Abstract As cities play increasingly visible roles in international relations and global governance, scholars have proposed multiple explanations for variation in their engagement and influence. This study examines a relatively understudied yet crucial factor: vertical coordination between cities and national governments. Through a structured-focus case comparison of four cities (San Francisco, Austin, Shanghai, and Shenzhen), it traces each city’s representation in governance networks, reputation-building efforts, and mobilization of its tangible and intangible resources across two contrasting approaches to coordination by the United States and China. The findings reveal that coordination functions as a pathway-structuring variable that determines the sequence and logic through which cities establish their presence and argue for their legitimacy. Strongly coordinated cases convert national legitimacy into flagship representational opportunities and sustained reputational gains; less coordinated cases generate visibility through local ecosystems but lack the structural capacity to translate reputational capital into norm-setting roles. These insights contribute to polycentric governance studies, advance scholarship on city diplomacy, and offer practical insights for the design of coordination frameworks in an era of growing urban involvement in global affairs.
Abstract Pandemics are a recurring phenomenon that, in addition to their devastating effects on human life and health, have profound economic, social, and political consequences, affecting national and international security. The framing and subsequent management of pandemics by different state actors is therefore an important research topic. Securitization theory has for the past three decades been a central approach in the study of how issues come to be framed as security threats and how such framings shape policy responses. This article seeks to advance this research agenda by examining and theorizing the role of so-called functional actors in securitization. This is an understudied category of actors who, while external to formal decision-making, nonetheless affect threat construction and security agenda setting in various ways. Drawing on insights from research on policy professionals, the article develops a more nuanced framework for understanding how functional actors operate within securitization processes and how their authority and influence vary across contexts. The theoretical assumptions are illustrated by four cases of securitization processes related to pandemics, namely the management of A(H1N1)/Swineflu and Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 in Sweden and Denmark. The article finds that the relationship between securitizing and functional actors plays a significant role in shaping how threats, such as pandemics are managed. The cases show not only how various actors adopted different functions within securitization, but also the dynamics of these processes. By highlighting the dynamic roles of functional actors, the article contributes to a more differentiated understanding of securitization. While the current study focuses on pandemics, this research agenda has broader implications for analyzing contemporary security challenges, where authority and expertise are increasingly dispersed across a range of actors.
In this article, we offer a theoretical framework outlining the conditions under which different types of crises, from wars to natural disasters, increase the probability of a woman ascending to a country’s highest office. We first draw on existing research to identify and develop four different supply and demand pathways that can confer a relative advantage to women running for executive office in times of instability: Traitcasting, Structural Shifts, the “Glass Cliff,” and Policy Recalibration. We then draw from the International Relations and Comparative Politics literatures to identify when each of these mechanisms is likely to be most salient. We suggest that a state’s domestic political institutions and norms along with the crisis characteristics operate as intervening variables, conditioning the salience of the four pathways. After outlining these intervening variables, the third section presents initial congruence tests on the rise of six women to executive office. In doing so, we provide preliminary evidence for this novel theoretical framework on women’s crisis leadership that can be further refined and empirically tested in future research.
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are operating in a challenging environment as governments are shrinking civic space and there is increasing competition for funding. Scholars have begun to examine how NGOs are adapting to these external challenges, but IR scholars have not yet systematically studied variation in their legal status and funding models. This article draws on scholarship from the NGO, not-for-profit, and political science literature, as well as publicly available datasets of NGOs’ legal status and finances. It identifies differences in legal form and funding models across large, well-established international NGOs. NGOs are often registering with multiple legal types, which enables them to adapt to shrinking civic space and engage in partisan politics. In addition, NGOs have different funding models; some rely on member donations, while others rely on large grants from philanthropic donors and/or the government. These funding models lead to different accountability dilemmas: member capture and donor capture. If IR scholars were to examine in detail the legal forms and funding models of NGOs, it would enrich our existing theories of resource competition, accountability, population ecology and shrinking civic space. It would also open new, exciting research agendas into the relationship between issue-based advocacy and partisan politics.
Abstract International organization (IO) studies exhibit a curious blind spot: They rarely theorize or investigate empirically what IOs do and effect “in the field.” Since IO research from rational-choice and constructivist traditions largely focuses on IO-state relations and bureaucratic politics at headquarters, the operational stage of global governance is rarely conceptually accounted for as a policymaking arena and a constitutive element of IOs. In this analytical essay, we map pathways towards a new research agenda on IOs that takes “the field” seriously. We argue and show that studying IOs from a field perspective requires rethinking the sites and boundaries of IOs, drawing analytical attention to previously neglected actors, interests, practices, and logics of action. In developing this argument, we build on two established strands of research: First, studies on street-level bureaucracy and transnational professionals, which investigate everyday decision-making by regular staff members. Second, research on the anthropology of development and peacebuilding, which highlights social, meaning-making processes in concrete, local settings. We connect their insights to established literatures on IOs around three conceptual “docking stations”: agency, change, and authority. We conclude by sketching a taxonomy with three avenues for future research on organizational structures and cultures, policies and procedures, as well as power and legitimacy. This shift in perspective unlocks new empirical research fields and extends conceptual and methodological approaches of IO studies, building the ground for an emerging field of study in International Relations that will allow us to fully understand IOs through the drivers, dynamics, and consequences of their local lives.
