How does a state’s marginalization of borderland communities influence their sense of belonging? We argue that, in unstable regions in the Global South, such marginalization reinforces people’s sense of belonging to a transnational community. As we demonstrate, two causal mechanisms account for this process: the marginalization enhances (i) the border’s “disguising” quality that muddies diverse forms

The category of the nomad has gained a newfound salience in recent decades, ranging from public interest in “digital nomadism” to academic debates about “nomadic theory.” Faced with this upsurge of interest in nomadism, this collective discussion brings together five scholars of diverse theoretical and academic backgrounds to investigate the pasts, presents, and possible futures of the nomad category

This paper draws on fieldwork interviews with migrants who fled their home countries (Somalia, Eritrea, and Sudan) and irregularly traveled through Sudan, Sahara, Libya, and the Mediterranean Sea, eventually reaching Europe. It demonstrates how, throughout their journeys, migrants were targeted by various armed groups (particularly non-state) for purposes including recruitment, extortion, ransom, immobilization

This article explores the importance of what we call “decolonial deconstruction” for contemporary global politics and policy discourses and develops a critique of this approach. “Decolonial deconstruction” seeks to keep open policy processes, deconstructing liberal policy goals of peace, democracy, or justice as always “to come”. It emerged through a nexus of postmodern and decolonial framings, well

This article theorizes smartphone detoxing as a practice of sovereignty. The article begins by arguing that the smartphone enables the exercise of psychopolitical control, a new mode of neoliberal governmentality under which individuals are governed through the algorithmic modification of behavior. Against this background, smartphone detoxing can be seen as a practice of sovereignty in the sense that

Critical methodologies in International Political Sociology (IPS) and its intersecting fields and research traditions have increasingly coalesced around the idea that research should be done in dialogue, and possibly cooperation, with people rather than only about them. Drawing together research under this theme and wider debates on participatory, activist, and action research, alongside our own research

This Collective Discussion aims to open up space for an international political sociology of the production of historical knowledge that interrogates the politics around benchmark dates and what becomes knowable and unknowable through them. Specifically, it examines 1492 as a historiographical device through which to unpack how the discipline of IR knows history. 1492 presents a relevant case for this

At the 1892 International Sanitary Conference in Venice, experts established international health politics as governing the flows of people, traffic, and information. This focus has remained ingrained in current health politics and shaped the international response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper focuses on the micropolitics among these experts to understand the emergence of such governance expertise

The archives of migration are piecemeal and scattered. This is both an epistemological problem, and a matter of political concern in an international order that forces people to migrate, racializes them, and renders them subject to violence. In response, we explore the potential of counter-archiving migration. First, we explain why archives matter politically, and consider which traces of migration

This article returns to the existentialist roots of ontological security theory (OST) and proposes a phenomenological re-reading of ontological security through the theoretical language of spherology and immunology in order to bring OST into a more substantive engagement with the spatial and immunological realities and practices of the globalizing world. Departing from the work of Peter Sloterdijk

A growing body of literature studies how expert practices constitute issues such as climate change, migration, or public health as international objects of expertise. The article contributes to this research agenda by highlighting the role of digital visual technologies and infrastructures in the constitution and governance of these international objects. It develops the concept of visual objects and

In the wake of the fall of the Daesh Islamic State “Caliphate” in 2019, the international community has been faced with the fact that thousands of displaced persons are stranded in Iraqi and Syrian detention centers. This article interrogates the governmental policies of ten Western European countries toward their nationals and legal residents held in the prisons and camps. We analyze the discourse

In an apparent departure from responses to the so-called 2015 “migration” crisis, Ukrainians displaced by the war have been welcomed relatively unbureaucratically by European states. Yet, despite this, they are positioned as a problem to be solved, a disruption to the normal order and state system. This article asks what this problematization of “migrants” reveals about the dominant system of thought

This paper analyses the extent to which zero-carbon energy transitions are a securitized phenomenon in selected countries and what that means for sustainability transitions more broadly. Without taking a normative stance on securitization, we focus on the ways in which security is constructed through in-depth interviews with experts in the energy, security, and defense sectors in Estonia, Finland,

What can we learn about diplomacy by studying its practice through the body of an apprentice? Drawing on the works of Loïc Wacquant, this article argues that to understand the making of background dispositions, tacit rules, and situated know-how in international politics’ diverse fields of practice, researchers ought to consider apprenticeship as a concept and a methodological device. This argument

