Pub Date : 2023-09-15DOI: 10.1017/s0260210523000438
Nina Reiners
Abstract This article further develops and illustrates the argument that relationships between individuals help to explain the success of human rights advocacy in international institutions. Drawing from advocacy theory and socio-legal studies, I shift the attention from collective forms of advocacy to the importance of interpersonal relationships of advocates with individuals in international institutions to influence the development of human rights. I introduce a framework consisting of three analytical steps – mapping the key actors in a network, process-tracing, and biographical research – and apply the framework to three cases of norm development by a United Nations human rights treaty body. My findings highlight the power of interpersonal relationships for the making of human rights, and they inform scholarship on transnational elites, human rights advocacy, and the politics of international law.
{"title":"The power of interpersonal relationships: A socio-legal approach to international institutions and human rights advocacy","authors":"Nina Reiners","doi":"10.1017/s0260210523000438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210523000438","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article further develops and illustrates the argument that relationships between individuals help to explain the success of human rights advocacy in international institutions. Drawing from advocacy theory and socio-legal studies, I shift the attention from collective forms of advocacy to the importance of interpersonal relationships of advocates with individuals in international institutions to influence the development of human rights. I introduce a framework consisting of three analytical steps – mapping the key actors in a network, process-tracing, and biographical research – and apply the framework to three cases of norm development by a United Nations human rights treaty body. My findings highlight the power of interpersonal relationships for the making of human rights, and they inform scholarship on transnational elites, human rights advocacy, and the politics of international law.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"111 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135436857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-11DOI: 10.1017/s0260210523000414
Daniel R. McCarthy
Abstract Infrastructures are central to processes of state formation. The revival of materialism in International Relations has made an important contribution to our understanding of states through careful analysis of the politics of infrastructure and state building. Yet, to date, engagement with the state-theoretical tradition associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas, and Bob Jessop has been absent. Through comparison with the external-relational ontology of Bruno Latour and actor-network theory (ANT), this article argues that state theory and its internal-relational ontology avoids reifying the state while providing an analysis of infrastructure and state formation sensitive to the historical reproduction of social orders over time. Developing Gramsci’s concept of the ‘integral state’, it emphasises the necessary interpenetration between civil society, the state apparatus, and the creation of infrastructure. These conceptual arguments are illustrated through an analysis of the United States’ development of nuclear infrastructures during the early Cold War period, in the internal relations between infrastructure and the integral state are explored through Civil Defense Education programmes. Clarifying the internal relations of past, present, and potential future forms of socio-technical order is an important task for rethinking the politics of technological design in International Relations.
{"title":"Infrastructure and the integral state: Internal Relations, processes of state formation, and Gramscian state theory","authors":"Daniel R. McCarthy","doi":"10.1017/s0260210523000414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210523000414","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Infrastructures are central to processes of state formation. The revival of materialism in International Relations has made an important contribution to our understanding of states through careful analysis of the politics of infrastructure and state building. Yet, to date, engagement with the state-theoretical tradition associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas, and Bob Jessop has been absent. Through comparison with the external-relational ontology of Bruno Latour and actor-network theory (ANT), this article argues that state theory and its internal-relational ontology avoids reifying the state while providing an analysis of infrastructure and state formation sensitive to the historical reproduction of social orders over time. Developing Gramsci’s concept of the ‘integral state’, it emphasises the necessary interpenetration between civil society, the state apparatus, and the creation of infrastructure. These conceptual arguments are illustrated through an analysis of the United States’ development of nuclear infrastructures during the early Cold War period, in the internal relations between infrastructure and the integral state are explored through Civil Defense Education programmes. Clarifying the internal relations of past, present, and potential future forms of socio-technical order is an important task for rethinking the politics of technological design in International Relations.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"139 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135981406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-31DOI: 10.1017/s0260210523000360
Denisa Kostovicova, V. Popovski
Scholars have studied how women’s domestic and transnational civil society activism addresses the gendered nature of transitional justice. In contrast, they have paid scant attention to women’s impact on transitional justice policy-making in institutions. We leverage the feminist institutionalist perspective that makes visible gendered norms, rules, and discourses in institutions. Homing in on women’s influence in parliaments where women are outnumbered by men and marginalised by adversarial discourse, we develop a conceptualisation of women’s discursive agency. Foregrounding discourse in women’s ability to drive change, women’s agency is enacted through their linguistic communication style and substantive normative positions that constitute micro- and macro-level structures of domination. Quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis is applied to a corpus of parliamentary questions about transitional justice in the Croatian parliament from 2004 to 2020. Our results show that women adopt the adversarial style of questioning, which they use to broaden the scope of entitlements and press for reparations for female and male victims. They overcome constraints posed by partisanship and ideology, while constraints of nationalism are less easily broken. The article advances feminist transitional justice by demonstrating how women’s language contributes to dismantling men’s policy domination in institutions, with implications for mixed-sex interactions in non-institutional domains.
