In this paper, I tell stories of my mother’s and grandmother’s muffled voices that I eavesdropped behind doors and sounds in my South Korean homes—stories that were not told to me, but that brushed against the rim of my ear in the South Korean domestic everyday—as a story about North Korea. By weaving together stories in and about homes and homemaking that were mumbled and that I eavesdropped and overheard through walls and doors, I contemplate eavesdropping as an (anti)methodology for doing International Relations (IR) research with the purpose of worldmaking otherwise . Walking with narrative approaches in IR, decolonial feminist thinkers, Black (feminist) thought, sound studies, and critical translation studies, I explore how eavesdropping muffled sounds in South Korean homes offers a praxis of remapping the global by rethinking North Korea as a method. Eavesdropping emerges as a praxis of anti-translation that embraces opacity over transparency, fumbling over mastery, and entanglement over othering.
This intervention reflects a keynote given before the Millennium: Journal of International Studies symposium on 3 November 2025 at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It details a personal consideration of the problem of gatekeeping in International Relations (IR) and the accountabilities of IR scholars during the current crises of our time. Still premised on an experience of scholastic rejection, this commentary is intended to serve as an entryway for speaking to structural patterns and systemic challenges first anticipated in a previous publication issued in 2022 with Alternatives: Global, Local, Political . Here, the author explores the possibilities that marginal forms of political practice and identity hold under increasingly global conditions, and what these mean for the question of whether academics should push towards a post-IR discipline. They press for deeper considerations of reflexivity, what it means to have power, and what it means to have the responsibilities to repair as IR moves forward in the 21st century.
What temporalities does international order assume, and how do non-Western states narrate political time through postage stamps? This study introduces the concept of philatelic temporalities: reading stamps as state-sanctioned artefacts through which non-Western states arrange the past, present, and future on their own terms, acting, in Hutchings’ phrase, as time creators rather than time creatures. Often dismissed as trivial, stamps serve as dense sites of chronopolitics that bring together deep pasts, ruptured presents, and aspirational futures into a collective sense of nationhood. Drawing on non-Western case studies, it identifies three modes of temporal narration: archival, linking the present to an illustrious past; anachronic, marking rupture from an undesirable past; and utopian, presenting an idealised future as if already realised. Methodologically, it draws on the aesthetic turn and postcolonial International Relations (IR) to read stamps as material sites where states narrate political time. Although recent IR scholarship has recognised the importance of temporality, the temporal turn has remained focused on discourse and theoretical abstractions rather than illustrating how ideas about time are materialised through everyday objects. This study addresses this gap by treating stamps as tools of chronopolitics, drawing on Hutchings, Birth, and Bashir to frame philatelic temporalities as a decolonial intervention for IR scholarship.
This paper explores how specific provisions of the NATO cooperation framework, as well as those governing international civil aviation, were strategically used by the CIA to maintain the secrecy surrounding the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) programme during the early years of the War on Terror. Building on Timothy Pachirat’s ‘politics of sight’, critical security and secrecy studies, as well as agnotology, we position secrecy as a central analytical category, inquiring into practices and tactics through which it is enacted. We mobilise two key concepts – fabrication and division – to analyse secrecy in the context of RDI programme. Fabrication refers to the manipulation of aircraft classifications, registration numbers, and flight plans to obscure rendition operations, while division captures how access to classified information by those involved in the programme was partial and fragmented. We argue that processes of fabrication and division contributed to concealing the operational details of the RDI programme. This paper contributes to the emerging research agenda in international relations that explores how international politics and practices are not only shaped by knowledge-making processes but also by the (deliberate) production of ignorance.
This article reconsiders the linguistic equivalence in the conceptual history of International Relations (IR) by examining translation as a historical and political practice. Building on Reinhart Koselleck’s method, it calls for a translingual conceptual history that reveals how IR’s concepts acquire layered meanings across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Through a case study of the term ‘international’ in the Sinosphere, the article traces three distinct translations from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century: wanguo , guoji and Yingtenaixiongnaier . Each reflected different historical contexts, ideologies and political options, from Confucian legal universalism and positivist diplomacy to socialist internationalism. Rather than spontaneous equivalence, these translations illustrate how concepts are mediated through asymmetric and politicised localisation. In sum, this article sophisticates IR’s disciplinary understanding by situating translation at the core. It aims to challenge the current Anglophone hegemony and Eurocentrism by adopting global resources, thereby advancing a more plural and decolonised understanding of international thought.
