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 investigates the colonial and racial origins and effects of this phenomenon. Contextualising the weaponisation of dogs at Europe’s borders today within a much longer history of racial violence, the article shows how canines have been systematically deployed by colonial and white supremacist powers against racialised bodies as tools to enact and secure racial order. Attentive to the ways in which modern humanness has been predicated upon its removal from the food chain, the article argues that the use of police dogs at Europe’s borders operates by reinforcing the non- or less-than-human status of racialised migrants by marking them as ‘animal-like’ and ‘edible’ bodies. Conceptualising this method as ‘the politics of edibility’, the article then shows how the exposure of migrants to the threat of ‘dog bites’ functions as a form of reinforcing racial hierarchies in a Europe traversed by racial anxieties.

Contemporary technology oligarchs are reshaping global power through their control over critical infrastructures, political institutions, and ideas. Across six essays, this forum examines the territorial, temporal, and ideational ambitions of Silicon Valley billionaires, highlighting how individuals like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg exercise unprecedented influence over states and societies. From charter cities and network-states to cloud computing and satellite systems, these oligarchs leverage personal wealth, technological mastery, and monopolistic control to bypass traditional state authority, turning themselves into quasi-sovereign actors. The essays situate these developments within historical and theoretical frameworks, comparing oligarchic power to early modern chartered corporations and the logic of state formation, while emphasizing the novel dimensions of control unique to the 21st century. Collectively, the essays demonstrate how individual technology oligarchs consolidate authority in ways that challenge traditional international relations theory, revealing a global order increasingly shaped by the ambitions and delusions of private actors.

Research on civil war termination typically classifies conflict outcomes into homogeneous categories. Civil wars are conventionally described as ending in ‘victory’ for one side, ‘negotiated settlement’, or ‘stalemate’. However, each of these common categories conceals a significant degree of unexplored variation. Not all peace processes are the same, nor should we assume equivalence between all ‘victory’ outcomes. Ignoring the variability in outcomes obscures our understanding of how civil wars actually end and can undermine efforts to examine how this may influence the sustainability of the ensuing peace. This article focuses on the concept of rebel victory and argues that it has been used to describe a wide range of civil war outcomes that share some features but that also differ along three dimensions: (i) the residual threat posed by the defeated regime; (ii) the role of external actors in enabling victory; and (iii) rebel fragmentation. The article describes these dimensions and the influence that they can exert on the likelihood of continued political instability in the aftermath of rebel victories. The examples of rebel victories in the Central African Republic (2003 and 2012) are used to demonstrate the analytical utility of this novel conceptualisation of rebel victory.

Territory and territoriality lie at the heart of both world politics and International Relations (IR) theory. In terms of IR theory’s geographical assumptions, one of the most influential studies to date has been political geographer John Agnew’s 1994 article on the ‘the territorial trap’ (TTT). While Agnew’s original insights and subsequent research has reached canonical status in political geography, mainstream IR scholarship has yet to fully engage TTT. Political geographers, in turn, have largely dealt with the consequences of TTT for our understanding of world politics. This study offers the first detailed account of the origins of TTT, which are hidden in broad daylight in IR’s own history. The origins of TTT and mainstream IR are intertwined in terms of two dynamics: the racist and colonial origins of IR, and the selective nationalistic ontology that dominated IR especially in the first half of the 20th century. The arguments offered in this study have a wide variety of implications for problematising the ways in which IR-as-epistemological-community approaches territory and territoriality as well as our understanding of the origins and evolution of the present-day global territorial order.

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 cultures to understand the nexus between bird crime, flyways, and global environmental governance. We analyse how bird migrations along flyways disrupt mainstream systems of knowledge production that global conventions rely on. Zooming in on bird crime along flyways, we demonstrate that crime relies on offenders’ understanding of avian cultures. We synthesise those findings with an analysis of the Convention on Migratory Species, as the only global convention that integrates animal cultures to develop more effective responses to wildlife crime. Our analysis demonstrates that international conservation overlooks the exploitation of avian culture for criminal activity, rendering policy responses less effective, particularly in contexts of scientific uncertainty. Integrating animal cultures can address scientific uncertainty and promote multispecies learning, creating more effective forms of global environmental governance. Ultimately, this renders the non-human visible and makes it possible to explore the implications for multispecies entanglements in IR.