This article makes a critical contribution to the study of digital reactionary movements by tracing the resonant circulation of “the cuck” memes across various levels of racialized and gendered subjectivity. It argues that the cuck meme resonates through composing an affective narrative of deferred and stolen enjoyment at the intersection of personal, social, and international politics. It follows

Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience (2003–2020) was an artistic performance of hypervisibility. Initiated in response to being misidentified as a terrorist, preemptively arrested, and interrogated by the FBI, the artist created a comprehensive life log documenting his everyday life for all to see. Despite transformations to the surveillance environment, the performance raised a question that remains

This study questions to what extent state agents invest efforts in building interpersonal relations with their counterparts. It is based on data collected during two years of ethnographic fieldwork at the Israeli president’s residence, where we observed credential ceremonies involving ambassadors from twenty-three states and interviewed the president’s advisors. We consider the credential ceremony

The concept of agency has long been a focal point of research in the social sciences. While traditional discussions primarily centered on human agency, recent scholarship has increasingly turned its attention to agency beyond the human realm. This paper introduces a framework for comprehending the agency of spiritual beings within complex pluriversal sociopolitical systems. It contends that exploring

Despite growing interest in studying counter-revolution in Egypt, scholars have neglected the ways in which the regulation of normativity governs conduct and discourages resistance. This article argues that discourses of normativity in Egypt have produced counter-revolutionary subjectivities, without whom the counter-revolution could not have succeeded. These subjectivities are constructed through

The article explores different and contested narrations surrounding alleged war crimes by former Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, with a particular focus on one veteran with considerable public standing, Ben Roberts-Smith. It shows how certain stories told to identify and condemn acts of extra-legal violence, work to separate these acts out as exceptional and different from wider violence in war

Research into online forms of far-right, alt-right, populist, and supremacist politics has raised questions about the extent to which social media enables or constitutes extremist affects and ideologies. Building on this research and through a case study of how a pro-Trump community on Reddit made sense of news events and sought to contest their representation, this paper explores the relationship

Scholars often emphasize how right-wing political actors in Europe use memory laws to undermine democratic traditions and revise historical accounts. But a broad range of political actors (with diverse motivations) support memory laws. Synthesizing research in international political sociology and memory politics, this analysis examines the relational and social practices of diplomats from small states

How do individuals navigate international politics and mitigate the anxieties it elicits in the everyday? Giddensian literature on ontological security suggests that (collective) internalized routines and narratives provide a sense of certainty and stability that enable individuals to “go on” with their daily lives. This article adopts a Kleinian psychoanalytical approach to show that when faced with

The international frameworks on refugee protection, including the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, are among the strongest norms to govern international mobility. Despite the salience and universality of these international norms, however, asylum outcomes, as indicated by refugee recognition rates (RRRs), vary extensively across state parties. The variation

Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an increased interest in the social performance of power in international political sociology. At the same time, recent years have seen the growing popularity of event ethnographic research approaches. In this article, we develop the concept of “curated power” as a tool to explore the performative enactment of power at and through conferences and events

Whereas asylum policy is predicated on the assumption that states define refugees, this paper examines how refugees define states. Through the legal case of refugees stranded on a British military base in Cyprus since 1998, I show how refugees and the states that grant them or deny them protection become co-constitutive. The processes involved in judicial activism delineate the modalities through which

Complementing discussions of reflexivity as a research practice, this article turns its attention to the classroom. How does a pedagogy that invites students to practice reflexivity represent possibilities for thinking, writing, and imagining otherwise in scholarly engagements with world politics? In response to this question, I explore the dilemmas, challenges, and possibilities students encounter

This article examines children’s political agency in the context of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest. The Eurovision Song Contest is widely recognized as a political arena—a space for nation branding and soft diplomacy, narratives of European musical and democratic harmony, and protests over global political events. But despite filling similar roles to their adult counterparts, the young performers’

This paper argues that the border regime works through entanglements of digital and nondigital data and of “low-tech” and “high-tech” technologies. It suggests that a critical analysis of the assemblages between digital and nondigital requires exploring their effects of subjectivation on those who are labeled as “migrants.” The paper starts with a critique of the presentism and techno-hype that pervade

