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Territorial Borders, InternationalEthics and Geography: Do GoodFences Still Make Good Neighbours?John WilliamsPublished online: 08 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: John Williams (2003) Territorial Borders, International Ethics and Geography:Do Good Fences Still Make Good Neighbours?, Geopolitics, 8:2, 25-46, DOI: 10.1080/714001033

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Territorial Borders, International Ethics andGeography: Do Good Fences Still Make

Good Neighbours?

JOHN WILLIAMS

The article surveys and summarises recent literature in political geography andnormative international relations theory to highlight how territorial borders areincreasingly regarded as social phenomena, rather than material facts, and how thisopens them to ethical and normative critique. The article suggests this is a line ofenquiry that has yet to be fully developed. In order to do so, though, it is necessary torecognise the ontological sedimentation and power of territorial borders understood asfences between states, suggesting that ontologically minimalist methodologies may beinappropriate. From here, the article argues that an ethically plausible defence ofterritorial borders-as-fences can be made, but only by scaling back the role thatterritorial borders play and linking it more closely to the role of borders in makingpossible and meaningful human ethical life.

Introduction

The idea that ‘good fences make good neighbours’ is one of those pieces offolk wisdom that seems to have affinity with international relations. Thenotion of territorial borders as the fences of international relations is onewith considerable intuitive appeal. Borders and fences divide the ownershipof a certain type of property – territory – and establish authority andresponsibility over that property as a result of ownership. The territorialdivision of the world into what Ruggie calls ‘distinct, disjoint and mutuallyexclusive territorial formations’ lies at the heart of this affinity.1 Disputesover the location of fences and borders are common, and thus neighboursaccepting the location and sharing an understanding of the role of the borderor fence is an important element of peaceful relations. As Gerald Blakenotes, ‘of fundamental importance [to a stress-free borderland] is politicalgoodwill. Unless neighbouring states have the political will to maintaingood relations, borderland harmony and cooperation will be impeded.’2

This kind of point is made in one of the best known poetic uses of theidea that good fences make good neighbours, signifying the folk wisdom of

John Williams, Department of Politics, University of Durham. E-mail: <j.c.williams@durham.ac.uk>.

Geopolitics, Vol.8, No.2 (Summer 2003) pp.25–46PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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the phrase. Robert Frost’s poem ‘Mending Wall’ makes the point that evenwhere relations generate so much trust as to call into doubt the point of theexercise, two neighbours still walk the wall and shore it up where it has beendamaged.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;And on a day we meet to walk the lineAnd set the wall between us once again.…There where it is we do not need the wall:He is all pine and I am apple orchard.My apple trees will never get acrossAnd eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’…

Here we see an example of how good fences make good neighbours inthese two senses of location and role and that this is not simply in responseto pressing circumstances. Both parties accept that agreeing where the fenceshould be helps neighbourliness. Second, both share an understanding of thefence’s role and a commitment to the maintenance of that role, even if thereseems no short-term need. Extending the analogy between Frost’s poem andinternational relations, we can say that even the most friendly states knowwhere the border lies and recognise there may be circumstances wherecontrols along it are necessary.

This, at least, is the kind of common sense understanding and analogythat this article, in common with a growing body of literature, particularlyin political geography, seeks to explore.3 In international relations, the focuson borders has traditionally been on the first of the two issues – location.Their role has been seen as relatively unproblematic in that territorialborders delimit sovereign ownership and that what goes along with this –international autonomy and domestic supremacy – is largely uncontentious.The questioning of this by political geographers parallels a different sort ofquestioning of borders in international relations theory. The language ofreconceptualising, reconsidering, problematising, deconstructing and so onhas been applied to many of the borders and boundaries of internationalrelations theory. However, it has only rarely been focused on the territorialborders that are the defining feature of the international system as it is mostcommonly understood.

This article attempts to bring these two approaches together in a limitedand specific, but hopefully helpful, way. It utilises the critique of the border-as-fence analogy in political geography to establish territorial borders associal practices. Whilst recognising this enables recognition of the

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differential functions territorial borders play, the article focuses on the ideaof borders-as-fences. Drawing on a number of boundary- and border-challenging approaches to normative international relations theory, thearticle looks at the ethical aspects of this particular role.

The article first summarises the two literatures. It looks at how politicalgeography has challenged the reified image of territorial borders as fencesbetween sovereign spaces, and then considers the way in which boundariesand borders have been critiqued as part of the resurgence of normativeinternational relations theory. The political geography literature receivesslightly less attention. In part this reflects my background in internationalrelations, but also because for my purposes the task is to establish theplausibility of territorial borders as social practices and institutions, ratherthan material facts, and thus amenable to ethical enquiry. Thus the richnessof this literature in working through the geographical, social and politicalimplications of challenged and differentiated borders is not fully reflected.

From here, the article focuses on a common question coming out of bothapproaches – the ontology of borders and subsequent methodological issuesabout how best to think about territorial borders. The article argues thatdespite our critique of a reified and static concept of borders, there is a needto recognise the strength of the border-as-fence analogy. In particular, thearticle critiques an ontologically minimalist approach to borders, arguinginstead that a neo-classical constructivism offers a more appropriatemethodology in considering both the ethical role territorial borders play andthe role they ought to play in international relations. This methodologicaldiscussion enables the article to move on to look at how it is that territorialborders play certain ethical and normative roles and to offer a limited, andsomewhat preliminary, defence of the ethical significance of territorialborders.

Challenging Borders in Political Geography and InternationalRelations

Conventional IR theory sees territorial borders as being material features –part of the fixtures and fittings of the international system, contentious andcontroversial in their location, but not in the role they play. Thedelimitation of distinct sovereign space is their role and challenges to thisare, basically, unimaginable. To remove, or even to reconceptualise,territorial borders would mean the end of international relations as weknow it, requiring a shift in the conduct of politics on the planet that isunimaginable. Certainly, dominant theories of international relations,whether neo-realism or liberal institutionalism, could not function withouta reified notion of territorial borders.

