What would it mean to decolonise the concept of war? ‘Decolonising’ means critiquing the ways in which Eurocentric ideas and historiographies have informed the basic categories of social and political thought. Dominant understandings of the concept of war derive from histories and sociologies of nation-state formation in the West. Accordingly, I critique this Eurocentric concept of war from the perspective of Small War in the colonies, that is, from the perspective of different histories and geographies of war and society than were assumed to exist in the West. I do so in order to outline a postcolonial concept of war and to identify some of the principles of inquiry that would inform a postcolonial war studies. These include conceiving force as an ordinary dimension of politics; situating force and war in transnational context, amid international hierarchies; and attending to the co-constitutive character of war and society relations in world politics.

Fears about the security of supplies have been central to debates about the development of an integrated EU energy policy over the past decade, leading to claims that energy has been ‘securitised’. Previous analyses have found, however, that although shared security concerns are frequently used as justification for further integration, they can also serve as a rationale for Member States to resist sharing sovereignty. Transcending this apparent paradox would require not just agreement about whether energy supplies are security concerns, but also agreement about what kind of security concern they are. In this article, we examine whether such an agreement could emerge through a comparative analysis of constructions of gas security in the UK and Poland. Utilising a framework that draws from both the philosophical and sociological wings of Securitisation Studies, we demonstrate that although gas has been elevated on the security agendas of both states, the specific logic of insecurity – securitisation or riskification – underpinning these constructions differs substantially, and is conditioned by distinct modes of governance in each Member State. This, we contend, limits the potential for further integration of EU energy policies in the context of the European Commission’s proposals for an ‘Energy Union’.

This article argues that some core tenets of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) can serve as heuristics for a better understanding of what the stakes of cyber-security are, how it operates, and how it fails. Despite the centrality of cyber-incidents in the cyber-security discourse, researchers have yet to understand their link to, and affects on politics. We close this gap by combining ANT insights with an empirical examination of a prominent cyber-incident (Stuxnet). We demonstrate that the disruptive practices of cyber-security caused by malicious software (malware), lie in their ability to actively perform three kinds of space (regions, networks, and fluids), each activating different types of political interventions. The article posits that the fluidity of malware challenges the consistency of networks and the sovereign boundaries set by regions, and paradoxically, leads to a forceful re-enactment of them. In this respect, the conceptualisation of fluidity as an overarching threat accounts for multiple policy responses and practices in cyber-security as well as attempts to (re-)establish territoriality and borders in the virtual realm. While this article concentrates on cyber-security, its underlying ambition is to indicate concretely how scholars can profitably engage ANT’s concepts and methodologies.

Concerns over disinformation have intensified in recent years. Policymakers, pundits, and observers worry that countries like Russia are spreading false narratives and disseminating rumours in order to shape international opinion and, by extension, government policies to their liking. Despite the importance of this topic, mainstream theories in International Relations offer contradictory guidance on how to think about disinformation. I argue that disinformation is ineffective in terms of changing the policies of a target as regards to its foreign policy alignments and armaments – that is, the balance of power. To be strategically effective, disinformation must somehow overcome three powerful obstacles: first, the fundamental uncertainty that international anarchy generates over any information broadcasted by adversaries; second, the pre-existing prejudices of foreign policy elites and ordinary citizens; and third, the countermeasures that are available even amid political polarisation. I examine the most likely case of there seemingly being a conscious and effective strategy that emphasises disinformation: the Russian campaign that has targeted the Baltic states, especially since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. The available evidence strongly suggests that the strategic effects of disinformation are exaggerated.

As digital technologies and algorithmic rationalities have increasingly reconfigured security practices, critical scholars have drawn attention to their performative effects on the temporality of law, notions of rights, and understandings of subjectivity. This article proposes to explore how the ‘other’ is made knowable in massive amounts of data and how the boundary between self and other is drawn algorithmically. It argues that algorithmic security practices and Big Data technologies have transformed self/other relations. Rather than the enemy or the risky abnormal, the ‘other’ is algorithmically produced as anomaly. Although anomaly has often been used interchangeably with abnormality and pathology, a brief genealogical reading of the concept shows that it works as a supplementary term, which reconfigures the dichotomies of normality/abnormality, friend/enemy, and identity/difference. By engaging with key practices of anomaly detection by intelligence and security agencies, the article analyses the materialisation of anomalies as specific spatial ‘dots’, temporal ‘spikes’, and topological ‘nodes’. We argue that anomaly is not simply indicative of more heterogeneous modes of othering in times of Big Data, but represents a mutation in the logics of security that challenge our extant analytical and critical vocabularies.