The Israeli military’s occupation of Palestinian territory relies heavily on its ability to shape the visual environment and set the terms of how Palestinians may see and be seen. However, the relationship between violent occupation and violent visualities has yet to be fully theorized. This article gathers several conceptual strands—biopolitics, visual biopolitics, and necropolitics—to theorize what

Who can speak from the perspective of the Global South? In answering this question, Global International Relations (IR) finds itself in a cul de sac: rather than globalize IR, Global IR essentializes non-Western categories by associating difference and knowledge to place (countries, regions, and civilizations) which occludes de-territorialized forms of knowledge production. To reach out for these forms

Visual politics is a fast-growing field and much of it is focused on images that inspire criticism. This tendency results in a lack of attention to oppressive visual practices. A political visual literacy approaches all visual practices as being layered with different “visual truths” that were developed in response to political commitments over time. These “visual truths” inflected visual practices

There has been a profusion of institutionalized practices of confiscation and destruction of migrants’ belongings during European bordering operations conducted by the police and border authorities. Clothes, shoes, money, food, mobile phones, and even water have been among the items seized by authorities, a practice that exposes migrants to multiple risks. That said, despite the pervasiveness of current

This article offers a novel conceptual framework to enable empirical investigation and analysis of the different ways in which contemporary data practices are entangled with colonialism. Departing from recent theorizations of the politics and political economy of data and data-driven technologies, including the theory of so-called data colonialism, I argue for a historicized and differentiated account

The role of violent histories and their legacies in reconciliation processes has been a central question in debates on reconciliation and nation building after conflict: whether, how, and when painful events should be remembered in post-conflict and post-transition societies. A dominant approach to this question since the 1980s has been the “reconciliation paradigm,” which views addressing violent

This article opens up the blackbox through which evidence is selected and assessed in the making of guidelines and recommendations in global governance, through an exploration of “methods regimes.” Methods regimes are a special kind of sociomaterial arrangement, which govern the production and validation of knowledge, by establishing a clear hierachy between alternative forms of research designs. When

For decades, fraud-based denaturalization was hardly used in Norway. In the 2015–2016 “refugee crisis,” however, the right-wing government decided to reinforce efforts to expose “citizenship cheaters.” This article asks how this decision emerged, what arguments the government articulated to legitimize this decision, and how parliament responded. I examine the Norwegian case by reworking Schmitt and

Scholars consider the translatability and efficacy of “western” LGBT politics as they diffuse, but pay little attention to the role of its histories and cultures as geo-temporal phenomena. Focusing on Pride events, this article demonstrates how such oversights inhibit a full account of the widely diverse impacts of similar actions in different places. We explore the ways in which Pride events, as a

This article argues that the Anthropocene produces a paradox when thinking about political mobilization. I show how the knowledge production practices that render the Anthropocene visible and actionable, including planetary boundaries, Earth System Science modeling of earth systems, and geological strata, also circulate a security rationality. This rationality is one that attempts to manage, co-opt

The UK Prevent strategy is strongly criticized: accused of racism, human rights violations, and demonization of the (Muslim) other. Outlining an original interpretation of these problems, the article draws on political theory to identify parallels between this controversy and Stanley Cavell's critique of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. Although aiming to avoid violence, Rawls limited the “conversation

During the past decades, militaries have increasingly used force against civilians and armed adversaries in operational settings other than war. Theories about legitimacy for the use of military force often focus on macro variables such as international law, government policy, and structural political contingencies. The strength of such theories in explaining military violence during conventional wars

This article explores the limitations of the oft-used biopolitical frameworks of interpreting the regulatory emergency measures that have been enacted worldwide in the face of the spreading pandemic of COVID-19. Not only have the state responses to coronavirus often been beset by manner of “biopolitical failures,” it is also the Foucauldian emphasis on the top-down formation and application of immunity

Our everyday life is entangled with products and services of so-called Big Tech companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook. International relations (IR) scholars increasingly seek to reflect on the relationships between Big Tech, capitalism, and institutionalized politics, and they engage with the practices of algorithmic governance and platformization that shape and are shaped by Big Tech. This

Theorists of border externalization have portrayed aid in border control cooperation as a bargaining chip that the European Union uses to “buy” the cooperation of countries of “origin” and “transit.” More recent scholarship, instead, has depicted aid as a rent that Southern actors try to extract from Northern donors by capitalizing on the presence of foreign, “undesirable” populations within their