International Relations (IR) has been transformed via its movement beyond the liberal imaginaries of the 1990s. This strange death of liberal IR, analysed here, enabled IR to transition from a discipline of lack – a discipline that was ‘pre-liberal’, struck in the timeless ‘state of nature’ – to a discipline of fullness that is ‘after IR’/‘beyond critique’. One alleged to be able to assimilate the world in ways that liberalism could not, going beyond the Eurocentrism of universal subject/object cuts and liberal binaries. IR, the liberal discipline in a non-liberal world, was famously theorised as a discipline lacking conceptions of progress, justice and ethics and as poor in relation to political theory. This article analyses the transition to ‘after IR’ as a discipline of plenitude and possibility, registering a world of uncertainty and contingency, where everything is possible except the articulation of any critical alternative to this world as it appears.
This article conducts a critical cartography of scholarship that engages with postcolonial feminist analysis of Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP). The article develops a concept of ‘Strategic Scepticism’ as a way that postcolonial feminist scholarship meets FFP: a sceptical approach towards Western-originated liberal policies, but strategically sceptic for not rejecting FFP. The article demonstrates that scepticism is seen through the measured approach taken towards FFP, informed by a feminist reluctance to trust state-led progressive policies, and concerns about the co-optation of feminism. Despite this scepticism, the scholarship engages with FFP through four inventive ways that form a part of their strategy that calls for a more inclusive FFP: not limiting FFP analysis to liberal feminist themes; analysing the non-engagement with FFP; scrutinising adoption beyond the FFP label; and studying links with other policy intersections. The critical cartography also reveals that the scholarship reinforces a spatialisation of borders between academia and the community, which maintains the Global North-South hierarchies it seeks to address. To contend with this, the article suggests that the scholarship could employ reflexive and transversal solidarities to actively engage with lesser studied sources of FFP knowledge production. This study provides insights into how ‘strategic scepticism’ in scholarship can both expand and deepen FFP analysis. The article has implications for knowledge production in International Relations by examining the hierarchies created in and by scholarly work.
Whilst metaphors such as ‘the law of the jungle’ often inform International Relations (IR) theory building, the more-than-human is rarely a focus of inquiry. Building on environmental history, critical plant studies, anthropology, and emerging IR scholarship on relationality and the Anthropocene, this paper presents the not-to-be-overlooked ecological conditions of IR that underpin global projects related to modernity in the past centuries – colonialism, the making and breaking of empires, and the evolving relations between humans and the more-than-human. Beyond highlighting the ‘dark side’ of entanglements among the more-than-human and differently positioned groups of human communities, this article also unpacks the important more-than-human conditions that enabled these global projects. This article takes the tree as a method and explores the global movements of oaks, rubber, and monkey puzzle trees in imperial and colonial contexts in their own terms, through a conceptual framework of translocalization. Translocalization is the locus where new political possibilities (oppressive or liberating ones alike) are enacted, and new meanings are generated and negotiated, highlighting that imperial and colonial projects, despite their very intentions, could never be totalizing. Translocalization connects the global and the local, and disrupts related binaries, for example, the (in)authentic, subject/object, and the governor/the governed.
What if global governance were designed for neurodivergent rather than neurotypical minds? This paper challenges International Relations’ (IR) unstated assumption that effective political actors think in neurotypical ways: through linear planning, sustained verbal attention, rational cost-benefit analysis, and consistent preference ordering. Drawing on disability studies, crip theory, and epistemic justice scholarship, I ask: whose cognitive styles count as legitimate governance? IR theory is embedded with ableist assumptions about political competence, yet complex global challenges may require precisely the cognitive diversity that neurotypical governance excludes. This work develops the idea of ‘cognitive diversity methodology’, functioning simultaneously as an analytical tool and design principle, while proceeding reflexively, acknowledging the contradiction of advancing these arguments through academic conventions that are themselves neurotypically structured. I refuse to accept neurotypical universalism, proposing a cognitively diverse politics that recognises different sorts of minds as entertaining different political possibilities, thus contributing to Post-IR conversations about epistemic pluralism and decolonial futures, by revealing cognitive assumptions as a third dimension of epistemic colonisation, one that operates not only through whose knowledge counts or whose perspectives are accepted, but through the way that valid political cognition itself must operate.