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Paasi and Newman note that such a view held sway in geography untilrelatively recently:

geographers in particular seem to understand [territorial] boundariesas expressions or manifestations of the territoriality of states … aspatial system which is characterised by more or less exclusiveboundaries. This thinking shapes crucially the way in which we viewthe functioning and compartmentalization of the political organizationof the world.4

Thus the arguments of someone like Gerald Blake, that border issues areessentially a problem of foreign policy and that territorial borders can be aforum for political hostility between states, stands as an example of thistraditional approach. His emphasis on the agreement, demarcation,maintenance and management of the border extends to the border’s role ingenerating a sense of security for a state’s citizens, linking easily with atraditional, state-centric and realist understanding of international relations.5

Border issues are focused on the ability of the state to control what happensacross borders, such as invasions, trans-national crime, refugee flows andpollution. For Blake, sovereignty disputes take place within this establishedand seemingly commonsensical understanding of the way the world is.6

Borders are empirical facts. This contrasts with the sort of critical approach described and developed

by Newman and Paasi, who stress how it is that political geography hasincreasingly challenged this kind of essentialised, reified view, in particularthrough the use of techniques associated with post-modern and post-structural analyses of the social condition. The idea of the border asdelimiter of sovereignty is thus constructed and re-constructed in a searchfor control, linked to the nature of political, principally state, power.

From a more anthropological perspective, Donnan and Wilson join thecritique of a reified borders-as-fences-between-states approach,

these borders are constructed by much more than the institutions ofthe state which are present there, or of which the border’s frameworkis a representative part … Borders are also meaning-making andmeaning-carrying entities, parts of the cultural landscape which oftentranscend the physical limits of the state and defy the power of stateinstitutions.7

This is reinforced by the claim that ‘the border is not a spatial fact with asociological impact, but a sociological fact that shapes spatially’.8

Agnew and Corbridge have used a neo-Gramscian approach to describethe essentialised territorialisation of international relations as ‘the territorialtrap’ which has blinded analysts and theorists to the significance of the

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representation of territory in the development, maintenance and decline ofhegemony.9 Their argument is that borders have to be understood as beinglinked to the constellation of power that constitutes hegemony in such a waythat not only does the hegemon exert potentially overwhelming force, butthat such force acquires a degree of legitimacy and acceptance. Thisreinforces the concern of politically astute anthropologists like Donnan andWilson that borders are power structures. Borders are inextricably linked tothe state’s existence. However, this existence is not as some sort of reified‘unit’, existing in a system of ‘like units’ and subjected to the samestructurally determined imperatives of action to defend those borders, but asa nexus of power, identity, authority, legitimacy and other contested andcontestable notions.

More radically, Gearóid Ó Tuathail has applied Foucauldian andDerridean post-modernism to political geography to produce a coruscatingcritique of the uses of spatial representation for power-political purposes.10

The nature of territorial borders as social and political constructs, intimatelyconnected with the needs and purposes of dominant and hegemonic socialgroups and political constellations, is therefore receiving serious attention.Tuathail provides perhaps the strongest appeal to us to reject thenaturalisation of territorial division as being a part of the facts of geography;as natural as the rivers, deserts and mountain ranges that so often providethe inspirational site for the cartographic precision of lines on the map.11

As Newman notes, there is a need for what he calls a ‘geography ofboundary differentiation’ that recognises the challenges, both theoreticaland empirical, that the traditional account of territorial borders is facing,whilst retaining room for their enduring dividing roles.12 Borders are playingall sorts of roles alongside that of fence, although it this function that is thefocus here. It is also necessary to recognise the differentiation in the effectsof border challenges, with some developments, particularly the neo-liberaleconomic claims underpinning the ‘borderless world’ notions of the likes ofOhmae, having greater applicability to the OECD and even here generatingbacklashes, particularly in terms of identity.13

It is important to note that these approaches and ideas in political andcritical geography and geopolitics do not appear from nowhere. ‘Boundarystudies have had a long, descriptive and relatively nontheoretical history ingeography.’14 Thus the lack of concerted attention on territorial borders ininternational relations reflects the traditional approach in politicalgeography too. However, work by Campbell15 and Shapiro and Alker16 hasattempted to stimulate a much more explicitly critical approach to territorialborders within international relations, and Newman and Paasi note theemerging crossover between critical geopolitics, for example, and criticalinternational relations.17 James Rosenau has attempted to develop an idea of

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the ‘frontier’ as being the shifting and sometimes elusive site ofinternational politics in an era he characterises as being characterised by adynamic of ‘fragmegration’ – an unstable mixture of integrative andfragmenting dynamics. This has substantial implications for territorialborders, leaving them as central at some times and in some places andbasically irrelevant in and at others.18

Nevertheless, and as Rosenau notes, in international relations, theoristsfrom the major approaches have failed to properly recognise the idea that‘boundaries have in fact been instruments of communication aimed atreifying, but at the same time depersonalizing, power’.19 The state as anactor, and in particular the territorial borders that define it, have become‘invisible’ in the sense of not being subject to critical analysis. This isdespite their massive visibility in the shaping and controlling of the lives ofpeople and their huge importance in one of the core questions ofinternational relations – war and conflict.

The binding of territorial borders into a framework that sees thedomestic as the arena of order and control and the external as the site of warand conflict echoes the kind of ‘inside/outside’ thinking that has been amainstay of postmodern and post-structural thinking in internationalrelations.20 The development of normative international theory in the lasttwo decades has been characterised by an assault on borders of all sorts,even if the idea of the border or boundary has been used in a metaphoricalsense rather than in a strictly territorial one.21 It seeks to challenge thereification of borders, although more rarely does it engage in a deep-rootedand historical analysis as to why this situation has emerged. This articlewishes to claim history is important to developing not just a criticalunderstanding of territorial borders, but also to a better account of the ethicsof territorial borders.

In large part these normative theoretical developments rest upon thedissolution of the boundaries between fact and value, theory and practicethat we associate with post-positivism.22 This effort to explore, in diverseways, the socially constructed nature of international politics and to assertthe ideational nature of the great majority of what were in the past regardedas ‘the facts’ of international politics has opened vast swathes of space fornormative enquiry.23 Three examples will hopefully suffice to illustrate thispoint and to explain why this move establishes the need for a strongerethical and normative turn in the on-going re-consideration of territorialborders.

