International Politics最新文献

While the discipline of IR has expanded its inquiry into LGBTQ+ politics, it is still missing an analysis of LGBTQ+ issues in the globalized ‘risk society’ in which crises are not exceptional but increasingly normalized and performatively manipulated. The various risks, threats and crises for LGBTQ+ people are embedded in a globally networked, accelerated interdependence characterized by neoliberal modernity, which produces differential challenges for LGBTQ+ rights promotion in the Global South and the Global North. This introduction to the special issue fills this knowledge gap by offering a novel conceptualization of the political risks and threats as well as the activist and governance responses to real and imagined crises in diverse domestic, regional and transnational settings. The introduction sets the stage for various contributions that draw on differing IR conceptualizations of crisis to investigate how the apparent (new) ‘normal’ of political, economic, environmental, health and other crises over past years have impacted LGBTQ+ politics. We show how LGBTQ+ advocacy politics responded to such challenges, highlighting how LGBTQ+ activists have become skillful norm entrepreneurs in domestic settings and mediators in rights promotion efforts between the Global North and South.

Over the last two decades, LGBTQ+ individuals in Russia have been using digital media to communicate and mobilize, making up for their lack of representation in mainstream media. However, the government has strengthened its control over the internet to reinforce authoritarianism, traditionalism, and anti-Westernism, using queerphobia to target online sources of ‘LGBTQ+ propaganda.’ This article explores the important role of digital media in Russian LGBTQ+ activism and how activists deal with issues of community and visibility in the face of growing authoritarian control. Russian LGBTQ+ activists face the challenges of balancing safety, visibility, and belonging. To make the most impact, they use creative strategies and international digital media, utilizing delocalized visibility to achieve belonging without compromising their safety.

“The science of international politics is in its infancy.” E.H. Carr opened The Twenty Years’ Crisis with a tone both hopeful and lamenting. He looked forward to scholarship that would identify the driving forces behind peace, war, and disorder and help policymakers avoid the mistakes of the past. Today, the scientific study of international order thrives among scholars who share Carr's faith that behind the complexity in world politics lie consistent mechanical forces that generate macro outcomes. The scientific literature on the causes of world order searches for evidence of this machinery in the patterns of international history. I explore this literature and find that the operationalization of order as a dependent variable leads to a depoliticized conception of order. When order is seen as a contested proposition rather than an objective, mechanical arrangement, then the scientific approach quickly hits a dead-end. In this domain of inquiry, the methods of science impede the substantive study of politics. The contradiction between concept and methods leads me to suggest an alternative research agenda that centers world-order scholarship on contestation and politics rather than mechanical relations.

This research reflects on how securitization works as a structure of power, or as a vehicle through which extant power structures (nationalism, race, gender, class, (dis)ability) are operationalised. I attend to the relationships between three thematic areas of securitization: immigration, health, and violence against women. I examine where securitization theory secures the state while calcifying the boundaries of who belongs to the state, ignoring or actively banishing marginalised and contested identities that do not form part of the audience that co-constitutes security and are obscured within the society for which security is made. The power structures guiding securitization narratives produce a racist, gendered, and classed interpretation of society in which violence against ‘outsiders’ or those who are only partially inside is endemic. This research remodels securitization theory as a tool through which researchers can expose the continuum of lived realities of violence and insecurity that are exacerbated by securitizing processes.

This paper offers some lines of flight away from stagnant features of Terrorism Studies. I largely reiterate the critiques made by field leaders like Lee Jarvis, but I frame the field in a way that eases the tensions between different forms of critical scholarship which have frustrated other writers. Where others split the field into ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ strands and admonish the ‘critical’ strand for its reticence to reflexively critique its referent objects, I suggest that Terrorism Studies can be read as a convergence of ‘Counterterrorism Studies’, ‘Critical Terrorism Studies’ and ‘The Beyond’. While the second category exists primarily to grapple with the first, relying heavily on the language and theoretical frameworks of the first, the third category troubles the very constitution of concepts like the state and the figure of the terrorist, which are the sine qua non of the first two categories.

