AbstractQuestions about how algorithms contribute to (in)security are under discussion across international political sociology. Building upon and adding to these debates, our collective discussion foregrounds questions about algorithmic violence. We argue that it is important to examine how algorithmic systems feed (into) specific forms of violence, and how they justify violent actions or redefine

Drawing on Foucauldian biopolitics, Max Weber's and Hannah Arendt's understandings of bureaucracy, and Achille Mbembe's theoretical insights into necropolitical power, I propose the notion of humanitarian bureaucracy to account for the involvement of medical personnel in the summary deportations of pregnant Comorian women in Mayotte, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean. In addition to

The paper explores the political narratives produced in English-language Israeli cookbooks. We examine an understudied, yet central component of everyday international relations, everyday nationalism, and identity contestations as practiced through gastronomy, and highlight the dilemma between the different political uses of popular culture in the context of conflict resolution and resistance. Our

AbstractThis article examines affective responses to terror and the emergence of communities of sense in the commemoration of such attacks. We challenge the predominant framing of responses to terror which emphasize security and identity. We focus on the singular response by the city of Manchester in the aftermath of the 2017 Arena bombing, drawing on fieldwork conducted at the 1-year anniversary commemorative

AbstractThis paper analyzes the transformations induced by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the extractive sector, through an ethnographic study of villages neighboring an oil-drilling site in the Peruvian Amazon. It examines the materialization of a specific CSR device—the communal enterprise—which involves the majority of village members in the extractive industry as workers, owners, and

AbstractThis paper asks how international political sociology (IPS) can articulate its criticality so that it can continue to engage with lineages that privilege processes and practices emerging from the always fluid and multiple entanglements of fragments without resorting to totalizing logics. IPS and IR more generally have experienced an intensified interest in situated and micro analyses. Engaging

This collective discussion proposes a novel understanding of intelligence as a social phenomenon, taking place in a social space that increasingly involves actors and professional fields not immediately seen as part of intelligence This discussion is a response to the inherent functionalism in Intelligence Studies (IS) that conceives of intelligence as a cycle serving policymakers Instead, our interventions

Resilience is a concept in world politics that emerged, in part, as a way to respond to the impossibility of guaranteeing security in an era of complexity. Absent a central authority that provides security, risk is devolved to the individual, and those who cannot secure themselves are enjoined to constantly adapt to the unknown. Where control over complex systems is now thought to be impossible, the

In its own tale, EUrope conceives of itself as a post-national and trans-border project, often through tropes of movement and the transgression of borders. In light of this imaginary, the recent mass migrations provoked a serious conundrum. How would this EUropean polity reconcile the dominant idea of itself with its desire to erect barriers to cross-border movements from the ‘Global South’? This article

This article presents a novel theoretical and empirical account of the genesis and constitution of genocide in Sudan. To do so, it brings developments in critical genocide studies, notably the colonial and international “turns” and renewed attention to the scholarship of Lemkin, into dialogue with theoretical arguments about processual ontologies, complexity theory, and assemblage thinking. The latter

Analyses of risk in international political sociology and critical security studies have unpicked its operation as a preventive and pre-emptive political technology. This article examines the counter-case of the governance of weapons circulation, in which risk has been mobilised as a permissive technology. Examining UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia and the war in Yemen, I demonstrate how risk assessment

Our understanding of contemporary international relations rests on flawed images of the past. One of the most problematic dimensions of this history is the idea that the core institutions and practices of modern territorial sovereignty originated in Europe before being gradually extended to other parts of the globe. A key dimension of this Euro-centric historiography is the story that the territorial

This article intervenes in discussions about the circulation of policing knowledge and the politics of expertise. As part of a broader conversation about transnational reconfigurations of state power, critical scholars have drawn attention to the influence of global policing “models” and “private” experts in shaping policy. They show how such figures and forms of knowhow symbolically enforce urban

The emergence of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) is increasingly in the academic and public focus. Research largely focuses on the legal and ethical implications of AWS as a new weapons category set to revolutionise the use of force. However, the debate on AWS neglects the question what introducing these weapons systems could mean for how decisions are made. Pursuing this from a theoretical-conceptual

Violent borders are one of the most pressing ethical and political questions of our time. This article seeks to challenge the violent construction of borders through the concept of noise. Drawing on Michel Serres's philosophy of noise and Marie Thompson's emphasis on its affectiveness, the article shows the generative, disruptive, and affective power of noise at the border. I argue that noise creates

