This article explains the events that brought about the meaningful negotiations between President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert. Despite Olmert’s good intentions and clear willingness to make peace by agreeing to unprecedented concessions, Olmert failed to convince Abbas to sign an agreement. The article opens by explaining the research methodology and the theoretical framework. It then explains the Annapolis conference and process including the three tiers of negotiations installed by Israel and the Palestinian Authority. While Olmert presented the best peace offer to date that any Israeli prime minister was willing to sign, it remained short of the Palestinian demands. A host of reasons led to yet another failure to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are analyzed: the negotiations’ structure, internal rivalries in Israel and the Palestinians, the continuation of the settlement project, Olmert’s decision to embark on two wars, Olmert’s illegitimate leadership due to his implication in corruption affairs, and Palestinian lack of trust in the Israeli government to deliver a long-lasting peace. The article concludes with a detailed assessment of the negotiation dynamics, aiming to distill key lessons that may inform future efforts should Israeli and Palestinian leaders re-enter serious peace talks.

This study analyzes how cross-border (transnational) groups constrain state’s commitments in international mediation and argues they serve as “transnational veto players” whose incentive and cost structures fall out of alignment with the negotiating state during mediation. This creates opportunities and incentives to veto policy change. Their influence is most evident when mediators use leverage against states to reorder preferences, but transnational groups do not receive comparable inducements. Agreements that create veto points such as implementation requirements or plebiscites endow transnational groups with veto power to undermine agreements and prevent changes to the status quo, while passing the costs of reneging onto the negotiating state. States seek to avoid the costs incurred by transnational veto players by reducing their opportunities and capabilities to act autonomously and align their incentives with their own. This argument is developed and tested in a single case study of ethnic Serbs in Kosovo constraining Serbian commitments, and Serbian attempts to manage their opportunities and capabilities to veto commitments.

While International Relation (IR) has long relied on historical cases and data, in recent years the Historical IR subfield has moved beyond banal recognition of this relationship to help overcome IR’s presentism and encourage reflexivity on the historical foundations of IR theory. Yet, despite its successes, Historical IR has primarily distinguished itself via its contributions to IR, rather than as an interdisciplinary bridge between IR and History. This article sketches a path for Historical IR to cultivate new dialogue between IR and History. This bridge would not only benefit IR by bringing historians’ insights to IR in a more sustained manner but also facilitate opportunities for IR to contribute to History. Although this bridge necessarily implicates historians, our argument focuses on moves the Historical IR subfield could make to become more attractive to History. To foster deeper dialogue, we argue that Historical IR should both work to synthesize the historical elements it brings to IR to make itself more recognizable to historians and engage historiography to target IR’s contributions to historical debates. Doing so, we argue, will not only enhance Historical IR’s contributions to IR, but also make it a more suitable interdisciplinary bridge.

During the last decade or so, most aspects of world politics have become saturated with digital-technological devices and platforms such as smartphones and social media. Yet, practice-oriented International Relations (IR) scholarship has not adequately accounted for the profound impact of this technological transformation on how world politics is ‘done’ within, across and beyond the traditional institutional settings of global political affairs. This paper addresses this gap by integrating the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ from Science and Technology Studies (STS) into the study of practices and world politics. Sociotechnical imaginaries encapsulate how technology intersects with society in and through collective visions of the future. Drawing on interviews with international communication professionals in Western European capitals, from across diplomacy and humanitarianism, we show how an attention to ‘future imaginaries’ sheds new light on how the emergence of new technologies (re)shape practitioners’ view of their role and agency in world politics. Concretely, we find that, despite their different circumstances, these professionals exhibit similar patterns of adaptations and evolving practices influenced by collectively perceived uncertainties and promises associated with a future saturated by social media and algorithms. The article thus contributes to a deeper understanding of the everyday interplay between technologies and practitioners by emphasising the role of ‘future imaginaries’ in shaping world politics.

This article explores the connections between systemic Islamophobia, exclusion and Islamist attitudes among young Muslims in four EU countries, utilising mixed-methods data, including 222 survey responses and 114 interviews. Analysis indicates a U-shaped correlation between Islamophobia and Islamism: moderate levels of perceived Islamophobia correlate with lower Islamist tendencies; moderate levels are associated with reduced tendencies; excessive discrimination promotes exclusionary ideas. Multilevel/non-linear regression indicates that perceived Islamophobia significantly affects Islamist attitudes, with education as a moderating factor. Higher education diminishes the connection between discrimination and extremism; however, it paradoxically correlates with a rise in Islamist sentiment due to enhanced understanding of systemic imbalances. The models of national integration and secularism account for over one-third of the variance in intergroup attitudes. Qualitative findings reveal segregation, gender-based discrimination and generational divides influencing reactive identity. A surprising positive correlation between trust in democracy and radicalisation indicates dissatisfaction arising from unmet institutional commitments.

