Shape shifting: Civilizational discourse and the analysis of cross-cultural interaction in the constitution of international society

The first wave

The significance of civilization to English School conceptions of international society has been evident from the outset (Epp, 1998). The first wave of English School scholars produced several important texts that engaged with discourses of civilization. These include Wight’s (1977) Systems of States and important essay ‘Theory of Mankind: Barbarians’ (Wight, 2002), Hedley Bull’s (1977) the Anarchical Society and Justice in International Relations (1984) and Adam Watson’s (1992) The Evolution of International Society. But the most important and canonical of these texts are Bull and Watson’s (1984) The Expansion of International Society and Gerrit Gong’s (1984) The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society. These texts have provided nodal points for subsequent ‘utterances’ in the English School’s engagement with civilizational discourse. I identify three principal sites at which discourses of civilization feature in this first wave: the role of a common civilization as the foundation for international society; the concept of the ‘standards of civilization’; and the language practices that juxtapose civilization and barbarism. Whereas the latter two sites engage primarily with the discourse of civilization in the singular, the first engages with civilization in the plural.

Both Wight and Bull treated cultural unity as vital to the foundation of international society and civilization as the quintessential representation of a common culture. Wight (1977) observes that systems of states will not come into being without a degree of cultural unity among its members (1977: 33). Bull’s conception of international society was more functionalist and instrumentalist than Wight’s (Buzan, 1993; Hurrell, 2008). For Bull, international society was more a practical than purposive society (Nardin, 1983) in so far as common needs and interests can generate common rules, common modes of thought, patterns of behaviour and norms and values, which may even themselves produce a common culture (Bull, 2000: 184). But at the same time, Bull treats cultural cohesion and civilizational commonality as foundational for the formation and smooth operation of international societies. For instance, Bull (1977) observed that all historical international societies ‘were founded on a common culture or civilization or at least some element of such a civilization’ (1977: 16). Thus, for both Wight and Bull, civilization provided a crucial thread weaving the webs of meaning that constituted international society. Similarly, Adam Watson (1992) saw links between civilizational identities and common codes of conduct, assumptions and values that facilitate the cohesion of international society.

Reflections on inter-civilizational encounter and their implications feature strongly in Bull’s (1984) Justice in International Relations and Wight’s International Theory. However, it is Bull and Watson’s (1984) edited collection The Expansion of International Society that most clearly articulates the English School’s engagement with inter-civilizational encounters and the role of civilization in the constitution of international society. The essays in this collection revolve around the narrative of how encounters between Europeans and the peoples of the Americas, Africa and Asia ultimately led to the incorporation of non-European peoples into the sovereign state order. The concept of civilizations plays a crucial role in this narrative. Bull and Watson argue that in 1500 the world comprised a series of regional systems, each rooted in a particular cultural tradition and comprising developed civilizations: the system of Christendom, then Europe; three Islamic regional systems; and the Sinic system. This international system was characterized by ‘marginal contacts based on rudimentary precepts’ (Bull and Watson, 1984: 425) but subsequently transformed into a single global international system dominated by European states, ‘who had come to conceive themselves as forming an exclusive club enjoying rights superior to those of other political communities’ (1984: 426). Admission of non-Europeans to this club was not impossible but required compliance with standards and norms established by European powers (Bull and Watson, 1984; Gong, 1984).

