By paying attention to love, this article offers a grammatical reading of International Relations’ founding grammar of inside/outside as an ethics of encounter. The decision to focus on love is, I suggest, to contend with the possibility that IR may express a lethal politics and ethics. I seek to substantiate this claim through an unsettling reading of neo-Jamesian contributions to the emotional turn. I conclude that the discipline’s founding grammar is an ‘avoidance of love’ and offer a reminder that an alternative way of loving is possible.

It goes without saying that feminist International Political Economy (IPE) is concerned in one way or another with the everyday – conceptualised as both a site of political struggle and a site within which social relations are (re)produced and governed. Given the longstanding grounding of feminist research in everyday gendered experiences, many would ask: Why do we need an explicit feminist theorisation of the everyday? After all, notions of everyday life and everyday political struggle infuse feminist analysis. This article seeks to interrogate the concept of the everyday – questioning prevalent understandings of the everyday and asking whether there is analytical and conceptual utility to be gained in articulating a specifically feminist understanding of it. We argue that a feminist political economy of the everyday can be developed in ways that push theorisations of social reproduction in new directions. We suggest that one way to do this is through the recognition that social reproduction is the everyday alongside a three-part theorisation of space, time, and violence (STV). It is an approach that we feel can play an important role in keeping IPE honest – that is, one that recognises how important gendered structures of everyday power and agency are to the conduct of everyday life within global capitalism.

This article revisits the Hobbesian account of the state of nature and the formation of states, attending to Hobbes’s account of the family. Drawing on feminist readings, we find in the Leviathan an account of the family as a natural political community. We contend specifically that a focus on conceptions of family life in the Leviathan, and in works by Hobbes’s early modern peers, points to the role of the family as a site of socialisation in the prelude to early state formation and in the formation of political hierarchies more generally – including, we suggest, the formation of international hierarchies. These accounts have thus far been missing from International Relations theory. Contra conventional IR theoretic readings of the Leviathan, the Hobbesian state of nature contains the seeds of both anarchy and hierarchy, as overlapping social configurations. While anarchy emerges clearly in the famous condition of ‘war of all against all’, hierarchy also exists in Hobbes’s depiction of family life as a naturally occurring proto-state setting. On the basis of this contemporary feminist analysis of a classic text, we consider implications for the emerging ‘new hierarchy studies’ in IR.

In contemporary Western, liberal democratic societies, the soldier is frequently regarded as ‘the best of us’, taking on the unlimited liability for the protection and betterment of the whole. In the context of volunteer militaries and distant conflicts, the construction of men (and the universalised masculine citizen) as ‘always-already’ soldiers (or potential soldiers) poses a substantial obstacle to the identification or performance of ‘good’ civilian masculinity – particularly during wartime. The theorisation and articulation of a positive, substantive civilian masculinity, or masculinities, rather than one defined simply by an absence of military service and implication in the collective use of violence, is a central challenge of contemporary politics. As a means of illuminating the complex dynamics of this challenge, this article examines charitable practices of civilian support for the military, and corresponding constructions of masculinity, in the UK during the ‘war on terror’. In doing so, the article demonstrates the ways in which gendered ‘civilian anxiety’, through its connection to citizenship, comes to condition the political possibilities and subjectivities of all those who seek belonging in the liberal political community. The article concludes by arguing for the essentiality of a research programme oriented around ‘civilianness’, and civilian masculinity/ies.

In this article, we focus on the subset of evolutionary theorising self-identified as Feminist Evolutionary Analytic (FEA) within security studies and International Relations. We offer this accounting in four sections. First, we provide a brief overview of the argument that reproductive interests are the ‘origins’ of international violence. Second, we break down the definitions of gender, sex, and sexuality used in evolutionary work in security studies generally and in FEA specifically, demonstrating a lack of complexity in FEA’s accounts of the potential relations among the three and critiquing their essentialist heteronormative assumptions. Third, we argue that FEA’s failure to reflect on the history and context of evolutionary theorising, much less contemporary feminist critiques, facilitates its forwarding of the state and institutions as primarily neutral and corrective bulwarks against male violence. Fourth, we conclude by outlining what is at stake if we fail to correct for this direction in feminist, IR, and security research. We argue that FEA work misrepresents and narrows the potential for understanding and responding to violence, facilitating the continued instrumentalisation of women’s rights, increased government regulation of sexuality, and a more expansive form of militarism.

