The field of International Relations (IR) has come under increasing and sustained criticism for producing and disseminating a particular reading of European history, one rooted in violence, as if it were universal knowledge. Generations of students, academics, practitioners, and policymakers have been taught and socialized into accepting this violent historical experience as the norm and, implicitly, as a reflection of human nature. As a result, the dominant accounts of IR tend to foreground competitive, conflictual, domineering, power-seeking, and exploitative behaviours as defining features of international life. This understanding of IR marginalizes and often ignores Indigenous ways of knowing that emphasize relationality, solidarity, mutual care, and cooperative forms of social organization. In this article, we argue that centring Afrocentric Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS), particularly their conceptualizations of persons in IR scholarship, has the potential to move the field beyond its bleak and violent roots towards a more humane and relational epistemology. The AIKS-centred approach to IR is better suited to capturing the nuances of contemporary global life while speaking to the lived experiences of Africans and potentially other Indigenous peoples around the world.
The article examines the ideas of Pan-Africanism and Black internationalism as African political thought and core concepts in African International Relations. They acquire significant meaning through their framing as political activism or as theoretical frameworks aimed at advancing social and political change. Pan-Africanism has been understood as an idea and a movement for African peoples’ self-determination and solidarity worldwide and has been linked to the concept of internationalism, specifically Black internationalism. Both concepts call for solidarity between Africa and its diasporas worldwide, and they both evoke the ideals of self-determination and Black liberation. The article argues that the two concepts are deployed not as problem-solving theories but rather as intellectual activism. They are central pillars of African intellectual exercises that seek to change or transform the international system to reflect the experiences of Africans and Black people, who have historically been marginalized in both scholarship and practices of international politics.
International Relations (IR) has come under increasing and sustained criticism for marginalizing Africa’s intellectual traditions, rich history, Indigenous knowledge systems, and lived experiences. Several scholars of IR have argued that meaningful engagement with African contexts and thought would lead to better theory and pedagogy, more robust concepts, sharper analysis, and the study of issues that have greater relevance to contemporary global life. Despite the seriousness and widespread nature of the criticism, it is rare to find manuscripts in major IR journals that move beyond critique to demonstrate concretely how centring Africa in IR scholarship could transform the discipline or substantially enhance its analytical tools. This symposium takes up that difficult task by showing how a focus on African systems of thought can enrich IR’s conceptual vocabulary, reorient core assumptions, and expand the range of questions the discipline is equipped to address.
Scholars of Africa’s International Relations (IR) have criticized how the continent is studied in IR and its positioning on the margins of the field. Though a significant portion of the IR literature on Africa focuses on gender, and women, African feminist thought has not been centred in this literature. In this paper, I examine how African feminisms can contribute to IR. I show that by drawing on African feminist thought, IR can address weaknesses in how Africa is studied in the field. Specifically, I discuss how African feminists’ understanding of the complexity of context, and attention to history and intersectionality, provide direction on how to study African states and societies and their interaction with the international.
How should we assess and judge the harm inflicted by egregious wrongdoing and how should we respond to such wrongdoings after they have occurred? These are the questions this contribution tackles from an African communitarian Ubuntu worldview that centres the humanity of everyone impacted in both its understanding of wrongdoing and remedy. It argues that restoration of shared humanity is regarded as the primary and ultimate function of justice in the African systems of political thought.
How can we read International Relations from the perspective of Africa in a way that does not perpetually put the continent in a permanent state of exception vis-à-vis global politics? What strategies are available to study Africa without overhyping narratives of its rise or demise? This article contends, drawing on Edward Said, that adopting contrapuntal reading enables reading Africa’s place in international politics beyond narratives and counter-narratives of Africa moving from one exceptional state of despair to an exceptional state of prosperity with nothing in between. The article uses the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative and its counter-narrative of Africa as a place of perpetual lack, deviance, and demise to illustrate how to practically adopt contrapuntalism as a method and as an ethos when engaging African perspectives in IR. It argues that contrapuntalism is a commitment to practicing critical thinking and questioning Eurocentric modes of thinking when approaching mainstream accounts of the history, origin, or interpretations of any political event. Contrapuntalism acknowledges that dominant narratives need to be read side-by-side with narratives of resistance and that non-Western concepts do not always need to be translated or rendered legible by creating (forced) Eurocentric equivalents for them to be legitimate or valid.
