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 argue that the slippage from democratic to national sovereigntism is rooted in fundamental conceptual instabilities within the concept of the nation-state. Whereas the first term in this hyphenated construct favours certain individuals based on their ethnic background, the latter is a universal concept that demands the equal treatment of all. My basic thesis is that these internal contradictions help to explain the nationalist tendency in calls to return political power to the nation-state. I illustrate these points by drawing on examples from the ‘illiberal democracies’ of Central-Eastern Europe, focusing on Poland and Hungary.

‘Visual turn’ scholarship in International Relations (IR) acknowledges the importance of new information and communication technology for the production and circulation of images but lacks sustained engagement with the technologies themselves and how they interact with humans in the visual production of security. This article brings the visual turn into conversation with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and mobilises Latour and Woolgar’s notion of inscription to show how the production of visual artefacts and their security effects are conditioned by human/device interaction. It advances the argument that the representational force of a visual artefact is dependent not only on the content and quality of the artefact itself, but also on the specific human/device relations that condition its production. To illustrate this, the article theorises the smartphone as an inscription device and the selfie as an inscription practice and analyses the case of Zelensky’s selfie videos from the first few days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Selfies inscribe meaning to security issues by mobilising the photographic affordances of indexicality, composition, and reflection in unique ways. Specifically, they focus images on the communicative acts of their producers and play on the relationship between human and device to invoke feelings of immediacy, authenticity, and intimacy.

The article explores the complicity of children’s picturebooks in the construction and critique of world politics. Focusing on The Gruffalo, it argues that this spectacularly successful book: (1) stories the international as a pessimistic, anarchical world populated by self-interested, survival-seekers; (2) disrupts this reading and its assumptions through evocation of the social production of threat; and, (3) provides a more fundamental decolonial critique of the international through parochial privileging of its protagonist’s journey through a ‘deep dark wood’. In doing this, we argue, the book vividly demonstrates the world’s susceptibility to multiple incompatible readings, while rendering visible the assumptions, framing, and occlusions of competing understandings of the international. As such, it theorises both world politics and knowledge thereof as contingent and unstable. In making this argument, three contributions are made. First, empirically, we expand research on popular culture and world politics through investigating a surprisingly neglected example of the former. Second, theoretically, we demonstrate the work such texts perform in (re)creating and (de)stabilising (knowledge of) global politics. Third, we offer a composite methodological framework for future research into the context, content, and framing of complex texts like The Gruffalo.

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 (IOs). Yet a rising and increasingly globally connected resistance works against LGBTI rights. It rests predominantly in the hands of a transnational advocacy network (TAN) that attempts to lay claim to international human rights law by reinterpreting it. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork and 240 interviews with LGBTI, anti-LGBTI, and state and IO actors, this article explores how the conservative TAN functions, in terms of who comprises it and how its agenda is constructed. We argue that this TAN has employed many of the same transnational tools that garnered LGBTIQ people their widespread recognition. It also conforms to the spiral model of rights diffusion, but in a process we call a double helix. As the double-helix metaphor suggests, rival TANs have a reciprocal relationship, having to navigate each other’s presence in an interactive space and thus using related strategies and instruments for mutually exclusive ends.

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. Based on 467 interviews with participants in a leading multistakeholder initiative, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), it presents four findings: (1) respondents identify more men than women as inspiring and visionary leaders, with the difference roughly corresponding to the share of women in leadership roles; (2) respondents tend to ascribe more leadership attributes to women than to men when explaining why they find them inspiring and visionary; (3) both feminine and masculine leadership traits are appreciated in relation to both men and women leaders at ICANN; (4) female respondents identify more women as inspiring and visionary leaders than male respondents. These findings contribute novel insights into gendered perceptions around leadership and the importance of role models in global governance. They also shed much-needed light on the demands and expectations from leadership in global multistakeholder arrangements.

Proposals for large-scale technical interventions into the Earth system to mitigate global warming – or climate engineering – have sparked considerable debate about their potential implications for international security and global governance. The article furthers this debate by bringing it into dialogue with the literature on visual global politics to develop a more ‘imagistic’ concept of climate engineering imaginaries. Based on a novel visual dataset, three major visual clusters in the public discourse on climate engineering are identified: images of the human–nature relationship, of climate engineering as tangible infrastructure, and of the actors involved in climate engineering projects. The analysis shows how images and other visuals do not only shape the dominant understanding of climate engineering but also competing imaginaries of future political orders in which such approaches might be deployed. Three main results of this analysis stand out. First, dominant ways of seeing climate engineering can further reinforce already dominant discursive frames by adding ‘visual proof’ to their underlying claims. Second, climate engineering visuality can also enable the politicisation of climate engineering by rendering concrete projects visible and hence contestable. Third, climate engineering images can paradoxically limit the scope of imagination as they often revolve around powerful visual icons and symbols of the past and present.

