With the advent of smartphones and social media, non-elites possess more resources to engage in politicisation and securitisation of issues. The increasing popularity and acceptance of eyewitness videos captured by non-elites presents new political-security implications, especially for the issue of migration and refugees, as witnessed during the European refugee crisis. The eyewitness videos the host population of Europe captured served as key heuristic artefacts for non-elites to engage in the securitisation and counter desecuritisation of asylum seekers. The production, visual, circulation, and audiencing aspects of eyewitness videos are significantly different from those of professional videos from news media and therefore can potentially articulate (in)security in distinct ways. I argue that the epistemic-political constitution of eyewitness videos and their online remediation through the complex networked act between the calculated security publics and video recommendation algorithms of social media play a key role in facilitating security articulations of asylum seekers. This is illustrated in the analysis of two popular eyewitness videos from Calais. The article examines how non-elites used eyewitness videos to politicise and securitise Calais asylum seekers.

The idea of integrative pluralism offers a promising path for the development of theory in international security and international relations. Instead of either trying to shoehorn all theorising into a single, limited paradigm or giving up entirely on theoretical progress, the integrative pluralist approach calls for bringing diverse approaches together. More precisely, integrative pluralism involves explaining specific phenomena by linking causal processes across multiple layers of reality, and then using the findings to inform broader theoretical constructs such as IR theory paradigms. Elements of the integrative pluralism approach are already visible in the work of mainstream scholars such as Snyder and Katzenstein, as well as of critical scholars such as Sjoberg and Hansen, but the field has tended to overlook these scholars’ efforts at theoretical integration. To more explicitly develop integrative pluralism for our field, this article first draws on critical realist philosophy and social theory. It then illustrates how further steps in this direction might be taken, in particular by highlighting the integrative pluralist aspects of Kaufman's applications of symbolic politics theory to explaining ethnic conflict and war more generally.

In a post-9/11 environment, the Department for International Development (DFID) shifted its strategic focus towards an integrationist approach that aligned mainstream development programming with the national security agenda. A key part of those reforms was integrating counterterrorism – directly and indirectly – into DFID's portfolio. Using a feminist institutionalist approach, I examine how discourses about women, development, security, and counterterrorism are reproduced through a ‘development-security-counterterrorism nexus’. Within the nexus, DFID represents a key site for the production, reproduction, and evolution of gendered discursive practices1 about women. I argue that institutional evolution is possible through a process of discursive evolution where certain discourses become more or less engrained or ‘sedimented’2 depending on the presence of alternative ideas and knowledges. The central research question asks how did gender-sensitive development work evolve after 9/11 and what factors influenced and shaped this evolution? The main findings were that as counterterrorism aims, objectives, and methods became more emphasised in UK development programming, a sense of institutional incoherence and poor strategic direction adversely affected how gender-sensitive programming was designed and implemented. Furthermore, I conclude that gendered development policy was largely based on assumptions rather than evidence, which negatively impacted how programmes were implemented.

This article examines how coalition forces sought to weaponise the counting of civilian casualties in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2014. Drawing on interviews with senior coalition officials, recently declassified documents, and coalition data on civilian harm, it will explain how these figures were used to calibrate the violence inflicted on the Afghan people, ensuring that commanders applied sufficient force to achieve their objectives without causing unnecessary harm to civilians and jeopardising the success of military operations. The article examines the formation of the Civilian Casualty Tracking Cell (CCTC), which was created by General David McKiernan in 2008. It also traces the formation of the Civilian Casualty Mitigation Team (CCMT), which was established by General John Allen in 2011. Furthermore, it explores how this data was deployed by coalition officials to minimise civilian harm where possible and to rationalise this harm where necessary. Rather than simply documenting the death and destruction, these counts were complicit in the violence experienced by Afghan civilians, helping to enable and enhance the effectiveness of military operations. As such, I argue that these counts failed to contest the violence of war or the continued dehumanisation of Afghan civilians.

Peacebuilding policies and practices represent strong attempts by external actors to exercise power in postconflict settings. Yet the extensive theoretical treatments of power in International Relations remain somewhat disconnected from empirical analyses of peacebuilding, and how external actors exercise power is under-conceptualised in the literature. Likewise, the literature on forms of resistance by local actors is seldom examined as an exercise of power in itself, and as part of a multidimensional relationship of power/resistance between external and local actors. This article thus theorises the different dimensions of power/resistance, with a detailed focus on an exemplary case – international efforts at peacebuilding in Burundi – that spans more than twenty years. It deploys a tripartite conception of both to analyse the ways in which different forms of power and resistance can be uncovered in peacebuilding practices, We demonstrate this via an analysis of postconflict peacebuilding in Burundi, and in particular the longer-term efforts of local actors to overtly and covertly bend and fuse peacebuilding practices to their own ends.

In recent years, Brazil and Poland have elected governments that are sceptical of both the liberal international order and gender. In both cases, contemporary administrations have bolstered the pre-existing anti-gender offensive of religious and secular conservative forces and converted this into legislation and public policy. Yet, at the same time, both have also created National Action Plans around the UN's Women, Peace and Security agenda. Why is this the case? Why do two governments that see gender as an ‘ideology’ continue to work on WPS? Using a feminist institutionalist framework, this article draws on content analysis of the NAPs and semi-structured in-depth interviews with stakeholders in Brazil and Poland to explore this puzzle. We argue that the WPS agenda has survived in these political contexts due the presence of key ‘femocrats’ within the state; the influence of international institutions; and the symbolic power that the WPS agenda gives to these countries on the world stage. As such, the article makes a key contribution to the literature on the WPS agenda and also bolsters the argument for a complication of the idea of gender ‘backlash’ – in domestic and international audiences, states are willing to adopt different attitudes to gender if it furthers their interests.

Tensions between civil and military authorities over issues such as budgets and strategic posture are unavoidable in pluralistic societies. Scholars of Civil-Military Relations (CMR) have identified a range of practices through which civil-military contestation occurs, and examined their implications for issues such as military effectiveness. This literature, however, has yet to incorporate critical approaches to knowledge into its analysis. Seeking to fill this gap, this article explores how the British military's presentation of its professional knowledge has been increasingly shaped by the political context of British defence policy. More specifically, it argues that the British armed forces’ presentation of opaque imaginations of future war in military doctrine has sought to entrench the role of Defence in an environment of increasingly integrated governmental responses to security challenges. To do this, the article focuses specifically on two concepts that have become increasingly significant in the British defence establishment's articulation of its professional authority and strategic purpose – Multi-Domain Integration (MDI) and the Integrated Operating Concept (IOpC). The article therefore contributes to the literature a fresh perspective of the role of military doctrine and epistemic practices in civil-military contestation, as well as a critical account of the politics of knowledge in British defence.