Scott Base is New Zealand’s year-round Antarctic research station, and it provides an operationally established template for designing sustained human presence in extreme, remote environments such as Mars. This Perspective article compares organizational, logistical, scientific and governance structures of the New Zealand Antarctic programme with conceivable Mars mission architectures to highlight shared challenges in remote operations and draw practical lessons for future Mars exploration programmes. Parallels include overlapping crew rotations to preserve institutional memory, a mixed logistics model combining national assets, public and private partnerships, in situ resource utilization for water production and governance frameworks that prioritize science and environmental protection. Emerging Mars mission architectures, such as NASA’s Moon to Mars strategy and SpaceX’s Starship transport system, which plans to target ice-rich landing sites such as the Arcadia Planitia region, may mirror many aspects of Antarctic operations. Insights from Scott Base and the New Zealand Antarctic programme provide scalable strategies for developing a sustainable, internationally cooperative presence on Mars. Collectively, the New Zealand Antarctic model, underpinned by research, science diplomacy and international partnerships, offers valuable lessons for human settlement beyond Earth.

The concept of collective intentionality has come to play an increasingly prominent role in the theoretical study of international relations (IR). In particular, scholars regularly treat two kinds of collectives – states and groups of states – as forming intentions and engaging in the joint pursuit of shared goals. In this piece, we intervene in the burgeoning IR debate on the ontology underlying this practice by making the case for a reductionist view of state intentions and joint interstate action. Drawing on Michael Bratman’s work on social ontology and original supporting arguments, we develop a sophisticated, non-summative reductionist account which overcomes many of the theoretical concerns that previously led scholars to reject reductionism as a viable ontological view within IR. Our account promises to advance both the empirical and normative study of international politics in several ways: it entails guidelines on how to study the origins of foreign policies and grand strategies; it lays the groundwork for novel views on interstate cooperation as it takes place in formats such as coalitions of the willing or security concerts; and it provides a promising framework for assessing collective moral responsibility and its relation to individual responsibility.

Ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) have been a persistent feature of global governance. However, only recently have they become the focus in governance scholarship. Why are they created, and how do they vary in their composition and afterlife? We examine AHCs since 1919 across health and security governance challenges. Our analysis rests on archival material from international organizations (IOs) and national governments. We argue that, in bringing together political rivals, AHCs serve three primary purposes. Firstly, as agenda setters, they address new governance challenges. Secondly, as capacity generators, they reshuffle membership compositions. Finally, as decision accelerators, they enable their members to bypass existing IOs. Beyond these commonalities, notable differences exist that are rooted in relative issue salience. Less salient issues are often led by bureaucrats and experts, glossing over political agendas and mediating between rivals. This set-up often leads to permanent cooperative structures. Issues that decision-makers perceive as highly salient occupy the attention of politicians who want to keep the coalition small. As a result, rivalries can easily come to the fore, leading to short-lived coalitions. Overall, AHCs point to more or less exclusionary action that serves as a testing ground for international cooperation in times of uncertainty and (geo)political crises.

This article examines the challenges of border-crossing science at geopolitical hot spots through the case study of the East Sea (also known as the Sea of Japan). The East Sea is a marginal sea on the north-west Pacific Ocean surrounded by four historically conflicted nations—South Korea, North Korea, Russia, and Japan. Despite vast scientific interest, severe military conflicts have restricted transnational cooperation in this region throughout the late twentieth century. Utilizing personal archives, cruise reports, and interviews with participating scientists, this article examines how an international team of East Asian oceanographers developed material, political, and rhetorical tactics to circumvent and even appropriate complex border problems at the end of the Cold War. The case study suggests that the global history of oceanography should pay further attention to the practical challenges of accessing geopolitically conflicted basins as well as creative strategies that scientists devise to bridge over those troubled waters.

This article examines how the participation and designations of the shared delegation of Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands to the Arctic Council have developed since the council’s establishment in 1996. Drawing on data from 223 meetings across all Arctic Council meeting types, we analyse participation patterns and delegation designations, linking them to shifting priorities and internal dynamics within the Kingdom. The delegation is unique for its frequent designation changes and documentation of nationality shifts. Our analysis shows that since 2013, designations have gradually standardised at ministerial and Senior Arctic Official (SAO) meetings, while at the working group level, designation practices are more fragmented. Denmark maintains the largest presence across all meeting types, but Greenland and the Faroe Islands have increased their engagement in specific groups in line with their foreign policy strategies. These developments highlight a broader rebalancing within the Kingdom, where Greenland and the Faroe Islands have strengthened their Arctic engagement and foreign policy agency.