This paper contributes to debates on the growing appeal of right-wing populism by combining a focus on visuality, narratives, and emotions. We argue that right-wing populists’ claims extend to establishing alternative emotion norms that collectivize feelings and their expression, and are conveyed in visual narratives. The emotional range covered by these norms transcends emotions usually associated

This article theorizes connected memory, or in other words how people remember each other's memories, through the connected histories of territorial partition in different contexts. It claims that social memories can travel beyond their original context, pushing beyond efforts to understand supranational “mnemonic communities,” or to understand cosmopolitan memory as a thin memory community encompassing

The idea of measurement (of bodies and identities) is a guiding principle of globalized surveillance in the War on Terror. Nevertheless, this inherently scientific notion is so naturalized in public and academic discourse that its meaning and implications are left undiscussed. This paper builds on quantum theory to present an immanent critique of measurement in surveillance. Foregrounding surveillance's

Cybersecurity has attracted significant political, social, and technological attention as contemporary societies have become increasingly reliant on computation. Today, at least within the Global North, there is an ever-pressing and omnipresent threat of the next “cyber-attack” or the emergence of a new vulnerability in highly interconnected supply chains. However, such discursive positioning of threat

Military tattoos have recently become the latest genre of war art deployed by museums to make war tangible to their visitors. These new war objects give rise to important temporal inconsistencies: as individual soldiers relate different understandings of wartime, exhibitions mediate them monolithically, reproducing a notion of wartime as exceptional, finite, and temporary. To grasp this inconsistency

Public and scholarly debates surrounding free speech often assume free speech is a public good and/or should be approached as a problem of “drawing the line” between free and regulated or benign and harmful speech. In contrast, this article provides a genealogy of free speech in which liberal freedom of expression has, since its inception, been integral to white supremacist settler colonialism in the

This article contributes empirically and conceptually to the literature on finance and security in the light of anti-money laundering and to discussions on international crime control and social order. It draws on unique data in Switzerland to question the chain of security through which the main global policy against crime is produced in concreto. What and who is denounced by financial institutions

This article speaks to debates in international political sociology that critically interrogate the ongoing digitization of border controls through the deployment of surveillance technologies that render mobility intelligible and governable. Our contribution to these debates is both empirical and conceptual. Empirically, we explore not only how surveillance is enacted but also how it is contested and

In 2005, officials designated Vraca Memorial Park in Sarajevo, Bosnia–Herzegovina, as a national monument. However, official disputes over responsibility for curating stalled progress on the site's restoration. In response, activists initiated two campaigns to save and restore Vraca: “Let's Save and Restore Vraca Memorial Park” and a campaign to restore the vandalized monument Ženi borac (woman fighter)

Global mental health expertise favors biomedical explanations of mental disorders that conceive such disorders as stable entities, which can be diagnosed according to universal categories. Following this logic, universal and standardized solutions can also be applied throughout the world, regardless of context. Despite its assumptions and data being contested within the field of psychiatry itself,

Recent efforts by intergovernmental actors, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), to foster collaboration on vaccine-preventable diseases stand in stark contrast to the contextually contingent nature of national immunization programs: vaccination schedules and delivery differ greatly, and so do the ways in which these programs are assessed by means of coverage rates—a key metric in global health

Against the background of the growing use of machine learning (ML) based technologies by the military, our article calls for an analytical perspective on ML platforms to understand how ML proliferates across the military and to what effects. Adopting a material–technical perspective on platforms as developed within new media studies, and bringing this literature to critical security studies, we suggest

Military suicide is an increasing concern for Western militaries. In this article, using a qualitative media analysis, we introduce the military suicide equation as a metanarrative and analytic tool for understanding discourse on military suicides. This metanarrative—overseas service + post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) = suicide—positions military suicide as the consequences of PTSD acquired during

This article argues that in order to understand how bodily impressions shape ways of knowing and being, researchers need to enhance claims of positionality through a language of intercorporeality. The notion of positionality is used to indicate the inherent situatedness and partiality of knowledge, but positionality statements also risk affirming a hierarchical narrative structure, leaving out how

This article investigates the global inequities imbricated in the international response to lethal viruses. It does so by developing a virographic approach to the study of international relations that builds upon the matrix methods pioneered within black feminist thought for unraveling particularly complex forms of interlocking oppression. Performing such a virography of international relations exposes