Abstract Disappearances are used by states, insurgents, militias, criminal groups, and transnational security services, yet international studies lack a shared framework for systematically comparing them across contexts. Despite their relevance to repression, civil conflict, criminal governance, and migration, they remain theoretically fragmented and empirically under-measured, examined across partially overlapping literatures employing distinct definitions and case-bound approaches. This article introduces the first global, systematically coded database of disappearances (1999–2023) and a purpose-based typology identifying nine strategic logics underpinning the practice, ranging from state repression and counterinsurgency to criminal extraction, trafficking, and identity-based targeting. The typology reveals shared rationales across political and criminal domains, while the dataset traces how disappearance practices diffuse, evolve, and adapt over time. By reconceptualizing disappearances as an adaptive form of coercion operating under conditions of heightened external scrutiny, the article contributes to international studies debates on repression, sovereignty, and the governance of violence.
Abstract World order projects frequently exhibit a structural contradiction of projecting inevitable success, yet simultaneously warn of existential fragility. While traditional theories of hegemonic order transition often dismiss such contradictions as incoherence, they fail to explain how great powers sustain mutually exclusive temporalities. This article advances the concept of ‘superposed present futures’ to theorize how great powers govern the radical uncertainty of international politics by maintaining conflicting temporalities simultaneously. Adopting a discursive superposition heuristic, we argue that the resilience of a world order project depends on managing an intra-actor paradox, as the project is discursively constructed as both historically inevitable and imminently threatened. The framework is operationalized through a qualitative analysis of China’s ‘Global Community of Shared Future’ (GCSF) discourse from 2013 to 2025 as a case study. By bridging quantum social theory with historiographical typologies of future generation, it is demonstrated how Beijing stabilizes the GCSF by superposing a future of inevitability to enhance international coordination, alongside a future of fragility to enforce political discipline in the face of complacency. The article contributes to the temporal turn in International Relations (IR) by reframing world order projects from linear projections to complex temporal regimes of expectation management that sustain power through productive tension.
Abstract Since World War II, energy producers have deliberately triggered two major international energy crises. The first was the energy crisis of the 1970s that was linked to economic and political turbulence in the Middle East. The second was the energy crisis in the 2020s that was generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Understanding the underlying sources of these exceptional producer-led forms of energy coercion is the focus of the article. This involves asking why, in both these crises, energy producers took actions that involved a high risk that they would damage long-term economic interests and undermine the trust of the customers that they had cultivated for a long time. We argue that a key causal factor in these two cases of energy coercion is the role of emotions and, specifically, that of resentment. The legacies of colonialism also provide a key context for both these energy crises, though in different ways. The article is original in highlighting the role of resentment in International Relations theory and in energy studies and in comparing the energy crises of the 1970s and those of the 2020s.
Abstract This paper develops ontological security theorizing beyond its Eurocentric focus by probing the Filipino pantayong pananaw (from-us-for-us perspective) movement as a potentially decolonial intellectual and political framework. Drawing on Lacanian theorization of ontological security, I argue that pantayong pananaw can be thought of as a master fantasy that guides the desire for and quest by a formerly colonized group to become coherent, complete, and indivisible Filipinos . Amidst the inescapable ontological lack and anxiety deeply entwined with their colonial experience, the pantayong pananaw fantasy operates as a protective mechanism that promises a resolution to an original deadlock: the absence of Filipinoness . Owing to its inherently Self-versus-Other orientation, however, the pantayong pananaw fantasy inevitably imposes a closure based on a singular version of social reality aligned with an idealized vision of the Filipino identity, homeland, and nation-state. The result is neocolonial decoloniality , that is, a condition where the pursuit of intellectual and political decoloniality paradoxically creates and entrenches existing (neo)colonial structures and arrangements that perpetually marginalize certain groups within a postcolonial society. Such a dilemma has significant implications for the ethos and practice of decoloniality both as an intellectual and a political project.
Abstract Decolonialism generates a different kind of expertise. Against disembodied, technocratic, and purportedly neutral notions of objectivity as producing expertise, decolonial theory, practice, and politics instead situates expertise as a matter of contextual embeddedness, autonomous agency outside Eurocentric systems of thought, and a futurist imaginary that promises radical global change. Increasingly – moreover – this idea of decolonial expertise is being promoted at the heart of global governance institutions, and particularly humanitarian organizations. In this article, I explore how this has occurred, and its political tensions, in three main ways. First, I tease out how this decolonial challenge to expertise is an aesthetic one – grounded in critiques of how traditional and power-inflected notions of objectivity are themselves aesthetically produced. Second, and drawing on the analysis of the rise of decolonial discourse in humanitarianism, I unpack how decolonialism has mobilized a counter-aesthetic that challenges the appropriateness of that purportedly neutral aesthetic. Finally, I explore the implications of this aesthetic generation of (decolonial) expertise for decolonial politics more broadly, suggesting that – pace critics of ‘metaphorical’ forms of decolonialism – the aesthetic generation of expertise has the potential to radically advance decolonial objectives in concrete, material, and tangible ways.
