This article broadens the understanding and empirical study of regime complexes by shifting the focus from the negotiation outcome to the processes of negotiating new international agreements. Although they are important to regime-complex formation and delimitation, the sites where states negotiate new agreements are rather neglected. We aim to enhance the methodological toolbox available to scholars studying global governance in two ways: (1) by demonstrating how dynamic relationships between states and international organisations (IOs) unfolding within the social space of international treaty negotiations contribute to regime-complex formation; and (2) how social network analysis (SNA) can help us to detect patterns in these relationships. Combining participant observation and collaborative event ethnography (CEE) with social network analysis, we present new empirical material illustrating how we delimited a regime complex and how IOs interact throughout the negotiation process. We applied our methodology to the case of marine-biodiversity governance and use observational data collected during three intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) (2018–19) on a new treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) for our analysis. We discuss the results in relation to our approach’s strengths and weaknesses and implications for future research on regime complexity.

Infrastructures are central to processes of state formation. The revival of materialism in International Relations has made an important contribution to our understanding of states through careful analysis of the politics of infrastructure and state building. Yet, to date, engagement with the state-theoretical tradition associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas, and Bob Jessop has been absent. Through comparison with the external-relational ontology of Bruno Latour and actor-network theory (ANT), this article argues that state theory and its internal-relational ontology avoids reifying the state while providing an analysis of infrastructure and state formation sensitive to the historical reproduction of social orders over time. Developing Gramsci’s concept of the ‘integral state’, it emphasises the necessary interpenetration between civil society, the state apparatus, and the creation of infrastructure. These conceptual arguments are illustrated through an analysis of the United States’ development of nuclear infrastructures during the early Cold War period, in the internal relations between infrastructure and the integral state are explored through Civil Defense Education programmes. Clarifying the internal relations of past, present, and potential future forms of socio-technical order is an important task for rethinking the politics of technological design in International Relations.

This Special Issue celebrates the 50th anniversary of Review of International Studies. Since 1975, the Review has published over 200 issues and over 1300 articles. The journal has played a key role in shaping the discipline of International Relations (IR), leading, or critically intervening in, key debates. To celebrate 50 years of Review of International Studies, we have curated a Special Issue examining the challenges facing global politics for the next 50 years. IR has regularly turned its attention backwards towards its historical origins. Instead, we look to the future. In this Introduction, we start by outlining four traditions of future-oriented thinking: positivist, realist prediction; planning, forecasting, and scenario-building; utopian dreams of an ideal political future; and prefigurative thinking in activist politics. From these traditions, we learn that thinking about the future is always thinking about the present. We then outline four themes in the Special Issue articles: How do we think about the future at all? How do we think about imperial pasts and the ongoing questions of colonization and racialization in the present? How will technological change mediate and generates geopolitical change? How are socioecological crises, and in particular climate change, increasingly shaping how we think about the future of global politics? Overall, these provide us with a diverse, stimulating, and thought-provoking set of essays about the future of global politics, as both discipline and set of empirical problems.

The war in Syria has been communicated to global audiences through images of dead and injured children, decapitated and tortured bodies, and ruined cities. The article shows how news media coverage of the war's impact on the city of Aleppo invoked a Gothic tradition. Drawing on Kristeva and Freud's concepts of the abject and the uncanny, the article argues that the Gothic tradition can further International Relations research on the constitution of Selves and Others. The Gothic Other is constituted through the (Gothic) Self's repulsion, fascination, and desire, and the Gothic tradition revolves around an understanding of the invisible as an in-between space of fear and anticipation. The ability to recognise Gothic themes in an image depends on one's familiarity with the Gothic tradition, hence images are theorised as having a Gothic potentiality. The article focuses on how the Anglo-Saxon Gothic tradition enabled Western readers to identify Gothic themes in news coverage of the war in Aleppo. The article adopts a multimethod strategy including a content analysis of 457 images published by Western news media; a discourse analysis of news stories; an analysis of three Gothic, uncanny iconic motifs; and an author-created comic drawing on Gothic elements from the published photographs.