{"title":"Women’s discursive agency in transitional justice policy-making: A feminist institutionalist approach","authors":"Denisa Kostovicova, V. Popovski","doi":"10.1017/s0260210523000360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210523000360","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Scholars have studied how women’s domestic and transnational civil society activism addresses the gendered nature of transitional justice. In contrast, they have paid scant attention to women’s impact on transitional justice policy-making in institutions. We leverage the feminist institutionalist perspective that makes visible gendered norms, rules, and discourses in institutions. Homing in on women’s influence in parliaments where women are outnumbered by men and marginalised by adversarial discourse, we develop a conceptualisation of women’s discursive agency. Foregrounding discourse in women’s ability to drive change, women’s agency is enacted through their linguistic communication style and substantive normative positions that constitute micro- and macro-level structures of domination. Quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis is applied to a corpus of parliamentary questions about transitional justice in the Croatian parliament from 2004 to 2020. Our results show that women adopt the adversarial style of questioning, which they use to broaden the scope of entitlements and press for reparations for female and male victims. They overcome constraints posed by partisanship and ideology, while constraints of nationalism are less easily broken. The article advances feminist transitional justice by demonstrating how women’s language contributes to dismantling men’s policy domination in institutions, with implications for mixed-sex interactions in non-institutional domains.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42363744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-30DOI: 10.1017/S0260210523000323
Lester Spence
Abstract In 2016, British investigative journalist Simon Rogers created a map/timeline of Twitter hashtags associated with Black Lives Matter. The map (which no longer exists) indirectly shows both the intensity of Black Lives Matter protests and their geographic scope. Within the United States, we see not only protest activity in metropolitan areas with large black population percentages, but also protest activity in metropolitan areas with few (if any) African Americans. Further, we see protests not just in the United States but throughout the world. The 2020 George Floyd murder arguably spurred more protests against police violence within the United States and around the world than any other moment. We understand these protests as part of a broader decolonial project that seeks to eradicate racialised violence. How does this project develop? In examining Black Lives Matter as a movement, most have either focused on domestic activity within the United States or on instances of international activity, but few have attempted to theorise its spread. I suggest that any approach that focuses solely or primarily on technological advances or on the work of activists misses an essential and under-examined element – US Black popular culture. Video Abstract
{"title":"The Black Fantastic in International Relations","authors":"Lester Spence","doi":"10.1017/S0260210523000323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000323","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 2016, British investigative journalist Simon Rogers created a map/timeline of Twitter hashtags associated with Black Lives Matter. The map (which no longer exists) indirectly shows both the intensity of Black Lives Matter protests and their geographic scope. Within the United States, we see not only protest activity in metropolitan areas with large black population percentages, but also protest activity in metropolitan areas with few (if any) African Americans. Further, we see protests not just in the United States but throughout the world. The 2020 George Floyd murder arguably spurred more protests against police violence within the United States and around the world than any other moment. We understand these protests as part of a broader decolonial project that seeks to eradicate racialised violence. How does this project develop? In examining Black Lives Matter as a movement, most have either focused on domestic activity within the United States or on instances of international activity, but few have attempted to theorise its spread. I suggest that any approach that focuses solely or primarily on technological advances or on the work of activists misses an essential and under-examined element – US Black popular culture. Video Abstract","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"584 - 596"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47517545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-23DOI: 10.1017/s0260210523000372
