Despite being outlawed, attacks on cultural heritage remain a pervasive feature in atrocity contexts, the effects of which are compounded by a relative deficit of accountability at the international level. To remedy this gap, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued Policy on Cultural Heritage. However, crimes against cultural heritage are not fully articulated in the Court’s governing instruments. To leverage the protective scope of the Court, the Policy adopts a human rights understanding of cultural heritage which I frame in terms of distinctive relationships between heritage and atrocity crimes. The Policy fertilises a second argument shorthanded as world-building. Against world-destruction, the Policy erects an accountability architecture. Conceptually, it foregrounds an understanding of the world as a cultural construct around which social relations are organised. Crimes against heritage undercut the very notion of what it means to be human; disrupt cultural identification, transmission, and development processes; and deny present and future generations the ability to be specific kinds of cultural human beings. In those regards, this article adds to the world society research agenda of English School theory by examining how the Policy more fully develops the Court’s role as an agent for humanity.

How do authoritarian actors navigate the liberal international order, adopting democratic facades without committing to democratic principles? And why is it so difficult for the international normative system to debunk their pretence when it comes to the use of democratic values? This paper explores this question by introducing ‘profilicity’ and ‘performativity’ as key concepts to understand how autocratic regimes build powerful profiles within a liberal system that values authenticity. Unlike conventional theories, which assume that engagement with liberal norms requires genuine commitment, profilicity reveals that strategic image-building can be just as effective. Through this lens, we see how autocracies exploit liberalism’s own ideals, using performative adaptation to secure status and reshape norms. This paper suggests that the liberal order’s emphasis on sincerity may itself be a strategic weakness, one that autocratic actors skilfully navigate in a world increasingly driven by profiles over principles.

This article examines the 19th-century ‘antiquities rush’ – the frenzy of archaeological digging, scientific expeditions, and straightforward looting of artefacts in the broader Mediterranean – through the framework of international status competition. To do this, I first situate material culture at the foundation of international status-seeking and demonstrate the importance of cultural objects as status symbols for states. I then elaborate two logics of status-seeking that explain why states engaged in massive cultural extraction practices in the early 19th century. The first logic is that of cultural custodianship, where states pursued status as guardians of the cultural heritage of humankind. The second logic is a claim to cultural descendance, where states sought recognition as cultural heirs of classical civilisations. Cultural extraction, therefore, was critical in the establishment of the 19th-century international cultural hierarchy. Echoes of these arguments reverberate today in the competing claims of ownership and restitution of these antiquities. To illustrate these arguments, the article focuses on the international competition between France and Great Britain over the extraction of antiquities, examining in detail the removal of the Parthenon Marbles from Athens at the turn of the 19th century.

World heritage has become UNESCO’s flagship programme, and it is a site of active state engagement. At the crux of that engagement is the prestigious World Heritage List. This engagement is regularly analysed as pursuits of national prestige. In this article, I advance a Bourdieusian analysis of world heritage as a field that generates international cultural prestige. I identify humanity as the field’s doxa that allows for a vertical separation and the generation of more-than-national cultural value. I show how states’ desire for this prestige jeopardised the field’s autonomy at a critical juncture in 2010 and analyse the field’s aftermath as involving fraught attempts by states to discursively reconstruct the field’s vertical and functional separations in the quest for international cultural prestige. This reconstruction involves nothing less than reinterpreting humanity as the community-of-states, pointing at once to humanity’s indispensability for more-than-national value and undermining its ability to generate that value.

Norm contestation has become an established research programme in International Relations. However, scholars have yet to scrutinise the form and effect of radical contestation. I argue that radical contestation is a disruptive form of contestation, distinguished by (1) the extensive scope that attacks a specific norm and wider normative order, institutions, and actors sympathetic to the norm, and (2) high emotional intensity in animating contestation. To bring these features of radical contestation together, I use insights from the study of emotions and backlash movements to advance a new ‘emotional backlash’ framework and explain the construction, mobilisation, and outcome of radical contestation. I subsequently apply this framework to analyse the emotional backlash against Rohingya refugees during Covid-19. Cultivated by resentment, the emotional backlash against the Rohingya contests refugee protection norms and extends to radically challenge human rights advocates, United Nations agencies, and the larger humanitarian and cosmopolitan principles. In doing so, backlash supporters aim to restore a society without refugees and their sympathisers, and instead to promote racism as a ‘normal’ organising principle. By capturing radical contestation, this contribution steers norms scholarship towards a new research terrain and highlights the implications that the backlash has for the international refugee regime.