In securitisation theory (ST) little attention has been paid to how actors undertake securitisation collectively. The empirical focus of that theory has also, paradoxically, neglected the military-strategic sector and with it regional security organisations like NATO. Such an oversight is worth correcting for three reasons. First, NATO is constantly engaged in securitisation across a range of issues, a process that reflects an underappreciated recursive interaction between the Alliance and its member states. Second, the Ukraine crisis has resulted in Russia being explicitly identified as a source of threat and so has triggered a successful collective (re)securitisation by the Alliance. Third, a framework that demonstrates NATO’s standing as a securitising actor has potential relevance to other regional security organisations. This article discusses and amends ST in service of an approach that permits securitisation by actors other than the state, in this case NATO. A model of collective securitisation is presented and then applied empirically to the post-Cold War desecuritisation of Russia and its subsequent resecuritisation following the annexation of Crimea. The implications of resecuritisation for the emergence of a self-reinforcing security dilemma in NATO-Russia relations are also considered.

Populists are on the rise across the globe and claim to speak on behalf of ‘the people’ that are set against the establishment in the name of popular sovereignty. This article examines how populist discourses represent ‘the people’ as a referent object that is threatened and the form and implications of this populist securitisation process. Drawing on securitisation theory and poststructuralism, the article understands populist securitisation as a discursive practice that propagates a politics of fear, urgency, and exceptionality in order to mobilise ‘the people’ against a ‘dangerous’ elite and normalise this antagonistic divide of the social space. While the proposed theoretical framework aims to clarify the relationship between poststructuralist and securitisation theory and capture the nexus between populism and security, the case of populism broadens the scope of potential subjects of security and poses important challenges to existing theoretical assumptions about security as something designated by states’ representatives and ‘security experts’. The article develops and illustrates its arguments with a case study on the (de)securitisation moves in the populist discourse of Donald Trump.

In this article we broaden the conventional understanding of prestige and show that prestige-seeking played a major role in the Danish and Norwegian decisions to provide military support to post-Cold War US-led wars. Both countries made costly military contributions in the hope of increasing their standing and prestige in Washington. Both governments regarded prestige as a form of soft power, which they could later convert into access, influence, and US support. Our findings are far from trivial. They make a theoretical contribution by demonstrating that small powers understand and seek prestige in ways that differ fundamentally from the ways great powers do. They also help to explain why smaller US allies made costly contributions to the Balkan, Afghan, Iraq, and Libyan wars at a time when there was no direct threat to their national security and their security dependence on the United States was low. The high value that small US allies attach to their visibility and prestige in Washington suggests that it is far easier for the United States to obtain military support from smaller allies than Realist studies of burden-sharing and collective action problems would lead us to expect.

Drawing on postcolonial and feminist writings, this article re-examines securitization theory’s so-called ‘silence-problem’. Securitization theory sets up a definably colonial relationship whereby certain voices cannot be heard, while other voices try to speak for those who are silenced. The article shows that the subaltern cannot securitize, first, because they are structurally excluded from the concept of security through one of three mechanisms: locutionary silencing, illocutionary disablement, or illocutionary frustration. Second, the subaltern cannot securitize because they are always already being securitized and spoken for – as in this case by the well-meaning intellectuals trying to highlight and remediate their predicament. Third, the subaltern cannot securitize because the popular rendering of securitization theory as critical obfuscates and rationalises their marginalisation. This article thus reveals the ‘colonial moment’ in securitization studies, showing how securitization theory is complicit with securitizations ‘for’ that marginalise and silence globally, not just locally outside ‘the West’.

Women participate extensively in armed, Islamist struggle. In recent years, foreign women have travelled from the West to join Daesh. Their participation perplexes policymakers, government officials, and researchers who call attention to the group’s gendered regulation, violence, and widespread use of rape. Consequently, observers often argue that women are deceived by the organisation or seduced by the promise of romance. This suggests that women would not, under rational circumstances, choose to join the group. In this article, we address two resultant questions: why do Western women join Daesh? Are their motivations distinct from other Islamist recruits? Using an original dataset of social media activity from 17 Western female recruits between 2011–15, we conclude that women are primarily driven by religious ideology that adopts an expressly gendered frame. We find that feelings of isolation and disaffection also drive migration. We suggest that female foreign recruits are not unique in their motivations and share many similarities with male fighters and women in other Islamist organisations. This research has valuable implications for security studies and counterterrorism, which tend to treat extremist women as unique. Female recruits should be taken seriously as insurgents intent on establishing an Islamic caliphate.

