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.
While state revisionism is well studied in International Relations, historical revisionism as a form of state revisionism has received significantly less attention, particularly in small states who are perceived to have diminished capacity and resources to engage in aggressive revisionist behaviors. This article focuses on denialist historical revisionism whereby political actors deny, trivialize, or minimize the qualification of or responsibility for certain atrocities contrary to the international consensus about them to investigate how revisionism develops from less to more aggressive forms for small states for which such practices might be too costly, both materially and reputationally. To do so, the article traces the trajectory of state-sponsored historical revisionism, including genocide denial, in Serbia and explores the factors that influence this trajectory. It adopts a relational approach to ontological security to observe historical revisionism as a mismatch between an actor's self-identity versus how the same actor believes the international community sees it considering the international consensus. Integrating both state-society relations and susceptibility to external recognition into the analysis, the article argues that whether or not small states like Serbia are emboldened to pursue more aggressive historical revisionist tactics necessitates a degree of both external and internal validation. More precisely, it requires securing and (mis)using traces of validation of the key aspects of the actor's favored self-identity from both outside sources of the international consensus, and domestic sources such as civil society, demonstrating creativity in agency. The article contributes to the studies of both (historical) revisionism and small states in International Relations.
What is voluntary action in International Relations (IR)? Literatures on bargaining, empire, foreign policy, grand strategy, hierarchy, hegemony, international law, international order, legitimacy, responsibility, status, and strategy depend on the answer, yet IR has no definition of it. We argue that voluntary action is an expression of genuine will. Yet, because of theoretical commitments, there remains deep disagreement about which actors are capable of genuine will, what process produces it, and what internal and external conditions interfere with it. We lay out where and why disagreements occur and discuss ways of advancing disputes over voluntarism in world politics.
With over three billion users, Facebook has direct access to a larger population than any state or nonstate actor in history. This article examines Facebook's power by constructing a political history of platform rule-the transnational exercise of state-like rulemaking by digital platforms that structure how networked publics form and interact. While much social media research rests on behavioral micro-foundations, this article mobilizes historical International Relations (IR) approaches to macro power to explain how Facebook generates collective political effects at scale. Drawing on theories of state power, the article conceptualizes platform rule through three dynamics. First, adapting Michael Mann's concept of infrastructural power, it shows how Facebook creates dependencies that organize communication and participation within networked publics. Second, building on James Scott, it analyzes how data surveillance and algorithmic curation render collectives legible-and selectively illegible-in ways that enable manipulation. Third, drawing on Charles Tilly, it conceptualizes Facebook's governance as a protection racket in which the platform generates harms through expansion and then unevenly mitigates them, particularly in the Global South. Empirically, the article draws on two decades of media reporting, leaked internal documents, and employee memoirs to trace Facebook's involvement in genocide, election interference, and mass surveillance. The article makes two contributions to IR scholarship on corporate power and private authority: it demonstrates that theories of state power offer critical leverage for understanding platform capacities to govern people directly, and it reveals how platform rule produces hierarchically organized networked publics with systematically unequal protections.
State systems vary in terms of the importance of declaratory versus constitutive forms of establishing statehood. We argue that interaction capacity explains this variance. Thinly developed systems with lower interaction capacity exhibit more declaratory properties of statehood, where states have less need to seek acceptance into an institutionalized "club" of states. Conversely, in systems with higher levels of interaction capacity, constitutive forms of recognition are more pronounced. Based on a combination of a qualitative analysis of historical state systems and a longitudinal network analysis of the contemporary international system, we demonstrate that increasing interaction capacity shifts the organizational principles of state systems from declaratory to constitutive practices. We theorize that this is how systems evolve. In thinner, low-capacity systems, states come first and make the system. But as the system thickens and constitutive practices are developed to manage crowding, it gradually determines who can be a state. Over the long run, the state made the system and the system made the state.
