This article examines how the meaning and function of “learning” have evolved over nearly three decades of Euro-Mediterranean cooperation on migration and how this evolution has shaped migration governance in the region. It conceptualises discourse as a technology of learning that performs three interrelated functions: encoding lessons from past experience; shaping learning by framing problems and coordinating expectations and simulating learning through claims of responsiveness and legitimacy. Drawing on more than 300 speeches and strategic policy documents, the article shows that what counts as learning has changed substantially over time. In the mid-1990s, learning was largely exploratory and centred on developing a shared language on migration through dialogue and mutual familiarisation. With the launch of the European Neighbourhood Policy, this open-ended approach was gradually replaced by a more hierarchical understanding of learning, closely tied to monitoring, evaluation and performance assessment. After the Arab uprisings, despite a brief period of reflection, learning shifted further into operational settings. Projects, indicators and audits increasingly came to stand in for learning itself, narrowing its scope and reinforcing existing policy approaches.
Does international status influence peoples’ feelings about the state? While recent scholarship suggests that status is valuable in part because it strengthens national pride among citizens, skeptics point out that the public is generally inattentive to foreign policy, and unlikely to care much about the state’s position in the world. This paper draws on social psychological theory to argue that changes in international status do influence affective national identification. I use cross-national and US-based observational survey data, as well as two original survey experiments, to demonstrate that changes in status and national pride are positively associated and plausibly causally related. I also show that this relationship has potentially significant consequences for understanding the role of international status in contributing to variation in state strength and cohesion.
China established a strategic partnership with Brazil in 1993, initiating the practice of partnership diplomacy worldwide. This article examines China’s strategic partnerships (SPs) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), focusing on how national power shapes both the timing of partnership formation and the subsequent upgrading of bilateral relationships. Drawing on the World Power Index (WPI), the analysis tests the hypothesis that China systematically prioritizes countries with higher levels of national power when establishing partnerships. While the empirical evidence indicates a strong association between national power and the timing of partnership establishment, the findings suggest that national power alone does not fully account for the depth of these relationships, which is shaped by the interaction between power-based differentiation and sectoral, geopolitical, and political considerations.
Human rights was one of the key topics embraced in Barcelona when the first ever Euro-Mediterranean Partnership conference was held in 1995. Three decades later, the state of human rights protection regime in the southern Mediterranean countries remains poor, with a few exceptions. This article will look at the evolution of the EU’s human rights promotion between 1995 and 2025 to take stock of its achievements and failures. Our focus is on the meso-level policy learning achieved by the EU. Our findings point to the EU’s human rights promotion in the Euro-Mediterranean region as a clear example of ‘negative policy learning’ processes, in which policy reform and innovation have not produced a meaningful outcome. However, we also argue that even in absence of positive outcomes, moments of modest policy learning and innovation can still be had within the policy process.
In the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the prevalence of banditry in Southwest China was extensive and involved complex elements, posing a direct threat to the stability of the newly established people’s regime and the reconstruction of social order. From 1949 to 1953, public security organs at various levels in Southwest China worked closely with the People’s Liberation Army in counter-banditry operations. They played a key role in supplementing the armed forces against bandits, conducting intelligence investigations, and mobilizing the people, thereby laying an important foundation for the victory of anti-banditry efforts and regional stability. On the basis of historical sources of the anti-banditry campaign in Southwest China during the early years of the PRC, this paper outlines the general situation of banditry and relevant policies, and focuses on elucidating the contributions of public security organs, in order to enrich research on the history of public security organs and the anti-banditry campaign in Southwest China during this period.
The premise of this article is that leaders’ decisions to go to war, or not go to war, and the way that states initially go to war, are fundamentally shaped by a concept labelled here as a ‘war script’. In simple terms, a war script is a decision-maker’s conception of what a specific future war will consist of and how it will play out. It is based on this conception that leaders will assess costs and benefits and then decide whether to go to war. This article sets out to develop a rationale, conceptual framework and methodology for a war script. Although the concept will require further refinement, it has the potential to offer a more targeted method for the analysis of decisions about war than many similar concepts in the war studies field.
This article analyses the evolution of Slovakia’s strategic culture by systematically examining its key national security strategies adopted between 1996 and 2021. While Slovak security policy has frequently been analysed from geopolitical or institutional perspectives, less attention has been devoted to how security threats are prioritised within the strategies themselves. To address this gap, the study employs a mixed-method approach combining qualitative interpretation with quantitative keyword-frequency analysis. Two indicators are used: emphasis value (formal prioritisation) and keyword frequency (discursive salience). Their combination produces an emphasis ranking visualised through quadrant-based mapping of threat prioritisation. The analysis demonstrates that Slovak strategic culture consistently prioritises societal and political sources of insecurity over conventional military threats, revealing a distinctive hierarchy of threat perception within Slovak strategic discourse.
