Abstract This paper explores the relationship between popular culture and imaginaries of resistance and violence, by looking at the influence of cultural artefacts on anti-technology beliefs within insurrectionary anarchism. Scholarly inquiry has investigated the intellectual roots of anti-technology extremism but eschewed the influence of popular culture. Focusing on dystopian narratives as mediating cultural technologies and adopting the theoretical distinction between substantivist and instrumentalist understandings of technology to explain their material manifestations, this paper develops a thematic framework identifying three purposes driving the inclusion of popular culture in anarchists’ anti-tech narratives. First, anti-technology anarchists leverage speculative fiction to vividly illustrate contemporary society’s dystopian and totalitarian nature. Second, the increasing popularity of techno-dystopian cultural products is interpreted as evidence of growing societal hostility toward techno-industrial civilization. Third, popular culture provides an opportunity to reflect on rebellion. By delving into the relationship between popular culture and imaginaries of resistance and violence, this paper contributes to understanding how the resort to cultural goods can provide insights into extremist worldviews and modus operandi.
Abstract This article develops the concept of the geopolitics of children’s sexuality to examine how childhood becomes a central arena of contestation in the global governance of gender and sexuality. Drawing on Polish and Hungarian legislative initiatives on the “protection” of children, it argues that childhood is strategically mobilized as a form of symbolic capital in transnational struggles. The framework foregrounds children’s sexual agency as a key object of dissensus linking the micro-politics of subject formation with the macro-politics of geopolitical boundary-making. Children’s rights, rather than constituting a stable legal framework, are reinterpreted by both liberal and illiberal actors, thereby revealing the constitutive ambiguity and normative elasticity of human rights. Illiberal actors deploy securitization strategies that construct childhood as a national good to be defended, framing gender and sexual diversity as threats to moral sovereignty. The article contributes to debates on norm contestation and the role of childhood as a technology of governance, showing how struggles over intimate life are constitutive of broader geopolitical conflicts.
Abstract Experience-near and reflexive research practice has become the new gold standard for constructionist scholarship in IR and IPS. A key promise of this dual ‘local’ and ‘reflexive turn’ is that privileging subaltern perspectives, everyday experience, and situated knowledges will help fracture traditional and foreground alternative ontologies of the International, thereby helping subaltern actors build effective forms of political agency. Although this strategy has produced a surge of methodological innovation and greatly increased the plurality of voices and standpoints represented within IR and IPS discourse, a growing number of scholars have raised doubts about the narrative that scientific inquiry can function as a performative catalyst of political agency for the situated knowledges it foregrounds. This article challenges the presumption that foregrounding reflexive and experience-near knowledges is sufficient to empowering marginalized and subaltern actors. I argue that this logic fundamentally mis-construes the “problem of (constructing) agency” these actors face because of the dominance of a “constitutive idiom” that (mis-)understands the production of scientific knowledge and social order as mutually reflective or co-constitutive. Building on feminist, post-colonial, and pragmatist insights, I show that experience-near, situated knowledges and techniques and instruments of theorizing are neither opposed nor mutually exclusive but complementary to the construction of reflexive and transformative forms of social agency.
Abstract Resilience has become a dominant paradigm in economic development, international security, and climate change mitigation. For many public commentators and policy practitioners, resilience promises better coping in a complex world of recurring crises. However, the academic disciplines of international relations and politics have so far been critical of the new governing ethos. Whether they see it as biopolitical, neoliberal, or post-liberal, critics agree on the passive and socially regressive nature of resilience. The article takes issue with this negative, one-sided view by articulating a pragmatist iteration of resilience. Drawing on the philosophy of John Dewey, the article argues that resilience and pragmatism share an affinity in three respects. First, both reject a will to truth, emphasizing the limited and provisional character of knowledge. Second, they embrace a deeply experimental ethos, putting the focus on practice over theory. Thirdly, they strive to include a diverse set of actors in the policy-making process. My argument is that these three commonalities help avoid the responsibilizing and depoliticizing nature of resilience identified by biopolitical and governmentality accounts of resilience. Through fallibilism, experimentation, and diversity, pragmatist resilience offers more than mere adaptation. It promises scientific progress, increasing human control and collective growth.
Abstract In liberal democracies, policing is conventionally understood as a secular and rational practice grounded in the rule of law. Yet this assumption is unsettled as religion re-emerges as a formative force in security governance. Across the contemporary global far right, religious nationalism increasingly legitimises authoritarian security agendas by fusing moral and emotional appeals with projects of exclusion and repression. This article argues that such dynamics hinge on what we term the counterpolitics of emotions, the political contestation through which actors seek to reshape the emotional norms that sustain liberal institutions. By reconfiguring how state agents feel about themselves, their work, and those they govern, these counterpolitics enable the affective normalization of authoritarian practices. The argument is developed through the case of Brazil, where Evangelical activism has become deeply entwined with policing. Drawing on documentary and interview data, the article shows how Evangelical chaplaincy organizations cultivate emotional repertoires that valorize pride and vulnerability while suppressing guilt and shame. In doing so, they recast police officers as divine subjects and policing as a Christian vocation. This emotional reorientation fuses Evangelical and far-right politics, transforming security institutions from within. The article thus demonstrates how counterpolitics of emotion underpin the rise of authoritarianism and contribute to its transnational diffusion.