Technology is of increasing importance for international cooperation, yet theory development in rationalist International Relations has not kept pace. I develop a theoretical framework for explaining cooperative outcomes in the international regulation of technology. I propose that uncertainty and the distribution of material capacities create a severe international collective action problem for novel technologies, which precludes robust cooperative outcomes and thus limits joint gains from the appropriation of technological benefits and from the mitigation of technological risks. While the severity of the collective action problem attenuates over time, in principle enabling greater ambition in cooperative outcomes, sociotechnical lock-in reduces the capacities and incentives of state actors to deviate from pre-existing rules. This leads to incremental change whereby rules harden over time but do not change significantly in terms of their regulatory substance. While early regulatory interventions are hampered by collective action problems, late interventions are constrained by lock-in. These temporal dynamics create a tendency towards systemic inefficiency in international technology regulation. I illustrate this argument using the cases of nuclear power and synthetic biology.

The burgeoning critical scholarship on space in International Relations (IR) overwhelmingly recognises space as a socially produced set of performances, practices, and discourses, converging into meaningful organisations of located experience. Drawing on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari on the related concepts of nomadism and the war machine, I argue that this productive emphasis betrays a continued statist methodology that proceeds by binding, or partitioning, space into finished outcomes. I present a conceptual challenge to the normative emphasis on socially produced space by following nomadism, the immanent tendency to variation in the process of spatial becoming. Working with nomadic potentials brings to the fore smooth space, which includes the continuous possibilities and intensities existing unencumbered beneath concretised productions of organised space. I follow the spatial movement of violence in Punjab during the Indian Partition of 1947 as the emergence of a war machine which deployed the nomadism of smooth space to decompose and upend striations. My objectives are first, to argue for spatial possibilities beyond the normative positivity of produced space, and secondly, to register the fundamental methodological and analytical shifts that these possibilities demand. These shifts can in turn deepen ongoing disciplinary inquiries into indeterminacy.

This article argues that the role of surrender in shaping international legitimacy has been largely overlooked – particularly its symbolic dimension. Challenging dominant views that reduce victory and defeat to moments of rupture, it adopts a long-term, relational perspective, reframing surrender as embedded in ongoing processes that shape and reshape legitimacy over time. It explores how symbols that become central during surrender – including foreign and domestic leaders – can mediate tensions between coercion–consent, pride–stigma, autonomy–dependence, while fostering social cohesion across domestic and international societies. Drawing on case studies, process sociology, complexity theory, the English School, and Thucydides, it demonstrates how the symbolic management of surrender can lead to path dependencies that influence state-formation, a defeated state’s identity, and regional integration. Emphasising the fluidity and political weight of symbolic meanings, it advances a relational understanding of hegemonic legitimacy. In doing so, it links the origins of legitimacy to its continuous development and critiques both simplistic victor’s peace narratives and process-reductive histories. Ultimately, it illuminates not only the challenges but also the symbolic opportunities for constructing legitimacy in an interdependent world – underscoring that power endures through its symbolic anchoring in meaning and, with it, the hope for reconciliation despite defeat.