A growing number of governments are seeking to return control from supranational authorities to the state. Many of them wish to do so without sacrificing the benefits of deep international cooperation. But this desire to increase national control while maintaining cooperation – which we term ‘sovereigntist internationalism’ – is often frustrated in practice. We argue that this is due to a ‘trust paradox’ these governments face when their ideological commitments push them towards trust-based institutional arrangements while simultaneously rendering them less trusting and less trustworthy. We illustrate our argument with a case study of the Brexit negotiations during Theresa May’s premiership from 2016 to 2019. Drawing on elite interviews, we show how the UK government sought to transpose existing forms of economic cooperation into looser institutional arrangements but failed to convince the European Commission that enough trust could be generated to make the continuation of deep cooperation viable without strong control mechanisms. Our argument advances debates in International Relations (IR) by, first, explaining governments’ sometimes contradictory preferences for institutional designs; second, showing that different actors need different levels of trust to achieve similar levels of cooperation; and, third, improving our understanding of how populist actors view international institutions.

States are increasingly resorting to international cooperative agreements to deter migrants and refugees from irregularly arriving at their borders. Although scholars have shown how these cooperative deterrence policies are undermining important refugee and human rights protections, making migration journeys more dangerous, and securitizing and criminalizing people on the move, what has not been adequately examined is how these cooperative arrangements can bring about normative changes that produce indifference to the suffering of refugees and migrants. This article examines the psychosocial dynamics of cooperative deterrence policies to show how the social processes of authorization, routinization, evasion of responsibility, and dehumanization weaken moral restraints and opportunities for moral contemplation. Governments are using these social processes to implement, legitimize, and promote harmful policies; evade legal responsibility; and obscure the moral implications of their policies. This article sheds new light on the psychosocial effects of cooperative deterrence, the dark side of international cooperation, and the role that indifference plays in maintaining and legitimizing migration deterrence polices.

Power transitions among major states have shaped the course of cooperation in the history of the international system. We study this relationship from a public opinion angle by examining the effect of a potential power transition on attitudes towards bilateral trade liberalization. Power transitions can spur political and economic conflict because the rising power gains greater influence over the course of world politics, including trade rules, allowing it to assert its national interest and the interests of its citizens. This implies that citizens in the rising power are more supportive of bilateral economic cooperation than citizens in the declining power. Empirical findings from parallel, survey‐embedded experiments in China and the United States lend support to this conjecture. Great Power competition, therefore, interferes with current international economic affairs – an aspect that has received less attention in previous research on trade politics.

Dominant discourses and practices in international cooperation have been characterised by depoliticisation and unequal power relationships. However, a number of more transformative experiences of cooperation also exist, where joint work between Northern and Southern social organisations is linked with a more political perspective. These kinds of experiences can be considered processes of informal learning in social action: through shared actions, strategies and frameworks and through interaction between organisations, institutions and the grassroots, informal and multidimensional learning processes occur in the people and organisations engaged. The study approaches four cases of networks that have linked Spanish and Colombian organisations which promote advocacy and social mobilisation for the defence of human rights in Colombia. The results show that people engaged in the cases experience intense learning processes that are relevant for the construction of solidarities and a radical global citizenship, but that these processes are also replete with limitations, tensions and challenges.

Information is a key variable in International Relations, underpinning theories of foreign policy, inter-state cooperation, and civil and international conflict. Yet IR scholars have only begun to grapple with the consequences of recent shifts in the global information environment. We argue that information disorder—a media environment with low barriers to content creation, rapid spread of false or misleading material, and algorithmic amplification of sensational and fragmented narratives—will reshape the practice and study of International Relations. We identify three major implications of information disorder on international politics. First, information disorder distorts how citizens access and evaluate political information, creating effects that are particularly destabilizing for democracies. Second, it damages international cooperation by eroding shared focal points and increasing incentives for noncompliance. Finally, information disorder shifts patterns of conflict by intensifying societal cleavages, enabling foreign influence, and eroding democratic advantages in crisis bargaining. We conclude by outlining an agenda for future research.

The second Trump administration has disrupted global climate politics, turning the United States away from the clean energy and environmental policies of the Biden administration. Consequently, analytical attention is turning, inside and outside of the United States, to a family of concepts referred to as “Climate Realism” (CR), which favors long-run investments in technology and adaptation over near-term climate mitigation efforts. We critically engage with CR and argue that political science identifies four key features of climate politics that shed light on CR’s strengths and weaknesses, and which will persist even in the second Trump era. Despite CR’s flaws, we contend that its emergence in reaction to the second Trump administration highlights some important dimensions of climate politics that deserve greater attention going forward. We highlight three topics for research: the political and practical strategies of the anti-green coalition; the heterogeneity in viable national economic strategies; and the implications for IR of a turn away from meaningful climate mitigation in powerful nations.