This article examines ‘diasporic geopolitics’ as a significant factor in the future of global politics. Whereas discussions of global order in IR have been highly spatialised, we instead highlight the extent to which different regions of the world are entangled via ongoing migration processes, and their legacies in the form of global diasporas. We examine the significance of these interconnections by focusing on rising powers and their relations with the existing international order. Major migration-sending states such as China, India, and Turkey are now aspiring great powers that seek to exert global influence in international affairs. In this context, their diaspora governance policies are also undergoing a transformation, with diasporas increasingly understood as important assets for promoting sending states’ geopolitical agendas and great power ambitions. We examine three mechanisms by which such states exert power transnationally via their diaspora engagement policies. States can treat ‘their’ diasporas as economic assets that facilitate trade and foreign investment; as soft power assets that contribute to the promotion of ‘civilisational’ politics; and as diplomatic assets that can be strategically mobilised or repressed. We conclude by discussing the implications for thinking about the nature of global order and power politics in the coming 50 years.

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 of how ‘status’ can be studied. It suggests replacing ‘status-seeking’ with ‘status performances’ that are conceptualised as part of ‘statecraft’ process. Drawing on post-structuralist and queer approaches as well as aesthetics in International Relations (IR), it is argued that status performances participate in the production of the state itself as a subject in world politics, so all states are ‘status-seekers’. This subject-production process occurs in multiple political sites, including the academic IR discourse in a country and visual presentations in the media. It is concluded that there is no ‘status’ beyond the subject, and status can never be achieved because it always needs repetitive performances. The argument is illustrated by an analysis of the production of ‘Turkey’ as a humanitarian state and demonstrates how this is effected in state-elite pronouncements, IR scholarship in Turkey, and visual representations.

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 balances sustaining life on the planet. As a consequence, a number of post-growth theories and approaches have emerged over the past few years. This article carries out a comparative analysis of three main post-growth schools of thought in order to trace back their origin, evolution, and policy impacts at the global level. It also investigates the main points of tension and synergy to advance the debate on how best to challenge conventional growth-based policies in the international arena.

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 actively reiterate securitisation practices. This richly textured empirical case study of the workings of Vietnamese society and politics represents an invitation to explore key debates surrounding securitisation theory. Reflecting on the empirical material of the case, this paper builds on scholarship seeking to highlight the shortcomings of the Copenhagen School’s model of securitisation and from there further explore securitisation theory and its limits. It takes aim at how the audience and its agency is conceptualised in the theory and develops the notions of ‘historical resources’ and ‘activation architecture’ to more adequately explain the processes of securitisation.

This article examines the visual politics of complicity within war, conflict, and military occupation in International Relations (IR). By arguing that complicity is a social relation through which actors navigate violence while drawing on power and resources that are distributed unevenly, it explores the production, articulation, and reception of complicity within the Israeli television series Fauda, which addresses complicit behaviour under the Israeli occupation of Palestine. By building on Feminist IR's engagement with emotions, gender, and visual representations, this article provides a twofold contribution to the study of complicity in international politics. Firstly, the complicit entanglement between creators, distributors, and viewers of Fauda spotlights the cultural workers’ role in shaping public knowledge of war, violence, and military occupation, particularly by creating and circulating cultural representations that facilitate the complicity of audiences with the violence that they consume through certain emotional logics (empathy, compassion, fear). Secondly, this article examines representations of complicity within Fauda to shed light on complicit actors’ embodied experiences of navigating between different identities while caught in the middle of violence (perpetrator, victim, witness, bystander). To this end, this article develops our understanding of emotions, resistance, and domination in international politics.

While postcolonial approaches to International Relations have offered new concepts, methods, and political imaginaries of global politics, postsocialism has been absent as an analytical and political approach. Postsocialism has been mainly a descriptive term naming the temporal transition of the Second World to liberal democracy and market economy or the geopolitical space of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Building on literature that has connected postsocialism and postcolonialism analytically and politically, particularly feminist work that has reclaimed postsocialism to understand the global legacies of socialism in the present, this article proposes to unpack dimensions of postsocialism as method and critique. Postsocialism as method attends to how socialist legacies endure and are transformed in the present while holding together contradictions and ambivalences. Postsocialism as critique is oriented to transversal solidarities and the epistemic vocabularies that can undergird these struggles. To trace these dimensions of method and critique, the article is situated empirically within debates about borders and migration. Postsocialism is not intended to replace or displace other critical approaches but to pluralise our vocabularies and multiply political interventions.

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 of speeches and policy statements (by Western leaders and President Volodymyr Zelensky) that specifically refer to resilience, it demonstrates that resilience is a significant ‘concept at work’ in the war, making certain forms of international and domestic politics possible. Second, while research on resilience frequently discusses different ways that the concept has been defined and approached in fields such as engineering, ecology, and psychology, this article highlights that diverse framings of resilience have become entangled as the concept is ‘at work’ in the war in Ukraine. More specifically, its analysis makes prominent the fusion of different resiliences at different levels – from the individual to the systemic – discursively working together for particular political ends. In this way, it offers a novel way of thinking multi-systemically about resilience and, by extension, about resilience and complexity.

