The Nuclear Age is said to be defined by the notion of existential threat. The ability to destroy human societies in their entirety with a single class of weaponry raises profound questions about human existence. It even gives us a new form of species extinction – ‘thermonuclear omnicide’. Unsurprisingly, existentialism was a philosophy that found its feet in the shadow of the bomb. This article explores the possibilities and limits of an existentialist approach to nuclear dangers. It contrasts the views of two figures central to early existentialism: Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron. Sartre responded to the existential threat of nuclear war with moral outrage about the ‘unreality’ of the Cold War politics driving the arms race and an existentialist call to reject militaristic social norms. Aron, a key figure in early IR realism, famously rejected existentialism and turned instead to outlining norms for an international society that might better restrain nuclear-armed decision-makers. Bringing Sartre’s and Aron’s post-Second World War discussions into the new century, this article argues that the ongoing, and even growing, threats posed by nuclear weapons highlight the limits of Sartre’s approach as a guide to authentic existence in modern life. Instead, it supports Aron’s more conservative approach but also draws on Existentialism to extend it, strengthening the nuclear taboo for the sake of human survival as a persistent but urgent political project. At a moment in IR when scholars and other analysts are once again critiquing the fragile norms of global order and speculating about the dawn of a ‘Third Nuclear Age’, theoretical reflection on the politics of existential threats and the hard choices they entail remain indispensable aspects of IR’s theoretical toolkit. While Sartre and other existentialists argued convincingly that existence precedes essence, Aron reminds us that survival remains a precondition for both.

Despite its common usage, the meaning of ‘democratic’ in democratic intelligence oversight has rarely been spelled out. In this article, we situate questions regarding intelligence oversight within broader debates about the meanings and practices of democracy. We argue that the literature on intelligence oversight has tended to implicitly or explicitly follow liberal and technocratic ideas of democracy, which have limited the understanding of oversight both in academia and in practice. Thus, oversight is mostly understood as an expert, institutional and partially exclusive arrangement that is supposed to strike a balance between individual freedom and collective security, with the goal of establishing the legitimacy of and trust in intelligence work in a national setting. ‘Healthy’ or ‘efficient’ democratic oversight then becomes a matter of technical expertise, non-partisanship, and the ability to guard secrets. By analysing three moments of struggle around what counts as intelligence oversight across Germany, the UK, and the US, this article elucidates their democratic stakes. Through a practice-based approach, we argue that oversight takes much more agonistic, contentious, transnational, and public forms. However, these democratic practices reconfiguring oversight remain contested or contained by dominant views on what constitutes legitimate and effective intelligence oversight.

Despite the increasing centrality of Internet memes for everyday political circulations and practices, their emergent implications as low-cultural artefacts of global politics have received little theoretical attention. In this article, I develop a critical theory of memes to provide a conceptual apparatus to understand the global political implications and possibilities of this pop-cultural phenomenon. I argue that, in order to attend to the emergent implications of memes and consider their differentiations from other pop-cultural phenomena, we need to unpack the spatial logic through which memes emerge and circulate. Analysing this spatial logic through the concept of the ‘memescape’ and deploying Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of striated and smooth spaces, this article articulates the spatial logic of the memescape as comprising rhizomatic, decentralised circulations of digital content; nomadic, playful, and humorous disruptions of once-stable signs; and affective congregations of a multiplicity of subjects. Through two examples exploring how these smooth spatial tendencies produce divergent political potentials in the resistant memes of Indigenous digital communities and reactionary memes of the Alt-Right, I conclude that the global politics of the memescape is open-ended and undetermined which requires careful and nuanced political and ethical attention to actualise its futures for emancipatory horizons.

Proposals for large-scale technical interventions into the Earth system to mitigate global warming – or climate engineering – have sparked considerable debate about their potential implications for international security and global governance. The article furthers this debate by bringing it into dialogue with the literature on visual global politics to develop a more ‘imagistic’ concept of climate engineering imaginaries. Based on a novel visual dataset, three major visual clusters in the public discourse on climate engineering are identified: images of the human–nature relationship, of climate engineering as tangible infrastructure, and of the actors involved in climate engineering projects. The analysis shows how images and other visuals do not only shape the dominant understanding of climate engineering but also competing imaginaries of future political orders in which such approaches might be deployed. Three main results of this analysis stand out. First, dominant ways of seeing climate engineering can further reinforce already dominant discursive frames by adding ‘visual proof’ to their underlying claims. Second, climate engineering visuality can also enable the politicisation of climate engineering by rendering concrete projects visible and hence contestable. Third, climate engineering images can paradoxically limit the scope of imagination as they often revolve around powerful visual icons and symbols of the past and present.

