Degrowth literature predominantly states that degrowth strategies are meant from and for the Global North. While economic mainstream discourse suggests that the Global South still has to grow in terms of achieving development, degrowth proponents expect a reduction of material and energy throughput in the Global North to make ecological and conceptual space for the Global South to find its own paths toward ecosocial transformation. Based on a Latin American post-development and post-extractivist perspective and drawing on dependency theory, this article suggests another approach: first, it argues that the growth imperative, which in the peripheral world translates into the imperative to develop, also causes harm in societies of the Global South. Throughout Latin America, in the last decades, economic growth has mainly been achieved through extractivism with negative impacts, which are now being pushed further by green growth strategies. Second, I explore some possibilities for a cross-fertilisation between degrowth and International Relations scholarship, calling into question the assumption that degrowth in high-income countries would automatically ‘make space’ for the Global South to engage in self-determined paths of ecosocial transformation, as long as the structures, institutions, and rules of global governance and trade which secure profoundly asymmetric, colonial relations are not challenged.

There is increasing recognition that Indigenous knowledges have considerable potential to enhance collective understandings of and improve responses to complex ecological threats, such as those to cultural heritage from climate change. At the same time, it appears that Indigenous peoples face structural barriers to participation in international organisations that advance knowledge about those problems. Using the conceptual framework of boundary organisations (BOs) theory and case studies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and UNESCO, I argue that the lack of meaningful Indigenous engagement in international knowledge institutions is not just an ethical problem; it also undermines the effectiveness of their assessments. The future success of their boundary work partly depends on further engagement with Indigenous stakeholders. At least at the heritage–climate change nexus, the salience, legitimacy, and credibility of IPCC and UNESCO assessments require substantive Indigenous representation alongside other state/non-state parties. Successful experiences in biodiversity governance indicate that incorporating the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) would enhance Indigenous engagement in UNESCO and the IPCC.

International Relations (IR) scholarship on ontological (in)security has explored how political agents seek to shape collective identity through the contestation and securitisation of memory narratives around controversial historical events. This article contributes a novel approach for understanding how actors promote emotional engagement with such narratives, synthesising nascent scholarship on vicarious identity and military subjectivity to develop the concept of ‘militarised vicarious identity promotion’. I use this framework to analyse how national custodian, the Royal British Legion, used the British 2014–18 First World War (WW1) centenary to promote affectively resonant revisionism around a war with difficult resonances in Britain by encouraging subjects to ‘live through’ others. Its ‘LIVE ON’ and ‘Every One Remembered’ initiatives first countered the centenary’s potential to destabilise homogenised militarist narratives underpinning national ontological security by rehabilitating WW1 through vicarious frames blurring different military subjectivities together in ways designed to reincorporate WW1 into homogenised remembrance discourses. Second, Britons were encouraged to integrate the nation’s military history into their personal biographies by vicariously identifying with ancestral and adoptive WW1 connections. Through enabling feelings of pride and status assuaging civilian anxiety, ‘vicarious military subjectivity’ based on family connections provided emotional reinforcement for identification with simplistic WW1 revisionism and homogenised British militarism more broadly.

To date, the vast majority of post-growth thinking has been focused on explaining why a post-growth transition is needed and the policies this would entail. Less attention, in contrast, has been paid to the relations of power and structural mechanisms through which ‘growth hegemony’ is continuously reproduced, and even less to the mechanisms, counter-hegemonic strategies, and coalitions that could plausibly drive post-growth transitions in core states of the world-system. This article will explore these issues through the lens of Neo-Gramscian theory, particularly the ‘complex hegemony’ framework developed by Alex Williams. From this perspective, rather than reducing growth to capitalist relations of production (as Marxists typically do), we should instead frame it as an emergent hegemonic structure and process shaped by the reciprocally determining forces of political economy, ideology, and militarisation. I will argue that this approach provides more insight into the messiness of possible post-growth futures – which may confound neat binaries such as capitalism/socialism – as well as the mechanisms and struggles through which the world-system might be pushed in post-growth directions.

