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.

Within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, millions of people had fled to neighbouring countries and across Europe. People throughout Europe were mobilised into action, and from the outset, the response to the unfolding humanitarian emergency in Ukraine was a complex and often messy web of private and public initiatives. In this article, we focus on the unique British humanitarian response to the greatest movement of refugees in Europe since the Second World War, known as ‘Homes for Ukraine’ (HfU). We develop our argument in three steps. First, we situate HfU within existing scholarship on ‘everyday humanitarianism’ and private refugee hosting in Europe, locating these within longer histories of private humanitarian action. Secondly, we show how HfU shifts the humanitarian space into the private and domestic sphere, a move reliant on particular conceptions of the ‘home’ as a space of sanctuary and safety. Finally, we unpack the gendered and racialised conceptions of the home and humanitarian hospitality more broadly, and how HfU sits within and outside of the broader bordering practices of the United Kingdom’s refugee response.

Much like nations, the nation-based order and the domestic and international hierarchies it produces are imagined. Benedict Anderson and scholars in Historical International Relations have frequently approached nationalism and nations as a horizontal division of the world. By contrast, this article explores the imagined hierarchies within and between nations during the 1848 Springtime of Nations. Through an examination of fraternal images found in a variety of textual and visual sources, I investigate how the European national imaginary of 1848 translated into the nation-based order and its corresponding domestic and international hierarchies. The collapse of the 1848 Revolutions brought about a crisis in the national imaginary. The revolutionary fraternity was co-opted in a distorted form by dynastic regimes and opposed by socialists advocating for the international brotherhood of workers. The Springtime of Nations, with its successes and failures, was a pivotal chapter in creating, shaping, legitimising, and challenging the nascent nation-based order.

This article contributes to disciplinary histories of International Relations (IR) by revealing a little-known history: how a Nazi diplomat, Curt Max Prüfer, occupied the first chair in IR in India. While the paper documents how Prüfer, a discredited diplomat, landed in Delhi through his connections with peripatetic Indian anti-colonial networks and spent slightly over two years as the first IR chair at Delhi University, it also makes broader claims about how we narrate disciplinary histories. Intellectual genealogies, the predominant way in which disciplinary histories are written, often miss the contingent factors that play a considerable role in the fashioning of the discipline. Contingency-filled narratives also point towards the fact that International Relations/Affairs, at least in its early period of formation, operated as a term of mythical heft – a placeholder to fit anyone with academic or practical expertise in varied fields such as international law, colonial administration, anthropology, diplomacy, history, political economy, and military strategy.

Complementing readings in International Relations (IR) that understand Covid-19 as an Anthropocene effect, this article observes the pandemic as a laboratory for engagements with Anthropocene experience. It argues that the pandemic turn to dreams renegotiated the conditions of experienceability of Anthropocene temporality. Exploring the scientific, archival, and practical registers on which dreams attracted interest during the pandemic, the article traces how dreams were valued for their promise of capturing the affective exposure of subjects to the pandemic present. This conditioning of experienceability on the limits of the human subject resonates with the relational turn in IR and its affirmation of being-in-relation as a condition for becoming attuned to the Anthropocene. Drawing from Koselleck and Foucault, the article understands this resonance as indicative of a shared archive of experiments in transcending modern accounts of temporality. For this archive, rendering an Anthropocenic present experienceable requires a shift from the distanced account of a modern author-subject to a subject that gauges its own exposure to the present. Despite this ambition of the turn to dreams, the article also flags its constraints, observing how this turn regularly tipped back into reaffirming the modern subject.

This article examines the extent to which or how self-identified great powers resort to military aggression following events that challenge their sense of greatness. It problematises the prevalent notion that great powers and events exist and have effects independently of the narratives that constitute them. The article does this by engaging with Ontological Security Studies, Great Power Narcissism, and the psychology of vulnerable and grandiose narcissism, as well as by analysing Japanese identity narratives in two periods seemingly marked by equally challenging events – the Meiji era (1868–1912) and the post-war period (1950–71). It finds that Japan’s military aggression against China in 1894–5 was enabled by vulnerable narratives of shame and insult, while the decision to wage war with Russia a decade later was facilitated more by grandiose narratives. Despite Japan’s overwhelming defeat in the Second World War and the persistent desire among conservative elites for great power status and identity, however, overall post-war narratives did not feature similarly negative emotions and calls for revenge. Japanese great power aspirations were arguably curtailed in this period through intense narrative contestation, notably progressive counter-narratives featuring more self-reflective expressions of guilt and remorse, and even the self-reflexive desire for a non-great power identity.

