This article brings Mouffe’s agonistic democracy into dialogue with queer peacebuilding to analyse how LGBTQ + mobilisation reopens democratic space in post-conflict societies. Post-conflict orders often seek to tame antagonistic conflict by accommodating the main groups while reproducing exclusion through heteronormative “shared rules”—norms of respectability, family citizenship, and moral regulation that determine who can appear as a legitimate political subject and which claims count as peace-relevant. This article theorises heteronormativity as a technology of post-conflict hegemony and specifies three dynamics of reopening: pluralisation, destabilisation, and interlinking. The case study of post-Agreement Northern Ireland is to explore queer agonistic peacebuilding. Drawing on campaign archives, Assembly records, and cultural analysis of artistic performance, the article traces how marriage-equality contention, rights advocacy, and queer cultural interventions expanded the peace agenda, exposed hegemonic contradictions, and forged solidarities beyond bloc politics. The article argues that post-conflict openness is not guaranteed but is made through sustained contestation. Thus agonistic peacebuilding must attend to the heteronormative closure technologies that settlements embed.
The concept of “imagination” has a complex role within the field of International Relations (IR). IR scholars are often trained to be grounded in “realities,” whether historical facts or data points. In IR scholarship, we see occasional calls for imaginative approaches and even to take fictional works seriously as resources for exploration. However, beyond creativity as an occasional activity, there are compelling reasons to incorporate creativity in all its forms into IR scholarship. One often-overlooked form of creativity in IR scholarship is speculative novels. These imaginative works have the potential to broaden the horizons of our academic perspectives. Thus, in the spirit of bringing about a more creative IR, this article uses the novels Station Eleven ( St John Mandel, 2014 ) and Children of Time ( Tchaikovsky, 2015 ) to push what can be imagined about interstellar relations, human relations, transpecies relations, survival, and the future of IR.
While dominant global policy frameworks and scholarship often understand violent extremism through securitised and state-centric lenses, this article offers a bottom-up reconceptualisation using a peace studies and gendered approach. Drawing on empirical data from Kenya, the study complicates current understandings by framing violent extremism as a continuum of direct, structural, and cultural violence rooted in everyday grassroots experiences. Utilising arts-based body mapping workshops, focus group discussions, and interviews in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kwale, the research centres participant agency and embodied knowledge to explore how local communities define and experience this violence. The findings reveal that participants conceptualise violent extremism as a multi-layered phenomenon driven by systemic governance failures, human rights violations, and marginalisation, rather than merely radical ideologies or non-state militancy. Crucially, these grassroots definitions are highly gendered. Male participants primarily associated violent extremism with state-sanctioned harms, such as police brutality, arbitrary arrests, and extrajudicial killings. In contrast, female participants identified deeply embedded cultural and structural harms, highlighting gender-based violence, specifically Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and intimate partner violence, as profound acts of violent extremism. Ultimately, the article argues that violent extremism is an everyday, relational, and embodied phenomenon. It calls for a departure from narrow counter-terrorism frameworks, advocating instead for holistic, peace-oriented strategies that address the foundational structural and cultural dimensions of violence sustaining this continuum of harm.
The global acceleration of clean energy deployment has intensified competition over technological leadership, industrial capacity, and supply-chain control. In response, the United States has expanded support for clean energy innovation and manufacturing through major legislative initiatives, including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS and Science Act. Yet, whether these policies will generate durable competitive advantages remains contested and varies across technologies and institutional contexts. This study examines how U.S. policy design, innovation capacity, and implementation constraints shape clean energy deployment and competitiveness. Rather than assuming a straightforward path to national leadership, it evaluates the conditions under which policy support can accelerate technological scale-up while also identifying the bottlenecks that may limit outcomes, including permitting delays, grid constraints, critical mineral dependencies, and international competition. Using a comparative policy-analytic approach, the study synthesizes policy instruments, sectoral trends, and evidence from selected clean energy technology domains, with particular attention to the interaction among federal incentives, industrial strategy, and supply-chain resilience. The analysis advances three core claims: first, policy incentives can accelerate deployment and investment when accompanied by implementation capacity and regulatory coordination; second, competitiveness outcomes vary across technology segments according to supply-chain exposure and commercialization maturity; and third, long-term leadership depends not only on innovation funding, but also on infrastructure readiness, workforce development, and international economic partnerships. The paper contributes to debates on energy policy and green industrial strategy by distinguishing short-term deployment gains from broader claims of sustained technological leadership. It argues that U.S. performance in clean energy should be assessed through conditional, evidence-based indicators rather than aggregate narratives of inevitable dominance.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the notion of contagion, rooted in the fear of an unknown pathogen, operated not only as a biomedical concern but also as a governing logic that enabled the social segregation of potentially 'contagious bodies' and governmental control over them. This politics of contagion is used to contextualise the lives of Bengaluru's (Karnataka, India) home-based female sex workers (FSWs), extending beyond the pandemic as a singular event. Drawing on the fieldwork-based qualitative narratives of these FSWs, the article examines the coexistence of their unique vulnerabilities and resilience. The article argues that the interplay between social and medical contagion produced a liminal status for Bengaluru's home-based FSWs, even as they continued to exercise agency in negotiating everyday survival. Amidst the pandemic turmoil, FSWs navigated the realities of struggle and survival, negotiating the tension between the necessity of human contact and the fear of contagion. This negotiation was further shaped by the compounding effects of the state's simultaneous presence and absence.
