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How can we explain Central and Eastern Europe’s (CEE) relative absence in the ‘worlding International Relations’(IR) conversation? What does provincializing the discipline from CEE might look like? I argue that CEE has been relatively neglected in the ‘worlding IR’ literature 1) due to local factors, 2) because it might have been turned into an ‘unimportant other’, 3) and because the history of the region challenges the macro-categories – ‘West/non-West’, ‘North/South’, ‘core/periphery’ – that structure this conversation. I show how the special issue offers promising endeavors to provincialize IR that are transferable to other contexts, for instance small states. Doing so, I use CEE as a case study to build a bridge between the special issue and the different debates it contributes to – making IR a less Eurocentric/parochial field, decentering European IR from the IR produced in UK/Scandinavian countries, and exploring the conditions of formulating critiques that produces something other than the problems they denounce.

Voicing criticism seems to be a difficult task for employees in international organisations (IOs), as numerous anecdotes in the literature suggest. This observation is alarming, since internal criticism is an indispensable resource for organisational learning processes. So why are IOs apparently not using this resource to its full potential? The present article is the first to provide a comprehensive answer to this question by combining insights from organisation theory with an empirical case study of the UN Secretariat. My general argument is that 'criticism from within' is ambivalent. It can be a resource for, but also a threat to IOs: internal criticism can endanger an IO's external reputation as well as destabilise the organisation from within. Based on this theoretical understanding, I identify and empirically examine three specific reasons for the UN Secretariat's weak criticism culture: (1) Criticism is suppressed due to a widespread fear of leaks resulting from external pressures. (2) Criticism is avoided as a strategy of self-protection in the face of (inevitable) failures. (3) Constructive criticism is difficult to express in settings where organisational hypocrisy is necessary.

The study of civil war recurrence is situated at the intersection of conflict and peacebuilding. These literatures focus on disparate definitions of peace. These literatures provide different explanations for variation in peace stability, and cover a large number of causal factors. We argue that these causal mechanisms are connected and conditioned by public policy. Specifically, we argue that the production and distribution of public goods post-conflict contribute to the maintenance of negative peace by acting as a credible commitment mechanism. In addition, public goods contribute to the building of positive peace when there is shared access to goods and services. We investigate the impact of public goods provision ‒ measured as health funding and distribution ‒ on causal mechanisms including opportunity, grievance, greed, and credible commitments. Using a duration model, we find that health spending, as a measure of public goods provision, is a strong predictor of the durability of peace after civil conflict.

The ongoing covid-19 pandemic has prompted discussions, both politically and analytically, that frame its security problematic as an infrastructural dilemma that unfolds between the public health-related need for interrupting the movement of people and calls to keep economic processes of production, distribution and consumption going. Moving beyond this diagnosis, we argue that infrastructural responses to the crisis in the European Union have resulted in the creation and invocation of economic and socio-material assemblages that are expected to steer societies through the crisis, which we term 'safe assemblages'. In empirical terms, we discuss the cases of the creation of economic emergency funds which we view as economic assemblages that guarantee payment connectivity for struggling businesses, and of the invocation of the 'home' as an assemblage that minimises contagion risks while maintaining social connectivity through digital means. In theoretical terms, we suggest expanding current theorisations of the role of circulation in security infrastructures, referring to Foucault, by a consideration of assemblages as a third component that mediates the relationship between circulation and its interruption.

Central and Eastern Europe played an important role in British interwar international thought. This article contrasts the visions of the region found in three key texts written by British scholars in the interwar period. Two of these, Halford Mackinder’s 1919 Democratic Ideals and Reality and E. H. Carr’s 1939 Twenty Years’ Crisis, share a common approach based on an abstract understanding of the nature of international order, even while they disagree on their prescriptions for Central and Eastern Europe. Starting from abstract principles, they then apply their findings to Central and Eastern Europe. By contrast, in her 1938 Czechs and Germans Elizabeth Wiskemann works in the other direction. Through a detailed analysis of the politics of the Bohemian historic provinces she comes to conclusions that can be applied to ideas of world order. Wiskemann’s detailed analysis and Mackinder’s and Carr’s more abstract proscriptions provided different viewpoints on the international relations of interwar Central Europe, although ultimately all three visions were overtaken by events.

How could research on memory politics in Eastern Europe speak to the wider concerns of International Relations (IR)? This article argues that research on historical memory (politics) that is common in area studies could help to rethink the study of crises in IR by demonstrating how crises change discourses and yield opportunities for memories to be challenged and defended – not only by the ‘strong’, but also by the ‘weak’ (or ‘peripheral’) actors. It further shows how conflicts over memory can become new crises. To illustrate this argument, the paper presents a comparative study of memory politics in Ukraine and Lithuania, tracing major discursive changes, their domestic and international impact, and offering a depiction of how hegemonic historical accounts were created before and during the 2013/2014 crisis in Ukraine and how they were contested in the aftermath of the crisis. By linking the study of international crises to memory politics of ‘weak’ actors, this paper attempts to develop a ‘provincialising’ platform for global IR.

