ABSTRACT
The previous three chapters have set out some conceptual clarifications about punishment at the global level.160 In Chapter 1, I argued that punishment is necessary for a just political order, but only if the institutions that engage in punishment exist within a constitutional international order. Chapter 2 took on the claim that punishment cannot take place at the global level because of a lack of a single sovereign authority. In response to this critique, I drew on the works of John Locke and Hugo Grotius to argue that punishment can take place without a single sovereign but only if judicial institutions of a sort can play some role in adjudicating violations of norms. Chapter 3 pointed to the tension that arises at the global level when punitive practices do not target the proper agent. This raised questions of the relationship between agency and responsibility, especially in an international system in which there are different types of agents operating. I explore some of those tensions by developing the idea of political agency as an alternative to moral and legal agency, a concept I draw from Hannah Arendt.