There has been a burgeoning interest in the concepts of relationality and temporality within the field of International Relations (IR) in recent years. This shift is driven by the recognition among many mainstream IR scholars that the global landscape has increasingly been characterised by profound uncertainty and unpredictability. A significant amount of recent works focusing upon the IR frameworks emphasise the relationality of actors. This is because the more pressing questions arise not from a desire to solve the problem of 'uncertainty and unpredictability' but from a need to critically examine how these concepts are problematised. One ideological current premised on this uncertain and unpredictable world is the discussion presented in this article, which originates at the intersection of three academic disciplines: Mah & amacr;y & amacr;na Buddhism, quantum theory, and IR. In this article, I critically examine the image of ontology historically assumed by contemporary IR and make every effort to further develop a new methodology grounded on Mah & amacr;y & amacr;na Buddhism supported by quantum mechanics for this purpose and I will present the potential implications of this integrated worldview for contemporary world politics, suggesting how these insights can contribute to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of global ethics.
Founded in the post-liberal peace thesis that stresses the culturally and contextually oriented peace, this paper examines the underlying causes of conflict among Indigenous Peoples (IPs) in the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) and Mindanao, emphasizing the deep-rooted tensions between indigenous cosmologies and the Philippine state’s legal and governance frameworks. Despite the landmark passage of the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA) in 1997 designed to uphold ancestral land rights and require Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), its implementation remains hampered by structural contradictions. Chief among these are the enduring influence of the Regalian Doctrine, the prioritization of state-led militarization, and the imposition of extractive development projects that disregard indigenous autonomy. The study highlights the continued relevance and strength of indigenous conflict resolution practices such as the Bodong and Tongtongan in the Cordillera, and Kasabutan, Batasan, and Kamot among the Ovu-Manobo and other Lumad groups in Mindanao. These systems reflect a philosophy of restorative justice, rooted in communal memory, intergenerational dialogue, and sacred relations with the land. However, these customary mechanisms face increasing strain due to weakened cultural transmission, external legal and political pressures, and the risk of co-optation by state institutions. The paper calls for a radical rethinking of governance and legal pluralism that harmonizes state law with indigenous justice systems. Sustainable peace in CAR and Mindanao demands institutional reforms that are rooted in decolonial justice, community empowerment, and the defense of indigenous lifeworlds against the ongoing threats of dispossession and cultural erosion.
This article examines how the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), and NATO have expanded their Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, questioning whether this normative expansion denotes an "evolution without progress." By bridging constructivist norm contestation theory with feminist institutionalism, the study explores the transition from discursive mandate expansion to behavioral contestation through budgetary allocations and implementation mechanisms. Employing a qualitative research design, the article compares institutional patterns across three distinct organizational contexts, the UN as a global norm entrepreneur, the EU as regional security community, and NATO as a military alliance, across WPS mandates, budgeting, and implementation practices. The findings demonstrate that while the conceptual and institutional expansion of WPS across these organizations reflects significant applicatory contestation, an asymmetry emerges where mandate expansion outpaces budgetary allocation and implementation by states. Normative robustness is frequently hindered by bureaucratic absorption, structural inertia, and fragmented financing. Furthermore, the agenda faces growing validity contestation, evidenced by gender backlash at the state level and the formal withdrawal of Feminist Foreign Policies. The expansion of the WPS agenda remains largely discursive as persistent implementation gaps highlight the limits of institutional evolution in the absence of genuine normative progress.
This study investigates disaster management in Southeast Asia by examining the institutional dynamics between two regional international organizations (IOs): the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC). It analyzes the drivers and consequences of their overlap, which emerged from ASEAN's expansion into disaster management via a formal agreement-the AADMER-and the creation of an operational arm-the AHA Centre-to carry it out. The analysis reveals substantial overlap in policy scope and governance functions, with more modest yet meaningful overlap in membership and funding. However, this overlap declined in the 2010s as the ADPC began to reorient its mandate and objectives. We theorize that ASEAN member states were prompted to create a formal regional disaster relief mechanism in response to increasingly frequent and costly disasters. Rather than relying on the ADPC, they opted to strengthen ASEAN's institutional role due to its greater authority and member states' like-mindedness. We further argue that the ADPC's institutional misfit-rather than ideological or normative divergence-resulted in differentiation, coordination, and collaboration. Empirical findings support these claims, demonstrating how institutional design and strategic considerations shape IO overlap and its consequences in the disaster relief regime complex.