This article unpacks the ways Eastern Europe (broadly conceived) has featured as a space, trope, and scholarly origin in major International Security Studies (ISS) and International Relations (IR) journals over the past three decades. A framing and authorship analysis in 18 disciplinary journals between 1991 and 2019 demonstrates how the region has been instrumental for the ISS subfield as an exemplary student of the Western theory and practice of IR. Eastern Europe has served as a symbolic space for exercising the civilising mission of the West and testing the related theories (security community building, democratisation, modernisation, Europeanisation, norm diffusion) in practice. The relative dearth of East European voices in ISS and leading IR theory journals speaks volumes about the politics of knowledge production and the analytical economy of the field. The positionality of East European ‘captive minds’ complicates ‘worlding’ IR from the region. The East European subalterns are largely enfolded in the definitive discourses of the field, and their power through disciplinary journals remains marginal.

This article builds on the criticism of the international socialisation narrative which mistakenly represents compliance as socialisation and recognises agency only to the extent it fails to comply. It pertains to the argument that such a narrative can lead to stigmatisation which reinforces social orders characterised by specific hierarchies of power and spatial relations. The example of EU member states from Central Europe (CE) that went from "star pupils of norm adoption" to "misbehaving children of Europe" serves as a case study. The research of literature treating CE countries as socialisees and international organisations (OSCE, NATO and EU) as socialisers shows two things. Firstly, it demonstrates that CE countries internalised norms even before they complied with norm-based rules, which challenges views that (under) socialisation was (is) an issue with these states. Secondly, it shows that non-compliance of the CE countries did not have much to do with non-acceptance of norms as such. It was rather related to hypersensitivity towards specific norms and rules in a context of multiple crises with asymmetric effects for the CE countries. In this process, the EU and CE used (non)compliance to reinforce their identities, thus creating stigma (the EU) and the attempt to resist it or even wear it as the source of pride (CE).

This paper analyses Hungarian foreign policy under the second and third governments of Viktor Orban (2010‒2018) with the help of role theory. Hungary presents an interesting case because during this period, being permanently torn between ‘pro-European’ and ‘sovereigntist’ roles, it was in a role conflict-situation. First, the article identifies the most important role concepts of three decision-makers, Prime Minister Orban and foreign ministers Martonyi (2010‒2014) and Szijjarto (2014‒2018), based on a sample of 103 speeches. In a next step, we describe the content of 13 most important role concepts. Building on the results, we then aim to answer three research questions. Firstly, what is the nature of the roles and what are the ‘others’ against which Hungary is positioning itself? Secondly, what conditions made the emergence of role conflict possible and why is Hungary willing to remain in a situation of sustained role conflict? And thirdly, how much continuity can be seen over the two legislative periods? The paper finds an abundance of ‘autonomous’ (as opposed to ‘interdependent’) roles, two new others (‘the West’ and ‘Hungary 1990‒2010’) and a surprising volatility in role concepts. In addition, a novel understanding of role conflict as beneficial (instead of constraining) is proposed.

Informal networks persist after conflict and undermine liberal peace-building. While these adverse effects are well-known, how informal networks survive beyond conflict is less understood. Scholars explain informal networks’ persistence by their stability and cohesion, attributed to solidarity of ascriptive bonds such as ethnic ties. In these accounts, networks are approached as actors and not as relational structures. We address this gap in the peace-building scholarship and conduct a longitudinal study of relations within an informal network in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Drawing on the political approach to networks, and applying Social Network Analysis, we investigate actors’ relational power and reveal how network actors use their connections to create strategic coalitions and opportunistic collaborations enabling them to exploit different stages of the peace-building process. We demonstrate that unequal distribution of relational power creates vested interests in sustaining the network and in seeking access to it, and how dynamic reconstitution of relational power within the network ensures continuity of network action from war to peace. From a policy perspective, this structural account of informal network persistence suggests a need for a better understanding of the dynamics among co-ethnics within an informal network that allows network members to subvert efforts to counter informality and undermines post-conflict institution-building.

The concept of ontological security has proved a valuable addition to International Relations (IR). At the same time, its discipline-specific incorporation has had consequences. Specifically, the widespread opposition of ontological security to physical security sometimes makes the ontological security-seeking self appear as disembodied. While a second wave of ontological security studies (OSS) has challenged such assumptions and paid greater attention to the ways in which ontological and physical security intersect, it has yet to address in detail the most immediate physical aspect of the self: its material body. Doing so allows us to extend the analytical reach of OSS and to move beyond a concern with particularised role-identities. Thus, this article draws on the foundational ontological security literature, as developed by Anthony Giddens and especially R. D. Laing, to highlight the importance of embodiment for ontological security. It argues that there is a genuine two-way relationship between physical and psychological security and that ontological security is consequently best understood as ‘security of the self-in-the-body’. Upon theorising what it means for states to have bodies, a brief analysis of the psychological impact of the so-called ‘North Korean abduction issue’ in Japan serves to illustrate this point.