Ignasi Torrent
The following article seeks to question the deterministic tinge behind entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, uninhibited, and totalising projection of the world as a relational wholeness. Alongside the rise of Anthropocene debates and the claimed incapacity of post-positivism to account for contemporary socio-natural transformations, the text embarks on two main goals. On the one hand, the article sketches a brief genealogy of processual and relational thinking, with a focus on International Relations (IR) literature. On the other hand, the text seeks to move forward critical engagements with the entangled grand narrative. To this end, the article exposes a problematic ontological assumption often overlooked by both entanglement fetishists and their critics: entanglements are infallibly generative, that is to say, they deterministically precipitate further beings and events. In doing so, the text invites IR scholarship to explore non-generative encounters and hence to address the question of the possibility of being without being in relation. Drawing from an unorthodox line of research, the article unearths non-relational, or beyond-the-relational, instances, whose engagement with an entangled world can only be materialised through the logics of subjugation. For this mode of being, the texts hints, non-engagement, refusal, and withdrawal become a form of political resistance and survival, thus distorting the controversial association between political subjectivity and emancipation.
{"title":"Problematising entanglement fetishism in IR: On the possibility of being without being in relation","authors":"Ignasi Torrent","doi":"10.1017/s0260210523000372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210523000372","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The following article seeks to question the deterministic tinge behind entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, uninhibited, and totalising projection of the world as a relational wholeness. Alongside the rise of Anthropocene debates and the claimed incapacity of post-positivism to account for contemporary socio-natural transformations, the text embarks on two main goals. On the one hand, the article sketches a brief genealogy of processual and relational thinking, with a focus on International Relations (IR) literature. On the other hand, the text seeks to move forward critical engagements with the entangled grand narrative. To this end, the article exposes a problematic ontological assumption often overlooked by both entanglement fetishists and their critics: entanglements are infallibly generative, that is to say, they deterministically precipitate further beings and events. In doing so, the text invites IR scholarship to explore non-generative encounters and hence to address the question of the possibility of being without being in relation. Drawing from an unorthodox line of research, the article unearths non-relational, or beyond-the-relational, instances, whose engagement with an entangled world can only be materialised through the logics of subjugation. For this mode of being, the texts hints, non-engagement, refusal, and withdrawal become a form of political resistance and survival, thus distorting the controversial association between political subjectivity and emancipation.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43052740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-22DOI: 10.1017/s0260210523000384
Peter J. Verovšek
The globalisation of political power into structures ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the nation-state has increasingly been called into question as part of a ‘sovereigntist turn’ in contemporary politics. While such demands for local control by bounded peoples may be democratic, empirically they often also take a nationalist form. Building on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of how ‘the nation conquered the state’, I argue that the slippage from democratic to national sovereigntism is rooted in fundamental conceptual instabilities within the concept of the nation-state. Whereas the first term in this hyphenated construct favours certain individuals based on their ethnic background, the latter is a universal concept that demands the equal treatment of all. My basic thesis is that these internal contradictions help to explain the nationalist tendency in calls to return political power to the nation-state. I illustrate these points by drawing on examples from the ‘illiberal democracies’ of Central-Eastern Europe, focusing on Poland and Hungary.