This paper draws attention to the untapped potential of international law (IL) in understanding how security communities develop. It focuses, among others, on ‘transnational legal processes’ – a key overlooked variable – by highlighting what international relations (IR) theory can learn from IL. In so doing, the paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it proposes a definition and conceptualisation of regional norms in the study of security communities. Second, by pointing out legal and judicial factors that facilitate or hinder the legal internalisation of regional norms, and consequently affect the development of a security community, it suggests new important research questions that can help broaden the ontology of security communities and bring theoretical heft to the fundamental concept of peaceful change. Third, the paper discusses how and under what conditions regional norms contribute to maintaining reasonable expectations of peaceful change not only at the systemic or state elite level, but equally at the domestic societal level.

This article theorises Indigenous feminist relational freedom that emphasises the ways in which relations and structures of domination disproportionately impact women and gender-diverse people, including through gender-based violence and environmental harm. The theory of relational freedom critiques both one-dimensional conceptions of Indigenous relationality and the conventional framing of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination through the lens of non-interference, a concept rooted in political autonomy grounded in liberal thought. While non-interference correctly emphasises the need for Indigenous autonomy from state intervention, it falls short in addressing the deeper aspects of Indigenous freedom. Western interference has long impacted Indigenous life, which has led Indigenous self-determination discourses to focus on avoiding state intervention. However, while this emphasis on political autonomy is valid, it does not account for structural forms of domination, particularly underlying inequalities that perpetuate subordination within these structures. These structures range from state institutions that dispossess Indigenous communities to internal systems of gender-based domination that marginalise Indigenous women and LGBTQ+ individuals. The persistence of these structures significantly impedes the full realisation of Indigenous self-determination. The article ultimately theorises Indigenous feminist relational freedom within broader frameworks of feminist relational autonomy and citizenship and Indigenous gift relations, exploring practical approaches for applying the principles of relational freedom within Indigenous governance.

Scholars have identified several temporal challenges in foreign policymaking, such as variable time horizons and maintaining commitment or resolve over time. While the behavioural turn has emphasised leaders and their subjective perceptions, research often relies on rationalist conceptions of objective and linear time and struggles to assess leaders’ subjective perceptions of it. This paper theorises time as an intrinsic aspect of narrative reasoning in foreign policy, introducing a ‘temporal definition of the situation’ (TDoS) framework to capture leaders’ situation-specific subjective time perceptions. I then operationalise the TDoS framework’s key temporal features and show how it can be empirically examined. The value of the TDoS is illustrated by assessing the temporal perceptions of Bush and Obama regarding Iran’s nuclear programme, showing how their distinct definitions of the foreign policy situation shaped their subjective time perceptions and their corresponding responses. I conclude by discussing how this advancement can enhance behavioural research, provide insights into the ‘why now?’ questions surrounding leaders’ actions, and challenge existing understandings of time’s impact on foreign policymaking.

This article explores India’s ‘long wars’ – the counter-insurgency campaigns the state imposed on recalcitrant populations and territories. Existing critical debates have focused on colonial and imperial counter-insurgency waged by developed Western states and empires. Yet these powers hardly command a monopoly on how these are fought, rationalised, or imagined. Indian counter-insurgency campaigns are a key case in point. The aftermath of British colonial rule led to a revivification of rather than an end to counter-insurgency. Indian counter-insurgency thinking betrays similar logics of differentiation to those of the British. However, an engagement with Indian counter-insurgency archives reveals that the political economy of (post-)colonial rule results in its own particular sets of inclusions and exclusions. We tease out these tensions and anxieties that underpin India counter-insurgency by exploring how India’s long wars in its north-eastern states have been rationalised and explained away among Indian counter-insurgents, namely through references to ‘diversity’ and ‘democracy’. Such references index a politics premised on a disavowal of violence, which represents a weapon of war. This disavowal, narrated through exceptionalist claims, manifests itself through distinct modalities with their own tensions and even contradictions, leading to India’s own complicated relationships with notions and practices of coloniality.

The relationship involving the unknown other has so far been exclusively translated into the language of fear as part of the securitised response to migration. The fear of the unknown other divides people into those who are associated with illegality and chaos and those who need to be protected from such ‘danger’. In contrast, the humanitarian approach to migration challenges the securitised response to the unknown other: it refuses to separate the self from the other and instead appeals to the idea of common humanity. This paper draws on the idea of the gothic to develop a humanitarian way of embracing the fear of the unknown. In the gothic framework, the other is feared not because of categorical differences between the self and the other, embodied in the securitised response to migration, but categorical ambiguity between the two. Using UK-based welcome activism as an example, I argue that gothic-inspired humanitarianism embraces the fear of the unknown other through the sharing of not knowing oneself. This offers a new basis for solidarity, in the language of fear, without resorting to the securitised relationship between the self and the other.

