Threat perception provokes a range of behaviour, from cooperation to conflict. Correctly interpreting others’ behaviour, and responding optimally, is thought to be aided by ‘stepping into their shoes’ (i.e. mentalising) to understand the threats they have perceived. But IR scholarship on the effects of attempting this exercise has yielded mixed findings. One missing component in this research is a clear understanding of the link between effort and accuracy. I use a US-based survey experiment (study N = 839; pilot N = 297) and a novel analytic approach to study mentalising accuracy in the domain of threat perception. I find that accurately estimating why someone feels threatened by either climate change or illegal immigration is conditional on sharing a belief in the issue’s overall dangerousness. Similar beliefs about dangerousness are not proxies for shared political identities, and accuracy for those with dissimilar beliefs does not exceed chance. Focusing first on the emotional states of those who felt threatened did not significantly improve accuracy. These findings suggest that: (1) effort does not guarantee accuracy in estimating the threats others see; (2) emotion understanding may not be a solution to threat mis-estimation; and (3) misperception can arise from basic task difficulty, even without information constraints or deception.

Irredentist disputes have produced distinct political ethnoterritories under the de jure sovereignty of recognised parent states, but the de facto political authority of external national homelands. This study problematises the relationship between national homeland and claimed ethnoterritory as a nested game in which, in addition to bargaining with each other, they face internal competition, outbidding, and changing costs of conflict, ultimately reducing commitment to external-facing bargains. This study contends that homelands pursuing irredentist conflict can reduce uncertainty and increase commitment from ethnoterritories by building hegemonic cross-border clientelist pyramids that link ethnoterritorial publics’ and elites’ political survival and livelihoods to supporting homelands’ preferences. Further, these structures marginalise alternative elites who may seek to contravene preferences by escalating conflict and increasing costs on homelands or bargaining across ethnic cleavages. Case studies of protracted conflicts in Cyprus, Kosovo, and Croatia support this argument and further find that public-sector distribution linked to the homeland is most effective in reducing competition and uncertainty, thereby increasing long-term commitment to preferences.

This article further theorises and develops the notion of a threat of abandonment while trying to elucidate the applicability and usefulness of this concept in the case of Ukraine in its fight against Russia since 2014. If Ukraine perceives the European Union (EU) as weakened by multiple crises, it may translate this image into a scenario of less attention to Ukraine and its problems, and – ultimately – to a threat of abandonment, of being left alone with a powerful aggressor. Theoretically, we employ a perceptual approach. We contribute to the literature on threats of abandonment, linking it to the existence of critical expectation gaps and introducing amplifying conditions that tend to result in such gaps: a broken frame of involvement and a perceived moral injury. We also introduce a set of key factors behind a perceived risk or threat of abandonment. Empirically, we investigate how Ukrainian elites think, feel, and speak about the threat of abandonment and to what extent the two amplifying conditions were perceived to be present. Our data come from 50 in-depth interviews with Ukrainian decision makers (2016–17, C3EU Jean Monnet Network) and 53 experts’ comments published in 2022 by a Ukrainian leading social research group, Razumkov’s Centre.

According to conventional wisdom, a great power engaging in international retrenchment regularly incurs tremendous costs. Following its withdrawal from a commitment abroad, the argument goes, windows of opportunity emerge that rivals exploit to their benefit, thus imposing significant costs on the retrenching great power. I argue that pundits and policymakers consistently overestimate the dangers associated with strategic withdrawals: great powers can – and in the past frequently have – successfully engaged in international retrenchment without creating opportunities for their rivals to gain significant strategic benefits. To make this case, I develop a new typology of international retrenchment strategies based on the kind and degree of disengagement they entail and demonstrate that most types do not regularly pave the way for rival gains. I support my argument through a series of plausibility probes: the Soviet retrenchment from Romania in the 1950s; the US retrenchment from Korea in the 1970s; and the US retrenchment from Western Europe in the 1990s.

Nuclear deterrence strategies are predicated on nuclear use scenarios. However, as nuclear weapons haven’t been used since 1945, why does use occur in scenarios but not in practice? If scenarios incorporated the political challenges of crossing the nuclear threshold, how would this change the utility of the deterrence strategies they support? To address these questions, this article examines Cold War-era American debates about a Soviet ‘first strike’, discusses the limits of technical critiques of nuclear use scenarios, and argues for an alternative approach to scenario design and criticism that includes political factors observable in crises and wars involving nuclear states.

In this article, we analyse the implications of the end of the Cold War for US non-proliferation policy and the non-proliferation regime. Contrary to widely held expectations, we show that the end of bipolarity did not undercut the pursuit of non-proliferation but supercharge it. While bipolarity had afforded non-proliferation hold-outs opportunities to evade superpower pressure, the structural condition of unipolarity both incentivised and enabled the United States to pursue a more robust non-proliferation policy than before. Against the view that contemporary unipolar power is severely circumscribed by the need to make compromises and adhere to social norms, unipolarity allowed the United States to entrench a regime that was widely considered unjust. We support this argument with an analysis of non-proliferation dynamics in the early 1990s, focusing in particular on the process that culminated with the indefinite extension of the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1995.

