This article sets the scene for the Special Issue ‘Reaching for allies?’ by setting out the research questions and structure of the Special Issue. Specifically, this introduction reviews the state of the art of dialectics interweaving International Relations and Area Studies. Specifically, it focuses on tracing the genealogy of these debates, identifying the actors engaged with them, as well as, mapping those sites where such transdisciplinary knowledge is produced and circulated. We also provide an assessment of the interaction between the two disciplinary traditions as scholarly disciplines by reviewing the field as it had developed in the last decade since 2013. In order to do so, we present data on the brokers of this dialogue by analysing top-ranked Journals across regions, dedicated Special Issues on the matter as well as main international conferences and participants. Overall, this article provides a threefold contribution: first, we provide an account of the globalization of knowledge production and circulation that has also increasingly decentred, valuing local peculiarities and epistemological traditions beyond the Western academia(s). Second, we assess and discuss how Western and non-Western academics have contoured concepts which demand and entail site-intensive techniques of enquiry, exposure to complexities on the grounds, ethnographic sensitivity, and, at the same time, comparative endeavours going beyond area specialisms. Third, by looking at international and regional policy-making milieus with attention to context-specificity, we believe critical policy-relevant implications can be discussed, specifically in relation to local ownership and bottom-up approaches.

The so-called practice turn in International Relations (IR) has established a new paradigm that puts practitioners' quotidian doings front and centre of IR theorizing. It is proving to be an influential development also for area studies (AS) that share much of IR's scholarship and objects of study. This is certainly the case for European studies (ES) where the works of International Practice Theory (IPT) scholars has greatly contributed to raise attention to situated, mundane, and everyday practices of EU institutions. This article reviews the contribution of IPT scholars to ES to assess the added value of this research agenda and its potential to become a ‘trading zone’ where IR and ES/AS scholars can advance understanding of how the local and the global connect. It also identifies two challenges that have not been adequately addressed in the extant literature: (1) finding ways to theorize and empirically observe the transition from the level of situated practices to EU-wide doings (generalization challenge); and (2) assessing the exact role of interaction in structuring and transforming both the global and the local (challenge of relationism). The article ends by calling for a global practice theory as a way to tackle these two challenges.

The paper argues that education is relevant for both domestic and international reasons and without an incorporation of the international within the national it is not possible to understand education's changes and transformations in post-conflict and conflict-affected contexts. The paper aims to connect the local to the global by investigating their dynamic interaction through the peculiar lenses of international assistance to education reform in post-conflict Kosovo. It asks two questions: (1) how do global agendas of peace and security affect education reforms in conflict-affected contexts? and (2) how does education reform in conflict-affected contexts interacts with and is related to broader, international dynamics, processes, and actors? More specifically, the paper analyses the role of international actors in traditionally national sectors and the multi-layered, hybrid governance of education reform within a broader statebuilding, peacebuilding, and stabilization perspective. The analysis is divided into two empirical instances: (i) education for liberal multicultural peace (1999–2013) and (ii) education against violent extremism and radicalization (2014–2019). The paper sheds light on the globalization and securitization of education as well as the changing forms and practice of statehood and sovereignty in times of post-war-reconstruction and fragility. A threat-containment and security-based logic has dictated priorities and determined choices in education reform and content.

Within the Special Issue ‘Reaching for allies? The dialectics and overlaps between International Relations and Area Studies in the study of politics, security, and conflicts’, this article investigates the post-2011 changing relationship between International Relations (IR) and Middle Eastern Studies (MES). The article departs from the assumption that the reading and writing of security in, on and from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has historically been trapped between the projection of security from abroad and endogenous security narratives. We argue that within the post-Arab uprisings renewed scholarly attention, with studies on security in, on and from the MENA region expressing an all-time methodological pluralism and the increasing and original application of bottom-up and non-military security understandings to regional security, societal and human security are among the most promising notions for transformative dialogue between IR and MES. In broader theoretical terms, we show how the ongoing debate on post-Weberian notions of statehood and post-Westphalian sovereignty point to an already transformative dialogue between IR and MES. The article illustrates this trend with two case studies – on Tunisia and on Iraq – pointing to changing security concepts reflecting changing security practices.

