Cosmopolitan Exception

Abstract

There has been a resurgence of interest in cosmopolitanism in contemporary political theory, based upon the hopeful premise that it heralds an ameliorative response to the malignity of sovereignty's lack and the treacherous violence of sovereignty's excess. The promise of cosmopolitanism inheres in the claim that state sovereignty is and should be supplemented by an international system backed by the legitimacy of international law, grounded in the sovereignty of human rights. Drawing upon Foucault and Agamben, my argument in this essay is that the laudable endeavour of liberal cosmopolitans is flawed in two ways: first, cosmopolitanism cannot escape sovereign violence, because it cannot escape sovereignty; and second, cosmopolitans misconstrue the composition of the very sovereignty they aim to escape. This means that cosmopolitan theorists are unable to identify cosmopolitan practices of sovereignty that also entail forms of violence: cosmopolitan exception. Cosmopolitan exception denotes violent sovereign practices that cannot be differentiated from the protection of rights.

The ethics of Carr and Wendt: Fairness and peace

“…These revelations open up the prospect of a closer engagement between mainstream and normative IR, two communities that have hitherto been quite skeptical of one another’s respective approaches. Indeed, Carr’s concern with fairness overlaps with the interests of Rawlsians in IR and the conception of justice as fairness (Doyle, 2015; Eckert, 2015; Rawls, 1971; Risse, 2016; Tong, 2017; Williams, 2014), whereas Wendt’s project for global peace is also a concern of cosmopolitans (Brown, 2012a; Hayden, 2013; Hibbert, 2013; McManus, 2013; Vernon, 2013). This may enable closer engagement between these diverse communities that rarely speak to one another and strengthen the disciplinary research on ethics as a result.…”