First, Kimberley Hutchings has asserted the distorting effect on ournormative vision of a deeply entrenched Western philosophical assumptionabout the essential incommensurability of the worlds of politics and ethics.24

Under this assumption the boundary lies between different modes of

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thought and enquiry whereby the practical, pragmatic needs of politics cannever be made to fit with the purity and permanence of an idealised ethicalsituation. Instead, the best that can be hoped for is the insertion into theworld of politics of some of the principles of the world of ethics as a way oflimiting the more brutal consequences of an untrammelled politics. Sheargues politics need not be ethically neutered and neither are ethicsapolitical. Instead there needs to be recognition of a mutually constitutiverelationship that is critically dynamic. We thus cannot argue that territorialborders are political necessities, isolated by the nature of politics aspragmatic action from an ethical enquiry that takes place in an essentiallydifferent place and different way.

Second, the post-positivist turn has enabled another boundary to bechallenged, that between domestic and international politics.25 From theinternational side of the border-as-fence, it is no longer feasible to view theborder as marking the place beyond which ethics start, and thereforerendering ethics as being of little interest to a properly internationalperspective.26 Instead, the role of borders in generating such bifurcation inour perceptions of ethics becomes a vital part of the enquiry into them. Ifthe outside is really in, and the inside really out, then how and why it hasproved possible to maintain the distinction for so long is an importantquestion and the conceptualisation and ethical content of territorial bordersbecomes an inescapable topic of enquiry.

Third, challenging the fact/value and inside/outside boundaries has, inturn, seen new boundaries erected and challenged. Perhaps most significantin normative international theory is the idea of a fundamental distinctionbetween communitarian and cosmopolitan approaches to making ethicaljudgement.27 Communitarianism can be seen as being linked to defendingthe right of a specific community, often a territorially bounded and idealisednation, to a substantial degree of ethical closure.28 Here the influence of theinflux of political philosophy is clear, with both camps often associated withtowering figures of political philosophy, Hegel and Kant.29

Substantial efforts to overcome this boundary exist. Andrew Linklatercites both Kant and Hegel as important influences in his effort to develop acosmopolitan ethic for international relations, one that simultaneouslyadvocates a greater sense of shared humanity whilst extending communalsensitivity in a more distributively just world.30 Mervyn Frost is another whoattempts to utilise Hegelian method in the service of cosmopolitan aims,focused on the constitution of individuals as rights-holders within a nexusof social situations, including the sovereign state and the states system.31

However, both these approaches and the need to make thecosmopolitan/communitarian distinction central have been challenged.Hutchings argues that their divergence from or solutions to this problem are

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generally unsuccessful, ‘collapsing back’ into one or other of thesedichotomised camps.32 Molly Cochran has argued that even without the boldphilosophical and methodological certainties of an Enlightenmentpositivism, both cosmopolitan and communitarian camps have made‘strong’, too strong in her view, claims about ethical standards ininternational relations.33 The ontological foundations of the competingcamps cannot, she asserts, be sustained. Thus, their epistemologicalconclusions about valid ethical knowledge rest on shaky foundations,because their weak foundations yield non-contingent judgements aboutethical principle and process.34 Cochran appeals to a post-positivistphilosophical pragmatism indebted to Dewey and Rorty as an alternativeway around this problem.35

A greater ethical inclusiveness certainly further undermines the idea ofterritorial borders as delimiting zones of exclusive authority, ownership andidentity. By extension, this ought also to lead to discussions of ethicalinclusion. However, whilst geographers like Newman have emphasised theon-going and dynamic role of borders in constituting and re-constitutingidentity, this ethical turn has not been fully taken.36 ‘[A] rich understandingof the ways in which power is embedded in social space has developed …yet little attention is given to normative implications, to how things ought tobe different.’37 For example, Tuathail’s ‘critical geopolitics’ certainly seeksto exploit fully the potential for post-positivist critique of borders as taken-for-granted, natural and immutable facts of the sovereign states system.However, this is at the cost of a neglect of ethics’ concern with exploringthe progressive traits immanent in existing practice and the need to besensitive to the powerful sense of right and wrong embedded in existingpractice and deeply valued by individuals and communities. David M.Smith notes that geography’s engagement with ethics in recent years hasproduced a range of responses, but no ‘core activity to which the label ofgeography and ethics can sensibly be assigned’.38 Given the range, depthand importance of the ethical issues surrounding territorial borders, thiscould be the core that Smith is searching for.

Tuathail’s approach certainly could be a way into this, but as with otherwork taking its inspiration from Derrida and Foucault, it is subject to similarcharges levelled at Cochran’s ontological minimalism. By removing all, orvery nearly all, the props of our conceptualisation and understanding ofsituations and institutions the risks of ethical relativism appear. If there areno standards that matter – because ultimately all are the products of a powerunderstood as coercive, repressive and factional – then power is all there is.We should no longer be surprised, let alone ethically troubled, that the worldhas been made by the powerful because it could not be any other way. Theethical standards, whether evidenced or immanent in practice and

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institutions, inevitably lose their meaning. Radicalism can become cynicismor even paranoia about existing practice, regarding it as all being the resultof the imposition by the strong upon the weak of norms that masqueradeself-interest and the protection of structures of power as speaking tochimerical wider and genuine notions of the good.39

Efforts to critique the geographical reification of borders and expandinclusiveness are concerned with strategies and techniques for overcomingthe divisiveness associated with territorial borders. Normative internationalrelations theory has focused on their role in the idea that ‘foreigners’ – thosewho live or originate from beyond the borders of our state – are none of ourethical concern. However, whilst so keen on re-conceptualising so many ofthe dividing lines of thought and ethical category, normative theorists havenot fully employed the attention lavished on the dividing lines on the mapby critical political geography. For normative theorists territorial bordersseem to endure, but that a more inclusive ethic will be able to work aroundor across them. Territorial borders ought to take on an ethically contingentstatus. They should be respected only where such respect serves a higherethical purpose, assuming one can be found, rather than because they haveany intrinsic ethical worth.40 This is something this article seeks tochallenge. It argues that we have good reasons to believe that borders,including territorial ones, do possess ethical value that whilst not absolute,eternal and constant, is nevertheless deeply seated in conceptions of ethicsand community that cannot be overlooked easily in the name ofcosmopolitan standards.

