Patients from religious minorities can face unique challenges reconciling their beliefs with the values that undergird Western Medical Ethics. This paper explores homologies between approaches of Orthodox Judaism and Islam to medical ethics, and how these religions’ moral codes differ from the prevailing ethos in medicine. Through analysis of religious and biomedical literature, this work examines how Jewish and Muslim religious observances affect decisions about genetic counseling, reproductive health, pediatric medicine, mental health, and end-of-life decisions. These traditions embrace a theocentric rather than an autonomy-based ethics. Central to this conception is the view that life and the body are gifts from God rather than the individual and the primacy of community norms. These insights can help clinicians provide care that aligns Muslim and Jewish patients’ health goals with their religious beliefs and cultural values. Finally, dialogue in a medical context between these faith traditions provides an opportunity for rapprochement amidst geopolitical turmoil.

The discourse of tragedy has significant value in a military context, reminding us of the temptations of hubris, the prevalence of moral dilemmas, and the inescapable limits of foresight. Today, however, this discourse is drawn upon too heavily. Within the tragicized politics of nuclear and drone violence, foreseeable and solvable problems are reconceptualized as intractable dilemmas, and morally accountable agents are reframed as powerless observers. The tragedy discourse, when wrongly applied by policymakers and the media, indulges the very hubris the tragic recognition is intended to caution against. This article clarifies the limits of “tragedy” in the context of military violence and argues for a renewed focus on political responsibility.

It seems today that a sense of crisis permeates international affairs. From war to pollution to trade and beyond, there is much talk of the disintegration of the settled ways of doing things and fear of what comes next. The twenty-first century has turned sour for many believers in international order. This is not unique in history; order has been on the minds of writers for centuries, from Kant to Carr to Hedley Bull. It is hard to find a period in history when there has not been some sense of crisis. The problem of international order is both a perennial theme and an urgent contemporary concern. The essays in this collection broaden the conversation to consider the ambiguity, complexity, and contradiction within the concept of world order. Order is neither self-evident nor universally agreed upon; to the contrary, it is contested, political, and contingent. Order is a very disorderly idea.

The quest for corporate accountability remains unabated in the business and human rights (BHR) field. This paper examines the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) and Business Interest Associations (BIA) as entrepreneurs, antipreneurs and saboteurs in setting human rights standards. Through this conceptualization, this paper argues that corporate accountability remains elusive because of corporate actors’ normative power and influence in the BHR norm contestation. It attributes corporate actors’ influence in the norm contestation to the UN multistakeholder design that sees nonstate actors as partners and stakeholders in setting global human rights standards. This article then argues that to force a norm change in the BHR field, there is a need to rethink the BHR governance model. Corporate actors must be reconceptualized as ‘regulated individuals’ during norm discussions and standard-setting processes.

In this essay, I use Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to open questions about international order and disorder. The idea of order is central to modern discourse on international politics, but the concept is often ill defined and ambiguous. King's ideas clarify three issues: First, is order understood as an objective condition of a system or a political judgment about its suitability for social life? Second, does compliance with law lead naturally to order? And third, is order always preferable to disorder? The way King answers each question is somewhat different than the conventional wisdom in international relations. IR scholars typically assume that international order is a universal good and that compliance with law enhances it. King highlights the gap between order as defined by the authorities in Alabama and his own lived experience. I use the difference to map the terrain of scholarship on international order and disorder and to draw implications for concepts, research methods, and political judgment.

One of the problems with the problem of world order is that what makes for order within societies is often precisely what makes for disorderly relations between them. I argue in this short essay that many of the problems with the problem of world order arise from assumptions that are widely shared within a discipline where the language of power and interest dominates and where a view of states as “like units” permeates. With more emphasis on values and visions of the good life, and acceptance that the ontological foundation of IR is difference rather than sameness, the debates about the problem of world order would take on a different form. The essay adapts the work of Hedley Bull and introduces the concept of “resilience-governance” to distinguish between resilience as a practice of self-governance taking place within ordering domains and resilience as a practice of “diversity-governance” taking place between ordering domains. The combination of the two allows for a bifocal view into how practices of resilience as self-governance may produce order within individual domains but will at the same time increase diversity and difference between the ordering domains, hence making the practices of resilience as diversity-governance much more challenging.