This article evaluates the way the dominance of a resilience narrative has shaped the evolution of the EU’s strategy in the world order. It employs the concept normalisation to explore how the resilience narrative displaced previously mainstream narratives at the centre of the EU’s strategy. We find that the normalisation of the resilience narrative justified altering two of the EU’s longstanding strategic priorities due to the growing uncertainty in the world order and the irreversible geopolitical transformations that occurred in the neighbourhood and globally. The new mainstream resilience narrative offered an opportunity to develop a more pragmatic and geopolitical actorness for the EU that has gradually displaced the rather normative and altruistic promotion of universal values, which underpinned earlier iterations of the EU’s strategy. Moreover, the focus on resilience was normalised through presenting it as an opportunity to enhance coordination, effectiveness and coherence in foreign policy.
This article examines Türkiye’s participation in the Second International Polar Year (IPY-II, 1932–1933) as a historically grounded and underexplored case of early science diplomacy. IPY-II coordinated interdisciplinary polar research across forty-four countries, and Türkiye’s involvement during the early Republican period offers fresh insight into interwar scientific cooperation. The article documents Türkiye’s scientific and institutional contributions and analyses them through the reciprocal framework of science impacting diplomacy and diplomacy impacting science. Drawing on archival documents, official correspondence, parliamentary records, and contemporary newspapers, supplemented by expert interviews, it assesses the case against an explicit definition of science diplomacy. Türkiye’s meteorological data, later incorporated into the synoptic weather maps of the Northern Hemisphere, were scientifically significant, institutionally coordinated, and internationally recognised, yet shaped by asymmetrical hierarchies. The case enriches the historical understanding of science diplomacy by non-hegemonic states.
This article introduces a forum on Weaponizing Civilian Protection: Counterinsurgency and Collateral Damage in Afghanistan that features contributions from Helena Zeweri, Joseph MacKay, James Eastwood and Moya Lloyd. This introductory article argues that current debates about Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR) need to be contextualised in relation to coalition efforts to reframe civilian casualties as strategic setbacks during the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan together with the specific measures that coalition officials introduced to recalibrate the violence inflicted on Afghan civilians. Rather than simply assuming that ideas associated with civilian protection serve as a normative bulwark that can shield civilians from martial violence, Weaponizing Civilian Protection traces how coalition officials tried to instrumentalise civilian protection in the struggle against insurgents, and how this worked to rationalise the violence inflicted on the civilian population and dehumanise the Afghans who were impacted. At the same time, this article warns that the same necropolitical logic that encouraged coalition officials to prioritise civilian protection when it seemed that minimising civilian casualties would be critical to mission success encourages officials to abandon these protections when minimising civilian harm is viewed as an impediment — rather than an enhancement — to American lethality.
What would an ontology of space suitable for International Relations (IR) look like? While the primary focus of contemporary IR thinking on space is devoted to the discursive construction of space, there is less attention to its physical dimensions. This paper prioritizes both dimensions by invoking the ideas of a Japanese philosopher, Watsuji Tetsurō. By reframing international political dynamics into Watsuji’s aidagara (‘inter-relations’), we can reframe space as co-constituting relationships, which in turn shape meanings for that space. I use references to the ‘Indo-Pacific’ by Japanese government’s relations with the United Kingdom (UK) as a case study to show that space needs to be reaffirmed as a confluence of the physical and the discursive dimensions. The case study highlights that space is where actors are physically located and meet one another, and through their socialization processes, the space acquires a set of discursive meanings.
This commentary engages Aparna Devare’s argument that B.R. Ambedkar’s Navayana Buddhism off ers a non-Western ethical vocabulary for International Relations, moving beyond his usual framing as the architect of theIndian constitution and a pioneering Dalit leader. It situates Ambedkar’s reinterpretation of Buddhism as anticipatingstructural violence theory and challenging secular, state-centric IR. The commentary extends Devare’s analysis byintroducing Rahul Sankritayan’s parallel Buddhist-Marxist cosmopolitanism and Savita Ambedkar’s role andcontribution to his legacy, while critically interrogating how Buddhist majoritarian violence in Sri Lanka and Myanmarcomplicates Navayana’s universalist claims, and ultimately positioning Ambedkar as a theorist of hierarchy, dignity,and moral community for reimagining international political ethics.