The appreciation of territorial borders as dynamic norms and their morecareful and thorough consideration as social phenomena combines withboundary-challenging normative theory to produce some strategies forthinking through the ethical implications of borders-as-fences. Bringingthese two strands together, however, asks some hard prior questions aboutthe ontology of borders, if we wish to avoid relativism, and the role ofontology in ethics. These need developing if we are to adopt the mostappropriate way of thinking through the ethics of borders.

The Ontology of Borders and the Need for Ontological Choices

Whilst Tuathail is the most ontologically radical of the political geographerssummarised, Cochran goes furthest among the theorists discussed here inurging that ontological assumptions should be as few and as weakly held aspossible.41 She urges such a course on the grounds of maximising thepotential for ethical discourse and inclusiveness.42 Ontologicalcharacterisation, for Cochran, closes avenues of enquiry by defining themout of existence, or at least out of admissibility in ethical debate. Those

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holding views incompatible with privileged ontologies are silenced andmarginalised.43

Cochran’s sparsely populated ontological world offers great room formanoeuvre, debate and discussion amongst diverse and divergent ethicalperspectives. It is these benefits that she stresses, so that the necessaryontological assumptions are those that enable entry to such an environmentand the bringing of a perspective to share. She argues that an ironically heldliberalism offers the best approach, in that liberalism has demonstrated apragmatic ability to be open to alternatives, to be dynamic in its ethicalagenda and to offer ways of safeguarding diversity and individuality. If thiscan be stripped of foundational ideas, such as sovereign individuality, thensuch a liberal sensibility and respect for diversity and individuality offers anideal, although contingently ideal, ethical framework.44

As Hutchings stresses, trying to set the world of ethics aside from theworld of politics has unacceptable intellectual and practical costs.45 There isa need for a critical re-examination of what is in the search for what oughtto be. Part of this, though, should also be to recognise the existingontological status of elements of an international ethic. If we need to startfrom where we are, part of that is also about recognising the relative fixityand sedimentation of different parts of where we are. A radical ontologicalminimalism brings with it the benefit of opening ethical space, but if thiscan only be explored in a way that relies on the detachment from where weare necessary to such an ontology then the difficulties of situating ethicalenquiry re-appear. Rather than the search for an unobtainable ethicalArchimedean point, ontological minimalism searches for an equallyunobtainable point requiring similar levels of detachment from the inter-subjective, transitory and contextual ethical world that is the starting pointfor critical interrogation.

Many studies accept that territorial borders-as-fences occupy a strongontological position in understandings of international relations.46 Thus anenquiry into their ethical role ought to recognise this level of entrenchmentand the general acceptance of their role to the point that such roles are rarelyquestioned. As Ruggie says, ‘some constitutive rules, like exclusiveterritoriality, are so deeply sedimented or reified that actors no longer thinkof them as rules at all’.47 That sedimentation and reification characterises thesituation should also play a role in our enquiry. Sayer and Storper‘acknowledge the extraordinary durability of the spatial material forms inwhich inequalities and injustices are embedded’.48 This raises questions asto how and why it is that this situation has come about and to what sort ofethical principles or needs does it speak, in addition to the social, economicand political, often power-political, roles stressed in fields such as criticalgeo-politics. If ‘it goes without saying that if a boundary exists, something

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must be enclosed within it’,49 then that something can be the source ofethical value and normative vision, as well as the product of power. IfHutchings is correct and power and ethics ought not to be and cannot bedivided into their separate realms then there is a need to recognise thatpower can also be right and right can also be powerful.

An immanent critique therefore requires us to move away fromontological minimalism, raising prior questions about how this should bedone. ‘[P]recisely because there are micro- and macrogeographies of power,normative proposals must be highly sensitive to these flows and sedimentedforms, and not fall prey to a facile kind of utopianism’.50 The dangers ofover-compensating, though, are clear – that by accepting the status ofexisting institutions as a part of our starting point we potentially re-legitimise their established and dominant position, producing post factojustifications for the status quo.51 A critical ethical edge is essential but itneeds to be found within existing practice, or at least to be seen to be apossible development within existing practice.

Given the focus in this paper on territorial borders as fences betweenstates, it is necessary to adopt an approach that takes the strength of thisconnection seriously, but without repeating the mistake of reification.Treating territorial borders as social practices importantly connected topower and ethics, vital to the construction and maintenance of states and aninter-state system across time, points to the need to use the history ofstatehood. This needs to avoid seeing states and their borders as inevitable,but that helps us appreciate how they have become so ubiquitous andembedded in international politics.

One way this has been explored historically, and in a methodologicallypost-positivist way, is by Hendrik Spruyt.52 He points to the state’s originsin France in response to changing trading and economic conditions from thetwelfth century onwards and how it proved to be more effective in the newconditions than its competitors, the city league and the city state.53 Spruytemphasises the role of a specific understanding of territory, and especiallythe specific and sharp delimitation of ownership, as important to the successof the state in competition with these alternative forms.54 It is the domesticorganisational and economic benefits brought by this approach to territorythat he asserts as being at least as, if not more, important than the war-making ability of states.55 Thus war and the struggle for survival are not theonly explanations for the triumph of the state.56 The classic and mostfrequently critiqued aspect of state power is not the end of the story.

This sort of ‘neo-classical constructivism’, to borrow a label ofRuggie’s, plays to this paper’s needs and its choice is thus a pragmatic one,rather than a claim about its necessary methodological superiority.57 Giventhat territorial borders are inextricably bound to the modern sovereign state

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and the modern sovereign state is inextricably bound to understandings ofinternational relations, ethical critique needs to recognise the ontologicalstatus of territorial borders. There is a need for an approach that iscomfortable with, but critical of, this and that can appreciate that borders aredynamic social structures.