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, depictions of neoliberalism as religion, system of belief, and “kind of faith” have multiplied in an attempt to explain neoliberalism’s remarkable power and resilience. These accounts, however, have remained largely impressionistic. In this article, I interrogate the meanings, implications, and value of conceptualizing neoliberalism as religion and advance

The fight against terrorism has undergone major changes over the past thirty years. These changes have often been interpreted as a manifestation of “exceptionalism,” a trend that should be criticized for undermining the rule of law. We agree with this diagnosis but want to take a further step by acknowledging that this critical relationship to developments in counterterrorism is an integral part of

This paper focuses on the financialization of refugee humanitarianism in Greece, bringing attention to the Cash Assistance Programme, which is the first European Union–funded project in Europe providing financial support to asylum seekers, coordinated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. This program consists of the delivery and monthly recharge of prepaid debit cards to asylum seekers

The concept ‘targeted killing’ has been increasingly adopted in scholarship, policy and media discourses, particularly in the context of US armed drone attacks. While ‘targeted killing’ is often understood as something new, there are strong historical continuities with more traditional concepts such as ‘assassination’ and ‘extra-judicial execution’, as well as with the colonial concept ‘police bombing’

Statisticians are under pressure to innovate, partly due to shrinking budgets and the call to do more with less, but also due to technological advances and emergence of new actors promising to produce more accurate and timely statistics with what has come to be known as “big data”. This raises the question, how do new forms of data and methods become legitimate and official? We approach this question

Images of suffering children have long been used to illustrate the violence and horror of conflict. In recent years, it is images of dead children that have garnered attention from media audiences around the world. In response to the deaths of four children killed by the Israeli army while playing on a Gazan beach, Israeli PrimeMinister Netenyahu accused Hamas of generating "telegenically dead" Palestinian

Feminist peace research is an emerging field of social sciences that is transdisciplinary, intersectional, and normative—as well as transnational. Although it draws from disciplines such as peace a ...

This article argues that while Foucauldian security studies (FSS) scholarship on the biopolitics of security and liberal war has not ignored racism, these works largely replicate Foucault's whitewashing of the raciality and coloniality of modern power and violence. Drawing on Black, indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial studies, we show how Foucault's genealogy of biopower rests on an unspecified

Country-of-origin information has secured a central place in European asylum systems, underpinning state decisions on the asylum status of refugee populations. All European states produce this type of information, and dedicated country-of-origin information units are increasingly common. This article analyzes the knowledge politics of country-of-origin information, with a focus on the relation between

Veterans have long sought to make sense of and capture their wartime experiences through a variety of aesthetic means such as novels, memoirs, films, poetry and art. Increasingly, scholars of IR are turning to these sources as a means to study war experience. In this article we analyze one such sense-making practice that has, despite its long association with war, largely gone unnoticed: military tattoos

What do border guards and central bankers have in common? Both operate, on a day-to-day basis, in political spaces exempt from many of the norms of liberal democratic politics and yet have the power to define and constrain them. In order to understand the role of such routine suspensions in the norms of liberal politics, we need to move beyond analyses that focus narrowly on security exceptionalism

The farmer suicides that have taken place in India since the 1990s constitute the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history. While existing research largely focuses on explaining the causes that lead farmers to take their own lives, this paper examines the biopolitical governing function that the suicides have. The paper argues that the farmer suicides have functioned to legitimate intervention

A range of socio-economic dislocations have spawned renewed interest in the capitalist system and its critiques. Within these trends, the politics of international trade has often been a flashpoint for civil society organisations (CSOs) concerned with social justice. This paper uncovers a neglected feature of this landscape: how, since the 1980s, certain CSOs have shifted from being ‘radical outsiders’

Challenging statist understandings of citizenship neglectful of their own ironies, we explore the literature on circulation to argue that political actors build citizenship capacities through the transfer of various technologies, ideas, and modes of organization and by enhancing selfunderstanding across and within borders. This work is largely conceptual. Although we focus on transnational activist

This article examines the diplomatic practices of contested states with the aim to challenge structural legal-institutional accounts of these actors’ international engagement, which are unsatisfactory in explaining change and acknowledging their agency. Considering contested states as liminal international actors, their diplomatic practices stand out for their hybridity in transcending the state versus

