Responsibility in World Politics: Moral Agency and Normativity

The workshop investigates the rise of the concept ‘responsibility’ in global politics. It focuses on responsibility as a normative focal point in different policy fields, wit regard to particular objects, and in international society more broadly. The workshop aims to, first, identify the origin of the concept of responsibility or how it became the key point of reference in world politics and, secondly, examine how this conceptual and normative turn plays out in practice. Taking its cue from critical norms research that demands a focus on practices of contestation of different meanings, the workshop embarks from the observation that responsibility has become a focal point of global politics in a multitude of contexts. For one, it plays out in different policy fields, most prominently security (R2P), environment (CBDR) and economics (CSR) but also in connection to human rights, fair trade, finance, health governance, as well as science and technology. In addition, references to responsibility occur in relation to objects of global governance, such as oil, fish, cyberspace, human genetics, human-animal relations, space and the earth’s atmosphere. Finally, responsibility is at the centre of international fora and organisations: the EU’s normative power has been a much-discussed case in point, but BASIC/BRICS fora are increasingly developing their own approaches which may lead to a non-Western understanding of responsibility in global politics. The common denominator between policy fields, objects and fora is the contestation of the meaning of responsibility, especially who is held responsible for what and by whom. Against this background, we invite contributions that investigate how the norm of responsibility emerged and how it is contested on the ground with regard to a specific policy field, object or in an international forum. The workshop’s contribution is twofold. First, shifting attention from regulations and rights, and thus from compliance and accountability, to responsibility brings into focus moral agency in international relations. Second, the workshop will lead to more general conclusions about responsibility in world politics. The objective is to examine whether there are similar processes and mechanisms at work across areas as well as to account for variation by identifying the conditions under which moral agency works. The collection of case studies leads into an empirically dense understanding of responsibility with a focus on core policy problems of global concern.