Complicating linear narratives of liberation, the Gaza Strip under Hamas rule, Somdeep Sen argues in Decolonizing Palestine, constitutes a microcosm of the Palestinian ‘long moment of liberation’ with Hamas assuming the dual role of an anticolonial force and postcolonial government. It is in this mix of the colonial and putatively postcolonial that this book treads. In so doing, Sen offers an important accounting of the messy temporalities of liberation that work against the grain of linear time. In this review, I think alongside Sen’s important provocation that we unbracket liberation from a unitary or single event to consider instead the punctuated, overlapping, and decisively non-linear temporalities that constitute decolonization. Equally, this review asks what dangers might inhere in tethering liberation to a governing authority? Bringing Sen’s work into conversation with contemporary Palestinian politics, movements, and revolutionary moments that cannot be contained within Hamas, this review asks how we might think with Sen about decolonisation as temporally unbounded but also as constituting heterogenous visions, forces, actors and practices that extend beyond formal structures and institutions. What might we gain, it asks, if we expand Sen’s invaluable ‘long moment of liberation’ to include this panoply of forces, visions, and instantiations of decoloniality in practice? It is here, in bridging the messy temporalities of liberation with the heterogenous forces and myriad of ways that Palestine’s decolonial futures are actively being made beyond formal parties and structures, that Sen’s thesis, it suggests, finds its liberatory potential.

This article asks whether transit countries that participate in migration management efforts with their more powerful neighbors achieve significant concessions or change on policy issues. Does their cooperation yield benefits well beyond the costs of hosting and policing migrant populations, and do their occasional efforts to blackmail destination countries by “weaponizing” migrant populations produce concessions or policy changes that were otherwise out of reach? The article examines recent attempts to use migration for political leverage by Turkey, Morocco, Mexico, and Indonesia to better understand what these transit countries may have gained for their cooperation. These exploratory case studies suggest that transit country strategies that involve the use of migration for diplomatic leverage seem to have only limited effectiveness. While transit states achieve payments for their border control efforts, they seemingly never fundamentally alter the behavior of destination countries on major bilateral issues.

An enduring question for social scientists concerns the origins of the system of states we currently live in. In this review paper, we aim to clarify the terms of the discussion by mapping out three different ways of periodizing its emergence. The first view is what we call the ‘millennial’ account of the system of states: it defines states and systems of states in the broadest fashion, identifying them as far back as the Bronze Age, if not earlier. The second and most famous position is the ‘early modern account’: it is grounded in the emergence of new actor categories like ‘state’ and ‘sovereignty,’ and points to major institutional developments pertaining to the fiscal-military apparatus. The third nascent position we present views the long nineteenth century as the birthplace of the system of states. Having mapped these accounts, we conclude by reflecting on their relation to one another.

The issue of rapprochement between former adversaries has received scant scholarly attention meaning there is little understanding of why some foes reconcile quickly, while others remain hostile for decades. Moreover, a specific facet of reconciliation, diplomatic normalization, while a crucial part of diplomacy, has not been explained by scholarly work. This study advances research on diplomatic normalization while proposing a novel theory of reconciliation involving Kantian elements: commerce, democracy, and law. Specifically, the paper proposes that significant economic incentives generate domestic lobbies in favour of normalization, while democratic norms and international institutions generate trust and transparency. This theory is tested on a new dataset that includes all potential cases of reconciliation after warfare since World War II. Survival analysis shows that market size, shared democracy, and joint international organization membership are significantly related to faster reconciliation. The causal mechanisms are examined in a case study of US—Vietnamese rapprochement. The policy implications for these findings and the limitations for political leaders are also discussed.

The article discusses political and media discourses on Russia’s all-out war in Ukraine. It assesses how convergent or divergent discourses are and determines whether the assumption of globalization of information flows holds at the time of war. Political and media discourses are considered here in conjunction. A method for visualizing and measuring the divergence or convergence of political and media discourses is developed and applied. In addition to illuminating the concept of war propaganda, it can be used to test a range of theories about relationships between governments and mass media in a comparative perspective. The geographical scope of the study includes five countries: Russia, Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The coverage of the first twelve weeks of the war by eleven mass media is considered, as well as speeches devoted to the war delivered by presidents of the five countries during the same period.