Abstract Critical studies of world politics urge greater engagement with the dynamics of constituting populations as ‘disposable’. Cautioning against an exclusive focus on contemporary neoliberalism, this article calls attention to the dynamics of colonial disposability, and the transmissibility of its ongoing harms, as they become disclosed through the flesh. Drawing on Hortense Spillers’ distinction between body and flesh, it proposes the flesh as a conceptual device, offering a theoretical account of the flesh’s ‘critical literacies’ in the context of Atlantic slavery and its afterlives. The article reads the movements between the word (discourse, signification) and world (materiality, structure), between body and flesh, in order to desediment both the dynamics of disposability and the flesh’s potentiality for refusal and wayward worldmaking. Through these fleshly literacies, the article examines, first, the production of a complex fungibility imposed on enslaved Africans; second, the de/valuation of Africans (legitimated) through racialisation; and third, the flesh’s illegibility to, and refusal of, the colonial modern order, through its non-normative forms of living and sociality. The discussion enhances our understanding of the inseparability of modernity from violent processes of disposability, and of the transmissibility of the racial significations, ethical exclusions, and affective harms that continue to buttress disposability today.
Abstract This article argues that to be morally acceptable, in addition to adhering to existing legal and ethical frameworks, war should hurt the individuals who conduct it. The article uses the example of drone warfare considering why/how this type of conflict is considered (un)ethical. Finding existing frameworks insufficient, the article suggests the addition of a feminist ethics of care. This framework provides the necessary nuance to both better empirically describe the context of ethical decision-making within war and a language, beyond that of trauma, through which to understand how and why killing is and should be hard to do. A feminist ethics of care enables a stronger engagement with the messiness and complexity of making moral judgements about harm, action/inaction, and death in warfare. From this, the article argues for a specific form of ‘hurt’ as the necessary result of ethical lethal action in drone warfare, drawing on notions of relationality, particularity, and response-ability. Differentiating from post-traumatic stress disorder and moral injury, the article argues that ‘hurt’ better represents the professional gravitas with which we want service personnel to operate.
Abstract The reproduction of the global agri-food system is, at a systemic level, conditional on the exploitation of migrant labour, raising the question of how exploitation became the default mechanism through which states regulate the sector. This paper disentangles the contingency between exploitation and border technologies through a critical policy analysis of the UK Seasonal Visa Scheme. The paper examines the governmentality of the border by identifying four colonial technologies that enable and sustain this exploitation: containment, malleable membership, liberal subjectivity, and a security paradox that legitimises nominal rights. I argue that whilst borders are reconfigured to facilitate capital accumulation, the origins of the visa regime are rooted in colonial statecraft designed to control and discipline subjects. Recentring the productive power of exploitative border regimes as artefacts of colonial governance, I show how the racial capitalist system of migrant exploitation is contingent on colonial statecraft, and that it is the state imperative to maintain the social racial order that motivates their reproduction. Whilst racial capitalism explains why migrant workers are exploited, it is state-constructed border regimes – and the technologies of racialised extraction – that explains how .
Abstract This article aims to improve our understanding of the intellectual foundations and lineages of the Trumpian revolution in US foreign policy, focusing on the contribution of paleoconservatism. The first section examines the writings of paleoconservative thinkers and politicians who, after the end of the Cold War, articulated a distinctly populist form of political realism as part of their ‘America First’ nationalist agenda. These ideas prefigured and laid much of the ideological groundwork for the foreign policy vision later pursued by the Trump administration and its political entourage, including a bold reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine and threats to annex Greenland and absorb Canada into the United States. The analysis then turns to paleoconservative interventions in conservative debates over Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis in the 1990s and early 2000s. Although largely overlooked at the time, these critiques provide important insights into the civilizationalism shaping the worldview of the Trump administration and its supporting right-wing coalition. The ‘Clashes of civilizations: old and new’ and ‘Trumpism and the paleoconservative moment in US foreign policy’ sections argues that these paleo-Trumpian continuities have produced a volatile mode of cultural geopolitics that elides the conventional distinction between isolationism and internationalism, and which is unlikely to reverse the erosion of America’s global power.
Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) play a crucial role in promoting compliance with international norms through fact-finding and on-site monitoring missions. Many of these missions take place in authoritarian regimes, which often employ various tactics to control and suppress critics both domestically and internationally. Yet, in some cases, authoritarian states permit IGO missions to operate with little or no interference and may even establish collaborative relationships in politically sensitive issue areas. This study examines this puzzle by asking why and when IGO on-site monitoring missions can persist and foster collaboration in authoritarian contexts, a dynamic I label a pragmatic partnership. Theoretically, I argue that two key conditions must be met for such partnerships to emerge: international pressure and the development of interpersonal trust. However, I also contend that these partnerships can generate contestation, risk legitimizing autocratic practices, and marginalize pro-democratic forces. Empirically, I illustrate my argument through an in-depth analysis of the International Labour Organization (ILO)'s monitoring mission on child labour and forced labour in Uzbekistan. Methodologically, I employ process tracing covering the period 2005-2022 and draw on multiple sources of evidence. While such partnerships can contribute to incremental compliance with international norms, I also show that they generate contestation, risk legitimizing autocratic practices, and may marginalize pro-democratic forces.
In the realm of global governance, the unique status and authority of expertise have traditionally been associated with its claims to rely on science and its often-associated qualities of 'neutrality', 'impartiality', and 'objectivity'. Policymakers and technocratic experts have widely resorted to these attributes to render their knowledge credible and authoritative. While such claims to scientificity remain significant, we contend that contemporary global governance increasingly relies on alternative practices to confer knowledge its expert status. Global sites of governance are nowadays engaging in a broader set of practices of knowledge production and packaging, which include participatory experiments, aesthetic performances, calls to the imagination, and repertoires of benevolence. Such practices of knowledge pluralization have largely been seen as positive and unproblematic moves. Without contesting the need to pluralize expertise, we argue that such practices are not inherently democratizing, but part of an evolving technocratic repertoire of governing. Our introduction is structured around four sections: 1) a justification for the issue and contribution to the literature on expertise in International Relations; 2) the conditions of possibility or 'context' of the pluralization of expertise; 3) a discussion of novel practices of knowledge authorization and of their politics; and 4) an outline of our main contributions.
Inaugurated in 1948 with initially 23 signatories, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) constituted a vital part of the post-war economic architecture. While traditionally the founding of the GATT has been strongly identified with the role of US hegemonic power and free trade enthusiasm, this article reframes the GATT's origins by highlighting how (anti-)imperial dynamics shaped negotiations over its basic elements, including participation, membership, and permissible exceptions to most-favoured nation principles. Drawing on sources from the GATT archives and government documents from the United Kingdom and the United States, it highlights how empires sought to preserve key elements of imperial economic relations, including by incorporating imperial authority structures, preserving colonial preference systems, and creating other exceptions to trade liberalization. It also shows how developing countries leveraged the trade negotiations to loosen the grip of empires, expand participation, and promote regional and developmental cooperation. Consequently, the final GATT outcome represents a hybrid and transitionary organization, with the organization preserving key elements of imperial economic relations even as it incorporated some demands for the equality of states and economic justice.
Abstract This article develops a theoretical framework of hybridization to reconceptualize norm diffusion in International Relations. Rather than treating norm diffusion as convergence towards a global standard and deviation as failure or resistance, it theorizes norm uptake as a process of normative recombination, theorizing hybridization as a structured, scope-condition-bound mode of norm evolution. The framework advances a typology of hybrid outcomes, ranging from dominant foreign influence to balanced hybridization to dominant local influence, and identifies key scope conditions explaining their variation, including economic dependency, institutional capacity, geopolitical hedging, and sector-specific dynamics. Empirically, the article applies this framework to a comparative analysis of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, examining how these states engage China’s Digital Silk Road and mediate its embedded political–technological norms. The findings reveal that despite China’s significant infrastructural and economic presence, its normative influence remains so far limited. In particular, cybersecurity governance converges around Western-derived standards with minimal local adaptation, while ethical artificial intelligence governance reflects balanced hybridization shaped by domestic values and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-mediated multilateralism. Hybrid norms are thus not intermediate compromises between global and local models, but structured configurations shaped by institutional capacity, strategic positioning, and transnational contestation.
