E thical questions of fairness, responsibility, and burden-sharing have always been central to the international politics of climate change and efforts to construct an effective intergovernmental response to this problem. The conclusion of the Paris Agreement last December, lauded by the media, governments, and civil society around the world, is the most recent such effort, following the collapse of negotiations six years prior at the  Copenhagen conference. The shape and form of the Paris Agreement, however, represents a radically different governance structure to its predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, reorienting the international regime toward a "bottom-up" structure, emphasizing national flexibility in order to ensure broader participation. In doing so, the Paris Agreement also provides a different answer to the question of what constitutes a fair and equitable response to climate change.The purpose of this essay is to review the normative implications of the Paris Agreement, namely in the challenges it poses for attaining a fair distribution of the "carbon budget" and for maintaining a good chance of keeping global warming below  degrees Celsius by the end of the century. In these new institutional arrangements and political compromises that have set the framework for climate action in the coming decade and beyond, how will fairness and equity be ensured in a world of voluntary climate "contributions"? The first section of this essay presents the key features of the Paris Agreement in the context of the "top-down/bottom-up" discussion on governance architectures and the notion of a carbon budget that has framed much of the recent ethics-based discussion on the distribution of emission rights and responsibilities. The second section then highlights the new ways in which the Paris Agreement has sought to respond to the normative importance of equity considerations in the climate response,

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The Paris Agreement is increasingly being used as an analogy in global environmental politics to discuss issues beyond climate change. This Forum article explores the two main ways in which this analogy has been discursively employed: as a symbol of diplomatic success to be emulated and as a model for institutional treaty design. It illustrates the broader meanings associated with the Paris Agreement, reflecting its preeminent public and political profile among environmental issues just a few years into its history and its potential significance in shaping subsequent global environmental negotiations.

The popular yet ambiguous idea of moderate Islam has been treated with either interest or indifference in international relations. The interest hinges on hopes of Islamic reformism, whereas the indifference originates from a cynical view that sees moderate Islam campaigns as driven by political opportunism. These viewpoints conceptualize the idea of “moderate Islam” as exegetically rooted and seek to measure state actions based on that. This article argues that “Islamic” signifiers in the foreign policy narratives of Muslim states are better understood from the postcolonial subjectivities of their producers, who are most aware of uneven global cultural hierarchies. It demonstrates that elite Muslim narratives of moderate Islam are less about religious reformation as they are about ontological security seeking. This need for ontological security seeking by Muslim state elites stems from the historical stigmatization of Islam that is exacerbated by the Global War on Terror. Using the case of Malaysia, I highlight how discourses about moderate Islam in foreign policy operate through two mutually reinforcing discursive strategies: image building and image differentiation. Through historical and discourse analysis, I argue that both strategies contain a stigma-correction motive as they worked to craft this image of Malaysia being an exemplary “moderate” Muslim state.