This paper asks how and by whom knowledge on permafrost thaw is produced, and how politics is implicated in this (non)knowledge production. Through interviews and fieldwork in Fairbanks, Alaska, the paper argues that knowledge production on climate change should interest International Relations (IR) much more than it does. What is at stake is IR's ability to discern which political actors and priorities

This article concerns the challenge of making postcolonial and decolonial art under postcolonial capitalism. A pioneer in the Gulf's growing art scene, the Sharjah Biennial has carved a niche for itself as an incubator of postcolonial and decolonial art. This article first locates the biennial's focus within the trajectories of postcolonial, decolonial, and Black radical theory across the increasingly

This article asks what reflexive practices one can learn from, with and against Pierre Bourdieu’s works on and in Algeria and later contributions. Addressing the question enables a revision of Bourdieusian reflexivity and a new contribution to the methodological reflexivity debate in international relations (IR) and International Political Sociology (IPS). It furthers the identification of three reflexive

Human rights rationales have in recent years been increasingly mobilized in international efforts to bring national legal frameworks on migrant smuggling in line with international law. This article explores the role of human rights in borderwork during the externally funded legal reform process of Senegal's legal framework on migrant smuggling. Adopting a multiscalar governmentality lens, it sheds

Is the state monopoly on the use of legitimate violence a modern invention that refers exclusively to a particular provincial sociohistorical phenomenon that emerged in seventeenth-century Europe? The answer this paper presents is no. Instead, I argue that the canonical Eurocentric epistemic communities have sought to displace other systems of governance and administration and replace them with European

Visual politics is a thriving subfield of international relations (IR) that traces its origin to the “visual turn” at the turn of the century. However, visual politics hardly engages with the central visuality of modernity: race. This article argues that visual politics has a longer history than the current disciplinary history suggests, and it deploys a sociographical analysis to explore the central

This article explores the affirmative dimension of necropolitics by looking at the articulation of the dead as an aesthetic and political subject in the work of the art-activist collective “the party of the dead.” Since 2017, their performances have exposed and challenged an aesthetic order based on the erasure of mortality in Russia. I draw on Rancière’s distinction between “politics” and “the police”

Critical security studies and emotion research in international relations have highlighted that the emotion of fear is a pivotal driver of material and psychological securitization processes and that political actors may attempt to instrumentalize fear to obtain their political objectives. This article suggests that complementing this focus on fear with closer attention to the emotion of hate provides

In this article, we examine the three Unfairy Tales advertising videos as part of the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) Act of Humanity campaign, which depicts the stories of Syrian refugee children fleeing armed conflict. Shared on UNICEF’s digital platforms, these videos sensibilize the audience to the challenges these children have faced in their migrations and stimulate the adult public

The article examines the performance of crisis in the UK Government’s push toward the Illegal Migration Act 2023. It considers political operations underpinning this campaign as “crisis work,” drawing attention to the staging of dangerous, harmful, and tragic subjects in a panoramic space of spectacular visibility. I develop this perspective based on a review of programmatic speeches, parliamentary

How is diplomacy, a profession long premised on face-to-face interactions, adjusting to life with and on the screen? In this article, I present insights from 5 years of fieldwork (2018–2023) focused on the diplomatic scene in Brussels. I approach this material through Sherry Turkle's concept of the “evocative object” to theorize how digitalization relates to diplomatic practice. In contrast to most

A growing body of literature builds on the observation that power is relational and directs attention to the diplomacy of marginal and liminal subjects, implying that they harbor a potential to change the structures undergirding international politics. However, performances of state power routinely find other loci than diplomacy, and all states are more or less marginalized from the conceptual core

How does a state’s marginalization of borderland communities influence their sense of belonging? We argue that, in unstable regions in the Global South, such marginalization reinforces people’s sense of belonging to a transnational community. As we demonstrate, two causal mechanisms account for this process: the marginalization enhances (i) the border’s “disguising” quality that muddies diverse forms

On September 8, 2022, after more than 70 years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II passed away. The responses among the public, media, and state institutions to the news were varied, with competing views on the role of the monarchy and the legacy of the queen. The questions this article seeks to answer are (1) how the monarch’s death introduced a fissure into the United Kingdom’s autobiographical narrative

This article explores the importance of what we call “decolonial deconstruction” for contemporary global politics and policy discourses and develops a critique of this approach. “Decolonial deconstruction” seeks to keep open policy processes, deconstructing liberal policy goals of peace, democracy, or justice as always “to come”. It emerged through a nexus of postmodern and decolonial framings, well