{"title":"‘The nation has conquered the state’: Arendtian insights on the internal contradictions of the nation-state","authors":"Peter J. Verovšek","doi":"10.1017/s0260210523000384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210523000384","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The globalisation of political power into structures ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the nation-state has increasingly been called into question as part of a ‘sovereigntist turn’ in contemporary politics. While such demands for local control by bounded peoples may be democratic, empirically they often also take a nationalist form. Building on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of how ‘the nation conquered the state’, I argue that the slippage from democratic to national sovereigntism is rooted in fundamental conceptual instabilities within the concept of the nation-state. Whereas the first term in this hyphenated construct favours certain individuals based on their ethnic background, the latter is a universal concept that demands the equal treatment of all. My basic thesis is that these internal contradictions help to explain the nationalist tendency in calls to return political power to the nation-state. I illustrate these points by drawing on examples from the ‘illiberal democracies’ of Central-Eastern Europe, focusing on Poland and Hungary.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48517551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-18DOI: 10.1017/s0260210523000396
Andrew Futter, O. Samuel
This article argues that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) would not have been possible without protecting the inalienable rights of states to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. While some Western states and NGOs have pushed to ban all applications of nuclear technology, this was unacceptable to a large number of disarmament-supporting states from the Global South and the Non-Aligned Movement. Without support from states across the Global South, the TPNW would not have achieved the required number of signatories to be adopted. Thus, we argue that to properly understand the TPNW, an appreciation of states’ interests and motivations beyond their more widely discussed frustrations with the pace of nuclear disarmament is essential. We also argue that nuclear weapons scholarship must pay more attention to perspectives from the Global South and the concept of Nutopia – a belief in both the dystopian potential of nuclear weapons and the utopian possibilities of nuclear energy – in its understanding of nuclear politics, past and present. Global South perspectives are often overlooked, and as such, current regimes of nuclear arms control and disarmament remain only partially understood in Western literature.
{"title":"Accommodating Nutopia: The nuclear ban treaty and the developmental interests of Global South countries","authors":"Andrew Futter, O. Samuel","doi":"10.1017/s0260210523000396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210523000396","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) would not have been possible without protecting the inalienable rights of states to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. While some Western states and NGOs have pushed to ban all applications of nuclear technology, this was unacceptable to a large number of disarmament-supporting states from the Global South and the Non-Aligned Movement. Without support from states across the Global South, the TPNW would not have achieved the required number of signatories to be adopted. Thus, we argue that to properly understand the TPNW, an appreciation of states’ interests and motivations beyond their more widely discussed frustrations with the pace of nuclear disarmament is essential. We also argue that nuclear weapons scholarship must pay more attention to perspectives from the Global South and the concept of Nutopia – a belief in both the dystopian potential of nuclear weapons and the utopian possibilities of nuclear energy – in its understanding of nuclear politics, past and present. Global South perspectives are often overlooked, and as such, current regimes of nuclear arms control and disarmament remain only partially understood in Western literature.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46876247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-10DOI: 10.1017/s0260210523000359
Håvard Rustad Markussen
‘Visual turn’ scholarship in International Relations (IR) acknowledges the importance of new information and communication technology for the production and circulation of images but lacks sustained engagement with the technologies themselves and how they interact with humans in the visual production of security. This article brings the visual turn into conversation with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and mobilises Latour and Woolgar’s notion of inscription to show how the production of visual artefacts and their security effects are conditioned by human/device interaction. It advances the argument that the representational force of a visual artefact is dependent not only on the content and quality of the artefact itself, but also on the specific human/device relations that condition its production. To illustrate this, the article theorises the smartphone as an inscription device and the selfie as an inscription practice and analyses the case of Zelensky’s selfie videos from the first few days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Selfies inscribe meaning to security issues by mobilising the photographic affordances of indexicality, composition, and reflection in unique ways. Specifically, they focus images on the communicative acts of their producers and play on the relationship between human and device to invoke feelings of immediacy, authenticity, and intimacy.
