This paper examines Ghana’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of decoloniality to highlight how the crisis underscored the enduring impact of coloniality in global health governance. Ghana’s response challenged the entrenched narratives of African incapacity and dependence by leveraging local knowledge systems, traditional medicine, and indigenous scientific contributions to combat the pandemic. By opposing neocolonial attitudes, Ghana demonstrated the resilience and agency of Global South epistemologies. The study reveals how colonial power dynamics continue to dominate global health discourse, which reduces Africa to a passive recipient of external aid while marginalizing its knowledge systems. Ghana’s commitment to self-reliance serves as a counter-narrative to the colonial construct of African dependency. The pandemic exposed the inequities of the global knowledge economy and the systemic erasure of African agency in global health strategies. This paper argues that Ghana’s decolonial governance approach provides critical insights for reimagining global health governance and fostering cognitive justice. The paper challenges the Westcentric dominance in knowledge production and reaffirms the credibility of scientific contributions from Ghana. Ultimately, the study calls for revalorizing African epistemologies and a shift toward inclusive frameworks that prioritize local agency in addressing global crises.
{"title":"Decoloniality of Power: Unpacking Local Agency in Ghana’s COVID-19 Response","authors":"James McKeown","doi":"10.1093/ips/olaf045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olaf045","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines Ghana’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of decoloniality to highlight how the crisis underscored the enduring impact of coloniality in global health governance. Ghana’s response challenged the entrenched narratives of African incapacity and dependence by leveraging local knowledge systems, traditional medicine, and indigenous scientific contributions to combat the pandemic. By opposing neocolonial attitudes, Ghana demonstrated the resilience and agency of Global South epistemologies. The study reveals how colonial power dynamics continue to dominate global health discourse, which reduces Africa to a passive recipient of external aid while marginalizing its knowledge systems. Ghana’s commitment to self-reliance serves as a counter-narrative to the colonial construct of African dependency. The pandemic exposed the inequities of the global knowledge economy and the systemic erasure of African agency in global health strategies. This paper argues that Ghana’s decolonial governance approach provides critical insights for reimagining global health governance and fostering cognitive justice. The paper challenges the Westcentric dominance in knowledge production and reaffirms the credibility of scientific contributions from Ghana. Ultimately, the study calls for revalorizing African epistemologies and a shift toward inclusive frameworks that prioritize local agency in addressing global crises.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"141 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145593582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Wars dichotomize (world) society and often reinvigorate “traditional” understanding of masculinity and femininity. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, discussions about the role of masculinity and war show how commonplace the problematization of masculinity has become. This article highlights tensions with “traditional” perceptions of masculinity as strength and femininity as vulnerability. Based on an analysis of Ukraine’s visual narrative during the first six months after the Russian invasion, we employ Visual Segment Analyses to uncover these tensions. Our results show how visual portrayals of female soldiers challenge conventional civilian or caregiving roles, presenting women as both defenders and symbols of resilience. Conversely, male vulnerability, illustrated through images of wounded soldiers, juxtaposes bravery with visible fragility, yet anchors masculinity in acts of sacrifice and valor. These depictions emphasize Ukraine’s narrative as a defender of liberal democracy and Western values, contrasting it with autocratic Russia. The findings underscore the strategic use of visual storytelling in shaping international perceptions of the conflict, revealing the complexities of integrating gender inclusivity in wartime communication. While these narratives disrupt some traditional gender norms, they remain embedded in established societal norms, reflecting broader struggles in representing modernity and inclusivity within a nationalist framework.
