Cristina Masters (CM): The articles in this forum speak to how influential and inspiring your work is for scholars in the discipline of International Relations (IR), not least feminist scholars. Particularly, I think, for encouraging us to (re)think and (re)work with deeply familiar ‘things’ in deeply unusual – yet troublingly fecund – ways. Blood, for example, comes up quite frequently in your writing on methodology, even though it appears, as you say, an ‘unlikely candidate for methodological use’. What is so promising about blood for making sense of global politics?

For a long time the intractable nature of the Jerusalem problem ensured that it was persistently swept under the rug in Middle East peace negotiations. Indeed, the widespread belief has been that the dispute over the city’s future political status cannot be settled until most other issues in the Israeli–Arab conflict have been resolved. Under the terms of the Oslo Declaration of Principles signed in September 1993, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed to settle the thorny issue of Jerusalem in the final stage of permanent status negotiations.The Oslo Declaration of Principles, based on the secret Israel–PLO talks in Norway, established a staged approach and a timetable for reaching a permanent settlement. First, the interim negotiations would result in Israeli military withdrawal from Jericho and the Gaza Strip, the transfer of power to a nominated Palestinian National Authority, and the beginning of a five-year transitional period of Palestinian self-government under this Authority. Secondly, the Palestinians would elect a Council and achieve early ‘empowerment’ (self-government) in five spheres in the rest of the West Bank. Thirdly, the permanent status negotiations — to cover Jerusalem, Jewish settlements, refugees, security arrangements and borders, among other issues — would commence by the start of the third year of the interim period, and the resulting final settlement would take effect at the end of the interim phase. The negotiations leading to the signing of the Gaza-Jericho Agreement in May 1994 achieved the first objective. The signing of the Israel-Palestinian Interim Agreement (also termed Oslo II and the Taba Agreement) in September 1995 set the stage for a partial implementation of the second goal: Palestinians gained full control over six main West Bank towns and administrative responsibility for almost the entire Palestinian West Bank population. A Palestinian Council was elected in January 1996.

This article considers a neglected question in International Relations, namely how violence of war contributes to the constitution of the political community at the intersection between war and peace. It exposes limitations of means-ends, instrumental understanding of war violence due to the overlooking of violence’s performative attributes stemming from the centrality of bodily injuries in war. The instrumental violence on which the constitution of the political community is grounded finds expression in an order of representation that can be termed ontopology, and a pervasive – circular – relationship between ontopology and violence insofar as ontopology has inspired extreme forms of human behaviour and also been used to justify violence as a means to enact an ontopological goal. Yet, recognising the role of bodily injuries in the course of fighting allows for a more complete understanding of war. Crucially it enables an interpretation of the structure of war as a relation between war’s interior content – casualties in war – and the exterior, verbal issues standing outside it (pertaining to security, identity, sovereignty, authority, ideology), that lead to a surrogate contest of reimagining political community in the process of which performative power of violence contributes directly to the emerging post-war peace and laws that justify it.

How do scenarios of dangerous futures imagined in the framework of the post-9/11 counterterrorism shape security institutions? Critical Security Studies (CSS)'s dominant answer is that state apparatus are significantly transformed by the use of new technologies of prediction that are very prolific in imagining potential risks. The present article questions this technologically determinist thesis. Introducing the notion of weak field in the study of pre-emption, it argues that the political sociology of transnational fields of power can help us in historicise and assess more precisely the impact of imagination over power and control in the pre-emptive era. The article analyses NATO's reaction to 9/11 as a case study. It shows how the fabrication of potential terrorist threats by NATO's practitioners, that served to justify the pre-emptive use of the collective self-defence clause of the Washington Treaty (Article 5), evolved into an ambiguous support for NATO's military policing of the Mediterranean basin and into its involvement in migration control.

The necessity for the United Nations Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) arose from a crisis in relations between the island's Greek and Turkish communities precipitated by an attempt on the part of President Makarios in November 1963 to adjust the 1960 Constitution in such a way as to lessen the influence of the Turkish minority within the state's institutions. An early unsuccessful attempt at mediation by Britain in the first weeks of 1964 (which aimed at a solution within the context of Nato) gave way to Security Council consideration at a series of meetings in February and March which resulted in a motion to dispatch a peacekeeping force.

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.