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The evolution of refugee humanitarianism is commonly studied in terms of critical junctures. One such historical moment is the creation of a 'safe zone' for Iraqi Kurdish refugees above the 36th parallel of Northern Iraq through the 1991 United Nations (UN) mission known as 'Operation Provide Comfort.' The UN intervention is widely accepted as a critical juncture because it marked the beginning of international humanitarianism's extra-territorial phase. 'Operation Provide Comfort' brought a paradigm shift in the management of displaced populations by means of introducing "preventive protection" as a novel approach combining protection with control as the idea is to keep refugees in their own countries and offer them help without the need to cross an international border. The standard narrative underlines Western historical priority by attributing the preventive protection to a single source of ideas and processes stemming from the West. Drawing on postcolonial research, this paper argues for recognizing the agency of the non-West in the formulation and execution of the safe haven concept as a historical milestone. More specifically, it demonstrates the pioneering role that Turkey played through international debates and diplomatic action, which culminated into the new episode of refugee humanitarianism. The findings also invite us to revisit current explanations of the evolution of international humanitarian norms by showing the entanglement of refugee protection on the one hand, and domestic and regional questions of ethnicity and counter-insurgency on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations (IR) scholars are increasingly interested in the role of memory in world politics. In this paper, we examine a key tension in the uptake of memory in IR between its status as a topic studied within IR and its use as an optic through which the basic categories of IR might be rethought. Focusing on the problem of scales of analysis, central within memory studies more broadly, we suggest that while memory poses a challenge to typical scalar arrangements in IR, such as "levels" of analysis, memory is often studied within these very arrangements. We argue that this is significant because questions of scale are at times the central political problem at stake in international memory. We track this tension between topic and optic in studies of memory, national identity, and foreign policy; studies of collective trauma and sovereignty; and studies of conflict and cooperation over memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the pedagogical implications of the "Global International Relations (GIR)" and "Worlding Beyond the West" agendas. These two programs have criticized IR's Western-centrism and offered systematic ways to expand beyond IR's Euro-Atlantic roots. Their development coincides with other high-profile theoretical and historiographic developments, not to mention societal imperatives, to expand the substantive remit of the discipline. However, the diversification agenda has been mostly concerned with the research output of IR and has treated the pedagogical side of IR's intellectual life as a secondary consideration. Proponents of the GIR and Worlding agendas have yet to convert these programs into a classroom pedagogy. This paper fills that gap. It critiques the practical and intellectual limits of GIR and Worlding pedagogies. More importantly, it provides theoretically informed ways to transpose their diversification projects into the undergraduate classroom. In doing so, this paper bridges disciplinary analysis, IR theory, and IR pedagogy in an integrated analysis of IR's much-needed attempts at diversification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligence services are important sites of contestation, often the foci of reform and calls for greater transparency. Yet, while growing attention has been paid to intersectionality, gender equality reform, and progress in other areas of international affairs, little of this same transparency and attention has been paid to diversity in the intelligence sector. This paper seeks to bridge the gap, comprising a systematic review of the literature on diversity in the intelligence sector to improve our understanding of what is known and what can be known about the history and current make-up of the intelligence sector—and those who "do intelligence work". By identifying strengths and gaps in the literature and setting an agenda for future research within these "secret institutions", this paper argues that the lack of transparency, data, and knowledge on the interplay of gender, race, and sexuality, among other aspects of diversity in intelligence, is deeply troubling. It hampers our knowledge of how the sector may be "gendered" or otherwise experienced, as well as how this particular area of the security sector may or may not be integrating gender and other perspectives into their work. This paper finds that diversity in the intelligence and national security sectors is both an asset and a liability to be managed. Diversity is seen as a source of intelligence gathering and analysis strength, as well as a potential threat to hegemonic masculinity in intelligence practice. Further, language and processes for promoting diversity in intelligence can reinforce stereotyped knowledge of marginalized groups that ultimately hamper calls for greater representation, diversity, inclusion, access, and opportunities in the intelligence sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is Christendom in international relations? We argue that Christendom does not equate to a long-lost historical empire but an enduring imaginary of a political order where government secures the church and the church ministers to government. Such imaginaries have taken a diverse range of historical and geographical forms, which have barely been explored in International Relations (IR). They may be state-centric or decentered. As intellectual historians of the discipline have demonstrated, international relations was founded on a Christendom ontology and theology, and then rapidly forgot that fact. One major feature of this forgetting is a narrow historical conception of Christendom—its equation with Latin Christendom—in contrast with the wealth of scholarship in the humanities, which has revealed various conceptual forms and discursive practices of Christendom from at least the fourth century CE to the present. The effect