Complementing readings in International Relations (IR) that understand Covid-19 as an Anthropocene effect, this article observes the pandemic as a laboratory for engagements with Anthropocene experience. It argues that the pandemic turn to dreams renegotiated the conditions of experienceability of Anthropocene temporality. Exploring the scientific, archival, and practical registers on which dreams attracted interest during the pandemic, the article traces how dreams were valued for their promise of capturing the affective exposure of subjects to the pandemic present. This conditioning of experienceability on the limits of the human subject resonates with the relational turn in IR and its affirmation of being-in-relation as a condition for becoming attuned to the Anthropocene. Drawing from Koselleck and Foucault, the article understands this resonance as indicative of a shared archive of experiments in transcending modern accounts of temporality. For this archive, rendering an Anthropocenic present experienceable requires a shift from the distanced account of a modern author-subject to a subject that gauges its own exposure to the present. Despite this ambition of the turn to dreams, the article also flags its constraints, observing how this turn regularly tipped back into reaffirming the modern subject.

Cartographic representations of Kashmir and Taiwan act as sites upon which Indian and Chinese state power is exercised to govern the logics of visibility and legibility for these two regions. Despite the differences in regime type, these major non-Western powers represent Kashmir and Taiwan respectively as internal and integral parts of their sovereign territorial form. In this article, we consider two cases that have not hitherto been studied together in International Relations (IR), putting forward ‘cartographic imaginaries’ as a framework to reveal systematic analytical dynamics in relation to representation, nationalism, and diaspora. Cartographic imaginaries are sites of productive power that evoke certain emotions and carry a set of ideas relating to territory that can be naturalised through repeated exposure. We present in-depth investigations providing a range of examples to trace Indian and Chinese states’ efforts, both domestic and international, involved in constructing and controlling cartographic imaginaries of Kashmir and Taiwan. Our analysis relates to significant current concerns in IR about critiques of imperial cartography, impact of rising powers on global order dynamics, and transnational governance of diaspora. Our framework thus demonstrates the connexions between affect, visuality, and state power and offers empirical insights into non-Western projections of imperialism on a global scale.

In the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and under the growing threat of planetary cataclysm, an array of prominent intellectuals grappled with the significance of nuclear war for the human condition and reflected upon the possibilities of escaping its peril. Following on the early interventions of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, the collected thoughts of Karl Jaspers, Hans Morgenthau, and Günther Anders outline a philosophical current of ‘nuclear existentialism’ preoccupied with the nihilistic ‘being-towards-species-death’ entailed by the advent of the Bomb. Faced with the apparent negation of reason in bringing about the means of its own destruction through the scientific piercing of nature’s innermost workings, the nuclear existentialists end up reaffirming, however precariously, a teleological conception of history in which the apocalyptic fear of the Bomb figures as the necessary condition for the ultimate realisation of human freedom. In the light of the contemporary resurgence of nuclear anxiety, this article surveys and critically assesses the corpus of nuclear existentialism, drawing upon the distinctive existential phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas to trace a potential alternative for thinking life and death under the Bomb.

The involvement of private actors in global policymaking has received significant scholarly attention in IR. Existing accounts have shown how entities such as corporations, businesses, and philanthropies build their authority to become legitimate actors and shape global politics. This paper argues that contemporary global dynamics, such as the financialisation of development and the rise of multistakeholderism, have ushered in a trend where private actors are not only seen as legitimate delegated authorities but also embraced as fully fledged political equals indispensable for addressing societal problems. To understand this shift, it is necessary to move beyond an examination of legitimation strategies to interrogate, instead, how private actors shape what are seen as ‘apt’ or ‘deviant’ ways of knowing and acting upon problems. Through an examination of what I call ‘political normalisation’ in the field of global food governance, I show how through concrete practices – individualising social problems, defining institutional aptness, and cultivating the landscape – private actors not only cultivate a perception of themselves as rightful global governors but also shape the parameters of what rightful governing ought to be. More broadly, this shift invites us to further complicate the public–private divide and assess the novel ways through which private actors ‘do’ politics.