In recent decades, sovereignty has come under increased academic scrutiny for being a Eurocentric notion antithetical to emancipatory politics, leading critical theory scholars to call for an overcoming or even abandonment of the concept. Paradoxical as it may seem, it nonetheless remains an appealing ideal for many colonised peoples. Indigenous activists and scholars have actively re-appropriated the language of sovereignty to encapsulate and advance Indigenous political aspirations. This paper discusses how Māori, Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Indigenous people, navigate their relations to the concept in their contemporary political discourses pursuing self-governance. Building on interviews with Māori leaders, scholars, and activists, it offers empirical insights into Indigenous political thought’s engagement with the idea of sovereignty. It highlights an ambivalence oscillating between rejection and rearticulation present both in Indigenous theorising and Māori politics. From an analysis of Māori contemporary conceptual strategies, this paper suggests that Yarimar Bonilla’s notion of ‘strategic entanglement’ offers a productive account to comprehend the approached Māori actors’ deployment of the sovereignty concept, and possibly that of Indigenous peoples beyond Aotearoa. This paper thus highlights the continued relevance of the sovereignty framework, both analytically and politically, to meaningfully engage with contemporary Indigenous politics.

Climate change and its potentially violent consequences for international peace and security have transformed the United Nations (UN) approach to Sustaining Peace. One of the emblematic initiatives of this new approach is the UN Joint Programme for Women, Natural Resources, Climate, and Peace. We use feminist peace scholarship to consider what the recent debates about who builds peace and where peace is built in Peace Studies and Environmental Peacebuilding miss when they treat concepts of ‘scale’ and local natural resource management as gender-neutral and what this might tell us about the wider UN Peacebuilding agenda in which it is situated. We make three claims. First, we claim that gendered relations of power that leverage women for win–win opportunities of peace and gender equality (re)produce an idea of a feminised, self-contained local. Second, we demonstrate that this makes it possible to reproduce the dominant political order that privileges intervention, and the dominant economic order that is occupied with forcing ‘local’ economies to adapt their natural resource management strategies. Third, we argue that assuming that ‘the who’ and ‘the where’ of building peace is local makes it much harder to ask about how the conditions of possibility for violence transcend scales.

Economic development is considered one of the pillars of international peacebuilding. The mandates of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations often contain the promotion of economic growth as a prerequisite for post-conflict recovery and sustainable peace. However, the relationship between peace and economic growth needs re-examination in light of urgent calls for global sustainability and climate action. To do this, I first review the claims and critiques that economic growth is a precondition for peace. I then revisit past peacebuilding cases where the promotion of economic growth has either corresponded with or led to environmental degradation and unequal distribution of resources, contributing to new or renewed forms of violence. Finally, I explore the prospects of post-growth peacebuilding based on recent efforts to make UN peacekeeping operations more attuned to environmental considerations and the changing climate. Post-growth peacebuilding is not just about reducing the environmental footprint of peacekeeping; it is, more importantly, about breaking away from the linear and growth-driven path of peace and development towards intergenerational and ecological justice.

Belligerents increasingly rely on media manipulation, propaganda, and communication to attain strategic advantages in conflict. Given the civilian propagandists’ clear role in creating tactical or strategic advantages for one side in the conflict, should these propagandists be considered combatants, and can they therefore be legitimately targeted because of their activities? This article overcomes traditional binary frameworks of distinction to argue that propagandists are indirectly participating civilians, i.e. participants who cannot be intentionally or directly killed in conflict. Because of their activities, propagandists, it argues, are liable to less-than-lethal harm, of which it identifies three types (destruction of property, privation of liberty, isolation). The article then proposes a necessary criterion – necessity – to decide if less-than-lethal harm is warranted against propagandists. It then creates four new criteria – denial of agency, falsehood, influence, gratification – to serve as assessment criteria able to decide what degree of harm a propagandist may maximally face. In making this argument, the article contributes to just war literature by proposing a novel way to evaluate the ethical status of a highly diverse, yet undoubtedly influential, category of war participants: those who undertake the ‘media battle’, outside of the military.