{"title":"Female Fighters and Male Vulnerabilities. Gendered Depictions in Ukraine’s Visual Narrative of the Russia-Ukraine War","authors":"Elena Dück, Georg Tiroch","doi":"10.1093/ips/olaf031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olaf031","url":null,"abstract":"Wars dichotomize (world) society and often reinvigorate “traditional” understanding of masculinity and femininity. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, discussions about the role of masculinity and war show how commonplace the problematization of masculinity has become. This article highlights tensions with “traditional” perceptions of masculinity as strength and femininity as vulnerability. Based on an analysis of Ukraine’s visual narrative during the first six months after the Russian invasion, we employ Visual Segment Analyses to uncover these tensions. Our results show how visual portrayals of female soldiers challenge conventional civilian or caregiving roles, presenting women as both defenders and symbols of resilience. Conversely, male vulnerability, illustrated through images of wounded soldiers, juxtaposes bravery with visible fragility, yet anchors masculinity in acts of sacrifice and valor. These depictions emphasize Ukraine’s narrative as a defender of liberal democracy and Western values, contrasting it with autocratic Russia. The findings underscore the strategic use of visual storytelling in shaping international perceptions of the conflict, revealing the complexities of integrating gender inclusivity in wartime communication. While these narratives disrupt some traditional gender norms, they remain embedded in established societal norms, reflecting broader struggles in representing modernity and inclusivity within a nationalist framework.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"128 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145089666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While critical scholarship has extensively analyzed the governance of migration as a security issue and has documented its detrimental effects, the securitization of migration has become a successful mobilizing tool for far-right actors. Deeply worried by this development, this study moves beyond critique to explore how ordinary people imagine alternative security futures. Based on ten participatory workshops with 125 residents of Hamburg in 2023, our research examines how participants conceptualize a “secure city for all.” Participants envisioned security through enabling and preventative spaces and infrastructures rather than exclusionary measures: accessible urban spaces, affordable housing, community solidarity, and alternative emergency responses. The findings both confirm existing vernacular security scholarship, showing the fundamental ambivalence of security imaginations, and extend it in two key ways. First, we identify accessibility (physical, linguistic, and informational) as a previously overlooked dimension of vernacular security that affects diverse populations transversally. Second, we demonstrate that imagination constitutes a distinct form of vernacular security knowledge, highlighting how non-elites actively theorize alternative security arrangements. By creating spaces for collective imagination, the study shows how participatory methods can serve as political interventions in an era of shrinking democratic spaces.
{"title":"Radical Imagination and Vernacular Security: Creating Spaces for Alternative Security Futures","authors":"Nina Perkowski","doi":"10.1093/ips/olaf033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olaf033","url":null,"abstract":"While critical scholarship has extensively analyzed the governance of migration as a security issue and has documented its detrimental effects, the securitization of migration has become a successful mobilizing tool for far-right actors. Deeply worried by this development, this study moves beyond critique to explore how ordinary people imagine alternative security futures. Based on ten participatory workshops with 125 residents of Hamburg in 2023, our research examines how participants conceptualize a “secure city for all.” Participants envisioned security through enabling and preventative spaces and infrastructures rather than exclusionary measures: accessible urban spaces, affordable housing, community solidarity, and alternative emergency responses. The findings both confirm existing vernacular security scholarship, showing the fundamental ambivalence of security imaginations, and extend it in two key ways. First, we identify accessibility (physical, linguistic, and informational) as a previously overlooked dimension of vernacular security that affects diverse populations transversally. Second, we demonstrate that imagination constitutes a distinct form of vernacular security knowledge, highlighting how non-elites actively theorize alternative security arrangements. By creating spaces for collective imagination, the study shows how participatory methods can serve as political interventions in an era of shrinking democratic spaces.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145089667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Images play a key role in shaping public perceptions of war and offer a unique window into the politics of the everyday. This article addresses the underexplored engagement with images of soldiering in visual International Relations (IR), centering the everyday practices of military personnel during the Iraq War (2003-2012). Engaging a collection of photographs taken on US army bases, it develops an analysis grounded in the interpretative potential of images and informed by the critical military studies literature. Using the concept of emotional bundling, the article explores how emotions such as love, grief, care, and desire circulate within the institutional semi-public, semi-private spaces of barracks. It traces how these emotions shape relational dynamics, including the interplay between intimacy and institutional control, the navigation of boredom and desire, and the tensions between institutionalized rituals of grief and personal mourning. By foregrounding the everyday, the article contributes to visual IR an analysis that emphasizes the emotional and embodied dimensions of militarism and its broader political and societal consequences.