Scholars are increasingly interested in how collective memories of war and civil conflict shape competing conceptions of democracy. Less attention has been paid to the role of political parties as representative institutions that select and reinterpret the past to address present issues in the public sphere. This article contributes to this debate by theorizing what we call the public–party tension as a core challenge of democratic memory politics. We examine this tension through a comparative study of how the French and Italian Communist Parties instrumentalized or overlooked the last letters written by partisans and patriots of the anti-fascist resistance before their execution by Nazi and fascist forces during World War II. Drawing on excerpts from the Italian and French anthologies, we uncover an ethics of partisan memory that offers an alternative to both sectarian uses of the past and contemporary cosmopolitan, antagonistic, and agonistic modes of remembering World War II. We argue that these letters offer an enduring normative resource for democratic memory politics, showing how the legacy of anti-fascist resistance can help sustain a pluralist democracy today.

This article seeks to deepen understanding of the global politics of reactionary discursive formations, which at the current conjuncture increasingly coalesce around self-victimising articulations of racial nationalism and a rejection of social justice struggles, often delegitimated as ‘elitist’ in Western core contexts or ‘Western’ in postcolonial spaces. Drawing on insights from feminist and postcolonial scholarship on racial entanglements, masculinism, and Occidentalism, I argue that racialised and gendered imaginations about an emasculated and overly multiracial West and, relatedly, renewed East/West binaries enable reactionary discourses in both Western societies and elsewhere through adaptable mechanisms of mediating between the international and the domestic. I then extend an analysis of global racial entanglements and gendered East/West binaries to Chinese anti-baizuo discourse from both online nationalists and dissident intellectuals, which provides a prime example of how grammars of global reactionary discourse are localised in different political projects and ideological constellations. It demonstrates how reactionary imaginations of the West are instrumental for animating narratives of racial-civilisational hierarchy and masculinist notions of politics and society hostile to egalitarian and emancipatory ideals in a ‘non-Western’ context. Moreover, by highlighting overlaps and divergence in the refashioning of dualistic constructs in American and Chinese ‘anti-woke’ narratives, I show that reactionary discourses operate not only across the geopolitical divide, but also through it, invoked by opposing political forces sharing ethnonationalist and masculinist logics in processes of mutual othering to perpetuate antagonistic identities. The article contributes to the intersection between critical research on the global right and postcolonial International Relations (IR).

Although calls to decolonise International Relations (IR) have become more prominent, the endeavour becomes infinitely more complex when searching for concrete approaches to decolonise IR knowledge production. We posit that decolonising IR, a global counter-hegemonic political project to dismantle and transform dominant knowledge production practices, must be enacted according to context-specific particularities. Contexts shape practices of epistemological decolonisation, since knowledge hierarchies are enacted and experienced – and must be challenged and dismantled – differently in different sites. Yet although acknowledged as important, contexts are understudied and under-theorised. This raises several questions: how do contexts matter to IR knowledge production, in what ways, and with what effects? This article disaggregates six contexts in IR knowledge production – material, spatial, disciplinary, political, embodied, and temporal – and explores how they impact academic practices. We bring together hitherto-disparate insights into the role of contexts in knowledge production from Global IR, Political Sociology, Feminist Studies, Higher Education Studies, and Critical Geopolitics, illustrating them with empirical evidence from 30 interviews with IR scholars across a variety of countries and academic institutions. We argue that an interrogation of the inequalities produced through these contexts brings us closer towards developing concrete tools to dismantle entrenched hierarchies in IR knowledge production.

Through the paradigmatic case of post-revolutionary Iran, this article argues critiques of power-laden human rights politics epitomised by Makau Mutua’s 2001 ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors Metaphor of Human Rights’ when combined with states’ anti-imperialist victim branding, and uncritical anti-imperialist solidarities give rise to a reactionary politics I call the ‘Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviours metaphor of human rights’. Here, anti-imperialist-branding states and their constructions of culture are recast as victims, and the state is treated as synonymous with the population it rules. Western imperialism, the human rights corpus, and those deploying human rights conceived of as extensions of Western imperialism are recast as the savages. Finally, leftist thinkers, anti-imperialist thought, and the resisting victim state and its constructions of Indigenous culture become the saviors. This politics eclipses local populations’ agency and lived experiences by (1) diminishing the moral weight of both the state’s transgressions and the human rights paradigm, (2) interrupting a sustained focus on the anti-imperialist-branding state’s acts of subjugation, (3) defining non-Western populations through essentialist notions of their culture as traditional saviourism does (but valorising rather than vilifying it), and (4) adhering to notions of moral complexity which deny or obscure the elements of moral clarity encompassed.

