Recent years have witnessed growing attention to popular culture’s role in the reproduction, negotiation, and contestation of global political life. This article extends this work by focusing on games targeted at young children as a neglected, yet rich site in which global politics is constituted. Drawing specifically on the Heroes of History card game in the Top Trumps franchise, I offer three original contributions. First, I demonstrate how children’s games contribute to the everyday (re)production of international relations through the contingent storying of global politics. Heroes of History’s narrative, visual organisation, and gameplay mechanics, I argue, construct world politics as an unchanging realm of conflict through their shared reproduction of a valorised, masculinised figure of the warrior hero. This construction, moreover, does important political work in insulating young players from the realities and generative structures of violence. Second, the polysemy of children’s games means they also provide opportunity for counter-hegemonic ‘readings’ of the world even in seemingly straightforward examples of the genre such as this. Third, engaging with such games as meaningful objects of analysis opens important new space for dialogue across International Relations literatures on children, popular culture, gender, the everyday, and heroism in world politics.

This article examines the role of normative power in shaping the global sustainability order. It challenges the prevailing focus on hegemonic leadership and norm diffusion from dominant states, arguing that less powerful states have contributed significantly to the global order by creating regional initiatives tailored to their unique contexts. The article adopts an alternative theoretical framework of norm-governed change, comprising norm-building, institutionalisation, and transformation. Using an illustrative case study of Africa’s regional economic institutions, it employs process-tracing and archival analysis of key policy documents. The study demonstrates how African states have proactively embedded environmental norms within their regional initiatives, while contributing to the global sustainability agenda, exemplifying a form of normative power referred to as ‘Green Pan-Africanism’. This approach broadens the understanding of global sustainability governance, positioning less economically powerful actors as active participants in world-making. The findings highlight the critical role of normative power in advancing global sustainability governance, particularly in addressing complex global challenges such as climate change.

This paper seeks to open an inquiry into the origins of astropolitics, an intellectual and popular imagination whose defining characteristic is the attempt to project geopolitical concepts and categories into outer space. I locate the roots of this vision not merely in Anglo-American maritime strategy but in the rather earthlier German tradition of geopolitics, more specifically in the work of the geographer Friedrich Ratzel and the political theorist Carl Schmitt. Surprisingly, however, my reverse chronology discovers that although the two men’s ideas reverberate through contemporary astropolitical discourses, they were both in fact, in different ways and for different reasons, hesitant about space colonisation. The paper makes sense of this finding and unpacks its implications for contemporary International Relations debates on off-earth politics.

This article examines United Kingdom (UK) parliamentary debates on the adoption of its first post-Brexit, from-scratch free trade agreement (FTA), with Australia. Building on Jessop’s cultural political economy framework, we identify and analyse the economic imaginaries animating UK post-Brexit trade policy debates at this time. We find that an imaginary of what we term ‘competitive free trade’ shaped the UK Government’s approach to the UK–Australia FTA. Meanwhile, the Opposition, much of the House of Lords, and a small number of Conservative Members of Parliament endorsed an alternative ‘embedded free trade’ imaginary. Our analysis suggests that the UK government successfully used the context of an unsettled domestic institutional environment for trade policy post-Brexit in order to negotiate and ratify an FTA with Australia that reflected its competitive free trade imaginary. The article offers an account of UK post-Brexit trade policy that highlights how material, political, and ideational dimensions co-constitute each other in the political economy of trade, and how particular economic imaginaries become reified and dominant at certain junctures.

International Relations (IR) accounts of the post–World War II international order often claim that after its defeat, Germany ‘transformed’ from a fascist, militaristic, and racist state into a model liberal democracy, facilitating its full rehabilitation and integration into Western institutions and alliances. Yet a closer examination of post-war German domestic and international politics challenges this account: denazification was widely reviled, survivors faced ongoing persecution, and a retooled antisemitism asserted itself in international diplomacy. This article offers the concept of adaptive politics to capture how collectively held beliefs, identities, policies, and conduct travel across incisive political events like defeat in war, occupation, and genocide, outlining the complex concurrence of continuity, adaptation, and change in their aftermath. Drawing on theories of sovereignty, biopolitics, racism, and antisemitism, the article tracks the unfolding of West German adaptive politics in the immediate post-war period, focusing on efforts to exonerate perpetrators, modifications of racism and antisemitism, and the role of the trauma diagnosis in debilitating survivors. By sanitising this history, IR scholarship positions the post-war liberal international order, and the international politics of the West more broadly, as entirely disconnected from the disordered conduct associated with Nazism.

