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For the archive yet to come Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Charlotte Mertens, Stéphanie Perazzone
This article explores the promises and pitfalls of the colonial archives for the study of seeing and knowing contemporary violence. As an ethnographic field and a site of decolonial struggles, the colonial archive is increasingly mobilised in scholarship that seeks to historicise and disrupt conventional, Western-centric knowledge production. While using the colonial archives might reproduce asymmetrical
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Industrial policy and the green state: Forging a world after growth Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Bentley B. Allan
The resurgence of industrial policy is reshaping the global political economy and creating emergent formations that could help create green states. Such green states can seed a world after growth. Growth is often taken for granted as a natural purpose of states and an appropriate basis of public policy. However, it has a recent political-economic and cosmological history. This suggests that an age
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Dealing with dangerous abundance: Towards post-growth International Relations Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-13 Jacob Hasselbalch, Matthias Kranke
Even though International Relations (IR) research increasingly recognises the unprecedented urgency of environmental degradation and the resulting ecological injustices, only few IR scholars have probed into the role of economic growth as a fundamental driver of global unsustainability. We level two critiques at the field of IR from a post-growth perspective. First, most IR theories are complicit in
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Thinking freedom relationally: Life projects and care as an ethical orientation for International Studies Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-13 Maggie FitzGerald
The field of International Studies has often been concerned with either negative conceptualisations of freedom and liberty (i.e. freedom from obstacles and interference) or positive notions of freedom (i.e. the possibility to act and develop). Further, these two notions of freedom have been conceived of as rival and incompatible. Drawing upon Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity (1947), this article
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Towards an abolitionist feminist peace: State violence, anti-militarism, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-03 Hannah Wright, Columba Achilleos-Sarll
Ever more doubts are being raised over the ‘transformative potential’ of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and whether it brings us closer to realising feminist peace. Underpinning a current of WPS activism and scholarship is a radical conceptualisation of feminist peace rooted in anti-militarism, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. This strand shares many commonalities with abolition feminism
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Regime of torture: Guantánamo Bay’s ongoing detention and prosecutions of the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation prisoners Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-30 Ruth Blakeley, Megan Price
Under the Convention against Torture, if states know of torture having taken place, they have obligations to provide redress and rehabilitation for victims and pursue prosecution of those responsible. Despite this, the United States continues to detain prisoners who were subjected to years of CIA torture in Guantánamo Bay. The United States is pursuing the death penalty through the Military Commissions
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International Relations and the non-human: Exploring animal culture for global environmental governance Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-27 Teresa Lappe-Osthege, Rosaleen Duffy
There is a paradox in global environmental governance that policymaking must ‘follow the science’ while environmental change is itself characterised by scientific uncertainty. This paper addresses this paradox by embracing that uncertainty. We bring International Relations (IR) into conversation with animal studies to further develop conceptual debates on integrating non-human actors. We focus on avian
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Degrowth, green growth, and climate justice for Africa Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-14 Chukwumerije Okereke
The concept of degrowth aligns with the principles of Climate and Environmental Justice (CEJ) in significant aspects. Both frameworks underline the need for new global structures and social movements that promote ecological conservation, local economic regeneration, and social well-being that goes beyond material accumulation. Therefore, degrowth can reinforce the pursuit of transformative global climate
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No place to hide: The public attribution of responsibility for policy failures of international organisations Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-13 Bernhard Zangl, Tim Heinkelmann-Wild, Juliane Glovania, Louisa Klein-Bölting
Who is held responsible when international organisations (IOs) fall short of public expectations? Scholarship on IO blame avoidance assumes that member states can hide behind IOs. As clarity of responsibility is assumed to be lacking in IOs, public responsibility attributions (PRA) will usually target the IO rather than individual member states. We argue, by contrast, that even in complex IOs such
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Images of international thinkers Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-09 Patricia Owens
This article analyses photographic portraits of three international thinkers – Merze Tate, Margery Perham, and Susan Strange – to shed new light on the intellectual and disciplinary history of Internationa Relations (IR). Photographic portraits are ubiquitous, and feminist intellectual recovery projects lend themselves to photographic representation. But IR’s historians have neglected portraits. Drawing
