Amidst the resurgence of scholarship on pacifism, this essay seeks to critically interrogate certain influential sections within pacifism which characterise Gandhi as a pacifist, and his philosophy as pacifism. After pointing out the shortcomings of existing attempts to problematise the pacifist connotations of Gandhi, I adopt a cosmological approach to reading Gandhi. I argue that such an approach enables us to view the uncritical equation of both strands of thought as symptomatic of the deep-rooted ontological, epistemological, and other biases informing Western cosmology. This is demonstrated by the channels through which Gandhian discourses are framed as pacifism (especially in their diffusion into the American context), via a distinct set of interactions with both the religious and secular cosmological background assumptions underpinning pacifism. In the subsequent section, I continue this approach by highlighting how an alternate relational cosmology – Gandhian hypophysics – with a radically different set of background assumptions results in an idiosyncratic notion of Gandhian ideas which are quite inimical to pacifism. Besides reconciling contradictory characterisations of the same man and his philosophy, as well as contributing to a dialogic, pluriversal approach, I argue that this work also seeks to extend the scholarship on the interrelated themes of agency and cosmology.

What role do national icons play in a political community’s drive for ontological security? And what implications does this have for global politics? This article situates national icons in service of state ontological security. Icons both unify and divide political communities; therefore they serve, but also disrupt, ontological security-seeking of collectives. Building on research on ontological security and status in International Relations, we examine two case studies of national icons – Vesna Vulović, the celebrated Serbian flight attendant who miraculously survived a major plane crash, and Muhammad Ali, the American boxing legend. Both Vulović and Ali initially generated, and then countered, ontological security for their national communities as they transformed from popular culture celebrities into anti-regime political activists. We conclude the article by discussing opportunities for future avenues of research on icons and the politics of identity going forward.

The article calls on academics and policymakers who focus on mass atrocity prevention to engage with Trust Studies. This is needed because trust and distrust are commonly identified as a significant factor in destruction processes, yet there remains no substantive engagement with these concepts. The article combines Trust Studies, interdisciplinary research on the Central African Republic (Anthropology, Sociology, African Studies, and Political Science), and primary sources to analyse social and political trust dynamics through an exploration of (a) leadership, (b) outsourcing, (c) identity politics, and (d) witchcraft. It makes a twofold contribution. First, it provides a more informed understanding of the mass violence that took place in the Central African Republic through a historical analysis of trust dynamics. Second, it considers the implications for mass atrocity prevention, as it argues that the mainstream commitment to ‘rebuilding trust’ is built on misguided assumptions. The case study holds broader implications for both Trust Studies and mass atrocity prevention. Ultimately, it calls for interdisciplinary research to aid our collective understanding of the multifaceted roles that trust and distrust play in mass violence.

Ontological security studies (OSS) has been established as a significant area of study in critical security studies (CSS) to describe the ways in which social groups sustain and secure a stable sense of self. Although the self is the central figure of OSS, the subfield is yet to engage in a sustained interrogation of subjectivity in a way that questions its colonial foundations. In this article, I return to Jef Huysmans’s seminal understanding of security as a ‘thick signifier’ to analyse the ways in which OSS upholds the colonial activity of ordering, particularly an ordering of the self. By introducing Sylvia Wynter’s account of the emergence of Man-as-human, I question OSS’s conventional understandings of the self as constituted by identity. Analysing the self as a sociogenic being governed by autopoetics uncovers the ways in which understandings of the self that collapse into ‘identity’ serve to uphold coloniality. By redeploying Huysmans’s understanding of ontological security as that which simultaneously orders and guarantees the activity of ordering, I interrogate the ways in which doing OSS has real-world implications for those denied humanness in our colonial present. This analytic, termed a ‘demonic’ approach by Wynter, unlocks radically alternative understandings of being human that can be operationalized in service of collective liberation.

This article examines the management and instrumentalisation of migration and mobility as an area of contested governance in civil wars. Building on work in migration studies and rebel governance, it shows how migration and mobility regimes form part of the structure of violent armed conflicts, as both states and non-state actors seek to control processes and consequences of mobility and migration to their advantage. Governance of migration during conflict involves the strategic use of mechanisms of migration governance for the purposes of achieving conflict aims. This article develops a framework for understanding how migration governance is instrumentalised in civil war as a means of managing and controlling populations. The framework is then applied to the case of the Kurdish conflict in Turkey and beyond through an analysis of three areas of migration governance that have played significant roles in this extended regional conflict: forced migration and refugee governance; border management; and diaspora engagement. The analysis provides a challenge to dominant state-centric, securitisation and humanitarian approaches to migration and security by pointing to the political and spatial complexity of contested migration governance in situations of protracted conflict.