This narrative, then, represents civilizational interaction as a key element in the expansion of international society, but focuses on how European international society established the terms of engagement for civilizational interaction, and how the institutional and normative structures of European international society became the foundations of global international society. ⁴ Global international society was formed as non-Western societies came to accept and conform with the criteria established by the West, expressed explicitly in civilizational terms as ‘the standards of civilization’. It clearly represents Europe or ‘the West’ as the source of global international society’s cultural cohesion. This belief was reiterated in Bull’s later concerns about the impact of growing cultural diversity of international society, which was the product of its ‘admission’ of new post-colonial states. Bull feared this could challenge the normative and institutional cohesion of international society. ⁵ Bull (1977) acknowledged that international society needed to incorporate some of the norms of other civilizations (1977: 315–317), but saw the Third World’s demands for ‘justice’ in the forms of national self-determination, racial equality and economic justice, – as constituting a ‘revolt against the West’ that threatened to destabilize an increasingly fragile consensus on the norms and institutions of the society. While acknowledging that demands for justice and equality ‘seem entirely compatible with the moral ideas that now prevail in the West’ and even took ‘Western moral premises as their point of departure’ (Bull, 1984: 5), Bull (1984) was concerned that differing interpretations of, for instance, sovereignty, self-determination and justice were not compatible with the West’s conceptions on which the society was founded (1984: 6–9).

At the same time, Bull (1977) also clearly remained confident that the Western-based international society would continue as the dominant forum for interaction among civilizations (1977: 41, 259, 295). This confidence in the universalization of Western civilization through the medium of international society is also reflected in Robert Jackson’s (2000) concept of the ‘global covenant’ of contemporary international society (Kayaoglu, 2010). Jackson (2000) acknowledges this covenant is embedded in the civilization of post-medieval Europe but argues it is no longer associated exclusively with Western civilization; instead it ‘serves as a bridge between the diverse cultures and civilizations in the contemporary world’ (2000: 24–25).

The first wave’s narrative of the expansion of international society therefore generates a particular ‘regime of truth’. It is a narrative of inter-civilizational encounter focused on the agency of Europeans and the centrality of European or ‘Western’ civilization in generating the structures of international society. It is also a narrative in which there is an immanent hierarchy of civilizations with Western civilization positioned at the core and non-Western civilizations at the periphery or outside international society. Global international society comes about through the incorporation of non-European peoples into a society defined and structured by Western civilization. Buzan (2010) describes this as the ‘vanguardist’ explanation of the expansion of international society in which ‘Europe remakes the world in its own political and economic image’ (2010: 6; Hobson, 2009; Kayaoglu, 2010; Stivachtis, 2008).

At one level, therefore, the first wave’s narrative of international society engages with a discourse of civilizations in the plural. However, this narrative is closely interwoven with engagement with the discourse of civilization in the singular. This is most evident in interweaving of the ‘standards of civilization’ into this narrative. The canonical text in this second site of engagement with discourses of civilization is Gong’s The Standard of Civilization. Gong places the ‘standards of civilization’ at the heart of encounters between Europe and other civilizations and societies. The ‘standards’ expressed tacit or explicit understandings of who belonged where and were a mechanism through European societies both differentiated themselves from, and regulated their relations with ‘others’ (Bowden, 2009: 104; Gong, 1984: 3). The standards were ‘self-consciously declared to represent universal values. Barbarians might therefore acquire ‘civilization’’ (Gong, 1984). This also married with a sense of the ‘noblesse oblige of the civilized to bring order and progress to “dark places” under the auspices of the civilizing mission’ (1984: 52).

Inclusion in and exclusion from international society, therefore, pivoted not simply on the presence of interaction, but on the politics of recognition. The criteria for recognition was the perceived willingness and capacity of non-European peoples to conform with structures and practices of governance articulated in the ‘standards’. ⁶ States adjudged to have met these criteria could be ‘admitted’ to the ‘family of civilized states’ which, until the latter nineteenth century, comprised only European peoples. ⁷ Gong and others acknowledged that conforming with the standards was often though not necessarily directly coerced, with emerging powers such as Japan keen to demonstrate their credentials to participate in the global civilizing mission. Suganami (1984) also notes the ‘eagerness’ of Japan to satisfy the European standard of civilization in both domestic and international affairs (1984: 198). The ‘standards of civilization’ are therefore treated as a regulatory and transformative force central to the constitution and expansion of European international society. This is not to say that concepts of standards of civilization are unique to Europe. Gong (1984) himself remarked that ‘the European confrontation with East Asia’ was not only political, economic, or military, ‘[i]t was also cultural and involved the clash of fundamentally irreconcilable standards of ‘civilization’ (1984: 172).

