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Recent discussions of the epistemological and political implications of the situatedness of knowledge in International Relations (IR) have raised important questions regarding the future development of the discipline. They pose the challenge of understanding under what conditions human beings develop more or less reality-congruent knowledge about world politics and what are the implications of such knowledge for emancipatory political activity. This article argues that process sociology should be understood as a relevant complement to these discussions. Assuming a fundamentally ‘realist’ orientation, process sociology provides a sociologically informed analysis of the material, ideational and emotional forces shaping the development of knowledge. As such, it can help those concerned with the implications of the situatedness of knowledge in IR reinforce their capacity to both understand the social conditions under which it is possible to develop more detached and reality-congruent knowledge about the world and better identify and explain the historically emergent values that should orientate the emancipatory transformation of world politics.

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This article consists of a review of Jürgen Habermas's discussions of the dilemma posed by human global interdependence to the possibility of democratic politics. According to Habermas, since the Second World War, and in a process that has become only more pervasive since the end of the Cold War, human societies have been brought into increasingly tighter and more complex political, social and economic networks of interdependence that have ultimately undermined the capacity of state-based democratic publics to have some degree of influence over their conditions of existence. From a critical international theory perspective, Habermas's argument highlights the fundamental contemporary challenge faced by the social sciences in general, and International Relations (IR) in particular. From that perspective, the fundamental task of IR is not only to explain world politics, but also to orientate social and political practice towards an expansion of democratic control over them. The purpose of this article is to show how Habermas's work makes a fundamental contribution to improve that critical orientating role of IR. The article connects Habermas's more recent political writings on the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) with his earlier work on the development of a theory of social evolution. In doing so, it shows how Habermas's work can constitute the basis for an approach to the study of world politics that both understands how the present dilemma between global complexity and democracy came to be the defining feature of the present stage of human development, and that discloses the immanent potential gathered by modernity for a radical expansion of democratic politics to the level of world politics.

Singapore is expert at using education as a means of projecting soft power internationally. For years, it has offered free and subsidized education opportunities in Southeast Asia, and now, with its interests in the Arctic, it is offering education opportunities to indigenous peoples as a way to involve itself in regional governance.