This article examines how the Peace of Westphalia has been interpreted and invoked from the conclusion of the peace itself to the present day. Rather than assessing whether different conceptions of Westphalia are valid or not, this article analyzes how conceptions of Westphalia have been used and reappropriated to legitimize notions of epochal change and constellations of power in international thought with profound consequences for international order. Ranging from celebrations of Protestant victory via visions of republican order and imperial international law to crude Cold War conceptions and its recent demise as a myth, the article demonstrates that conceptions of Peace of Westphalia have fulfilled a range of ideological functions crucial to the making of the modern international system.
Despite the endurance of unipolarity in material terms, Russia insists that the world is now multipolar. In this article, I argue that such claims function less as an empirical diagnosis and more as rhetorical strategy of great power status-seeking. Explicit discursive status claims risk to appear vain and may thus backfire. To that end, Russia invokes multipolarity to reclaim its great power status without explicitly asking for prestige. The article identifies three conditions that allow this strategy to gain traction: China's rise and its reluctance to embrace a bipolar structure; the normative reframing of multipolarity toward something inherently fair and just; and the enduring authority of realist language in world politics. The article traces how this narrative has gained traction not only among Russia's strategic partners, but also among Western powers. Their adoption of multipolarity rhetoric helps validate Russia's claim. The article concludes that multipolarity, far from being a neutral analytical term, has become a vehicle for status-seeking among major powers under the guise of structural description.
Why do some displays of gold in diplomacy appear legitimate while others are judged excessive or inauthentic? This article develops a framework for analyzing the moral foundations of diplomatic aesthetics. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s notion of hypergoods and integrating it with practice theory in International Relations, it conceptualizes diplomatic aesthetics as material and visual practices whose legitimacy rests not only on procedural appropriateness but also on alignment with deeper moral commitments and shared background knowledge about what is considered “proper,” “authentic” or “excessive” in diplomacy. Hypergoods and practical competence are therefore treated as intertwined. The analysis builds on interviews and photo elicitation with Swedish diplomats, civil servants, politicians and representatives of the Royal Court. It identifies two sets of hypergoods that orient Swedish understandings of diplomatic aesthetics: authenticity and restraint, and inclusion and equality. In Swedish settings, gilding is legitimized through its association with these values, allowing it to coexist with an egalitarian self-identity. By contrast, similar ornamentation in autocratic contexts, such as Russia, is widely interpreted as projecting hierarchy and domination. The article contributes by introducing hypergoods as an analytical lens for studying legitimacy in diplomacy and by shifting empirical attention to the perspectives of those who stage diplomatic aesthetics. It further shows how moral vocabularies function as boundary-drawing resources through which some aesthetic performances are authorized as tasteful and legitimate while others are dismissed as vulgar, derivative or morally suspect.
This article shows how knowledge around race, violence, and the political economy in the construction of international problems reproduces existing power dynamics in global governance. In particular, I contend that the operation of racial capitalism in the international system organizes the knowledge used to construct international problems, thereby limiting the possible solutions to those that maintain rather than unsettle the relations of power and dependency underpinning the global order. I develop this conceptualization through the Kimberley Process, wherein knowledge used to construct diamond regulation as an international problem emphasized the market-disruptive violence of civil war while racialized violence in production that made profits possible was left to continue unencumbered. This framework explains how global governance can reproduce inequitable relations despite inclusive sets of actors and also speaks to broader efforts in the discipline to understand the role of race in international relations.
This article develops a comprehensive typology of economic statecraft methods that contributes to a deeper understanding of how states wield power in the 21st century. Despite extensive scholarships on economic statecraft and geoeconomics, existing frameworks lack a unified structure that captures the full range of methods available to states. We propose a novel typology that distinguishes between two dimensions - statecraft venues (domestic, bilateral, network, and international economic organizations) and power use (accumulation and exercise) - to organize economic statecraft methods at a mid-level of abstraction between techniques and strategies. This framework integrates insights from existing literature and contemporary policy and security practices to derive a parsimonious yet granular classification of 17 distinct methods, including some that are underexplored in existing scholarships but in focus among national security and intelligence services. It also identifies generalizable conditions under which states can employ different methods, highlighting that while many states can accumulate and possibly exercise power through domestic and bilateral venues, only a few alone possess the structural advantages needed to apply economic statecraft through network and international economic organization venues. The typology provides analytical tools for scholars and policymakers to evaluate states' capabilities and vulnerabilities in a globalized economy but also reveals important areas of future research to advance the economic statecraft literature and inform policymaking.