This paper offers a non-Eurocentric account of raced capitalism in Malaysia, articulated as a developmental state project that has navigated the contested racial logics of British colonialism and Japanese imperialism. By historicising Malaysia’s experience, I provide a reading of the Malaysian developmental state as a project that has taken the form of anti-colonial raced capitalism. This is not meant to valorise raced capitalism as anti-colonial, but to suggest that decolonisation must also confront hegemonic elements engraved on the anti-colonial register of nationalised raced capitalism. In bringing a feminist critique to anti-colonial projects that leave capitalist relations uncontested, the paper makes three contributions. First, it recentres race and colonialism in its analysis of the developmental state, offering anti-colonial raced capitalism as a language that speaks to similar projects that enable, legitimise, and obscure new forms of racial/gender domination with counter-hegemonic frames. Second, it brings back politics to anti-colonialism, reestablishing it as a political space with competing visions, imaginations, and agendas, shaped by the geopolitics of empires. Third, it features gender, social reproduction, and the household as key sites to ground the politics of anti-colonialism, enacting the scaffolding for gendered understandings of raced capitalist development on the periphery of the global economy.

This paper examines how Britain, through ‘gunboat diplomacy’ campaigns against so-called Arab pirates, overran the pre-existing Gulf suzerain system and became the predominant power in its waters. By filling a gap in the classical English School ‘international society’ expansion thesis, this article describes how and when political and ideational shifts in the Gulf allowed sovereignty to manifest into its present dynastic form. It argues British imposition of rules, norms, and institutions through a series of nineteenth-century Anglo-Arab treaties against Arab ‘pirates’ broke traditional conditions of divisible sheikhly authority to embed a new telos of sovereign indivisibility, facilitating indirect colonisation. Colonialism as an overlooked primary institution in the classical international society expansion story reinforced political inequality to create dynasticism to simplify colonial statecraft. The 1836 Restrictive Line was a central institution introduced by Britain to manage the transition from divisible to indivisible authority. Drawing from colonial archives, the paper argues that British control over cross-coastal movements through a Restrictive Line reinforced domestic sovereignty of British treaty signatories while weakening agency of maritime sheikhs outside the Anglo-Arab treaties framework. This unsettled traditional structures, transforming maritime tribal confederacies from participation to compliance and reconfiguring Gulf coastal security imperatives for treaty-signatory sheikhs from sea to desert.

This article reads Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages series (1863–1905) through a worldmaking lens. It argues that, rather than simply reflecting 19th-century ideologies of progress, Verne was engaged in creative global ordering. The article argues that Verne constructed global order as technocratic, anti-political, and necessarily violent. This space was ambiguously but persistently appropriated by white, male engineers and scientists. This generates two important insights for International Relations (IR). First, Verne’s global order was not about states, sovereignty, or political community: it was about an elite vanguard of technocratic adventurers roaming the globe. At a time when colonial incursions frequently emerged out of interventions by explorers and engineers and other ‘people with projects’, this understanding resonated deeply. It is also worth recovering as a current of technocratic thought not centred on bureaucracy and strong government but on private enterprise. Second, Verne’s fiction constituted a powerful conception of global order, and contemporaries drew upon this as an inspiration for real-world interventions. At the French Société de Géographie, of which Verne was a long-time member, as well as among imperialists across Europe, the Voyages became a casual frame of reference in justification of colonial expansion. Better understanding this typically downplayed aspect of the modern international imagination not only promises to enrich IR’s understanding of the role of speculative fiction in global ordering but also puts the current revival of techno-colonial projects – from Seasteading to the colonisation of Mars – into needed perspective.

The crisis over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses exposed the contrasting ways Western and Muslim actors understand the place of religion in international order and the responsibilities of states in religious controversies. No other Muslim national leader supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for Rushdie’s death in 1989, but many Muslims expressed anger and disbelief that Britain and Western powers could not restrict a book that caused so much international disturbance. This paper seeks to understand this discord through the overlapping but conflicted language games of Western and Muslim national leaders. It analyses a previously unreported exchange of letters between British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, along with other recently released archival material from the diplomatic crisis. These letters reflected different unwritten rules informing the actors’ understandings and practices of international order, despite their shared acceptance of the sovereignty of national states. For Mahathir, the Western world was itself a religious identity, and its collective propagation of The Satanic Verses compounded a religious insult to the Muslim world. But Thatcher and other British actors did not see religious identities, especially their own, as basic elements of international relations, instead reasserting the secular primacy of national states.