Spurred on in part by the large social justice mobilizations that began in 2020, recent years have seen growing calls for diversifying and decolonizing the disciplinary practices in the field of International Relations (IR). In response to these calls within the field and across academia more broadly, faculty and students in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University embarked on a project to produce a ‘Resource Bank’ highlighting and centring alternatives to Euro-American epistemologies, pedagogies, and ontologies that have thus far dominated the IR field. Drawing on our experiences as project managers of this Resource Bank project since its inception in 2021, we discuss some of the most salient issues and important challenges that emerged in the course of this work. We employ a postcolonial theoretical framework to tease out and problematize the Eurocentric foundations of the IR field and utilize the Resource Bank to reimagine research and teaching in the IR field.
In 2021, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), an umbrella organization mobilizing a network of sectoral initiatives for climate action, was launched to ‘transform the global financial system.’ In part due to its efforts, hundreds of global financial companies joined and collectively committed to net-zero emissions reduction targets. But the momentum was short-lived: in the ensuing years, internal and external challenges led to defections, the reconfiguration of GFANZ, and the collapse of affiliate alliances. Such a pattern rests uneasily with theories of change like the norm cascade, which asserts that exponential uptake is a prelude to resilience, not fragility. In this paper, I argue that cases such as GFANZ may be better described as a ‘hype cycle’ rather than a norm cascade, where ambiguity and uncertainty limit normative and calculative reasoning; actors refer to each other’s behavior as an indication of what to do; and time limits incentivize participation to avoid being left behind. I demonstrate the validity of this account through an analysis of three GFANZ-affiliated alliances (the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, and the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative), and their episodes of membership growth and decline.
What is the relationship between political ideology and realism in international relations? This article reconceptualizes the realist relationship with ideology in terms of a recurring experience of ideological exile. Exile was a crucial part of the biographical experience of early realists like Hans Morgenthau and John Herz. I argue that the idea of exile also marked an aspect of their relationship to ideology. Realists often allied themselves with ideological camps, through which they aimed to shape political practice. Yet realists mistrusted ideological utopianisms, and these liaisons often ended badly - in effect driving realists into ideological exile. The resulting exile persona has marked realism durably, recurring among later realists who do not have a biographical experience of exile in the conventional sense. Exile has thus become a persistent, constitutive feature of the intellectual project of realism itself. My argument has ongoing implications for how we understand realism as a political project.
This paper analyzes two ideal-type signaling interactions that are fundamental to international relations: reassurance and coercive bargaining. In reassurance, states attempt to signal that their goals are compatible in order to avoid conflict, whereas in coercive bargaining, they attempt to inflate the incompatibility of their goals in order to increase their negotiating leverage over a disputed asset. This article conceptualizes these two types of signaling interaction and delineates semi-overlapping conditions under which each obtains. It then identifies three ways in which credible signaling occurs differently in reassurance versus coercive bargaining. First, the directional effects of power shifts are reversed in each interaction, generating incentives for rising states to misrepresent in reassurance but not in bargaining. Second, whereas signals that are costless to honest, high-resolve senders are widely available in bargaining, the most prominent reassurance signals are typically costly even to honest senders with benign intentions. Third, it is often difficult to infer which issue area motivates senders’ behaviors in reassurance, whereas in bargaining senders have incentives to reveal which issues they prioritize. In combination, these distinctions suggest that reassurance is systematically more difficult than signaling high resolve.
A growing number of governments are seeking to return control from supranational authorities to the state. Many of them wish to do so without sacrificing the benefits of deep international cooperation. But this desire to increase national control while maintaining cooperation - which we term 'sovereigntist internationalism' - is often frustrated in practice. We argue that this is due to a 'trust paradox' these governments face when their ideological commitments push them towards trust-based institutional arrangements while simultaneously rendering them less trusting and less trustworthy. We illustrate our argument with a case study of the Brexit negotiations during Theresa May's premiership from 2016 to 2019. Drawing on elite interviews, we show how the UK government sought to transpose existing forms of economic cooperation into looser institutional arrangements but failed to convince the European Commission that enough trust could be generated to make the continuation of deep cooperation viable without strong control mechanisms. Our argument advances debates in International Relations (IR) by, first, explaining governments' sometimes contradictory preferences for institutional designs; second, showing that different actors need different levels of trust to achieve similar levels of cooperation; and, third, improving our understanding of how populist actors view international institutions.
