depth critical analysis of the concept “democratic accountability.” The book proceeds with separate chapters on accountability as found in the U.S. Ratification debates, agency theory, ancient Athenian democracy, theories of deliberative democracy, capitalist markets, and cosmopolitan democracy. Through an engagement with these different traditions and contexts, the book paints a picture of democratic accountability as a multidimensional concept harboring competing imperatives and diverse instantiations. It both engages conventional electoral models of accountability and moves beyond them by situating democratic accountability within more deliberative, participatory and agonistic contexts. Contrary to dominant views that emphasize discipline and control, the book describes democratic accountability as a source of mutuality, community, and political transformation. The book also challenges deep-seated understandings of democratic accountability as an expression of popular sovereignty. It instead argues that accountable governance is incompatible with all claims to ultimate authority, regardless of whether they refer to the demos, the state, or cosmopolitan public law. Rather than conceiving of democratic accountability as a way to legitimize a secure and sovereign political order, the book contends that destabilization and democratic insurgence are indispensable and often neglected facets of democratic accountability practices.

This book studies war in the thought of one of the 20th-century's most important and original political thinkers, Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt's writing was fundamentally rooted in her understanding of war and its political significance. But this element of her work has surprisingly been neglected in international and political theory. This book assesses the full range of Arendt's historical and conceptual writing on war and introduces to international theory the distinct language she used to talk about war and the political world. It builds on her re-thinking of old concepts such as power, violence, greatness, world, imperialism, evil, hypocrisy, and humanity and introduces some that are new to international thought like plurality, action, agonism, natality, and political immortality. Chapters engage Arendt's writing in dialogue with various schools of political and international theory, including realism, liberalism, constructivism, post-structuralism, post-colonial thought, neoconservatism, and Habermas-inspired critical theory. Re-reading Arendt's writing — forged through firsthand experience of occupation and struggles for liberation, political founding, and resistance in time of war — reveals a more serious engagement with war than her earlier readers have recognised. Arendt's political theory makes more sense when it is understood in the context of her thinking about war and we can think about the history and theory of warfare, and international politics in new ways by thinking with Arendt.

This book examines the evolution of international peacebuilding since the cold war, identifying the factors that limit the progress of international actors to institutionalize democratic authority and the rule of law in war-shattered societies. It gives particular attention to Afghanistan's Bonn Agreement process (2001–5) and post-Bonn period (2006–9), in which the country's multiple, competing forms of authority (e.g., religious leaders, tribal elders, militia commanders, and technocrats) challenged efforts to create “modern” forms of political authority rooted in democratic norms and the rule of law. Despite the significant risks involved, this volume argues that the institutionalization of democratic legal authority can create the conditions and framework necessary to mediate competing domestic interests and to address the root causes of a conflict peacefully. At the same time, one overlooked problem of international peacebuilding stems from the divergent conceptions, between international officials and the local population, of authority and its sources of legitimacy. By helping a conflict-affected society reconcile the inherent tensions between competing forms of authority, international peacebuilders can contribute to improved conditions for governance and a reduction in intrastate political violence. Due to high expenditures in a period of global economic uncertainty and frustrations in Afghanistan and elsewhere, democratization as an approach to conflict management and resolution is in retreat in some influential policy circles. But it is only a deepening of democracy, rather than lowering the metrics for progress and conditions for exit, that will determine whether fragile states are placed on a viable course toward stability and greater self‐sufficiency.

Broadly defined as the grey area between strategy and tactics, operational art spans the theory and practice of planning and conducting campaigns and major operations aimed at accomplishing strategic and operational objectives in a given theatre of operations. An intermediate link between strategy and tactics has always existed, but a distinct concept that encompasses a systematic and deliberate plan of campaign for major operations is a mere two hundred years old. Based on country‐specific case studies, this book describes how the concepts that underpin operational art originated, how they received practical expression in various campaigns, and, how they developed over time. The point of departure is the campaigns of ‘the God of War’, Napoleon Bonaparte; the book then proceeds with chapters on the evolution of operational art in Prussia/Germany, the Soviet Union/Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, and China. The final chapter deals with the future of operational art in irregular warfare. Theory is critical to refining and improving existing methods of applying operational warfare, and its importance cannot be overstated; however, to be useful, theory and its accompanying vocabulary must be combined with a proper examination of historical trends and practical experience. The present volume attempts to achieve that combination.

Unlike many other trans-boundary policy areas, international migration lacks coherent global governance. There is no UN migration organization and states have signed relatively few multilateral treaties on migration. Instead, sovereign states generally decide their own immigration policies. However, given the growing politicization of migration and the recognition that states cannot always address migration in isolation from one another, a debate has emerged about what type of international institutions and cooperation are required to meet the challenges of international migration. Until now, though, that emerging debate on global migration governance has lacked a clear analytical understanding of what global migration governance actually is, the politics underlying it, and the basis on which we can make claims about what ‘better’ migration governance might look like. In order to address this gap, the book brings together a group of the world's leading experts on migration to consider the global governance of different aspects of migration. The chapters offer an accessible introduction to the global governance of low-skilled labour migration, high-skilled labour migration, irregular migration, lifestyle migration, international travel, refugees, internally displaced persons, human trafficking and smuggling, diaspora, remittances, and root causes. Each of the chapters explores the three same broad questions: What, institutionally, is the global governance of migration in that area? Why, politically, does that type of governance exist? How, normatively, can we ground claims about the type of global governance that should exist in that area? Collectively, the chapters enhance our understanding of the international politics of migration and set out a vision for international cooperation on migration.