Dominant debates about China’s growing presence in the Pacific Islands – through infrastructure, aid, trade, and investment – suggest that Chinese material power directly translates to influence and effective interference in Pacific states’ domestic and foreign affairs. These perspectives fail to clarify the causal link between Chinese economic statecraft and Pacific governments’ alignment with Beijing’s interests. They also deny Pacific people agency, overlooking how power relations are mediated by Pacific state and non-state actors operating across complex political and socio-economic structures. We challenge such rationalist conceptualisations of Chinese power by developing a constructivist taxonomy of power as presence (dormant capability), influence (socialisation), and interference (incentives), and applying it to the Melanesian subregion. We argue that Chinese power is not merely material, causal, and unidirectional. Chinese power can also (re)shape the identities and interests of Pacific elites and publics in a constitutive manner, potentially aligning their ideas about substantive norms, rules, and practices guiding their foreign relations with Chinese ‘core interests’ and perspectives on regional and global politics.

What explains the revanchism of (post-)imperial states? This question has renewed salience amid Russia’s expanded war against Ukraine in 2022. In this article, we conceptualise revanchism as a foreign policy preference that involves reclaiming territory once controlled. We also advance a new explanation for revanchism that emphasises elite continuity in those states that experience territorial loss. Elite continuity matters because the ruling political class in (post-)imperial states, which was socialised under the old regime, preserves certain beliefs about world politics and the perceived legitimacy of their territorial claims. We show that elite continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet political leadership in Moscow helps explain Russia’s revanchism better than those alternative explanations that we derive from the International Relations literature. To substantiate our argument, we compile a novel dataset to operationalise elite continuity across regimes and use discursive evidence and other indicators of elite attitudes towards the desirability of reclaiming lost territory. We also discuss the applicability of our theory to other cases.

In this article, I critically examine the ‘Cyber Kill Chain’, a methodological framework for thought and action that shapes both contemporary cybersecurity practice and the discursive construction of security threats. The history and epistemology of the Cyber Kill Chain provide unique insight into the practice of contemporary cybersecurity, insofar as the Kill Chain provides cybersecurity practitioners with predetermined categories and indicators of threat that shape how threats are conceptualised and understood by defenders and suggests actions to secure against them. Locating the origins of the kill chain concept in US military operational logics, its transformation through the anticipatory inquiries of intelligence, and its automation in computational networks, this article argues that the Cyber Kill Chain is emblematic of a vigilant socio-technical logic of security, where human perception, technical sensing, and automation all respond to and co-produce the (in)security through which political security concerns are articulated. This practice makes politics; it excludes, includes, and shapes what is perceived to be dangerous and not, directly impacting the security constructed. Through a critical reading of the Cyber Kill Chain, this article provides insight into cybersecurity practitioners’ epistemic practice and as such contributes to discussions of cybersecurity expertise, threat construction, and the way in which cybersecurity is understood and practised as a global security concern.

While there is literature on ‘populist securitisation’ and on the ‘securitisation of Islam’, the possibility that some populists may desecuritise Islam is not sufficiently explored. Left-wing populist parties have demonstrated solidarity towards Muslim minorities in Europe through a discourse based on inclusionary rhetoric and deconstruction of the securitising narratives promoted by mainstream and populist right-wing parties. However, their attitude towards Islam can be ambiguous. This paper argues that left-wing populists tend to desecuritise Islam. However, desecuritisation happens in ways that do not always accommodate Muslims’ religious freedoms. This happens because the driver of the left-wing populist desecuritisation of Islam lies in the left-wing thick ideology surrounding populism and not in the populist thin core. I illustrate this argument through the case study of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing populist party La France Insoumise. Through a discourse analysis of texts from 2009 to 2022, I show that Mélenchon has predominantly desecuritised Islam. While his desecuritisation is populist, it has not been truly emancipatory for Muslims. Although a more committed fight against Islamophobia has emerged since 2019, Mélenchon’s ideological attachment to laïcité hinders a full rearticulation of French political community based on genuine recognition of Muslims’ religious freedoms.

The integration of ‘AI’ technologies into weapon systems introduces a complex dimension to international relations and security, championing technological solutions for enduring warfare challenges, notably enhancing ‘situational awareness’ through advances such as automated ‘vision’. However, the discourse, particularly in Western militaries like that of the United States, often overlooks inherent limitations and issues in AI-based warfare. This paper explores ‘AI’s’ implications for military vision by inter alia scrutinising the US military’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) process. It argues that the US military actively transforms the observation, decision, and action apparatus, progressively substituting human vision and decision-making, leading to a multidimensional de-visualisation. This denotes fundamental changes in human perception, reshaping knowledge, control, and agency dynamics. In conclusion, the paper suggests an imminent era of de-visualisation in the military – a deliberate relinquishment of human control for perceived military efficiency and effectiveness. This marks a transformative shift, urging nuanced consideration of the profound impact of ‘AI’ technologies on warfare dynamics.

For more than two decades, Iran’s nuclear programme has concerned policymakers and scholars alike. Whether speeding up uranium enrichment, slowing down international negotiations, or disrupting the timing of key initiatives, actions around Iran’s nuclear programme bear a clear time signature. Yet systematic accounts of the importance of time in shaping foreign and security policymaking have been largely neglected. Through foreign policy timing theory’s (FP4D) reconceptualisation of time we show how actors both constructed and then used time to pursue their strategic interests, creating, altering, and sabotaging the timing mechanism linking Iranian nuclear technology and international sanctions. These manipulations of time by both domestic and international actors resulted in prolonged international negotiations and fluctuating periods of crisis and produced a temporally flawed agreement frozen in time. We consider time’s impact on the current challenges and future direction of nuclear diplomacy with Iran as well as its importance for broader nuclear security issues.