Victims have become a topic of scholarly debate in conflict studies, especially regarding the impact of their activism on the evolution and termination of violence. Victims of terrorism are now enlisted within counter-terrorism, given their moral authority as spokespeople for counter-narratives and de-escalation. Our research explores how Spanish terrorism victims’ associations have evolved across eras of political violence and how they mediate the translation of international War on Terror discourses into Spanish counter-terrorism. We offer a topography of how the War on Terror has opened a ‘social front’ in Spanish counter-terrorism, with Spanish political elites prominently employing the victims’ associations to this end. Contemporary terrorism discourses are read back onto the memory of ETA, with victims’ associations assisting the equation of ETA with al-Qaeda and ISIS. Collective memory of the defeat of ETA has also contributed the veneer of ‘lessons learned’ to contemporary counter-terrorism measures. Our research explores the fluidity of terrorism-memory and the importation of global terrorism discourses into Spanish politics, relying upon interviews with key stakeholders in victims’ associations, local politics, and the research director of the new Victims of Terrorism Memorial Centre in Vitoria.

This article revisits and revives the concept of ‘the Stranger’ in theorising international relations by discussing how this figure appears and what role it plays in the politics of (collective) identity. It shows that this concept is central to poststructuralist logic discussing the political production of discourses of danger and to scholarship on ontological security but remains subdued in their analytical narratives. Making the concept of the Stranger explicit is important, we argue, because it directs attention to ambivalence as a source of anxiety and grasps the unsettling experiences that political strategies of conquest or conversion, including practices of securitisation, respond to. Against this backdrop, the article provides a nuanced reading of the Stanger as a form of otherness that captures ambiguity as a threat to modern conceptions of identity, and outlines three scenarios of how it may be encountered in interstate relations: the phenomenon of ‘rising powers’ from the perspective of the hegemon, the dissolution of enmity (overcoming an antagonistic relationship), and the dissolution of friendship (close allies drifting apart). Aware that recovering the concept is not simply an academic exercise but may feed into how the term is used in political discourse and how practitioners deal with ‘strange encounters’, we conclude by pointing to alternative readings of the Stranger/strangeness and the value of doing so.

Strategic narratives are increasingly considered important for domestic and international support for foreign policy. However, debate continues about why some strategic narratives successfully shape policy outcomes, while others are rejected. How states construct strategic narratives is well established. We know less about how states appropriate the strategic narratives of others, and the role this plays in policy adoption. Addressing this, we introduce a theoretical framework to trace the relationship between strategic narratives and policy adoption. Its central premise is that a state is more likely to adopt a new policy if it can strategically narrate about it in a way that promises material gain but without undermining its ontological security. We test our framework using states’ responses to China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Examining the Second Belt and Road Forum in 2019, we trace how far China's strategic narratives are appropriated by multiple states – Kazakhstan, Italy, United Kingdom, Netherlands, United States, India, and Mexico. Countries appropriate China's narrative emphasis on connectivity, trade, and prosperity. However, they contest that China's intentions are benign, based on its human rights record, assertive foreign policy, and fears of indebtedness. Finally, we discuss our framework's utility in explaining what makes strategic narratives persuasive in International Relations.

Observers of international courts (ICs) note that several ICs carry out a broad range of non-judicial activities, ranging from legal training workshops and public seminars to visits with public officials. Despite the growing prominence of these activities, they have received little attention from scholars. Seeking to fill this gap, this article examines these activities as a form of ‘judicial diplomacy’, asking how and why ICs employ judicial diplomacy. The article argues that ICs use judicial diplomacy as a means of legitimation. They seek to boost institutional legitimacy through their judicial diplomacy by targeting the public and communicating norm-referential narratives about their processes and outcomes. This argument bears out in case studies on the judicial diplomacy of the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Caribbean Court of Justice. Both courts are shown to have judicial diplomacy that is public-oriented and people-centred. This argument has important implications for literature on international courts and the legitimacy of international institutions.

The Brandt Line is a way of visualising the world that highlights the disparities and inequalities between the wealthy North and the poorer Global South. Forty years after its popularisation as part of a call for global reform, is the Brandt Line now a misleading way of representing world politics? This article assesses whether the Global South has lost its distinctiveness and coherence relative to the North since 1980. Existing assessments of global inequality do not settle the question of whether the North–South divide remains relevant for international relations because they overlook the most politically significant measures of inequality. Drawing on power transition theory, this article provides a systematic assessment of the North–South divide in terms of levels of economic development, relative inequality, economic power, and political satisfaction. The evidence suggests that the Brandt Line is largely intact. Although the economic diversity of the South has increased and its collective economic power has risen, relative income rankings remain unaltered and the states of the Global South are as dissatisfied as they were four decades ago. Differential growth rates are reshaping world politics without eroding the North–South divide traced by the Brandt Line.

While the gravity of the injustice and inequality experienced by Palestinians is now widely documented, evidenced, and acknowledged, when it comes to action the situation appears ‘impervious’ to international law and norms of global politics, with Israel largely enjoying impunity. This article argues that this state of affairs can be most coherently understood through a critical interdisciplinary emancipatory framework centred on ‘liminality’. Referring to situations and actors ‘betwixt and between’, the framework of liminality offers significant potential for understanding how particular actors and spaces are intentionally marginalised, disempowered, and silenced within global politics and international law. Furthermore, in revealing the root causes of liminality, and the inherent vulnerability of such spaces to contestation and subversion, the framework also opens up potential pathways of transformative emancipation. Applying the lens of liminality to Palestine, it is demonstrated that Palestinians have been deliberately corralled to a liminal space within international law and global politics in order to enable an expansionist Zionist/Israeli settler colonial enterprise. After exploring how Palestinian liminality manifests in global politics and international law, the article turns to a range of efforts to subvert Palestinian liminality and assesses prospects for a teleological emancipation for Palestinians.

As a result of the spread of International Parliamentary Institutions (IPIs), international organisations face crucial questions of representational design. We introduce a distinction between citizen-centred and state-centred IPIs in international organisations (IO). Drawing on original data, we show that, even though parliaments might seem likely to foster citizen representation in the international realm, they in fact often follow state-centred representational designs. We further find that citizen-centred IPIs are a near exclusive phenomenon of a few, democratic regional integration projects. Given the prevalence of state-centred representational designs, we conclude that IPIs’ potential to represent different cross-border communities, concerns, and conflict lines than intergovernmental IO bodies remains institutionally limited. IPIs are thus unlikely to challenge these bodies in similar ways as often observed in the relationship between the European Parliament and the European Union's Council of Ministers.