Does neorealism contain a conception of human nature? Although neorealists usually claim to sidestep the question of human nature altogether, scholars frequently trace the theory back to the work of Thomas Hobbes, a philosopher who in fact defended a robust account of human motivations. As a result, some scholars have concluded that neorealism contains a Hobbesian view of human nature. Against the conventional wisdom, this article argues that neorealism contains a Rousseauian philosophical anthropology. Whereas Hobbes provides a deeply pessimistic account of human motivations, Rousseau combines optimism about human motivations with pessimism about social structures. Rousseau’s critique of Hobbes profoundly influenced neorealism’s founding father, Kenneth Waltz, a political theorist who later gravitated towards International Relations. After exploring Waltz’s reading of Rousseau and demonstrating Rousseau’s influence on Waltz’s theory, the article investigates what is gained by reading neorealism as Rousseauian. Returning to the Rousseauian roots of neorealism reveals the true character of the tragic heuristic employed in neorealist theory, sheds new light on the role of pity in neorealist foreign policy, and clarifies the logic of the theory itself.

The retreat of the modern liberal order in contemporary democracies can be understood as co-constituted with the normalisation of the far right. The far right has increasingly accessed the political ‘mainstream’ through the enabling of erstwhile-disavowing centre-right and right-wing counterparts. In contexts of political ‘victory’, the identity (re)formation of these mainstream right-wing subjects and discourses can be observed and analysed through celebrations alongside the far right and in emotions and attitudes like elation, gloating, and self-righteousness. In this article, I address how victory-related manifestations of enjoyment – or jouissance – are articulated in the discourses of mainstream right-wing subjects. I ask what enjoyment-based rhetoric reveal about the normalisation of the far right and the identity reformation of right-wing subjects and discourses. To address this, I first discuss the role of enjoyment on far-right normalisation by merging Derk Hook’s analytics of enjoyment (2017) with ontological security, expanding on the latter concept as a libidinal fantasy of ideological closure. Subsequently, analysing the case of the 2022 Swedish election, I explore three interrelated dimensions of co-(re)formation of right-wing enjoyment, discourses, and identities: the symbolic space where civilisational-securitising fantasies are produced; the threatening modes of enjoyment of cultural Others; and the imperilled enjoyment modes of the ‘real Swedes’.

In the field of International Relations, sovereignty refers to a state’s authority to govern itself without external interference, closely tied to the principle of non-intervention. Recent scholarship has illuminated sovereignty as socially constructed and dynamic, yet non-interference remains central to its conception. Catherine MacKinnon’s feminist critique exposes the patriarchal implications of fetishising non-interference, silencing marginalised voices, and perpetuating gendered power imbalances. This Forum examines whether Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty that prioritise non-interference are shaped by patriarchal ideologies, particularly through the emphasis on relationality – rooted in kinship – and the central role of consent in Indigenous understandings and practices of sovereignty. By examining the intersection of non-interference with systems of oppression, this paper contributes to a nuanced understanding of Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and gendered relations. It concludes with a discussion of the relationship between consent, non-interference, and non-domination.

Technology is of increasing importance for international cooperation, yet theory development in rationalist International Relations has not kept pace. I develop a theoretical framework for explaining cooperative outcomes in the international regulation of technology. I propose that uncertainty and the distribution of material capacities create a severe international collective action problem for novel technologies, which precludes robust cooperative outcomes and thus limits joint gains from the appropriation of technological benefits and from the mitigation of technological risks. While the severity of the collective action problem attenuates over time, in principle enabling greater ambition in cooperative outcomes, sociotechnical lock-in reduces the capacities and incentives of state actors to deviate from pre-existing rules. This leads to incremental change whereby rules harden over time but do not change significantly in terms of their regulatory substance. While early regulatory interventions are hampered by collective action problems, late interventions are constrained by lock-in. These temporal dynamics create a tendency towards systemic inefficiency in international technology regulation. I illustrate this argument using the cases of nuclear power and synthetic biology.

In this article, we analyse how anti-globalist conspiracy theories were mobilised online to delegitimise national authorities and policies designed to curb the Covid-19 pandemic in Canada. These conspiracy theories attacked the political authority underpinning public health measures and targeted purportedly ‘liberal’ policies and ‘globalist’ actors. Our case study examines the Freedom Convoy, a series of protests against Covid-19 vaccine mandates that began in Canada but inspired global demonstrations. The Freedom Convoy fostered and relied upon anti-globalist conspiracy theories, including the ‘Great Reset’ and ‘Great Replacement’, both of which posit a global conspiracy to erode national sovereignty and impose a ‘liberal’ international order. We investigate far-right social media commentary from 4chan’s Politically Incorrect imageboard /pol/, Infowars, and Rebel News, showing how conspiratorial claims were marshalled in alt-tech spaces. These narratives were used to delegitimise public health measures to combat Covid-19 and the Liberal Trudeau government by linking them to various ‘globalist’ forces. In exploring three mechanisms of delegitimation – externalisation, personification, and Othering – we argue that far-right movements like the Freedom Convoy, motivated by anti-globalist conspiracism, mobilise the international realm by leveraging the legitimacy gap of international organisations and agendas to undermine the political authority of actors at the national level.

