Abstract

Some scholars have argued that one of the most characteristic aspects of the ‘new’ post-1989 political and legal order has been the emergence—or re-emergence—of a form of international political morality based not on the ‘particularism’ of the modern society of States, but rather on the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the rising global society. Against the traditional State-centric approach to international relations, from the 1990s on there have been more and more positions favouring a real ‘global’ turn of politics, founded on ‘universal principles that challenge the presumed moral supremacy of territorial boundaries and which favor instead the welfare of humanity generally’. The aim of this chapter is to reconstruct the main issues at stake in the philosophical-political debate about the so-called “humanitarian turn” in global politics, in order to discuss their actual meaning in an age of ‘national-populist backlash’.