The ethics of the international monetary system (IMS) can be framed either as a case of background injustice or of structural injustice. Both ideas suggest that due to the background conditions, the interaction of agents, in a context of no rules, can lead to domination and unfairness. Moreover, both ideas emphasise the need to create regulation, or a structure, that prevents domination and unfairness. This article asks how (if at all) do monetary regimes, or each of the three scenarios that stem from the Mundell-Fleming trilemma, raise domination and unfairness. This article identifies domination and unfairness in both regimes with open capital markets: the one with floating exchange rates and the one with fixed exchange rates. Moreover, it offers a principle of non-domination, according to which institutions of the IMS ought to guarantee effective sovereignty of participant states or offer an equal distribution of this value when securing full effective sovereignty for all is not possible. For the last regime, of closed capital markets, this article identifies unfairness but no domination. By identifying domination and unfairness in each regime, this article proposes policies and regulation, or a structure, to prevent and mitigate these issues.
A central concept in Global International Relations (IR) is 'global' or 'globality,' which has been commonly understood as the sum total of all geo-cultural parts of the world. This understanding underpins Global IR's efforts to make IR more geo-epistemologically representative and inclusive, but it has been criticized for its essentialism trap and geo-epistemology. While many critics problematize Global IR's conception of globality, few pay attention to an alternative form of existence of globality, namely, its embodiment within each of the 'geo-cultural' parts. This article aims to engage with this form of globality by drawing on the conceptual framework of quantum holography, which sees the whole as not just comprising its parts but also being encoded within them. The implications are that if global-local relationality is holographic in nature, globalizing IR should entail not only externally expanding IR's geo-epistemological horizon but also discovering and appreciating the globality that always already exists within each locale. Thus, this approach may help us tackle the stubborn binary of global vs. local/national in the Global IR debate and mitigate its essentialism trap and geo-epistemology. To illustrate, we apply this framework to problematize 'Chineseness' in the Chinese School of IR theory.
Scholars of Kant have long been critical of International Relations’ appropriation of his Toward Perpetual Peace, in particular as it informed democratic peace theory. Now, with democratic backsliding occurring even at the core of the ‘separate peace’ the theory claims developed between democracies, that critique gains newfound salience. This essay demonstrates how the theory is unable to understand democratic backsliding, especially as it is occurring in the United States, but would have been able to if not for misinterpretations of certain substantive elements of Kant’s schema, and, more crucially, a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and proper use of it. Grounding a reading of Toward Perpetual Peace more thoroughly in Kant’s philosophical system, I develop the idea of conceiving of and utilizing the essay’s schema in terms of what I call a critical cosmology of peace – a holistic and evolving vision of interrelated practices, conditions, and mechanisms encompassing all of humanity through time and space, and meant mainly to act as a tool of perpetual critique of whatever existing form and degree of democratic peace is currently in existence.
International organisations (IOs) hold important governance functions and power. Yet, they are several steps detached from the constituencies that have entrusted them with functions and resources to carry them out, even as accountability expectations remain significant for their legitimacy. This article presents a broadly generalisable theoretical framework for understanding the variable accountability of IOs, seeking to advance the understanding of international accountability in three new ways. First, it elaborates on the concept of the scope of IO accountability, which can vary across organisations, over time, and across contexts. The idea of a scope of accountability moves beyond the dichotomy of accountable versus non-accountable power holders and advances an understanding of accountability as a multi-layered phenomenon, whereby both the expectations and practices of accountability can evolve over time and with respect to different audiences. Second, the article identifies three political factors – namely the formal and informal excercise of power, institutional structure, and public salience – that can shape, in important ways, the variable scope of IO accountability. Finally, it critically explores the tensions and contradictions between these political dynamics, and the implications for access to and the efficacy of accountability systems.
How might international society serve as an ontological security provider? Ontological security studies sees societies as both containers of anxiety and providers of security, but there is little research on how international society relates to this. Any answer to my question is further complicated by multiple takes (Lacanian, Kleinian, and Winnicottian) on the way the subject secures its self. I demonstrate how this multiplicity is accommodated by the conceptual heterogeneity of the 'English School' and offer three separate answers. Lacanian theory suggests a 'pluralist' international society can mitigate ontological insecurity because its institutions encircle 'the lack' that constitutes (collective) subjectivity. Kleinian theory supports the institutions of a 'thin solidarist' international society because it demonstrates how the collective action needed to protect the legal rights that recognise and secure the (collective) self does not necessarily cause anxiety. Drawing on Winnicott, Honneth argues that the (collective) self can only be fully secured if the institutions of a 'thick solidarist' international society go beyond legal recognition to socially esteem the contribution the subject makes to realising the common good. The analytical framework is applied to interpret and respond to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, offering a timely intervention into debates on a post-liberal international order.