Research on status-seeking strategies recognises that moral authority and pro-social foreign policies can enhance small states’ their international standing. Yet, little attention has been given to why small states behave pro-socially after transgressing socio-normative rules in international affairs. Drawing on social psychology, this article introduces the concept of ‘moral guilt’ to explain why small countries adopt pro-social foreign policies even in precarious conditions. It argues that when small-state leaders experience guilt over perceived wrongdoing, they tend to engage in reparative behaviours, prioritising moral atonement over strategic cost-benefit calculations. In other words, they pursue a status redemption policy. To demonstrate this, I examine Thailand’s humanitarian treatment of enemy civilians and prisoners of war during the Second World War. Despite aligning with Japan in 1941 and declaring war on Britain and the United States in 1942, Thailand deviated from Japan’s harsh treatment of captives. Archival evidence shows that Thai leaders not only complied with the Geneva Conventions but also extended humanitarian treatment to those not covered by them. I contend that the Thai leadership experienced moral guilt for bandwagoning with Japan and enacted humanitarian measures as a form of moral reparation to redeem the country’s status in international society.

In this analytical essay, I aim to advance the debate on trust in International Relations (IR) by clarifying how trust can be understood in practice-theoretical terms. To this end, I build on recent IR scholarship that has shifted from viewing trust as a mental state to viewing it as an active process through which social actors relate to one another—that is, as trusting . To clarify what this shift entails and initiate a more systematic dialogue between the dynamic yet still largely unconnected literatures on trust in international politics and on international practices, I proceed as follows: first, I survey how IR scholars have thought about trust thus far; second, I identify three commitments that give coherence to the emerging practice-theoretical literature on trust, namely, a focus on relations, processes, and agency; and third, I outline three theoretical options for studying trust in practice-theoretical terms: conceiving of trust as a product of practices, as a background of practices, or as itself a practice.

Why do violent actors engage in strategic exhumations and relocate victims’ remains after a conflict, even when those remains no longer pose any security threat? We argue that analyzing the strategic management of victims’ remains by perpetrators can reveal a lot about the logic motivating actors to deploy clandestine repertoires of violence. We drew on a new global repository of countries with strategic exhumations supporting a comparative analysis of Cyprus and Chile. Despite differing conditions, both cases showed systematic disinterment processes. We argue international accountability coupled with organizational capacity drove these actions, with motives and capabilities varying between conflict and authoritarian settings.

This article presents a Luhmann-inspired theory of conflictualization, that is, how objects, relations, and societies come to be defined by the logic of conflict. This article presents a Galtung- and Luhmann-inspired theory of conflictualization, that is, how objects, relations, and societies come to be defined by the logic of conflict. The article conceptualizes conflictualization as a threefold process of (1) forming social relationships, (2) displacing the focus toward “winning” the conflict, and (3) making an increasing number of issues into objects of contestation. It positions the concept of conflictualization in relation to contemporary (Nordic) peace research, securitization, politicization, and polarization, showing the added value of the theory in terms of teasing out how conflict “does something” and should therefore not be reduced to its causes or effects, but understood distinctly as conflict. To illustrate this, the article discusses three examples of how a society, a relationship, and an issue, respectively, are conflictualized: (1) how the Danish-Greenlandic relationship has been conflictualized, (2) how the war in Gaza has shaped social relations and conflictualized other issues like climate activism and LGBTQ+ rights across the Nordic countries, and (3) conflictualization of the Colombian society post-accord. Moreover, we discuss how conflictualization relates to agency and change, that is, the degree to which conflictualization can be seen as a deliberate process and calls for strategies of conflictualizing and de-conflictualizing issues.

This article advances securitization theory by introducing the concept of transformative securitization, in which crises are not only framed as existential threats but also as catalysts for reconstituting political orders. Drawing on the Copenhagen School and Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality, the article distinguishes transformative securitization from conservative forms that aim to preserve the status quo. It conceptualizes transformative securitization through three dimensions: agency (bottom-up and participatory), procedure (disruptive yet potentially democratizing), and outcome (yielding durable institutional or normative change). Through empirical illustrations from Denmark and Norway’s responses to COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and climate change, the article shows how securitization can both constrain and enable democratic transformation. It finds that while some responses reinforce executive power and narrow deliberative space, others—especially in climate politics—reflect participatory and future-oriented securitizing moves that can reconfigure societal sectors or entire polities. Climate change emerges as a paradigmatic case of transformative securitization, where intergenerational justice and systemic change are driven by civic agency. By bridging crisis and political founding, the concept refines securitization theory’s understanding of extraordinary politics and offers new tools to analyze the democratic potential and pitfalls of security responses in an era of overlapping, urgent predicaments.