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Coming of age within ‘implosion’ Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Luise Bendfeldt, Emily Clifford, Hannah Richards
In a recent article, Maria Eriksson Baaz and Swati Parashar1 trace the continued salience of Eurocentrism in critical International Relations (IR), demonstrating how the ‘master’s outlook’ continues to stifle the study of global politics; they ultimately encourage an unsettling and even implosion of the discipline. Starting from this proposed ‘implosion’ of critical IR, this article reflects on our
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The future of control/The control of the future: Global (dis)order and the weaponisation of everywhere in 2074 Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Mark Lacy
In this article, I am going to suggest that questions of societal and political control will be fundamental to the challenges humanity faces in the next 50 years, a continuation of the political and social problems of modernity but playing out in a range of political contexts and with a range of technological ‘tools’. Technicians of security will attempt to manage the disorder and insecurity that results
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On making peace with nature: Visions and challenges towards an ecological diplomacy Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Costas M. Constantinou, Eleni Christodoulou
This article interrogates United Nations (UN) calls that ‘making peace with nature’ should become the crucial mission of the 21st century. It ponders the kind of diplomacy envisioned for such a reconciliation ecology to be credible. Drawing on one of the most promising and less known programmes of the UN system – namely, Harmony with Nature (HwN), which pioneers Earth-based jurisprudence and rights
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The future is just another past Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Oliver Kessler, Halvard Leira
Before International Studies can confront the future, it needs to get a better grip on its past and present. The discipline lacks agreement on both its own name and the name of its object of study. More importantly, key concepts used to describe phenomena have changed continuously: no concept emerging in the 19th century has remained untouched, no envisioned future of the past could have prepared us
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Reproducing socio-ecological life from below: Towards a planetary political economy of the global majority Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Cemal Burak Tansel, Lisa Tilley
Confronting the coming five decades from our present conjuncture demands – to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci’s famous mantra – both critical pessimism and a wilful politics of hope. In this article, we engage with the politics of climate breakdown and the responses to wider socio-ecological crises with a necessary critical pessimism. Specifically, we confront the capture of green transition imperatives
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AI and the future of IR: Disentangling flesh-and-blood, institutional, and synthetic moral agency in world politics Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Toni Erskine
Intelligent machines – from automated robots to algorithmic systems – can create images and poetry, steer our preferences, aid decision making, and kill. Our perception of their capacities, relative autonomy, and moral status will profoundly affect not only how we interpret and address practical problems in world politics over the next 50 years but also how we prescribe and evaluate individual and
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The terrestrial trap: International Relations beyond Earth Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Enrike van Wingerden, Darshan Vigneswaran
Human capacity to explore and shape outer space will increase substantially over the next 50 years. Yet, International Relations (IR) theory still treats outer space as an isolated, unique, or inconsequential realm of political life. This paper moves IR beyond its ‘terrestrial trap’ by theorising planetary politics as inherently embedded in relations with environments and actors that are located beyond
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On the horizon: The futures of IR Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Martin Coward, Matthew Paterson, Richard Devetak, Carolina Moulin, Nisha Shah, Maja Zehfuss, Andreja Zevnik
This Special Issue celebrates the 50th anniversary of Review of International Studies. Since 1975, the Review has published over 200 issues and over 1300 articles. The journal has played a key role in shaping the discipline of International Relations (IR), leading, or critically intervening in, key debates. To celebrate 50 years of Review of International Studies, we have curated a Special Issue examining
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Post-Soviet power hierarchies in the making: Postcolonialism in Tajikistan’s relations with Russia Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-22 Karolina Kluczewska
This article explores post-Soviet power hierarchies which constitute a unique system of vertical stratification in world politics. It does so by analysing relations between two former Soviet states, Tajikistan and Russia, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. The article investigates the underlying reasons for power asymmetries between the two countries, the ways hierarchies are
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Resilience as a ‘concept at work’ in the war in Ukraine: Exploring its international and domestic significance Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-22 Janine Natalya Clark
In the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is striking that there have been many references to resilience, including by Western and Ukrainian leaders. This article is precisely about their use of resilience discourse, and it makes two important contributions to existing scholarship on resilience in conflict settings. First, drawing on Ish-Shalom’s idea of ‘concepts at work’ and analysing a selection
