Studies of nuclear politics and IR more widely have failed to seriously engage with what future nuclear-disarmed worlds would or should look like. I respond to this failure of imagination by advocating for a project of ‘post-nuclear worldmaking’. Counter-hegemonic political efforts around the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) are a useful first step to ‘connecting’ our nuclear-armed present to a disarmed future. However, they do not tell us much about the broader characteristics of this future. Moreover, they often fail to transcend conservative assumptions of plausibility and probability, which unnecessarily exclude what might be called ‘utopian’ visions of alternative futures. In the context of mounting uncertainty generated by threats to planetary security, post-nuclear worldmaking can assist in drawing strong connections between the present and radically different future worlds, which should not be discounted as improbable or impossible. This project enables a widening of the scope of nuclear futures and policy options which are considered thinkable, as well as contributing a future-facing, prefigurative element of politics which complements existing counter-hegemonic strategy. It highlights the unavoidable obligation for nuclear scholars to think in utopian terms.

This article addresses a gap in the literature on military adaptation by focusing on the first step in the adaptive process: detecting failure. We argue that institutionalised feedback loops are a critical mechanism for facilitating detection. Feedback loops are most effective when they filter information and distribute lessons learned to senior tactical commanders. In turn, effective filtration depends on incorporating frontline soldiers and specialists into intelligence cells while creating a protected space for dissent. We evaluate our theory against both irregular and conventional wars fought by the British Army: the counterinsurgency campaign in the Southern Cameroons (1960–1) as well as the evolution of British assault tactics on the Western Front of the First World War (1914–18).

Central to the conception of this article is the architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi's dictum, ‘There is no architecture without action, no architecture without events, no architecture without program … no architecture without violence.’ Shaped as well by Eyal Weizman's conception of ‘forensic architecture’, the focus of the investigation is on Israel's architecture of security and on the corresponding Palestinian architecture of resistance. Emphasising an encounter of cartographies that reveals the way Palestinians make life livable in response to the architectural violence they face, the analysis continues with reference to Yari Sharif's analysis of architectures of resistance and with a reading of a feature film, Hany Abu-Assad's Omar (2013) in which the Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine is one of the film's primary agent/protagonists. The article surveys popular culture texts, focused on crime and espionage to analyse a range of security practices and breaches that amplify the analysis with attention to security issues in individual households, multiple-person dwelling arrangements, architectural locations throughout cities, and buildings housing governmental security agencies. That trajectory of architectural sites lends a micropolitical analysis to the macropolitical level of governmental policy and modes of resistance to it.

Intermestic security challenges arise when there is concern in a country that a dissatisfied minority relies on transnational bonds with a foreign kin group for support. They result from ethnic and/or ideological affinities translating into foreign support seen as problematic, and they are aggravated when the dissatisfied minority is able to raise territorial claims. This can lead to complications not only in domestic politics, but also in international relations (hence, the term ‘intermestic’). Intermestic challenges can escalate into civil war and other political calamities, but they can also be managed by governments. This article develops a theoretical model and discusses it with regard to China and its Muslim-majority neighbouring countries. To the west of China, transnational bonds of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang with co-ethnics and coreligionists in Central Asia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan complicate Chinese relations with those countries. In the southeast, transnational bonds of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia with their ancestral homeland have complicated Indonesian and Malaysian relations with China. While the cases have followed different trajectories, Beijing has managed either challenge rather successfully. The theoretical model developed and the management strategies discussed are likely to be useful in other contexts.

This article examines the conflict between traditional Marxist attitudes toward war and the problem of the nuclear revolution. It shows how the advent of the nuclear revolution in the 1950s undermined traditional Marxist-Leninist concepts of war, and then goes on to argue that this development must be placed at the centre of contemporary Marxian IR if it is to have explanatory power in the twenty-first century. To make this case directly, it engages with Justin Rosenberg’s revival of Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development and its subsidiary law of ‘the whip of external necessity’, and argues that the whip can remain salient today only if one accepts the political utility of nuclear war. The impasse created by the nuclear revolution, it concludes, points Marxist IR in the direction of classic Marxist visions of supranationalism and human unity.

Why do some regional powers collectively threatened by a potential hegemon eagerly cooperate to ensure their security, while others appear reluctant to do so? I argue that robust security cooperation at the regional level is less likely when an unbalanced distribution of power exists between the prospective security partners. In such situations, regional security cooperation tends to be stunted by foot-dragging and obstructionism on the part of materially inferior states wary of facilitating the strategic expansion of neighbours with larger endowments of power resources, anticipating that much of the coalition's gains in military capabilities are likely to be achieved through an expansion of the materially superior neighbour's force levels and strategic flexibility. Evidence drawn from primary material and the latest historiography of France's postwar foreign policy towards West Germany provides considerable support for this argument. My findings offer important correctives to standard accounts of the origins of Western European security cooperation and suggest the need to rethink the difficulties the United States has encountered in promoting cooperation among local allies in key global regions.

This article addresses the problem of drone violence that is ‘grey’ in the sense of being hard to categorise. It focuses on circumstances, such as arose in Pakistan, in which a foreign government's armed drones are a constant presence. A lesson from US experience there is that the persistent threat of drone strikes is intended to suppress activities that endanger the drone-using state's security. However, this threat inevitably affects innocent people living within potential strike zones. To judge such drone use by reference to military ethics principles is to assume that ‘war’ is going on, but indefinite drone deployments are difficult to conceptualise as war, so traditional Just War thinking does not suffice as a basis for moral judgement. In assessing the US government's commitment to drone-based containment of risks emerging along its ‘terror frontier’, the article considers three alternative conceptualisations of drone violence arising in non-war contexts: vim (‘force short of war’), terrorism, and imperialism. It then rejects all three and proposes that such violence is better conceptualised as being merely ‘quasi-imperialistic’. On this basis, however, the sustaining of a drone strike campaign against a series of suspected terrorists can still be condemned as violating the right to life.

Assessing the risk of nuclear terrorism is a challenging task due to the diversity of actors involved, variety of pathways to success, range of defensive measures employed, and the lack of detailed historical record upon which to base analysis. Numerical models developed to date vary wildly in both approach and ultimate assessment: estimates of the likelihood a nuclear terrorist attack differ by up to nine orders of magnitude. This article critiques existing efforts from the standpoint of probability theory, and proposes an alternative perspective on the utility of risk assessment in this area. Nuclear terrorism is argued to be a ‘virtual risk’ for which it is not possible to meaningfully ascribe a quantitative measure, making numerical estimates of the likelihood of nuclear terrorism misleading. Instead, we argue that focus should be placed on utilising models to identify areas of disagreement as targets for further research, with greater emphasis on understanding terrorist decision-making and adaption in response to nuclear security measures.