Abstract Taking stock of the recent growth in engagement between cities and global governance, this article questions whether such developments align with the historical and political tenets of municipalism. It asks: does the ‘rise of the city’ as a global political actor advance the municipalist project, despite the fact that it takes place in, and ostensibly follows the rules of, the state-led system? To evaluate this, it conceptualises municipalism as a multifaceted project encompassing institutional, normative, and technical dimensions, rooted in principles of decentralisation, local democracy, political participation, and transnational solidarity. The article then empirically analyses the growing engagement of cities in global governance, specifically in relation to the United Nations’ global agendas. It finds that while cities have gained visibility and influence, their institutional role so far remains largely consultative and informal, falling short of municipalist aspirations for formal recognition and decision-making power. Normatively, efforts to embed principles such as decentralisation and local democracy at the global level have faced significant resistance from states. In contrast, the technical dimension – manifested in city networks and policy-oriented cooperation – has expanded substantially, though often in depoliticised and technocratic forms. The article concludes that contemporary city activism reflects only a partial and uneven realisation of municipalism, with its political ambitions constrained but its technical practices flourishing within existing global governance structures.
Abstract This article critically examines the gendered and sexualized foundations of liberal interventionism through the case of Afghanistan, focusing on the underexplored Bacha Bazi practice that proliferated during the 2001–2021 US-led occupation. We address the contradiction between liberalism’s promise of gender justice and the violent gendered practices it sustains through militarized peacebuilding. While women’s rights are often invoked to legitimize intervention, this discourse obscures broader regimes of gendered violence, particularly against marginalized sexual and gender minorities. Drawing on feminist and queer theorizing, primary interviews with Afghan professionals and activists (2016), and secondary sources, we use critical discourse and frame analysis to interrogate how narratives of peace, security, and rescue justified intervention while reinforcing hegemonic masculinity and global hierarchies. Our findings reveal two central dynamics: first, liberal peacebuilding instrumentalized gendered suffering to advance geopolitical aims, especially through the trope of ‘saving women’ while ignoring or exploiting boys and queer populations; second, interventions aligned with – rather than dismantled – local patriarchal and militarized networks, entrenching gender-oppressive orders post-withdrawal. By situating Bacha Bazi within these transnational dynamics, we theorize liberal intervention as a violent gender regime and call for feminist and queer peacebuilding frameworks that centre marginalized voices.
How can we explain interactions between historical international orders? Despite growing interest in the role of marginal interactions in the evolution of international orders, scholars struggle to account for their contingency. Enduring commitments to substantialist approaches limit our ability to theorize the link between micro-level interactions in system encounters and macro-level international order, and vice versa. I argue that conflicts in system encounters can be explained as manifestations of a process through which international orders and their differences are constituted and negotiated. International orders and their differences exist in concrete instantiations only in the context of system encounters. Building on a practice-relational approach to international order, I propose that system encounters are characterized by a series of crises that challenge the taken-for-granted nature of established practices, prompting actors to articulate the relevant differences between them. I illustrate this process in the context of the Russian, Dutch, and British embassies to China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and show how the relevant differences between the East Asian and European international orders can be reconstructed from those interactions. This paper advances the study of historical international orders and has important implications for how we think about conflicts in system encounters.
How did health governance get internationalised, and with what effects? In the early nineteenth century, a range of transregional sanitary councils were responsible for mitigating the pandemic spread of diseases such as cholera. The International Sanitary Conferences, first convened in 1851, centralised this arrangement but also discriminated against non-European public health expertise. This article argues that this was a case neither of imperial power politics alone nor simply of functional problem-solving, but of the appropriation of pre-existing governance structures. The article singles out epistemic and institutional appropriation as crucial twin dynamics that shaped nineteenth-century health governance. Analysis of the 1866 and 1892 sanitary conferences shows how Europeans systematically disqualified non-European expertise: they constructed and prioritised cholera as an ‘Oriental’ threat to Europe, and repeatedly claimed the superiority of French and German over Ottoman, Persian, and Egyptian experts. Inversely, expert-based resistance to European policy proposals was nominally welcomed, but in practice sidelined whenever expert-based objections did not reproduce the dominant Eurocentric interpretation of public health. By showing how imperial and racial hierarchies actively obscured the transregional origins of health governance, the article innovates International Relations’ understanding of what internationalisation empirically looks like and contributes a novel account of appropriation as a key means by which hierarchical relations get built into international organisations.
The psychoanalytic literature in International Relations (IR) is flourishing, from Kleinian to Lacanian and Freudian approaches to the production of meaning in international politics. This literature has compellingly examined the affective resonance of certain discourses, the role of desire in structuring subjectivity, and actors' pursuit of various fantasies of ontological security. Yet while psychoanalytic theory developed from clinical practice and was conceived as a specific, rigorous methodology with which to access and analyse the unconscious, the IR literature has yet to engage with the potential of clinical psychoanalytic tools as a corresponding research method. Following scholarship in social work, public health, and criminology, I argue that psychoanalytic methods can be deployed beyond individual therapeutic ends and hold significant promise as a means for scholars of international studies to access the unconscious or partly conscious aspects of socially produced discourse and meaning. Concretely, using vignettes from my work on European peacebuilding staff in West Africa, I demonstrate the value of three concepts from psychoanalytic practice - transference, free association and evenly hovering attention - to interpretive interviewing. These concepts can be used fruitfully as tools to access unconscious aspects of meaning-making, to better understand how the unconscious surfaces and impacts how subjects navigate international politics.