While studies on the role of knowledge and expertise have seen a resurgence of interest in International Relations and in literature on peacebuilding and security governance, little is known how knowledge enters the governance routines after the initial establishment of peacebuilding operations. Taking the mandate decision-making process of MINUSMA and EUTM operations in Mali in the German parliament as case for our explorative study, we ask how knowledge has entered the parliamentary process and how various epistemic practices and epistemic agency shape this peacebuilding governance since 2013. Informed by an object-centred knowledge framework, we argue that the practices and types of agency involved mostly ‘lock-in’ the governing of robust peacebuilding in Mali in much broader foreign- and security policies routines. Epistemic practices are not primarily concerned with new impulses or critical analysis, but with rendering Mali governable as interventionary object. The epistemic authority of the government is dominant and we do not find much evidence that hegemonic knowledge is challenged. Intervening agents do extract certain knowledge via transnational channels from Mali, however, broader knowledge debates or the involvement of Malian agents are missing.

This article contributes to an ‘historical turn’ in security scholarship. It addresses imbalance in security studies’ attention to historical empirics, and argues against notions of temporal disjunct prevalent within the discipline. I employ a genealogical framework to clarify the interpellation of past and present; and I introduce the ‘conceptual archive’ as a lens for pursuing that interpellation in research. My thesis on the ‘conceptual archive’ represents a twofold contribution. Firstly, a conceptual contribution: I advance the ‘conceptual archive’ as a way of thinking about past-present interpellation (specifically, existing conceptual logics’ remodelling in arguments justifying new practice). Secondly, an analytical contribution: I propose the ‘conceptual archive’ as a tool for doing genealogy (a research programme with historicising promise, but one suffering nebulous operationalisation at present). I use the field of terrorism studies as an entry-point to these contributions: adopting a mixed-methods research design to trace British counterterrorism practices’ roots within an ‘archive’ of logics on Northern Ireland. I find 1970s British governments remodelled long-standing ‘archival’ vocabularies in their arguments for new security provisions: framing exceptional practices according to an accepted fabric of concepts.

Strategic narratives are employed by political actors as tools to pursue their goals, constructing a shared meaning of the past, present, and future in order to shape behaviour. Building on discourse analysis of the magazine Dabiq and from in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between 2018 and 2019 with IS civilian employees and civilians living in IS-controlled territory, we analyse how IS organised its strategic narrative of governance and statebuilding around three main themes considered as central in the statebuilding literature – the provision of security, the provision of basic services, and social cohesion – and how such a strategic narrative was received by citizens living in IS-controlled territory. We argue that the study of strategic narratives of governance and statebuilding casts light on the factors leading to the success or demise of emergent statebuilding efforts, equally demonstrating how IS’s project is quite conventional when compared to other mainstream statebuilding narratives.

IR’s visual turn has emphasised visual analysis over visual method, centring images of war and crisis. Meanwhile security studies centres great power politics and moments of rupture. Together, they reinforce a dominant image of security as spectacular. This article unites two ethnographic projects focused on everyday security: one examining everyday security landscapes in China, and one examining health security at the UK border. Both found a gap between the dominant image of security and what we saw, and explored this gap through photography. Building on the everyday and visual turns, the article introduces interpretive photography as method to make two contributions. The first is methodological: it introduces interpretive photography as a distinct critical qualitative method that operates on five modes: enabling the seeing-capturing-making-sharing of visual artefacts, it also disrupts dominant visions and contributes to the construction of international relations. The second contribution is empirical: a deeper, richer account of what security looks like. While the discipline associates security with emergency politics or a state of exception, Nyman’s photographs show the exception-made-everyday, while Ferhani’s photos reject the exception by showing banal routines. In this way, photography engages the visuality of security, and can change how we see security.

The emergence of military ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) in Africa as a tool for conflict management outside established institutional frameworks brings about a number of questions: are they undermining existing security structures such as the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) or are they contributing to further regime complexity? In order to answer these questions, the article applies the logic of functional differentiation as it is used in the literature on regime complexity and inter-organisational studies. Scope conditions are developed exploring when and how functional differentiation operates and what consequences it brings about for interacting institutions. Empirically the example of military ad hoc coalitions in the Lake Chad Basin and Sahel is at the centre of analysis. It will be argued that ad hoc coalitions are part of a functionally differentiated system response within the African Security Regime Complex and not in direct competition to the APSA.

Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), is often referred to as a ‘Plan B’ if mitigation strategies to reduce emissions fail and the need to rapidly reduce global temperatures becomes urgent. In theory, SAI would help buy more time to bring carbon and other emissions down while also cooling or keeping the planet below the threshold for dangerous warming, though it is not a solution to the problem of climate change in itself. What little attention it has received in International Relations (IR) is usually focused on the need for governance of the technology and assumes that development and use of the technology will be driven primarily by vulnerability to climate impacts. Through an analysis of common security assumptions and preemptive security framings the article shows that while current assessments of SAI focus on the technology’s environmental impact, broader political and security dynamics, particularly the desire to render climate change more intelligible as a security problem with a solution may have substantial influence on how the technology is used and by whom.

Scholars and policymakers agree that major powers have leverage over their more junior partners. Giving security assistance or providing arms is supposed to increase this leverage. However, major powers often hit roadblocks when trying to influence the behaviour of their junior partners. This article demonstrates that junior partners are often successful in constraining the behaviour of the major power partners, and have particular success in extracting additional resources from their major partners. This article develops the concept of loyalty coercion to explain that leverage is based on rhetorical and symbolic moves, rather than material preponderance. It then uses cases of US arms sales to show that weapons transfers did not lead to US leverage, instead opened opportunities for junior partner influence. The article contributes to scholarly and policy perspectives on alliance management and reputation, and leverage in world politics.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty reserved outer space for ‘peaceful purposes’, yet recent decades have witnessed growing competition and calls for new multilateral rules including a proposed ban on the deployment of weapons in space. These diplomatic initiatives have stalled in the face of concerted opposition from the United States. To explain this outcome, we characterise US diplomacy as a form of ‘antipreneurship’, a type of strategic norm-focused competition designed to preserve the prevailing normative status quo in the face of entrepreneurial efforts. We substantially refine and extend existing accounts of antipreneurship by theorising three dominant forms of antipreneurial agency – rhetorical, procedural, and behavioural – and describing the mechanisms and scope conditions though which they operate. We then trace the development of US resistance to proposed restraints on space weapons from 2000–present. Drawing on hundreds of official documents, we show how successive US administrations have employed a range of interlayered diplomatic strategies and tactics to preserve the permissive international legal framework governing outer space and protect US national security priorities. Our study illustrates the specific techniques and impacts of resistance in a domain of growing strategic importance, with implications for further refining understandings of norm competition in other issue areas.

Major theories of military innovation focus on relatively narrow technological developments, such as nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers. Arguably the most profound military implications of technological change, however, come from more fundamental advances arising from ‘general-purpose technologies’ (GPTs), such as the steam engine, electricity, and the computer. Building from scholarship on GPTs and economic growth, we argue that the effects of GPTs on military effectiveness are broad, delayed, and shaped by indirect productivity spillovers. We label this impact pathway a ‘general-purpose military transformation’ (GMT). Contrary to studies that predict GPTs will rapidly diffuse to militaries around the world and narrow gaps in capabilities, we show that GMTs can reinforce existing balances if leading militaries have stronger linkages to a robust industrial base in the GPT than challengers. Evidence from electricity's impact on military affairs, covering the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, supports our propositions about GMTs. To probe the explanatory value of our theory and account for alternative interpretations, we compare findings from the electricity case to the military impacts of submarine technology, a non-GPT that emerged in the same period. Finally, we apply our findings to contemporary debates about artificial intelligence, which could plausibly cause a profound GMT.

Following its exceptional response to the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) gained new powers to securitise infectious disease outbreaks via the revised 2005 International Health Regulations (IHRs) and the ability to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). This article investigates the declaration of a PHEIC in relation to the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that the securitisation of these outbreaks was dependent upon global surveillance networks that utilised genetic technologies to visualise the molecular characteristics and spread of the pathogen in question. Genetic evidence in these cases facilitated the creation of a securitised object by revealing the unique and ‘untypable’ nature of the H1N1 and SARS-CoV-2 viruses and made visible the widespread prevalence of Ebola across the population of West Africa. The power of this evidence draws from a societal perception of science as producing objective ‘facts’ about the world that objectivise their objects of concern and empower political actors in the implementation of their security agendas. As a result, scientific evidence provided by genetic technologies now plays a necessary and indispensable role in the securitisation of infectious disease outbreaks.