Critical methodologies in International Political Sociology (IPS) and its intersecting fields and research traditions have increasingly coalesced around the idea that research should be done in dialogue, and possibly cooperation, with people rather than only about them. Drawing together research under this theme and wider debates on participatory, activist, and action research, alongside our own research

The archives of migration are piecemeal and scattered. This is both an epistemological problem, and a matter of political concern in an international order that forces people to migrate, racializes them, and renders them subject to violence. In response, we explore the potential of counter-archiving migration. First, we explain why archives matter politically, and consider which traces of migration

In understanding and responding to the problem of misinformation during global health emergencies, health experts and organizations such as the WHO have relied on the concept of the “infodemic,” or the idea that there is such an overabundance of information that ascertaining trustworthy sources and reliable guidance is difficult. Is this the best way to understand the problem of misinformation, however

This paper draws on fieldwork interviews with migrants who fled their home countries (Somalia, Eritrea, and Sudan) and irregularly traveled through Sudan, Sahara, Libya, and the Mediterranean Sea, eventually reaching Europe. It demonstrates how, throughout their journeys, migrants were targeted by various armed groups (particularly non-state) for purposes including recruitment, extortion, ransom, immobilization

This article theorizes smartphone detoxing as a practice of sovereignty. The article begins by arguing that the smartphone enables the exercise of psychopolitical control, a new mode of neoliberal governmentality under which individuals are governed through the algorithmic modification of behavior. Against this background, smartphone detoxing can be seen as a practice of sovereignty in the sense that

At the 1892 International Sanitary Conference in Venice, experts established international health politics as governing the flows of people, traffic, and information. This focus has remained ingrained in current health politics and shaped the international response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper focuses on the micropolitics among these experts to understand the emergence of such governance expertise

The category of the nomad has gained a newfound salience in recent decades, ranging from public interest in “digital nomadism” to academic debates about “nomadic theory.” Faced with this upsurge of interest in nomadism, this collective discussion brings together five scholars of diverse theoretical and academic backgrounds to investigate the pasts, presents, and possible futures of the nomad category

Throughout the twentieth century, colonies emerged from the so-called tutelage of European imperial powers to represent themselves as sovereign states. One consequence of this change was an expansion in overseas diplomatic training, aimed at inducting into international life the hundreds of diplomats required to staff new foreign services. This paper interrogates the pedagogical and (geo)political

This article returns to the existentialist roots of ontological security theory (OST) and proposes a phenomenological re-reading of ontological security through the theoretical language of spherology and immunology in order to bring OST into a more substantive engagement with the spatial and immunological realities and practices of the globalizing world. Departing from the work of Peter Sloterdijk

This article inquires the individual and collective agency of female migrant domestic workers in Spain. I use fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2023 to examine the interplay between the migrant workers’ individual coping strategies, the claims-making strategies of the domestic workers’ trade union Sindihogar, and the structures they operate within and attempt to challenge. Drawing on contemporary

The article examines the affective dynamics of collective survival and resistance under Israeli settler colonialism in the Gaza Strip. Focusing on Gaza as an under-researched enclave of Israeli settler colonialism, it analyzes how young Palestinians renegotiated their affective bonds in response to two coinciding deadly events: the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 Israeli bombings. Theoretically, we

A growing body of literature studies how expert practices constitute issues such as climate change, migration, or public health as international objects of expertise. The article contributes to this research agenda by highlighting the role of digital visual technologies and infrastructures in the constitution and governance of these international objects. It develops the concept of visual objects and

In the wake of the fall of the Daesh Islamic State “Caliphate” in 2019, the international community has been faced with the fact that thousands of displaced persons are stranded in Iraqi and Syrian detention centers. This article interrogates the governmental policies of ten Western European countries toward their nationals and legal residents held in the prisons and camps. We analyze the discourse

This Collective Discussion aims to open up space for an international political sociology of the production of historical knowledge that interrogates the politics around benchmark dates and what becomes knowable and unknowable through them. Specifically, it examines 1492 as a historiographical device through which to unpack how the discipline of IR knows history. 1492 presents a relevant case for this

In an apparent departure from responses to the so-called 2015 “migration” crisis, Ukrainians displaced by the war have been welcomed relatively unbureaucratically by European states. Yet, despite this, they are positioned as a problem to be solved, a disruption to the normal order and state system. This article asks what this problematization of “migrants” reveals about the dominant system of thought