States increasingly confront security threats from exiled economic elites who retain power through offshore wealth, political influence, and informational leverage. This paper introduces the concept of weaponised legal dependence to explain why and how states file commercial lawsuits against their own citizens in foreign courts – particularly in global legal hubs like London – to neutralise these transnational plutocratic threats. While conventional tools of transnational repression (e.g., extradition, abduction, information warfare) target dissidents’ legitimacy or messaging power, only foreign litigation can directly constrain the material assets that underpin a plutocrat’s influence. However, initiating extraterritorial claims is costly, risky, and entails a partial surrender of sovereignty to liberal jurisdictions. I argue that states resort to these legal strategies when they face power parity with plutocrats – situations where neither side has hierarchical control, prompting political conflict to spill into foreign legal systems under the guise of commercial dispute. Drawing on 60 interviews with legal practitioners and case studies from Russia and Kazakhstan, this paper shows how states instrumentalise the credibility of liberal legal institutions to reclaim offshore assets and delegitimise their rivals. In doing so, illiberal regimes exploit liberal infrastructure, turning courts meant to enforce commercial norms into battlegrounds of domestic power politics.

Critical International Relations Theory (CIRT) is in ‘crisis’. Some argue for a recovery of ‘the inspirational quality’ of Horkheimer and Adorno’s first-generation negative critique. Certainly the challenge of right-wing populism begs questions of CIRT’s ‘consolatory’ cosmopolitanism. I have two concerns however. First, these proposals underplay the reasons why first-generation theorising failed; secondly, CIRT risks throwing the second-generation Habermas–Linklater ‘baby’ out with the ‘bathwater’ at the moment it has particular value. I do two things. I look back to pre-Habermasian Critical Theory, but I set a future agenda based on the Pragmatism of John Dewey. This helps CIRT realise the emancipatory potential in IR’s recent ‘practice turn’, addressing concerns that CIRT is disengaged. It also brings balance to negative and positive critiques, offering a novel challenge to critical/problem-solving binaries in ways that speak to real-world challenges like climate change. Second, I look forward from Habermasian-inspired theory to the third-generation (and Pragmatist-inspired) ‘recognition theory’ of Honneth. This brings a critical edge to IR ontological security studies, further develops the praxeological branch of CIRT, and better informs the political left’s response to the alienating effects of the liberal international order and the rise of right-wing populism.

In this paper, we detail and critique dominant narratives of war crime apologia. These narratives portray the circumstances of a war crime, the perpetrator’s character and motives, and the broader context in which the crime occurred, in ways that minimise or negate the perpetrator’s moral, and sometimes legal, blameworthiness. In section one, we identify and critique three broad categories: (1) individualising narratives (‘uncommon practice’), (2) excusatory narratives (‘essence of war’), and (3) justificatory narratives (‘tragic necessity’). Drawing on a range of real world examples, we outline the features of these narratives and the underlying theory of moral responsibility and blameworthiness on which they implicitly depend. In section two, we elucidate the role of these narratives in the promotion and perpetuation of socially, politically, and legally harmful attitudes towards war crimes. By advancing self-serving perpetrator-centric views about responsibility and blame, these narratives cultivate a cultural and legal toleration and, in some cases, celebration, of atrocity. They also perpetuate a distorted image of war itself, as a space that cannot accommodate moral and legal restraints. This image of war, we argue, weakens the post-Geneva consensus about the reach and limits of battlefield violence and makes the future commission of war crimes more likely. In conclusion, we consider how these narratives could be challenged within military institutions, and in the political and social realm.