of this narrowness has been to confirm IR's historical Eurocentrism and prevent it from exploring the international politics of Eurasian, Eastern Orthodox forms of Christendom, and signs of new imaginaries of Christendom emerging in the Global South. But such neo-Christendoms—which imagine government as re-centered on the church—raise the possibility of the emergence of modern variations of the legitimized violence associated with Latin Christendom. Alternative theologies of post-Christendom—imagining the church as politically active but decentered from government—indicate that such an imaginary is contested not just beyond but within Christian theology. The paper provides a new definition of Christendom and re-evaluation of its afterlives for the study of religion and theology in international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper criticizes the epistemic foundations of democratic state-building, which are derived from a model of political transitions according to which liberal democratic institutions will transform a hitherto authoritarian and troubled country into a more prosperous and stable society and, therefore, foreign interventions to establish these institutions are realistic and worthy investments, provided they are properly planned based on knowledge of what has worked elsewhere. This expectation is based upon two epistemological premises. The first premise, linearity , is that social and institutional change exhibits identifiable input–output relations connecting socioeconomic conditions and outcomes. The second premise, ergodicity , is that these relations, inferred from past samples, provide reliable probabilistic projections about future outcomes, which can guide the focus of policy interventions. Drawing from the study of complex systems, the paper indicates why these two premises offer a flawed conception of political transitions and why radical and large-scale interventions, such as state-building, will tend to generate unintended consequences rather than the planned effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security scholars have traditionally viewed emergency as a state of exception that triggers a struggle for survival, justifying the breaking of rules and excesses of state power. While there have been attempts to decouple security from its survivalist logic, emergency has remained an analytical blind spot in security studies. The dominance of an elite-centric, exceptionalist paradigm in the study of emergency has foreclosed the possibility of alternative conceptions of emergency and neglected the voices of structurally disempowered agents. This paper advances a vernacular contextual research agenda that is sensitive to the empirical diversity of emergency meanings and practices while foregrounding emergency claims made by non-elite actors. Challenging the idea of emergency as a form of "anti-politics," the paper contends that emergency should be understood as an intrinsic part of politics. It then recovers an alternative, "emancipatory" conception of emergency as an extraordinary moment of spontaneous beginnings that can activate the collective agency of marginalized actors. The final section establishes conceptual foundations for actor-centered, grounded empirical research into emergency politics and suggests avenues for future research. Contextualizing emergency and attuning to the voices and experiences of everyday actors are crucial to remove the key variable that ties security to the logic of survival and exception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The religion–politics nexus has become a thriving field within the study of global politics. However, the fast development has translated only into a moderate diversification of the research. Building on Bourdieu's analysis of the social field, this paper argues that this limited pluralization is related to the strong heteronomy of the field. This heteronomy has three "concentric" sources—the dependence on the field of politics, the continued influence of the secularist bias of Western social science, and the dependence on the theoretical developments in the broader discipline of international relations. Methodologically, the article builds on a detailed analysis of eighteen top academic journals and their scholarly output related to religion in global politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the question of what drives proxy alignment in war and argues that current proxy war scholarship needs further thinking to go beyond focusing on the principal–agent theory and individual actors' motivation analysis. Rather, there is a need to look at the generative mechanisms of proxy alignment as a process that constitutes patterns of friend–enemy relations. The paper argues securitization patterns from domestic to regional and international levels drive actors to re-evaluate their positions and define their enemies and friends. This is a process of securitization alignment and confluence, which serves as a generative mechanism for proxy alignment in a conflict. Securitization alignment is based on a convergence of securitizations by different actors that create a friend–enemy dynamic and convergence of security interests between actors. The confluence of securitizations from the domestic level to regional and beyond also connects actors across different levels to be in alignment and impact the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why does a state change its foreign policy objectives and who is responsible for instigating such change? According to Hermann, four primary change agents are central to this process: leaders, bureaucracies, changes in domestic constituencies, and external shocks. This paper argues that the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is a complementary policy process framework that can explain foreign policy change (FPC) and that accounts for all four of these primary change agents. Additionally, it is a broader framework of the policy process that facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing FPC than traditional FPC research. The ACF has the potential to broaden our understanding of FPC by emphasizing the intersection of the international system with domestic politics and focusing on a myriad of policy actors coordinating their advocacy efforts to influence FPC. To support this argument, the paper discusses how FPC can benefit from the ACF and reviews past applications. It proposes a research agenda using the ACF to study