Drawing on a notable example of a non-Western normative initiative, Brazil’s ‘Responsibility while Protecting’ (RwP), this article contributes to broadening the scope of the norm dynamics literature beyond its common Western-centric focus. Post-2011 Libya intervention, Brazil proposed RwP to clarify what ‘using force’ means under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) banner, but then withdrew from visible norm sponsorship, only to return to this as part of a collective exercise to institutionalise R2P at the United Nations. First, the article highlights the significant role of non-Western agents whose contributions usually go overlooked, yet carry the highest potential to address the legitimacy deficit of norms like R2P. Second, the article proposes adding a new conceptual tool when investigating the role of agency in norm dynamics, one that incorporates a wider range of norm ‘shaping’ processes and highlights enabling, contingent circumstances. The latter, is argued, best captures the anomalies in contemporary norm contestation. This is illustrated through an empirical analysis of the conditions under which Brazil was able to advance RwP, despite the subsequent emergence of unfavourable circumstances. This article emphasises how significant an alignment of enabling circumstances is to non-Western agents in terms of shaping norm contestation and normative exercise completion.

In today’s world, a significant portion of international security politics is conducted through multilateral channels, often from the halls of international organisations such as the United Nations or NATO. This article theorises and empirically documents the production, reproduction, and contestation of local diplomatic hierarchies that practitioners often call ‘international pecking orders’. According to conventional wisdom in IR, the sources of international hierarchies are primarily structural, stemming from the interstate distribution of (material) capabilities. Yet the growing prevalence of multilateral diplomacy in the governance of international security generates distinctive forms of social stratification organised around a struggle for diplomatic competence. As they pursue their instructions and manage security politics, state representatives posted to international organisations make use of the opportunities and constraints of a given situation and compete for rank through the display of practical know-how. The article illustrates this process by looking at how a key set of multilateral practices lend themselves to pecking order dynamics, from esprit de corps to reporting through brokering. By taking the multilateralisation of security politics seriously, the article shows that international hierarchy, far from an unobservable reality, is actually part of parcel of each and every practice that makes the world go round.

The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore the political potential of visual autoethnography. I do so through my experience of working as a Swiss Army officer in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Drawing on my own photographs I examine how an appreciation of everyday aesthetic sensibilities can open up new ways of thinking about security dilemmas. I argue that visual autoethnography can be insightful not because it offers better or even authentic views – it cannot – but because it has the potential to reveal how prevailing political discourses are so widely rehearsed and accepted that we no longer see their partial, political, and often problematic nature. I illustrate this potential in two ways: (1) how a self-reflective engagement with my own photographs of the DMZ reveals the deeply entrenched role of militarised masculinities; (2) how my positionality and my photographs of everyday life in North Korea show that prevailing security discourses are highly particular and biased, even though they are used to justify seemingly objective policy decisions.

This article re-examines the history of NATO’s original post-Cold War enlargement to include the Visegrad states of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. It uses both published materials and the author’s new interviews with key US and Russian policymakers, and employs robust qualitative counterfactual methods to ask two questions: whether there were any realistic alternatives to NATO enlargement, and whether NATO enlargement was responsible for the downturn in Russian relations with the West. It concludes that domestic politics were the dominant factors explaining policy directions on both the US and Russian sides; that NATO enlargement was probably inevitable given US domestic political factors and West European acquiescence; that Russia’s turn against the West preceded the NATO expansion discussion in the US; that the tenor of the Russian turn is explained by status concerns rather than military threat perceptions, and that it was aggravated most by Western unilateral airstrikes rather than NATO’s geographical enlargement; and that the one policy initiative that might have realistically slowed NATO enlargement if it had been adopted differently, Partnership for Peace, did not affect those Russian status concerns and thus could not have redirected the relationship.

In this article, we show how Annemarie Mol's notion of ontological politics helps to open up the research agenda for cyber security in Critical Security Studies. The article hence seeks to further the debate about STS and Critical Security Studies. The article's main claim is that the concept of ontological politics enables an engagement with the complex and transformative dynamics of ICT and the new security actors and practices that shape security politics in the digital age. By examining the virulent attacks executed by the Mirai botnet – one of the world's largest, fiercest, and most enduring botnets – we point to four aspects of cyber security that attention to the ontological politics of cyber security attunes us to: the proliferation and entanglement of security agencies, actors, sites, and spaces. These aspects of cyber security, we argue, are becoming increasingly prominent alongside the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G network technology. In conclusion, we discuss the wider security theoretical and normative-democratic implications of an engagement with the ontological politics of security by exploring three avenues for additional conversation between ontological politics and Critical Security Studies.