In the terms of Finnemore and Sikkink, territorial borders-as-fences area norm that ‘cascaded’ a long time ago, especially in Europe.58 By the ideaof a norm cascade, Finnemore and Sikkink argue that international normsspread by a process whereby certain actors take on the role of ‘normentrepreneurs’, promoting a revision to the existing norms of theinternational community. When these entrepreneurs are able to attractenough other actors to their view, including some of the leading powers,then the norm reaches a ‘tipping point’. From here, the momentum behindit is enough to cause it to ‘cascade’ throughout the international system,being rapidly adopted and internalised by a large majority of actors. Once acascade takes place, then practical questions dominate discussions such as,in this case, the location of borders and agreed ways of demarcating andmaintaining that location.59

The idea of borders-as-fences has not been successfully replaced by analternative conception. However, this is not to say that cascaded norms donot undergo subsequent evolution and incremental development. Bignormative changes in previously acceptable practice may be attentiongrabbing, but ‘mini-cascades’ also take place within the general parametersof well-established norms. For example, the shift from an absolutistconception of sovereignty to a popular, national one altered the legitimationof territorial borders – turning them from the delimiter of royal property tothe boundaries of national homeland – without substantially altering theirrole as fences in international politics.60

We can overcome the danger of an overly static approach thatunjustifiably privileges the status quo as an embodiment of the goodbecause of its ability to endure. A notion of ‘mini-cascades’ helps to addressconcerns about the overly formal approach of Finnnemore and Sikkink.Their model is too neat for the rather more organic and untidy ways inwhich social facts are constructed and re-constructed. This latter point isparticularly important as incremental alterations within establishedparameters can nevertheless be highly significant. It is essential to recognisethis to maintain a critical edge and avoid reinforcing the reification ofborders-as-fences that Ruggie highlights.

Rather than norm cascades being the result of deliberate action by ‘normentrepreneurs’ aiming at a particular goal in terms of changing practice andcustom, mini-cascading recognises the knock-on effects of cascades in othernorms on existing and established ones. Equally, accidents happen, with

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practice in one area, or designed to achieve one goal, having effectselsewhere or cascading in a different way to that intended. A less formallymodelled approach to norms is necessary to appreciate properly the variousways in which they are created, modified and replaced. Finnemore andSikkink are able to establish a plausible account of how some of the mostimportant norms took their place in the ideational structure of theinternational system. They are less able, though, to explain the knock-oneffects that these have elsewhere and to account for the mini-cascading inunpredictable or unintentional ways that may occur.

There is thus a need to situate this kind of model alongside a morehermeneutic or interpretivist approach to territorial borders. This has theadded advantage of avoiding one of the dangers of more formal models inthat they tend to reinforce objectivism in study, underplaying the ways inwhich studying and modelling international politics are also acts ofinternational politics. This is a key post-positivist insight and one thatefforts by neo-classical constructivists to reach out to positivist enquiry canoverlook too much.61 Potential transformation is always immanent andnorms are always dynamic, even if only through their re-creation, and thiscan take forms different to those that may have brought the norm intoexistence as an important element of the ideational structure of theinternational system.

Thus a more hermeneutic approach than Finnemore and Sikkink’s tonorms in constructivism offers an account of the normatively charged andethically important role of the rules, norms and principles of behaviour thatstates have evolved through practice over a substantial historical period. Itis possible to engage in a critical ethical investigation of territorial borders-as fences that reflects the ontological sedimentation of these foundationalelements of the international system, but that does not have to become anapologia for the status quo. Ontological assumptions are essential to anyenquiry and they ought to be self-consciously made. However, a post-positivist ethics interrogating the immanent ethical potential of the world asit has been constructed needs these assumptions to reflect the here and now.A neo-classical constructivism, allied to an awareness of the importance andimplication of methodological choices indebted to more ontologicallyminimalist positions, offers a useful mechanism for ethical investigationinto territorial borders.

Defending the Ethics of Territorial Borders

The foregoing discussion leads us to two issues to discuss in relation todeveloping a partial and limited defence of the ethics of territorial borders.The ontological strength of territorial borders leads to questions about the

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ethical component of the depth of practice that supports this. Here, thearticle wishes to point to evidence that borders of some sort, includingterritorial borders, are deeply rooted in ethics. The second ethical issue thatarises relates to the defence of a neo-classical constructivist mode ofenquiry into international relations. This is an ethically consequentialistaccount that looks at the desirable elements of practice that flow from themore fundamental ethical role of borders.

Turning to the first of these tasks, it is implausible to assert thatinstitutions as enduring as territorial borders-as-fences inextricably linkedto the sovereign state have endured for so long and are so entrenched unlessborders are in some way representative of a need for division in humanethical life. There is evidence in both the material already surveyed andfrom elsewhere in normative and ethical accounts of division, distinctionand differentiation to support the idea that the ontological strength ofterritorial borders in international relations can be connected to a deep-rooted need for division in human ethical life.

In relation to the material at the heart of this paper, territorial borders aresynonymous with division. ‘Boundaries, by definition, constitute lines ofseparation or contact. … The point of contact or separation usually createsan “us” and an “Other” identity.’62 In their idealised essentialism they dividezones of sovereign control; they divide inside from outside; they divideforeign from domestic; they divide our identities as citizens; they dividenational communities; they divide those to whom we owe primaryallegiance from those who come second (if anywhere) in moral calculation;they divide us from them.

The endurance of borders and boundaries in human society, whetherthey be territorial borders or otherwise, implies that borders and the need tocreate an ‘us’ and an ‘other’ are very powerfully entrenched in humanrelations and our ability to identify and understand ourselves. The critiqueof reified sovereign territoriality in political geography does not lead to theabandonment of territorial borders. Instead they are reinterpreted as featuresof hegemony, for Agnew and Corbridge, of power for Tuathail and ofidentity for Newman, requiring the re-territorialisation, rather than the de-territorialisation, of social life under conditions of globalisation. Theanthropological work of Donnan and Wilson points to the need forboundary distinctions between social groups and the vital role that theseplay in the maintenance and development of identity.63 Frances Harbour’ssurvey of universal ethical propositions, also drawing on anthropologicalwork, suggests a necessary division in human ethical life. By extension, thepower-riddled, historically conditioned, accident prone and even arbitrary,careless or plain misguided creation of territorial borders does have deeproots. Borders, including territorial borders, may be inescapable in

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international politics not just for reasons of power, but for reasons of right,too. Recalling Hutching’s injunction not to separate these into essentiallyincommensurable categories of thought we can argue that the weight ofevidence about the ubiquity of borders points to their being a necessary partof human life, and a basic category of ethical thought about that life.

