As an alliance without a formal Indo-Pacific mandate, NATO’s engagement in this region prompts questions about its strategic orientation. This article assesses NATO as an unconventional actor along three dimensions: a broadened threat calculus (China as a systemic challenge), functional expansion into non-traditional domains (cyber, information resilience, defence-industrial coordination), and strategic alignment with the IP4 (Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand). Using the Forum’s five variables – trade, political-normative interests, security, external pressures, and posture – the article shows that NATO’s posture is modular, partnership-driven, and politically calibrated. Empirically, it finds that the Alliance operates as an external platform for coordination – delivering technical cooperation on cyber and supply-chain resilience and promoting interoperability – while avoiding treaty commitments or forward deployments. The analysis concludes that NATO’s institutional capacities reshape trans-regional security practices but remain bounded by legal limits, member divergence, and partner sensitivities.
The Indo-Pacific is swiftly becoming the world’s geopolitical and geoeconomic epicentre. While the scholarly literature has focused on the regional interactions of traditional and emerging powers, very little attention has been devoted to “Unconventional Indo-Pacific Actors,” whether institutionally atypical, geographically peripheral, or functionally distinct. To address this noticeable gap in the scholarship, this article introduces the first Forum on this topic. It first contextualises the Indo-Pacific’s significance, prior to outlining the Forum’s notion of unconventionality and its theoretical and analytical frameworks. The latter comprises: (i) trade; (ii) political-normative interests; (iii) security interests; (iv) external pressures; and (v) regional posture and trends. Next, it presents its case studies: Ethiopia, NATO, South Africa, and Turkey. Lastly, it highlights the goals, means, and limitations in their Indo-Pacific engagement. Consequently, both this article and the Forum contribute to the IR literature by casting light on this topical and underexplored development.
This article uses Ethiopia’s Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Somaliland as a case study to examine how a landlocked African state can develop maritime aspirations, challenging prevailing assumptions about who counts as an Indo-Pacific player. Subjecting the case study to the assumptions of neoclassical realism and neoliberal institutionalism, we contend that internal legitimacy pressures and ethnic fragmentation intersect with institutional constraints and opportunities generated by global partners. Using the Forum’s five-parameter analytical framework (trade ties; political-normative interests; security interests; external pressures; current posture/trends), we demonstrate that Ethiopia’s pursuit of sea access leveraging geocultural memory is both innovative and destabilising: it connects Nile politics with Red Sea corridors, externalises domestic fragility into regional arenas and draws extra-regional rivalries into the Horn of Africa. This clarifies the conditions under which a landlocked state can act as an unconventional Indo-Pacific actor, and the consequences this poses to regional order and institutional norms.
When Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers agreed on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), many believed that the nuclear deal could be concluded mainly due to U.S. President Barack Obama’s determination and persistent overtures towards Tehran. However, such a point of view overlooks the fact that Obama’s approach towards Iran was not always conciliatory. This article begins with the assumption that Obama’s stance on Iran changed due to the array of challenges and opportunities posed by the Middle East. Employing operational code analysis, this study finds that Obama’s foreign policy learning towards Iran was intrinsically related to changes in his view of the deteriorating situation in the Middle East rather than Iran’s evolving domestic political environment. It therefore argues that the Iran nuclear deal was pursued as a strategy to prevent further destabilization of the Middle East, without a fundamental change in Obama’s perception of Iran.
This paper investigates the role that discourses of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ play within the legitimacy claims of both hegemonic and counterhegemonic projects. In particular, it considers how accusations of ‘disordering’ are used to stigmatise, and thus delegitimise, rival hegemonic projects. It looks at how China’s rise is represented within Western scholarly and policy discourse as necessarily a risk to international order: China is depicted as antithetical to the fundamental pillars of the ‘liberal’/rules-based international order, and is thus stigmatised as a disordering influence on the international. A close examination of China’s practices, policy discourses and scholarship relating to international order, however, suggests a different picture: China goes out of its way to represent itself, not just as conforming to the existing norms of international order, but in fact as a leader on these norms, and as a more faithful guardian of the fundamental values of international justice, peace and prosperity which underpin international order. Furthermore, Chinese policy discourse in turn seeks to (counter) stigmatise the US and its allies as themselves the greatest threat to international order, and centres the global South as the crucial ‘audience of normals’ for these claims.