{"title":"Inscribing security: The case of Zelensky’s selfies","authors":"Håvard Rustad Markussen","doi":"10.1017/s0260210523000359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210523000359","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 ‘Visual turn’ scholarship in International Relations (IR) acknowledges the importance of new information and communication technology for the production and circulation of images but lacks sustained engagement with the technologies themselves and how they interact with humans in the visual production of security. This article brings the visual turn into conversation with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and mobilises Latour and Woolgar’s notion of inscription to show how the production of visual artefacts and their security effects are conditioned by human/device interaction. It advances the argument that the representational force of a visual artefact is dependent not only on the content and quality of the artefact itself, but also on the specific human/device relations that condition its production. To illustrate this, the article theorises the smartphone as an inscription device and the selfie as an inscription practice and analyses the case of Zelensky’s selfie videos from the first few days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Selfies inscribe meaning to security issues by mobilising the photographic affordances of indexicality, composition, and reflection in unique ways. Specifically, they focus images on the communicative acts of their producers and play on the relationship between human and device to invoke feelings of immediacy, authenticity, and intimacy.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41565807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-07DOI: 10.1017/s0260210523000335
Xander Kirke, Brent J. Steele
This paper contributes to this special issue by examining the existentialist themes re-emerging in Ontological Security Studies (OSS) and does so by proposing an under-explored and overlapping terrain regarding the function of myths and ontological security. What Blumenberg calls the ‘absolutism of reality’ becomes something to avoid through the process of telling, retelling, and adapting myths to suit our existential needs. The paper distinguishes our existentialist intervention into OSS from recent ones within that research community and then draws examples of the work on and of myth from the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Speaking to the need for OSS to develop an ethical-political perspective to not only explain but also change the world, the account we develop here also provides a pathway for an alternative politics based in counter-myth. It discloses, therefore, a promising and, in the face of rising authoritarianism and anti-democratic forces, necessary moral ethos regarding prescriptive ideas about what to do and how to confront and and counter the mounting challenges of global politics in the 2020s and beyond.
{"title":"Ontological security, myth, and existentialism","authors":"Xander Kirke, Brent J. Steele","doi":"10.1017/s0260210523000335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210523000335","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper contributes to this special issue by examining the existentialist themes re-emerging in Ontological Security Studies (OSS) and does so by proposing an under-explored and overlapping terrain regarding the function of myths and ontological security. What Blumenberg calls the ‘absolutism of reality’ becomes something to avoid through the process of telling, retelling, and adapting myths to suit our existential needs. The paper distinguishes our existentialist intervention into OSS from recent ones within that research community and then draws examples of the work on and of myth from the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Speaking to the need for OSS to develop an ethical-political perspective to not only explain but also change the world, the account we develop here also provides a pathway for an alternative politics based in counter-myth. It discloses, therefore, a promising and, in the face of rising authoritarianism and anti-democratic forces, necessary moral ethos regarding prescriptive ideas about what to do and how to confront and and counter the mounting challenges of global politics in the 2020s and beyond.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48012741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-20DOI: 10.1017/s0260210523000256
Benjamin Meiches
This paper examines the influence of nuclear weapons on fantasies of racial violence. Specifically, it argues that weapons impact the emergence of social formations, producing unique patterns of thought, desire, anticipation, and identity. While the effects of nuclear power have been central to disciplinary debates in international studies, existing critical commentary has largely focused on the discriminatory nature of the global nuclear hierarchy. By focusing on the productive impact of weapons on cultural registers, this article demonstrates that nuclear power not only reinforces global structures of racism and colonialism but also creates new articulations of white supremacy. It argues that a specific fantasy of nuclear genocide, seizing nuclear power as a means for executing a global race war, is an expression germane to the nuclear age. This article concludes by arguing that this fantasy plays an important role in white supremacist approaches to politics and existing forms of racist hierarchy.
{"title":"Dreams of atomic genocide: The bomb, racial violence, and fantasies of annihilation","authors":"Benjamin Meiches","doi":"10.1017/s0260210523000256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210523000256","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper examines the influence of nuclear weapons on fantasies of racial violence. Specifically, it argues that weapons impact the emergence of social formations, producing unique patterns of thought, desire, anticipation, and identity. While the effects of nuclear power have been central to disciplinary debates in international studies, existing critical commentary has largely focused on the discriminatory nature of the global nuclear hierarchy. By focusing on the productive impact of weapons on cultural registers, this article demonstrates that nuclear power not only reinforces global structures of racism and colonialism but also creates new articulations of white supremacy. It argues that a specific fantasy of nuclear genocide, seizing nuclear power as a means for executing a global race war, is an expression germane to the nuclear age. This article concludes by arguing that this fantasy plays an important role in white supremacist approaches to politics and existing forms of racist hierarchy.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42026998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"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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