How should the responsibility for refugees be distributed among states? While scholars have proposed various sources of responsibility to make the distribution more equitable, they have not provided guidance on how to weigh each principle within a composite scheme. This is an important problem to resolve because the principles often implicate different actors, resulting in distinct distributions of responsibility. Moreover, states are particularly able to obfuscate their level of responsibility when multiple principles exist. To remedy this problem, I specify the range of possible solutions to the weighting problem, based on the principles of liability, community, and capacity. This argument identifies the relative importance of each principle based on the stated goals of a particular framework. These goals include whether the scheme is intended to operate under ideal or non-ideal assumptions, or if it intends to optimize state or refugee interests. By focusing on how to weigh various sources of responsibility, this paper paves the way for scholars to develop determinate schemes that can identify each state’s fair share in contexts where multiple principles apply.

Despite Fanon’s recent popularity, his work on violence is portrayed as controversial, particularly regarding revolutionary violence. Revolutionary violence in anti-colonial movements is either glorified as a liberating force or vilified as terrorism. However, this portrayal misses one of the main contributions of Fanon’s thought on violence, that is, violence cannot be separated into direct and structural, physical and epistemic, or revolutionary and colonial violence. I theorise what Fanon calls ‘atmospheric violence’ – violence that is, like the air, pervasive within the colonial system and its totality is reflected not only in the apparatus, structure, and meaning, but also in the felt, visceral, and embodied. In this sense, atmospheric violence cannot be compartmentalised but is layered, dynamic, and able, which is particularly useful in investigating the revolutionary violence of the colonised being. This paper theorises atmospheric violence through three points of engagement: first, atmospheric violence shows that colonial violence is violence of abjection rather than of social domination and subordination; second, atmospheric violence indicates that revolutionary violence reveals the complex relationship to agency and postcolonial subjectivity; third, atmospheric violence shows how revolutionary violence poses a potential for and a limitation to decolonisation due to its nature of non-compartmentalisation.

This article offers a new approach to the opposition of utopianism and realism in interwar International Relations. It first analyses how E. H. Carr drew on Karl Mannheim to develop that opposition in his 1939 classic, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, and how Alfred Zimmern, one of Carr’s predecessors in the Woodrow Wilson Chair in International Politics at Aberystwyth, responded to Carr and his Mannheimian model in a review in the Spectator as well as in private correspondence with Norman Angell and others. It then offers a close reading of Carr’s allusions to Zimmern in his discussions of power, morality, and international law, and of the passages from Zimmern’s works that Carr was quoting. Analysis of how Carr and Zimmern read each other’s works and of some of Zimmern’s other writings suggests that they were closer in thought than Carr was willing to allow and that it was Carr’s apparent relativism to which Zimmern took objection. This article shows that contemporary readers, including Christian Realists such as J. H. Oldham and William Paton, were alive to these similarities and relates Carr’s misreading of Zimmern to their different attitudes to appeasement and their different disciplinary notions of International Relations.

The paper advances a novel theoretical perspective on the agency of international organizations (IOs). It argues that existing accounts–whether focused on intraorganizational actors such as bureaucracies or on member-dominated IOs–overlook the fact that IO agency is inseparable from their personification through the ascription, in decision-making and official documents, of various intentions, beliefs, and emotions. To address this gap, the paper draws on Margaret Gilbert’s concept of plural subjects, i.e., collective agents formed through the joint commitment of their members to act as aunified body. Using the UN Security Council as an illustrative case, the paper contends that IOs function as such plural subjects. In doing so, the paper departs from the longstanding criterion in International Relations that IOs must act independently of state interests and preferences to qualify as agents in their own right. It further argues, also contra dominant theories, that IO agency is not transient, but a stable and enduring feature. The paper concludes by outlining the theoretical and empirical implications of this perspective, particularly for understanding institutional moral agency and IO authority.

In recent years, ontological security studies (OSS) have developed an impressive breadth of empirical applications and depth of theoretical advancements. However, despite increasing disciplinary diversity, methodological differences in OSS and the resulting implications have not yet been discussed. Drawing on Jackson’s taxonomy of scientific methodologies, this article outlines that OSS is characterized by considerable methodological diversity cutting across existing distinctions in the field. Greater focus on this diversity is important, as (tacit) underlying methodological assumptions have significant implications concerning the types of knowledge claims that can be advanced. Providing the first systematic discussion of methodological questions in OSS, this article outlines the contours of grounding OSS in neopositivist, critical realist, reflexivist, and analyticist methodologies and provides examples thereof. It then discusses the implications emerging from different methodologies in terms of (1) the production and evaluation of valid knowledge claims about ontological (in)security, (2) the perception of and dealing with ontological and epistemological challenges in the concept of ontological (in)security, and (3) the critical potential of OSS. While highlighting the potential of OSS grounded in analyticism, this article ultimately emphasizes the inherent value of methodological pluralism structured around a common vocabulary enabling meaningful conversations – both within OSS and with International Relations more broadly.

How might international society serve as an ontological security provider? Ontological security studies sees societies as both containers of anxiety and providers of security, but there is little research on how international society relates to this. Any answer to my question is further complicated by multiple takes (Lacanian, Kleinian, and Winnicottian) on the way the subject secures its self. I demonstrate how this multiplicity is accommodated by the conceptual heterogeneity of the ‘English School’ and offer three separate answers. Lacanian theory suggests a ‘pluralist’ international society can mitigate ontological insecurity because its institutions encircle ‘the lack’ that constitutes (collective) subjectivity. Kleinian theory supports the institutions of a ‘thin solidarist’ international society because it demonstrates how the collective action needed to protect the legal rights that recognise and secure the (collective) self does not necessarily cause anxiety. Drawing on Winnicott, Honneth argues that the (collective) self can only be fully secured if the institutions of a ‘thick solidarist’ international society go beyond legal recognition to socially esteem the contribution the subject makes to realising the common good. The analytical framework is applied to interpret and respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, offering a timely intervention into debates on a post-liberal international order.