Discussions of the liberal international order, both inside and outside the academy, tend to take its necessity and desirability for granted. While its specific contours and content are left somewhat open in such debates, the idea that this international order is essential for global peace and stability is left largely unquestioned. What is more, the potential loss or end of this order is often taken to mean a return to anarchy, chaos, and disorder. In this essay, I question the presumed necessity and desirability of the liberal international order that most discussions of it seem to share. By rethinking the international order as processual, emergent, and grounded in the social and political contexts that shape its constitution and operation, I suggest that fears about the crisis of international order are less about international order itself and more about the loss of a specific order. This specific order, I argue, constituted in part through processes of racialization, is not so much a rules-based order of sovereign equality but rather an international order of White sovereignty that secures the domination and rule of some over others, of Whiteness over non-Whiteness. Recognizing the role of White sovereignty in the contemporary international order points toward a need to take seriously calls for abolition. Rather than signifying a return to chaos and disorder, the prospect and promise of abolition represents a call to break free from the constraints of the present order and reach into an as-yet-unimaginable future.

Godwin Mbikusita-Lewanika, the founding president of Zambia’s first nationalist organisation, is now remembered as a staunch supporter of colonial rule. Such figures are not uncommon and are often termed “loyalists,” a term that is usually understood in the literature as a fixed category that either dwindled in the face of racial oppression or was a choice shaped and hardened by conflict. Lewanika, however, moved easily between different sides, reinventing himself as an anticolonial nationalist, trade unionist, colonial loyalist, and Lozi traditional monarchist as circumstances warranted. The tumult of the mid-twentieth century opened up new opportunities and Lewanika seized roles that were not previously available. Biographies of anticolonial nationalists often argue they turned to political action when their education and ambitions clashed with the highly-circumscribed roles available under colonialism. Lewanika’s life was the opposite. He carved out a prominent place for himself in the colonial order and then in independent Zambia.

This article looks at the gender regime of the governing Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) in Turkey through the double lenses of “gender ideology” and moral panics. It traces the itinerary along which “gender ideology” as a reactionary discourse has traveled through a landscape stretching from the Vatican to Turkey. This trajectory places the AKP’s gender perspective and policies within a larger right-wing populist rhetoric of transnational fundamentalism which claims gender is an ideology. The “gender ideology” discourse of the AKP is maintained through a constant sense of crisis which reveals itself in moments of moral panics. The article specifically takes the period of 2019–2020 where such a moment of moral panic was heightened and examines this specific period through an analysis of public speeches of political figures, newspaper articles, and other published materials on the issue. The article shows how this fundamentalist discourse of “gender ideology” and its concomitant strategy of moral panics built an oppressive political environment for women and LGBTI+ people in Turkey and paved the road to the country’s withdrawal from the İstanbul Convention in 2021.

This article uses an original dataset to sketch a portrait of women mayoral candidates and women elected as mayors in Italy in the period 1993–2021. The analysis highlights several significant findings. Women must compensate for their political marginality by deploying other resources, such as higher levels of education. Nevertheless, women are penalised not only by the reluctance of parties to put them forward as candidates, but also by the elections themselves. More specifically, the electoral presence and strength of women decreases when the population size of the municipality grows, except for municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Moreover, women candidates are most disadvantaged in geographical areas where the socioeconomic condition of women is more marginal. However, women mayors running for a second mandate have the same chance of winning as men. Finally, it is the protest parties, rather than the left-wing parties, that are revealed as doing the most to promote women.

According to normative pluralists there are no truths about what one ought simpliciter to do, only truths about what one ought to do according to some normative system or standpoint. In contrast with conceptual normative pluralists who argue for this conclusion on the basis that the concept of an ought simpliciter is somehow defective, non-conceptual normative pluralists defend this conclusion on first-order grounds. Non-conceptual normative pluralism has recently received a book-length defence by Mathea Slåttholm Sagdahl. In this article I critique Sagdahl's defence of non-conceptual normative pluralism. Firstly, I challenge Sagdahl's attempt to motivate non-conceptual normative pluralism by appealing to Henry Sidgwick's work on the dualism of practical reason. Secondly, I criticise her response to the most prominent argument against non-conceptual normative pluralism in the philosophical literature, the argument from nominal-notable comparisons. Thirdly, I explore the possibility of a view similar to Sagdahl's position but which accepts the ought simpliciter.