Explanations of the causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war tend to drift towards one of two lines of argument. These are the 'NATO expansion' argument, chiefly focusing on the structure of the international system and the possibility of the acceptance of Ukraine into NATO, and the 'Putin's war' argument, which attempts to place the bulk of blame for the war on the actions and agency of Putin himself. Both arguments might better be considered as focused on processes rather than structures, and this leads to explanations operating at the level of actual manifestation of causes rather than real and underlying structures. Critical realism cannot tell us what structures are the right ones to study, but a plausible explanation might lie in the notion of the patrimonial imperialism of Russian state-society relations. To address the issue of an alternative to these arguments, one overly structural and the other overly agential, this article proposes a framework referred to as patrimonial imperialism. It will attempt to show how an imperialist state structure can come to perpetuate and ingrain itself and thereby induce actors to behave in certain ways consistent with the state structure. The above framework will be integrated into a model of stratified reality and will situate the constituent arguments surrounding the causes of the war into an ontological framework that will allow greater clarity and coherence of thought when attempting to grapple with the causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

This article examines anticipatory governance (AG) in South Korea and the UK, revealing contrasting approaches, shaped by unique historical, political, and social contexts. It explores the levels of trust, consensus, and empowerment and the dynamics of government, society, and citizens in both countries. First, Korea demonstrates proactive, future-oriented and anticipatory policymaking through strong government leadership, readiness for adaption, and the participation of and wellnurtured futures literacy of citizens. This is rooted in a tradition of development and the government's consciousness of public reaction, trust and legitimacy. Second, while the UK embraces an AG approach such as horizon scanning and foresight, these efforts are hindered by short-term resilience thinking, an absence of education and awareness of the public, and fragmented implementation. In the UK's AG, resilience becomes an excuse for incapacity in finding solutions to complex problems while shifting responsibility of a government to the public without adequate capacity-building. Instead of longer-term planning, AG is used to justify governance from a distance, the role of the market and the responsibilisation of individuals. Moreover, resilience becomes an excuse for incapacity to find solutions to complex problems while shifting responsibility from the government to the public without adequate capacity-building. From this perspective, the Korean approach would be criticised as rooted in an overly-modernist and state-interventionist strategy that still sees the government as the main actor in times of crisis. The article concludes with the traps and pitfalls of AG, constrained by relation-based dynamics, neoliberal ideologies, and a focus on resilience over longterm planning.

Although the neglect of Marxism has been a pervasive characteristic of IR theory, there has been a marked revival of interest in Marxism. Marx's materialist insights into the general historical development of societies, as well as his critique of capitalism and political economy, have served as alternative starting points for different critical approaches to IR and offers a welcome alternative to neorealism, constructivism, and poststructuralism that have dominated IR for several decades. Marxism provides a redefinition of IR by focusing on changes in material circumstances, historical conditions, and society instead of assuming unchanging and fixed structures of anarchy or the state. Marx's analysis and insights into the dynamics of international relations have become even more important given the ongoing crisis of neoliberal capitalism, the rise of authoritarianism, right-wing nationalist populisms, and the racial and gendered subordinations accompanying them pointing to the importance of Marxifying IR and IRifying Marxism.

The COVID-19 pandemic raises important questions about biopolitics and governmentality, not least, what are the limitations of governing through not governing too much? Important questions concern the role of the state, citizenship, privacy, and concerns about populist movements and personal freedom. The pandemic challenges the idea that liberal government is the most effective way to care for populations while raising the spectre of an underlying authoritarianism. Indeed, the triangle of governance, sovereignty and discipline remains the most effective way to conceptualise the current situation. The article will explore how authoritarian elements underlie liberal governmentality while noting the paradox that this might not necessarily be such a bad thing if it enhances pastoral care for the population.

International crises, most recently the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, often radically change our view of the world and our place within it. The European Union (EU) has been particularly impacted by these developments because these crises have accentuated some of its ontological and epistemological uncertainties and insecurities. While the EU’s resilience turn initiated by the EU Global Strategy of 2016 aimed at strengthening the EU’s ability to prepare and recover from external shocks and crises, since then, the concept of resilience has undergone a transformation. In recent years, we have seen the EU turning back in on itself and abandoning the radical aspects of resilience. Hence a paradox has emerged – the more complex the problems faced by the EU, the more it turns away from the logics of complexity present in the idea of resilience. In this article, we examine this conceptual shift through the lenses of concepts in action and the way these have reflected changes in the external context, but also power coalitions and institutional path dependencies. This argument will be explored by examining the recently adopted Strategic Compass and the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).