Abstract This Forum theorizes translation in International Relations as a constitutive, world-making process through which meaning, temporality, and authority are negotiated in global politics. It moves beyond understandings of translation as a neutral transfer between fixed contexts to approach it as transformation—an ongoing process in which meaning is produced, circulated, and contested across time and space. Translation operates through acts such as categorizing, labeling, periodizing, and historicizing that shape how concepts travel and how worlds of meaning become intelligible. By foregrounding the temporal dynamics of translation, the Forum explores how meaning emerges in encounters across difference and how translation simultaneously generates new beginnings and stabilizes orders of knowledge. Collectively, the contributions reveal that the “international” is not pre-given but continually remade through iterative translations that mediate ambiguity, hierarchy, and the politics of meaning.
This forum brings together voices from diverse backgrounds to explore how relationships shape our understanding of international relations (IR). Drawing from personal experience, daily life, and academic research, the authors present fresh perspectives that challenge the usual ways we think about the world. Their contributions show how theory and real-world practice are deeply interconnected, offering practical tools for expanding what IR can be. Each essay questions various expressions of universalisms-such as those tied to religion, capitalism, the "international", IR-and introduces new ways of relating and thinking that disrupt these patterns while reimagining the boundaries of time, space, life, death, self, and other. This forum demonstrates how IR can be pluriversally re-envisioned and diversified, nurturing a more expansive and inclusive appreciation of our interconnected realities.
How do scholars navigate the politics and poetics of relationality in their writing and research? Following a roundtable from the 2024 Annual ISA Convention, this forum explores what is at stake in raising such questions within intellectual work that dissects coloniality and articulates alternative expressions of sociality and connectivity. How do we translate modes of relating that already reflect creative ways of transcending a Manichaeism that can seep into how we talk about relations, coloniality, and politics? What kinds of internal struggles within the field of International Relations render some relational modes recognizable while leaving others absent or peripheral? This forum approaches relationality as both method and ethical orientation for navigating the entanglements of the nation, colonial rule, and imperialism that define the field and our own scholarly practices. Echoing & Eacute;douard Glissant, it stages a dialogue on how the powers of relationality play a role in our intellectual pursuits, where a relation is not an absolute to strive for but a totality and a force that is poetic, practical and unceasing-something that continually seeks to be spoken, perfected, and made whole.
This Presidential Special Issue brings together diverse communities and networks of scholars recentring relationality in international studies. Drawing together contributions from the 2024 International Studies Association Annual Meeting, the four forums in this collection explore the plural relationalities that challenge the violent universalisms and hierarchies of International Relations.
The crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO) has intensified amid growing great-power competition, the war in Ukraine, and the erosion of multilateral institutions. This Forum examines security assistance (SA)-the training, equipping and support of external security actors-as a critical lens for understanding how this crisis is unfolding and how international order is increasingly contested in practice. The Forum consists of an introductory essay and nine contributions organized into three thematic sets. Collectively, the contributions move beyond viewing SA as either a technocratic instrument of governance reform or a mechanism of proxy warfare. Instead, they conceptualize SA as relational practices that shape political authority, strategic alignments and normative expectations across diverse contexts. The first set analyses SA as a foreign policy instrument, focusing on its political purposes, strategic logics and effectiveness in an era of intensified geopolitical rivalry. The second set examines the unintended and often destabilizing consequences of SA. The authors show how assistance can contribute to political-territorial fragmentation, militarized competition and the proliferation of violence, while frequently in tension with its stated objectives. The final set of contributions looks ahead, exploring why SA continues to expand despite persistent shortcomings and how it may evolve as the liberal foundations that historically underpinned Western-led assistance are increasingly contested. Taken together, the Forum demonstrates that SA is a central site of contestation within contemporary international politics. While commonly justified as a means of stabilization and order-building, SA often produces new forms of dependency, dissonance between intention and outcome, and competing visions of political order. As a growing number of states deploy SA to an expanding range of recipients, the Forum highlights the need for a relational understanding of SA that captures its simultaneous ordering and disordering effects in an era of multipolar competition.
This forum proposes to rethink the specific conditions and dynamics under which trust can endogenously emerge in international conflicts. Traditionally, International Relations (IR) scholars have viewed trust and conflict as opposites or antagonists, with trust being seen as essential to overcoming conflict, and conflict seen as corrosive of trust. However, this framing is of limited use when it comes to understanding the complex role of trust in an increasingly heterogeneous and conflictual international system. In this forum, the contributors discuss the extent to which trust can emerge from and be strengthened within conflict. Conflict requires high-stakes decisions with uncertain outcomes. It helps actors learn about their interests and identities, as well as those of their counterparts. Conflict also fosters social bonds through shared experiences of successfully dealing with it. This approach complements existing research that has primarily focused on how trust, whether pre-existing or exogenously generated, can contribute to conflict resolution.
Despite prolific critique, development, and refinement of securitization theory, there is still no clear understanding of what “success” means. Whether securitization happens or not (and in what form, by what means, and to what extent) is fundamental to understanding (de)securitization contests. To advance theoretical stalemates that have resulted in no clear measure of securitization success, failure, or the grey areas in between, we distill three dimensions of success: of the securitization process, understood as the dominance (or otherwise) of discourse and policy measures with a security logic; of its relational implications for the physical and ontological security, concurrently, of both the “referent object” and the “referent subject”; and of its implications for (de)securitizing agents. Cutting through seven key “faultlines” in securitization research and integrating insights from Ontological Security and Policy Studies, we create a five-point continuum to capture shifts across all three dimensions, yielding matrices of different outcomes. Our original heuristic aims to guide rigorous empirical and normative research and help systematize hitherto unworkable cross-case comparisons about how security is made, what it does over time, and for whom.