Although expressivism has been studied in relation to criminal justice since the emergence of modern international criminal law, an expressivist perspective in norms and criminal justice research resurfaced in the past decades, inviting a new viewpoint on the dynamic interplay between norms and symbolic action in International Relations (IR). Situated as an account of punishment, expressivism has been criticised for being too abstract and lacking an immanent meaning or for its dialectic position in relation to punishment. Addressing this theoretical shortcoming, this article remediates our understanding of expressivism, establishing new knowledge of the meaning of norm expressivism in IR and clarifying the relationship between expressivism and notions of punishment in criminal justice and norm research. To this end, it hermeneutically deconstructs the rhetoric of country delegates at the United Nations in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It examines crucial examples of expressivism: disagreement pronouncements, denunciation of norm violation, postulation of guilt, and penal analogies. While criminal justice research posits expressivism as a distinct account of punishment, the novelty of this article consists in illustrating how, even in the absence of prosecution in the courtroom, expressivist rationales can have a reinforcing effect on the international legal order.

This article makes a twofold contribution on the relationship between self/other securitisation, ambiguous threat constructions, and anxiety at the intersection of Securitisation Theory (ST) and Ontological Security Studies (OSS). First, we develop the concept topos of threat (TT) as a potent linguistic anchor in securitisation processes. TTs depict an entire self/other threat situation that warrants escape, serving identity needs while staying flexible and ambiguous. However, their frequent rhetorical deployment can blur the threat construction and increase anxiety: this challenges the classical scholarly assumption that antagonism necessarily alleviates anxiety. Second, we theorise metapolitics as an anxiety mediation strategy. Metapolitics is a mode of interpretation – a relentless analysis of surface clues to expose a deceptive, powerful adversary – which in the final event fails to alleviate anxiety. The dual practice of nurturing topoi of threat and metapolitics drives conflict because it sets in motion a vicious securitisation spiral that entrenches rigid patterns of self/other representation and fosters a bias of anticipating hostility. We employ abductive theorising: working with established theory alongside empirical discovery through a discourse analysis of Russia’s official rhetoric on NATO and the use of the TT ‘colour revolution’ since the conflict in Ukraine began in 2014.

Research on civil war termination typically classifies conflict outcomes into homogeneous categories. Civil wars are conventionally described as ending in ‘victory’ for one side, ‘negotiated settlement’, or ‘stalemate’. However, each of these common categories conceals a significant degree of unexplored variation. Not all peace processes are the same, nor should we assume equivalence between all ‘victory’ outcomes. Ignoring the variability in outcomes obscures our understanding of how civil wars actually end and can undermine efforts to examine how this may influence the sustainability of the ensuing peace. This article focuses on the concept of rebel victory and argues that it has been used to describe a wide range of civil war outcomes that share some features but that also differ along three dimensions: (i) the residual threat posed by the defeated regime; (ii) the role of external actors in enabling victory; and (iii) rebel fragmentation. The article describes these dimensions and the influence that they can exert on the likelihood of continued political instability in the aftermath of rebel victories. The examples of rebel victories in the Central African Republic (2003 and 2012) are used to demonstrate the analytical utility of this novel conceptualisation of rebel victory.

Recent years have witnessed growing attention to popular culture’s role in the reproduction, negotiation, and contestation of global political life. This article extends this work by focusing on games targeted at young children as a neglected, yet rich site in which global politics is constituted. Drawing specifically on the Heroes of History card game in the Top Trumps franchise, I offer three original contributions. First, I demonstrate how children’s games contribute to the everyday (re)production of international relations through the contingent storying of global politics. Heroes of History’s narrative, visual organisation, and gameplay mechanics, I argue, construct world politics as an unchanging realm of conflict through their shared reproduction of a valorised, masculinised figure of the warrior hero. This construction, moreover, does important political work in insulating young players from the realities and generative structures of violence. Second, the polysemy of children’s games means they also provide opportunity for counter-hegemonic ‘readings’ of the world even in seemingly straightforward examples of the genre such as this. Third, engaging with such games as meaningful objects of analysis opens important new space for dialogue across International Relations literatures on children, popular culture, gender, the everyday, and heroism in world politics.