This article examines China’s rapid and large-scale renewable energy expansion and the challenge it presents to orthodox approaches to sustainable energy diffusion that emphasise soft interventions and stakeholder participation. We show that China eschewed participatory modes of energy governance and pursued a centrally steered, hard interventionist strategy adapted to its non-democratic regime. We observe that China’s approach provides an alternative blueprint for development that is potentially attractive to some audiences. Drawing on recent soft power debates, we argue that China’s hard interventionist mode of governance in the renewables sector has the potential to enhance Chinese soft power both domestically and abroad.

In this paper, we examine Brazil’s international activism and ascent to the status of rising state during the presidencies of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003–2010) and his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff (2011–2014). We focus on the dissemination of social policies under an innovative model of development that reflected the political and economic context of a developing country. We argue that this activism was framed in terms of Brazil’s socio-economic and cultural peculiarities, whereby these were treated not as obstacles but as positive contributions to developing states’ attempts to reform global governance structures. We argue that this reflects an alternative form of foreign policy politicisation in which the social dilemmas, particularities and contradictions of the Brazilian experience are incorporated in the foreign policy agenda to leverage its international stature as a rising state. We explain how Brazil’s international cooperation through transferring its public policies and development models (policies for fighting hunger and poverty, agrarian development and income generation) to its Southern partners has been discursively articulated as representing Brazil’s normative potential to contribute to political and institutional solutions, and rebuild norms and standards that affect the distribution of international power and wealth.

Despite the growing activities of cities in world politics, and the importance of local actors in norm research, little has been done to assess the contribution of cities to global norm dynamics. Drawing on the normatively contested field of global HIV/AIDS policies, we show how cities differ from other local actors usually discussed in norm research. Instead of adapting, contesting or even rejecting global norms, cities amplify them. Amplification is a local reaction to global norm dynamics that resembles a combination of norm implementation and norm entrepreneurship. To show this urban engagement with norms in detail, we first link the existing strands of city research and norm research in IR. Second, we present the global norm dynamics related to HIV/AIDS policies as a normative context for city activities. Third, we scrutinise cities’ contribution to norm dynamics by analysing their networking and dissemination activities within and beyond city borders. As a result, we find that cities support global norm dynamics and amplify global norms even against a very different local and national background. These results have important implications for current norm research that has so far neither examined cities in detail, nor conceptualised local actors as amplifiers of global norms.

Energy security as a concept is void of meaning if not related to specific sociotechnical settings, this article argues. By bringing in insights from science and technology studies and national identity-making, we focus on how sociotechnical imaginaries of energy security in Norway and Ukraine are formative and productive for both technological development and societal discourses. This leads to diverse national narratives and strategies for providing energy security. In Norway, the imaginary transcends technical reasoning and day-to-day administration and has created a highly stable discourse seldom politicised. In Ukraine, the sociotechnical imaginary is in flux and highly politicised – if not securitised – as a new Ukrainian identity is under construction with and against energy technology and the Russian other. The article shows the benefits of understanding energy security as an interplay between societal discourses, technologies and natural resources rather than a stable end goal to be pursued.

Past decades have witnessed an upsurge in the use of global performance indicators (GPIs) to influence state behaviour. Within international development, the millennium development goals (MDGs) introduced an era of indicator-based governance, which now continues with the sustainable development goals (SDGs). The article provides a theoretical and empirical account of the workings and effectiveness of GPI-based development governance. Focusing on MDG 3, which concerned gender equality, the article presents the results of (1) a mapping of GPI adjustment in 15 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2000 to 2015, and (2) a study of the causal mechanisms of gender policy change in Kenya and Ethiopia. The findings demonstrate that MDG 3 was effective in influencing domestic policy commitments but struggled to generate further behavioural change, highlighting the risks of superficial GPI adjustment. The case studies show that domestic change was primarily driven by the donors’ economic conditionality and social influence strategies, leveraged through MDG performance assessments. The reason why material and social pressure was unable to close the gap between commitments and implementation efforts rests with its reliance on incentives as a source of change. These findings have implications for GPI-based governance, SDG implementation and gender equality change.

According to governmentality studies, resilience, like any other neoliberal policy framework, reproduces a paternalising dichotomy between capable Northern policy elites and incapable Southern actors. In contrast to this popular governmentality reading, this article argues that resilience thinking is actually geared towards critiquing international policy expertise and the privileged knowledge position of international interveners. Rather than imposing particular policy options from the top down, resilience thinking actively seeks out vernacular, non-liberal forms of governing. However, the drive to critique domineering neoliberal policy initiatives does not usher in a post-liberal paradigm. Instead, this article demonstrates how resilience works as a field of transition on which the retreat from liberal forms of governing is mediated discursively without giving up entirely on the notion of normative, law-based security. These insights are drawn out with reference to crime-related US security interventions in the Americas.