Europe’s (post-)colonial borders have been recently marked by a profusion of cases of violence against racialised migrants with the use of police dogs, following a continual process of integration of canines into the border apparatus of violence. Engaging simultaneously with the recent post-colonial literature on border and migration security and the incipient domain of animal studies, this article investigates the colonial and racial origins and effects of this phenomenon. Contextualising the weaponisation of dogs at Europe’s borders today within a much longer history of racial violence, the article shows how canines have been systematically deployed by colonial and white supremacist powers against racialised bodies as tools to enact and secure racial order. Attentive to the ways in which modern humanness has been predicated upon its removal from the food chain, the article argues that the use of police dogs at Europe’s borders operates by reinforcing the non- or less-than-human status of racialised migrants by marking them as ‘animal-like’ and ‘edible’ bodies. Conceptualising this method as ‘the politics of edibility’, the article then shows how the exposure of migrants to the threat of ‘dog bites’ functions as a form of reinforcing racial hierarchies in a Europe traversed by racial anxieties.

This article explores the BBC television drama Vigil (2021) as a significant site for the construction of public knowledge about nuclear weapons. In doing so, it extends beyond discourse-oriented approaches to explore how nuclear discourses manifest in visual communication, everyday encounters, and popular imagination. In a close reading of Vigil, this article questions concepts of security, peace, and deterrence, revealing how the series (occasionally) challenges conventional discourses while reproducing gendered and racialised representations of nuclear weapons politics. The exploration asks questions of responsibility for nuclear decision-making, the portrayal of anti-nuclear activists, and the depiction of nuclear weapons as agents of both peace and destruction. While the BBC series reproduces existing (and problematic) discourses, it also provides a ‘thinking space’ for critical engagement. Amid the current geopolitical landscape, this article emphasises the urgency of studying contemporary representations of nuclear weapons and the need for scholarship that challenges traditional Cold War perspectives.

A key feature of the long-observed ‘core’ hegemony in International Relations (IR) is a linguistic one, yet it remains the least explored and confronted, with even today’s ‘Global IR’ discussion unquestioningly taking place in English. However, the non-English IR world is demographically and intellectually immense, and global IR cannot afford to ignore it. This study argues that English dominance in IR knowledge production and dissemination is a pillar of a dependent relationship between an English-speaking core and a non-English periphery. It further argues that this linguistic unilateralism, through assimilation, is structurally homogenising, and impedes the periphery’s original contribution potential in an imperialistic manner. This study examines 135 journals from 39 countries in the linguistic periphery to assess the degree and nature of English dominance in them. It explores the relationship between publication language and ranking and analyses citations to understand whether language matters for being cited in the core. We conclude with recommendations for institutions, individuals, and knowledge outlets, including a call for greater multilingualism, which – though a possible risk for parochialism and provincialism – is necessary for periphery concept development and incorporation into a broadened ‘core’, and a necessary stage to curbing the imperialistic impact of linguistic unilateralism and encouraging a genuine globalisation of IR.

This paper aims to un-suture common-sense assumptions based on Westphalian International Relations (IR) from South Korea’s non-essentialist and situated perspective, in the context of decolonising IR. Towards this end, the paper methodologically investigates a South Korean novel, A Grey Man, published in 1963 during South Korea’s early post-colonial period at the height of the Cold War. Using a non-Western novel to conduct a contrapuntal reading of Westphalian IR, this paper constructs a different type of worlding, conceptualising ‘the international’ through ‘the cultural’. It explores the following questions: How do ‘yellow negroes’ (the subject race) make sense of themselves and their roles and life-modes in a world defined for them by the white West (the master race)? How do yellow negroes understand and respond to the white West, which is hegemonic in world politics and history? In what ways does the protagonist of A Grey Man resist, engage with, and relate to the hegemonic West, which he has already internalised? In addressing these questions, the paper attempts to access different IR words to think with, such as race, white supremacy, intimacy without equality, sarcastic empathy, and disengagement. These provide an arena in which we can think otherwise, while un-suturing dominant Westphalian IR thinking.

