This introduction to the Agora outlines the issues raised by and arguments in Itamar Mann’s article, ‘From survival cannibalism to climate politics: Rethinking Regina vs Dudley and Stephens’, and the four commentaries thereon.

Many global norms are currently facing substantial contestation by various actors. While contestation is a regular practice in norm dynamics, it can potentially result in the destabilisation of norms. At the same time, international city networks (ICNs) are increasingly positioning themselves in global governance. While research in International Relations has not analysed how ICNs respond to norm contestation and whether they stabilise existing norms and normative orders, this article demonstrates that ICNs are relevant actors in norm dynamics by focusing on their activities. To examine how ICNs stabilise norms, we employ a theoretical framework based on existing approaches in norm research, which assumes that norms must be as robust, resilient and legitimate as possible to maintain their functions in facilitating individual orientation and collective order. Empirically, we analyse the stabilising activities of three ICNs – Mayors for Peace, Rainbow Cities Network and Fast-Track Cities Initiative – as contributions to preventing norm decay in security, human rights and health. We show that these ICNs stabilise norms by supporting them in discourse and practice, by connecting norms in clusters, and by including affected stakeholders. In sum, we present ICNs as relevant actors in global governance due to their stabilising activities and networked capacities.

This essay proposes a novel framework for conceptualising climate politics through the lens of maritime custom. Drawing on A. W. Brian Simpson’s study of Regina vs Dudley and Stephens (1884) and Cătălin Avramescu’s intellectual history of cannibalism, it critically examines ‘providential’ and ‘catastrophic’ lifeboat metaphors in political thought. Despite their apparent opposition, these metaphors share common assumptions rooted in natural law traditions. As an alternative, the essay introduces the concept of the ‘commonist lifeboat’, grounded in maritime custom, class consciousness and environmental encounters. Inspired by historical practices of survival and mutual aid at sea, this approach suggests principles for addressing climate adaptation through bottom-up customs rather than top-down theoretical solutions. Three brief illustrations address climate policy’s intersections with property law, criminal law and international human rights law. This approach ultimately offers a historically informed perspective on climate crisis challenges, reconciling consequentialist arguments with concerns for dignity and consent.

This article examines the paradoxical effects of international legal accountability processes on the international law of intelligence. In response to increasing exposure of their intelligence activities, liberal democracies have shifted from a national security culture of secrecy to one of legal rationalisation, offering legal justifications to defend and legitimate contested practices. Rather than improving compliance, accountability processes have enabled states to strategically reshape legal norms to accommodate their preferred policies. Focusing on how legal justifications affect international law’s constraining function, the article analyses the effects of legal justifications on three dimensions of legal norms: obligation, precision and delegation. Intertwining doctrinal legal analysis with International Relations scholarship on rhetorical and justificatory approaches to international law, it identifies four causal mechanisms through which strategic legal justifications decrease law’s constraining power on state behaviour and facilitate norm evasion. The article demonstrates how strategic uses of international law for legitimation purposes can gradually alter legal norms without formal changes to legal texts or institutions, ultimately decreasing international law’s constraining power. Shedding light on the limits and risks of legalisation as a regulatory strategy, these findings raise important questions about the effectiveness and adequacy of legal accountability strategies, particularly strategic litigation, in inducing behavioural change.

In From Survival Cannibalism to Climate Politics (2025) as well as in Law and Politics from the Sea (2024) Mann proposes the ‘commonist lifeboat’ as a political metaphor for the age of climate change. This response to Itamar Mann’s re-reading of Regina vs. Dudley and Stephens proposes a materialist reading of his political theory of the ‘commonist lifeboat’, arguing that the lifeboat may be a metaphorical and practical site from which alternatives to our current ways of doing and thinking about politics in times of climate crisis might emerge. The text brings Mann’s lifeboat into conversation with my own and other scholars’ work on radical vessels – historical and contemporary – in order to demonstrate and expand its analytical capacity as a more-than-metaphorical term. Building on Mann’s use of the lifeboat as a metaphor and a site of maritime custom, I propose to understand the ‘commonist lifeboat’ also as a material container that operates in a specific material environment: the sea. I argue that a focus on the materiality of the sea and of the lifeboat may point to political practice, community and customs yet to be invented, which may help us navigate the turbulent political environment of our time.