For a discipline as philosophically and temporally sensitive as International Relations, it is curious that Martin Heidegger, widely considered the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, has only recently begun to receive disciplinary attention. It is also noteworthy that as IR begins to grapple with right-wing extremism, it has not addressed Heidegger’s fascist politics. Conducting a close reading of his account of existence in time, this article argues that from his magnum opus to his final diaries, Heidegger prefigured many existentialist discussions, but his particular conceptualisations of time, temporality, and authentic Being lent political life a dangerous edge. Scrutinising both the conceptual and practical consequences of Heidegger’s thought, this article traces key tensions in his claims that, to realise true Selfhood, we must overcome social time on the road to death. This antagonism encourages overly individuated and aggressive habits of thought and action that reject the possibilities of co-existence. We can see this in how Heidegger’s obsession with authenticity over time pushed him deeper into Nazism, and in the ways that his existential vernacular resounds through today’s right-wing renaissance. Juxtaposing authenticity, then and now, helps draw out the distinctively temporal dynamics of Heidegger’s existentialism as well as the existential politics of our time.

The representatives of contested states – that is, territories whose claim to sovereign statehood is not, or is not fully, recognised by the international society of states – often make significant efforts to engage in diplomacy. Two literatures have recently begun to explore these diplomatic activities, one focusing on the ‘rebel diplomacy’ of insurgents and secessionist movements, the other on ‘liminal actors’ in global politics. However, these two literatures have defined the phenomenon in very different ways, namely, as either instrumental action or cultural performance, and study it largely without regard to each other's insights. My argument in this article is that contested state diplomacy can be better understood if we appreciate the nature of modern diplomacy as a set of bureaucratic practices. As a routinised process within a bureaucratic organisation, modern diplomacy both gives rise to specific decisions and sustains the reality of the state as the locus of legitimate power. The representatives of contested states therefore have strong reasons to set up more or less rudimentary bureaucracies for their diplomacy. I use the history of Kosovo's foreign policy institutions as a paradigmatic case to demonstrate how everyday bureaucratic practices fuse instrumental action and cultural performance and further theorise the interplay of ‘political’ and ‘technical’ conduct in contested state diplomacy.

IR scholars increasingly turn to the writings of Existentialists to make sense of the multiple and entangled planetary crises that characterise the twenty-first century. In this article, I argue that two postwar intellectuals, Günther Anders (1902–1992) and J. G. Ballard (1930–2009), offer a rich intellectual ancestry and inspiration to such scholarship. Both authors critically and creatively reworked central Existentialist ideas in the context of postwar technological acceleration and the development of nuclear weapons. To Anders and Ballard, nuclear weapons symbolised, and were the most extreme manifestation of, the pathologies they associated with technological modernity: mass consumption, spectacular violence, a deadening of affect, and an increased inability of humans to psychologically process and grasp the destructive capacities of science and technology. To counter these trends, they both firmly relied on Surrealism to bolster the human imagination as a catalysator for personal and social transformation. I argue that their work offers an opportunity to reconnect the study of nuclear weapons in IR to broader existentialist questions and suggest that their respective attempts to foreground human being in the nuclear age as ‘being-towards-extinction’ holds important lessons for recent attempts to recentre the study of IR around planetary imaginaries of extinction.

This article examines the visual politics of complicity within war, conflict, and military occupation in International Relations (IR). By arguing that complicity is a social relation through which actors navigate violence while drawing on power and resources that are distributed unevenly, it explores the production, articulation, and reception of complicity within the Israeli television series Fauda, which addresses complicit behaviour under the Israeli occupation of Palestine. By building on Feminist IR's engagement with emotions, gender, and visual representations, this article provides a twofold contribution to the study of complicity in international politics. Firstly, the complicit entanglement between creators, distributors, and viewers of Fauda spotlights the cultural workers’ role in shaping public knowledge of war, violence, and military occupation, particularly by creating and circulating cultural representations that facilitate the complicity of audiences with the violence that they consume through certain emotional logics (empathy, compassion, fear). Secondly, this article examines representations of complicity within Fauda to shed light on complicit actors’ embodied experiences of navigating between different identities while caught in the middle of violence (perpetrator, victim, witness, bystander). To this end, this article develops our understanding of emotions, resistance, and domination in international politics.