How do non-state armed groups form in intra-state armed conflicts? Researchers have started to disaggregate armed groups, but we still know little about how armed groups emerge in different ways. Drawing on the literature on social movements, civil wars, and civil–military relations, we generate a typology of ‘movement’, ‘insurgent’, and ‘state splinter’ origins of armed groups. We argue that fundamentally different dynamics of conflict shape armed group origins in the context of broad-based mobilisation, peripheral challenges to the state, and intra-regime fragmentation. Armed groups that emerge in these contexts in general differ in their initial membership and leadership, the basic organisational dimensions that we focus on. We demonstrate the utility of our typology by mapping different origins of armed groups onto existing cross-national data and charting type narratives in illustrative cases. This discussion advances recent efforts to understand the importance of armed group emergence for outcomes of interest to conflict scholars by moving beyond either separate types of origins or highly disaggregated organisational analyses to broader conflict dynamics through which armed groups form, with implications for how these groups act. Future research should consider different origins which we identify in comparison through an in-depth analysis of armed groups’ complex histories.

This article further develops and illustrates the argument that relationships between individuals help to explain the success of human rights advocacy in international institutions. Drawing from advocacy theory and socio-legal studies, I shift the attention from collective forms of advocacy to the importance of interpersonal relationships of advocates with individuals in international institutions to influence the development of human rights. I introduce a framework consisting of three analytical steps – mapping the key actors in a network, process-tracing, and biographical research – and apply the framework to three cases of norm development by a United Nations human rights treaty body. My findings highlight the power of interpersonal relationships for the making of human rights, and they inform scholarship on transnational elites, human rights advocacy, and the politics of international law.

Before International Studies can confront the future, it needs to get a better grip on its past and present. The discipline lacks agreement on both its own name and the name of its object of study. More importantly, key concepts used to describe phenomena have changed continuously: no concept emerging in the 19th century has remained untouched, no envisioned future of the past could have prepared us for the present. Old concepts have been discarded, new ones adopted, and existing ones modified. This implies that any exercise in ‘futurology’ must necessarily come with an openness towards conceptual change, and that a key challenge for International Studies going forward will consist in matching our conceptual toolbox to an ever-changing world. The importance of conceptual change has until recently been neglected in the study of global politics. Thus, in this paper we start by presenting the empirical case for incorporating conceptual change by laying out key past and present conceptual changes in the international realm. We then move on to a presentation of conceptual history and the tools it provides us for grasping conceptual change, before discussing how to tackle conceptual developments when thinking about the future of global politics.

In a recent article, Maria Eriksson Baaz and Swati Parashar1 trace the continued salience of Eurocentrism in critical International Relations (IR), demonstrating how the ‘master’s outlook’ continues to stifle the study of global politics; they ultimately encourage an unsettling and even implosion of the discipline. Starting from this proposed ‘implosion’ of critical IR, this article reflects on our hopes, as two current PhD candidates and one early career researcher in global politics, for teaching and learning in this future world. We begin by reflecting on our own complicity in reproducing the Western-centrism of the discipline and consider how this discomfort can be used productively. The article then considers the radical potential of the classroom and the necessity of empathetic, collaborative inquiry to the future of the discipline of global politics. We advocate for an IR which is imaginative, relational, messy, and vulnerable – and are hopeful about how this may animate a meaningful and sustainable implosion. Embracing our discomfort and the possibility of failure, we hope to contribute to the ongoing ‘unsettling’ of academia from the standpoint of incipient feminist scholars and hopeful early-career teachers.

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.

This paper is interested in the role and function of memories in United Nations Security Council debates about humanitarian intervention. It posits that historical experiences and their lessons serve as interpretative devices for the abstract international norms and principles under discussion. The paper speaks of ‘international memories’ where the meaning and lessons derived from the past coalesce among a group of states. Empirically, its case study explores how the memories of totalitarianism/fascism and colonialism were employed in United Nations (UN) representatives’ verbal pleas to intervene in Libya and Syria after the Arab Spring. It finds that those who supported or opposed humanitarian intervention held different interpretations of these memories and their lessons. In each case, however, memories provided essential normative guidance to states when it came to implementing the abstract international principles, norms, and rights that underlie humanitarian intervention.