Italy became the only G7 member to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2019. Yet, 5 years later, Rome announced its withdrawal, a rare reversal among BRI participants. This article examines Italy’s abrupt policy shift. We argue that Italy’s decision to join and subsequently exit the BRI reflects a strategy of institutional hedging, in which states calibrate their institutional engagements based on evolving assessments of institutions’ relative capacities, relevance and risks. Initially, Italy perceived the BRI as an unparalleled opportunity in the absence of viable Western alternatives, with anticipated risks deemed limited. As rival institutions emerged, Italy’s relevance in them increased, and the risks of participation in the BRI grew, Rome recalibrated its stance at different stages from institutional hedging to balancing. By examining this case, we demonstrate how small and middle powers navigate institutional rivalry between great powers. Theoretically, this article contributes to the literature by developing an analytical framework of institutional hedging, an existing yet insufficiently elaborated concept, to account for small and middle powers’ behavior regarding international institutions.
This article suggests that debates on the disordering of the ‘liberal’ international order stand to benefit from the further study of how the ordering of war itself is changing. It considers how war is not only spreading, intensifying, and rapidly evolving in technological means, but also becoming increasingly contested. To advance this study, it introduces the concept of ‘war regimes’ and traces the succession of war regimes in the modern experience. It finds that the character of war is rapidly evolving, but that war is also increasingly contested after liberal hegemony, albeit minimally ordered at thresholds of deterrent capabilities. The case is made that this has significant political and strategic implications for how states may attempt to reorder war in this century.
This study contributes to the literature on the unintended consequences of economic sanctions by exploring how sanctions impact women’s health. We argue that sanctions impair women’s health through two mechanisms: government spending on healthcare and out-of-pocket health costs. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), we identify the causal pathways linking sanctions to female health outcomes. Results from mediation analysis using panel data from 193 countries between 2000 and 2019 indicate that the sanctions-women’s health relationship is strongly mediated by government spending and out-of-pocket costs, both of which are measures of financial health resources. A key finding is that sanctions-induced financial constraints lead target governments to cut back on health spending, which in turn results in higher out-of-pocket medical expenses and diminished health outcomes. The study further reveals that the effect of economic sanctions on health is more pronounced for women than for men.
The decolonising effort within International Relations takes as a core concern the political implications and effects of Eurocentric universals that have positioned the global north as the privileged site of modernity and given rise to binary distinctions. This article asks: how are the universals of Eurocentrism constructed? To answer this question it investigates the notion of exclusive property ownership in the colonial context. Drawing from Hegelian recognition theory it argues that such a notion, was constructed via an essentially contested process of inter-subjective mediation and conflict within the modern European state. Such a process has at its core the dynamic and creative force of the negative as not-self/not-I or other in and through which our experience develops and shared norms and universals are constructed. The negative reveals the fundamental openness of our political experience and takes its place as a vital tool for critical thinking and theorising within International Relations.
Ambivalence is widely regarded as a source of ontological insecurity and anxiety due to its close association with uncertainty, undecidability, and indeterminacy. While ontological security studies (OSS) has usefully engaged with the concept of ambivalence as an epistemic phenomenon and its manifestations in international politics such as 'strangers', almost no attention has been paid to ambivalence as a strategic choice, that is to strategic ambivalence. Building up on the extant OSS scholarship, this article first conceptualizes strategic ambivalence as strategization of affective ambivalence by state actors for ontological ends through narrative productions and discursive representations. It then deploys the Lacanian theorization of the lacking-desiring subject's relations with the symbolic Other to investigate the question of how strategic ambivalence may operate as a vehicle for fulfillment of a fantasized Self and attainment of ontological security. It argues that strategic ambivalence speaks to a deeper Self-negating paradox at the heart of the split subject as it desires - and inevitably fails - to remedy its inherent division and ontological insecurity. Adopting a subjective-performative view of statehood as opposed to an essentialist 'state as person' framework, the article lastly proceeds to instantiate its theoretical propositions by interrogating the Islamic Republic of Iran's controversial intervention in the Russia-Ukraine War on behalf of the Russian aggressor; an involvement Iran has, paradoxically, both confirmed and denied in a strategically ambivalent attempt to manage contradictions and anxieties of its anti-Western and anti-aggression identities.