Perhaps one of the most significant dimensions of Gong’s analysis is his highlighting of how civilizational discourses contributed to the evolution of one of international society’s core institutions, international law. Gong (1984) demonstrates how the criteria established by the ‘standards’ generated a structural hierarchy of ‘civilized’, ‘semi-civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ countries – or as rendered in the work of legal publicist James Lorimer, civilized, barbarian and savage (1984: 57), determining the degree to which societies came within the ‘pale and protection’ of international law (1984: 6). This affected the degrees of protection afforded them by international law. ⁸ The standards were integrated into juridical codes to differentiate civilized from uncivilized people and to position them in hierarchies of interaction that empowered the ‘civilized’. This was expressed in mechanisms such as unequal treaties and capitulations (Gong, 1984: 64–69). Through international law, ‘civilization’ became a principal means of demarking of the boundaries of international society.

In his engagement with discourses of civilization, Gong demonstrates how the concept is used to both construct identities and to generate and naturalize particular hierarchies and subject positions, which are embedded in key institutions of international society. His work engages deeply with juxtapositional constructs, exploring how these legitimated particular practices, interventions and structures of authority of international society. ⁹ Gong’s work on the ‘standards of civilization’ resonates with Martin Wight’s (2002) discussion of the barbarian as a linguistic construct. This provides a third site of engagement with civilizational discourse among first-wave English School scholars. In his essay ‘Theory of Mankind’, Wight (2002) asks, how far does international society extend? And how does this affect human beings and societies that are external to it? (2002: 49). Wight explores how discourses of civilization and barbarism framed different conceptions of inter-cultural interaction and legitimate practices across different traditions of Western thought. Within the Realist tradition, the barbarian can be positioned outside the society of mankind, legitimating practices of subjugation or extermination. Within the Revolutionary tradition, the barbarian may be seen as holding equal rights within the community of mankind, legitimating practices of assimilation. Within the Rationalist tradition, the barbarian may be situated within the community of mankind but as a lesser moral being without the capacity to exercise full rights. This positioning facilitated the constitution of a hierarchy in which the civilized had a duty to bring the benefits of progress to ‘weaker’ societies, as expressed in the ‘civilizing mission’ and the ‘sacred trust of civilization’.

The ‘Theory of Mankind’ therefore explores the role of the language of civilization in constructing hierarchies of power and authority that helped to define international society. Significantly, like Gong, Wight explores the ways in which subjects are positioned within particular hierarchies of power and authority through strategies of juxtapositioning, and the ramifications of this for drawing the boundaries of international society. Wight (2002) demonstrates how each of these discursive representations legitimated quite different forms of political action: extermination, subjugation, tutelage or assimilation. This renders intelligible particular political practices across different contexts, including the evocation of the ‘sacred trust of civilization’. The ‘sacred trust’ was used to justify imperial authority, but lingered in the language of international governance as in the League of Nations Covenants and the Mandates system and in the United Nation’s Trusteeship Council.

The second wave

From the mid-1990s onward, the narrative of the expansion of international society has been critically scrutinized by what I describe as a second wave of English School scholars, which focused in particular on critique of The Expansion of International Society. Once again, engagement with discourses of civilization plays a key role in this work. The two sites which I focus upon here are a rewriting of the narrative of inter-civilizational encounter in the expansion of European international society and the role of civilization in constructing a bifurcated international order.

