*Originally published in 2018. This is a forum article containing contributions by Jacinta O’Hagan, John Williams, Cornelia Navari, Matthew S. Weinert, Filippo Costa Buranelli, Dimitrios Stroikos, Thomas Linsenmaier, Barry Buzan.

Bringing conceptual clarity to the English School concept of a world society was a major agenda item and justification of Barry Buzan’s proposal to reconvene the English School.[i] As the English School has developed over the past two decades, its world society concept has been the subject of persistent debate concerning the significance and nature of the political world beyond the society of states. To reassess and advance this ongoing debate, the special issue, ‘Conceptualizing World Society’ was convened and published in International Politics. The special issue collected contributions from Cornelia Navari, Matthew S. Weinert, A.C. McKeil, Filippo Costa Buranelli, Dimitrios Stroikos, Thomas Linsenmaier, and Yannis Stivachtis, with Barry Buzan providing a revisiting of world society as a response to the special issue as a whole. The special issue makes a number of key conceptual distinctions and advances a number of empirical findings.

In light of the complexity and the breadth of these conceptual and empirical advances, this forum article is convened here in e-International Relations, to complement the special issue. This forum article aims to cement the special issue by bringing an added layer of reflection to the number of conceptual distinctions and empirical contributions it develops. In this forum article, Jacinta O’Hagan and John Williams provide invited commentaries on the special issue and the contributors to the special issue were asked to provide reflections on their contributions in respect to the special issue. Lastly, Barry Buzan provides a final re-visiting of his response to the special issue. 

The commentaries and discussions in this forum article suggest a consensus: the political world beyond society of states plays a significant role in world politics and as such world society remains squarely on the agenda of the English School. This forum article also suggests the English School world society debate is far from settled, containing more focused but nonetheless persistent contentions. These contentions include, chiefly but not exclusively, the fundamental institutions of world society, the status of normative world society, the major actors and role of regions in world society, as well as the conditions, processes, form, and historical character of a sociological transformation from international to world society.

This forum article proceeds first with invited commentaries from Jacinta O’Hagan and John Williams, followed by reflections on the special issue by its contributors. The forum article concludes with Buzan’s revisiting of his ‘Revisiting World Society’. 

The principal objective of this special issue is to probe the concept of world society, a concept that is generating renewed interest in English School thought. The problem of how to define world society is one that concerns each of the contributors. However taken as a whole the collection is less about providing the definitive meaning of this concept than about how the concept can contribute to our understanding of world politics, be that as a normative aspiration, a shared social space, a network of actors and institutions, or as forms of political community. The collection therefore becomes a rich conversation about issues ranging across agency and structure, power and norms, legitimacy and institutions; and – importantly - with processes of constitution and of transformation.

All of the contributors observe the lack of specificity in the definition of world society but there is a consensus that it refers to a realm of agency beyond the state, be that cast broadly as a society of mankind or the network of non-state actors that permeates world politics. But how, as McKeil asks, do we conceptualize this realm? These actors are not necessarily seen as independent of the state or the states system; in fact the interaction between world society and the society of states is a core concern of all contributors. Where the contributors do vary is how they position themselves in the debate on understanding world society as a normative domain, animated by a foundational cosmopolitan conception of a community of humankind, or a more sociological conception of world society constituted by networks of non-states actors, which provide services, act as sites of advocacy, and seek to influence the society of states. An interesting question is the degree to which these conceptions of world society are mutually exclusive or interconnected? Buzan seeks to draw elements of this discussion together by reiterating his distinction between normative world society as a realm in which primary institutions are lodged, whilst the political world society comprises actors and institutions that actively purse and operationalize these primary institutions. To an extent this resonates with Weinert’s argument that shared normative and cognitive dispositions consciously aim to (re)produce integrative systems in the particular ‘worldly domains’ (p. 29). This suggests that rather than envisaging world society as either a normative or political realm, we should understand the concept as multi-faceted or even multilayered. However it also suggests that whilst normative world society may be a prerequisite for the political world society the opposite may not be the case (i.e. the social networks and structures may not be present or sufficiently robust or powerful to mobilize the primary institutions of world society).

A second key theme that animates a number of the contributions is how we define the scope of world society, specifically is world society necessarily a global realm? For a number of contributors, world society can also exist at a sub-global level, such as at the regional level (Linsenmaier, Buranelli, Stivachtis. See also Buzan and McKeil). Perceptions of common cultures – religion, language, histories, ethnicities generate a sense of collective, transnational identity that help to locate actors in a broader imagined community (regional world society) that can be mobilized in political practices. Linsenmaier makes a useful distinction here between ‘world society’ and ‘world’ society. Here ‘world’ refers to ‘large scale’ forms of human organization that have ‘self–contained’ qualities.  This resonates with Immanuel Wallerstein’s conception of ‘world systems’, which are also not necessarily global in scale. However the idea of regional world societies raises of the question of what differentiates a ‘world’ society from other ways in which we imagine political community at the sub-global level, such as through concepts such as regionalism, or transnational or ‘Pan’ identities? In other words, what ‘work’ does world society do that is not already being done by other concepts of political community?

The same question might also be asked at the global level: what work does world society do that is not currently being done by, for instance, globalization, civilization or transnational civil society? To me part of the answer is ontological; that is the idea of ‘world’ society provides us not only with idea of shared identities, values or a more encompassing conception of agency but that it is associated with a particular worldview. This then prompts an important question that is particularly relevant at the global level: to what extent is world society necessarily understood as a manifestation of a particular worldview; that is of a liberal cosmopolitan world view linked with conceptions of modernity and progress? Can world society be constituted by alternative worldviews premised on different ontologies, relational and normative structures and configurations of agency? Here McKeil’s observation of the importance of historical context is important.  It suggests that world society provides a potentially useful framework for analyzing the evolution of world politics across different historical and cultural locations. This could help us escape rather than become further bound to a Western-centric reading of world politics. It allows us to ask questions about if and how alternative and even contending ‘world’ societies coexist?  In this context, world society may provide us with a valuable lens to examine not only contending conceptions of world order in the past but vying structures of agency and fundamental institutions animated by different world views in contemporary world politics. 

Reading the papers in this Special Issue clearly reiterates the dynamism of the world society debates within contemporary ES theory and the commitment to the centrality of the concept to the School's future. Getting beyond the idea of world society as a ‘residual’ or ‘dustbin’ concept where things ES theorists wish to set to one side reside animates all the contributors, although in very different ways.

The diversity of research agendas in these papers reflects the recognised incoherence of the world society concept itself as it stood in the mid-2000s. The authors here are pursuing issues including: basic methodological debates about how to go about framing, understanding and developing the concept and its relationship to wider elements of the ES framework, typically building on Buzan's work as the baseline for this, which acknowledges the foundational work he has done here, and the need to move........

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