This paper analyses the extent to which zero-carbon energy transitions are a securitized phenomenon in selected countries and what that means for sustainability transitions more broadly. Without taking a normative stance on securitization, we focus on the ways in which security is constructed through in-depth interviews with experts in the energy, security, and defense sectors in Estonia, Finland,

What can we learn about diplomacy by studying its practice through the body of an apprentice? Drawing on the works of Loïc Wacquant, this article argues that to understand the making of background dispositions, tacit rules, and situated know-how in international politics’ diverse fields of practice, researchers ought to consider apprenticeship as a concept and a methodological device. This argument

This article makes a critical contribution to the study of digital reactionary movements by tracing the resonant circulation of “the cuck” memes across various levels of racialized and gendered subjectivity. It argues that the cuck meme resonates through composing an affective narrative of deferred and stolen enjoyment at the intersection of personal, social, and international politics. It follows

Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience (2003–2020) was an artistic performance of hypervisibility. Initiated in response to being misidentified as a terrorist, preemptively arrested, and interrogated by the FBI, the artist created a comprehensive life log documenting his everyday life for all to see. Despite transformations to the surveillance environment, the performance raised a question that remains

This article presents a theory and analysis of the social aesthetics of digital diplomacy. Drawing inspiration from the sociology of taste and visual theory, we conceptualize social aesthetics as the encoding of social norms and hierarchies into visual representations. Through this lens, we examine how the multitude of images uploaded by diplomats on social media daily contribute to the symbolic authority

The scholarship on the politics of immigration often frames governments’ responses to far-right mobilization as a return to border closures and a rowing back on neoliberalism. In this article, I draw on and expand the scholarship on coloniality to address the limitations of this diagnosis. Specifically, I explore the role of political mobilization in the making of the post-Brexit border regime. My

The concept of agency has long been a focal point of research in the social sciences. While traditional discussions primarily centered on human agency, recent scholarship has increasingly turned its attention to agency beyond the human realm. This paper introduces a framework for comprehending the agency of spiritual beings within complex pluriversal sociopolitical systems. It contends that exploring

Despite growing interest in studying counter-revolution in Egypt, scholars have neglected the ways in which the regulation of normativity governs conduct and discourages resistance. This article argues that discourses of normativity in Egypt have produced counter-revolutionary subjectivities, without whom the counter-revolution could not have succeeded. These subjectivities are constructed through

The article explores different and contested narrations surrounding alleged war crimes by former Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, with a particular focus on one veteran with considerable public standing, Ben Roberts-Smith. It shows how certain stories told to identify and condemn acts of extra-legal violence, work to separate these acts out as exceptional and different from wider violence in war

Research into online forms of far-right, alt-right, populist, and supremacist politics has raised questions about the extent to which social media enables or constitutes extremist affects and ideologies. Building on this research and through a case study of how a pro-Trump community on Reddit made sense of news events and sought to contest their representation, this paper explores the relationship

This paper explores the emergence of “Soviet active measures” in US political discourse during the “Second Cold War” of the early 1980s. It follows the efforts of the Active Measures Working Group, a little-known interagency organization led by Reagan administration appointees that constructed an image of Soviet active measures as a threat to national security. I detail, especially, how the Working

If asked what “arms manufacturer” first brings to mind, few people would likely answer “women’s rights.” And yet, each International Women’s Day (IWD), leading global arms manufacturers present themselves as working to help bring about gender equality. “Gender washing” refers to corporate social responsibility communications aimed at presenting a corporation as empowering to women and girls, even while

This article works toward an ontology of war centered on the life of the planet, or geos. Noting a disciplinary tendency to focus on the makers of war, we ask: What if our analyses of war begin not with the technologies of killing but with the life that is targeted? Our response proceeds in four sections. We first identify a “militarized ontology” of war that forms through the ways that militaries

This study questions to what extent state agents invest efforts in building interpersonal relations with their counterparts. It is based on data collected during two years of ethnographic fieldwork at the Israeli president’s residence, where we observed credential ceremonies involving ambassadors from twenty-three states and interviewed the president’s advisors. We consider the credential ceremony

Scholars often emphasize how right-wing political actors in Europe use memory laws to undermine democratic traditions and revise historical accounts. But a broad range of political actors (with diverse motivations) support memory laws. Synthesizing research in international political sociology and memory politics, this analysis examines the relational and social practices of diplomats from small states