Many second-wave scholars critique the Eurocentricity of the Expansion of International Society’s narrative. In John Hobson’s (2014) terms, it depicts the expansion of international society as ‘the miraculous “big bang of modernity” that exploded autonomously into existence within Europe before the Western civilizational frontier expands outwards through the “Genesis Effect” to create an entirely new and fully Western earthly universe’ (2014: 563). ¹⁰ The second wave also critiques the Expansion narrative’s elision of the history of violent conquest and European domination. In his analysis of what he calls the ‘empire of civilization’, Brett Bowden (2009) observes that ‘[o]n practically every front, European expansion was by and large an aggressive act involving usually violent conquest and suppression of indigenous peoples’ (2009: 105; Crawford, 2017; Pearcey, 2016). It also ‘excluded the story of peoples destroyed and dispossessed in the process of expansion’ (Kayaoglu, 2010; Keal, 2003: 36; Keene, 2002).

While the first wave of authors did not completely ignore or valorize the physical and structural violence of these inter-civilizational encounters, this was not the primary focus or prominent part of their narrative. In contrast, second-wave scholars more strongly emphasize the role of discourses of civilization in legitimating such violence and the ‘exclusionary aspects of the standard of civilization’ (Pearcey, 2016: 3). Here then, second-wave scholars engage with discourses of civilization to challenge and disrupt ‘regimes of truth’ they see as immanent in the Expansion narrative. They do so by demonstrating the discursive ramifications of positioning Europeans at the centre of the expansion narrative, and marginalizing and silencing the experiences of others. Here, we see the unfolding of a counternarrative of the constitution and expansion of international society.

At the same time, there is a layering of texts, with second-wave scholars building on the work of Wight and Gong in revealing the juxtaposing of subjects through tropes of civilization and barbarism, and how this positions subjects within – or beyond – international society. They also build on Gong’s work tracing the links between civilizational hierarchies and the core institutions of international society, in particular international law and sovereignty (Keal, 2003; Pearcey, 2016). Legal codes that governed relations between ‘civilized and ‘uncivilized’ peoples, notes Keene (2002), are framed as ‘fulfilling a morally desirable purpose by enabling the former to bring civilization to those parts of the world that did not yet enjoy its benefits’ (2002: 111). However, scholars such as Keene are also critical of the failure of the Expansion narrative to sufficiently acknowledge the degree to which the evolution of a society of sovereign states was interwoven with the establishment of an extra-European international order that was imperial and hierarchal. Keene has made the influential argument that this generated a bifurcated order in which tolerance defined the purposes of the sovereign state order, while the civilizing mission defined the purpose of the hierarchical imperial order. These scholars build this critique upon critical legal scholars who argue that international law and the concept of sovereignty evolved not simply in the context of intra-European interaction but through the interaction between European and non-European peoples (Anghie, 2005; Koskenniemi, 2001).

It is important to note that first-wave scholars did acknowledge that the evolution of European international society and European expansion were ‘simultaneous processes, which influenced and affected one another’ (Bull and Watson, 1984: 6). But there is undoubtedly a more profound interest among second-wave scholars in exploring the interplay between the normative and institutional dynamics of imperial expansion and the constitution of European international society, and in the role of civilizational discourse in shaping, driving and structuring international society within this relationship. Civilizational discourse is treated as a generative force and identified as the central premise of this hierarchy, with the civilizing mission shaping the dynamics of European intervention and control over non-European peoples (Keene, 2002). Keene, Keal and Hobson’s analyses have become nodal texts in debates about the expansion of international society. They are influential reference points for alternative narratives that aim to reveal subjugated voices and to uncover power relations and relative silences inherent in first-wave analysis. They also deepen the analysis of how the ‘standards of civilization’ and the civilizing mission generated the structures of a dualistic international order within which international society itself evolved. They focus more fully on how the juxtaposing of civilization and barbarism framed the politics of recognition and subject positions that were embodied in international law, locating societies within hierarchies of power and authority.