This article presents an initial discussion of the political and legal challenges associated with weaponised technologies in three interconnected areas that may impinge upon the ability to protect civilian populations during peace and war and imperil international security: armed unmanned combat aerial vehicles (commonly known as drones); autonomous weapons systems (known as ‘killer robots’); and the potential militarisation of cyberspace, or its use as a weapon, and the operation of drones and killer robots in the cyber domain. Supporting the argument that the world is ‘facing new methods of warfare’ and that international security governance and law are not keeping up, the article provides an overview and interpretation of three technologies in connection with aspects of five branches of law: state responsibility, use of force, international humanitarian law, human rights law, and law of the commons. I argue therefore that ‘preventive security governance’ could be a strategy to curtail uncertainty in the preservation of stability and international order. I define ‘preventive security governance’ as the codification of specific or new global norms, arising from existing international law that will clarify expectations and universally agreed behaviour on a given issue-area. This is essential for a peaceful future for humanity and for international order and stability.

The ban on inter-state war in the UN Charter is widely identified as central to the modern international order–Michael Byers calls it ‘one of the twentieth century’s greatest achievements’. Even if it is only imperfectly observed, it is often seen as a constraint on state autonomy and an improvement on the pre-legal, unregulated world before 1945. In response to this conventional view, this article shows that the laws on war in the Charter are better seen as permissive rather than constraining. I make two points. First, by creating a legal category around ‘self-defence’, the laws on war authorise, and thus legitimate, wars that are motivated by the security needs of the state, while forbidding other motives for wars. Second, state practice since 1945 has expanded the scope of this authorisation, extending it in both time and space beyond the black-letter text of the Charter. The permissive effect of law on war has therefore been getting larger. These two effects suggest that international law is a resource that increases state power, at least for powerful states, and this relation between international law and power politics is missed by both realists and liberal internationalists.

This article explores original empirical findings from a research project investigating representations of cyberterrorism in the international news media. Drawing on a sample of 535 items published by 31 outlets between 2008 and 2013, it focuses on four questions. First, how individuated a presence is cyberterrorism given within news media coverage? Second, how significant a threat is cyberterrorism deemed to pose? Third, how is the identity of ‘cyberterrorists’ portrayed? And, fourth, who or what is identified as the referent – that which is threatened – within this coverage? The article argues that constructions of specificity, status, and scale play an important, yet hitherto under-explored, role within articulations of concern about the threat posed by cyberterrorism. Moreover, unpacking news coverage of cyberterrorism in this way leads to a more variegated picture than that of the vague and hyperbolic media discourse often identified by critics. The article concludes by pointing to several promising future research agendas to build on this work.

Spheres of influence remain one of the most pervasive phenomena in the practice and history of international relations, yet only rarely have they been taken up analytically. To bring conceptual and discursive clarity, this article advances two arguments. First, it argues that spheres of influence are not a distinct form of hierarchy in international relations, but rather practices of control and exclusion that can be found within any ideal-type hierarchy. Second, these hierarchical practices are generally underspecified by those invoking the term. Different theoretical perspectives on international relations offer highly divergent ways of understanding control and exclusion, and all do so with plausible empirical mooring. Spheres of influence do not themselves denote a form of governance even if it does a form of order construction and maintenance. Any given empire, hegemonic order, or alliance may also be a sphere of influence depending on the practices that occur; the key is not to identify whether particular hierarchical traits are dispositive of one of these relational structures, but rather whether, and the extent to which, assertions of control and exclusion define the hierarchy.

Latin American militaries are today in many regards inoperative and obsolete as an instrument of defence. Yet, they seek to maintain their organisational power and privileges. Governments, on the other hand, lack the adequate means to fight criminality, persisting poverty and social inequality. In an apparent win-win situation, Latin American governments have used the military as a wildcard to step in where civilian state capacity falls short, including for urban and border patrols, literacy campaigns and to collect garbage, among many other tasks. The military's manifold internal use has been defended mainly based on pragmatic reasons. We argue instead that the ostensive pareto optimality between militaries and governments has had negative effects for civil-military relations from a democratic governance point of view that takes into consideration the efficiency and effectiveness of how the state delivers basic services across different policy areas.