What makes a peace process a ‘success story’? In Northern Ireland, suicidality rose sharply after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, even as the peace process became internationally celebrated as a model of conflict settlement. International Relations and peacebuilding scholarship have largely recognised suicide only when it emerges as political self-sacrifice – terrorism, hunger strike and self-immolation – while ‘ordinary’ or everyday suicides are politically and institutionally routed to public health, psychology and sociology and thereby risk being depoliticised. Against this division of labour, the article theorises post-conflict civilian suicidality as a peace governance outcome; namely, an immanent, structural effect of liberal peacebuilding’s logic of containment, stabilisation and political trade-offs. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, I argue that peace processes can be analysed as death-driven structures. They reproduce themselves by repeating practices that secure negative peace while undercutting positive peace, including healing, reconciliation, integration and care. This self-undermining repetition casts off what I call surplus violence: the remainder generated by the subtraction of negative peace gains from positive peace aspirations. I conceptualise the governance of this remainder as autoktonopolitics, that is, the circulation and distribution through which self-killing is made intelligible, normalised and absorbed as collateral, private or non-political. Empirically, the article draws on interviews in Northern Ireland from 2024 to 2026 to trace technologies of autoktonopower across peace funding, consociational governance, post-paramilitary appeasement and territorialised coercive community control. The article redescribes peace as a question of post-conflict order reproduction, opening a research agenda for Lacanian peacebuilding studies and the libidinal economies of peace processes.
The North Atlantic Alliance has been a crucial pillar of American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. According to conventional accounts, the imperative to defend "free people" from the menace of communism was critical in legitimizing the birth of the North Atlantic security community. However, why then was the defence of "free people" limited to European empires and not extended to populations segregated at home or those colonized by those very "Western democracies"? I argue that racialized liberalism can explain this discrepancy. Racialized liberalism is the everyday popular ideology that sees White people as the natural subjects of democracy. It made White democracies appear as natural allies and made it a sacred obligation to defend White democracies from external threats. This paper shows that racialized liberalism - popularly referred to as "Western civilization" - was crucial to legitimizing American commitments to the North Atlantic in the immediate postwar era and that it was particularly effective at dismissing criticism by isolationists, including dismissing arguments by fiscal conservatives, realists, and liberals. As such, contrary to a race-neutral postwar liberal international order, racialized liberalism legitimized a security community between White democracies while concurrently subsidizing colonialism, in the name of defending "freedom" abroad.
This article explains why state agencies selectively implement international norms despite their lack of legal ratification. This theoretical puzzle stems from an empirical case of uneven adoption of human rights norms in Indonesia’s fishery sector. In response to various scandals of worker maltreatment in the country’s fisheries industry, the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries implemented elements of a human rights certification aligned with international labour organization (ILO) Convention 188. However, the formally authorised Ministry of Manpower resisted incorporating the norm into national law. What drives this fragmented application? More specifically, why do the two ministries take different positions on applying the embraced international norm? The established norm diffusion theories have explained how international norms are localised and contested by domestic actors. However, they do not theorise the role of contested social classes and economic interests in fragmenting the implementation of the norms in the local context. To close this gap, the article combines norm localisation with the Gramscian theory of state fragmentation. Fragmented norm implementation is explained as the outcome of conflicting economic interests among social forces that capture state agencies. Through this lens, the article argues that the conflicting economic interests of the dominant social forces directing the Ministry of Manpower and their challengers, holding the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries, have led to the fragmented application of the assumed Convention 188. This study contributes to broadening and deepening the conceptual framework for analysing the impacts of local agents in the norm diffusion scholarship from a critical political economy perspective.
A novel case for the neoclassical realist (NCR) scientific research program is made via a rigorous yet practical expert guide, integrating insights from six theoretical traditions - Rosean, Cadillac, Aronian, Munich, New European, and Global - structured by eight targeted abductive questions and demonstrated across four contemporary empirical scenarios. It first maps NCR's topography through an analysis of 265 scholarly works, highlighting extensive geographical and theoretical diversity. In complementary fashion, it identifies six NCR traditions - both implicit and self-declared, some extant, others emerging - each analytically powerful across diverse regions: the US-based Rosean and widely exported/indigenized Cadillac traditions; two traditional European yet overlooked schools, philosophical Aronian and synoptic Munich; the converging New European tradition; and the emerging Global NCR emphasizing non-Western yet still realist perspectives. In their identifying, we explicitly reject inter-theoretical fusion, set clear criteria, and maintain meta-theoretical coherence within realism. Each tradition has distinct epistemological orientations and explanatory logics, challenging prevailing views of NCR as merely a unified American extension of structural realism. The article introduces an original abductive comparative framework structured by eight guiding questions addressing analytical purpose, historical timeframe, systemic-domestic drivers, leadership/regime characteristics, degree of Westphalian sovereignty, revisionist-status quo orientations, alliance patterns, and nuclear/advanced-deterrence considerations. Positive heuristics of an abductive approach to NCR is demonstrated across four empirical scenarios - War in Ukraine, Sino-US rivalry, Saudi-Iran balancing, and Brexit/European Union (EU) crisis - optimizing puzzle fits and enhancing theoretical precision, explanatory coherence, and empirical sensitivity. This approach offers scholars directly comparable theory lines to tackle complex international dynamics in the 21st century.
This article foregrounds the ethical nature of the relationship between temporality and history in International Relations (IR) theory, in the context of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. The article contends that a retrieval of history is a defining feature of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. However, both mainstream and more critical IR frameworks, including those critical of how IR theorises temporality, struggle in different ways to account for subaltern historical consciousness, thus casting history as teleological, and as something to be repaired, caught up with or left behind. In response, the article introduces a conceptual distinction between repair and retrieval. Repair functions within a progressive temporal logic, seeking to redress past harms in order to improve the present and advance into a more just future. Retrieval, by contrast, inhabits a different temporal horizon: it re-enters the past to reclaim suppressed histories, materialities and political possibilities that continue to animate subaltern life-worlds and subaltern political demands. The article argues that the logic of retrieval better reflects the historical consciousnesses of peoples subjected to state and imperial violence, particularly in this time of genocide. Through an engagement with Palestinian struggles for decolonisation, it shows how subaltern temporalities contest dominant narratives of irretrievability and assert the enduring presence of worlds otherwise deemed lost in history. This ethical reorientation towards history and temporality challenges IR theorists to reconceive theory not simply as explanation or projection, but as a response to historical demands for decolonisation that remain unresolved and ongoing.