Scholarship on global environmental assessments call for these organisations to become more reflexive to address challenges around participation, inclusivity of perspectives, and responsivity to the policy domains they inform. However, there has been less call for reflexivity in IPCC scholarship or closer examination of how routine concepts condition scholarly understanding by focusing on science and politics over other social dynamics. In this article, I suggest that scholarly reflexivity could advance new analytical approaches that provide practical insights for changing organisational structures. Through reflecting on my understanding of the IPCC, I develop actors, activities, and forms of authority as a new analytical framework for studying international organisations and knowledge bodies. Through its application, I describe the social order of the IPCC within and between the panel, the bureau, the technical support units, the secretariat and the authors, which is revealing of which actors, on the basis of what authority, have symbolic power over the writing of climate change. The fine-grained analysis of organisations enabled by this analytical framework reveals how dominance can and is being remade through intergovernmental relations and potentially, identifies avenues that managers of these bodies can pursue to challenge it.

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 climate action. To do this, I first review the claims and critiques that economic growth is a precondition for peace. I then revisit past peacebuilding cases where the promotion of economic growth has either corresponded with or led to environmental degradation and unequal distribution of resources, contributing to new or renewed forms of violence. Finally, I explore the prospects of post-growth peacebuilding based on recent efforts to make UN peacekeeping operations more attuned to environmental considerations and the changing climate. Post-growth peacebuilding is not just about reducing the environmental footprint of peacekeeping; it is, more importantly, about breaking away from the linear and growth-driven path of peace and development towards intergenerational and ecological justice.

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 after growth is not only possible but likely. In the current conjuncture of crises and challenges, industrial strategies that bring together environmental, social justice, and pro-growth coalitions offer the best chance to meet climate goals and improve the prospects for inclusive prosperity globally. In addition, there is evidence that industrial policy is providing a platform to build active states, rebalance state–business relations, forge new systems of calculation, and gather cosmological resources for new action.

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 by finance capital, as well as the troubling orientation of transition towards building new structures of accumulation around the vision of an electrified consumer society. We also see the coming decades being marked by the ever-increasing wealth of global asset-owning classes – who, by definition, enclose the atmospheric commons faster than any other community. Against this dystopian picture of increasingly concentrated wealth, corporate excess, and terrestrial crisis, we focus on the stubborn reproduction of socio-ecological life through various grounded projects across the world. We engage with communities who work against structural constraints to reproduce life from below through urban commoning, food sovereignty, Indigenous organising, and caretaking economies – all of which are scaling out their visions through alternative internationals. All of these projects, we argue, present a planetary and multiscalar political economy in practice, which connects grounded experience with resistance to the dynamics of capitalism at the state, corporate, and transnational levels. With lessons from these communities in mind, we call for a ‘planetary political economy of the global majority’, which prioritises the reproduction of socio-ecological life according to the visions of grounded anti-systemic projects.

The way that leaders and citizens cope with stress is under-theorised in the study of International Relations (IR). This article anchors psychological studies on coping to the literature theorising emotions in IR to clarify two unaddressed questions: (1) how do political actors – individuals and collectives – cope with both sudden crises and long-term change?; and (2) in the context of international politics, whose coping matters, and under what conditions? Our coping framework demonstrates that intersubjective appraisal of urgency from everyday stressors triggers a process that elevates individual coping to the collective level. Circulation of coping responses, a key but neglected process of scaling up, binds individuals to affective communities. Our theoretical contribution is an innovative coping framework to explore how individual pursuit of well-being is transformed into collective agency. The methodological novelty is the triangulation of emotional representation with survey data and in-depth interviews to capture the circulation of coping responses. We illustrate our conceptual framework with the overlooked case of Hong Kong. Our findings suggest coping constitutes conditions of political possibilities, in that individual Hong Kongers’ efforts to sustain emotional well-being are aggregated to create momentum for a state-building project unexpected by the former British colonisers or the Chinese Communist Party.

In the debate on the (de-)judicialisation of international affairs and the International Criminal Court (ICC) specifically, the distinctions between legality and politics and between state sovereignty and the international remain contested. While realist and legalist approaches discuss the transformation of international politics by international criminal law, sociological and critical-legal perspectives instead highlight the politics of international criminal law. In this contribution, we focus on how the distinctions between (international) law and politics matter, not as substantively opposed spheres, but as boundaries that the ICC itself contingently and flexibly draws when considering particular situations. These meta-politics of invoking and reproducing key boundaries in seemingly technical elaborations of the interest of justice, the scope of its jurisdiction, or the application of complementarity reflect the Court’s particular authority but also its predicament of pushing for an international criminal law serving humanity, rather than states, while reproducing the distinctions between (international) law and politics. We illustrate the Court’s meta-politics by revisiting three recent decisions of the ICC to (not) investigate alleged international crimes committed by British forces in Iraq, by the Taliban, governmental, and US forces in Afghanistan, and by Israeli authorities and Palestinian groups in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.