The growing focus on the agency of norm violators has led to new insights on various rhetorical strategies that states accused of norm violation deploy. However, few studies have simultaneously examined both specific rhetorical devices that enable norm evasion and their social psychological underpinnings. Building on International Relations (IR) research on norm evasion and social psychological research on in-group wrongdoings, this paper conceptualises states’ rhetoric of norm evasion as a social psychological coping strategy: aimed at protecting in-group esteem. Empirically, the paper offers a systematic analysis of Japan’s rhetoric of norm evasion regarding its colonial and wartime past, as well as its social psychological underpinnings. Five rhetorical strategies of norm evasion are identified: (1) claiming legality, (2) claiming the inapplicability of relevant treaties, (3) claiming the inapplicability of relevant norms, (4) equivocating, and (5) citing non-disparagement pledges. These strategies, as well as the psychological disengagement they enable, have culminated in the promotion of non-remembrance, or behavioural manifestations of norm regress.

Social Darwinism was a pathbreaker in the history of Chinese international thought. In this study, we explore the hitherto sparsely discussed process of the reception of social Darwinism in China, which led to a fundamental transformation in Chinese thinking about the international order and the position of China vis-à-vis Western powers. Drawing on the work of three leaders of that intellectual transformation – Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, and Liang Qichao – we analyse issues such as the struggle for existence and survival, national and racial competition, and statism. We demonstrate how the three aforementioned thinkers modified the original Darwinist thought, enriching it with voluntarism and radical collectivism, all in order for the emerging set of ideas to suit China’s historically determined needs. Overall, our analysis contributes to both the history of International Relations thought in China and the broader debate on the globalisation of IR theory and IR knowledge production.

This article contends that investigating relationalities between business continuity management (BCM), staff behaviours, and bureaucratic resilience advances understandings of the survival of international organisations (IOs). Drawing on in-depth interviews, a global staff survey, and a discourse analysis of United Nations (UN) reports and applying a post-colonial feminist theoretical approach foregrounding care ethics to the study of IOs, the article examines how the UN Secretary-General’s Alternative Working Arrangements directive to close physical offices and open ‘virtual offices’ was implemented in the first 18 months of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is contended that BCM is necessary for IO survival, since if the IO bureaucracy is unable to be productive and maintain its spheres of influence during a crisis, it risks losing power and authority. Between March 2020 and August 2021, staff facilitated IO survival organically, from the bottom up, in four ways: demonstrating good performance and productivity; being adaptable and resilient; maintaining personal spheres of influence; and building communities of care within the UN. However, the UN’s neoliberal, technocratic approach to business continuity and bureaucratic resilience-building neglected staff care needs. Consequently, IO survival is predicated on staff performing as exploited gendered and racialised ‘neoliberal subjects’, revealing a chronic structural crisis rooted in the UN bureaucracy’s hierarchical composition and unequal employment regime.

Although calls to decolonise International Relations (IR) have become more prominent, the endeavour becomes infinitely more complex when searching for concrete approaches to decolonise IR knowledge production. We posit that decolonising IR, a global counter-hegemonic political project to dismantle and transform dominant knowledge production practices, must be enacted according to context-specific particularities. Contexts shape practices of epistemological decolonisation, since knowledge hierarchies are enacted and experienced – and must be challenged and dismantled – differently in different sites. Yet although acknowledged as important, contexts are understudied and under-theorised. This raises several questions: how do contexts matter to IR knowledge production, in what ways, and with what effects? This article disaggregates six contexts in IR knowledge production – material, spatial, disciplinary, political, embodied, and temporal – and explores how they impact academic practices. We bring together hitherto-disparate insights into the role of contexts in knowledge production from Global IR, Political Sociology, Feminist Studies, Higher Education Studies, and Critical Geopolitics, illustrating them with empirical evidence from 30 interviews with IR scholars across a variety of countries and academic institutions. We argue that an interrogation of the inequalities produced through these contexts brings us closer towards developing concrete tools to dismantle entrenched hierarchies in IR knowledge production.

A world without hunger demands a post-growth rewiring of the global agrifood system predicated on emancipatory politics that enables reform of actors and institutions outside agriculture. This is necessary to shift out of the prevalent growth-hegemonic framing of agriculture and its contributions to economic growth, where the structural injustice of hunger is rendered invisible. Recent International Relations (IR) scholarship highlights the institutional arrangements underpinning global agrifood problems. This paper uses critical IR theory to understand the structural mechanisms and relations of power through which the growth-hegemonic theorisation of agriculture is produced and reproduced, sustaining hunger within an exceedingly financialised agro-industrial complex. The structural power of knowledge shaping the interlocking structures of finance, production, and security is evident in the extremely high multilevel concentration in modern agrifood systems. This structural power evident in local decentralised agroecological systems and in transnational agrarian movements reflects post-growth principles of sufficiency, shared prosperity, care, ecological and social justice.Together, they are the counter-hegemonic voices, cooperative social systems, and class interests championed by post-growth politics.