How do populists conduct foreign policy? The existing literature on populism focuses mainly on domestic patterns, and until recently the foreign dimension of populism has been largely overlooked. This paper aims to fill theoretical and empirical lacunae by mapping patterns of change and continuity in the formulation of geopolitical and economic international policy among Latin-American populist governments. Striving to conduct a systematic comparative analysis, this paper explores three waves of populist foreign policies in Latin America (classic, neoliberal, and progressive). While it is difficult to highlight a unified phenomenon, the findings reveal that several ‘unifying’ elements indeed exist: they are manifest in the tendency of such governments to jointly (re)construct transnational solidarities for legitimation purposes and to adopt economic foreign policies with a pragmatic bent. Moreover, in opposition to the two first waves of populist governments, the most recent wave has embraced personalist styles, emotional public diplomacy, and clientelist techniques with support networks abroad, thus actively projecting the domestic patterns of populism to the regional and global levels in an attempt to leverage both domestic and international legitimacy. This study offers critical lessons for IR scholarship’s increasing engagement with populism, contributing to the lively debate regarding the rise of populist trends across the globe.

There are several considerations of the papacy’s vision of what global politics should be like. There are, however, few mappings of the papacy’s actual concept of global politics, of how it evaluates the current state of global politics, understood as global political, social, and economic trends, patterns, actors and their relationships. This article delineates Pope Francis’ conception of global politics and contextualises it within the papacy’s trajectory of participating in global politics. Attending to a particular concept, of how the pope thinks about global politics, helps to better understand and place the papacy in the study of global politics. The article shows how Francis conceptualises global politics from below, from the periphery of society and politics, which leads him to unmask global inequalities. In particular, the article illustrates that Francis contests widespread assumptions of central hierarchic interstate relations and individualism, dominating the conceptual discourse about global politics.

This article considers efforts to improve the effectiveness of global governance by examining the nature and consequences of informal global governance by focusing upon the operation of the Group of 20 (G20). It does so by considering the relationship between the existing forms of global constitutionalism, which indicate a foundational role for rules and laws within the existing forms of multilateral global governance, with informal forms of global governance operating with respect to the G20. This is conducted by considering a constructivist understanding of diplomatic practices which operate to sustain international cooperation and better manage multilateral global governance. The article contends that informal global governance is animated by an underlying non-legal disposition of global informalism and is evident in various informal diplomatic practices in the operation of the G20. The article seeks to better comprehend the consequences of informal global governance and challenge the field of global constitutionalism by highlighting the important but problematic nature of non-legal and informal global practices in contemporary global governance.

Since the end of the Sierra Leonean civil war, successive governments have designated youth as a priority area of policy intervention and proposed numerous programmes to deal with the so-called ‘idle’ youth problem in the country. This focus on youth as objects of policy concern partially owes to contemporary discourses about the relationships between youth and conflicts, and especially, the idea that the existence of a large youth population represents a threat to domestic and international security, and thus functions as part of a larger global governance mechanism that targets societies as part of a liberal interventionist and conflict containment strategy. This paper uses the Sierra Leonean example to stage a broader critique of these interventionist and conflict containment strategies and the ideological schemas that make them possible. It suggests that these programmes are circumscribed epistemically by evolutionist preconceptions that construct the targeted populations as objects of power to be reproduced as neoliberal cosmopolitan subjects as a way of transcending the purported threat they represent. However, that these policies are incapable of transforming the structures within which the so-called ‘idle’ youth problem is produced. Rather, they reproduce, in other guise, the very conditions of precarity that they aim to address.

Which groups do global governance institutions address in their efforts to legitimate themselves? Global governance institutions are increasingly attempting to present themselves as legitimate vis-a-vis both internal and external audiences. Yet, empirical research on these legitimation audiences is still nascent. This article proposes a conceptual framework that highlights the selection of audiences by global governance institutions as a key element of their self-legitimation. Specifically, we argue that our approach addresses three continuing challenges in empirical research on self-legitimation. First, it emphasises how different actors within the institution may pursue multiple, and potentially conflicting, strategies with regard to the legitimation audiences they address. Second, our framework calls attention to what we call intermediary legitimation audiences, that is, audiences targeted with the expectation that they will in turn convince other audiences of the institution’s legitimacy. Finally, instead of taking for granted that external critique steers who is targeted by self-legitimation, our approach highlights that an institution’s internal assessment of such critique is decisive. We demonstrate the wide applicability of our framework through exploratory studies of three global governance institutions that differ with regard to their membership compositions: the World Health Organization, the International Criminal Court and the Forest Stewardship Council.

An increasingly lamented consequence of re-regulatory efforts following the 2007/2008 global financial crisis has been ‘de-risking’—the growing disengagement by banks and other financial institutions with markets perceived as posing greater risks than justified by potential profits. As banks based in the Global North have moved to withdraw financial services from many emerging economies, de-risking has attracted attention for undermining financial inclusion and developmental efforts. Novel technologies are being harnessed to address this problem, including applications of blockchain, the digital ledgers of transactions originally underpinning cryptocurrencies. Contributing to IR theorising of legitimacy and re-risking, this article illustrates how technology-based de-risking efforts that seek to attend to the perceptions of foreign financiers can undermine the legitimacy of financial inclusion projects. Contrasting unfolding blockchain-based financial inclusion initiatives in two regions of small states in the Eastern Caribbean and Eastern Europe, our analysis stresses the need for greater local participation and clearer distribution of benefits from finance and technology (fintech) centred forms of digital development.