Civilizational discourse and the third wave of English School scholarship

The first and second waves of English School scholarship provide an important intellectual platform for what I call the third wave of English School scholarship. Once again, engagement with discourses of civilization is an essential element of this still emerging body of work. The first site of engagement with civilizational discourses here is an expanded narrative of civilizational interaction that shifts the analysis beyond the responses of non-European peoples to European expansion towards the agency of non-Western actors themselves. The second is again the ‘standards of civilization’. However, in this wave there is a stronger focus on rupture and continuity in the discourse of the ‘standards’, and on the ongoing constitutive role the ‘standards’ play in international society. ¹¹

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the English School in the inter-cultural and civilizational dimensions of international society. ¹² One the objectives of this is to demonstrate that European expansion occurred within the context of existing societal and political structures and sophisticated patterns of commercial and political interaction, particularly across Asia and West Africa (Hobson, 2009, 2012; Phillips, 2014, 2017; Phillips and Sharman, 2015; Suzuki et al., 2014; Zhang, 2017). Buzan (2010) contrasts this ‘syncretist’ reading of the expansion of international society with the earlier ‘vanguardist’ narrative in so far as it highlights the formative influence of inter-civilizational encounter on international society. Hobson, for instance, argues that Europe’s engagement with these societies exposed it to ideas, institutions and practices that significantly influenced the evolution of European social and political institutions. These in turn provided the foundations of the society of sovereign states (Hobson, 2009, 2012). An excellent example of this approach is the collection of essays in Suzuki et al.’s (2014) International Orders in the Early Modern World: Before the Rise of the West. The editors of this volume powerfully critique the Eurocentricity of The Expansion narrative and the idea ‘that the only truly “international” and “cosmopolitan” norms that can be shared among humankind are those that originate from the West’ (Suzuki et al., 2014: 5). These essays represent the narrative of international society by setting the clock back to the early modern period, thus recalibrating the context of the narrative. They argue that Europe’s early encounters with non-Western societies were often shaped by the norms and practices of Europe’s interlocutors. This was a series of encounters negotiated across civilizational complexes within institutional and structural parameters often premised on non-Western worldviews. However, ‘in the English School’s narrative of the historical evolution of international society there is little scope for non-European actors to exercise any agency, as they are usually depicted as passive recipients of European norms’ or as potential threats (Suzuki et al., 2014: 5; see also Kayaoglu, 2010). But this critique is not confined to the work of the first-wave scholars. Suzuki et al. also see a degree of Eurocentricity in second-wave scholarship’s ongoing focus on the European role in the rise of global international society. While acknowledging Keene’s important contribution to ‘highlighting the coercive, “civilizing” face of European international society’, they critique his exclusive focus on European intellectual debates and history, omitting ‘the voices of those at the receiving end of Europe’s mission civilisatrice’ (Suzuki et al., 2014: 6).

These analyses broaden, deepen and shift the parameters of the historical and cultural contexts in which international society evolved. Once again, the pivot for the discussion is a critique of the narrative articulated in The Expansion of International Society; however, it goes beyond this and the second wave’s by repositioning non-European societies in the narrative of civilizational encounter. It is other civilizations rather than Europeans that are the principal subjects of the narrative with Europeans initially occupying a subordinate position within the narrative. This emphasizes the degree to which it was often other more powerful and sophisticated non-Western civilizations that defined the structures and terms of their engagements with Europeans rather than vice versa. ¹³ The growth of European power and the decline of other civilizations therefore is treated as a rupture in the politics of civilizational interaction, challenging the narrative of a teleological process of the expansion of European international society. This provides a more complex and nuanced reading of civilizational interaction than that found in first- and second-wave English School scholarship. The complexities of civilizational interaction hinted at in The Expansion are now placed at the heart of narratives and truth claims about international society.

In analysing the dynamics of civilizational interaction, third-wave scholars engage with discourses of civilization in the plural. However, this wave has also deeply engaged the discourse of civilization in the singular in regard to how shifting perceptions and configurations of the ‘standards of civilization’ have influenced the politics of recognition and legitimacy in international society. For instance, Zarakol (2011) explores how the politics of stigma peripheralized actors such as Turkey, Japan and Russia. She explores in greater depth how European standards of civilization were internalized by emerging national elites as a marker of modernity to be aspired to, in part, to facilitate their inclusion and recognition in international society. Aalberts has continued the School’s exploration of the interplay between the standards of civilization and international law. However, she treats international law as not only as an institution but an ordering principle, a governmental technology and a form of productive power through which shifting conceptions of legitimate authority are articulated and regulated (Aalberts, 2014: 779).

