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Neoclassical realism(s) vis-à-vis other theories of foreign policy: taking the indistinguishability problem seriously International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-09-18 Federmán Rodríguez
Neoclassical realism (NCR)’s opponents have considered it an incoherent and indistinctive approach because of its interest in addressing ideational and institutional factors. Specifically, they have denounced NCR’s fuzzily established internal and external conceptual boundaries, corresponding to central dimensions of this approach’s ‘indistinguishability’ problem. Even though NCR has responded in a
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Central Europe: bringing a forgotten realm to Global International Relations International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-09-09 Štěpánka Zemanová, Radka Druláková
In recent decades, intensive attempts emerged to introduce a new Global International Relations (GIR) research programme related to the post-colonial critique of western dominance and its efforts to overcome the current geopolitics of knowledge. Even though several regional and national approaches have been included in GIR, the integration of semiperipheral IR thinking is only in its early stages.
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Bringing the climate into existence International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-08-12 Hannah Hughes
This special issue takes up the problem of how, where and through what methodological means the study of international relations, and ourselves as scholars, may be brought into closer connection to climate change and contribute to the social and political change critical to responding to global environmental degradation. In the introduction, I begin from where I became aware of the absence of climate
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Back from the dead: the ecology of IR International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-08-10 Peter Newell
Rather than dealing in death, if IR is to retain relevance among the social sciences in seeking to both account for and change a world in the midst of a deepening ‘polycrisis’, it needs to recognise and take its place in the web of life. In this article, I firstly argue for the need to ‘choose life’ by de-centring three key (interrelated) pillars of the discipline: the normalisation of militarism as
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Transforming epistemological disconnection from the more-than-human world: (inter)nodes of ecologically attuned ways of knowing International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-08-10 Erzsébet Strausz
Drawing out resonances across art-based practice and critical imaginations in the discipline, this paper maps out conceptual, creative and experiential resources for re-rooting International Relations for the climate and the needs of the more-than-human world. I trace what I describe as ecologically attuned ways of knowing along two main inspirations: L. H. M. Ling’s Imagining World Politics and the
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Indigenous climate finance and the worlding of International Relations: climate justice in motion International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-08-09 Veronica Korber Gonçalves, Thais Lemos Ribeiro, Cristina Yumie Aoki Inoue, Juliana Lins
This exploratory research investigates how Indigenous Peoples (IPs) reshape International Relations (IR) and challenge established boundaries through an analysis of two Indigenous Climate Funds: the “Shandia Alliance for People, Nature and Climate” and the “Podáali Fund,” both autonomously managed by indigenous communities. By examining their engagements at COP-26 and conducting interviews, this study
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IR, climate politics, and change: opportunities for productive engagement? International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-08-01 Steven Bernstein
‘Change’ or ‘transformation’ are longstanding preoccupations of both International Relations (IR) and global climate change politics scholarship. Yet, the two fields largely occupy independent axiological, epistemological, normative, and ontological spaces that have led to misunderstandings, mutual criticisms, and a lack of serious engagement on these questions. The result is missed opportunities to
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Beyond International Relations and toward International Relationality? International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-28 Ronnie D. Lipschutz
This article provides a review and commentary on the articles in this special issue, which offer alter-IRs as approaches to bringing climate change into international relations theory and practice as a force or phenomenon that can transform theory and practice. I summarize the articles, as I read them, and suggest that this is a largely futile task. Is description of new ontologies and epistemologies
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Embedded hegemony and the evolution of the United States’ structural power International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-28 Madison Cartwright
Whilst the United States’ (US) economic hegemony has existed continuously since the end of World War II, it has not been realised in the same way. In the early post-war period, the US’s hegemony rested on its dominance over gross world product and manufacturing output and exports. However, by the 1970s it began to transition to high-technology industries, services and foreign investment. Using a structural
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Fit for purpose? Climate change, security and IR International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-28 Matt McDonald
As the contributions to this special issue suggest, IR has had a problematic relationship with environmental issues. Indeed it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that IR has treated environmental change almost as a distraction from important concerns of global politics, and gives us few significant resources for understanding these challenges or addressing them effectively. This is perhaps most starkly
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Rediscovering the ‘Meaning of Science’? Hans Morgenthau and the ethics debate in quantum IR International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-26 Michael PA Murphy
The concept of science has long played an important role in defining the field of international relations, both in its broader epistemological debates and in the formation of distinct research traditions. I argue that the emerging quantum approaches to international relations theory destabilize the conventional bifurcations of scientific and humanistic approaches to international relations, and that
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Infrastructural power in foreign policy: conceptualising states’ efforts to mobilise non-state actors International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-26 Jens Heibach, Hakkı Taş
This article translates Michael Mann’s notion of infrastructural power into the foreign policy realm and develops a conceptual framework that allows for the systematic treatment of states’ strategic efforts at mobilising domestic non-state actors. Despite the common rationales underlying such efforts across regime types, the article argues that states’ systemic features matter greatly. It generates