This paper argues that political representation in transnational civil society networks needs to be investigated as practice with regard to its flexibility, relationality and dialogical agency. Analysis of transnational representation from a practice-theoretical perspective can facilitate a better understanding of the actual representation practices of civil society actors in a transnational setting. The question raised is this: how do representation practices ensue, change or shift within the broader structures in which they are embedded? By focusing on flexibility, relationality and dialogical agency as the key theoretical concepts for representation practice, this study delves deeper into those aspects through empirical analysis of qualitative interviews with activists from two major transnational civil society networks: the Clean Clothes Campaign and Friends of the Earth. The study finds that transnational representation in civil society networks evolves in a non-linear fashion, is characterised by shifting agency, discursive claims and a disembodiment of representation. The paper concludes with a discussion of how future research can pursue such critical engagement without falling back into standard, static notions of political representation.

This article engages with the debate about how we come to know IR the way that we do. It seeks to contribute to this research agenda in two related ways. Firstly, it highlights the influence that a previously neglected circuit of practice has on the co-constituted knowledge relationship between global finance (GF) and International Relations (IR): the business intellectuals of cultural circuits of capital (CCC). Secondly, it argues that the science and technology studies’ concept of boundary objects is invaluable in accounting for both how IR’s ‘constitutive’ theorising is influenced by other circuits of practice and the co-constituted nature of ‘the international’ as an object of investigation. To exemplify both arguments, and how they relate to one another, the article traces the co-constituted operation of the concept of ‘BRIC’ (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Following the global financial crisis in 2007/2008, CCC popularised the concept of ‘BRIC’, which then came to operate as a boundary object between IR and GF and in the process impacted on how IR knows ‘rising powers’ and ‘global governance’. Thus, the functionality of BRIC as a boundary object served to provide business intellectuals with constitutive influence on how IR knows its object of study.

Why do some bilateral relationships have the ability to become strong, stable and amicable but others do not even when they have incentive to develop higher resilience? This article proposes that perceived relational identity differences between two states, or otherness, shapes and limits resilience in their relationship. Drawing on the existing IR identity literature, the article develops a conceptual and operational definition of otherness and proposes a useful and replicable framework that can be used to capture the complexity of bilateral ties. The article illustrates this framework with two types of cases. First, two historical “least-likely” cases (Germany–Israel, 1949–1973; India–USSR, 1947–1970) of higher resilience, in which one would not expect the resilient relationships that developed. Second, a most likely contemporary mini-case (India–Israel 1992–2012), which uncovers lower than expected resilience. The article then concludes with the implications of this framework for further academic research and policy analysis.

This article sheds light on the root causes of terrorism by assessing the effect of food security on domestic terrorism among developing countries. Food security is a fundamental physiological need and captures a core well-being outcome. We argue that food insecurity creates grievances among citizens and increases demand among them for action against the government. Terrorist organisations provide the opportunity for citizens to channel their grievances against the government by resolving collective action problems and mobilising citizens. We demonstrate the link between food insecurity and domestic terrorism through quantitative analyses on a sample of 70 developing countries from 1980 to 2011. Our findings demonstrate the deleterious effects of food insecurity on peace in the developing world.

This paper seeks to bring new insights into the foreign aid allocation behaviour and patterns of two donors from the group of post-communist EU member countries, namely Poland and the Czech Republic. We use quantitative regression analysis to address Polish and Czech foreign aid objectives with a specific emphasis on geopolitical considerations and promotion of democracy. The results reveal a considerable level of similarity between Polish and Czech foreign aid allocation. Both donor countries use foreign aid to safeguard their own geopolitical self-interests—the Czech Republic and especially Poland prioritise post-Soviet countries in their aid allocations. They also prefer recipients in a relative geographic proximity. On the other hand, economic objectives are not significant drivers of Polish and Czech foreign aid. Given the recipients’ needs, the middle-income effects are evident in both countries’ aid allocations. Although support of democracy is an official objective of both donors, the level of democracy and freedom played a statistically significant role only in the allocation of overall Czech aid. A separated analysis on Polish and Czech democracy aid reveals even stronger biases of democracy aid towards former post-Soviet countries. Our research has also acknowledged the need for a more precise definition of democratic assistance.

International Relations theorists have recently paid increasing attention to the hierarchical nature of international society, that is, to its built-in structural inequalities. In this article, we focus on one thus far neglected aspect of global social stratification by highlighting the role that international institutions play in both reproducing and transforming inequalities among states and other global subjects. We argue that this focus on institutions can advance our understanding of the processes through which global inequalities are maintained and changed, and that institutionalist research can in turn benefit from shifting its attention from the predominant cooperation paradigm to capturing the manifold ‘inequality’ effects of institutionalised interactions in world politics. We illustrate this shift of perspective with a dual case study of the Ottawa and Oslo Conventions banning anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions.