This article presents drag performance as a queer method of critique in the field of IR, which contributes to a longstanding move in IR to engage with aesthetics, and a more recent move to engage with performance art. The article discusses the author’s making of a performance piece that revisited the EU’s response to Hamas’s success in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Soft, camp, feminine, and childlike voices; a female body in men’s clothing; and the translocation of bodies in spaces are used in the performance piece to disrupt the coherency of normalised diplomacy. Queer IR theory emphasises the imperative to dismantle logics of normality that prevent creativity in response to political issues. Performative drag practices disrupt anxious attachments to a ritualised discourse of strategic interests that shapes political initiatives. This article comments on other drag moments in politics, such as the anxiety around Jeremy Corbyn’s dress, Barack Obama’s anger translator, and Janelle Monáe’s androgynous articulation of community. The form that research dissemination takes implicates the kind of knowledge that is produced. This article reviews three methodological provocations of drag, an alternative departure point of the ‘what if’, performing a politics of refusal, and a Brechtian technique of estrangement.

This article develops the concept of ‘frontline diplomacy’ – what practitioners referring to work in embassies, consulates, and permanent representation as ‘the field’ –, defined here as all diplomats’ activities taking place away from headquarters. IR scholarship tends to focus on Ministries of Foreign Affairs located in capitals. On the contrary, building on the practice turn in IR, we first show that international politics emerge from frontline practices. Adding to criticism against the practice turn, we then explain that it has missed important transformations occurring in frontline diplomacy because it tends to privilege stability over change. We finally discuss two innovations in frontline practices: the action of Sherpas in G20 summits following the 2008 crisis and the use of Twitter by US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul (2012–14). For each we answer three questions: How do these activities transform traditional modes of operation? How are non-state actors involved in them? What do they tell about transformation of global politics? Because diplomatic practices at the frontlines epitomise international politics, these new directions for inquiry contribute substantively to IR scholarship. At the theoretical level, they enrich the continuing encounter between IR and diplomatic studies through practice theory and help to understand change in practice.

This article argues that the case of the Egyptian 2011 revolution forces us to rethink accounts of counter-revolution in International Relations. The debate over whether the events of 2011–13 in Egypt should be considered a ‘revolution’ or merely a ‘revolt’ or ‘uprising’ reflects an understanding of revolutions as closed and discrete events, and therefore of international counter-revolution as significant only after revolutionary movements have seized sovereign power. Against this account, which maintains the idea of sovereignty as the boundary between domestic/social and international/ geopolitical phenomena, I argue that counter-revolutions can operate across boundaries during revolutionary situations before and to prevent revolutionary transformation and therefore affect whether a revolutionary sovereign power is established at all. Such counter-revolutions draw upon both the ideological inheritance of historical strategies of international ‘catch-up’, and the cross-border class relations that these different strategies bring into being. In the Egyptian case, the counter-revolution thus relied upon two factors deriving from this strategy: the ideological inheritance of Nasserism as a response to international hierarchy, and the integration of the post-Nasser Egyptian ruling elite with Gulf financial, and US security, networks.

The aim of this article is twofold: first, it seeks to address the question of why the competitive knowledge economy orientation that emerged in certain economically advanced states as a response to the crisis of Fordism came to be embraced by the Indian and the Brazilian states from the late 1980s onwards. Second, it aims to elucidate the manner in which the goal of becoming competitive knowledge economies has been articulated and implemented locally, especially from the mid-1990s onwards, by key fragments of the Indian and the Brazilian states. Drawing on insights from the competition state, regulation school, knowledge economy literature and that on India and Brazil, attention is paid to the context- and conjuncture-specific domestic and international factors that have contributed not only to the adoption of the competitive knowledge economy orientation, but also to the necessarily distinctive ways in which it found expression in practice in India and Brazil.