Right-wing free speech advocacy is increasingly shaping global politics. In IR, free speech has generally been viewed within human rights and international legal frameworks. However, this article shows that contemporary free speech advocates often ignore or oppose human rights and international law, focusing instead on (what they describe as) a defence of the nation state against the enemies of free speech. This article examines this articulation of free speech's enemies: first historically as the ‘savage’ in John Stuart Mill's influential formulation of free speech; and then contemporarily as the ‘snowflake’, ‘mob’, and ‘cultural Marxist’ by elected officials and lobbyists in the UK and US. The article argues that John Stuart Mill's savage is figured within a racialised civilisational hierarchy of degrees of humanity. Today, right-wing free speech advocates extend and reconfigure this hierarchy, imagining the ‘snowflake’, ‘mob’, and ‘cultural Marxist’ as lesser human, subhuman, and extra-human, respectively. Thus, in contrast to rights-based analyses of free speech advocacy – which assume or assess the promotion of rights as a ‘public good’ – the article argues that narratives of free speech's enemies are deployed by right-wing free speech advocates to underwrite racialised policy responses and global hierarchies.

This study explores how the Academy Award for A Fantastic Woman facilitated the adoption of Chile's Gender Identity Law. Approved in 2018 after languishing for over five years in Congress, the law establishes individuals’ right to modify their national identification documents without the need to change their physical appearance or receive prior court authorisation. While trans rights activists extensively lobbied for a law that guaranteed access to gender marker changes, conservatives rejected the initiative, framing their opposition in terms of Christian values and against the ‘gender ideology’ that purportedly informed the bill. We argue that this backlash dissipated in the wake of the award. International recognition made support for trans rights temporarily a matter of national pride, thereby opening a window of opportunity for the approval of the law. The case of Chile's Gender Identity Law illustrates how international status cues can foster normative change by mobilising affect in domestic audiences. It contributes to recent debates on status and domestic political change, and the role that emotion and affect play in world politics.

What is the basis of status in world order? Status is assumed to come from strength, even if strength is reconfigured to be social and normative, not just material. Status, however, can also come from perceived weakness – it is conferred to those recognised as ‘victims’. We make four theoretical contributions to the scholarship on status in world affairs. First, we examine how the category of victim is produced. Two, we expand the possible sources of status in world affairs by adding the category of victim. Three, focus on victimhood status further demonstrates that status is independent of material power. Lastly, victimhood as status exhibits the paradox that power depends on perceived powerlessness. We illustrate these arguments with three features of victim status in modern international politics: the changing desirability of victim status in Israel, the gendered construction of ideal victim in the Congo, and the hierarchy of victimhood in Bosnia.

Can trust – a core element of diplomacy – be taken online and if so, how? This article starts form the concern that trust is tied to face-to-face diplomacy, which is challenged in digitalising settings. We adopt a practice theoretical lens and study diplomatic information sharing in the Council of the European Union. Drawing on fieldwork from 2018–2021, we find that digital tools are indispensable for trust's enactment and, contrary to commonly held assumptions, do not negatively impede diplomatic trust, per se. Theorising from how diplomats handle digital tools, we find that this leads to a renegotiation of the place and boundaries of trust in diplomatic work. First, we show how digital tools create both new opportunities for and challenges to diplomatic trust, though these opportunities are more accessible to some than others. Second, whereas trust is taken online, it is not easily built digitally. Third, digital tools lead to a rearticulation of the place of transparency and confidentiality in diplomatic negotiations. It pushes diplomats to reconsider what it means to share information in an (un)trustworthy manner. Altogether, these findings further our understanding of contemporary diplomatic practice and offer a refined conception of diplomatic trust.

This article examines the soldiering body in relation to the increasing prevalence of genitourinary injuries in military personnel. Feminist scholars have demonstrated that the idealised masculine soldiering body are central to the workings of international politics. The article shows that US militarised masculinity operates through the selective distribution of bodily capacities. The article draws upon critical disability studies, particularly Jasbir Puar's work on capacity and debility, to argue that treatments for genitourinary injuries revolve around the production of seminal capacity. Queer and trans bodies are debilitated in these arrangements through the denial of heterosexual and cisgender capabilities to them. To unpack this argument the article analyses treatments for genitourinary injuries. The article shows that genitourinary injuries destabilise the gender identity of US service members. Through an exploration of surgical treatments, including penis transplants and reconstructive surgeries, and fertility treatments, the article shows how masculine capacitation is achieved for some US service members through the debilitation of others; in particular, queer and trans bodies, and the bodies of Iraqi and Afghan civilians.