This article is concerned with groups of states that do not fight each other and, moreover, hold stable expectations that war between them is unlikely to occur in the future. Such no-war communities can be seen as a particular, minimalist form of the concept of international security communities as coined by Karl Deutsch and further developed by Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett. The security community literature has identified several potential communities across the globe but failed to offer a conclusive explanation for how these emerged because, as I shall argue, insufficient attention has been paid to the domestic conditions of state capacity. This article proposes an alternative path to community in which a lack of state capacity forms the common knowledge foundation between states. Under certain conditions, a low level of capacity to fight can assure states of their common desire to avoid war and gives rise to mutual recognition and toleration. I demonstrate the argument based on two cases that have commonly been seen as the most likely candidates for security communities beyond Europe, the regions of South America and Southeast Asia.

Why do political actors prefer one counter-terrorism policy over another? We apply discourse network analysis and the advocacy coalition framework to the recent debate on counter-terrorism measures in Austria and argue that actors’ positions are based not so much on objective security factors and international or structural causes but on domestic politics and three interdependent variables. Political actors choose specific counter-terrorism policies because of: (1) a sense of ownership; (2) ideology; and (3) anticipated political gains. We show how different actors in Austria exploit the counter-terrorism debate to shield themselves from being blamed for being passive, to promote their ideological views, and/or to gain politically.

Countries emerging from violent conflict must overcome several challenges to achieve long-lasting peace. The literature paints a bleak picture indicating that only few post-conflict countries improve in terms of good governance and the rule of law. Instead, they might experience even more corruption, because state structures are not fully developed while informal networks have flourished during the civil war. Yet, we know surprisingly little about what happens to corruption during conflict. In this study, we examine whether levels of corruption in post-conflict countries are systematically different from pre-war levels. Using data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, we find that corruption is relatively stable over time. However, longer and more intense conflicts are associated with higher levels of corruption.

This article addresses the question of how the EU exercises power in international politics and, in particular, whether or not there is anything distinctive about the ways in which it does so. Taking a relational approach to power, where the focus is on practical knowledge and perceptions of self and other, the paper departs from the assumption that such a question has to be evaluated in specific settings. Extrapolating from the EU’s attempt to influence outcomes in Tunisia and Morocco following the Arab Spring, this paper proposes that the power of ambiguity captures some of the distinctiveness of the EU as a global actor. The paper highlights the ambiguity of what the EU is in the eyes of others, which opens up avenues for exercising power that others lack, not necessarily in accordance with a well-defined agenda, but understood as the production of effects in delimited settings.

In 1945, Albert Hirschman proposed that countries can use asymmetric trade relations as a weapon of political influence at the direct expense of the security of their trading partners. This paper argues that Hirschman’s theory of asymmetric interdependence can be applied to the contemporary case of European-Russian gas relations given that Russia uses its monopoly on gas to promote its regional political and security interests. At the same time, we argue that Hirschman’s concepts of ‘supply effect’ and ‘influence effect’ must be reevaluated in light of the deepening economic interdependence in European gas trade. By exploring three different types of dependent states, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Germany, we find that the interdependent network of trade relations in Europe, and the shared vulnerability and political influence of European gas importers, have weakened both types of economic statecraft. Yet, more indirect and diffuse forms of political influence are possible through forging ties of asymmetric interdependence.

For two decades scholars have used insights from constructivist approaches and principal-agent (P-A) theory to understand the relationship between states and international organisations (IOs). Together, these works identify the conditions under which IOs can operate independently of states, although they have yet to explain when and why IO bureaucrats are likely to do so. Nor do they articulate a clear and consistent definition of autonomy. In this article, we seek to fill these gaps. We advance a narrow understanding of autonomy that distinguishes unintended behaviour from the intended independence of IO bureaucrats, before developing a three-stage, integrative explanation for the conditions under which IO bureaucrats act autonomously. First, we borrow from constructivist approaches a focus on staffing rules and the identity of IO bureaucrats to explain the sources of these agents’ preferences. Second, we add insights from work on exogenous pressures for change—crises and critical junctures—to explain when and why IO bureaucrats will advance their preferences. Third, we incorporate P-A theory’s attention to an IO’s institutional design, along with insights from literature on domestic institutions, to explain when bureaucrats can implement their preferences. Case studies of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) illustrate our argument.

This article appraises Professor Rumelili's important central focus on anxiety by broadening the scope of the challenges the age of anxiety poses. With reference to recent events, such as the covid-19 pandemic and authoritarian politics, it argues that practices and strategies once thought to alleviate anxiety are now resources for it. The article concludes by calling for scholars to consider the possibility of anxiety as a structural feature of global politics, and organising our theoretical interventions, analyses, and politics around that constitutive feature. Ontological security, therefore, proves more elusive than ever before.

Do states join human rights treaties if they know that non-compliance can have tangible consequences? We contend that states are less likely to accede to such treaties, especially if they have an outside option. We investigate this in the context of accession to the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (or: Hague Convention), which regulates the adoption of children across borders. We theorize that the incentive to join the treaty is structured by the salience of, and likelihood of participation in, intercountry adoption: states with larger orphan populations should prefer the outside option, whereas the presence and pressure children’s rights NGOs should prompt states to join the convention. We employ new data on the presence of children’s rights NGOs and a Cox proportional hazards technique. We find support for our propositions, with a caveat: states with large orphan populations initially prefer to the outside option, but become more likely to join the convention over time. This suggests that NGOs can influence states to join treaties that have consequences—especially if they assist with the development of administrative infrastructure that meets treaty requirements.