Aalberts’ work is emblematic of ongoing interrogation within the English School of how the discourse of the ‘standards’ not only shaped the boundaries and structures of international society in the past but continue to do so in the present. In the first instance, this wave of scholarship traces shifts in how the language of civilization is situated in the politics of legitimacy and recognition. For instance, scholars such as Buzan (2014), Linklater (2016) and Zhang (2014) bring to the fore how the ‘standards of civilization’ were discredited by the mass slaughter of two world wars and the Holocaust. This analysis reveals the denaturalization of the idea of a hierarchy of civilizations and the superiority of Western civilization, which in turn challenged the legitimacy of European rule over others. In Zhang’s (2014) words, the standard of civilization that was ‘codified in international law first crumbled in the ashes of the First World War and was totally discredited when many of the cultural assumptions that had underpinned the European states system “vanished in the fog of war”’ (2014: 683; Linklater, 2016). Married to this are challenges to the ethical and political premises of the ‘standards’ themselves. Reus-Smit (2013), for instance, argues that the articulation of conceptions of universal human rights and the self-determination generated a normative shift in understandings of civilization and its configurative influence on conceptions of sovereignty. ‘Decolonization’ argues Barry Buzan (2014), ‘put an end to the “standard of civilization” as a polite term of political discourse’ (2014: 585). Here then, third-wave scholars engage with discourses of civilization to explicate the role of the language of civilization in undermining the legitimacy of colonialism, contributing to the reconstitution of international society.

Again, we can see a layering of texts within the English School here. First-wave scholars such as Gong (1984) had noted the erosion of the legitimacy of the ‘standards’ (1984: 90). Robert Jackson (1993) had also mapped the erosion of civilization as a criterion for sovereign recognition and self-determination as a component of the shift from the norm of ‘positive sovereignty’ to ‘negative sovereignty’ in international society. Subsequent waves of English School scholars build on but challenge this narrative on two fronts. First, they place greater emphasis on how the language of the ‘standards’ and the civilizing mission still lingered in UN Trusteeship system, where administering powers continued to be designated the responsibility to promote the ‘progressive development’ of trust territories ‘towards self-government or independence as appropriate’ (Crawford, 2002: 312; Keene, 2002). Reus-Smit (2018) goes further in arguing that the ‘standards of civilization’ were, in effect, still used until the 1970s to ‘police the movement of colonial people towards independence’ (2018: 203). But on the other hand, Reus-Smit’s (2011) also highlights the agency post-colonial states in ‘grafting’ the right to self-determination onto the emergent norms of universal human rights and racial equality, and framing self-determination as a prerequisite for achieving human rights (2011: 235–236). This shows how newly independent states redefined the ‘regimes of truth’ contained in the narrative of the role of civilization and the institution of sovereignty in international society (Reus-Smit, 2013). Thus, whereas Jackson’s engagement with the discourse of civilization focuses on normative change within the colonial powers, more recent scholarship highlights the agency of the colonized and post-colonial states.