{"title":"Everyday Soldiering, Emotions, and the Iraq War: A Visual International Relations Analysis","authors":"Matthias Humer","doi":"10.1093/ips/olaf030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olaf030","url":null,"abstract":"Images play a key role in shaping public perceptions of war and offer a unique window into the politics of the everyday. This article addresses the underexplored engagement with images of soldiering in visual International Relations (IR), centering the everyday practices of military personnel during the Iraq War (2003-2012). Engaging a collection of photographs taken on US army bases, it develops an analysis grounded in the interpretative potential of images and informed by the critical military studies literature. Using the concept of emotional bundling, the article explores how emotions such as love, grief, care, and desire circulate within the institutional semi-public, semi-private spaces of barracks. It traces how these emotions shape relational dynamics, including the interplay between intimacy and institutional control, the navigation of boredom and desire, and the tensions between institutionalized rituals of grief and personal mourning. By foregrounding the everyday, the article contributes to visual IR an analysis that emphasizes the emotional and embodied dimensions of militarism and its broader political and societal consequences.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144927835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Recent years have witnessed a surprising resurgence of treason accusations in public discourse, despite their rarity in legal prosecutions, particularly within democratic states. This article examines the effects of treason accusations, shifting focus from their causes to their role in shaping political communities and the meaning of allegiance. Deploying the term treason has important effects, as it contributes to delegitimizing groups of people, branding them as disloyal outsiders. Based on a historical analysis of the discourse on treason and political community in England after the Reformation, I show how treason played a central role in securing the English state through prosecuting dissent and continues to shape collective identities. Drawing attention to changing notions of treason, I show how these contributed to understandings of loyalty, belonging, and exclusion. Through stigmatizing dissenters as disloyal outsiders, treason accusations not only reveal alternative imaginaries of political community and authority but also uncover the violent dynamics sustaining group identity. This historical lens offers insights into contemporary debates about treason’s role in redefining sovereignty and belonging, underscoring its enduring power as a fundamental discursive and performative political act.
{"title":"Treason and Political Community:Exclusion, Belonging, and Loyalty","authors":"Benjamin de Carvalho","doi":"10.1093/ips/olaf025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olaf025","url":null,"abstract":"Recent years have witnessed a surprising resurgence of treason accusations in public discourse, despite their rarity in legal prosecutions, particularly within democratic states. This article examines the effects of treason accusations, shifting focus from their causes to their role in shaping political communities and the meaning of allegiance. Deploying the term treason has important effects, as it contributes to delegitimizing groups of people, branding them as disloyal outsiders. Based on a historical analysis of the discourse on treason and political community in England after the Reformation, I show how treason played a central role in securing the English state through prosecuting dissent and continues to shape collective identities. Drawing attention to changing notions of treason, I show how these contributed to understandings of loyalty, belonging, and exclusion. Through stigmatizing dissenters as disloyal outsiders, treason accusations not only reveal alternative imaginaries of political community and authority but also uncover the violent dynamics sustaining group identity. This historical lens offers insights into contemporary debates about treason’s role in redefining sovereignty and belonging, underscoring its enduring power as a fundamental discursive and performative political act.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144898809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Studies have shown how online political communication mobilizes support by appealing to the audience’s emotions. The role of the visual affordances of digital technologies in this process, however, remains insufficiently studied. This paper analyzes visual narratives surrounding international political debates on climate change at the United Nations Climate Change Conference of 2021. Our findings highlight that images are key in conveying emotion in tweets, and show that actors use a variety of visual tools both to construct and to undermine trust. We find that visuals communicate important affective nuances in emotion norms and that the latter, in turn, play a key role in political messaging that fosters or undermines trust in Conference of the Parties (COP) proceedings by validating certain emotions as appropriate to engage with the climate issue. The official COP narrative builds trust through images of professional neutrality, where rational detachment or optimism are the emotional norms of engagement. Climate deniers and climate activists reproduce this emotional neutrality through common-sense rationality and scientific objectivity, respectively, but also construct alternative emotion norms, which work to undermine trust in COP proceedings, albeit in different ways. Our contribution infuses a sociological perspective of emotions, trust, distrust, and mistrust, and highlights the role of visuality in international political debates about climate negotiations.
