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Shared problems require shared action. The world economy and deepening global risks bind us together, but we lack the collective global agency required to address them. A sustainable global future will be impossible without a fundamental shift from the dominant national mythos to a global worldview, and the concomitant creation of institutions with transformative political agency. A world political party would be well-suited to bring about such a shift. Although such a party will not materialize overnight, it can emerge from the chrysalis of activism and experimentation already forming on the world stage. The transnational Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) is a compelling experiment in this vein, providing useful lessons for a world political party proper. Although the challenges to forming a transformative world party are profound, the risks of inaction are grave—and the rewards of success momentous.

From a post-Deutschian perspective, common institutions may aggravate the problem of conflicts and violence, but they can also be part of its solution. Contradictions and conflicts arise from shared processes and especially those of global political economy. Contradictions can be overcome through learning and building common institutions. Social contexts differ in terms of their self-transformative capacity, which is closely related to the question of democracy. While a hardening will means trouble; actors, rules and institutions can be made more open to challenge and revision. In essence, what emerges from these considerations is a normative vision of, and an argument for, pluralism and democratic governance of the world system. This is not a panacea, however, and many contingencies must be taken into account. ; Peer reviewed

In the normative theory of International Relations, the major debate has been between the state-centric view and cosmopolitanism. A quarter of century ago I attempted to deconstruct one round of this debate – between Chris Brown and Mark Hoffman – by showing that the debate is both utopian and has an other-negating character. With the help of epistemological discussions and an analysis of two "case studies", I built a case for a contextualist and dialogical morality, grounded on the concept of judgement. Interestingly, Brown's 2010 collection of essays is entitled Practical Judgement in International Political Theory. In this paper I first explore whether similar or analogical deconstruction would anymore be possible. Second, I discuss Brown's ideas about global civil society, democracy and justice, particularly in light of world-historical developments since the early 1990s and in relation to the development of my own thinking on the topic. While Brown has tried to overcome the dichotomy between the state-centric view and cosmopolitanism, I examine whether the idea of universal ethico-political learning and its cosmopolitan implications might explain the divergence in our practical judgements. I conclude by arguing any area of activities in international relations and world society, from property and contract to nuclear safety and global warming, can be subject to normative debates and potentially democratic politics. Good normative arguments often involve designs for better institutions, but they must be realizable by virtue of being connected to real causal processes. ; Peer reviewed

The Anarchical Society outlines various possible world orders, such as New Medievalism and world state, as alternatives to the anarchic order of the modern states-system. In this chapter, I evaluate critically the factual and normative premises of his arguments concerning possible, likely and desirable future world orders (factual and normative are intertwined but not inseparable). A key point is that Bull somewhat underestimated the sway of globalizing forces, including the gradual emergence of elements of world statehood. My main argument, however, is that because of his omission of political economy, Bull would have been puzzled about the causes of the re-emergence of great power conflicts. For the same reason, he also misjudged the importance of building better common institutions. ; Peer reviewed

Both positivists and post-positivists have misunderstood causation. By explaining why there are no stable and uncontested empirical invariances in IR, critical realism (CR) has pushed theoreticians and practitioners to reflect critically upon the conception of causation they have so far taken for granted. However, the original CR claim about radical asymmetry between explanation and prediction has turned out to be misleading. Not everything is irregular. Policy and action are future-oriented and require at least some predictive capacities. In this paper, I explore ways in which practically adequate knowledge can draw on historical analogies, social organisation of time and space, contrastive demi-regularities and explanatory theories and models. Anticipations of future possibilities — that may concern even the global system as a whole — must be made systematically revisable and be reflexively aware of their own involvement in shaping the course of history. The concept of probability, too, can and must be rethought from this perspective. Finally, I argue that the notion of reflexive self-regulation of social systems has interesting parallels in the theory of history, ethics and politics of dialectical CR, understood as a theory of freedom. ; Peer reviewed

