The 1979 Islamic Revolution was a tectonic change that influenced the geopolitics of the Middle East to this day. This article highlights the necessity of re-examining the events of 1979 from a securitisation perspective. Through an investigation of Ayatollah Khomeini's pivotal role, I challenge the methodological nationalism often found in the study of Israel–Iran relations. Despite his unconventional position in security matters, Khomeini played a crucial role in the securitisation of the 1979 revolution. Drawing on Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives, secondary sources, elite interviews, and Khomeini's theological speeches, this article re-examines the intricate stages of securitisation and counter-securitisation spanning 16 years. Khomeini effectively mobilized the political audience (Iranian people) to support the revolution, aiming to overthrow the Shah and remove Israel’s presence from Iran. I argue that a non-linear securitisation process was employed, characterised by Khomeini's ability to establish informal authority among the opposition. This process ultimately led to him gaining legitimacy from the Iranian people and culminated in the successful securitisation act of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Studies of masculinity and armed conflict have struggled to capture the complex interaction between globalized militarized masculinities and local gender formations. Particularly in conflicts characterized by a high degree of combatant mobility (in the form of foreign fighters, massed displacement, or significant diaspora involvement) locating the relevant gender dynamics can prove to be a difficult step in understanding the character of armed groups. Based on fieldwork with Indonesian former foreign fighters, we make the case that feminist international relations have tended to unreflectively default to the nation when locating gender hierarchies. Exploring the multiple articulations of masculinity present in former fighters’ lives, we suggest that efforts must be made to resist methodological nationalism in understanding the relationship between gender hierarchies and armed conflict. Charting how foreign fighters traverse local constructions of gender, national gender hierarchies, and transnational social structures to participate in the conflict, we argue that adopting a conscious consideration of scale in our research method is needed to move beyond methodological nationalism.

This article examines the historical sociology that informs Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems. On the sociological side, it critically assesses Linklater’s use of Elias and Wight, arguing that his ‘higher level synthesis’ is internally incompatible. On the historical side, the article argues that the occlusion of the transnational interactions that, in great measure, drive historical development means that Linklater’s analysis is inadequate for its stated purpose: to chart the development of civilising processes within the Western state-systems.

The return journey has long been recognized as a central feature of diaspora, yet contemporary diaspora studies have conventionally understood it in stubbornly mythological terms. This paper looks to foster discussion about physical diasporic return journeys by juxtaposing M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003) and Neil Bissoondath’s The Worlds Within Her (1998). Although the two novels overlap in their exploration of the Indian diaspora against the backdrop of racially volatile independence movements in former British colonies, they offer starkly different renderings of diasporic return that are reflected in their engagements with diasporic history. The paper closes with a consideration of the critical assumptions that have allowed the return journey to be overlooked in diaspora literary studies to date, suggesting that its absence may reflect the methodological nationalism of the field.

Open nearly any general text on Southeast Asia and you will find that some space is taken up in the introduction assessing the reality and validity of the regional framework on which that text rests. Likewise, with the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), many scholars question whether or not the regional entity amounts to anything of any substance. In this article, I mount a defence of Southeast Asia as a regional framework in scholarship and draw attention to ASEAN as an evolving regional entity. While the concept of Southeast Asia among researchers and the politics of ASEAN are distinct issues, I treat them together in this article to highlight their interrelationship and parallels. My primary objective is to outline the displaced politics – of both academic and realpolitik varieties – embedded in deconstructive and dismissive critiques of both Southeast Asia and ASEAN. Critiques of both are not without value, as they sharpen our attention to processes through which supra-national regionalism is produced. Nevertheless, I argue that regionalism remains a valuable method in both politics and scholarship, in no small part as a counterweight to the hegemony of methodological nationalism in contemporary thought and research.