How can we understand the audience agency and securitisation processes that can induce anxiety? The Copenhagen School of security studies conceptualises an audience as possessing political agency which is contingent on their capabilities to respond to securitising moves. Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s approach to ontological security, we argue that there is another type of agency supplementing political agency. Ontological agency refers to exercising control over the stability and continuity of one’s everyday routines and practices to minimise disruption to these routines caused by securitisation. Because routines of day-to-day life are central to bracketing sources of anxiety, people may choose to overlook and not react to securitising moves designating threats and implementing emergency measures that can undermine ontological security. We illustrate the analytical purchase of ontological agency by using unstructured observations of South Korean people’s responses to military practices that securitise North Korea. Our observations reveal that there is latent anxiety regarding North Korea that manifests in varying degrees ranging from inaction when routines are not disrupted by securitisation to outward bursts of emotional reactions and breakdown when securitisation practices disrupt people’s basic routines. This raises implications about the importance of ontological security driving the success or failure of securitisation and the politics of existentialism.

Civil wars are not only destructive: they can also generate new, long-lasting social, political, and economic structures and processes. To account for this productive potential and analyse post-conflict outcomes, I argue that we should analyse civil wars as critical junctures. Civil wars can relax structural constraints, opening opportunities for wartime processes to generate changes or to reinforce, rather than transform, the status quo. Changes or stasis may then be locked in by conflict outcomes, creating path dependencies. Studying civil wars as critical junctures allows for a clearer understanding of what variables mattered and interacted at different points in the conflict process, and the varying roles of structure and agency in producing institutional change or reinforcing pre-existing conditions. I explore the potential benefits of a critical juncture approach in the civil wars literature on different aspects of post-conflict politics and illustrate them in analysing the literature on women’s empowerment during and after civil wars. Applying the critical junctures framework to civil wars’ effects on institutions and socio-behavioural patterns can provide analytical clarity about complex processes and contexts, can facilitate comparison across cases and studies, and draws critical attention both to what civil wars change and to potential pathways not taken.

In 2021, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) moved to integrate climate risks into its Article IV surveillance of member states. While the IMF has not traditionally been at the forefront of climate change efforts, this decision involved defining climate change as a risk to macro-economic stability. I argue that the integration of climate change into IMF surveillance can be understood as a case of international organisation (IO) boundary work taking place via the mechanism of economisation: an economic institution addressing a (traditionally non-economic) issue as an economic issue. The study identifies crucial factors shaping this boundary expansion, particularly the agency of IMF staff, as well as preferences within the IMF Executive Board, and institutional ideas. The straightforward integration of physical and transition climate risks is in contrast to the contestation surrounding the integration of mitigation policy. The findings contribute to the literature on IOs and their boundaries, change within the IMF, and the environmental political economy. The analysis reveals the role of IMF staff in this boundary work and, in addition, that institutionalised ideas and the heterogeneous preferences among member states acted as scope conditions limiting how far this economisation could go.

Governance institutions such as the Arctic Council face ongoing (de)legitimation that impacts the broader legitimacy beliefs which enable them to govern effectively. Research has increasingly studied how different actors engage in legitimation and delegitimation that bolster or challenge legitimacy, but there has been limited study of the variation in the (de)legitimation practices of individual states and the reasons for this variation. This article studies variation in discursive (de)legitimation of the Arctic Council by the United States and China. It advances a theoretical argument for how this variation in (de)legitimation is driven by broader political developments. Using content analysis, it maps these two states’ (de)legitimation of the Arctic Council over a 12-year period and examines evidence for this theory. The article finds that both states vary considerably in their (de)legitimation of the Arctic Council over time. Changes in the intensity of their (de)legitimation are found to be linked to political developments including heightened security tensions, positive/negative shifts in environmental politics, and institutional changes. This contributes empirical evidence and new theoretical insights to the body of research about how different actors engage in (de)legitimation of global governance.

This article analyses the (post)colonial politics of UK bordering through the lens of monstrosity. Historicising contemporary bordering within colonial-era monsterisations of racialised people and their mobility, we identify four mechanisms through which migrants are constructed and policed as monsters today: animalisation, zombification, criminalisation, and barbarisation. We then examine how the state embodies monstrosity itself through border policies of deterrence and creating ‘hostile environments’. In addition to the instrumentalisation of horror, this entails extending the border’s reach domestically throughout everyday life and internationally through deportation and externalisation measures. We argue these developments embody a new form of state power, depicted as a headless, tentacled Leviathan. Doing so provides insights into monstrosity as a form of liberal statecraft, the local/global diffusion of bordering, the transnationalisation of sovereign power, and the racialisation of citizenship. It also raises important questions about the construction of border violence as a necessary and legitimate monstrosity in (post)colonial liberal societies, the everyday complicity of citizens, and the limits of efforts to humanise monsterised migrants or reform monstrous state institutions. Revealing how within liberal regimes of citizenship and humanitarianism values ‘there be monsters’, we argue, opens space for thinking about abolitionist alternatives in international politics.

