Unexpectedly, several prominent European countries have begun to issue official state apologies to their former colonies. What does this proliferation of official colonial sorrow from such countries as Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Britain reveal about the normative tenets of the contemporary international order? This article analyses colonial apologies as crucial symbolic and ritualistic sites where state elites project liberal credentials and affirm liberal normative tenets in the international system. Specifically, the article demonstrates how these apologies for colonial atrocity appear to reinforce liberal conceptions of human rights, the renunciation of violence, cordial relations with formerly colonised states, and commitments to state accountability and transparency. Yet, textual analysis of several state apologies reveals that these performatives simultaneously contradict each of these liberal tenets. It finds that – even in apology – political elites reflect ambivalence about certain human rights violations; persist in glorifying or sanitising the violent colonial past; recycle paternalistic and hierarchical discourses and policies towards the apology's recipients; and offer contradictory notions of the state's historical responsibility. In exposing these performative contradictions of empirical sorrow, the article seeks to expand the discipline's understandings of, and dilemmas within, a key performative and ritualistic legitimation strategy whereby liberalism reproduces itself in the international system.

Tackling germs, negotiating norms, and securing access to medicines are persistent challenges that disproportionally affect developing countries' participation in global health governance. Furthermore, over the last two decades, the excessive focus on global pandemics and security in global health diplomacy, rendered peripheral diseases that usually strike the poor and vulnerable, creating situations of marginalisation and inequality across societies. However, as the importance of regions and regionalism increases in global politics, and integration ambitions and initiatives extend beyond trade and investment to embrace welfare policy, there are new opportunities to explore whether and how regional commitments affect health equity and access to medicine in developing nations. What, if any, are the possibilities for meso-level institutions to provide leadership and direction in support of alternative practices of global (health) governance? Can regional polities become international advocacy actors in support of global justice goals? This article addresses these questions by analysing regional health diplomacy in South America. The article argues that regional organisations can become sites for collective action and pivotal actors in the advocacy of rights (to health) enabling diplomatic and strategic options to member state and nonstate actors, and playing a role as deal-broker in international organisations by engaging in new forms of regional health diplomacy.

A novel form of international order was developed in the nineteenth century by international administrative unions such as the International Telegraph Union and the Universal Postal Union. This administrative internationalism posed a striking alternative to the international society of great powers, sovereignty, and forms of imperial domination, for the members of administrative unions included not only sovereign states but also semi-sovereigns, vassals, and colonies. Members were equal and bound identically to the union treaty and its international administrative law. This article examines the structure of unions and their politics of membership in the nineteenth century, and engages theories of global governance to argue that early administrative unions present a mode of international order different from theories of both global networks and the international system of neorealism.

This article analyses discourses on climate change and mitigation through the deconstruction of European Union (EU) rhetoric and practices on climate benchmarking. It critically examines the motivations behind climate benchmarking, the methods used to construct international benchmarks, and the reasons for variety in domestic compliance. Germany and the United Kingdom are analysed as cases where domestic politics drive very different reactions to the practice of climate mitigation, differences that have been largely hidden by the type of quantification that EU benchmarking involves. Through an exploration of the methods used to formulate climate benchmarks, the article demonstrates that these commitments have privileged certain responses over others, and thus helped to paint a picture of EU benchmarks as ‘reformist’ but not ‘radical’. EU climate benchmarks often end up concealing more than they reveal, making it difficult to fully engage with the scale and complexity of the far-reaching domestic changes that are required in order to comply with agreed international benchmarks. The deficiencies of benchmarks as a mechanism for driving long-term sustainable change, and importantly discouraging harmful policies, may ultimately undermine their credibility as a means for governing climate change at a distance in the EU.

Even though the international permeates our daily lives in many ways, it rarely discloses itself as part of our everyday engagements. Drawing from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology, this article seeks to explore the ways in which the international remains hidden to, as well as the ways in which the international can become part of, our being-in-the-world. Additionally, it will show the terms in which International Relations (IR) scholars can disclose the world of the international, and what the implications of that ‘knowing’ are for the discipline. Finally, it will explore the possibilities and limitations of a Heidegerrian phenomenology for a social science such as IR.

The article illuminates the International Relations (IR) enigma of how states with relative low power succeed in gaining privileges reserved for great powers. Many IR studies on status stress the importance of social recognition as a precondition for enjoying the status of a great power. However, very few focus on the factors that affect such recognition. This article tries to fill this gap by looking at systemic wars. Systemic wars are special circumstances wherein a new world order is built and privileges are redistributed among states. In these situations, states may use their symbolic, moral, and circumstantial assets to grant themselves a paramount role in the new order. A state's previous status as a great power, its contribution to victory in a war, and the utilitarian considerations of other countries are all assets that help it to win the privileges reserved for great powers – and that in the long run could gain it recognition as a great power, despite its lack of the requisite capabilities. By using this conceptual framework in the case of France during and after the Second World War, this article tries to explain how a relatively weak power can gain a leading role in a postwar order.

Derived from the Latin Victoria, which itself can be traced to vino victus, meaning ‘to conquer’, victory evokes a number of close synonyms, principally conquest and triumph. It occupies an ambivalent position in respect of contemporary war. Though in some regards a concept that is essential to the very idea of combat, the notion of winning wars has acquired an ironic ring in the aftermath of two brutal world wars and the advent of nuclear weapons. Victory in war is clearly a contentious subject. Yet scholars of the just war tradition have largely ignored it. This article fills that breach by asking what, if anything, victory can mean in relation to just war? It argues that victory has an aporetic quality insofar as it appears both integral to but incompatible with the just war ethos. As such, it reveals both the limits and possibilities of just war thinking.

Global benchmarks (re)shape political conversations and institutionalise authoritative languages. It does not necessarily follow, however, that benchmarks can exert a lasting or significant influence over policies and behaviour of benchmarked actors. We analyse how the World Bank uses benchmarks to manage its relations with both donors and recipient governments. We analyse the role of the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA), both at headquarters and in relation to the recent history of two countries in Africa: Ethiopia and Malawi. We find that the CPIA is not – and contrary to what one would expect from the CPIA’s nominal function and the literature on benchmarks – a very important tool for signalling incentives and allocating funds, or shaping the policy dialogue or the World Bank’s strategy in these two countries. Rather, the CPIA is used highly selectively as one factor among many in the negotiations between World Bank staff and governments. We conclude that the CPIA helps establish the World Bank as an actor that embodies global authority on development issues, including with donors, but that there is a tension between such global authority on the one hand, and concrete authority to shape policy in domestic contexts, on the other.