This article investigates joint naval exercises (JNEs) between China and seven littoral states of the Gulf as a prism through which to examine shifting alignments in a global order in flux. These questions have become only more salient in light of the US-Israel-Iran war. In a region long shaped by U.S.-led security structures, JNEs with China, described by the U.S. as a 'pacing challenge', raise questions about the Gulf states' evolving strategic orientations. Drawing on original open-source data and a newly compiled dataset of all JNEs involving Gulf states from 2000 to 2025, the article offers a quantitative and qualitative assessment of China's role as a security actor in the region. By comparing the number and frequency of JNEs conducted by China with those of other external powers - including the U.S., U.K., France, Japan, South Korea, and Russia - it evaluates whether China's growing global and regional stature has translated into meaningful security partnerships in the Gulf. Based on the findings, we argue that while Gulf states have increasingly pursued economic and political ties with China, the limited number of JNEs with these actors underscores the enduring predominance of U.S. and Western security partnerships. These findings shed light on the instrumental and performative nature of JNEs in the Gulf and particularly in relation to China-Gulf ties, as well as contribute to broader debates over multipolarity, alignment, and strategic signalling in the Global South and beyond.
Critical Peace and Conflict Studies (CPCS) has played an important role in questioning liberal peace through the local turn and the concept of hybridity. Much of this work, however, has tended to focus on epistemological concerns related to recognition and representation, while paying comparatively less attention to the ontological assumptions that underpin how peace is imagined. This tendency is particularly visible in discussions that describe peace as a process, which often continue to imply a normative horizon of positive peace. This paper engages with these debates by foregrounding vulnerability as a constitutive condition of being. Drawing on feminist care theory, it develops an affective-relational perspective that understands beings as inherently exposed, responsive, and relationally embedded. Rather than approaching care as a moral value or normative ideal, the paper treats it as a relational condition through which questions of ontology, epistemology, and ethics become intertwined. From this perspective, the ambivalence frequently associated with hybridity and the local can be read not simply as a problem of practice, but as reflecting broader tensions within prevailing ways of thinking about peace. By taking vulnerability and affectability seriously, the paper contributes to ongoing discussions by reorienting how peace is approached, and by suggesting the relevance of extending relational thinking beyond human-centred frameworks to include human-nonhuman relations.
Historical memory shapes individual and collective identities, with long-lasting effects on relations between countries. This study explores the enduring impact of historical memory on international relations, focusing on recent events in Northeast Asia, including the South Korean boycott of Japanese goods and the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment in China. Specifically, it investigates why collective memories, especially those related to past conflicts and atrocities, do not fade with time, but intensify sometimes, affecting diplomatic ties. The theoretical framework employs the "International Reconciliation Triangle," encompassing legal, moral, and political processes. The study delves into the role of collective memory, intergenerational transmission, and the selective nature of collective forgetting. Moreover, it analyzes the complex interplay between legal mechanisms, moral acknowledgement, and political leadership in fostering or hindering reconciliation. The results have theoretical implications, as they challenge existing theories by examining the proactive role played by the younger generation in recent anti-Japanese movements. Additionally, they question the assumptions around the ease of reconciliation as collective memories fade.
The methods of foresight analysis and scenario planning (FASP) are being applied in a wide range of use cases as institutions to plan for an uncertain future. Such efforts promise to mitigate future risk by informing action in the present. However, FASP approaches have failed to consider what lessons might be learned from the shortcomings of prior imaginative practices for risk mitigation. This article draws on work from Critical Security Studies to consider how FASP methods might be sharpened as tools for policy makers and academic researchers alike. In particular, we argue that FASP risks reproducing the very forms of overconfidence and epistemological closure that earlier risk management paradigms generated. By engaging concepts such as premediation, non-knowledge, and the politics of prediction, the article highlights how imaginative practices can both mitigate and manufacture vulnerability. A critically informed FASP framework therefore requires methodological transparency, epistemic humility, and explicit attention to the generative effects of imagining futures in the present.
