Keene Edward. Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics

Cambridge University Press, 2004. — 181 p.Edward Keene argues that the popular idea of an ‘anarchical society’ of equal and independent sovereign states is an inadequate description of order in modern world politics. International political and legal order has always been dedicated to two distinct goals:it tries to promote the toleration of different ways of life, but at the same time it promotes one specific way of life that it labels ‘civilization’. The nineteenth-century solution to this contradiction was to restrict the promotion of civilization to the world beyond Europe. That discriminatory way of thinking has now broken down, with the result that a single, global order is supposed to apply to everyone, but that has left us with an insoluble dilemma as to what the ultimate purpose of this global order should be, and how its political and legal structure should be organized.
Edward Keene is Tutor in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford, and has previously taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. With Eivind Hovden he co-edited the journal Millennium, and The Globalization of Liberalism (2002). He is the author of International Society as an Essentially Contested Concept in Michi Ebata and Beverly Neufeld (eds.), Confronting the Political: International Relations at the Millennium (2000) and The Reception of Hugo Grotius in International Relations Theory (Grotiana).