What do different ways of seeing the world mean for actors engaged in peacemaking? Through the case of Cameroon, I illustrate the critical yet often-overlooked role of one’s conceptions of self in the world – how actors see the world and their positions within it – in shaping peace processes. Considering the growing debate over the conceptualisation of the world order as anarchic or hierarchical and foregrounding Cameroonian articulations, I examine how notions of hierarchy and hypocrisy are constitutive of the conflict actors’ perceptions of the world and condition their engagements in foreign-led mediation concerning the Anglophone Crisis. Drawing on over 60 interviews, including those with Cameroonian ruling party members, opposition politicians, and individuals leading the armed separatist movement, I explain how considerations of self-image and status are powerful drivers of behaviours and not aspects that can be dismissed as ‘irrational’ or ‘overly sensitive’; rather, various Cameroonian actors deploy themes of hierarchy and hypocrisy in highly rational and intentional ways to further their aspirations. Inspired by Historical International Relations and reverse ethnography, the article challenges the presentist bias in much of today’s analysis of global politics and offers a historically conscious explanation of conflict parties’ behaviour in mediation.

This article examines the use of heritage in the context of populism. It is interested in how populists’ division of society in an us-versus-them dichotomy and exclusionary politics intersect with the appeal to the past and the weaponised politicisation of history. More specifically, the analysis focuses on far-right populism’s selective embrace of nostalgia. To this end, we examine heritage politics under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist who ruled Brazil between 2019 and 2022. By surveying government speeches and policies, we developed a typology of the uses of heritage as a form of political power: (1) Heritage as historical revisionism, which has mainstreamed distorted and/or inaccurate history in the official narrative; (2) Heritage as identity repositioning, which has redefined core aspects of Brazil’s identity based on particular understandings of history and tradition; and (3) Heritage as alliance building, which has brought Brazil closer to some countries based on shared narratives and legacies. We find that the selective construction heritage has become an indissociable element of Jair Bolsonaro policies’ quest for domestic and international legitimacy.

Film offers untapped potential for making critical interventions in world politics, particularly in ways that harness people’s capacity to narrate stories that creatively empower their communities. Combining International Relations scholarship on visual politics with narrative theory and feminist scholarship on care, this paper presents film as a means of exploring and expressing narrative agency; that is, the power to tell stories that represent people’s experiences in ways that disrupt hegemonic narratives. Dialectics of care and narrative agency are explored in the context of military-to-civilian ‘transition’ in Britain. We argue that the landscape of transition for military veterans is dominated by a preoccupation with employment and economic productivity, resulting in a ‘care deficit’ for veterans leaving the military. Through the Stories in Transition project, which used co-created film to explore narrative agency in the context of three veterans’ charities, we argue that the act of making care visible constitutes a necessary intervention in this transitional landscape. Grounding this intervention within feminist care ethics and the related notion of care aesthetics, we highlight the potential for film to reveal in compelling audio-visual narratives an alternative project of transition which might better sustain life and hope in the aftermath of military service.

This article examines the relationship between the International Studies Conference (ISC), the question of peaceful change, and the study of international relations (IR) in the United States. It argues that the prewar and wartime years constituted a pivotal moment in the disciplinary history of American International Relations, particularly in terms of the transformation of the field from prewar international studies into postwar IR; and that the ISC and its American committee offer a valuable vantage point for observing the dynamics and stakes involved in this transformation. The growing urgency of peaceful change during the 1930s imbued the ISC and its American committee with unprecedented significance for U.S. scholars in the field, promoting in the process a framework for international studies that favoured international and interdisciplinary collaboration as well as multi-conceptual perspectives. Disappointment with the results of ISC deliberations on peaceful change, however, undermined the ISC-associated framework, boosting in the process another framework centred in and on the United States as well as on ‘power politics’. The growing ascendency of this second framework would mark IR in the United States, providing fertile terrain for the postwar emergence of realism.

A desire to preserve its ontological security was crucial in France’s decision to leave Algeria. France neither militarily lost the Algerian War (1954–62), nor were the financial costs of war too burdensome to bear. Instead, the contradictions between two narrative strands of France’s sense of self – liberal-democratic universalism and white European ethnonationalism – came unravelled, sparking a crisis of ontological security. These two narrative strands were rewoven together around the decision to leave Algeria, which saved France from facing a true reckoning about its sense of self and the dynamics of colonialism that had pushed France to create a racial hierarchy that contradicted French republican values. Algeria shows that ontological security can be preserved by using narrative strands to create the impression of stability amid profound changes. Additionally, in critical situations during periods of great global political change, shedding certain role-identities (such as being a colonial power) can help states recover ontological security. France’s pivot away from its colonial empire under President Charles de Gaulle is an example of such a transition away from a specific role-identity that was narrated in such a way that it actually – and paradoxically – projected stability.