A growing amount of literature is being devoted to interrogating gendered dynamics in both violent extremism and terrorism, contributing to the integration of international and feminist security. This includes how such dynamics can shape differences in the motivations and participation of women and men. By critically analysing ideological gender constructs in two women-only extremist forums – the Women's Forum on Stormfront.org and Women Dawah, a Turkish-language pro-Islamic State group chat on Telegram – and employing feminist methodology, this article demonstrates how gendered online spaces influence women's ‘everyday practices’ within extremist movements. We argue that women-only online spaces not only facilitate gendered practices by allowing women to share everyday experiences, hold ideological discussions, and engage in debate, but also provide an important means to navigate these issues within the movement itself. In fact, women-only forums are actively used by women within extremist movements to exert greater agency in the face of otherwise constraining gendered ideological constructs. In turn, gendered everyday practices are reinforced by virtual communities that strengthen a sense of meaning – and purpose – in the movement, albeit being ideologically confined to the private sphere in many ways. This study sheds light not only on the differences in participation between women and men, but also on how such virtual communities can serve as spaces to frame and reinforce gendered practices in extremist movements. This has key implications for deradicalisation and disengagement strategies, which are at present overwhelmingly gender neutral. We provide evidence of how women navigate agency in these spaces, while challenging the stereotype that women in extremist movements are typically passive actors confined to traditional roles.

Dehumanisation is one of the most invoked factors in analyses of mass atrocities with many scholars focusing on its crucial role in enabling perpetrators to inflict violence on their victims. However, while its application is widespread, its relevance is often assumed a priori, with claims regarding its empirical relevance often asserted rather than argued for. Not only does its meaning, nature, and function remain amorphous, current scholarship also lacks a general conceptualisation of the basic features that bind the manifold appearances of dehumanisation together. It is this paucity of sustained reflection and particularly the lack of conceptual clarity that the present article seeks to address. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, it aims to deliver a more thoroughgoing appraisal of the nature of dehumanisation as a fundamental violation of plurality to conceptually consolidate and ground its meaning and bind together its diverse manifestations across cases of mass violence.

State responses to repatriation of Islamic State (ISIS) foreign fighters and their children detained across Syria and Iraq are highly diverse. Repatriation policies implemented between 2018 and 2020 range from denying repatriation of nationals and revocation of citizenship to repatriation and subsequent gender-responsive rehabilitation programmes. What explains the variation in state responses? This article seeks to explain why repatriation policies differ despite the global challenges faced by all states. It investigates and categorises the repatriation policies for foreign fighters across 69 countries ranging from unconditional repatriation to denying repatriation. To explain the state responses to a common security and human rights dilemma, a mixed-method approach is employed involving an explorative statistical analysis to test key explanations and a narrative analysis. The findings reveal how diverse social constructions of gendered and racialised ‘threat narratives’ of foreign fighters in policy documents and the media explain variation in foreign fighter repatriation policies.

The conflicts in Iraq and Syria have led to concerns in the West over ‘foreign fighters’. Although states are anxious about the role these individuals play in the conflicts they join, their primary concern relates to the perceived ‘terrorist’ threat they pose on their return. This fear has led to an evolution in the international policymaking arena, with foreign fighters now often referred to as ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ (FTFs). A Critical Theory-inspired immanent critique is offered to highlight various problems that exist with the FTF term and to argue policymakers should resist its use. The article demonstrates the importance of language by showing how the invocation of the FTF threat has strengthened the ongoing development of globally coordinated counterterrorism action. Specifically, it argues UN Security Council Resolution 2178, agreed in 2014, generates a legal obligation upon UN member states to implement new counterterrorism laws at national level to combat the perceived threat from FTFs. The article highlights the negative effect these laws have on human rights. It is argued institutions like the UN need to ensure new counterterrorism legal instruments are built from a human rights rather than security-first perspective if commitments to human rights in transnational counterterrorism are to be fully realised.

When should peacekeepers partially or fully withdraw from a country or region in which they are operating? This important question has received little scholarly attention. However, it has profound implications. If peacekeepers depart prematurely, as happened in Rwanda in 1994, the consequences can be disastrous with the potential to lead to widespread preventable deaths and human suffering. If they overstay, peacekeepers risk alienating the population they are seeking to protect and undercutting popular sovereignty at significant economic costs. Striking a balance, we propose a framework for just withdrawal that is both normatively compelling and empirically sound. It focuses on three aspects that are vital for understanding when peacekeepers can depart in an ethically justified manner: just cause, effectiveness, and legitimacy. By considering a number of objections, we also address critics who challenge the overarching premise of peacekeeping or might prefer different standards by which to suggest peacekeepers should stay or depart. Finally, we illustrate our argument with theoretical and empirical examples and a discussion of UN peacekeeping in East Timor.