The involvement of private actors in global policymaking has received significant scholarly attention in IR. Existing accounts have shown how entities such as corporations, businesses, and philanthropies build their authority to become legitimate actors and shape global politics. This paper argues that contemporary global dynamics, such as the financialisation of development and the rise of multistakeholderism, have ushered in a trend where private actors are not only seen as legitimate delegated authorities but also embraced as fully fledged political equals indispensable for addressing societal problems. To understand this shift, it is necessary to move beyond an examination of legitimation strategies to interrogate, instead, how private actors shape what are seen as ‘apt’ or ‘deviant’ ways of knowing and acting upon problems. Through an examination of what I call ‘political normalisation’ in the field of global food governance, I show how through concrete practices – individualising social problems, defining institutional aptness, and cultivating the landscape – private actors not only cultivate a perception of themselves as rightful global governors but also shape the parameters of what rightful governing ought to be. More broadly, this shift invites us to further complicate the public–private divide and assess the novel ways through which private actors ‘do’ politics.

Many populist leaders politicise disputes with external financial ‘elites’, but most are forced by economic pressures to fundamentally change their ‘people-versus-elite’ problem representations and ‘concede defeat’. Notable exceptions are Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who sooner or later resisted strong push-back and defied the IMF or distressed-debt funds. These instances of prolonged populist defiance differ widely across commonly used structural and agential explanatory factors at international, domestic, and individual levels. To explain how Orbán, Kirchner, and Erdoğan managed to ‘beat the elite’, this paper clusters several root causes into a parsimonious framework of two intervening variables. The temporality of strong ‘elite’ push-back and the openness of advisory systems are theorised as shaping distinct cognitive mechanisms of representational continuity or change, through which ‘people-versus-elite’ input is either preserved until – or discarded before – feeding into decision outputs. As the two-by-two matrix of early/later external shocks and open/closed inner circles explains, Orbán did not move beyond marginal representational adjustments; Kirchner’s contingent representational fluidity benefited from opportune situational developments; and Erdoğan defied significant socio-economic cost with fundamental representational continuity. These insights highlight the potential of studying populism at the intersection of foreign policy analysis and international political economy.

Persistently rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations challenge dominant Liberal hopes that science and multilateralism might deliver rational, global climate outcomes. Emerging Realist climate approaches that take geopolitics and national interests more seriously have yet to explore Morgenthau’s concern that ‘scientism’ – exaggerated faith in scientific rationality to solve political problems – would lead to disastrous underestimations of power and irrationality. Recently, Realists have mooted ‘solar geoengineering’ designs as a ‘lesser evil’ option to deliberately cool the Earth independently of emissions reductions. However, assessments of solar geoengineering prospects barely factor in Realist concerns, focusing instead on idealised scientific modelling of bio-physical effects and Liberal governance scenarios. To explore how geoengineering techno-science would be ‘translated’ into security assessments, geopolitical logics were elicited through interviews and group discussions with (mainly Arctic-oriented) national security professionals. Security experts reframe solar geoengineering in three significant ways: (a) from a climate ‘global public good’ to a source of geopolitical leverage and disruption; (b) from a risk-reduction tool to a potential source of distrust and escalation; and (c) from a knowledge-deficit problem solvable by more research, to a potential disinformation vector. This expands Realist scholarship on climate change and identifies serious risks to ongoing scientific and commercial pursuit of such technologies.

This article contributes to the empirical and theoretical discourse on the ‘stability–instability paradox’, the idea that while possessing nuclear weapons deters cataclysmic all-out war, it simultaneously increases the likelihood of low-level conflict between nuclear dyads. It critiques the paradox’s dominant interpretation (red-line model), which places undue confidence in the nuclear stalemate – premised on mutually assured destruction – to prevent unintentional nuclear engagement and reduce the perceived risks associated with military actions that fall below the nuclear threshold. Recent scholarship has inadequately examined the unintentional consequences of the paradox in conflicts below the nuclear threshold, particularly those relating to the potential for aggression to escalate uncontrollably. The article employs empirically grounded fictional scenarios to illustrate and critically evaluate, rather than predict, the assumptions underpinning the red-line model of the stability–instability paradox in the context of future artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled warfare. It posits that the strategic cap purportedly offered by a nuclear stalemate is illusory and that low-level military aggression between nuclear-armed states increases the risk of unintentional nuclear detonation.