This article deals with a question foregrounded by historian Willem van Schendel in his seminal 2002 article ‘Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance’: how do arms, arms flows, and associated regulatory practices reshape the geometries of authority and power in borderlands? The rich transdisciplinary literature on borderlands has fruitfully deployed van Schendel's insights to re-spatialise areas and states but has devoted scant attention to such question. Drawing from ‘new materialist’ scholarship in IR and the concept of scale in political geography, the paper argues that fluid and fractionally coherent combinations of weapons as technical objects that come from somewhere, rationalities, and techniques of arms control reproduce multiple scales of territorial authority and struggles over scaled modes of governing violence in borderlands. Such struggles of scales and about scale constantly reconfigure the territorial arenas of authority on violence at the edge of the state. Based on fieldwork in Ta'ang areas of northern Shan State, Myanmar, the article develops an empirical analysis of encounters between explosive devices/landmines and the subjects and spaces they target. Delving into the processes and practices of ‘making’ and controlling the ‘landmine’, I find that different socio-political orders confront themselves through rationalities, techniques, and practices of humanitarian arms control via which they navigate/jump across scales, forge new ones, or mobilise multi-scalar alliances. Different types of ‘dead’ and ‘alive’ landmines nonetheless defy these attempts at rescaling territorial authority over violence by acting in unforeseen manners at the scale of their own ecologies of violence.

The Global IR research agenda lays emphasis on the marginalised, non-Western forms of power and knowledge that underpin today's international system. Focusing on Africa, this article questions two fundamental assumptions of this approach, arguing that they err by excess of realism – in two different ways. First, the claim that Africa is marginal to international relations (IR) thinking holds true only as long as one makes the whole of IR discipline coincide with the Realist school. Second, the Global IR commitment to better appreciate ‘non-Western’ contributions is ontologically realist, because it fails to recognise that the West and the non-West are dialectically constitutive of one another. To demonstrate this, the article first shows that Africa has moved from the periphery to the core of IR scholarship: in the post-paradigmatic phase, Africa is no longer a mere provider of deviant cases, but a laboratory for theory-building of general validity. In the second part, the Sahel provides a case for unsettling reified conceptions of Africa's conceptual and geographical boundaries through the dialectical articulation of the inside/outside dichotomy. Questioning the ‘place’ of Africa in IR – both as identity and function – thus paves the way to a ‘less realist’ approach to Global IR.

East Asia is increasingly at the centre of debates among International Relations (IR) scholars. China's political, economic, and military ascendency is increasingly considered as a crucial test case for main approaches to IR. Despite this renewed attention, mainstream theories employed to analyse contemporary Asia are still remarkably Euro-centric. A wave of studies has argued in favour of a broad ‘decolonization’ of theoretical concepts used to analyse East Asia as well as other regions. These efforts have produced several distinct research agendas. Firstly, critical and post-colonial theorists have worked on the par destruens, highlighting the inherent Euro-centrism of many IR concepts and theories. Secondly, scholars such as Buzan and Acharya have promoted the idea of Global IR, seeking to advance a ‘non-Western’ and non-Euro-centric research agenda. This agenda has found fertile ground especially in China, where several scholars have tried to promote a Chinese School of IR. This article has three main purposes. Firstly, it briefly explores the issue of Eurocentrism in IR studies dedicated to East Asia. Secondly, it maps the theoretical debates aimed at overcoming it, looking in particular at the ‘Global IR’ research programme and the so-called Chinese School. Finally, it sketches a few other possible avenues of research for a very much needed cooperation between Global IR and area studies.

International observers have not been kind to Italy during the past two decades. The International Monetary Fund (IMF, 2016) wrote about the country's two lost decades, the Economist (19 May 2005) described it as the real sick man of Europe and eminent economists, such as Bruno Pellegrino and Luigi Zingales (Pellegrino and Zingales, 2017), tried to diagnose the Italian disease. Italy's GDP has barely grown since the mid-1990s and the past decade was the worst in the history of its economy, world wars included.