Global surveys indicate that massive disillusionment with economic globalisation, upheld by the liberal order, which is ignored by governments in European, Asian and Latin American countries, has paved the way for the ascent of nationalist forces. This trend is also visible in Indonesia. President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) has consolidated power against opponents who exploit nationalist, populist and religious causes. On the international front, Jakarta has been actively engaged within a variety of multilateral organisations where liberal institutionalist agendas are enforced. Therefore, it is worthwhile considering the influence of internal and external environments on Jokowi’s economic policy which is getting increasingly nationalistic. This article argues that nationalist economic practices have emerged as the Jokowi government’s response to domestic and international challenges which can have an impact on its perceived legitimacy. The discussion proceeds in five steps. To begin, this article presents a comparative perspective to understand the position of Indonesia in the developing international political economic context. This is followed by an overview of the definition of economic nationalism and its connections to domestic politics and foreign relations. The third section is about the Indonesian government’s efforts to put economic nationalism into effect. The next two parts investigate how the inside and outside dynamics generate Jokowi’s inward-looking policies. The conclusion emphasises what can be learnt from the Indonesian case.

The main contribution of this article is a rethinking of the peace concept, geared towards the creation of a framework for the analysis of agonistic peace. The literature on agonistic peace has thus far been elaborate in terms of theoretical sophistication. However, the dearth of empirical research on the concept is quite remarkable. This study takes that lacuna as a starting point for the grounding of the agonistic peace concept in empirical research and the creation of an analytical tool which can be utilised in the analyses of peace processes in disparate contexts such as Bosnia–Herzegovina, Israel–Palestine and Northern Ireland. The literature on agonistic peace envisions peace as the creation of a political space where former relations of enmity are reframed into being legitimate adversaries. This article forwards an understanding of two fundamental building blocks for understanding agonistic peace—institutional inclusion and identity change, the two theoretical strands which have rarely been interconnected in peace research. Through a cross-fertilisation of these fields, an analytical framework suited for the analyses of peace processes and their aftermaths in terms of agonistic peace is carved out. As such, this study serves as a stepping-stone in furthering empirical as well as conceptual understandings of the viability of peace processes over time.

Schadenfreude, the arousal of positive emotions in view of negative experiences of another, is considered one of the most inappropriate emotions in social life. Its international manifestation is puzzling, as it arouses the question of why people in one state enjoy seeing the residents of a friendly country suffer. To address this, the article offers a conceptualisation of international Schadenfreude and treats it as an emotion with purifying and cleansing qualities. I argue that Schadenfreude assists in self-justifying our policies, behaviours, and beliefs within political interactions. I suggest four interrelated conditions that are responsible for the emergence of Schadenfreude. The likeliness of the emotion is thus high when one side (1) perceives an imbalance vis-a-vis the other as unjust; (2) views the other’s misfortune as relevant to the perceived imbalance of the relations; (3) already carries negative sentiments towards the other; and (4) considers the trouble of the other as a minor one. The significance of international Schadenfreude is illustrated here through the Israeli responses to the terror attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. Aiming to link official and popular emotional expressions, the research is based on both discourse analysis and elite interviews.

Costly investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) cases have led several developing countries to take far-reaching steps to distance themselves from the global investment regime, such as the denunciation or renegotiation of international investment agreements (IIAs) or the withdrawal from the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Despite facing the highest number of investment claims worldwide and despite being very vocal about the shortcomings of the current regime, Argentina has neither denounced a single IIA nor renounced ICSID. This article addresses this puzzle. It first shows that under the Kirchners’ governments (2003‒2015), Argentina adopted a dual approach: maintaining its IIAs and membership in ICSID on the one hand, but vigorously fighting ISDS awards on the other. Using in-depth interviews, news reports, and secondary sources, it then demonstrates that this ‘neither-in-nor-out’ approach is best explained by a unique Argentinian identity, which combines Latin American and Western dimensions, conditioned by external political and economic constraints, especially in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 financial crisis. As such, this study underscores the need to account for both material and ideational factors when striving to grasp development-related foreign policy.

The developed/underdeveloped dichotomy is the starting point of mainstream theories of development. Based on a theoretical framework inherited from modernisation theories, they represent development as the process through which productive structures in the Global South are transformed following the footsteps of the Global North. Dependency theories productively challenged this linear conception of development, but failed to provide a consistent alternative because of their incapacity to move beyond the developed/underdeveloped dichotomy. In this article, I claim that Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development finally indicates a way to think of development beyond the developed/underdeveloped dichotomy. Through analogies with the work of the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, I contrast the concept of uneven and combined development with competing views of development to show both that it makes better sense of particular development trajectories and that it offers a better theoretical base for political action. By stressing the necessarily perspectived character of development, the concept of uneven and combined development makes it possible to ask a crucial question often overlooked: development for whom?