FPC and draws conclusions about future challenges and directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions regarding the political significance of international relations (IR) and how scholarly practice relates to/constitutes a political practice appear newly resonant, but are longstanding concerns. This article utilizes the growing literature on temporality within international politics to analyze the political potential of these intellectual interventions and generate new ways of framing scholarly practice. We observe two trends within the field. First, IR as a discipline remains largely—although not exclusively—imagined as an English-language discipline generated by scholars in the Global North. Each area's political discourse is currently dominated by fears surrounding foundational political and institutional change due to the rise of racialized authoritarianism within these self-imagined democratic societies. Despite these purportedly dramatic developments, there has not been a similarly dramatic shift in the scholarly relationship with politics. Scholars continue to successfully intervene in their collective presents, but scholarship itself remains oriented toward enduring claims that accumulate knowledge and resist the possibility of "failure." This paper theorizes the temporality of critical intervention to better relate positively to the bodies that co-constitute our political present. Ultimately, this paper concludes by arguing for a reconsideration of contradiction and failure as frames for thinking scholarly practice in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consistently low credit-taking rates, 16 percent in 2016 (Global Terrorism Database), continue to challenge the understanding of terrorism as "propaganda of the deed" twenty years after researchers initially pointed out the conundrum. While providing an overview and evaluation of the limited existing literature on credit-taking, this paper draws attention to three core problems in the current literature on terrorist credit-taking, which may have led the low credit-taking rates to appear more puzzling than is due. First, the available explanations struggle to find corroboration when empirically tested and many also show theoretical shortcomings with strong unspoken assumptions and unclear predictions of credit-taking behavior. Second, data structure and data availability unnecessarily narrow our academic understanding of credit-taking. Finally, theories focused on group characteristics such as religious motivation or state sponsorship suffer from severe issues of sample bias due to unintended selection on the dependent variable. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research less prone to the problematic issues identified in the article. A re-orientation toward a less restrictive and more fine-grained understanding of credit-taking is advised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some near crises tip over into full-blown crisis and others do not? This paper considers existing scholarship and identifies four key barriers to using quantitative analysis for tipping-point analyses: strategic indeterminacy; the incentives for conflict parties to avoid inefficiencies; the paucity of cases; and the availability of quality data. Due to these challenges, many do not perform well as immediate causes for crisis escalation. We also argue and demonstrate through two quantitative models of crisis escalation that some variables, particularly related to domestic politics, can do well in explaining why some disputes tip into crisis and others do not. As we illustrate with reference to the 1995–1996 Third Taiwan Straits Crisis, qualitative approaches that analyze the processes by which leaders and foreign policy institutions make decisions add needed explanatory power to purely quantitative models of the potential for near crises to tip into crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations scholarship has posited multiple pathways through which democracies accrue advantages in world politics. These range from enhanced warfighting capabilities to sovereign borrowing capacity to more constructive cooperation with like-minded regimes. A series of crises over the past generation, however, have called these advantages into question. This paper re-examines the key conceptual pillars underlying the democratic advantage in world politics. Scholars have posited that democracies possess inherent advantages in credible commitment mechanisms and public goods provision. The rise of populism has eroded these underlying advantages. Furthermore, the rise of China threatens to hamper the network effects that enhance democratic flourishing at the global level. Whether the democratic advantage is real and sustainable should be one of the defining political science research programs of this century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is safe to say that much of international law—the bedrock of the international order—has been shaped by the Western legal doctrine. How does the Islamic legal tradition relate to international law? What are Islamic law states' (ILS) stance toward the global order and international relations? This article offers a fresh perspective of similarities and differences between international law and Islamic law. ILS' patterns of commitments to a number of international treaties and institutions reveal a nuanced picture of these states' position in the contemporary global order. I bring together the English-language-dominated field of international relations and the Arabic-language literature on global order and Islamic law. I trace Islam's contributions to international law and argue that international law and Islamic law share more similarities than they are given credit for. However, the inherent diversity of Islamic law and the lack of an authoritative body of Islamic international law muddle effects of historical cross-fertilization between Islamic law and international law. In reality, ILS' position in the global order is not about a fundamental clash of values. A much more intricate picture emerges. In an important way, this paper sketches an emerging research agenda for understanding ILS' position in the modern global order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and with what effects do institutions diffuse between international organizations (IOs)? An emerging literature extends a key insight of the study of diffusion processes among states to the international