In this paper I seek to develop an account of institutions of international society that contributes to the development of a revised and revived pluralist normative position. The paper argues that ‘traditional’ pluralist accounts of institutions, such as Bull’s, are overly tied to a highly conservative account of international society that unjustifiably separates international institutions from deeper social practices and also unjustifiably privileges discourses that are in compliance with dominant understanding of the nature and purpose of an institution over those which are in opposition to it. This produces a normative account of the role of institutions in international society that is focused on the maintenance of inter-state order. The paper argues that the leading contemporary account of institutions, Buzan’s, fails to address this problem because it consciously brackets out the normative dimension of English school theory, neglecting a critical aspect of the nature and purpose of institutions, despite the greater analytical insight enabled by his approach.
From this initial critique, the paper considers ‘subaltern’ social practices as providing distinctive normative insight into the operation of a range of institutions, including war and the market, reconnecting our understanding and assessment of institutions to social practices usually seen as located within ‘world society’ and as therefore occupying an ontologically distinct realm of global politics from the statist account of international society that dominates traditional pluralism.
The final section of the paper develops this analysis of institutions to highlight how a revised and revived pluralism has the potentially to better capture the connections between a much greater range of social and political communities that inform political life and the institutions of a statist international society. It is argued that this offers a far more normatively attractive and analytically insightful agenda for pluralism to pursue than that associated with traditional exponents such as Bull and Jackson.