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Secrecy games, power, and resistance in global politics Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-22 Elspeth Van Veeren, Clare Stevens, Amaha Senu
In contrast to a view of secrecy as a tool of statecraft, where the game of ‘covering/uncovering’ dominates as the central way of interpreting secrecy’s power, we set out ‘secrecy games’ as an approach for understanding secrecy’s power and influence. To do so, we offer a set of three games to illustrate the more varied ways that secrecy operates and draw attention to the ways in which non-state actors
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Maternalism. Care and control in diplomatic engagements with civil society Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-22 Katarzyna Jezierska
Relations between diplomats and civil society are central to diplomatic work. However, scholarship on diplomacy has not paid sufficient attention to how diplomats interact with civil society actors abroad. This article theorises and empirically examines diplomatic engagements with civil society organisations (CSOs) in host states. The article introduces a new concept – maternalism – into the analytical
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Post-growth theories in a global world: A comparative analysis Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-20 Lorenzo Fioramonti
The process of globalisation, the global pecking order, and most international development policies are anchored on the concept of economic growth, which is at the same time increasingly questioned on social and ecological grounds. Increases in global output (GDP) are indeed among the main drivers of energy and natural resources overuse, with potentially destructive consequences for the overall ecological
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Degrowth, global asymmetries, and ecosocial justice: Decolonial perspectives from Latin America Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Miriam Lang
Degrowth literature predominantly states that degrowth strategies are meant from and for the Global North. While economic mainstream discourse suggests that the Global South still has to grow in terms of achieving development, degrowth proponents expect a reduction of material and energy throughput in the Global North to make ecological and conceptual space for the Global South to find its own paths
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Indigenous peoples at the heritage–climate change nexus: Examining the effectiveness of UNESCO and the IPCC’s boundary work Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-08 Pedram Rashidi
There is increasing recognition that Indigenous knowledges have considerable potential to enhance collective understandings of and improve responses to complex ecological threats, such as those to cultural heritage from climate change. At the same time, it appears that Indigenous peoples face structural barriers to participation in international organisations that advance knowledge about those problems
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Legitimate governance in international politics: Towards a relational theory of legitimation Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-08 Wolfgang Minatti
How do governing actors in international politics become legitimised? Current approaches to the study of legitimation do not fully account for the complexities of governance in contemporary international and global politics because they pre-specify ‘sources’ of legitimacy and treat change in audience expectations towards rightful rule as exogenous to legitimation processes. Instead, this article synthesises
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‘Every one (re)membered’: Anxiety, family history, and militarised vicarious identity promotion during Britain’s First World War centenary commemorations Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Joseph Haigh
International Relations (IR) scholarship on ontological (in)security has explored how political agents seek to shape collective identity through the contestation and securitisation of memory narratives around controversial historical events. This article contributes a novel approach for understanding how actors promote emotional engagement with such narratives, synthesising nascent scholarship on vicarious
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‘Sovereignty is still the name of the game’: Indigenous theorising and strategic entanglement in Māori political discourses Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Valentin Clavé-Mercier
In recent decades, sovereignty has come under increased academic scrutiny for being a Eurocentric notion antithetical to emancipatory politics, leading critical theory scholars to call for an overcoming or even abandonment of the concept. Paradoxical as it may seem, it nonetheless remains an appealing ideal for many colonised peoples. Indigenous activists and scholars have actively re-appropriated
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Sustaining gender: Natural resource management, conflict prevention, and the UN Sustaining Peace agenda in times of climate catastrophe Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Caitlin Ryan, María Martín de Almagro
Climate change and its potentially violent consequences for international peace and security have transformed the United Nations (UN) approach to Sustaining Peace. One of the emblematic initiatives of this new approach is the UN Joint Programme for Women, Natural Resources, Climate, and Peace. We use feminist peace scholarship to consider what the recent debates about who builds peace and where peace
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Post-growth peacebuilding Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-15 Dahlia Simangan
Economic development is considered one of the pillars of international peacebuilding. The mandates of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations often contain the promotion of economic growth as a prerequisite for post-conflict recovery and sustainable peace. However, the relationship between peace and economic growth needs re-examination in light of urgent calls for global sustainability and