This article provides a historical reassessment of the contribution of middle powers to the evolution of the outer space regime. We argue that the traditional focus by scholarship on superpower competition and on the five founding treaties has led to an underappreciation both of the role of smaller powers and of the normative developments within the regime beyond hard law. Our analysis focuses on Latin American middle powers and reveals that they influenced the regime's commitment to norms of non-appropriation and openness to all countries irrespective of development levels and have played a constructive role in sustaining multilateralism in the face of great power deadlock. The article is based on a mixed-methods approach, through which we quantitatively identify an original four-phase chronology of the regime's evolution in the UN and discern consistent Latin American emphases on each period via qualitative analyses of primary sources, interviews and observation of negotiations. It outlines a new chronology of the space regime and detects the contribution of Latin American middle powers to its evolution, given their concern with safeguarding multilateral talks threatened by great power rivalry, along with their pursuit of institutionalisation, de-escalation and influence through managerial positions.
Deviations from presidential term limits are potentially damaging to democracies in low- and middle-income countries because they allow for the dangerous consolidation of authority. One way to address this problem is to determine the critical institutions able to protect term limits. By evaluating a set of relevant historical cases using qualitative comparative analysis, this study highlights the combinations of institutions associated with the successful protection of presidential term limits in the past. The study finds that independent judiciaries, legislatures, electoral commissions, and militaries, strong political parties, and vibrant civil societies, working together in various combinations, are the institutions that most effectively protect presidential term limits when they are challenged in democratic countries. Exploiting these findings, large-N qualitative analysis is then used to examine the hypothesized regularities of the optimal pathways identified by the QCA to explain the causal mechanism behind the protection of term limits in the study cases.
Earth orbit has become increasingly crowded, threatening fragile space systems and the natural environment. These challenges are generating an acute need to assess international norms regulating outer space security, safety, and sustainability. This article has two objectives. First, we systematically survey the contemporary international norm architecture of outer space, filling a gap in the academic literature by bringing outer space law and governance into dialogue with contemporary IR norms research. To do so, we refine Lantis and Wunderlich's three-dimensional (3D) norm framework to demonstrate how space activities are governed by norms across three interconnected structural dimensions: individual policy norms, norm clusters, and foundational meta-norms. Second, we demonstrate the utility of the 3D framework to understand the dynamic relationship between norm structures and agency by detailing prominent contemporary initiatives where actors are leveraging vertical and horizontal norm synergies to interpret and reinforce existing norms and promote new norms to regulate outer space mining and anti-satellite weapons.
Why do leaders sometimes pursue aggressive policies driven by outrage rather than by rational calculation? Although anger has long been recognised in international relations as a source of conflict, existing accounts under-theorise its causal impact on state behaviour and overlook insights from evolutionary psychology. Drawing on recalibrational theory, I develop outrage balancing, a new theory of aggressive foreign policy, defined as an anger-driven response to perceived injustice whereby leaders adopt punitive policies to recalibrate an adversary's disregard for their welfare. I specify the conditions under which outrage arises and demonstrate how it produces disproportionate, risk-prone, and morally framed foreign policies that diverge from rational expectations. As a plausibility probe, the article re-examines Japan's 1941 decision to enter the Pacific War, arguing that the Hull Note acted as the proximate trigger, provoking elite outrage and shifting preferences toward war.
Promotion of public diplomacy (PD) policy has been growing worldwide. In the US, support rebounded after 9/11, as the government sought to curb anti-American sentiments. Educational exchanges relying on assumptions about social contact benefits became key to American PD policy. However, equally widespread efforts to objectively evaluate whether educational exchanges based on such assumptions serve governments' PD goals are lacking. This study therefore examines a critical PD case, the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant program in Turkey, and offers a longitudinal look at one cohort of 94 ETAs and the nearly 2000 students with whom they regularly interacted. Using pre/post measurements of both groups' intercultural sensitivity levels, it seeks to assess the effectiveness of the program from a PD perspective. The article concludes with suggestions for modified conceptual emphasis on contact theory based PD initiatives; and accordingly, suggests revisions to how educational exchanges like the ETA program are implemented.