International relations scholarship has recently made significant strides in acknowledging and analysing the international politics of translation. This paper contributes to such work by untangling the interlingual politics involved in contestations between Indigenous (Māori) and non-Indigenous sovereignty in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Analysing how different stakeholders advanced different understandings of sovereignty-translation throughout, respectively, the WAI1040 inquiry process and the Treaty Principles Bill controversy, we strive to uncover the importance of distinguishing between ‘conceptual’ and ‘translational’ politics when it comes to Indigenous sovereignty claims. Beyond focusing on what happens when ‘sovereignty’ is translated between two different languages, we analyse how the nature of translating sovereignty is perceived in (post)colonial settler-Indigenous relations. Recognising the limitations of the English language when engaging with Indigenous sovereignty claims, we argue that to highlight the idea of two different languages rather than conceptions of sovereignty is to depoliticise and efface the contestation over Indigenous rights, privileges, and powers.
This forum assesses the impact of forms of 'unruly politics', especially revolutions, on the modern world order. It is oriented around the 2025 Fred Halliday lecture, delivered by George Lawson at the London School of Economics in May 2025, which has been lightly edited for this forum. In his lecture, Lawson argues that the contemporary era of 'polycrisis' is also one of 'polyprotest' - multiple, interlinked forms of turbulence are being accompanied by, and to some extent caused by, a range of 'unruly' movements. Lawson maps and assesses the three main forms that contemporary 'unruly' movements take - 'people power', 'restoration revolution' and 'decentralised vanguardism' - and makes the case for their ongoing significance to contemporary world politics. The responses by Jasmine Gani, Maria Tanyag and Benjamin Abrams engage, challenge and extend Lawson's claims, paying attention to the politics of both naming and engaging in revolutionary events (Gani), the relationship between women, gender and revolution (Tanyag) and the importance of differentiating types of revolutionary change (Abrams). An introduction by Toby Dodge sets out the terms of debate for the forum, with particular reference to Fred Halliday's corpus of work, while a response by Lawson sets out strategies by which to extend who counts as a 'revolutionary voice' and how to listen more attentively to 'revolutionary silences'. Taken as a whole, the forum makes clear the centrality of revolution in particular, and 'unruly politics' more generally, to debates about world order, past and present.
This article continues scholarly efforts to articulate an ontological turn of international relations (IR) away from frameworks organized around states' exceptional sovereignty and foreign/domestic policy binary, which fail to account for the planetary entanglements that characterize shared crises of biophysical and social reproduction under global capitalism. As a counter-hegemonic intervention, 'planet politics' help to address the historical processes that have denied and severed planetary entanglements via foreign policy projects of colonial domination. Through a case study of Canada, as an inherently international terrain characterized by multiple and overlapping sovereignties, I trace the continuities of struggle for mutually assured survival across foreign and domestic policy agendas. By recovering the already existing heritage of Indigenous anti-colonial resistance and diaspora consciousness, planet politics emerges as centuries-old praxis grounded in relational ethics of reciprocal care for each other and the rest of nature. Drawing on Indigenous cosmologies and place-based ontologies, decolonial IR critiques, and eco-socialist feminism, I highlight the analytical categories of shared, consensual, and overlapping sovereignty. Conceptualized in this way, planet politics reveals the mutuality of reparatory projects that advance Indigenous self-governance, migrant and labour justice, and transnational solidarity in defence of human life and ecologies.
Liberal democracies experienced an unexpected resurgence of nationalism in the 2010s. Although many accounts have sought to explain this development, few acknowledge the sudden, simultaneous, and profound ideologization of both the ideological left and right. Consequently, prevailing narratives about nationalism's rise fail to capture the broader transformation that defined the decade. This paper argues that technological innovation, reaching a critical threshold around 2014, fundamentally reconfigured the institutional and cultural framework of liberal-democratic states, catalyzing the emergence of contemporary culture wars. These innovations reshaped everyday life, giving rise to a 'post-digital' reality and a corresponding 'post-digital' individual. The transformation also created new avenues for foreign actors to influence identity formation within liberal democracies, exacerbating a legitimacy crisis in the West. In response, Western governments have begun pursuing a new, 'Cyber-Westphalian' liberal-democratic consensus aimed at restoring political stability in the post-digital age.
