In recent years, various crises such as the financial crisis, Brexit, and the Covid-19 pandemic have shed light on citizens’ (dis)satisfaction with international organisations (IOs). Yet, despite their crucial importance for the support of IOs, individual citizens’ connection to these organisations remains understudied. This article contributes to the literature on emotion research in International Relations (IR) by exploring the everyday emotions of ordinary individuals about IOs and their repercussions on world politics, moving beyond the state or community level to examine how citizens actually experience international politics. It does so by (i) theorising individuals’ emotional attachments to IOs and demonstrating how they shape perceptions and preferences that impact the future of organisations, and (ii) advocating for the use of focus groups as a research method to study emotions in IR. Contributing to the ‘everyday turn’ in emotion research in IR, it uses the European Union as a case study and analyses 21 focus groups with individuals from four different countries (Belgium, France, Italy, and Portugal). The article’s insights provide a deeper understanding of the micro-political foundation that enables and legitimises government action, and against whose background international relations are conducted.

Vietnam’s initial response to Covid-19 was conspicuous for various reasons, including how its attempt at securitisation drew deeply from historical narratives, symbols, and traditions specific to the Vietnamese experience, as well as how the securitisation project was not simply top-down and state-driven but also featured ground-up participation where the public was mobilised to participate in and actively reiterate securitisation practices. This richly textured empirical case study of the workings of Vietnamese society and politics represents an invitation to explore key debates surrounding securitisation theory. Reflecting on the empirical material of the case, this paper builds on scholarship seeking to highlight the shortcomings of the Copenhagen School’s model of securitisation and from there further explore securitisation theory and its limits. It takes aim at how the audience and its agency is conceptualised in the theory and develops the notions of ‘historical resources’ and ‘activation architecture’ to more adequately explain the processes of securitisation.

Why do racialised states subscribe to the racial international hierarchy? While the critical scholarship in International Relations (IR) has meaningfully unsettled the discipline’s silence on race, it remains bound to the white versus non-white binary, neglecting the transmission and persistence of racism in international politics outside that divide. This article proposes a Lacanian reading of race as constitutive of state subjectivity in the modern world order to address this gap. Focusing on Lacan’s notion of the ‘lack in the Other’, I suggest that non-West/non-white racism is a fantasy that racialised states construct upon encountering the void of ‘Whiteness’ as a master signifier. I argue that racialised states appropriate racism in response to the anxiety induced by the collapse of the Other’s authority. Using the case of Japan’s transition to a modern nation-state, I mobilise the framework to examine Japan’s flirtation with Western racial theories and subsequent attempts to depart from the white racial order by creating its own racial hierarchy.

A dominant narrative, produced and reproduced especially by terrorism scholars, holds that terrorism in its worst form is religious. The most dangerous and non-negotiable form of terrorism, in other words, is the religious kind. At the same time, there is a recurring implication, proposed by many terrorism scholars and reflected in public discourse, that terrorism, no matter its official designation, is always inherently ‘religious’ or ‘religious-like’. Both this implication and the dominant narrative about the uniquely dangerous character of ‘religious terrorism’ – which I summarise as the Religious Terrorism Thesis – builds on colonial knowledge and assumptions about ‘religion’. Religion is also, as I argue, written into the category ‘terrorism’ and enables its negative discursive power and the colonial imagination of ‘terrorism’ as racialised and a system-threat to (Western) modernity. Terrorism, therefore, can never constitute a neutral signifier of a specific kind of political violence. Instead, it functions as a negative ideograph to Western societies, which means it functions to uphold the project of Western modernity/coloniality. The Religious Terrorism Thesis, which I identify as the foundation for the dominant discourse on terrorism today, is a crucial element of coloniality and justifies many controversial and contemporary counterterrorism practices.

Has Visual International Relations (IR) become too distant from the content of visual artefacts? This is a paradoxical question. Visual IR is a vibrant and pluralist field exploring visuals in innumerable ways. Nonetheless, the field tends to focus on ‘deep’ readings of the socio-political implications of visual artefacts at the expense of a close and attentive observation and description of the events, situations, or phenomena they may depict. Simply put, visual IR usually analyses visuals-as-visuals rather than seeing them as entry points for studying the social world. But might a video of torture teach us something about the practicality of torture? Might a video of peace negotiations teach us something about their successes or failures? Can we gain a fleeting glimpse of ‘reality’ within visuals? We address these questions by first situating our focus on close ‘visual (data) observation’ in conceptual conversation with the literature’s existing focus on deep interpretation. Second, we outline three approaches to visual observation as they are deployed outside IR. Third, we unpack how those approaches might be of value for IR, especially vis-à-vis the study of practice, materiality, and discourse. Finally, we conclude by asking if visual data observation can retain critical political potentiality.

