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Introduction: evolving conceptualizations of world society
Globalization has changed the human world in myriad ways, but it has done relatively little to change international relations theory's focus on the state. After all, ‘national’ is in the very name of the discipline. At its core, international relations theory is still ‘an area of study concerned with the interrelationships among states in an epoch in which states, and most commonly nation-states, are the principal aggregations of political power’ (Cox, 1981, 126). Like other contemporary approaches to international relations, the ‘English School’ approach associated with Bull (1977), Wight (1977, 1992), and Buzan (2004, 2014a) tends to be ontologically state-centric (Devlen, James, and Ozdamar, 2005, 176), yet English School scholars have long sought to supplement the study of the international system of competing states with the study of a ‘second-order’ society of states under the rubric of ‘international society’ (Buzan, 2014a, 12–15). This research program is now well-developed and intellectually well-elaborated, and has entered the mainstream of the discipline (Buzan, 2004, 2014a).
English School scholars have also pioneered the theorization of ‘world society’ in international relations. In its English School conceptualization, world society is not a second-order society of societies but a first-order society of individual human beings (Buzan, 2014a, 15) that, together with the international society of states, constitute a whole society of human institutions (Albert and Buzan, 2013). The English School understanding of world society is similar to that pioneered by Meyer et al. (1997) and the ‘Stanford School’ in sociology, who characterize world society as ‘stateless’ (145, 169) and ‘mainly made up of what may … be called ‘rationalized others’: social elements such as the sciences and professions … that give advice to nation-state and other actors about their true and responsible natures, purposes, technologies, and so on’ (162). Buzan ranks world society among the core concepts of the English School, maintaining that ‘the foundation of English School theory is the idea that international system, international society and world society all exist simultaneously,’ but in Buzan's view, ‘world society has been the Cinderella concept of English School theory, receiving relatively little attention and virtually no conceptual development’ (Buzan, 2004, 10–11). He emphasizes that ‘if, as many people think, the world...