Philosophical weight can also be brought to bear in defence of a view ofborders and boundaries as being part of the human condition through thework of Hannah Arendt. She famously argued that ‘we are all the same, thatis, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else wholived, lives or will live’.64 The unique, distinctive individual finds their self-understanding through interaction with fellow human beings with whomthey share community and in spaces where they can meet as equals. Thisequality importantly includes an equality of community membershipgranting them a set of shared ideas, experiences and values, rather thansome sort of de-contextualised equality such as that experienced behind aRawlsian veil of ignorance.65 Arendt’s account emphasises the requirementfor communities to retain their distinctiveness from one another, includingthrough the use of borders and boundaries.

[H]uman dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in anew political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this timemust comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remainstrictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorialentities.66

In simple terms, borders can be seen as either being prior to and creative ofdifference, or that difference is prior to and creative of borders. This starkjuxtaposition of opposites is resolved in favour of the latter option by thearguments that borders are social phenomena and that the human conditionis characterised by an essential diversity of human beings and the necessaryrelationship between distinctive individuals and their communities.

The durability and depth of sedimentation of territorial borders as fencessuggest that division, and division on a territorial basis, speaks to a deep-seated need of human identity and also in human ethics. We need to havereasons for granting a privileged position to some that is not available toothers, perhaps in the form of recognising rights and duties of specialbeneficence, and accepting that proximity, both geographical andemotional, and location upon one side of the line on the map or the other,does make a difference.67 Territorial division in the form of states is animportant, but certainly not the only, aspect of this. The endurance of theterritorial border-as-fence as the primary mechanism for division ininternational politics cannot, though, be treated as prima facie ethicallyirrelevant or straightforwardly contingent. However, its position as a social

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phenomenon also means that the creation and re-creation of the border-as-fence has to be held up to constant ethical questioning and critique. Thearguments of tradition, culture and precedent as to who is to count and whois not, who is to be a citizen and who is not, what the role of territory oughtto be and how it should be delimited cannot be taken for granted.68 As thenormative theorists insist, a part of ethical analysis and enquiry is toconstantly question dominant ethical arguments. This may be crucial inexploring the current location of territorial borders and the enunciation ofthe role that they play, but such a critique may not be able to land an ethicalknock-out blow upon a feature of human ethical thought and life that seemsto be highly durable. Location and role may change, but that borders willhave locations and play roles, and that these should be critically explored,may be a fixture.

A cosmopolitan international ethic thus needs to engage with thedesirability of division as well as to promote inclusiveness. There is a needfor cosmopolitan ethics to go further than identifying the consequences ofterritorial borders that are the frequent target of normative critique.Repression, religious intolerance, discrimination, ethnic cleansing and so onhave become inextricably associated with the territorial state. Theconsequences of the existence of territorial borders can indeed be extremeand morally repugnant. However, whether such effects are an inevitable andessential result of the existence of territorial borders seems far less certain.

We may argue that the role of territorial borders to divide in internationalpolitics is potentially ethically justifiable. Such justification needs to berooted in elements of existing practice and values that are generallyregarded as legitimate and serving important purposes in shaping the waythe world ought to be. If we accept the view of normative theory outlinedearlier then we can see that the social creation and recreation of ethicsincludes, via mechanisms like territorial borders, a view of division anddistinction that is ethically valued. An appreciation of the constructed anddynamic nature of territorial borders holds out the prospect of being able todetach these aspects from the more violent practices that have alsoaccumulated around territorial borders. This, of course, is easier said thandone.

This ossification of their role and the ways in which this role has beenused to justify oppression has caused ethical and normative enquiries intointernational relations to seek ways around or over borders, taking forgranted their role as fences and assuming this to be a problem. The accountsoffered from a critical perspective in political geography offer us a focusupon borders themselves but in their effort to re-cast them as socialconstructs and features of social existence with spatial consequences theytoo have underplayed their ethical significance. Seeing borders as

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manifestations of hegemony and power can fall into the trap that Hutchingswarns us against, of separating ethics and politics and seeing the productsof power as ethically null.

Nevertheless, in offering some defence of the ethical desirability ofterritorial borders it needs to be seen as a fairly weak defence. In relation tothe issue of diversity as ethically desirable this is for two reasons. Firstly,because of the need for due weight to be placed upon the efforts to broadenethical inclusiveness by appeals to an individual focused cosmopolitanismand the need to recognise a much greater range of community membershipsgenerating notions such as rights and duties of special beneficence.Secondly, it is moot as to whether or not the social practice of territorialborders-as-fences can be rescued from their role in generating a violentintolerance and exclusion of other human beings.69 The social processeswhich have given us the territorial border-as-fence have also brought withthem a whole host of wars, conflicts and disputes about borders, especiallytheir location, that are ethically troubling.

This brings us to the consequentialist part of the ethical defence ofterritorial borders. These ethically troubling aspects of practice that havedeveloped around territorial borders may lead us to reject the possibility ofa consequentialist ethical defence. We may accept the argument about theethical need for borders in human life, but argue that the way in which theterritorial form of borders have been constructed to play a particular role ininternational relations is indefensible. The norm cascade that brought aboutterritorial borders-as-fences is one that ought to be challenged in a fairlyfundamental way, either to de-territorialise international relations, or, moreplausibly, to re-territorialise it in ways that do not generate such levels ofviolence, intolerance, repression and suffering.70

These are good arguments. However, whether the burden of these woescan be placed solely at the door of territorial borders is questionable, asthere are other social practices and institutions of the international systemthat may deserve an equal or even greater share of the blame. Nevertheless,another reason for the partial nature of the ethical defence of territorialborders being offered here is the limited nature of the ethically desirableconsequences of territorial borders-as-fences. The focus is on the way inwhich they have helped to manage the consequences of the diversity thatunderpins and is in part perpetuated and shaped by territorial borders.