The decentring agenda has gained traction in the literature on EU foreign policy over the past fifteen years. While debates have largely focused on normative and epistemological questions, methodological and fieldwork-related issues have been overlooked. This article emphasizes the potential contribution of ethnography to further operationalize the decentring agenda. We argue that the relocation of the site of observation from Brussels-based institutions to the ground of intervention - in Niger - reveals the agency of African actors and their influence on EU foreign policy. Following an inductive approach, ethnography also serves as a heuristic device connecting bodies of literatures that examine EU interventions in Africa from different perspectives (international relations, foreign policy analysis, sociology of EU integration, and African studies). The first part of the article discusses what ethnographic research entails and its added value to the decentring agenda. The second part reflexively introduces the conditions under which it might be possible to conduct fieldwork research and observations, building on the case of Niger. The third part explains how the empirical material produced and collected on the field provides insights that contribute to the decentring of EU foreign policy.
Since the 2000s, recurrent calls have been made to de-provincialize, globalize, and decolonize International Relations. While such increasing awareness within the scholarly community has led to a considerable wealth of knowledge production, the scope and scale of this turn remain nonetheless very debated. Centring an archival methodology, the article contributes to these debates through the insights and praxes of socio-political formations confronting US-led imperialism. The article draws on the case of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and focuses on the internationalist newspaper, al-Zahaf al-Akhdar (The Green March). It argues that Zahaf is an example of how the anti-imperialist archives foreground an ethos of resistance whose conditions of articulation stem from the pursuit of sovereignty, national liberation and internationalist unity against imperialism. It concludes reflecting on how the materialist analyses that these archives develop force us to re-imagine the contours of IR, at a time of increasing US-led imperialist violence.
This article explores the complementarity between the criminalization of solidarity and the externalization of EUropean borders by mapping laws across states working with Frontex. While both strategies have been widely documented and are central to the EUropean border regime's deployment of violence, they have often been studied in isolation. The article pursues two goals that aim to contribute to documenting the effects of EUropean policies while avoiding the pitfalls of EU-centrism and presentism. First, it maps the geographical spread of laws criminalizing solidarity. Second, it examines how the EUropean border regime operates by analyzing convergences and divergences between legal systems. This approach requires contextualizing and situating these strategies in the longue dur & eacute;e history of European colonial empires. The article's main contribution is to show through laws criminalizing solidarity how the EUropean border regime operates as a vehicle for normalizing and circulating legal regimes to deter, intercept, and push back people on the move.
The Cyprus problem has persisted for over half a century, resulting in a state of negative peace rather than positive peace based on social integration and mutual trust. Although today's youth have grown up within this divided status quo, the opening of checkpoints in 2003 has enabled intermittent intercommunal contact, raising questions about how young Cypriots envisage peace and under what conditions their attitudes may shift. Although there is growing recognition of young people in international frameworks, their perspectives remain marginal in Cyprus and there is limited systematic comparative evidence. This article contributes to the literature by providing rare comparative quantitative evidence on the factors shaping support for three interrelated indicators of positive peace: openness to intercommunal contact, voting intentions in a future reunification referendum, and support for additional checkpoints. The findings demonstrate that intercommunal contact can contribute to more positive attitudes towards peace, while also highlighting important differences between the two communities, underscoring the contextual nature of youth attitudes in a divided society.
In 2004 the European Union (EU)'s membership grew from 15 to 25 member states. This article analyses how the EU used this 'big bang enlargement' to promote horizontal and vertical expansion to its role as a global development actor. It describes how the Union's larger membership realised considerable horizontal expansion, primarily by increasing the development cooperation budget managed by the EU institutions. The global financial crisis, austerity measures in its member states as well as legal and institutional changes, however, hampered vertical expansion, with many member states failing to sufficiently increase their own national budgets and efforts to promote coordination and harmonisation delivering limited results. The understanding of the task division between the EU and its member states has evolved with the EU having gained a stronger role as a global development actor in its own right. This article contextualises and describes these expansion patterns by analysing key policy trends in the period 2000-2025 in a historical and international perspective and contributes new evidence to the literature on international organisation expansion.
Recent studies on Myanmar's foreign relations during its democratic transition (2011-2021) focus on its relations vis-& agrave;-vis great powers through the lens of hedging and bandwagoning. This article puts forward diversification and prudence as alternative conceptual frameworks that foreground our analysis on small states' agency and preferences in approaching Myanmar's external engagement during the period of National League for Democracy (NLD) government. During the period, Myanmar diversified its relations with major regional and extra-regional powers such as, but not limited to, Japan, India and Russia in different issue areas (military, economic and ideational). In parallel, the NLD, or Daw Suu in particular, considered China to be an indispensable partner due to its geopolitical and strategic importance. Therefore, it pursued benefits from China that aligned with the government's strategic priorities while properly assessing and mitigating risks from bilateral relations, for example, in its reduction of investment size in Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects. While two concepts are analytically distinct, collectively they fulfil a task of offering a more nuanced and contextually grounded picture of Myanmar's external engagement, demonstrating how the NLD government diversified its external relations to reduce its overreliance on China while simultaneously engaging with it in a prudent manner.