Humanitarianism is imagined to be a short-term response to a temporary emergency. However, in reality, both crisis and aid often become protracted. This article examines a glaring consequence of protracted humanitarian presence in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo: the formation of a local humanitarian class, for whom the sector becomes a site of social mobility and identity construction. Incorporation into the humanitarian political economy, however, has been vastly unequal, exacerbating processes of social stratification. There has been a groundswell of public discontent with global humanitarianism. Framing these tensions as a story of local resistance versus international intervenors overlooks the fact that most employees working for global aid agencies in the Global South are locally hired. This article illustrates how protracted humanitarian action also generates localised tensions around access to resources and employment, and questions of material inequality and class stratification produced by humanitarian permanence itself. A focus on local class transformation and stratification challenges neat assumptions about local empowerment in the global politics of humanitarianism. Instead, the humanitarian class is at the centre of contemporary debates about the future of international humanitarianism: a lightning rod for mounting public frustration at the paradoxical consequences of protracted emergency operations.
International actors working to implement the UN's Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda emphasize the importance of partnership with local women's organizations and activists. Building on data from Myanmar, this study examines how and when women in conflict contexts are understood as ideal participants in - and vehicles for - the WPS agenda. Drawing on interviews with international donors, gender experts, and Myanmar women activists, the analysis demonstrates how both desirable and undesirable participant subject positions are produced through the discourses and funding choices of WPS donors. In particular, we identify and discuss three undesirable subject positions prominent in donor-driven discourses: the oppositional woman, the fearful woman, and the apolitical woman. We also find that how (un)desirability is framed depends on changing factors that include shifts in local political context and in the foreign policy goals of international donors - shifts that may be particularly dramatic and abrupt in conflict-affected contexts. Critically examining the production of these three undesirable subject positions, we discuss what kinds of local women can be recognized as desirable participants in the implementation of the WPS agenda and draw attention to persistent power relations that shape political space and inclusion in peacebuilding.
This article explores (a) how conceptualisations of movement embed sedentism within the security-migration nexus and its protection logics and (b) which conceptualisation of movement can analytically challenge that embedding. The overall aim is to problematise the opposition between sedentism and movement. I address these questions by analysing mapping and countermapping practices and considering what insights can be gained by conceptualising life as fundamentally in motion. The maps reveal four concepts of movement: border crossing, routes, journeys, and threads. Each operates within the security-migration nexus. The article then extends the notion of threads into a conceptualisation of life (and matter) as inherently in motion, or life-in-motion. Allowing life to emerge from and through the coexistence of movements offers an analytical framework that creates cracks in sedentism inscriptions within the security-migration nexus while avoiding the reduction of movement to nomadism - the 'other' of sedentism.
The article seeks to examine the contested politics of memory-making in postcolonial, Hindu nationalist India through the figure of Adivasi, anti-colonial leader Birsa Munda. It argues that the Indian state has engaged in a dual process of appropriation and erasure by monumentalizing Birsa through large-scale statuary, selectively framing his legacy within a sanitized narrative of national belonging. Such representational strategies function to depoliticize the contemporary struggles of Adivasis living under abject conditions of dispossession, subject to paroxysmal violence. In contrast, the article foregrounds the counter-mnemonic practices of the Pathalgadi movement in Jharkhand, through erecting smadhi sthals and pathals as subaltern attempts at reclamation of Birsa's legacy. By attending to the material dimensions of such practices of resistance, the article frames decolonization not as a finished event, but an unfinished labour of mnemonic resistance against statist forms of historical closure. The article endeavours to make a twofold contribution: firstly, it contributes to the mnemonic turn in International Relations (IR) - by foregrounding Adivasi mnemonic agency; and secondly, it reconceptualizes decolonization as an embodied, material, and ongoing practice of reclaiming memory from statist memory regimes. In doing so, the article calls for IR to engage with the politics of Adivasi memorial praxis in the Global South.
Scholars are increasingly interested in how collective memories of war and civil conflict shape competing conceptions of democracy. Less attention has been paid to the role of political parties as representative institutions that select and reinterpret the past to address present issues in the public sphere. This article contributes to this debate by theorizing what we call the public-party tension as a core challenge of democratic memory politics. We examine this tension through a comparative study of how the French and Italian Communist Parties instrumentalized or overlooked the last letters written by partisans and patriots of the anti-fascist resistance before their execution by Nazi and fascist forces during World War II. Drawing on excerpts from the Italian and French anthologies, we uncover an ethics of partisan memory that offers an alternative to both sectarian uses of the past and contemporary cosmopolitan, antagonistic, and agonistic modes of remembering World War II. We argue that these letters offer an enduring normative resource for democratic memory politics, showing how the legacy of anti-fascist resistance can help sustain a pluralist democracy today.