Whether we talk about human learning and unlearning, securitization, or political economy, the forces and mechanisms generating both globalization and disintegration are causally efficacious across the world. Thus, the processes that led to the victory of the 'Leave' campaign in the June 2016 referendum on UK European Union membership are not simply confined to the United Kingdom, or even Europe. Similarly, conflict in Ukraine and the presidency of Donald Trump hold implications for a stage much wider than EU-Russia or the United States alone. Patomäki explores the world-historical mechanisms and processes that have created the conditions for the world's current predicaments and, arguably, involve potential for better futures. Operationally, he relies on the philosophy of dialectical critical realism and on the methods of contemporary social sciences, exploring how crises, learning and politics are interwoven through uneven wealth-accumulation and problematical growth-dynamics. Seeking to illuminate the causes of the currently prevailing tendencies towards disintegration, antagonism and – ultimately – war, he also shows how these developments are in fact embedded in deeper processes of human learning. The book embraces a Wellsian warning about the increasingly likely possibility of a military disaster, but its central objective is to further enlightenment and holoreflexivity within the current world-historical conjuncture. This work will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, peace research, security studies and international political economy. ; Peer reviewed

There is much more to democracy in a globalised world than the liberalist idea that it promotes bilateral state-to-state peace. In this chapter, I examine the state of the art in these three regards: the theory of democratic peace, the theory of cosmopolitan democracy, and theories about the conditions of security community, this last understood in terms of peaceful changes, self-transformative capacity of contexts, and democracy. In that connection, I reopen the Rousseauian and Marxian question of whether private property in some sense can also be a reason for state violence, or political violence more generally. I argue that as the world has seen a return to the economic liberal ideals of the nineteenth century, it is plausible to assume that the Marxian question too has become again more acutely relevant. ; Peer reviewed

International Studies is a multidisciplinary field, which includes a long and rich tradition of studying both the political economy conditions of war, peace and security, and the impact of security concerns and war on economic developments. While the fragmentation of International Studies has tended to make the essentially interwoven nature of many processes invisible, over time, a number of important claims and hypotheses have been subjected to various empirical tests, especially during the last few decades. In this chapter, I am asking: what is it that we have learnt on the political economy conditions of war and peace, and of security more generally? What about the impact of security and war on the economy? To what extent has our learning about the political economy of security been cumulative? What should we make of the fact that major disagreements persist? Going through the basic arguments of liberal, nationalist, Marxian, underconsumptionist, Keynesian and Neorealist theories and various recent political economy of security studies, I conclude by arguing that capitalist market economy is not inherently peaceful, but involves mechanisms and processes that can give rise to processes of securitization and enemy-construction. While empirical studies have rendered no unequivocal support for any of the political economy utopias of harmony (liberal, Keynesian, Marxian, or Neorealist), they have stressed the importance of the possibility of resolving conflicts by means of peaceful changes. ; Peer reviewed

Following decades of economic globalisation and market-oriented reforms across the world, Karl Polanyi's double movement has been invoked not only to explain what is happening but also to give reasons for being hopeful about a different future. Some have suggested a pendulum model of history: a swing from markets to society leading, in the next phase, to a swing from society to markets, and so on. The double movement can also be understood dialectically as a description of an irreversible historical development following its own inner laws or schemes of development. Going beyond a thesis–antithesis–synthesis pattern, I maintain that conceptions and schemes drawn from dialectics, and especially dialectical critical realism, can provide better geo-historical hypotheses for explaining past changes and for building scenarios about possible future changes. I analyse political economy contradictions and tendencies, and focus on normative rationality, to assess substantial claims about rational tendential directionality of world history. I argue that democratic global Keynesianism would enable processes of decommodification and new syntheses concerning the market/social nexus. A learning process towards qualitatively higher levels of reflexivity can help develop global transformative agency. Existing contradictions can be resolved by means of rational collective actions and building more adequate common institutions. These collective actions are likely to involve new forms of political agency such as world political parties. ; Peer reviewed

In this brief polemic we argue that Trump's words, actions and inactions are potentially deeply damaging to the legitimacy of the office he holds and to the continuity of the institutions defining that position. This, writ large, is an issue for organization theory. We use Searle's concept of status functions to argue that Trump invokes problems of status dysfunction. He has failed to place himself in a position to be competent and does not conform to expectations of the role of president, his presidency is characterized by disorganization and he has not become presidential. This is important in the context of US political culture and institutions. ; Peer reviewed