This article analyzes the entanglements of feminist commodity activism and state feminism. Feminist commodity activism refers to consumption and commodified communication as modes of feminist political participation. Earlier research on these topics has focused on the business sector and on media and popular culture, largely sidelining the state as a site of feminism. This article addresses the increasingly

As border controls have spanned from the territorial border to the interior, outsourcing controls to non-state actors has become the integral technology in everyday bordering. Whilst the racialized consequences of deputizing controls have been illuminated, the governmentality and biopolitical implications of these outsourcing processes have been overlooked. This paper argues that as the architecture

Originally a biogeographic term, “Indo-Pacific” is increasingly replacing “Asia-Pacific” in political discourse. This is not merely a linguistic matter but also has political implications. However, the meaning of “Indo-Pacific” remains unclear, and its implications are contested. While it has attracted the attention of a wide spectrum of political pundits, the regional designation “Indo-Pacific” is

This paper invokes Edward Said’s notion of counterpoint to present a transnational sociological account of the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. This contrapuntal reading raises questions of sovereignty, violence, and identity, which—filtered through a political sociological lens—offer novel perspectives on the power of empire and colonialism in relation to these key IR categories. Specifically, I argue

In this article, I consider critical writings on territory in International Relations, focusing on recent work on U.S. practices of extraterritorial jurisdiction. I suggest that, while such work has importantly traced the multiple ways in which U.S. authority often exceeds the supposed territorial boundaries of the United States, it has nonetheless failed to reckon with the contested and uneven nature

How do individuals navigate international politics and mitigate the anxieties it elicits in the everyday? Giddensian literature on ontological security suggests that (collective) internalized routines and narratives provide a sense of certainty and stability that enable individuals to “go on” with their daily lives. This article adopts a Kleinian psychoanalytical approach to show that when faced with

This article is aimed at transdisciplinary (critical International Relations, visual anthropology, and existential philosophy) analysis of Russian gendered nationalism and masculine ontological insecurities. It explores and re-imagines how visual representations of “Mother Russia” became signifiers of the phallocentric voice of the Russian gendered state. What can return the voice back to the “invisible

This article explores sanctuary in Wales, focusing on the Welsh Government’s recent declaration to become a Nation of Sanctuary (NoS), and identifying how the national scale provides an alternative locus for progressive sanctuary measures. In revealing the nation’s emergence as another crucial site of sanctuary, the work reconceptualizes the nation’s place in sanctuary policies and practices in two

This article critically examines the embodied and relational politics of networked advocacy in the case of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda in the United Kingdom. Moving beyond liberal framings that position WPS advocacy as an attempt to overcome gender exclusion from peace and security policymaking, this article is concerned instead with the gendered, racialized, and classed logics and hierarchies

The international frameworks on refugee protection, including the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, are among the strongest norms to govern international mobility. Despite the salience and universality of these international norms, however, asylum outcomes, as indicated by refugee recognition rates (RRRs), vary extensively across state parties. The variation

In 2022, the United Kingdom hosted the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, with this games featuring a pride programme that promoted LGBTIQ+ inclusion around the Commonwealth. With British colonial norms and laws often providing the origins of homophobic and transphobic policies in Commonwealth member states, this paper sees LGBTIQ+ inclusivity narratives at the games as a significant object of study

In contrast to traditional top-down perspectives, this article aims to shed alternative light on the prospects for change in global order through evaluating how perspectives offered among social movements located in the Global South consider how change can take place beyond established approaches. With reference to perspectives offered among the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, the article elucidates

This article explores how the war on drugs in Southeast Asia upholds the protection of the young as a key justification for extrajudicial killings carried out by the state. As many as 30,000 extrajudicial killings took place during Philippine former President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs between 2016 and 2022, echoing a similar anti-drug campaign in Thailand in 2003, which saw around 3,000 people

Bordering practices have been a central and controversial feature of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Closed borders, lockdowns, and restrictions on movement and individual “freedoms” have revived concepts of the biopolitical “state of exception” and state control. In this article, we argue that biopolitical critiques of responses to the pandemic fail to grasp the opportunity to rethink worldmaking and instead

Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an increased interest in the social performance of power in international political sociology. At the same time, recent years have seen the growing popularity of event ethnographic research approaches. In this article, we develop the concept of “curated power” as a tool to explore the performative enactment of power at and through conferences and events