How do governing actors in international politics become legitimised? Current approaches to the study of legitimation do not fully account for the complexities of governance in contemporary international and global politics because they pre-specify ‘sources’ of legitimacy and treat change in audience expectations towards rightful rule as exogenous to legitimation processes. Instead, this article synthesises existing models of legitimation with relational theory to argue that constellations of institutional complexities necessitate an analytical focus on audiences and their expectations as embedded in governance networks. It then provides a relational theory of legitimation, emphasising the mechanisms undergirding legitimation: legitimation should be conceptualised as a process of congruence-finding between actors’ normative expectations. A governance relation might be influenced towards greater or lesser congruence via several mechanisms working at the level of the relation and the wider network, with more congruence giving rise to stabler governance practices. In this way, the theory builds upon legitimation scholarship by developing pathways to investigate legitimation across the varied contexts of international politics: it avoids a normative background theory of legitimacy sources and provides an improved framework for understanding change in the legitimacy of institutions over time by considering endogenous mechanisms of legitimation.

In recent years, scholars of global politics have shown that issues of race and white supremacy lie at the centre of international history, the birth of the field of International Relations, and contemporary theory. In this article, I argue that race plays an equally central role in the 21st century’s current and future crises: the set of systemic risks that includes intensifying climate change, deepening inequality, the endemic instabilities of capitalism, and migration. To make this argument, I describe the contours of the current crisis and show how racism amplifies its effects. In short, capitalism’s winners and losers and the effects of climate change fall along racial lines, amplifying both direct and indirect racial discrimination against non-white migrants and states in the Global South. These interdependent crises will shape the next 50 years of international politics and will likely perpetuate the vicious cycle of global racial inequality. Accordingly, this article presents a research agenda for all IR scholars to explore the empirical implications of race in the international system, integrate marginalised perspectives on global politics from the past and present into their scholarship, and address the most pressing political issues of the 21st century.

The globalisation of political power into structures ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the nation-state has increasingly been called into question as part of a ‘sovereigntist turn’ in contemporary politics. While such demands for local control by bounded peoples may be democratic, empirically they often also take a nationalist form. Building on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of how ‘the nation conquered the state’, I argue that the slippage from democratic to national sovereigntism is rooted in fundamental conceptual instabilities within the concept of the nation-state. Whereas the first term in this hyphenated construct favours certain individuals based on their ethnic background, the latter is a universal concept that demands the equal treatment of all. My basic thesis is that these internal contradictions help to explain the nationalist tendency in calls to return political power to the nation-state. I illustrate these points by drawing on examples from the ‘illiberal democracies’ of Central-Eastern Europe, focusing on Poland and Hungary.

The article explores the complicity of children’s picturebooks in the construction and critique of world politics. Focusing on The Gruffalo, it argues that this spectacularly successful book: (1) stories the international as a pessimistic, anarchical world populated by self-interested, survival-seekers; (2) disrupts this reading and its assumptions through evocation of the social production of threat; and, (3) provides a more fundamental decolonial critique of the international through parochial privileging of its protagonist’s journey through a ‘deep dark wood’. In doing this, we argue, the book vividly demonstrates the world’s susceptibility to multiple incompatible readings, while rendering visible the assumptions, framing, and occlusions of competing understandings of the international. As such, it theorises both world politics and knowledge thereof as contingent and unstable. In making this argument, three contributions are made. First, empirically, we expand research on popular culture and world politics through investigating a surprisingly neglected example of the former. Second, theoretically, we demonstrate the work such texts perform in (re)creating and (de)stabilising (knowledge of) global politics. Third, we offer a composite methodological framework for future research into the context, content, and framing of complex texts like The Gruffalo.