This chapter examines and contrasts post-Marxism and critical realism, two highly influential schools of thought with great relevance to such Gramscian themes as hegemony, class, subject positions and interests, ideology and discourse. It starts by outlining the post-Marxist position as articulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and the school of discourse analysis associated with the University of Essex. It then moves on to the critical realist approach associated with Roy Bhaskar. It notes how post-Marxism is more explicitly engaged with Gramsci, developing a new understanding of hegemony that places emphasis on plurality, contingency and the discursive articulation of complex elements. Critical realism is less sympathetic to such an approach given its emphasis on the intelligibility of social science and the structured and enduring character of the social world. After developing the post-Marxist position the chapter outlines the character of the critical realist critique.

This article reflects on how European Union (EU) narratives of the crisis of the liberal international order (LIO) have reshaped its resilience approach and its foreign and security policy more broadly. Drawing on qualitative textual analysis, we trace the evolution of the EU's resilience approach over time and the way it has been shaped by crisis narratives. While the idea of resilience was introduced in EU foreign policy to foster the resilience of crisis-affected societies from the bottom up, the perception of an increasingly contested world first led to a reinterpretation of resilience in pragmatic ways, with values and interests combined selectively to protect the rules-based international order. More recently, on the grounds of a worsening crisis of the LIO, resilience has taken a defensive turn, adopting a more geopolitical stance to strengthen the EU's own resilience and that of the LIO. We argue that EU crisis narratives about the LIO thus serve to sustain and to rescue it. Furthermore, we conclude that the defensive reinterpretation of resilience is eroding the normative character of EU foreign and security policy. It also challenges the persistence of the LIO in the long term.

This contribution explores the different options for governmentality and how it differs across the globe. To demonstrate this, the chapter looks at the spread of resilience-building policies across different European countries as well as how resilience forms part of the system of global governance (or global governmentality). It explores how governmentality takes different forms in different places, but remains dominated by an Anglo-Saxon form that emphasizes the role of the market, the individual, and the importance of adaptive behavior. The argument presented below differs from most poststructuralist approaches to governmentality which tend to emphasize governmentality as a rationality and set of practices while avoiding questions of its material conditions of possibility and the dominance of particular liberal forms of governmentality. This is explored here through the combination of the concept of governmentality and a Gramscian theory of hegemony. An examination of how resilience-building is promoted is used to illustrate variations in governmentality and to show that, despite these differences, global governance (or governmentality) still takes a hegemonic Anglo-Saxon form.

This chapter evaluates critical realism, a term which refers to a philosophy of science connected to the broader approach of scientific realism. In contrast to other philosophies of science, such as positivism and post-positivism, critical realism presents an alternative view on the questions of what is ‘real’ and how one can generate scientific knowledge of the ‘real’. How one answers these questions has implications for how one studies science and society. The critical realist answer starts by prioritizing the ontological question over the epistemological one, by asking: What must the world be like for science to be possible? Critical realism holds the key ontological belief of scientific realism that there is a reality which exists independent of our knowledge and experience of it. Critical realists posit that reality is more complex, and made up of more than the directly observable. More specifically, critical realism understands reality as ‘stratified’ and composed of three ontological domains: the empirical, the actual, and the real. Here lies the basis for causation.

This chapter evaluates critical realism, a term which refers to a philosophy of science connected to the broader approach of scientific realism. In contrast to other philosophies of science, such as positivism and post-positivism, critical realism presents an alternative view on the questions of what is ‘real’ and how one can generate scientific knowledge of the ‘real’. How one answers these questions has implications for how one studies science and society. The critical realist answer starts by prioritizing the ontological question over the epistemological one, by asking: What must the world be like for science to be possible? Critical realism holds the key ontological belief of scientific realism that there is a reality which exists independent of our knowledge and experience of it. Critical realists posit that reality is more complex, and made up of more than the directly observable. More specifically, critical realism understands reality as ‘stratified’ and composed of three ontological domains: the empirical, the actual, and the real. Here lies the basis for causation.

This introduction provides a conceptual and theoretical background to the more detailed analyses contained in the articles of the Special Section. The introduction firstly presents a critical overview of the rise of resilience and its increasing role in shaping the terms of international interventions. It identifies a set of interrelated conceptual themes relevant to theorising the relationship between resilience and peacebuilding and evaluates how appropriate a resilience approach might be in promoting sustainable peace and what might be its main dangers and pitfalls.