The academic imprint of Susan Strange, long considered a pioneer in the field of IPE, no longer resonates with contemporary debates about the organization and structure of the global political economy. We argue that her analytical framework continues to be a productive way to think about important current developments, most importantly in relation to what can now be called the digital age and its emergent form of capitalism. We therefore modify and update Strange’s framework to highlight its unique analytical potential, and to set out the operational principles of what we want to call a ‘neo-Strangean’ framework of authority. We then apply it to what Strange identifies as the finance or credit structure. By focusing on a core domain of political-economic power, we demonstrate our principal claim that a neo-Strangean framework of authority points towards an understanding of how new actors and imperatives are reshaping the global political economy. We close by outlining the analytical benefits that a neo-Strangean research agenda promises for the field of IPE, which for us centre on emphasizing the dynamics and disruptive consequences of a knowledge-infused global political economy in a way that pays sufficient attention to ideational and material factors.

Normative conflict is at the centre of many current discussions about order and change in world politics. In this article, we argue that studying normativity in practice is necessary when analysing processes of global ordering, such as negotiating, cooperating, or protesting. Practices are imbued with normativity. This key aspect, however, remains often overlooked in current International Relations (IR) practice research due to a conservative bias that treats practices mainly as patterned. Focusing on normativity reveals the inherent contestation of practices, providing a conceptual avenue for understanding how international practices oscillate between social order and change. Normativity can be defined as evaluating criteria experienced in practice and used for the contextualised moral judgement of public performances. This perspective is relevant for IR scholars interested in how relational, contested, and learning processes relate to order and ordering in world politics. We propose taking a comprehensive approach hereto based on three key dimensions: how normativity is enacted and disputed in practice; how it must be learnt as practical knowledge in communities; and, how ambiguity remains due to the multiplicity of rules applied in everyday situations. We illustrate our approach by examining global protests in different fields (sports, the environment, and peace).

How did conflicting legitimation narratives in early modern East Asia coexist despite the tensions their mutually exclusive claims generated? Prevailing accounts understand authority to be legitimised through narratives emphasising hierarchical delegation or autonomous production. In practice, both existed simultaneously. Existing accounts in International Relations (IR) suggest conflicting legitimation narratives should produce instability at best and hostilities at worst. Yet conflicting narratives endured over the long term in this period. I argue conflicting legitimation narratives were performed by actors in early modern East Asia within separate locations, allowing contradictory claims around the nature of their authority to coexist. This is seen through the contemporaneous phrase wài wáng nèi dì or ‘emperor at home, king abroad’. To demonstrate this, I introduce the segmentation of space as a concept. Producing an inside/outside dynamic, East Asian actors performed their authority through autonomously produced legitimation narratives inside while acknowledging hierarchically delegated narratives as the basis for authority outside. I identify this process of segmentation operating at both the state and the region level. Both early modern Japan and Vietnam demonstrate how East Asian thinking and practices on spatial organisation were adapted across all levels of the system. Thus, conflicting legitimation narratives could endure without converging on shared understandings.

The dominant understandings of space that inform International Relations (IR) theories struggle to account for the material dynamism of the natural environment. From neo-realism through to constructivism and post-structuralist IR perspectives, the natural environment is relegated to the background of analysis as the seemingly stable backdrop against which humans do global politics. Supporting this relegation is an associated tendency among IR theorists to view nature abstractly, rather than materially, in alignment with the cartographic imagination. Meanwhile, realist scholars adhering to the tenets of classical geopolitics foreground the natural environment as a factor in global politics yet view it as ontologically static and materially deterministic in its effects. In an era of unprecedented spatial flux amid human-induced climate change, this article seeks to contribute to ongoing efforts in IR and political geography to develop alternative spatial frameworks that can account for the natural environment’s material dynamism and instability. To do so, the article adopts a post-humanist framework that centres matter’s ontological fluidity and mobility. By affording primacy to matter-in-motion, it is argued, a richer understanding of space as performatively produced through relational processes can be developed, where attention is attuned not only to what matter ‘does’, but also how it moves.

Cartographic representations of Kashmir and Taiwan act as sites upon which Indian and Chinese state power is exercised to govern the logics of visibility and legibility for these two regions. Despite the differences in regime type, these major non-Western powers represent Kashmir and Taiwan respectively as internal and integral parts of their sovereign territorial form. In this article, we consider two cases that have not hitherto been studied together in International Relations (IR), putting forward ‘cartographic imaginaries’ as a framework to reveal systematic analytical dynamics in relation to representation, nationalism, and diaspora. Cartographic imaginaries are sites of productive power that evoke certain emotions and carry a set of ideas relating to territory that can be naturalised through repeated exposure. We present in-depth investigations providing a range of examples to trace Indian and Chinese states’ efforts, both domestic and international, involved in constructing and controlling cartographic imaginaries of Kashmir and Taiwan. Our analysis relates to significant current concerns in IR about critiques of imperial cartography, impact of rising powers on global order dynamics, and transnational governance of diaspora. Our framework thus demonstrates the connexions between affect, visuality, and state power and offers empirical insights into non-Western projections of imperialism on a global scale.