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Interventions of post-colonial states in the normative structure of world politics: the case of Iran and the norm of democracy International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-24 Daniela Huber
Within Global IR a constructivist-postcolonial literature is emerging which inquires into how postcolonial states intervene into the normative structure of world politics. This research programme has less covered the question how postcolonial states relate to the international norm of democracy, how and in which ways do they contest this norm, and to which effects? This question is important both to
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The discursive process of resemantisation: how global health discourses turned male circumcision into an anti-HIV policy International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-06-21 Audrey Alejandro, Joshua Feldman
In 2007, the WHO and UNAIDS established male circumcision as the first surgery ever implemented as a preventive health policy, via their Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision (VMMC) anti-HIV programme that delivered 18.6 million circumcisions in Southern and Eastern Africa by 2017. This article investigates how this genital ritual became a global health policy taking discourse as the entry point. Based
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Emotion norm violations in small communities: The Carter-Brezhnev hotline correspondence International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-05-28 Eszter Simon, Agnes Simon
How do international actors move from milder to more serious measures as they handle emotion norm violations that parallel behavioral norm infringements in small communities that would collapse if community members ejected the violator? Here, we trace this process analytically by examining the interaction between President Carter and General Secretary Brezhnev via the Moscow-Washington hotline, which
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Do leaders really matter? The failure of ambitions in Turkish foreign policy International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-05-16 Murat Ülgül
The field of international relations is recently witnessing an inflation of attention toward political leaders and personalities. Yet, while political leaders mattered to understand foreign policy behaviors, the question is how much they do and under what conditions. This article argues that how leaders and personalities affect foreign policy is up to the variables that can be analyzed at the state
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Angell versus Mahan: revisiting International Relations on the eve of World War I International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Seán Molloy
In 1912 a debate erupted between Alfred Thayer Mahan and Norman Angell. The debate revolved around what motivates states and what constitutes the fundamental bases of human conduct in relation to war, peace and material interests. The article traces the thrusts and counter thrusts of Angell and Mahan as they lay bare the errors and misconceptions of each other in a heated exchange that marked an important
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Oil, materiality and International Relations International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Roland Dannreuther
Oil is a major topic in International Relations (IR). However, the discipline has tended to focus primarily on the effects and impacts of oil, particularly in relation to conflict, war and empire, and on the international political economy of oil, such as the role of the large oil companies and the oil-rich producer states. This article offers a more holistic approach by adopting a new materialisms
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Saudi Arabia’s costly war in Yemen: a neoclassical realist theory of overbalancing International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Thomas Juneau
Saudi Arabia faced multiple threats from Yemen in 2015: its southern neighbor had collapsed; a hostile sub-state actor, the Houthis, was entrenching itself along the border; and the presence of its rival Iran was growing. Responding was rational; it would have been sub-optimal for Riyadh to underbalance by doing little to counter the threat. Instead, however, Saudi Arabia overbalanced by launching
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A gendered analysis of US decline: a cautionary tale International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Clara Eroukhmanoff
This article offers an innovative gendered analysis of the thesis of US decline, a prominent theory shared amongst International Relations scholars and US foreign policy experts about the impending end of US hegemony and the US-led international order. Inspired by feminist International Relations, it demonstrates that masculinism underscores the theory in three important ways: the methodologies used
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When contestation legitimizes: the norm of climate change action and the US contesting the Paris Agreement International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Laura von Allwörden
In 2017 US president Trump announced the intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. This was widely perceived as a major challenge to continued cooperation to counter climate change. A feared consequence was further member withdrawal leading to the weakening of the Paris agreement and thus, the climate change action norm. Yet instead, states and non-state actors recommitted to the agreement and further
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The post-hegemonic turn in humanitarian intervention: regional ownership and troubled great power management International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Peter Viggo Jakobsen, Tonny Brems Knudsen
Since the Great Recession in 2008, the academic debate has been flooded with literature that predicts the sunset of the liberal world order including the practice of humanitarian intervention as initiated at the United Nations (UN) in the early 1990s and regulated by the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in 2005. In contrast, this article argues that the practice of humanitarian intervention
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The international cooperation of the populist radical right: building counter-hegemony in international relations International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-01-13 Thorsten Wojczewski
This article analyses the international cooperation of the radical right and the role of populism in forging cross-border ties between different political projects. Drawing on the Laclauian-Mouffian poststructuralist discourse theory, it conceptualises this cross-border collaboration as an attempt to build an international counter-hegemonic project and sheds light on its discursive formation and content
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Invitation games and the politics of joining US-led coalition warfare: a small state perspective International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-06 Rasmus Pedersen, Yf Reykers
How do status-seeking governments in small states mobilize parliamentary support for participation in US-led warfare coalitions? We argue that the formulation of official invitations by the United ...