This argument can be summarised in terms of order in diversity as abasic element of ethical negotiation, debate and agreement in internationalrelations. In one sense, this is to return to the familiar ideas of the EnglishSchool, where territorial borders-as-fences play a prominent part in creatinga set of rules, norms and principles that enable order.71 Most important inthis case is the principle of non-intervention, whereby states agree that one

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another’s domestic affairs are not an acceptable basis for internationalpolitical action, with limited, if arguably growing, exceptions.72

However, there is more to this consequentialist line of argument.Importantly, the issue of diversity is central here, given the claims about astrong ontology of borders and its basis in an ethical need for division. Inthe English School account, especially Bull’s classic Anarchical Society, theissue of diversity is a secondary consideration to the need for territorialborders-as-fences to enable order in conditions of anarchy. Diversity is acomplicating factor, and one that Bull stressed in his critique of claims toethical universalism, but it remains secondary to anarchy.73

The argument here, by contrast, puts diversity at the heart of the ethicsof territorial borders, offering us a way to critique and evaluate theprocesses of construction, cascading and so on that perpetuate and developthe role, and understanding of the role, of territorial borders. Evaluation isparticularly important from an ethical perspective, as if we see territorialborders as being linked to a need for ethical division in life, then we canassess the ways in which they contribute to this in a positive form.Developments in the understanding of the role of territorial borders thatcontribute to the protection of diversity, via notions such as toleration,reciprocity, respect and co-operation, are valuable and welcome parts ofinternational relations.74 These values, of course, are not exclusively thepreserve of territorial borders in international relations, but they are valuesthat can be attached to territorial borders and that speak to a normativeagenda that reflects and draws upon deep-rooted ethical needs.

These elements are immanent in existing practice, recognising the kindof normative theoretical arguments put forward earlier in the paper, andfully cognisant of territorial borders as social phenomena. They enable usto, potentially at least, differentiate those elements of the practices andpropositions that surround territorial borders that are ethically positive fromthose that are destructive. Territorial borders-as-fences need not beinherently and irretrievably the products of immoral power, aimed at thedomination and repression of human beings, their ethical aspirations and anormative vision of a better world. As they are currently constructed andunderstood they can and do have this effect, but this need not be and is notalways the case.

Conclusion

A major norm cascade producing a world free of territorial borders or onewhere territorial borders no longer play the role of fences is not going tohappen in the near future. The classic role of territorial borders ininternational relations that has been the focus of this article will endure,

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even in the face of growing differentiation. The need for political goodwilland a shared understanding of the role, as well as the location, of bordersshall continue to be a prized asset in political relationships between states.

However, this article has tried to argue that the questioning of borders,especially territorial borders, is important and has far-reachingconsequences for how we think, or ought to think, about the ethical aspectsof their role in international relations. The work in political geography hasdemonstrated how the essentialised border-as-fence conception is bothinadequate and misleading, particularly in terms of naturalising and de-politicising one of the most powerful and potent political symbols. Post-positivist ethics has nevertheless sensitised us to the need to search for andbe aware of immanent ethical potential in practice and the need for asituated ethics that comes from, rather than is separate to, social andpolitical practices, including power.

The depth of the sedimentation of the border-as-fence analogy ininternational politics caused us to question the more ontologicallyminimalist approaches to international ethics as being an appropriatemechanism for considering the ethics of territorial borders. Instead, througha consideration of ontological issues, a neo-classical constructivist approachappeared to offer a more persuasive methodology for examining the reasonsfor the persistence of territorial borders-as-fences in international relations.

In the final section, these ontological and methodological issues wereused to underpin a preliminary and limited defence of the ethics of territorialborders. Their ontological strength raised questions about the need forborders in human ethics, pointing to ways in which a recognition of this waspresent in the political geography discussed in the paper, somethingreinforced by some more anthropological work and via the politicalphilosophy of Hannah Arendt. This underpinned a more consequentialistanalysis of the ethics of borders that added greater ethical focus to neo-classical constructivism’s account and analysis of the establishment andmaintenance of territorial borders. This greater ethical sensitivity moves ussome way towards developing an ethical aspect to the differentiation of thefunctions of territorial borders in international relations, showing howethically complex their role is and how important it is to maintain critique,analysis and challenges to established understandings.

Critiquing the reification of territorial borders and the promotion of agreater ethical inclusiveness in international relations does not have todemolish or by-pass territorial borders-as-fences or render them contingenton more individualistic, cosmopolitan standards. Big changes may draw themost attention, but an ethical enquiry into features as sedimented as states’territorial borders-as-fences must not ignore or underestimate thecumulative significance and the creation and re-creation of immanent

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potential. Good fences can still make good neighbours, but only if the fenceremains a negotiated social practice, situated within an understanding ofneighbourliness that recognises, respects and values the differentcontributions the interlocutors bring. As a mechanism to close debate, shut-off contact and impose understandings, territorial borders-as-fences retainthe ability to generate violence, conflict, war, repression and injustice.

ACKNOWELDGEMENTS

Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the 2001 ISA Annual Convention in Chicago andthe RISA/NISA/CEEISA 2002 Annual Convention in Moscow. Thanks are due to theparticipants, especially Simon Caney, for their comments. Mark Aspinwall and Bill Callahanoffered detailed and very valuable suggestions for improvement, as did two anonymous referees.

NOTES

1. John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Territoriality at Millennium’s End’, in John Gerard Ruggie,Constructing the World Polity: essays on international institutionalization (London:Routledge 1998) p.173.

2. Gerald Blake, ‘Borderlands Under Stress: some Global Perspectives’, in Martin Pratt andJanet Allison Brown (eds), Borderlands Under Stress (London: Kluwer Law International,2001) p.1.

3. For a good summary see David Newman and Anssi Paasi, ‘Fences and Neighbours in thePostmodern World: Boundary Narratives in Political Geography’, Progress in HumanGeography 22/2 (1998) pp.186–207.