This paper seeks to open an inquiry into the origins of astropolitics, an intellectual and popular imagination whose defining characteristic is the attempt to project geopolitical concepts and categories into outer space. I locate the roots of this vision not merely in Anglo-American maritime strategy but in the rather earthlier German tradition of geopolitics, more specifically in the work of the geographer Friedrich Ratzel and the political theorist Carl Schmitt. Surprisingly, however, my reverse chronology discovers that although the two men’s ideas reverberate through contemporary astropolitical discourses, they were both in fact, in different ways and for different reasons, hesitant about space colonisation. The paper makes sense of this finding and unpacks its implications for contemporary International Relations debates on off-earth politics.

This article examines the role of normative power in shaping the global sustainability order. It challenges the prevailing focus on hegemonic leadership and norm diffusion from dominant states, arguing that less powerful states have contributed significantly to the global order by creating regional initiatives tailored to their unique contexts. The article adopts an alternative theoretical framework of norm-governed change, comprising norm-building, institutionalisation, and transformation. Using an illustrative case study of Africa’s regional economic institutions, it employs process-tracing and archival analysis of key policy documents. The study demonstrates how African states have proactively embedded environmental norms within their regional initiatives, while contributing to the global sustainability agenda, exemplifying a form of normative power referred to as ‘Green Pan-Africanism’. This approach broadens the understanding of global sustainability governance, positioning less economically powerful actors as active participants in world-making. The findings highlight the critical role of normative power in advancing global sustainability governance, particularly in addressing complex global challenges such as climate change.

International Relations (IR) accounts of the post–World War II international order often claim that after its defeat, Germany ‘transformed’ from a fascist, militaristic, and racist state into a model liberal democracy, facilitating its full rehabilitation and integration into Western institutions and alliances. Yet a closer examination of post-war German domestic and international politics challenges this account: denazification was widely reviled, survivors faced ongoing persecution, and a retooled antisemitism asserted itself in international diplomacy. This article offers the concept of adaptive politics to capture how collectively held beliefs, identities, policies, and conduct travel across incisive political events like defeat in war, occupation, and genocide, outlining the complex concurrence of continuity, adaptation, and change in their aftermath. Drawing on theories of sovereignty, biopolitics, racism, and antisemitism, the article tracks the unfolding of West German adaptive politics in the immediate post-war period, focusing on efforts to exonerate perpetrators, modifications of racism and antisemitism, and the role of the trauma diagnosis in debilitating survivors. By sanitising this history, IR scholarship positions the post-war liberal international order, and the international politics of the West more broadly, as entirely disconnected from the disordered conduct associated with Nazism.

This article examines United Kingdom (UK) parliamentary debates on the adoption of its first post-Brexit, from-scratch free trade agreement (FTA), with Australia. Building on Jessop’s cultural political economy framework, we identify and analyse the economic imaginaries animating UK post-Brexit trade policy debates at this time. We find that an imaginary of what we term ‘competitive free trade’ shaped the UK Government’s approach to the UK–Australia FTA. Meanwhile, the Opposition, much of the House of Lords, and a small number of Conservative Members of Parliament endorsed an alternative ‘embedded free trade’ imaginary. Our analysis suggests that the UK government successfully used the context of an unsettled domestic institutional environment for trade policy post-Brexit in order to negotiate and ratify an FTA with Australia that reflected its competitive free trade imaginary. The article offers an account of UK post-Brexit trade policy that highlights how material, political, and ideational dimensions co-constitute each other in the political economy of trade, and how particular economic imaginaries become reified and dominant at certain junctures.

How can we understand the audience agency and securitisation processes that can induce anxiety? The Copenhagen School of security studies conceptualises an audience as possessing political agency which is contingent on their capabilities to respond to securitising moves. Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s approach to ontological security, we argue that there is another type of agency supplementing political agency. Ontological agency refers to exercising control over the stability and continuity of one’s everyday routines and practices to minimise disruption to these routines caused by securitisation. Because routines of day-to-day life are central to bracketing sources of anxiety, people may choose to overlook and not react to securitising moves designating threats and implementing emergency measures that can undermine ontological security. We illustrate the analytical purchase of ontological agency by using unstructured observations of South Korean people’s responses to military practices that securitise North Korea. Our observations reveal that there is latent anxiety regarding North Korea that manifests in varying degrees ranging from inaction when routines are not disrupted by securitisation to outward bursts of emotional reactions and breakdown when securitisation practices disrupt people’s basic routines. This raises implications about the importance of ontological security driving the success or failure of securitisation and the politics of existentialism.