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Is someone’s mercenary another’s contractor? American, British, and Russian private security companies in US and UK parliamentary debates International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-03-25 Matteo C M Casiraghi, Eugenio Cusumano
Scholars disagree on whether an anti-mercenary norm exists, whether today’s private military and security companies (PMSCs) fall under its scope, and whether the privatization of security erode par...
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Strength born of weakness: the advantages of open maritime polities in multipolar international systems International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Mihai Murariu, George Anglitoiu
This paper focuses on open maritime polities and their competitive advantages in multipolar international systems. Firstly, the paper explores the various understandings of seapower and its possibl...
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Trumpism and the rejection of global climate governance International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Aaron Ettinger, Andrea M Collins
This paper explains the ideational foundations of Donald Trump’s rejection of global climate cooperation and its implications for the future of global climate governance. We argue that Trumpism’s a...
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Beyond hegemony, world order as domination: Iran’s Green Movement and the nuclear sanctions regimes International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Shabnam J Holliday
Contributing to neo-Gramscian IR and debates regarding world order, this article puts forward Gramsci’s domination as a framework for better understanding the dynamics of a so-called ‘western liber...
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The purpose of military force and the Obama doctrine: no fighting for face International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Payam Ghalehdar
The scholarly debate about the Obama doctrine has focused on the extent of military force in Obama’s foreign policy. Offering both a novel definition of presidential doctrines and a reinterpretatio...
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Parliamentarizing war: explaining legislative votes on Canadian military deployments International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Philippe Lagassé, Justin Massie
The parliamentarization of military deployments is a burgeoning area of study but has tended to neglect the peculiar cases of legislatures deprived of any war powers. This article contributes to th...
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Anxiety, humour and (geo)politics: warfare by other memes International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Christopher S Browning, James Brassett
Humour is usually overlooked in analyses of international politics, this despite its growing prevalence and circulation in an increasingly mediatised world, with this neglect also evident in the gr...
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Covid-19: crisis, emotional governance and populist fantasy narratives International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-01-20 Catarina Kinnvall
This short article discusses how different fantasy narratives have come together during the Covid-19 crisis in various far-right movements, parties and audiences across the world and how much of th...
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COVID-19: uncertainty in a mood of anxiety International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 Bahar Rumelili
This contribution to the Forum, Anxiety and possibility: the many future(s) of COVID-19, develops a conception of uncertainty as constituted by cognitive (awareness of possibilities) and affective ...
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Anxiety and political action in times of the Covid-19 pandemic International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-01-16 Andreja Zevnik
Since the beginning of the global Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 countries across the world have implemented various measures to contain the virus. They have restricted public gatherings, ...
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Anxiety and possibility: the many future(s) of COVID-19 International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-01-12 Bahar Rumelili
This is the introduction to the forum, Anxiety and possibility: the many future(s) of COVID-19. It summarizes the contributions within a common framework and situates them in the extant literature.
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No such thing as a free donation? Research funding and conflicts of interest in nuclear weapons policy analysis International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-22 Kjølv Egeland, Benoît Pelopidas
Numerous scholars have in recent years concluded that the field of nuclear weapons policy analysis is plagued by widespread self-censorship, conformism, and enduring disconnects between accepted kn...
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Chasing gender equality norms: the robustness of sexual and reproductive health and rights International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Esther Barbé, Diego Badell
This article studies Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) at the United Nations (UN). SRHR, a gender equality norm that applies human rights to sexuality and reproduction, have traditio...
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Twinning for solidarity: building affective communities in the aftermath of the Nicaraguan Revolution International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-07 Holly Eva Ryan
In the British popular imagination, ‘twinning’ is perhaps most commonly associated with mayoral delegations, civic ceremonies and the post-war peacebuilding project in Europe. However, the model an...
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Conflict and Covid-19: exploring the effects on women International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-07 Outi Donovan
What happens when conflicts collide with major disease pandemics? Weak or fragmented institutions, contested legitimacy of authorities, overstretched or destroyed health sector, crowded refugee cam...
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Realism, reckless states, and natural selection International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-04 Matthew Rendall
Why is daredevil aggression like Russia’s war on Ukraine such an important factor in world politics? Neither offensive nor defensive realists give a fully satisfactory answer. This paper maintains ...
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Mission saves us all: Great Russia and Global Britain dealing with ontological insecurity International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Alicja Curanović, Piotr Szymański
In this paper we analyse a situation wherein the political establishments of Russia and the United Kingdom, in the face of ontological insecurity, use narratives with messianic overtones in their f...
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The limits of US national identity: interests and values in US military aid International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Evan W Sandlin
According to policymakers, US national values shape US foreign aid policy. However, these national values clash with material interests when policymakers are faced with the decision of whether or n...