4. Newman and Paasi (note 3) p.187, emphasis in original.5. Blake (note 2) pp.1–2.6. Blake (note 2).7. Hastings Donnan and Thomas M Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State

(Oxfoprd: Berg, 1999) p.4.8. Georg Simmel, quoted in Herbert Dittgen, ‘The End of the Nation-State?’, in Pratt and

Brown (note 2) p.53.9. John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge, Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and Political

Economy (London: Routledge 1995).10. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (London:

Routledge 1996).11. Ó Tuathail (note 10) esp. pp.57–74.12. David Newman, ‘Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity: Towards Shared or Separate

Spaces?’ in Pratt and Brown (note 2) pp.17–34.13. Newman (note 12) p.17. See Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in

the Interlinked Economy (London: Fontana, 1991); Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of Regional Economies (London: HarperCollins, 1995); Kenichi Ohmae, TheInvisible Continent: Four Strategic Imperatives of the New Economy (London: NicholasBrealey 2001).

14. Newman and Paasi (note 3) p.189.15. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity

(Manchester: Manchester University Press 1992).16. Michael Shapiro and Hayward Alker (eds), Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows,

Territorial Identities (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996).17. Newman and Paasi (note 3) p.188.18. James N. Rosenau, Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a

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Turbulent World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997).19. Newman and Paasi (note 3) p.187. For Rosenau’s critique of realism and liberalism see

Rosenau (note 18) pp.30–32.20. E.g. R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press 1993).21. Newman and Paasi (note 3) p.188 note this metaphorical usage in general.22. There are many accounts of this move in international relations theory. See, for example, Jim

George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)introduction to International Relations(Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner 1994).

23. The most highly developed, although not necessarily the most persuasive, account of theideational nature of the international system is Alexander Wendt, Social Theory ofInternational Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999) esp. pp.92–138.

24. Kimberly Hutchings, International Political Theory: Rethinking Ethics in a Global Era(London: Sage 1999).

25. E.g. Walker (note 20).26. An early example of this, although from a very different perspective to Walker’s, is Charles

R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress 1979).

27. Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (London:Harvester Wheatsheaf 1992).

28. E.g. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford:Robertson 1983); David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon 1995).

29. Brown (note 27).30. Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the

Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).31. Mervyn Frost, Ethics in International Relations: A Constitutive Theory (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press 1996).32. Hutchings (note 24) esp. pp.55–90.33. Molly Cochran, Normative Theory in International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999) pp.21–120.34. Ibid. p.118.35. Ibid. pp.173–211.36. Newman (note 12).37. Andrew Sayer and Michael Storper, ‘Ethics Unbound: For a Normative Turn in Social

Theory’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15/1 (1997) p.1.38. David M. Smith, ‘Geography and Ethics: How Far should we Go?’ Progress in Human

Geography 23/1 (1999) p.123.39. One example of this near paranoia is Ó Tuathail’s critique of Luttwak’s ‘geo-economics’,

which he introduces by highlighting Luttwak’s Transylvanian ancestry. Ó Tuathail (note 10)p.231. See the critique of post-modern and post-structural theory’s ethical failures in Sayerand Storper (note 37) esp. pp.4–5.

40. E.g. Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Non-Ethnocentric Universalism’, in Tim Dunne and Nicholas J.Wheeler (eds), Human Rights in Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press1999) p.150.

41. Cochran (note 33) pp.246–73.42. Ibid. p.255.43. This can be a problem even for post-positivist ethical theories. Ibid. pp.167–70.44. Ibid. pp.173–272.45. Hutchings (note 24) pp.28–54.46. E.g. Ruggie, ‘Territoriality’ (note 1).47. John Gerard Ruggie, ‘What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the

Social Constructivist Challenge’, International Organization 52/4 (1998) p.873.48. Sayer and Storper (note 37) p.11.49. Newman (note 12) p.19.50. Sayer and Storper (note 37) p.11.51. Frost’s constitutive theory has sometimes been seen as open to this charge, although he

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avoids it in my view. For discussions of Frost’s theory see Cochran (note 33) pp.78–120;Peter Sutch, ‘Human Rights as Settled Norms: Mervyn Frost and the Limits of HegelianHuman Rights Theory’, Review of International Studies 26/2 (2000) pp.215–32; JohnWilliams, ‘Mervyn Frost and the Constitution of Liberalism’, Journal of Peace Research35/4 (1998) pp.511–17.

52. Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1994).

53. Ibid.54. Ibid. pp.77–108.55. Spruyt (note 52).56. Ibid. pp.153–80.57. Ruggie, ‘What Makes the World Hang Together?’ (note 47).58. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political

Change’, International Organization 52/4 (1998) pp.887–918.59. Recall the arguments of Blake (note 2) about the requirements for ‘stress free borderlands’.60. E.g. Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press 1977) ch.6.61. A target here is Wendt (note 23). E.g. Steve Smith, ‘The Discipline of International

Relations: still an American social science?’ British Journal of Politics and InternationalRelations 2/3 (2000).

62. Newman and Paasi (note 3) p.191.63. Donnan and Wilson (note 7).64. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1958) p.8.65. Arendt, Human Condition (note 64).66. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1973)

p.ix.67. Ibid. See also John Williams, ‘The Ethics of Borders and the Borders of Ethics: International

Society and Rights and Duties of Special Beneficence’, Global Society 13/4 (1999).68. A useful discussion of issues such as these can be found in Nigel Dower and John Williams

(eds), Global Citizenship: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2002)in particular Section 3.

69. For a discussion of the idea of territorial borders contributing to an ethic of toleration ininternational relations see John Williams, ‘Territorial Borders, Toleration and the EnglishSchool’, Review of International Studies 28/4 (2002) pp.737–58.

70. For a critique of the sovereign states-system in these terms see Ken Booth, ‘Human Wrongsand International Relations’, International Affairs 71/1 (1995) pp.103–26.

71. The classic account is Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in WorldPolitics (London: Macmillan 1977).

72. E.g. Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in InternationalSociety (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000).

73. Hedley Bull, ‘The State’s Positive Role in International Affairs’, Dædalus 108/4 (1979).Hedley Bull, Justice in International Relations (Ontario: University of Waterloo Press,1984).

74. Williams, ‘Territorial Borders’ (note 69).

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