All revolutionaries seek to remake their domestic orders, but only some pursue transformative change beyond the state. Those revolutionaries that are transformative at home and abroad have challenged imperialism (Nicaragua 1927), exported revolution (Iran 1979) and upset international alliances (Cambodia 1975). However, there is another category of revolutionaries who want to transform international order(s), but refrain from doing so. For these revolutionaries, survival of the revolution limits their ability to effect international change. I call this disjunct between revolutionary aspirations and actions "strategic acquiescence." Using a novel dataset of revolutionary pragmatism, this article conceptualizes, maps and typologizes the phenomenon of strategic acquiescence in the period between 1900 and 2020. Doing so not only shows the different ways in which revolutionaries have navigated the trade-off between survival and transformation, but also widens our understanding of the difficulties facing those seeking to effect radical change in world politics.
For some years, the traditional conceptual frames of International Relations (IR) scholarship have been under fire. We have been encouraged to 'sidestep' classical IR concepts and '-isms' in order to better engage the challenges facing varied human and non-human populations on the planet. In so doing, three distinct, yet seemingly interconnected, approaches have stood out: relational, planetary, and multispecies frames. While theoretical interventions have grown in confidence, practical questions abound: how do we 'do IR differently' in relational, planetary, and multispecies ways? This article tackles this crucial challenge for the future of IR theory and research practice. I argue that to do so we should start, not with abstract concepts, theories, or definitions, but rather by feeling, moving, and thinking in relations with others somewhere. To show what this might entail for IR, the article explores a process of engaging planetary multispecies relationalities in and around a cowshed in Wales, UK. It is argued that, far from being a peripheral site for IR, in the cowshed one can (1) more readily notice the limits of IR concepts and scales; (2) enable new analytical senses, connections and expressions to percolate to the fore; and (3) thus also gain a 'sense' not only of why relational planetary multispecies politics is so challenging for IR theory and practice but also what it would mean to 'do IR differently'.
This article engages with the mobile phone as a locus of military practice and resistance by examining the use of mobile phones as tactical targets in war. Our analysis adds to the International Relations (IR) and security studies literature that has investigated the mobile phone by mobilising Paul Virilio's thinking around prosthetic technologies and obedient resistance. In this way, we offer an account of how the mobile phone enables political domination and violence, while at the same time affording creative modes of resistance. To illustrate our theorisation of the mobile phone at war, we turn to three empirical examples from the post-9/11 US drone strikes, the post-2022 war in Ukraine, and Israel's walkie-talkie and pager attacks in Lebanon in 2024. They show how tactical targeting operates through the ontological collapsing of human and device and how the relative 'smartness' of the device influences levels of human/technology integration and the kind of political violence that the phone makes possible. Moreover, the illustrations demonstrate how obedient resistance may occur through three related strategies, all of which seek to partly reverse the integration of human and device: decoupling, encrypting, and unsmarting.
What if the notion of the state was not first conceived of in political theory, nor traceable to Thomas Hobbes, but gradually articulated through humdrum statutory formulations? Through a study of treason statutes in the wake of the English Reformation of the 1530s, this article traces how the state was first framed as an abstract, impersonal entity against changing notions of treason. Thus, the article challenges established narratives that trace the state's conceptual origins to Hobbes (or, more obstinately, Westphalia). Through Tudor treason statutes, I show how allegiance was gradually transposed from the person of the ruler to the state or realm itself, thus bringing about the state as a subject of loyalty long before it appeared in canonical texts. Methodologically, the article advances an embedded or relational approach to conceptual change in that it demonstrates how key transformations in political authority often arise from peripheral concepts and sites, such as administrative practices, rather than from innovations in core theoretical categories. In doing so, I contribute to recast the conceptual foundations of International Relations by foregrounding the everyday practices and state utterances through which political authority became thinkable-long before it was rationalized in political theory.