The book highlights how wellbeing, resilience and sustainability come together in both policy making and public consciousness to promote a particular form of governance. While noting some of the confusion, ambiguity and contradiction present in how policy-makers take up these concepts, our main point has been to point out their connectedness, particularly as they have emerged 'after the crisis' as neoliberalism tries to recalibrate. We strongly associate these ideas with forms of governance that see themselves as responding to crisis and as advocating the need for rethinking and renewal. These ideas are thus connected to the dynamic wider social, political and economic context and the changing global political environment. There is often a conscious embrace of paradox, in particular through an obsession with better governing while also raising doubt and uncertainty about our ability to intervene. The new trinity provides a means whereby these doubts are being worked into the mechanisms of governance, while not interrupting the process of getting on with actual governing. This is the central paradox of the new trinity: that the three ideas have a certain critical element inherent in them that questions the rationalism, calculation and science on which government intervention has been founded, while at the same time exploring new ways that rationalism, calculation, science can be deployed to reinforce the governance systems that they raise their concerns about. We argue that the radical implications of the trinity are being compromised by this relationship to existing mechanisms of governance and call for a more systemic and genuinely transformative approach to the central issues of our time.

Wellbeing, resilience and sustainability are three of the most engaging terms in current political usage and have come to have real grip in all our lives in recent years. Here, we begin to outline how they are seen to offer new approaches to issues that recent natural and human-made crises have highlighted as having been inadequately dealt or overlooked by mainstream policy approaches. Either separately or together they have been claimed by some commentators as being elements of a much-needed paradigm shift in political and policy thinking. Here, we introduce some of the commonalities between the ideas, particularly their concern with distinctive human capacities that shape who we are and that imply a particular relationship to our wider social and natural environments. With this in mind, this book sets out to do three things. First, it seeks to explain these three ideas, while also exploring areas of dispute and uncertainty. We thus seek to review the debates about their possible meanings and significance. Second, we explain how these three ideas connect with and even define one another. We outline an understanding of why it is that they have emerged simultaneously, at this particular moment. Third, and relatedly, we wish to examine how these ideas connect with strategies of governance, broadly understood, addressing questions of the current social, political and economic context and wider arguments about the changing global environment. As part of the SPERI series, we are particularly concerned to outline how these ideas contribute to governance 'after the crisis', and the questions of social, political and economic uncertainty influence the ways in which these main arguments are developed.

Abstract The aim of this article is to understand populism as a hegemonic project involving a struggle for power between different social forces. We take a critical realist approach in defining populism. This implies several things. We develop a new approach to understanding populist politics by taking neither a purely discursive (Laclau), nor a solely structural (Poulantzas), but a critical realist approach and analysing the three-way relationship between structural conditions, agency, and institutional framework. Second, it implies that populist politics is composed of complex and often contradictory dynamics and emergent features involving mainly domestic but also international processes. We develop this through a combination of three concepts – passive revolution, hegemonic depth, and partial hegemony. These indicate how a hegemonic project is situated in deeper social relations and how hegemonic leadership responds to this. We take the policies of AKP government in Turkey as a case in populist hegemonic project. We demonstrate that AKP has followed different hegemonic projects during its rule changing from an initial majoritarian populist politics to one of neoliberal authoritarian populism as it has consolidated its hegemonic depth. These different populist projects involve alternative visions of Turkey but are nevertheless all compatible with a global neoliberal agenda.

The article provides a critical overview of the rise of resilience at the European Union (EU) level and to what extent its adoption is reshaping the terms of the EU's peacebuilding interventions. It argues that resilience offers a four-fold contribution to promoting sustainable peace: (1) a focus on complexity; (2) a systems approach; (3) a shift toward local capacities; and (4) an emphasis on human agency. The article then applies this framework to assess the implementation of the EU's "resilience turn" since the adoption of the EU Global Strategy in 2016. Focusing on the EU's discourse and its peacebuilding practices in the Western Balkans, the evidence suggests that the EU has only embraced a systems/integrated approach, while neglecting deeper understandings of complexity, local capacities and human agency. As a result, the contribution of resilience to EU peacebuilding remains limited.

This article looks at the development of the resilience approach in EU foreign policy. Building state and societal resilience in the EU's neighbourhood has been identified as one of the key priorities in the EU global strategy. Here we critically analyse these developments and seek to provide an account of the complex dynamics within which the EU's approach to resilience is located. We argue that EU resilience-thinking is influenced by three broad dynamics - the neoliberal and Anglo-Saxon approaches to resilience in the sphere of global governance; the particular normative discourse of the EU as a certain type of global actor (the EU as a normative/liberal power); and the multilevel character of the EU with its complex institutional structure and path dependencies which results in decoupling. As a consequence, the 'translation' of resilience constitutes an emergent project at the EU level, but also brings with it new challenges. The argument will be illustrated through a study of the EU global strategy and the Joint Communication on resilience in the neighbourhood.