Valueism in International Politics

Where liberal and constructivist theories often assume the convergence of values across states, I argue that legitimacy in international politics is shaped by persistent value pluralism. My in-progress book manuscript, Valueism: A Theory of Legitimacy in International Politics, develops this approach by demonstrating how different societies generate and defend value systems that structure their perceptions of security. This framework has direct implications for nuclear politics, as value pluralism informs debates over nuclear responsibility, proliferation norms, and the legitimacy of deterrence doctrines. By introducing valueism, I aim to create a new line of inquiry that will inspire both my own future research and a broader scholarly conversation, opening space for an entirely new generation of work on legitimacy, values, and international security.

This chapter introduces Valueism as a new paradigm in international relations. It argues that states do not act primarily on material interests, institutional incentives, or socialized norms, but rather through recursive performances of legitimacy. Beliefs, shaped by memory, trauma, and narrative, give rise to values, which then guide behavior. Behavior generates feedback, which either consolidates or recalibrates the beliefs and values that anchor legitimacy. What traditional IR dismisses as inconsistency or hypocrisy—such as democratic states acting illiberally, or ideological opposites aligning—is instead interpreted as the normal process of legitimacy negotiation.

Here the book lays out its theoretical core. States, the chapter argues, do not project all of their values into international life. They selectively project those that sustain their domestic legitimacy while remaining legible abroad. This selection process is constrained by what the author calls legitimacy architectures—slow-moving moral frameworks, such as sovereignty, liberty, dignity, or resistance, sedimented through history, religion, and collective memory. Thus the United States projects freedom and democracy, China projects sovereignty and harmony, Iran projects resistance and dignity. Foreign policy is framed less as a matter of interest than as a recursive affirmation of the self through value performance.

This chapter explains how to study Valueism empirically. It distinguishes between values (symbolic moral architectures), beliefs (cognitive interpretations of causality and context), and legitimation (the performance that ties them together). It shows how states prioritize some values while suppressing others, and how these projections serve as justification, signaling, narrative alignment, or reflexive reassurance. The chapter also outlines a Valueist research design, drawing on process tracing, discourse analysis, and symbolic interpretation, to track how legitimacy is continually performed and recalibrated.

The Peloponnesian War, often claimed by realism as evidence of power transition, is here reinterpreted as a conflict of incompatible legitimacy systems. Athens performed a democratic-imperial ethos, rooted in civic dynamism and rational superiority, while Sparta embodied restraint, hierarchy, and order. Episodes like Pericles’ Funeral Oration, the Mytilenean Debate, and the Melian Dialogue show that war was driven less by polarity than by failures of normative recognition—neither city could accept the other’s values as legitimate. The war, from a Valueist perspective, was a crisis of mutual unintelligibility rather than an inevitable clash of power.

This chapter critiques the democratic peace thesis, arguing that peace among democracies is not guaranteed by institutions but by moral alignment. Democracies coexist peacefully when they share mutually intelligible legitimacy architectures—when they read each other’s actions as justified within a common moral grammar. The U.S.–U.K. alliance exemplifies this alignment, while World War I demonstrates its breakdown between Britain and Germany. The 2003 Iraq War shows how democratic allies fractured over divergent beliefs about what democracy required. India’s strategic autonomy, meanwhile, demonstrates democracy without liberal convergence. Peace, in this account, is contingent on legitimacy recognition, not regime type.

While constructivism emphasizes norms and identity, this chapter argues that it depends too heavily on assumptions of mutual intelligibility. Valueism highlights that norms often fail to translate across legitimacy systems. The Responsibility to Protect, embraced in principle but discredited after Libya, is one example of normative misrecognition. China’s legitimacy grammar of sovereignty and civilizational renewal, the European Union’s internal fractures over migration and law, and the fractured foundations of the nuclear taboo all illustrate how normative consensus often masks deep moral dissonance. Constructivism describes contestation; Valueism explains incommensurability.

Bringing queer IR into the Valueist framework, this chapter uses the metaphor of the closet to explore how sovereignty and legitimacy are performed through managed visibility. Queer lives become symbolic terrain on which states reaffirm sovereignty—Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act and Russia’s anti-LGBTQ laws cast queerness as foreign threat to national order. Queer asylum processes demand forced legibility, disciplining applicants into narrow narratives of identity, while reproductive violence in U.S. detention centers exposes the biopolitics of legitimacy. By contrast, Brazil’s travesti movements resist necropolitics by creating their own infrastructures of survival and value. The chapter insists legitimacy must move beyond recognition to honor opacity and unintelligibility as valid in themselves.

This chapter places Valueism in dialogue with Marxist and postmodern traditions. Marxism reveals structural exploitation, and postmodernism exposes the fictions of order, but neither can fully account for legitimacy collapse. Case studies show how austerity and debt regimes moralize suffering as responsibility, how the War on Terror became a cycle of infinite justification that hollowed its own moral authority, and how climate collapse has created governance without a believable future. Valueism reframes these crises not as anomalies but as instances of legitimacy exhaustion, where values are reconfigured in fragments, flows, and fugitive performances.

Here the book consolidates its paradigm. It lays out six foundational commitments: values are primary, legitimacy is performed, values travel and recombine, the body is a site of politics, power is value-laden, and theorizing is an act of moral attention. It proposes methodologies of attunement, fragments, and refusal, and argues for reorienting pedagogy and research around ethical presence. The chapter frames Valueism not as another addition to IR theory, but as a paradigm shift—a call to rebuild the discipline around plural legitimacy systems and the values people live, defend, and grieve.

The conclusion synthesizes the argument, insisting that legitimacy in global politics cannot rest on universal norms or institutional convergence. Instead, it must be understood as plural, performative, and recursive. In a world of many moral orders, politics becomes the work of recognition across difference, even when translation fails. Valueism calls for international relations to embrace ethical presence—staying with contradiction, honoring opacity, and bearing witness to values in motion. The book closes with an invitation: not to restore a single global order, but to learn to live in a world made of many worlds.