Development promotes bureaucratization, and bureaucracies are based on knowledge and produce knowledge. Failures of development are therefore regularly attributed to a lack of knowledge. The article argues that the quest for knowledge is embedded in the managerial rationality of interventions. This rationality also structures the developmental knowledge field and thereby generates ignorance. The example

Diaspora politics is of growing interest to International Relations (IR), yet theorizing about sending states’ engagement of diasporas in different global contexts has been minimal. Central to this article is the question: How do challenges to postconflict statehood shape a sending state’s diaspora engagement? I provide a fresh socio-spatial perspective on “diaspora positionality,” the power diaspora

Schemes for more responsible global governance have often come with new ways of thwarting meaningful voice, participation and dissent of those they are claimed to be beneficial for. This article argues that these processes extend beyond the more often criticized disciplinary effects of civil society promotion and community participation, which, despite a rhetoric of empowerment and emancipation, also

In March 2003 (the eve of Iraq’s invasion) the George W. Bush Administration reissued, extended, and enforced a Directive prohibiting the publication and broadcast of images and videos capturing the ritual repatriation of America’s war dead. This Directive (known as the Dover Ban) is exemplary of a wider set of more subtle processes and practices of American statecraft working to move suffering and

War and peace are gendered and gendering geopolitical processes, constituting particular configurations of masculinity and femininity. When men are considered in relation to war and peace the majority of scholarly accounts focus on soldiers and perpetrators, typically observing their place in the gendered geopolitical solely through military/ized masculinities. In contrast, this article examines fatherhood

Tracing transformations in the way that humanitarian organizations respond to insecurity in the field, this article examines the bureaucratization and professionalization of security in relation to intraorganizational struggles between humanitarian professionals. Whereas some advocate for the triumph of remoteness and bunkerization as organizing principles of humanitarian action, others challenge the

In recent years, counterradicalization work has come to focus on empowering vulnerable communities and individuals through programs implemented by local governments and welfare services. This article examines this new regime of counterradicalization, focusing on how such programs seek to immunize people allegedly susceptible to radicalization by making them "active citizens." In contrast to the stated

As students and scholars of global politics, we have been witnessing, participating in, and feeling the effects of recent global upheavals. These include specific events, such as the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit, but are better understood through their resulting political effects (e.g., pushing back on migration, hardening national borders, denying climate change, reneging on trade deals

Work on affect has made significant contributions to how international relations (IR) scholars understand the high politics of international affairs, capturing political reactions to the horrific, the spectacular, and the exceptional. However, the turn to affect has been less inclined to offer comprehensive insight into the importance of emotion in banal or everyday international politics. The theory

Recent scholarship in International Relations (IR) and International Political Sociology (IPS) has made significant contributions to the study of images. Chief among such studies on visual politics has been the focus on popular visual media including cartoons, film, photography and video games. This paper takes a look at another prominent medium: the comic. Comics provide ample potential starting points

The contemporary fascination with terrorism in Anglo-American popular culture, political discourse, news reportage and beyond is boundless and well-documented. In this article we explore contemporary productions of terrorism as the outcome of three drives to knowledge: laugher, lamentation and detestation. Drawing on a range of social and cultural practices – including jokes, street art, film, memorial

This paper provides a detailed study of the liquid bomb plot from 2006, focusing on the ways in which the plot was constituted as “an event unlike others” (Adey, Anderson, and Lobo Guerrero 2011, 340). Engaging with a critical body of scholarship that examines how events are assembled and governed as emergencies, disasters, or catastrophes, the paper explores two sets of questions. First, the paper

Global mobility continues to challenge and unsettle forms of citizenship, political engagement, and belonging in various ways. Within this voluminous and wide-ranging movement, it is particularly the figure of the ‘refugee’ that has come to question the “national order of things” (Malkki 1995). Paradoxically, refugees both disrupt this order by simply existing and depend on it to exist in the first

In past decades, social and cultural theory as well as international relations theory and political theory have been preoccupied with the subject of fear. In this article, I return the conversation ...