This article explains the relationship between Mearsheimer's theoretical work and role as a public intellectual on three contemporary issues: Russia, China and Palestine. The argument is twofold. First, Mearsheimer's theory sets limits on state behaviour that are dictated by the requirement of survival, while offering little normative theorisation on how policymakers should address the consequences of these limits. Second, the combination of too much limit and too little normative theorisation turns Mearsheimer's theory into a prison that he seeks to escape in his public commentary through inconsistency and/or referring to rhetorical hopes. These rhetorical hopes absolve Mearsheimer of the responsibility to explore alternative actions to address the normative challenges in these cases. By surrendering these alternatives, Mearsheimer's hope serves his theory's ideological rationalisation of the status quo. Mearsheimer's experience showcases that IR theorists should not restrict theories to the point where they enclose future possibilities of political action and become ideologies of state power in the status quo. Theorists can discharge this responsibility by taking seriously the role of power in the operation of their concepts and limiting their concepts' elevation above the political as the realm of the contestation of interests.
This article reappraises the rise, impact and limitations of aspirations to create a rule-based liberal world order in the transformative 'long' 20th century (1860-2025). Pursuing a poly-perspectival and global approach, it illuminates dominant ideas and concepts that informed these aspirations. And it analyses how far those who became key actors in this process indeed found ways - against both authoritarian and communist competitors - to remake the norms, ground-rules and institutional foundations of international order on liberal premises, and on a truly global scale. Finally, it explores what lessons can be drawn from liberal achievements and frustrations of the long 20th century to rebuild a rule-based world order for the 21st.
Much of the current debate about the crisis of the liberal international order rests on a misleading assumption: that rising and revanchist powers such as China and Russia challenge Western primacy from a common posture of revisionism. The argument developed int this article is that beneath Russia and China's shared rejection of Western dominance lie different philosophical understandings of what it means to create order and disorder. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of 365 Chinese and 160 Russian official statements (2012-2024) on the issues of Ukraine and the South China Sea, it shows that Russia pursues a strategy of disruptive legitimacy, one that depicts the liberal order as ametaphysical evil undermining civilisational plurality and justifies its deconstruction through eschatological narratives of resistance. China, by contrast, advances a strategy of constructive legitimacy, seeking to build an alternative, hierarchical but morally ordered system inspired by a Confucian-Legalist synthesis linking virtue, history, and authority. While both contest the liberla order's moral and institutional foundations, they diverge in purpose. The article concludes that the most significant challenge facing world politics today is not a struggle for power, but an ontological contest over the meaning of order itself. In this shifting landscape, China's reformist narrative of "constructive" hierarchy is likely to command wider consent than Russia's disruptive exceptionalism, steering the international system toward a fragmented future in which legitimacy, rather than material power, defines the boundaries of order.
Accounts of the 'crisis' of the liberal international order abound. However, many of the anxieties surrounding the future of this order expose a subtle investment in a set of colonial-racial inequalities and hierarchies. In this paper, I explore this unacknowledged investment on the part of liberal internationalism in the domination, sovereignty, and rule of Whiteness. I do so by reading G. John Ikenberry's latest account of crisis in the liberal international order as a crisis of White sovereignty, focusing on how it exposes the foundations of liberal international as constituted in part through racialising processes that designate some subjects as the source, origin, and trustees of order, and other as its passive recipients, or worse, as agents of disorder in need of ordering. In this way, I show how the construction and maintenance of liberal international order structurally relies on and is tacitly invested in the (re)production of White sovereignty.
A decade ago, Amitav Acharya outlined his 'new agenda' for International Relations (IR) scholars: 'Global International Relations'. This article seeks to modestly move forward two aspects of the Global IR agenda. First, we foreground a region largely missing from the Global IR literature: the Pacific Islands. That the Pacific has been 'geo-politically marginal' has consequences for the Global IR, and broader Political Science and IR scholarship, which has missed out on analysing and learning lessons from a rich and diverse region. Second, the Global IR scholarship has focused on important questions about ontology and epistemology, but with less consideration of methodology. That means that the question of how to move 'beyond critique' and do the practical work of studying Global IR remains largely unanswered. In the second part of our article we outline considerations arising from greater Global IR, and broader Political Science and IR, scholarly attention to the Pacific and then provide a grounded perspective of the practicalities of doing research there.