How should the responsibility for refugees be distributed among states? While scholars have proposed various sources of responsibility to make the distribution more equitable, they have not provided guidance on how to weigh each principle within a composite scheme. This is an important problem to resolve because the principles often implicate different actors, resulting in distinct distributions of responsibility. Moreover, states are particularly able to obfuscate their level of responsibility when multiple principles exist. To remedy this problem, I specify the range of possible solutions to the weighting problem, based on the principles of liability, community, and capacity. This argument identifies the relative importance of each principle based on the stated goals of a particular framework. These goals include whether the scheme is intended to operate under ideal or non-ideal assumptions, or if it intends to optimize state or refugee interests. By focusing on how to weigh various sources of responsibility, this paper paves the way for scholars to develop determinate schemes that can identify each state's fair share in contexts where multiple principles apply.
Despite Fanon’s recent popularity, his work on violence is portrayed as controversial, particularly regarding revolutionary violence. Revolutionary violence in anti-colonial movements is either glorified as a liberating force or vilified as terrorism. However, this portrayal misses one of the main contributions of Fanon’s thought on violence, that is, violence cannot be separated into direct and structural, physical and epistemic, or revolutionary and colonial violence. I theorise what Fanon calls ‘atmospheric violence’ – violence that is, like the air, pervasive within the colonial system and its totality is reflected not only in the apparatus, structure, and meaning, but also in the felt, visceral, and embodied. In this sense, atmospheric violence cannot be compartmentalised but is layered, dynamic, and able, which is particularly useful in investigating the revolutionary violence of the colonised being. This paper theorises atmospheric violence through three points of engagement: first, atmospheric violence shows that colonial violence is violence of abjection rather than of social domination and subordination; second, atmospheric violence indicates that revolutionary violence reveals the complex relationship to agency and postcolonial subjectivity; third, atmospheric violence shows how revolutionary violence poses a potential for and a limitation to decolonisation due to its nature of non-compartmentalisation.
This article offers a new approach to the opposition of utopianism and realism in interwar International Relations. It first analyses how E. H. Carr drew on Karl Mannheim to develop that opposition in his 1939 classic, The Twenty Years' Crisis, and how Alfred Zimmern, one of Carr's predecessors in the Woodrow Wilson Chair in International Politics at Aberystwyth, responded to Carr and his Mannheimian model in a review in the Spectator as well as in private correspondence with Norman Angell and others. It then offers a close reading of Carr's allusions to Zimmern in his discussions of power, morality, and international law, and of the passages from Zimmern's works that Carr was quoting. Analysis of how Carr and Zimmern read each other's works and of some of Zimmern's other writings suggests that they were closer in thought than Carr was willing to allow and that it was Carr's apparent relativism to which Zimmern took objection. This article shows that contemporary readers, including Christian Realists such as J. H. Oldham and William Paton, were alive to these similarities and relates Carr's misreading of Zimmern to their different attitudes to appeasement and their different disciplinary notions of International Relations.
The paper advances a novel theoretical perspective on the agency of international organizations (IOs). It argues that existing accounts–whether focused on intraorganizational actors such as bureaucracies or on member-dominated IOs–overlook the fact that IO agency is inseparable from their personification through the ascription, in decision-making and official documents, of various intentions, beliefs, and emotions. To address this gap, the paper draws on Margaret Gilbert’s concept of plural subjects, i.e., collective agents formed through the joint commitment of their members to act as aunified body. Using the UN Security Council as an illustrative case, the paper contends that IOs function as such plural subjects. In doing so, the paper departs from the longstanding criterion in International Relations that IOs must act independently of state interests and preferences to qualify as agents in their own right. It further argues, also contra dominant theories, that IO agency is not transient, but a stable and enduring feature. The paper concludes by outlining the theoretical and empirical implications of this perspective, particularly for understanding institutional moral agency and IO authority.