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State of nature versus states as firms: reassessing the Waltzian analogy of structural realism International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-26 Zhichao Tong
This paper examines one often overlooked aspect of Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics: the analogy he makes between firms and states. Specifically, I contrast this ‘states as firms’ a...
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The Chagos Islands and international orders: human rights, rule of law, and foreign rule International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-05 Martin Welz
This article uses the Chagos Archipelago that is administered by the United Kingdom, used as a military base by the US, and claimed by Mauritius, as a case study to explore competing international ...
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The liturgy of triumph: victory culture, popular rituals, and the US way of wartiming International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Andrew R Hom, Luke Campbell
Wartime is fundamentally important to the study of international politics but not especially well understood. In this paper, we use timing theory and the concept of liturgy to unpack the contempora...
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‘We watched his whole life unfold. . .Then you watch the death’: drone tactics, operator trauma, and hidden human costs of contemporary wartime International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Terilyn Johnston Huntington, Amy E Eckert
Scholars of war and combat posit that soldiers are more willing to execute strikes on adversaries when they perceive lower risk to themselves or less connection with their targets. Accordingly, tec...
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Afterword: war:time International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Lisa Ellen Silvestri
How should we think about war today? This afterword assesses the impact of using a temporal lens to understand contemporary conflict. Reflecting upon my own work on media and war alongside wider so...
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Wartime in the 21st century International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Andrew R Hom, Luke Campbell
Wartime dominates the 21st century. The term is ubiquitous in contemporary politics, providing an intuitive trope for narrating foreign relations, grappling with intractable policy problems, and re...
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Home and the world: the legal imagination of Martti Koskenniemi International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 David Armitage
The Finnish lawyer-historian Martti Koskenniemi’s new book, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power, 1300–1870 (2021), is the culmination of a 30-year-long pr...
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From subjects to objects: honor flights and US ontological insecurity International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Brent J Steele
Following the 2004 establishment of the World War II memorial in Washington DC, itself a product of the collective re-commemoration of the so-called ‘Greatest Generation’ of WWII veterans in the US...
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The world is upside down: seeing IR from below International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-13 J. Ann Tickner
This review essay engages three texts focused on women who engaged with international thought in the early to mid-20th century. Women’s International Thought: A New History and Women’s Internationa...
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The Liberal International Ordering of crisis International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-07 Columba Peoples
This article analyses and critically reflects on how the concept of ‘crisis’ has tended to feature within prominent debates on ‘Crisis of the Liberal International Order’. Within such scholarship, ...
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A ‘continuing, imminent’ threat: the temporal frameworks enabling the US war on terrorism International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Christopher McIntosh
For nearly two decades, the United States has chosen to narrate its response to terrorism through what Judith Butler refers to as the ‘frame of war’. Despite this, victory in that country’s longest...
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A contestation of nuclear ontologies: resisting nuclearism and reimagining the politics of nuclear disarmament International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Nick Ritchie
The global politics of nuclear disarmament has become deeply contested over the past decade, particularly around the negotiation of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Dif...
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Wartime, professional military education, and politics International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-09-27 Kathryn Marie Fisher
The 2018 United States (US) National Military Strategy claimed that professional military education (PME) in the US had ‘stagnated’. Since then the 2020 US Joint Chiefs of Staff publication Develop...
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Fashion’s diplomatic role: an instrument of French prestige-based commercial diplomacy, 1960s–1970s International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-09-23 Vincent Dubé-Senécal
This article re-examines the aid-to-couture plans enacted by France at the end of the 1960s from both historical and diplomatic perspectives. In so doing, it assesses the decision-making process of...
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At war or saving lives? On the securitizing semantic repertoires of Covid-19 International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-09-23 Stephane J Baele, Elise Rousseau
This paper offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the ways and extent to which the US president and UK prime minister have securitized the Covid-19 pandemic in their public speeches. This assessmen...
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Western populism and liberal order: a reflection on ‘structural liberalism’ and the resilience of Western liberal order International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-09-21 Johnson Singh Chandam
The rise of populism in Western democracies creates presumed threats on liberal international order. Although a number of scholarly works are dedicated to the populist challenge on liberal democrac...
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Counterinsurgency in (un)changing times? Colonialism, hearts and minds, and the war on terror International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-09-07 deRaismes Combes
Counterinsurgencies mostly fail, as the 2021 allied withdrawal from Afghanistan illustrates. Still, confronting insurgencies remains a central component in ongoing counterterror efforts around the ...
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Selective humanitarians: how region and conflict perception drive military interventions in intrastate crises International Relations (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Sidita Kushi
Why are some violent intrastate crises more likely to prompt humanitarian military interventions than others? States appear to intervene robustly in reaction to some internal conflicts, such as Kos...