Civil wars are not only destructive: they can also generate new, long-lasting social, political, and economic structures and processes. To account for this productive potential and analyse post-conflict outcomes, I argue that we should analyse civil wars as critical junctures. Civil wars can relax structural constraints, opening opportunities for wartime processes to generate changes or to reinforce, rather than transform, the status quo. Changes or stasis may then be locked in by conflict outcomes, creating path dependencies. Studying civil wars as critical junctures allows for a clearer understanding of what variables mattered and interacted at different points in the conflict process, and the varying roles of structure and agency in producing institutional change or reinforcing pre-existing conditions. I explore the potential benefits of a critical juncture approach in the civil wars literature on different aspects of post-conflict politics and illustrate them in analysing the literature on women’s empowerment during and after civil wars. Applying the critical junctures framework to civil wars’ effects on institutions and socio-behavioural patterns can provide analytical clarity about complex processes and contexts, can facilitate comparison across cases and studies, and draws critical attention both to what civil wars change and to potential pathways not taken.

In 2021, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) moved to integrate climate risks into its Article IV surveillance of member states. While the IMF has not traditionally been at the forefront of climate change efforts, this decision involved defining climate change as a risk to macro-economic stability. I argue that the integration of climate change into IMF surveillance can be understood as a case of international organisation (IO) boundary work taking place via the mechanism of economisation: an economic institution addressing a (traditionally non-economic) issue as an economic issue. The study identifies crucial factors shaping this boundary expansion, particularly the agency of IMF staff, as well as preferences within the IMF Executive Board, and institutional ideas. The straightforward integration of physical and transition climate risks is in contrast to the contestation surrounding the integration of mitigation policy. The findings contribute to the literature on IOs and their boundaries, change within the IMF, and the environmental political economy. The analysis reveals the role of IMF staff in this boundary work and, in addition, that institutionalised ideas and the heterogeneous preferences among member states acted as scope conditions limiting how far this economisation could go.

Governance institutions such as the Arctic Council face ongoing (de)legitimation that impacts the broader legitimacy beliefs which enable them to govern effectively. Research has increasingly studied how different actors engage in legitimation and delegitimation that bolster or challenge legitimacy, but there has been limited study of the variation in the (de)legitimation practices of individual states and the reasons for this variation. This article studies variation in discursive (de)legitimation of the Arctic Council by the United States and China. It advances a theoretical argument for how this variation in (de)legitimation is driven by broader political developments. Using content analysis, it maps these two states’ (de)legitimation of the Arctic Council over a 12-year period and examines evidence for this theory. The article finds that both states vary considerably in their (de)legitimation of the Arctic Council over time. Changes in the intensity of their (de)legitimation are found to be linked to political developments including heightened security tensions, positive/negative shifts in environmental politics, and institutional changes. This contributes empirical evidence and new theoretical insights to the body of research about how different actors engage in (de)legitimation of global governance.

This article analyses the (post)colonial politics of UK bordering through the lens of monstrosity. Historicising contemporary bordering within colonial-era monsterisations of racialised people and their mobility, we identify four mechanisms through which migrants are constructed and policed as monsters today: animalisation, zombification, criminalisation, and barbarisation. We then examine how the state embodies monstrosity itself through border policies of deterrence and creating ‘hostile environments’. In addition to the instrumentalisation of horror, this entails extending the border’s reach domestically throughout everyday life and internationally through deportation and externalisation measures. We argue these developments embody a new form of state power, depicted as a headless, tentacled Leviathan. Doing so provides insights into monstrosity as a form of liberal statecraft, the local/global diffusion of bordering, the transnationalisation of sovereign power, and the racialisation of citizenship. It also raises important questions about the construction of border violence as a necessary and legitimate monstrosity in (post)colonial liberal societies, the everyday complicity of citizens, and the limits of efforts to humanise monsterised migrants or reform monstrous state institutions. Revealing how within liberal regimes of citizenship and humanitarianism values ‘there be monsters’, we argue, opens space for thinking about abolitionist alternatives in international politics.

The involvement of private actors in global policymaking has received significant scholarly attention in IR. Existing accounts have shown how entities such as corporations, businesses, and philanthropies build their authority to become legitimate actors and shape global politics. This paper argues that contemporary global dynamics, such as the financialisation of development and the rise of multistakeholderism, have ushered in a trend where private actors are not only seen as legitimate delegated authorities but also embraced as fully fledged political equals indispensable for addressing societal problems. To understand this shift, it is necessary to move beyond an examination of legitimation strategies to interrogate, instead, how private actors shape what are seen as ‘apt’ or ‘deviant’ ways of knowing and acting upon problems. Through an examination of what I call ‘political normalisation’ in the field of global food governance, I show how through concrete practices – individualising social problems, defining institutional aptness, and cultivating the landscape – private actors not only cultivate a perception of themselves as rightful global governors but also shape the parameters of what rightful governing ought to be. More broadly, this shift invites us to further complicate the public–private divide and assess the novel ways through which private actors ‘do’ politics.