The following article seeks to question the deterministic tinge behind entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, uninhibited, and totalising projection of the world as a relational wholeness. Alongside the rise of Anthropocene debates and the claimed incapacity of post-positivism to account for contemporary socio-natural transformations, the text embarks on two main goals. On the one hand, the article sketches a brief genealogy of processual and relational thinking, with a focus on International Relations (IR) literature. On the other hand, the text seeks to move forward critical engagements with the entangled grand narrative. To this end, the article exposes a problematic ontological assumption often overlooked by both entanglement fetishists and their critics: entanglements are infallibly generative, that is to say, they deterministically precipitate further beings and events. In doing so, the text invites IR scholarship to explore non-generative encounters and hence to address the question of the possibility of being without being in relation. Drawing from an unorthodox line of research, the article unearths non-relational, or beyond-the-relational, instances, whose engagement with an entangled world can only be materialised through the logics of subjugation. For this mode of being, the texts hints, non-engagement, refusal, and withdrawal become a form of political resistance and survival, thus distorting the controversial association between political subjectivity and emancipation.

This article argues that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) would not have been possible without protecting the inalienable rights of states to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. While some Western states and NGOs have pushed to ban all applications of nuclear technology, this was unacceptable to a large number of disarmament-supporting states from the Global South and the Non-Aligned Movement. Without support from states across the Global South, the TPNW would not have achieved the required number of signatories to be adopted. Thus, we argue that to properly understand the TPNW, an appreciation of states’ interests and motivations beyond their more widely discussed frustrations with the pace of nuclear disarmament is essential. We also argue that nuclear weapons scholarship must pay more attention to perspectives from the Global South and the concept of Nutopia – a belief in both the dystopian potential of nuclear weapons and the utopian possibilities of nuclear energy – in its understanding of nuclear politics, past and present. Global South perspectives are often overlooked, and as such, current regimes of nuclear arms control and disarmament remain only partially understood in Western literature.

‘Visual turn’ scholarship in International Relations (IR) acknowledges the importance of new information and communication technology for the production and circulation of images but lacks sustained engagement with the technologies themselves and how they interact with humans in the visual production of security. This article brings the visual turn into conversation with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and mobilises Latour and Woolgar’s notion of inscription to show how the production of visual artefacts and their security effects are conditioned by human/device interaction. It advances the argument that the representational force of a visual artefact is dependent not only on the content and quality of the artefact itself, but also on the specific human/device relations that condition its production. To illustrate this, the article theorises the smartphone as an inscription device and the selfie as an inscription practice and analyses the case of Zelensky’s selfie videos from the first few days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Selfies inscribe meaning to security issues by mobilising the photographic affordances of indexicality, composition, and reflection in unique ways. Specifically, they focus images on the communicative acts of their producers and play on the relationship between human and device to invoke feelings of immediacy, authenticity, and intimacy.

Latin America has long been subjected to colonial development that has negated Indigenous territory. In the present conjuncture, the region is home to the largest volume of environmental conflicts in the world. These conflicts are intrinsically connected to the wider model of neo-extractivist development that has been embraced throughout the continent since the early 2000s. Indigenous communities have frequently been the victims of this model of extractive development, with their territories becoming the primary sites for the aggressive expansion of the resource frontier. This has generated new political conflicts, as Indigenous communities conversely assert claims to territory and resources. In this article, I link these conflicts to what I term the ‘coloniality of space’, whereby Indigenous territorial forms have been theoretically elided from traditional spatial imaginaries within International Relations and concretely negated through practices within the global political economy. Moving beyond the territorial trap of nation-state centrism, Indigenous forms of resistance raise important questions about the subject and actors of International Relations.

After important critiques highlighted that studies of peacebuilding and statebuilding tend to bypass people living the consequences of intervention, scholars moved to include local experiences and subjects into knowledge production. This article builds upon these efforts by identifying and then furthering their common goal of coeval engagement. Coeval engagement implies encountering interlocutors as contemporaneous subjects of international politics and centring their experiences as a base for knowledge production. While the urgency and ongoing failures of coeval engagement are widely discussed, I focus on a thus far unconsidered possibility: that coeval engagement is impossible within the conceptual confines of intervention itself. The article delineates two defining parameters of intervention thinking that limit ongoing efforts at coeval engagement: predefined fields of visibility and the local-international binary. As an alternative, it proposes seeing intervention as part of a wider politics of improvement. This conceptual shift leads to unexpected empirical sites and continues challenging intervention’s constitutive binaries. The potential of this reorientation is demonstrated by showing how a common tool of ‘soft’ statebuliding – non-formal youth education – functions within the politics of youth (un)employment in Serbia.