A pressing question at the forefront of current global political debates is: how can we salvage the democratic project in the context of globalization? In recent years, political activists have mounted high-profile campaigns for the democratization of powerful international institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, and for greater ‘corporate accountability’. In turn, many of the NGOs linked to these campaigns have themselves faced demands for greater democratic legitimacy. Through reflecting on the democratic dilemmas surrounding the political power of global NGOs, this book challenges the state-centric theoretical assumptions that have underpinned the established democratic theories of both ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘communitarian’ liberals. In particular, it challenges the widespread assumption that ‘sovereign’ power, ‘bounded’ (national or global) societies, and ‘electoral’ processes are essential institutional foundations of a democratic system. The book then re-thinks the democratic project from its conceptual foundations, posing a number of questions. What needs to be controlled? Who ought to control it? How could they do so? In answering these questions, the book develops a theoretical model of representative democracy that is focused on plural (state and non-state) actors rather than on unitary state structures. It elaborates a democratic framework based on the new theoretical concepts of public power, stakeholder communities, and non-electoral representation, and illustrates the practical implications of these proposals for projects of global institutional reform.

The international doctrine of human rights is one of the most ambitious parts of the settlement of World War II. Since then, the language of human rights has become the common language of social criticism in global political life. This book is a theoretical examination of the central idea of that language, the idea of a human right. In contrast to more conventional philosophical studies, the book takes a practical approach, looking at the history and political practice of human rights for guidance in understanding the central idea. It presents a model of human rights as matters of international concern whose violation by governments can justify international protective and restorative action ranging from intervention to assistance. The book proposes a schema for justifying human rights and applies it to several controversial cases — rights against poverty, rights to democracy, and the human rights of women. Throughout, the book attends to some main reasons why people are sceptical about human rights, including the fear that human rights will be used by strong powers to advance their national interests. The book concludes by observing that contemporary human rights practice is vulnerable to several pathologies and argues the need for international collaboration to avoid them.

In the ‘war on terror’ both sides have taken great pains to justify their actions in moral terms. As force is employed so are sophisticated arguments which directly invoke the just war traditions of the West and Islam. This book explores the moral‐theological arguments for war offered by the George W. Bush administration and al‐Qaeda. It examines the way in which these actors have drawn upon key just war concepts and, in some cases, reconceptualized their scope and content. The book's principal contention is that, in significant ways, the just war arguments of Bush and bin Laden are inconsistent with the moral requirements of their respective just war traditions. In two parts, the book examines these arguments in relation to the body of thought which comprises the Western just war tradition and that of Islamic jihad, and assesses the consistency of Bush and bin Laden's claims. The central argument of the book—that the Bush administration and al‐Qaeda depart from important consensuses about justified warfare—contains within it an alternative way of understanding the war on terror. Rather than a clash between civilizations, it is suggested that the war on terror can be accounted for by a clash within civilizations: in resorting to violence, both sides have acted against their own traditions and contravened the requirements of their own civilizations.

This book advances a novel theory of international justice that combines the orthodox liberal notion that the lives of individuals are what ultimately matter morally with the putatively antiliberal idea of an irreducibly collective right of self‐governance. The individual and his or her rights are placed at center stage insofar as political states are judged legitimate if they adequately protect the human rights of their constituents and respect the rights of all others. Yet, the book argues that legitimate states have a moral right to self‐determination and that this right is inherently collective, irreducible to the individual rights of the persons who constitute them. Exploring the implications of these ideas, the book addresses issues pertaining to democracy, secession, international criminal law, armed intervention, political assassination, global distributive justice, and immigration. A number of the positions taken in the book run against the grain of current academic opinion: there is no human right to democracy; separatist groups can be morally entitled to secede from legitimate states; the fact that it is a matter of brute luck whether one is born in a wealthy state or a poorer one does not mean that economic inequalities across states must be minimized or even kept within certain limits; most existing states have no right against armed intervention; and it is morally permissible for a legitimate state to exclude all would‐be immigrants.

Ethical constraints on relations among individuals within and between societies have always reflected or invoked a higher authority than the caprices of human will. For over two thousand years Natural Law and Natural Rights were the constellations of ideas and presuppositions that fulfilled this role in the west, and exhibited far greater similarities than most commentators want to admit. Such ideas were the lens through which Europeans evaluated the rest of the world. In this book the author rejects the view that Natural Rights constituted a secularization of Natural Law ideas by showing that most of the significant thinkers in the field, in their various ways, believed that reason leads you to the discovery of your obligations, while God provides the ground for discharging them. Furthermore, the book maintains that Natural Rights and Human Rights are far less closely related than is often asserted because Natural Rights never cast adrift the religious foundationalism, whereas Human Rights, for the most part, have jettisoned the Christian metaphysics upon which both Natural Law and Natural Rights depended. Human Rights theories, on the whole, present us with foundationless universal constraints on the actions of individuals, both domestically and internationally. Finally, one of the principal contentions of the book is that these purportedly universal rights and duties almost invariably turn out to be conditional, and upon close scrutiny end up being ‘special’ rights and privileges, as the examples of multicultural encounters, slavery and racism, and women's rights demonstrate.