Global governance institutions have increasingly ‘opened up’ to non-state actors, leading to more formally inclusive governance arrangements. This has prompted inquiry into the extent and the drivers of this inclusivity, patterns of participation, and the consequences for the legitimacy and effectiveness of global governance. However, while the measurement of formal openness has expanded, the quality of inclusion remains underexplored. We therefore introduce a framework centred on the notion of ‘meaningful inclusion’, distinguishing between formal (de jure) structures and the perceived quality of actual (de facto) engagement. Drawing on extensive empirical data, we then examine the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation. This case exemplifies strong formal mechanisms for inclusion that are contrasted sharply by significant shortcomings in effective engagement. Our findings suggest that improvements in formal global governance structures alone cannot ensure meaningful inclusion. Instead, we highlight the centrality of power dynamics and vested interests in shaping inclusivity dynamics in practice.

This article explores the promises and pitfalls of the colonial archives for the study of seeing and knowing contemporary violence. As an ethnographic field and a site of decolonial struggles, the colonial archive is increasingly mobilised in scholarship that seeks to historicise and disrupt conventional, Western-centric knowledge production. While using the colonial archives might reproduce asymmetrical power relations, they also hold the potential to unsettle the ‘toxic imperial debris’ of our time. How can the colonial archives challenge the post-colonial politics of erasing imperial violence and contribute to decolonial futures? Drawing on research in the African Archives in Belgium and fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this paper complicates problematic portrayals of the post-colonial state in the DRC and Congolese women as always already violated or silenced. We argue that the logics of the African Archives reveal a set of destabilising state anxieties that reflect the duality and instability of colonial rule itself and that infuse contemporary (international) politics. This recounting of the violence contained in the archives both narrates the concrete, violent manifestations of our ‘global coloniality’ and works towards its own demise as part of a broader ‘anticolonial archive’.

The resurgence of industrial policy is reshaping the global political economy and creating emergent formations that could help create green states. Such green states can seed a world after growth. Growth is often taken for granted as a natural purpose of states and an appropriate basis of public policy. However, it has a recent political-economic and cosmological history. This suggests that an age after growth is not only possible but likely. In the current conjuncture of crises and challenges, industrial strategies that bring together environmental, social justice, and pro-growth coalitions offer the best chance to meet climate goals and improve the prospects for inclusive prosperity globally. In addition, there is evidence that industrial policy is providing a platform to build active states, rebalance state–business relations, forge new systems of calculation, and gather cosmological resources for new action.

Even though International Relations (IR) research increasingly recognises the unprecedented urgency of environmental degradation and the resulting ecological injustices, only few IR scholars have probed into the role of economic growth as a fundamental driver of global unsustainability. We level two critiques at the field of IR from a post-growth perspective. First, most IR theories are complicit in naturalising economic growth as a fundamental condition of global order. Second, IR scholarship has neglected to engage seriously with post-growth thinking. What happens when we start to question the background economic assumptions of the current international system? How might a global politics of post-growth challenge and enrich IR and environmental politics? This Editors Forum brings together a diverse group of scholars from across the globe to reflect on these pertinent questions. As a whole, the Forum begins to address the complicity and neglect critiques. To varying degrees, each contribution considers what IR can learn from post-growth research (both conceptually and empirically), and vice versa. In this introductory article, we set the stage for such an engagement by reviewing an interdisciplinary body of relevant work and synthesising the key contributions from a total of seven Forum articles.

The field of International Studies has often been concerned with either negative conceptualisations of freedom and liberty (i.e. freedom from obstacles and interference) or positive notions of freedom (i.e. the possibility to act and develop). Further, these two notions of freedom have been conceived of as rival and incompatible. Drawing upon Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity (1947), this article rejects such a binary conceptualisation of freedom and instead puts forward a relational understanding of freedom. This article also begins to sketch the possibilities offered by such an understanding of freedom via a nascent dialogue between this relational freedom and the ethics of care. Specifically, it is posited that care and freedom weave together to form the very ethical space and conditions in and through which in becomes possible to pursue various life projects in the first place. Care and freedom, it is suggested, may thus provide one orientation for studying and practising international relations in a manner that moves towards building, amending, and maintaining relations that better support everyone (where this, crucially, also entails the ending of relations which oppress, harm, and cause suffering).