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Are propagandists combatants? Analysing the ethical status of propagandists in warfare Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Marie Robin
Belligerents increasingly rely on media manipulation, propaganda, and communication to attain strategic advantages in conflict. Given the civilian propagandists’ clear role in creating tactical or strategic advantages for one side in the conflict, should these propagandists be considered combatants, and can they therefore be legitimately targeted because of their activities? This article overcomes
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Armed group formation in civil war: ‘Movement’, ‘insurgent’, and ‘state splinter’ origins Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Anastasia Shesterinina, Michael Livesey
How do non-state armed groups form in intra-state armed conflicts? Researchers have started to disaggregate armed groups, but we still know little about how armed groups emerge in different ways. Drawing on the literature on social movements, civil wars, and civil–military relations, we generate a typology of ‘movement’, ‘insurgent’, and ‘state splinter’ origins of armed groups. We argue that fundamentally
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Between race and animality: European borders, ‘colonial dogs’, and the policing of humanity Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Tarsis Brito
Europe’s (post-)colonial borders have been recently marked by a profusion of cases of violence against racialised migrants with the use of police dogs, following a continual process of integration of canines into the border apparatus of violence. Engaging simultaneously with the recent post-colonial literature on border and migration security and the incipient domain of animal studies, this article
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Navigating nuclear narratives in contemporary television: The BBC’s Vigil Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Emily Faux
This article explores the BBC television drama Vigil (2021) as a significant site for the construction of public knowledge about nuclear weapons. In doing so, it extends beyond discourse-oriented approaches to explore how nuclear discourses manifest in visual communication, everyday encounters, and popular imagination. In a close reading of Vigil, this article questions concepts of security, peace
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Race and systemic crises in international politics: An agenda for pluralistic scholarship Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Andrew S. Rosenberg
In recent years, scholars of global politics have shown that issues of race and white supremacy lie at the centre of international history, the birth of the field of International Relations, and contemporary theory. In this article, I argue that race plays an equally central role in the 21st century’s current and future crises: the set of systemic risks that includes intensifying climate change, deepening
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Un-suturing Westphalian IR via non-Western literature: A Grey Man (1963) Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Young Chul Cho, Jungmin Seo
This paper aims to un-suture common-sense assumptions based on Westphalian International Relations (IR) from South Korea’s non-essentialist and situated perspective, in the context of decolonising IR. Towards this end, the paper methodologically investigates a South Korean novel, A Grey Man, published in 1963 during South Korea’s early post-colonial period at the height of the Cold War. Using a non-Western
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Exposing linguistic imperialism: Why global IR has to be multilingual Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Ersel Aydinli, Julie Aydinli
A key feature of the long-observed ‘core’ hegemony in International Relations (IR) is a linguistic one, yet it remains the least explored and confronted, with even today’s ‘Global IR’ discussion unquestioningly taking place in English. However, the non-English IR world is demographically and intellectually immense, and global IR cannot afford to ignore it. This study argues that English dominance in
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Cosmologies of conquest: The Renaissance foundations of modern international thought Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Jens Bartelson
This paper seeks to reconstruct the worldview informing Iberian overseas expansion during the long sixteenth century, arguing that this worldview was more indebted to Renaissance cosmology than to a recognisably modern scientific worldview. The paper describes how this cosmology provided the intellectual resources necessary to justify overseas expansion to those who doubted its viability and legitimacy
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Negotiating regime complexity: Following a regime complex in the making Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-16 Arne Langlet, Alice Vadrot
This article broadens the understanding and empirical study of regime complexes by shifting the focus from the negotiation outcome to the processes of negotiating new international agreements. Although they are important to regime-complex formation and delimitation, the sites where states negotiate new agreements are rather neglected. We aim to enhance the methodological toolbox available to scholars
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The double-helix entanglements of transnational advocacy: Moral conservative resistance to LGBTI rights Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-14 Phillip M. Ayoub, Kristina Stoeckl
The rights of people who are marginalised by their sexual orientation and gender identity (LGBTI) have improved in many countries. Largely, these achievements can be traced back to the ‘spiral model’ of factors including transnational mobilisation by the LGBTI rights movement, the actions of a few pioneering governments, and advances in the human rights frameworks of some international organisations
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The difference multiplicity makes: The American Civil War as passive revolution Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Alexander Anievas, Dabney Waring