{"title":"The Politics of Trust: Emotions and Visual Narratives in Online Climate Change Debates at COP26","authors":"Nicole Doerr, María Florencia Langa","doi":"10.1093/ips/olaf029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olaf029","url":null,"abstract":"Studies have shown how online political communication mobilizes support by appealing to the audience’s emotions. The role of the visual affordances of digital technologies in this process, however, remains insufficiently studied. This paper analyzes visual narratives surrounding international political debates on climate change at the United Nations Climate Change Conference of 2021. Our findings highlight that images are key in conveying emotion in tweets, and show that actors use a variety of visual tools both to construct and to undermine trust. We find that visuals communicate important affective nuances in emotion norms and that the latter, in turn, play a key role in political messaging that fosters or undermines trust in Conference of the Parties (COP) proceedings by validating certain emotions as appropriate to engage with the climate issue. The official COP narrative builds trust through images of professional neutrality, where rational detachment or optimism are the emotional norms of engagement. Climate deniers and climate activists reproduce this emotional neutrality through common-sense rationality and scientific objectivity, respectively, but also construct alternative emotion norms, which work to undermine trust in COP proceedings, albeit in different ways. Our contribution infuses a sociological perspective of emotions, trust, distrust, and mistrust, and highlights the role of visuality in international political debates about climate negotiations.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144901706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the early 2000s, the murders and disappearances of women happening since the 1990s in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, became an issue of global concern, sparking—alongside transnational political mobilizations—a breadth of cultural products addressing these killings. This article analyzes global visual arts pieces about feminicide in Ciudad Juárez to show how artists represented the events through different aesthetic frames, thus rendering it a multivocal issue. I use visual frame analysis of 138 visual art pieces, contextualized by interviews with artists and curators, and secondary texts to examine how artists translated feminicide. First, Western artists appeal to universalistic, humanitarian ideals to make people care about the victims based on a shared humanity. Second, Chicane artists construct feminicide in Ciudad Juárez as the epitome of oppressive global hierarchies. Finally, Mexican artists focus on social loss and mourning produced by the feminicides. By untangling three aesthetic frames, I contribute to discussions on global meaning-making by adding visual analysis and suggesting that complementary aesthetic frames can contribute to the symbolic power of feminicide worldwide.
{"title":"Multivocal Anti-Feminicide: Aesthetic Frames and the Making of the Women of Ciudad Juarez as a Global Injustice Symbol","authors":"Ana López Ricoy","doi":"10.1093/ips/olaf016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olaf016","url":null,"abstract":"In the early 2000s, the murders and disappearances of women happening since the 1990s in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, became an issue of global concern, sparking—alongside transnational political mobilizations—a breadth of cultural products addressing these killings. This article analyzes global visual arts pieces about feminicide in Ciudad Juárez to show how artists represented the events through different aesthetic frames, thus rendering it a multivocal issue. I use visual frame analysis of 138 visual art pieces, contextualized by interviews with artists and curators, and secondary texts to examine how artists translated feminicide. First, Western artists appeal to universalistic, humanitarian ideals to make people care about the victims based on a shared humanity. Second, Chicane artists construct feminicide in Ciudad Juárez as the epitome of oppressive global hierarchies. Finally, Mexican artists focus on social loss and mourning produced by the feminicides. By untangling three aesthetic frames, I contribute to discussions on global meaning-making by adding visual analysis and suggesting that complementary aesthetic frames can contribute to the symbolic power of feminicide worldwide.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144684578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The British government’s Prevent Duty puts a legal obligation on civilians employed in health, education, and social work sectors to “prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.” The policy repurposes safeguarding and duty of care principles embedded within these sectors to establish a regime of control where frontline staff have to take up surveillance duties. Given the statutory nature of the policy, compliance is mandatory. However, within the everyday enactment of Prevent Duty, we can also find people pushing back against its stipulations or working around them. Using everyday resistance and Foucauldian counter-conducts, this paper will demonstrate that while counter-terrorism technologies co-opt public sector sites and practices to establish structures of surveillance, resistance is still possible. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with medical staff, educators, and social workers in England, this paper will put forward a typology of everyday resistance to capture the different ways in which frontline staff tasked with counter-terror obligations challenge the Prevent Duty and reclaim the spaces and acts securitized by this policy.