This article investigates the rationale and activities of the European Union Strategy for the Adriatic and Ionian Region (EUSAIR) established in 2014 with the objective of addressing macro-regional challenges—most importantly, the attempt to couple the protection of the Adriatic and Ionian seas with the area’s economic development—while progressively integrating Southeastern European states into the European Union through multi-level governance programmes. The results of this scheme, however, have been so far unsatisfactory. Through an examination of two highly salient issues pertaining to its development, oil and gas exploration in the Adriatic Sea and the building of a highway linking Greece to Italy, this article shows how the EUSAIR influences only marginally, if at all, states’ priorities and it does not yet contribute significantly to the building of cross-border cooperation and trust. Accordingly, the EUSAIR risks becoming irrelevant vis-a-vis the challenges that the macro-region is expected to confront.

Soft power debate has not analytically moved beyond the questions of whether soft power matters and of whether soft power can work independent of hard power since Nye’s initial formulation. Furthermore, the question of how a state selects the source(s) of its soft power remains silent in the literature. This neglect leads to the underspecification of the nature and content of a given state’s soft power policy. In this article, we fill in these gaps by recasting the conventional understanding of soft power conceptually and analytically. Conceptually, we make the case that soft power should be understood as a form of productive power for its conceptual and analytical distinction. On the basis of this reformulation, we specify an analytical framework that helps map out how a state determines the sources of its soft power. The crux of the framework is the notion of ‘dual process’ of international recognition and domestic self-identification mutually informing and reinforcing each other for the identification of a specific source of a given state’s soft power. We illustrate the analytical framework with an empirical example of South Korea’s launch and consolidation of its new ODA policy, Knowledge Sharing Program.

For several decades, Japan kept in place significant self-imposed constraints on its security policy even as its economy grew tremendously. While it has been argued that Japan refrained from enacting security policy change because of strong domestic pacifist or anti-militarist sentiments, recently, radical policy changes have nonetheless taken place. How can these changes be understood? The existing explanations typically see them as a response to objectively existing or constructed external threats. Such threat constructions might have contributed to the policy changes, but do not fully account for how the conditions that previously limited similar changes have altered. This article combines temporal othering and de-securitisation theory to account more fully for the policy changes. It shows that during the post-war period, Japan’s temporal other, that is its wartime self, was securitised within Japan, limiting changes in security policy. More recently, however, a de-securitisation of the Japanese temporal other has taken place, which has enabled more far-reaching policy change. Apologies have played a key role in this de-securitisation process by repeating and strengthening an identity narrative about how fundamentally different Japan has become from its past wartime self.

This essay explores the domestic foundations of currency internationalisation. I consider how a state that internationalises its currency might sustain the domestic economic and social costs of doing so. In particular I highlight the role of welfare provision as a neglected element of the domestic political economy of currency internationalisation. I examine the trajectory of welfare provision in Britain (1870-1930), the United States (1950-2020) and China (2000-2018), and use this data to consider some of the ways in which these costs might be related to the question of issuing world money. In this essay I suggest, first, that our conceptual framework for understanding currency internationalisation is strengthened when we consider welfare provision as an important element of the domestic foundation of issuing world money; and, second, that it is unclear whether the current level of welfare provision in China is adequate to meeting the costs to China of fully internationalising its currency as world money. This framework generates further insights about how China's challenge to American monetary leadership remains incomplete, and provides another angle of vision by which we might assess the multifaceted foundations of US dollar domination in the global political economy.

This article seeks to bridge the gap between the literature on international organisations (IO) and the field of crisis management (CM) by focusing on two themes: how crisis conditions lead organisations to centralise decision-making and how this subsequently affects an international organisation's autonomy. We do this based on two dimensions inspired by the CM literature, that is, the degree of the perceived time pressure and the precrisis legal institutional framework. The plausibility of the analytical framework is assessed on the basis of three cases: the WHO's dealing with the SARS crisis; the European Commission's dealing with the Mad Cow Disease crisis; and the UN's handling of the humanitarian crisis in the Great Lakes region. The results show that the perceived time pressure affected IO autonomy in so far as higher time pressure that rendered IO autonomy stronger, whereas with regard to the institutional framework no stringent pattern could be seen. Moreover, based on our findings, we propose that IO autonomy in crisis situations also depends on the framing of an issue in terms on impartiality, on the extent to which the IO in question is subject to politicisation, as well as on the degree to which it possesses specific technical expertise.

In social movements and contentious politics, the factors determining success or failure of a movement remain contested since different scholars tend to argue differently. As a contribution to this debate, this paper draws on two cases representing the relative success and failure of movements targeting the government of Cambodia and foreign joint venture investments to address the communities’ grievances. The paper reveals that, while other factors such as strategies, resource mobilisation, networks and corporate behaviour remain necessary to the debate, the variation in outcome is essentially determined by the patron–client network, a political dynamic employed by the neo-patrimonial rulers to cling onto power.