In this commentary on Itamar Mann’s rich re-reading of Regina v Dudley and Stephens (1884), I want to draw attention to two issues. First, the salience of the distinction between abstraction and idealization for his argument. Second, the question of political form in relation to each of the three models of the lifeboat that Mann explore – the providential, the catastrophic, and the commonist. I do so in order to explore the implications of Mann’s proposal for the politics of global governance.

The Nordic countries have often been portrayed as pioneers of human rights and international law. However, few are aware that court-protected human rights played an almost negligible role in post-Second World War Scandinavia. Instead, scepticism towards natural law thrived, and minimalist procedural democracy alongside legal positivism positioned ‘the people’ as represented in parliament at the apex of the democratic hierarchy. Therefore, while the desire to impose judicial limits on parliamentary majorities after the Second World War came to dominate most international constitutional discourse as a combination of judicial review and rights, the Nordics cultivated a form of political and even anti-constitutionalist position long before the term gained popularity elsewhere. This article presents the untold story of how and why the Nordics became a symbol of procedural democracy and majoritarianism, making it challenging for the region to embrace a European constitutional order in full. It also argues that by having few judicial safeguards in place nationally, the Nordic countries are badly positioned in the event of a populist or illiberal takeover. The article warns that a procedural and anti-constitutional democracy model, still strongly hailed in the Nordic countries and increasingly prominent in recent constitutional literature, may legitimate illiberal leaders around the globe with its strong link between the idea of unconstrained power of the majority and the right to rule. It may also, in a European context, significantly obstruct the European Court of Justice’s efforts to flesh out a stronger European constitutional democracy.

Boat-based metaphors, which portray individual societies or even humanity as a whole as cast adrift on a sea of challenges, have resonated within political theory since the time of Plato, and they continue to frame how we understand and respond to key political choices. However, unless handled very carefully, they can facilitate mis-framings of our contemporary predicament. To date, these metaphors have often done a poor job of capturing the ecological challenges we face. They also risk downplaying the messy pluralism that enduringly characterises political life. If this is true, we should be suspicious of the conclusions their authors seek to draw about our collective future. Lifeboat metaphors, I will suggest, are prone to the same general problems but also add some distinctively their own. As a consequence they should be deployed with especial caution.

This article examines the relevance of ‘deliberative’ constitutionalism – the idea that democratic deliberation ought to inform our expectations of constitutional law and processes – to constitutional moments in non-state contexts. More specifically, it explores the ways in which extending a deliberative constitutional lens to non-state spaces can both enrich our understanding of the legal-political dynamics within these spaces and, in turn, inform the field of deliberative constitutionalism itself. To do this, it takes an empirical approach to interpret and analyse a constitutional process through which a university student union reinvented its own democratic structures, in significant part through a ‘deliberative mini-public’ of everyday members. Drawing on interviews, observations and records, it demonstrates that a deliberative constitutional lens maps onto and usefully interprets the democratic process in this context while also offering empirical insight into an underexplored dimension of deliberative constitutionalism: that is, connections between deliberative approaches ‘to’ constitutional reform and the resulting constitutional features ‘from’ which subsequent political deliberation flows. It shows how the former carries ‘through’ into the latter by way of the internalization of deliberative norms resulting from both direct and indirect experience with deliberative approaches.

In ‘From survival cannibalism to climate politics: Rethinking Regina vs Dudley and Stephens’, Itamar Mann argues inter alia that survival cannibalism and the duty to rescue at sea can inform how to approach climate politics (Mann, p 1). In this piece, I will address this claim through maritime law, the law of the sea and human rights law perspectives. In particular, I will argue that the criminalisation of survival cannibalism is justified on grounds of protection of the fundamental right to life. Survival cannibalism is presented here as a ‘practice’ or ‘custom of the sea’ rather than a maritime custom or ‘bottom-up customary law’ (Mann, pp 4–6). I will suggest an alternative model of sacrifice accompanied by a system of redress grounded in the maritime custom of general average to inform the commonist lifeboat model proposed. In this process that starts at the inner circle before moving to the outer circle where the customary duty to rescue at sea is examined, class dynamics will be briefly considered. The environment will be the last element examined through the Teitiota case. Human rights concerns inform the overall approach taken in an effort to affirm and advance fundamental principles in addressing climate adaptation.