{"title":"Resisting the Prevent Duty—A Typology of Everyday Resistance","authors":"Amna Kaleem","doi":"10.1093/ips/olaf024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olaf024","url":null,"abstract":"The British government’s Prevent Duty puts a legal obligation on civilians employed in health, education, and social work sectors to “prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.” The policy repurposes safeguarding and duty of care principles embedded within these sectors to establish a regime of control where frontline staff have to take up surveillance duties. Given the statutory nature of the policy, compliance is mandatory. However, within the everyday enactment of Prevent Duty, we can also find people pushing back against its stipulations or working around them. Using everyday resistance and Foucauldian counter-conducts, this paper will demonstrate that while counter-terrorism technologies co-opt public sector sites and practices to establish structures of surveillance, resistance is still possible. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with medical staff, educators, and social workers in England, this paper will put forward a typology of everyday resistance to capture the different ways in which frontline staff tasked with counter-terror obligations challenge the Prevent Duty and reclaim the spaces and acts securitized by this policy.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144639675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The article demonstrates how international relations (IR) as a discipline has failed to sufficiently attend to caste and casteism as matters of crucial significance for analyzing international, transnational, and global politics. Despite ongoing initiatives to make IR scholars knowledgeable about and attuned to how issues of race and racism directly impact many of the discipline’s core areas of research, including IR’s own history as a distinct field, caste and caste-based discrimination have not been subjected to the same level of attention and scrutiny. On the contrary, there is an evident dearth of articles that are addressing caste and its relevance beyond strictly local or national contexts in the discipline’s leading journals. The article argues that this omission is foremost a result of poor training, a current tendency to uncritically valorize non-Western sources of IR, and a consequent acceptance of seemingly conventional, yet since long abandoned, conceptions of caste. The latter, as the article evinces, risks reproducing and affirming Hindu nationalist renderings of India as an international actor and entity.
{"title":"International Relations, Silent Erasure, and the Cruelty of Caste","authors":"Ted Svensson","doi":"10.1093/ips/olaf022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olaf022","url":null,"abstract":"The article demonstrates how international relations (IR) as a discipline has failed to sufficiently attend to caste and casteism as matters of crucial significance for analyzing international, transnational, and global politics. Despite ongoing initiatives to make IR scholars knowledgeable about and attuned to how issues of race and racism directly impact many of the discipline’s core areas of research, including IR’s own history as a distinct field, caste and caste-based discrimination have not been subjected to the same level of attention and scrutiny. On the contrary, there is an evident dearth of articles that are addressing caste and its relevance beyond strictly local or national contexts in the discipline’s leading journals. The article argues that this omission is foremost a result of poor training, a current tendency to uncritically valorize non-Western sources of IR, and a consequent acceptance of seemingly conventional, yet since long abandoned, conceptions of caste. The latter, as the article evinces, risks reproducing and affirming Hindu nationalist renderings of India as an international actor and entity.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144603124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of memory in world politics. Within this literature, contentious memory politics have been shown to play an outsized role in many international relationships, especially among post-Soviet states and in Northeast Asia. Most existing scholarship on such international “history wars,” however, has tended to privilege explanation of their official diplomatic conduct, unproblematically assuming the existence of a social reality in which this conduct is possible and makes sense in a national context. To address this, in this article, I draw from critical understandings of foreign policy and research on popular culture and world politics to theorize how, what I term, the everyday mnemonic foreign policy practices of popular culture materials, through their construction of understandings of the past and identities of Self and Other in relation to this past, contribute to making possible, imaginable, and even common-sensical the official conduct of international history wars. To illustrate this phenomenon, I analyze Japanese and South Korean popular culture materials to demonstrate the role they play in (re)producing a mnemonic social reality through which the conflictual official diplomatic conduct of the so-called “history problem” between these countries is enabled.
{"title":"Enabling International History Wars: Everyday Mnemonic Foreign Policy in South Korean and Japanese Popular Culture","authors":"Chris Deacon","doi":"10.1093/ips/olaf018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olaf018","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of memory in world politics. Within this literature, contentious memory politics have been shown to play an outsized role in many international relationships, especially among post-Soviet states and in Northeast Asia. Most existing scholarship on such international “history wars,” however, has tended to privilege explanation of their official diplomatic conduct, unproblematically assuming the existence of a social reality in which this conduct is possible and makes sense in a national context. To address this, in this article, I draw from critical understandings of foreign policy and research on popular culture and world politics to theorize how, what I term, the everyday mnemonic foreign policy practices of popular culture materials, through their construction of understandings of the past and identities of Self and Other in relation to this past, contribute to making possible, imaginable, and even common-sensical the official conduct of international history wars. To illustrate this phenomenon, I analyze Japanese and South Korean popular culture materials to demonstrate the role they play in (re)producing a mnemonic social reality through which the conflictual official diplomatic conduct of the so-called “history problem” between these countries is enabled.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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