This article engages in an experiment that aims to push critical/post-structuralist thought beyond its comfort zone. Despite its commitment to critiquing modern, liberal ontologies, the article claims that these same ontologies are often tacitly reproduced, resulting in a failure to grasp contemporary structures and histories of violence and domination. The article brings into conversation five selected

In the wake of the disclosures by Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance practices, a series of public hearings was held before the Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs (LIBE) Committee of the European Parliament in 2013–2014. These hearings offer a wealth of information concerning the details of Snowden’s claims, their implications for privacy rights, and the way in which the transatlantic political

Recent studies of civil war have problematized frameworks that rely on a strict binary between state-sanctioned order and anarchy. This paper extends these insights and combines them with theories of performativity to examine welfare practices during the Syrian conflict (2011-2015). Specifically, we argue that conceptualizing the state as a construct—as an effect of power—can expand the study of civil

This paper uses the work of Samuel Beckett to reflect on the in-between positionality of International Political Sociology (IPS) and offers a field guide to help scholars, students, and thinkers embrace this disposition more energetically. It makes the case for a more balanced transdisciplinarity that keeps the field of inquiry open while attending to the international, the political, and the social

This paper interrogates the emerging practices of narrative methods in research that focuses on mobility and migration. It seeks to understand how these methods enable a conceptualization of global politics that challenges the global/local divide, revealing instead complex entanglements through which the local and the global are mutually constituted. Focusing in particular on the primacy of narrative

In the past few years the relative success of international political sociology as an intellectual project has stimulated debates about its contribution to international studies. With this issue we celebrate ten years of International Political Sociology. The journal was created in 2006, with the first issue published in 2007. It has been an intellectually fascinating ride. Since its beginnings, IPS

This article is a brief inquiry into the changing meaning of war in Western political thought, with special reference to its role in fracturing the contemporary international system. I argue that contemporary debates about the changing nature of war have failed to note what I take to be the most important change in our understanding of war in recent decades—the return of the long-suppressed view that

In this article, I offer a critical historical analysis of modernity, identifying tensions between logics of modernity that rely on premises of colonial and capitalist modernity as a universalizing project, and those that instead propose an alternative decolonial project. As part of the latter, I outline the contours of an emergent and distinct political project premised on deep relational ontologies

IED attacks in Afghanistan went from 797 attacks in 2006 to 15,222 attacks in 2012. In that time, 53,997 IEDs and their human collaborators injured more than 11,416 US soldiers and killed over 1,298 soldiers in Afghanistan. If you include Iraq, IEDs account for almost two-thirds of all US soldiers wounded and killed in both wars. This article investigates why something as low-tech as an improvised

Using a combination of migration studies, political sociology, and policy studies, this paper explores the contradictions and violence of immigration detention, its architectures, and its audiences. The concept of “detention-as-spectacle” is developed to make sense of detention’s hypervisible and obscured manifestations in the European Union. We focus particularly on two case studies, the United Kingdom

This paper focuses on a particular instance of migrant resistance: the hunger strike of three hundred irregular migrants in 2011 in Greece. It does not conceptualize the politics of migrant resistance as an isolated incidence of mobilization of irregular migrants against the government in support for their rights in existing institutions. By drawing on a set of fifty-two face-to-face semi-structured

This study develops and examines the concept of hegemonic religion and its relationship with democracy. A religion is hegemonic not only when the state grants that religion exclusive material and political privileges and benefits, but also when the religion is a core element of national identity and citizenship. We empirically examine the link between hegemonic religion and democracy using the Religion

The quantification of problems that actors decide to understand and fix has become central to policy-making. However, this article suggests that critics of this move miss the point if their critique is limited to inadequate methods or inaccurate results. Dialoguing with recent literature on governance by numbers, the article argues that errors are not the issue. Taking development policy-making as

This article examines the political and social impact of elevating military values in society in a context of austerity. Centering on discussions around two British government “military ethos” initiatives, I consider the idea that military service instills desirable qualities and values in military personnel, making them well suited to educating and socializing children, to the advantage of both children

Luc Boltanski is one of the most important contemporary social theorists. Whether and how his sociology matters for International Relations (IR) theory has, so far, not been explored. Boltanski’s work, as this article demonstrates, can greatly advance international political sociology by further developing a practice theoretical account which reconciles Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Pierre

The claim that big data can revolutionize strategy and governance in the context of international relations is increasingly hard to ignore. Scholars of international political sociology have mainly discussed this development through the themes of security and surveillance. The aim of this paper is to outline a research agenda that can be used to raise a broader set of sociological and practice-oriented