How may literary figures contribute to international thought? This article addresses this question using the previously neglected yet archetypal case of novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, who pioneered the term 'international thought' in the early 20th century. In its analysis of the Hardy case, the article offers a framework elucidating how literary figures may contribute to international thought not only through direct theoretical and conceptual advancements but also indirectly in their use of literary techniques to reimagine the international and through their public figure status. The analysis draws attention to Hardy's challenge to anthropocentric approaches to peace and his educational, emotional and humanitarian approaches to internationalism that may offer valuable alternatives to dominant rationalist perspectives in addressing a world confronted by ecological crisis and populist leaderships. The article acknowledges tensions in Hardy's international thought and offers the lineaments of a research agenda for further inquiry into literary figures and international relations.
This article connects research on music and peacebuilding with an exploration of related Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of being, knowing and doing. To understand the vision and potential of music-based peacebuilding in Australia, we consider Indigenous-led music and culture festival Treaty in the Park as a timely case study. Engaging the concept of 'resonance', we illuminate how peacebuilding knowledge is grounded in place through sound, song and music. Noting intersections with broader traditions of Indigenous resistance and resurgence, we suggest that the peacebuilding considered here is animated by, and sustained through, music's capacity for resonating with Country and across generations of people. In this way, audiences may see, hear and feel prospects for peace rippling beyond what dominant approaches to understanding, analysing and practicing peacebuilding typically offer. We thus theorize these music-based peacebuilding practices as offering uniquely powerful potential for advancing intergenerational peacebuilding.
This article employs Edward Said's contrapuntal reading to challenge the account offered by proponents of offshore balancing of the conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine. This reading, the article argues, presents two challenges to the strategy of offshore balancing. First, it shows that the strategy's treatment of Israel and Russia as states like any others morally equalises the dispossessors and the dispossessed, and leads to unviable policy conclusions - namely, the two-state solution (Palestine) and territorial concessions (Ukraine). Second, it shows that the strategy's assessment of these conflicts solely based on capabilities harms US national security and threatens the survival of the United States as a liberal democracy. The article advances postcolonial critiques of neo-realism towards its contemporary application via offshore balancing in Palestine and Ukraine. Furthermore, by extending Said's contrapuntal reading to Ukraine, it contributes to a closer engagement between postcolonial scholarship on the 'Global East' and the 'Global South'.
This article draws on Black Feminism to demonstrate how the mainstreaming of race war and the obsession with the heteronormative patriarchal family in white supremacist thought is rooted in a longer genealogy. I follow how race war's familial imagery emerges through a contrast with civil wars, which were constituted as fraternal and fratricidal. Tracing this genealogy through antiquity, I show how civil war's potentially redemptive bloodletting within the family relied on the slave's constitutive exclusion from the family. Carrying this exclusion through the 19th and 20th centuries, I examine white fantasies of Black rebellion and race war in the history of chattel slavery. White fantasies of race war took the images of miscegenation, infanticide, and parricide. In contrast to civil war's potentially redemptive war within the family, race war destroyed the patriarchal family and with it, political order. I show how this fantasy of race war emerged as an idealized patriarchal family that simultaneously was upheld as a model of pacification and continued warfare against the enslaved. Slavery's violence and the institutional form of the heteronormative family intersect to produce a fantasy of race war as an attack on whiteness through an attack on the family.
Scholars widely recognize that memory laws related to the Holocaust have facilitated the integration of several Central and Eastern European countries into the European Union (EU). However, less attention has been paid to how memory laws can, for some political actors, work to keep candidate countries out of the Union. For example, Armenian Genocide memory laws (AGMLs) have played an important, understudied role in Turkey’s bid to become an EU member state. This article unpacks political actors’ strategic use of AGMLs to highlight Turkey’s unreadiness to join the EU. In so doing, it introduces the concept of memory conditionality – that is, a strategic use of memory laws to express concerns about a candidate country’s accession to the EU. Memory conditionality takes different forms: In some instances, actors use the memory law to set pre-conditions for entry and encourage the candidate country to acknowledge past wrongs; in others, actors use memory conditionality to oppose a candidate country’s accession altogether. In either case, memory conditionality highlights how memory laws and EU enlargement often intersect. In unpacking the concept of memory conditionality, this article explores AGMLs in France between the late 1990s and early 2010s.