Jean-Paul Sartre's trilogy Roads to Freedom is written against the backdrop of the crises between 1938 and 1940 that led to war and the Fall of France. In this article I argue that Roads to Freedom can be read as an IR text, and I concentrate on four areas. First, a refocusing on the international relations of the everyday. Second, the anatomy of a crisis from an existentialist viewpoint that can enrich our understanding of crises. Third how the interactions of the main characters reveal the ‘mediation of estrangement’ at the heart of diplomacy, first explored by Der Derian in his 1987 On Diplomacy. Fourth, it calls into question our emphasis in IR on the centrality of causes to understand a crisis. Rather, Roads to Freedom refocuses our gaze on the diverse effects in everyday IR. The argument of the article is interwoven with my own experiences reading the trilogy for the first time, and how it influenced my decision to study IR.

‘Follow the money’ is currently the central principle of international financial security, although money itself is probably one of the most unlikely objects to make traceable. Two recent scandals around a security unit and the payment processor Wirecard show how existing systems of financial surveillance that seek to capture ‘flows’ of money for security purposes are either enabled or frustrated. While this current regime of financial surveillance adheres to demanding the free flow of money through financial infrastructures and various actors and intermediaries, new digital currencies build on a set type of ledger(s) in which money is stored as data. Hence, what we understand as money does not ‘flow’, but is rather updated. This change in the underlying infrastructure means that traceability does not need to be enacted; it is an intrinsic feature of digital currencies. With new central bank digital currencies (CBDC), the regime of financial security thus changes from the monitoring of financial flows and flagging of (potentially) illicit transactions towards the storage of financial data in (de)centralised ledgers. This form of transactional governance is engendered by shifting geopolitical agendas that increasingly rely on fractured instead of globalised financial infrastructures, thus making CBDCs themselves subject to security efforts.

In the face of the current decline or spectacular collapse of peace processes, this article investigates whether peace has become systematically blocked. It investigates whether the ineffectiveness of an ‘international peace architecture’ (IPA) can be explained by a more potent counterpeace system, which is growing in its shadow. It identifies counterpeace as proto-systemic processes that connect spoilers across all scales (local, regional, national, transnational), while exploiting structural blockages to peace and unintended consequences of peace interventions. It elaborates three distinct patterns of blockages to peace in contemporary conflicts across the globe: the stalemate, limited counterpeace, and unmitigated counterpeace. Drawing on the counterrevolution literature, this research asks: Have peace interventions become the source of their own undoing? Which factors consolidate or aggravate emerging conflict patterns? Are blockages to peace systemic enough to construct a sedimentary and layered counterpeace edifice?

Since humanity is no longer the epistemological, ontological, or moral measure of all things, then (how) should international political theorists rethink animal politics? The archive ‘When They Fight Back’ records incidences of when animals ‘fought back’. It explores ways of conceptualising resistance and the implications of broadening the concept to include non-human actors via three findings: (1) Animal conflicts are everywhere and classifying them as revolt, reaction, and resistance is a creative exercise that encourages reflections about interspecies relations; (2) Most animal/human conflicts are not treated as ‘conflicts’. Instead, they are normalised within a biopolitical discourse that seeks to reduce resistance (characterised as Animal living) in order to promote living (characterised as Human resistance). (3) If excluded, animal resistance finds its way back into literatures via ethical-aesthetic figurations, traces, and desires ‘for’ the Animal. As such, the archive stages a Clausewitzian case of escalation from resistances into total war. In open hostility towards a perceived enemy, animals fight back – and because they fight back, humanism has built its own form of resistance (i.e., politics, ethics, aesthetics, biopolitics, international relations, etc.). I conclude that Human Being (as a form of resistance) must be surrendered if the war on life itself is to end.

The Anthropocene rupture refers to the beginning of our current geological epoch in which humans constitute a collective geological force that alters the trajectory of the Earth system. An increased engagement with this notion of a rupture has prompted a lively debate on the inherent anthropocentrism of International Relations (IR), and whether it is possible to transform it into something new that embraces diverse forms of existence, human as well as non-human. This article challenges that possibility. It shows how much of the current debate rests on the idea fulfilling future desirable ideals, which are pushed perpetually beyond a horizon of human thought, making them unreachable. As an alternative, the article turns to Jacques Derrida's understanding of the future to come (l'avenir), highlighting the significance of unpredictability and unexpected events. This understanding of the future shows how life within and of the international rests on encounters with the future as something radically other. On this basis, it is argued that responding to our current predicament should proceed not by seeking to fulfil future ideals but by encountering the future as incalculable and other, whose arrival represents an opportunity as much as a threat to established forms of international life.