Over recent decades, we have witnessed the consolidation of securitization as a framework for understanding state-led responses to migratory influxes, in particular focused on border impenetrability and territorial control. However, we have also seen growing tensions and contradictions between migration securitization practices on the ground, migration governance processes, and racialized regimes of capitalist production. This article highlights how the migration securitization literature often homogenizes and universalizes the relationship between security responses and borders, by bringing it into conversation with the literature on racial capitalism. We bridge this theoretical divide via a case study examination of Brazil's "Operation Welcome" since 2018, which has worked to receive and resettle Venezuelan migrants and refugees away from the border state of Roraima to other parts of the country. We present how the militarization of Operation Welcome was carried out through a "bureaucratization of militarization," instead of conventional military tactics seeking to contain migration. And we discuss how access to the national territory and legal employment for Venezuelans in Brazil facilitates their insertion into racial capitalist structures of labor exploitation. Employing extensive fieldwork data, interviews, and participant observations to sustain these claims, we present how migration securitization methods, processes, and outcomes are not simply the result of sovereignty anxieties or a need to reaffirm border security, but rather are also shaped by global and local structures of (racialized) exploitation and dispossession.
Appeals to solidarity are common in international relations, but solidarity is rarely addressed in International Relations research. In this paper, we theorize the concept, propose a strategy of operationalization and map empirical manifestations in a most likely case: natural disasters. Solidarity refers to mutual moral and material support in times of need. It arises when adversity befalls an innocent victim, prompting expressions of compassion by less affected parties and collective sharing to help the victim recover. Solidarity is neither rare nor a given: we find that in 50 percent of large natural disasters between 1995 and 2018, some form of mutual support occurred. Solidarity emerges most consistently when it is needed most, to address very deadly disasters. Yet, its limited forms - with strong moral support or high material sharing, but not the other - are more common. Our theoretical framework offers insight into the causes and correlates of different solidarity outcomes.
What do the costumes that soldiers wear have to do with the ethics of war? This article tackles this question. It argues that military uniforms operate as a site and source of ethics of war discourse, reproducing codes of conduct as the dress code. It advances an account of the uniform as a material interface where the ethics shows itself in aesthetic form, and vice versa. It elaborates this position via a case study of the 2018 decision of the Australian Defence Force to respond to the commission of war crimes by its members by tightening uniform regulations - specifically by banning patches that displayed death symbology (e.g. the Grim Reaper logo, Punisher emblem, etc.). While critics and former military personnel have derided this move as superficial, we suggest that it reflects a sophisticated attempt to leverage dress code as a means of reinforcing ethical code. We build on this insight to mount a case for a new approach to the ethics of war. Contemporary ethics of war scholarship focuses predominantly on textual sources, treating them as if they are the only vector of ethical reasoning about war. This overlooks the reality that ethical positions bearing on war are routinely transmitted via a range of non-textual conduits, including material, aesthetic, and ritual practices. The argument, which we develop over the course of this article, is that ethics of war scholars should widen their aperture to account for the full range of forms that ethical claims about the use of force assume.
The literature on contested states and other sovereignty claimants, from de facto states to governments-in-exile, has explored their predicaments, trajectories, and bids for recognition to grasp whether and how their sovereignty claims stick. In this article, we complement existing research by focusing on actors other than governments and international organizations, including ordinary people, field offices of UN agencies, and international courts, that come to indirectly validate assumptions of sovereignty. Although often for limited purposes, such as requesting and issuing identity documents or delineating jurisdiction in specialized proceedings, these actors presume, bracket, and project states at various scales and sites, with important consequences. Claims to state sovereignty, we argue, have performative effects when picked up in circulating attributions, including unwitting ones. More specifically, functional work-arounds and interim arrangements afford limited placeholder exceptions which tend to be reiterated in other situations, leading to consequential expansions with knock-on effects. Sovereignty is thus bootstrapped as a self-validating status assumption, as we show with examples from Northern Cyprus and Palestine to the Tamil Tigers and Syrian opposition governments. Bootstrapping can also falter, however, when validations are suspended. These placeholder dynamics help explain how attributions of sovereignty simultaneously challenge, mimic, and rearticulate the statist international (dis)order.