Why do threat-based identity dichotomies persist in international politics, even as observable behaviour shifts in ways that might otherwise challenge those framings? This article addresses this puzzle through the case of China’s rise, arguing that efforts to project a peaceful identity paradoxically reinforce the threat perceptions they seek to counter. It introduces the concept of a self-categorisation recursive loop: a process in which peaceful identity performances respond to and stabilise external negative categorisations. Drawing on Social Categorisation Theory and Self-Categorisation Theory, the article identifies four mechanisms – comparative fit, normative fit, mirroring, and entitativity – that reproduce the logic of threat. The argument is illustrated through a multimodal visual communication analysis of three Chinese state-produced documentaries broadcast during the COVID-19 pandemic, a moment of heightened scrutiny over China’s capacity to manage crisis, order, and responsibility. The article contributes to International Relations by theorising how intersubjective relations are stabilised through cognitive and performative micro-processes and proposes that recursive self-categorisation explains persisting threat-based dichotomies of rising or marginalised powers.
Hungary, under Victor Orbán, and Slovakia, since late 2023, have been the clearest outliers on the EU’s policy of support for Ukraine, despite their past history of dominance by the Soviet Union. This article explores reasons for their surprising sympathy for Russia’s position and tepid support for Ukraine, identifying both similarities and differences between the two cases. After exploring how the regional geopolitical environment may influence policy, the study examines the impact of history and identity, economic and energy relations, domestic political considerations, and leadership beliefs and interests. Finding minimal support for structural realist explanations, the study unravels interconnections between domestic factors and geopolitical interpretations that seem consistent with the expectations of neo-classical realistic theory. Furthermore, while each factor has its own dynamic, in sum they produce a vicious cycle of deviation from the mainstream EU position, as political, economic, ideological, and geopolitical concerns reinforce each other. The study concludes that electoral politics have the strongest potential to bring change.
This article reads B.R. Ambedkar as a theorist of global oppression and social injustice in his critique of the Indiancaste system. In tearing apart the caste structure that keeps his people, the Dalits, at the bottom, Ambedkar craftsa new identity that is both rooted in the local context of caste but can also be read as providing a broader frameworkfor understanding domination and inequality worldwide. Ambedkar is a unique public fi gure who addresses bothinternal forms of oppression, including caste, and probes the limits of Western liberal ideas of freedom and Marxistnotions of emancipation, given both their complicity with global violence. He off ers a signifi cantly reconstructedreading of Buddhist ideas that draws on liberal and Marxist concepts while also going beyond them. Ambedkar’snavayana Buddhism is a new conceptual register on which to think and act on key global ideas such asemancipation, justice, and freedom. Economic and political equality, for instance, must go alongside ideas ofmaitri (friendship), non-violence, andkaruna (compassion)- values that must be cultivated through dialogue and debate. Dalits must build an ethical community in their fi ght not just against their own oppression but also build bridges withtheir fellow marginalized worldwide. He attempted to build a Buddhist brotherhood cutting across borders (such aswith other Asian societies) and encourage a spirit of service in his attempt to provide alternative visions in seekingequality. The article concludes that Ambedkar’snavayana project off ers a powerful intellectual and political resourcefor reimagining global justice beyond national boundaries and off ering a diff erent vision of the ‘global’.
Devare shows Buddhist universality can serve emancipatory politics when mobilised from subaltern, anti-caste positions. This response asks whether Buddhism is inherently peaceful, examining the Kyoto School, which sharesthe Buddhist ontology of impermanence, emptiness, and relational selfhood with Ambedkar’s argument, yet remains complicit in wartime militarism. Drawing on Tristan Garcia’s theory of ‘us’, the paper traces how universalist claims can become dangerous: a collective claiming universality generates an internal ‘they’, subordinates particular ethics to that mission, and enables violence. The Kyoto School, itself an ‘inner they’ within Western universality, reproduced this by constructing Japan as the leader of a non-Western ‘us’, subordinating other Asians. Preventing this requires decoupling ‘us’ from the nation-state; engaged Buddhism’s self-negation offers a possible interruption.
How do US policymakers respond to the growing influence of US partners outside of their immediate neighborhood and into third regions? In an era of global politics characterized by increasingly independent-minded middle powers– many formal partners of the US– with global ambitions and an ability to project power beyond their neighborhood, this question is fundamental to US alliance management strategy and 21st century global order. Since 2011, no dynamic has better illustrated this new feature of global politics than the political, economic, and military rise of enterprising Middle Eastern states across the African continent. This includes the UAE, Qatar, and Turkey, each of whom are, in different ways, important pillars of the US alliance network in the Middle East. This paper traces how the US has responded to the expanding influence of its Middle Eastern partners in Africa and why it chose the approaches it did. It argues that the US largely pursued strategies of encouragement and accommodation that sought to align the conduct of these countries with US goals across Africa and the Middle East. Yet it acquiesced when its Middle Eastern partners pursued policies out of step with US objectives in Africa. This reflected US strategic prioritization, as US policymakers prioritized alignment with their Gulf and Turkish partners on key Middle Eastern issues, over and above any strategic goals the US may have had in Africa. The paper draws on case studies from the Horn of Africa and Libya in making its argument.