This article examines and further develops the relationship between the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD), recently taken up by International Relations (IR) scholars to furnish a social theory of ‘the international’, and the Gramscian concept of ‘passive revolution’, which refers to a molecular process of top-down revolution and state formation that preserves ruling-class power by transforming
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International memories in global politics: Making the case for or against UN intervention in Libya and Syria Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Kathrin Bachleitner
This paper is interested in the role and function of memories in United Nations Security Council debates about humanitarian intervention. It posits that historical experiences and their lessons serve as interpretative devices for the abstract international norms and principles under discussion. The paper speaks of ‘international memories’ where the meaning and lessons derived from the past coalesce
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Towards a post-imperial and Global IR?: Revisiting Khatami’s Dialogue among Civilisations Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Shabnam Holliday, Edward Wastnidge
This article argues that Dialogue among Civilisations can be put forward as a crucial contribution to debates addressing IR’s Eurocentrism. It highlights the blurring of West/non-West, domestic/international, and imperial/post-imperial bifurcations. This is evident in three ways. First, Dialogue among Civilisations needs to be appreciated in Iran’s wider historical context and its multifaceted intellectual
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Meditations on ‘international friendship’: Situating twinning in global struggles for solidarity, recognition, and restitution Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Holly Eva Ryan
This article takes the practice of twinning as an entry point for problematising conventional accounts of ‘international friendship’ in the field of International Relations. In particular, the paper zeroes in on three examples of twinning practice, past and present, that have challenged the status quo: twinnings established in opposition to the Contra war in Nicaragua; twinning as an act of recognition
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Becoming a humanitarian state: A performative analysis of ‘status-seeking’ as statecraft in world politics Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Ali Bilgic
Status-seeking is ubiquitous in world politics, and the literature is currently dominated by state-centrism and rationalism, which is almost exclusively focus on state elites. This results in a thin and limited understanding of what ‘status-seeking’ is, where it works, and how it is effected. This article challenges the existing approaches by introducing a performativity framework and offers an overhaul
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Emotions, International Relations, and the everyday: Individuals’ emotional attachments to international organisations Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-03 Anne-Marie Houde
In recent years, various crises such as the financial crisis, Brexit, and the Covid-19 pandemic have shed light on citizens’ (dis)satisfaction with international organisations (IOs). Yet, despite their crucial importance for the support of IOs, individual citizens’ connection to these organisations remains understudied. This article contributes to the literature on emotion research in International
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‘Chống dịch như chống giặc’ (‘Fighting the pandemic like fighting the invader’): Audience agency and historical resources in Vietnam’s early securitisation of Covid-19 Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Xuan Dung Phan, Quah Say Jye, Minh Son To
Vietnam’s initial response to Covid-19 was conspicuous for various reasons, including how its attempt at securitisation drew deeply from historical narratives, symbols, and traditions specific to the Vietnamese experience, as well as how the securitisation project was not simply top-down and state-driven but also featured ground-up participation where the public was mobilised to participate in and
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Beyond the numbers on women’s representation: Recognition of women’s leadership in global governance Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-27 Hortense Jongen
To what extent has the glass ceiling in global governance been shattered? To answer this question, we need to look beyond the numbers on women’s representation and study how far women are perceived as inspiring and visionary leaders in global governance. This article offers an analysis of perceptions of inspiring and visionary leadership in global multistakeholder initiatives from a gender perspective
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The coloniality of the religious terrorism thesis Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Rabea M. Khan
A dominant narrative, produced and reproduced especially by terrorism scholars, holds that terrorism in its worst form is religious. The most dangerous and non-negotiable form of terrorism, in other words, is the religious kind. At the same time, there is a recurring implication, proposed by many terrorism scholars and reflected in public discourse, that terrorism, no matter its official designation
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Violations of the heart: Parental harm in war and oppression Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Rebekka Friedman, Hanna Ketola
This article examines ‘parental harm’ – a harm that occurs when a parent loses or faces the threat of losing a child. We contend that the manipulation and severing of relationships between parents and children has played a central role in war and oppression across historical contexts. Parental harm has long-term and pervasive effects and results in complex legacies for carers and their communities