level, establishing that the adoption of institutions in IOs is regularly conditioned by the choices of other IOs. Yet, this literature neglects a key contextual difference between the two settings: unlike in the hierarchically structured organizations that have dominated the literature on diffusion, institutional creation, and change in IOs are the result of decentralized bargaining among sovereign governments. This paper develops a heuristic model that shows how diffusion between IOs shapes decision-making within them through its impact on the institutional preferences of individual governments. The model establishes that, unlike in diffusion processes among states, convergence is an unlikely outcome of diffusion between IOs. By implication, studies that take institutional convergence as their starting point are likely to underestimate the pervasiveness of diffusion effects. I demonstrate these arguments with a case study of the establishment of a regional dispute settlement system in Mercosur, a regional organization in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can there be a "radical IR?" Scholars have given little attention to the question of the following: where is radicalism in the discipline? I argue that not only is it possible to think about radical international theory, but that it is necessary in the contemporary world. International theorists have to grapple with developments of fundamental change, including the so-described decline of the (neo)liberal international order, transformations in global capital, and an upsurge in populist political movements that advocate for fundamental political change. In approaching the question of radicalism in IR, the article develops a working definition of radicalism as an approach to politics that focuses on the International as a whole, uses theoretical tools from the humanistic sciences to engage in an active politics of fundamental transformation, and deploys methods that are historicist, genealogical, and oriented toward "getting to the root of things." Additionally, the paper illustrates the virtues and promises of a radical IR by using the case of (neo)liberal world order arguments to show how a radical IR could change the trajectory of these engagements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The received view in international relations (IR) is that the European multistate system was created when the medieval religious order broke down in the centuries following the Reformation. This view, which sees the medieval Catholic Church as a factor that hindered the advent of the multistate system, ignores a key insight of medieval historians, namely that the deeper historical precondition for the European multistate system was that the Church challenged the notions of empire and hegemony after the eleventh-century conflict of church and state. By mining this body of historiography, this paper shows how the end of the fusion of lay and religious authority in general and the Church's persistent interest in avoiding that one secular polity outmatched the others in particular contributed to the development of the European multistate system. These insights not only question dominant historiographic assumptions of IR, but may also be said to challenge the epistemological approaches of much of this scholarship. Resumen El criterio aceptado en Relaciones Internacionales (RI) es que el sistema multiestatal europeo se creó tras el colapso del orden religioso medieval en los siglos posteriores a la Reforma. Este criterio, que considera a la Iglesia católica como un factor que dificultó el advenimiento del sistema multiestatal, ignora un conocimiento clave de los historiadores medievales, específicamente, que la condición previa histórica más profunda del sistema multiestatal europeo fue que la Iglesia desafió las nociones de imperio y hegemonía después del conflicto entre la iglesia y el estado en el siglos XI. Al indagar exhaustivamente este cuerpo de historiografía, este informe demuestra cómo el fin de la fusión entre autoridad laica y religiosa en general y el interés persistente de la Iglesia por evitar que una forma de gobierno secular supere a las otras en particular contribuyeron al desarrollo del sistema multiestatal europeo. Estas conclusiones no solo cuestionan las conjeturas historiográficas dominantes de RI, sino que puede decirse que también desafían los abordajes epistemiológicos de gran parte de esta erudición. Extrait Le point de vue généralement accepté dans les relations internationales est que le système multiétatique européen s'est constitué lorsque l'ordre religieux médiéval s'est effondré dans les siècles qui ont suivi la Réforme. Ce point de vue, qui voit l'Église catholique médiévale comme un facteur ayant empêché l'avènement du système multiétatique, omet une perspective clé des historiens médiévaux, c'est-à-dire que l'une des conditions historiques préalables plus profondes à l'établissement du système multiétatique européen a été le fait que l'Église avait remis en question les notions d'empire et d'hégémonie après le conflit entre Église et État du 11e siècle. En exploitant ce corpus historiographique, cet article montre comment la fin de la fusion des autorités laïques et religieuses en général, et l'intérêt persistant de l'Église à éviter qu'un régime laïque ne dépasse les autres en particulier, ont contribué au développement du système multiétatique européen. Ces perspectives remettent non seulement en question les hypothèses historiographiques dominantes, mais nous pouvons considérer qu'elles remettent également en question les approches épistémologiques d'une grande partie des recherches dans ce domaine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an original theoretical framework for the study of insults in international relations (IR). Bringing into IR the two main theoretical approaches to aggravating language, slurs and dysphemisms, we conceptualize insults' disruptive impact on international interactions in a way that explains their logic, consequences, and risks. Specifically, we argue that insults constitute both at once tactical tools used by international actors to achieve their interests by disrupting an interaction and modifying the payoffs associated with it and linguistic artifacts constructing and sharpening self- and other identities. The components of our theoretical framework are illustrated with a wide range of empirical cases of international insults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]