Since the end of the Cold War, democracies have sought to create a range of normative and international legal standards intended to reduce the frequency, and legitimacy, of coups. The rise of the anti-coup norm has led to the isolation and punishment of numerous coup-created governments, and evidence suggests it has helped reduce the frequency of coup attempts. However, the norm is contested, and coup leaders often find that the international condemnation they face is countered by quiet acquiescence or active support by international allies. This paper examines the politics of norm contestation around the anti-coup norm by considering the international response to the 2021 coup in Myanmar. It introduces the concept of ‘norm waverers’ and illustrates how committed norm promoters and norm resisters often try to persuade norm waverers – in this case exemplified by ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) – to join their respective camps. International pressure after the Myanmar coup induced ASEAN to take steps to enforce the anti-coup norm. But these ultimately reflected a concern with its own reputation and credibility, rather than any underlying institutional commitment to the norm itself. The result was a shallow institutionalisation of the anti-coup norm.

This article proposes a theoretical framework for explaining the motivations behind the early adoption of international public policy innovations. While there has been a proliferation of transnational policy diffusion studies, there is less research on why some governments become early adopters when new international policy norms are promoted. Most research on the topic looks only at monocausal explanations without considering their interactions in a coherent, integrated framework. The article proposes four motivations for early adoption: normative, reputation, competition, and locking-in. The framework is then illustrated by application to the early adoption of business and human rights policy innovations, with Colombia and Ecuador serving as two cases for comparative analysis. The article advances understanding of early adoption and policy diffusion by highlighting particularly important explanations for what motivates early adopters to begin processes of subsequent diffusion and suggesting how motivations may interact to strengthen the case for early adoption.

This paper makes the case for a discursive understanding of ontological security and demonstrates the utility of such an approach in an analysis of European Parliament (EP) debates between 1990 and 2020. We argue that articulations of ontological (in)security operate through the (re)inscription of a set of metanarratives in what we call ‘discursive nodal points’. Building on an extensive analysis of EP debates over 30 years, we demonstrate that in contrast to the prevailing view of the European Union (EU) as an ‘anxious community’, at least on the political level, EU actors remain surprisingly confident in the European project. While they do invoke challenges to the EU, they see these as incentives to strengthen the integration project and often consider operating in crisis mode as an essential EU characteristic. In doing so, they draw on modernist metanarratives of progress, control, and power to construct an ontologically secure EU. We argue that the future ontological security of the EU will partly depend on allowing for more ambiguity in this modernist narrative without accepting a nationalist counter-narrative that undermines the idea of European integration.

Despite the growing interest in secondary state efforts to avoid choosing sides in great power competition, International Relations scholars have paid scant attention to the question of how great powers respond to secondary state ‘hedging’. We offer a first approximation for this important question by focusing on ‘high-value’ hedgers, i.e. secondary states whose location or capabilities afford them the potential to tip the scales in a great power war. We posit that great powers are likely to accommodate high-value hedgers and refrain from trying to manipulate their alignment choice. This is because the likelihood and costs of losing a high-value hedger are such that competing great powers would rather be safe than sorry. Concretely, we expect established and rising great powers to (re)assure high-value hedgers: the former by demonstrating their commitment to a regional balance of power, and the latter by showing they harbour no ill intent towards the hedging secondary state. To probe our argument, we examine how Great Britain and Germany responded to Dutch hedging in the early 20th century, and how the United States and China are responding to Singapore’s hedging today.

Narratives of the making of the international have a specific configuration of past–present–future that constitutes the unitary character of historical time and continues to reproduce spatio-temporal hierarchies. The article argues that the historical turn in IR has addressed spatio-temporal hierarchies through different timing strategies but has not sufficiently problematised the concept of History specifically with respect to unitary historical time. The article focuses on the problem of a unitary historical time; building on works that have underlined how the past, the present, and the future are not fixed entities given to us by an objective ‘truth’ but rather performatively constructed through different politics of time, it aims to develop an analytical vocabulary to further explore how to write history in the plural. How to write history in the plural will be explored through three different readings of the Haitian Revolution, underlining ‘timeliness/untimeliness’, dialogues between presents and pasts and futures, and past and multiple presents aiming to expand our analytical vocabulary in discussing the historical time of the international.

In the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and under the growing threat of planetary cataclysm, an array of prominent intellectuals grappled with the significance of nuclear war for the human condition and reflected upon the possibilities of escaping its peril. Following on the early interventions of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, the collected thoughts of Karl Jaspers, Hans Morgenthau, and Günther Anders outline a philosophical current of ‘nuclear existentialism’ preoccupied with the nihilistic ‘being-towards-species-death’ entailed by the advent of the Bomb. Faced with the apparent negation of reason in bringing about the means of its own destruction through the scientific piercing of nature’s innermost workings, the nuclear existentialists end up reaffirming, however precariously, a teleological conception of history in which the apocalyptic fear of the Bomb figures as the necessary condition for the ultimate realisation of human freedom. In the light of the contemporary resurgence of nuclear anxiety, this article surveys and critically assesses the corpus of nuclear existentialism, drawing upon the distinctive existential phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas to trace a potential alternative for thinking life and death under the Bomb.