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The intimate public as a decolonial lens: “cripping” affect, nationalism and imperial violence Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Sara Tafakori
This article brings an intimate perspective to bear upon the violence of economic sanctions, shifting attention away from an exclusive focus on state actors, in order to examine how “‘wounds” enter politics’.1 In this research, I ‘stretch’ Berlant’s notion of the intimate public, reconfiguring it as a decolonial analytic lens on subaltern suffering in conditions of endemic imperial violence. I focus
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Visual (data) observation in International Relations: Attentiveness, close description, and the politics of seeing differently Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-12 Jonathan Luke Austin, Isabel Bramsen
Has Visual International Relations (IR) become too distant from the content of visual artefacts? This is a paradoxical question. Visual IR is a vibrant and pluralist field exploring visuals in innumerable ways. Nonetheless, the field tends to focus on ‘deep’ readings of the socio-political implications of visual artefacts at the expense of a close and attentive observation and description of the events
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Conceptual politics and resilience-at-work in the European Union Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Jonathan Joseph, Ana E. Juncos
International crises, most recently the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, often radically change our view of the world and our place within it. The European Union (EU) has been particularly impacted by these developments because these crises have accentuated some of its ontological and epistemological uncertainties and insecurities. While the EU’s resilience turn initiated by the
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Existentialism and International Relations: In it up to our necks Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Andrew R. Hom, Cian O’Driscoll
What, this essay asks, is the relation between contemporary IR scholarship and the existentialist intellectual and cultural tradition? How is our discipline informed and animated by existentialist thinking? Is existentialism a heritage to be recovered, claimed, and embraced by IR scholars, or a shadow to be escaped? And what resources does it furnish us for thinking through the kind of issues that
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The power of interpersonal relationships: A socio-legal approach to international institutions and human rights advocacy Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Nina Reiners
This article further develops and illustrates the argument that relationships between individuals help to explain the success of human rights advocacy in international institutions. Drawing from advocacy theory and socio-legal studies, I shift the attention from collective forms of advocacy to the importance of interpersonal relationships of advocates with individuals in international institutions
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Infrastructure and the integral state: Internal Relations, processes of state formation, and Gramscian state theory Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Daniel R. McCarthy
Infrastructures are central to processes of state formation. The revival of materialism in International Relations has made an important contribution to our understanding of states through careful analysis of the politics of infrastructure and state building. Yet, to date, engagement with the state-theoretical tradition associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas, and Bob Jessop has
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Women’s discursive agency in transitional justice policy-making: A feminist institutionalist approach Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Denisa Kostovicova, Vesna Popovski
Scholars have studied how women’s domestic and transnational civil society activism addresses the gendered nature of transitional justice. In contrast, they have paid scant attention to women’s impact on transitional justice policy-making in institutions. We leverage the feminist institutionalist perspective that makes visible gendered norms, rules, and discourses in institutions. Homing in on women’s
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The Black Fantastic in International Relations Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Lester Spence
In 2016, British investigative journalist Simon Rogers created a map/timeline of Twitter hashtags associated with Black Lives Matter. The map (which no longer exists) indirectly shows both the intensity of Black Lives Matter protests and their geographic scope. Within the United States, we see not only protest activity in metropolitan areas with large black population percentages, but also protest
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Problematising entanglement fetishism in IR: On the possibility of being without being in relation Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Ignasi Torrent
The following article seeks to question the deterministic tinge behind entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, uninhibited, and totalising projection of the world as a relational wholeness. Alongside the rise of Anthropocene debates and the claimed incapacity of post-positivism to account for contemporary socio-natural transformations, the text embarks on two main goals. On the one hand, the
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‘The nation has conquered the state’: Arendtian insights on the internal contradictions of the nation-state Review of International Studies (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Peter J. Verovšek
The globalisation of political power into structures ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the nation-state has increasingly been called into question as part of a ‘sovereigntist turn’ in contemporary politics. While such demands for local control by bounded peoples may be democratic, empirically they often also take a nationalist form. Building on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of how ‘the nation conquered the state’, I