Third-wave scholarship thus engages with both continuity and rupture in the language of civilization in the constitution of international society. It also engages with the ‘standards’ as an ongoing force that positions states within contemporary international society. This includes demonstrating how ideas of moral and political progress intrinsic to the ‘standards of civilization’ have been reconfigured and persist in the normative frameworks of international society. These reconfigured norms continue to influence perceptions of legitimate forms of interaction and intervention. Concepts such as ‘good governance’ and human rights are represented as articulating a new ‘civilizing mission’ (Fidler, 2001; Linklater, 2017: 447–451). This includes, for instance, a critique of the ‘standards’ of market and financial civilization’. This refers to how international mechanisms and institutions are employed by organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to promote the standards of a liberal economic order such as trade and financial liberalization, transparency and regulation. As with earlier ‘standards of civilization’, states that do not or cannot comply with these standards may formally remain sovereign, but may find access to important resources and institutions limited or conditional (Best, 2006; Bowden, 2014; Bowden and Seabrooke, 2006; Fidler, 2001; Mozaffari, 2002). Nicolaides et al. (2014) similarly explore how the European Union and the concept of ‘normative power Europe’ establishes an ideal of ‘the good state’ premised on democracy, human rights and economic openness. This highlights the capacity of the EU to tacitly regulate the behaviour of other states and induce compliance to norms established by Europe through how it grants access to special partnerships or membership of the EU. Here, the relationship between democratic structures and international legitimacy is framed as a new configuration of the standards of civilization. Democracy, perceived as a marker of progress and a prerequisite for freedom, accountability and the rule of law, is represented as ‘the new focal point for the new standard of civilization’, with lack of respect for democracy even providing grounds for intervention in sovereign states (Clark, 2009; Hobson, 2008: 84; Stivachtis, 2008; Zhang, 2014).

One of the most prominent sites of the revival of the language of the ‘standards of civilization’ highlighted by third-wave scholars is human rights. This argument was foreshadowed by Gong (1984) and builds on Jack Donnelly’s (1998) widely cited essay. Donnelly represents human rights as the new ‘standard of civilization’ in so far as the language of universal human rights and racial equality re-inscribe concepts of moral and material progress. Universal human rights have been deeply integrated into the institutional and normative frameworks of international society at sites such as the UN Charter. International standards of human rights, argues Donnelly, have become part of the calculus of everyday legitimacy in the post-Cold War order. Zhang (2014) reiterates this in arguing that human rights may be ‘the most codified standard of “civilization” in international law and society today’ (2014: 689). But here the standards of civilization have become again a site of contestation. As noted above, the promotion of self-determination as a right was fundamental to decolonization and delegitimating the ‘standards of civilization’ as a regulatory framework of sovereignty (Aalberts, 2014). The commensurate reconceptualization of sovereignty fundamentally altered the boundaries and politics of recognition in international society. However, gross violations of human rights have also provided justifications for international intervention. As Linklater (2017) notes, this echoes conceptions of the responsibilities of ‘civilized states’ to intervene in other societies to contain violence and acts of ‘barbarism’ (2017: 451). States depicted as uncivilized, backward, illiberal or rogue are often represented as ‘failed states’, justifying interventions by states who conform to liberal criteria (Aalberts, 2014: 785). Yet the selectivity of humanitarian interventions has fuelled perceptions that human rights provides a new mechanism for promoting Western values and interests, replicating the use of civilizational discourse to construct hierarchies within, and the boundaries of, international society (Buzan, 2014; Teitt, 2017; Zhang, 2014, 2017).

The third wave of English School scholars therefore have used the language of the standards of civilizations to invoke the idea of gradations of sovereignty and the memory of imperial control (Aalberts, 2014; Bain, 2003). They challenge perceptions that civilizational discourses, and in particular, the ‘standards of civilization’, have become redundant in constituting international society and use the discursive tools of juxtapositional analysis and interpolation to read the structures and dynamics of contemporary international society. Discourses of civilization remain a powerful conceptual lens for these scholars through which to reveal structures and practices of recognition and the legitimation of particular forms of control and intervention. What is particularly interesting from a discursive perspective is how third-wave scholars invoke the ‘standards of civilization’ as a negative concept. Invoking the ‘standards’ is a very powerful rhetorical device used to critique the strategies associated with the liberal ‘good governance’ agenda, framing these as resonating with or even replicating norms and practices of the ‘civilizing process’. This contests a powerful narrative of progress within contemporary international society, positioning developing states in hierarchies of power that continue to legitimate the conditionality of sovereignty, rather than upholding the norms of sovereign equality that ostensibly define contemporary international society.