This paper seeks to reconstruct the worldview informing Iberian overseas expansion during the long sixteenth century, arguing that this worldview was more indebted to Renaissance cosmology than to a recognisably modern scientific worldview. The paper describes how this cosmology provided the intellectual resources necessary to justify overseas expansion to those who doubted its viability and legitimacy, and how the same cosmological beliefs were invoked to make sense of the New World and the people found there, if only to facilitate and justify the subjection of the latter to European rule. This story constitutes an important yet often neglected part of the prehistory of modern international thought insofar as it exposes its Iberian origins and Renaissance foundations and the role played by pre-modern ideas in the making of a modern international system.

This article examines and further develops the relationship between the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD), recently taken up by International Relations (IR) scholars to furnish a social theory of ‘the international’, and the Gramscian concept of ‘passive revolution’, which refers to a molecular process of top-down revolution and state formation that preserves ruling-class power by transforming its social base. To this end, the paper: (1) advances a productive distinction between ‘societal’ and ‘(geo)political’ multiplicity, increasing the transdisciplinary potential of UCD and challenging dominant state-centric approaches to IR; (2) demonstrates that UCD is central to creating the conditions for passive revolution; and, (3) argues that UCD illuminates the distinct spatial dimensions of passive revolution, for which the succession of ‘classes’ in time requires the expansion of capitalist social relations in space. To illustrate these claims, the article demonstrates how the American Civil War is best understood as an inter-societal conflict, exacerbated by the coexistence of two social formations within a single state, leading to war. It then shows how, upon victory, the North’s abolition of enslaved labour and the subsequent attempt to re-subsume the South within a single sovereign polity constituted a radical instance of passive revolution.

This article takes the practice of twinning as an entry point for problematising conventional accounts of ‘international friendship’ in the field of International Relations. In particular, the paper zeroes in on three examples of twinning practice, past and present, that have challenged the status quo: twinnings established in opposition to the Contra war in Nicaragua; twinning as an act of recognition for communities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories; and twinning as a vehicle for the recovery and return of sacred artefacts to post-colonial Kenya. Through these examples, it argues for an alternative conceptualisation of international friendship – one that pushes beyond the methodological nationalism and ontological rigidity of dominant approaches.

This article argues that Dialogue among Civilisations can be put forward as a crucial contribution to debates addressing IR’s Eurocentrism. It highlights the blurring of West/non-West, domestic/international, and imperial/post-imperial bifurcations. This is evident in three ways. First, Dialogue among Civilisations needs to be appreciated in Iran’s wider historical context and its multifaceted intellectual heritages. This demonstrates that the idea of the West as distinctly different from the East is problematic because of engagement between Iran and the so-called West. Second, Khatami’s intellectual endeavours are based on a simultaneous engagement with Western political thought, Islamic philosophy, and the idea of Ancient Iran. Finally, the notion itself reflects an internal dialogue whereby Western civilisation along with Islam and Iran’s pre-Islamic heritages are considered integral to Iranian political culture. Furthermore, it is an aspiration for how post-colonial Muslim societies can engage with colonial power while maintaining a post-colonial authenticity. Our contention is that an in-depth understanding of Iran alongside a revisiting of Khatami’s Dialogue among Civilisations can act as a means of bringing the perspective of the ‘other’ into debates on the international and our epistemological and ontological understanding of the West.

If critical thought is to contribute to liberatory struggle, it arguably requires a general, even structural, theorisation of the nature and sources of power and oppression. This appears to be at odds with the critical project of questioning the immanence of truth to power, as famously framed by Michel Foucault. Yet Foucault’s philosophical project in fact hinged upon his own attempts to grapple with this tension. What is more, his ultimate failure to resolve it led to ambiguities that might be considered generative (especially in light of increased rapprochement between Foucauldian, Marxian, and decolonial International Relations [IR]). Reading Indigenous and decolonial movement intellectuals in tandem with Foucault, alongside the philosophy of science of one of his major influences – Gaston Bachelard – we advocate attentiveness to the ‘experimental’ way in which struggles against capitalist extraction and (neo)colonialism hold together dissonant theoretical – and ontological – commitments when putting forward structural accounts of power. This leads us to an ethos of inquiry that starts from lived thought, as well as to a non-linear approach to the relations between method, theory, and associated ontological commitments, from which scholars are traditionally trained away in social science.