The rights of people who are marginalised by their sexual orientation and gender identity (LGBTI) have improved in many countries. Largely, these achievements can be traced back to the ‘spiral model’ of factors including transnational mobilisation by the LGBTI rights movement, the actions of a few pioneering governments, and advances in the human rights frameworks of some international organisations (IOs). Yet a rising and increasingly globally connected resistance works against LGBTI rights. It rests predominantly in the hands of a transnational advocacy network (TAN) that attempts to lay claim to international human rights law by reinterpreting it. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork and 240 interviews with LGBTI, anti-LGBTI, and state and IO actors, this article explores how the conservative TAN functions, in terms of who comprises it and how its agenda is constructed. We argue that this TAN has employed many of the same transnational tools that garnered LGBTIQ people their widespread recognition. It also conforms to the spiral model of rights diffusion, but in a process we call a double helix. As the double-helix metaphor suggests, rival TANs have a reciprocal relationship, having to navigate each other’s presence in an interactive space and thus using related strategies and instruments for mutually exclusive ends.

To what extent has the glass ceiling in global governance been shattered? To answer this question, we need to look beyond the numbers on women’s representation and study how far women are perceived as inspiring and visionary leaders in global governance. This article offers an analysis of perceptions of inspiring and visionary leadership in global multistakeholder initiatives from a gender perspective. Based on 467 interviews with participants in a leading multistakeholder initiative, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), it presents four findings: (1) respondents identify more men than women as inspiring and visionary leaders, with the difference roughly corresponding to the share of women in leadership roles; (2) respondents tend to ascribe more leadership attributes to women than to men when explaining why they find them inspiring and visionary; (3) both feminine and masculine leadership traits are appreciated in relation to both men and women leaders at ICANN; (4) female respondents identify more women as inspiring and visionary leaders than male respondents. These findings contribute novel insights into gendered perceptions around leadership and the importance of role models in global governance. They also shed much-needed light on the demands and expectations from leadership in global multistakeholder arrangements.

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.

This article examines ‘diasporic geopolitics’ as a significant factor in the future of global politics. Whereas discussions of global order in IR have been highly spatialised, we instead highlight the extent to which different regions of the world are entangled via ongoing migration processes, and their legacies in the form of global diasporas. We examine the significance of these interconnections by focusing on rising powers and their relations with the existing international order. Major migration-sending states such as China, India, and Turkey are now aspiring great powers that seek to exert global influence in international affairs. In this context, their diaspora governance policies are also undergoing a transformation, with diasporas increasingly understood as important assets for promoting sending states’ geopolitical agendas and great power ambitions. We examine three mechanisms by which such states exert power transnationally via their diaspora engagement policies. States can treat ‘their’ diasporas as economic assets that facilitate trade and foreign investment; as soft power assets that contribute to the promotion of ‘civilisational’ politics; and as diplomatic assets that can be strategically mobilised or repressed. We conclude by discussing the implications for thinking about the nature of global order and power politics in the coming 50 years.

Status-seeking is ubiquitous in world politics, and the literature is currently dominated by state-centrism and rationalism, which is almost exclusively focus on state elites. This results in a thin and limited understanding of what ‘status-seeking’ is, where it works, and how it is effected. This article challenges the existing approaches by introducing a performativity framework and offers an overhaul of how ‘status’ can be studied. It suggests replacing ‘status-seeking’ with ‘status performances’ that are conceptualised as part of ‘statecraft’ process. Drawing on post-structuralist and queer approaches as well as aesthetics in International Relations (IR), it is argued that status performances participate in the production of the state itself as a subject in world politics, so all states are ‘status-seekers’. This subject-production process occurs in multiple political sites, including the academic IR discourse in a country and visual presentations in the media. It is concluded that there is no ‘status’ beyond the subject, and status can never be achieved because it always needs repetitive performances. The argument is illustrated by an analysis of the production of ‘Turkey’ as a humanitarian state and demonstrates how this is effected in state-elite pronouncements, IR scholarship in Turkey, and visual representations.