Contemporary security governance increasingly relies on science and technology, yet little attention has been paid to how their place in security has been historically constituted and continues to shape security practices. High-containment laboratories working with dangerous pathogens exemplify this puzzle: while expert debates have focused on governing these dual-use technologies, they often overlook the historical conditions that enabled their global expansion and continue to affect the insecurities these laboratories generate. This article examines how the rise of high-security laboratories has been intertwined with changing understandings of biological threats and approaches to governing them. Bringing together research on technopolitics, global history, and security studies, the paper develops technopolitical histories of security, an analytical framework for the historical study of technoscientific systems in security politics. The framework examines how security rationalities are materialized in scientific practices and technologies, how these arrangements are constituted through global connections and power asymmetries, and how they prefigure subsequent approaches to security. Empirically, the article traces high-security laboratories across three technopolitical arrangements: biological warfare, biological defence, and biological preparedness. It shows how pathogen research mobilized for past security projects laid the structural foundations for contemporary biological security governance, making visible the enduring political effects of technoscientific systems.

Throughout the 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), particularly Fatah, cultivated a global network of solidarity rooted in worldwide anti-imperialism and advocacy for the Palestinian cause. Among its allies was the People’s Mujahidin Organization of Iran (MEK), which dispatched dozens of fighters to Fatah training camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq from 1970 to 1979 and emerged as one of the leading opposition groups to the Iranian shah. Examining the individual trajectories of MEK members who established ties and trained with the PLO provides insight into both organizations. For the MEK, this relationship not only embedded the group into a global revolutionary network centered on Palestine but also shaped its organizational trajectory by influencing its conception and practice of armed struggle. Further, the informality through which their ties emerged—and the central role played by rank and file MEK members in forging them—exemplifies a distinctive mode of transnational alliance-building for the PLO, one that complemented its formal diplomatic efforts. Finally, after the Iranian Revolution, this relationship positioned the MEK, the primary Iranian opposition in the early 1980s, to contest the Islamic Republic’s claim to the Palestinian cause.

The 18th century regime of electoral republicanism within nation-states, later rebranded as ‘democracy’, appears to be threatened around the world. To rebuild democracy on sounder bases, theorists and practitioners alike emphasize the value of inclusive and participatory institutions. But how should these institutions be built? This paper presents the results of a deep dive into the forms that inclusion and participation have taken across history and the globe – we refer to them as ‘collective governance’. We describe the methodology used to explore the cases, what the data look like, and some preliminary findings. These findings put pressure on well-known social scientific assumptions about the possibilities and limits of collective governance and present a more fine-grained picture of the conditions that may sustain robust collective governance institutions at scale.

How can a political society established in one port city in Revolutionary France be a ‘global’ actor? This article examines the revolutionary Society of Lorient, an Atlantic port founded to be the seat of the French East India Company, as a case study of the viability of the ‘micro-spatial’ approach to global history outlined by Christian De Vito. It considers how the Lorient Society positioned itself as an intermediary between global concerns and the French national authorities, as well as the Society’s evolving perspective on global imperial rivalries in their relationship to revolution, the ‘rights of man’, trade, war, race, and slavery. In doing so, it shows how a seemingly local actor could help construct the global in the context of the ‘Age of Revolution(s)’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Through comparative analysis of two historical cases of transition from hierarchical to competitive international orders—from the Han dynasty to the Period of Disunion in third-century China, and from the Abbasid Caliphate to the Islamic Commonwealth in the tenth century—we consider how social movements have long been significant facilitators of international change. With reference to the contributions to these transitions of early Daoist and Sunni movements respectively, we offer a comparative framework for understanding how social movements may undermine established hierarchies and induce legitimacy contests that contribute toward the emergence of new international orders. Moreover, by contrasting these cases against the role of the Reformation movement in the development of European international order, the article both decenters the European experience and illuminates how social movements can be central to crafting fundamental, yet varying, relationships between political authority and society across highly diverse cultural and temporal contexts.

Flows of Spanish American silver have long been bound up in narratives of early modernity, the growth of globalization, and the coming of capitalism. This article reconsiders these narratives through a trial held in seventeenth-century Ottoman Istanbul of imported lion dollar coins that were suspected of being false. The trial shows the different ways groups—both within and outside the state and transacting on different scales from local to interstate—sought to impose criteria of evaluation on coins as they crossed oceans and empires in an era of incomplete state power and growing interstate trade. The trial worked to align competing understandings of money and restored confidence through a performance of measurement. In reckoning with competing understandings of money before multiple monetary authorities, social relations, as much as the physical coins, were on trial. By moving past a traditional divide between thinking globally about money as a trade commodity and thinking comparatively about money as a creature of the state in distinct polities, the trial of the lion dollars shows how early modern money was made and remade through a process of global circulation and far-reaching interactions with competing authorities.

This article investigates the global history of the population control movement through the case of the relationship between the Italian Association for Demographic Education (AIED) and American philanthropist Clarence J. Gamble. Drawing on archival sources from Italy and the United States, this study examines how international debates on modernization and demographic control intersected with national anxieties surrounding southern Italy’s underdevelopment. Italian activists engaged with international discourses linking population control to modernization, promoting family planning initiatives despite their illegality. Through its collaboration with Gamble, AIED was introduced in a global circulation of cheap contraceptives, an experiment targeting poor and southern women. The article argues that AIED’s persistent connection with Gamble contributed to its growing isolation within international networks by the mid-1960s, as the priorities of Western family planners shifted decisively towards the Global South. By situating the Italian case within these international dynamics, this study offers a new perspective on how national contexts were shaped by the global politics of family planning.