Critical International Relations Research Articles

Coming of age within ‘implosion’

AbstractIn 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.

Madonna versus “Mother Russia?” Visual Anthropology of Loneliness and Gendered Nationalism on Russian 2021–2023 Political Posters

Abstract This article is aimed at transdisciplinary (critical International Relations, visual anthropology, and existential philosophy) analysis of Russian gendered nationalism and masculine ontological insecurities. It explores and re-imagines how visual representations of “Mother Russia” became signifiers of the phallocentric voice of the Russian gendered state. What can return the voice back to the “invisible women”? I claim that the political activism of the singer Madonna in the spheres of resistance to warfare and protection of gender minorities may shed new light on hidden manipulations with masculine anxieties in modern Russia. Besides original empirics, the article proposes theoretical avenues to integrate into gendered nationalism studies research on what I call masculine “politics of loneliness.” I also look at the role such politics plays in constituting Russia's domestic narcissistic master narratives of the collective self and its frontiers with transnational celebrity activism. Based on feminism and narrative IR, this article investigates the “sociological dimension” of Russian loneliness. It examines the alienation of femininity as reflected on Russian street posters photographed during 2021–2023 and represented in the form of five “dialectical collages.”

Expanding Eurocentric Narratives of International Relations through Conservative Cooperation

Since the mid-1990s, critical International Relations (IR) scholars have increasingly drawn on postcolonial studies to call for opening up IR. However, it has turned out to be a more challenging task than initially imagined. It requires insight into the reasons behind the differences between the forms of national IR and the implications of such variation for our understanding of the international. Such differences need inquiring into by treating those from outside North America and Western Europe as thinking actors and paying attention to their accounts of the international. Eurocentrism occurs when research is designed in a way that occludes the global theory by drawing a direct line from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe to modern day ‘West’ with next-to-no sociological insight into ‘connected histories’ of societies. Over the years, methodological Eurocentrism has produced a particular narrative about Europe’s place in world history. Thus, Eurocentric narratives have allowed designing research by virtue of the persistence of concepts that have been informed by the very same narratives. The critical point being, the very concepts through which we make sense of world politics (such as state, development, sovereignty and security) have their limitations not only when transplanted to other parts of the world but also when studying ‘Europe’ itself.

The Moving Spirit of Settler Colonialism: Temsula Ao, Counter-Sovereignty, and the Politics of Intervention in the Borderlands of India

Abstract This paper investigates the incursions, or more accurately, the interventions of the Indian state into what are often called its “Northeast borderlands.” It grapples with the specific space occupied by those who belong to this minoritized region in India. Theoretically, it works through conceptions of “sovereignty” and “intervention” to underscore what is at stake for those who lie within the remit of recognized state sovereignty but are nonetheless subject to brutal and invasive “intervention.” The article engages Naga author Temsula Ao’s writing on questions of “tribal” identity, globalization, and borders to situate India as a postcolonial “settler” state. Finally, it puts her work in conversation with Manu Karuka’s notion of “counter-sovereignty” to highlight the ways in which even critical International Relations (IR) theory risks falling into the trap of reifying “sovereignty” and unwittingly giving credence to Westphalian and Euro-centric understandings of sovereignty at the expense of alternative and prior imaginaries.

A New Comprehensive Two-Volume Study on Theories of International Relations in Bulgarian

Abstract The two-volume study, authored and edited by Professor Gotchev, presents a broad range of theoretical approaches and frameworks of analysis in International Relations (IR) and is the most comprehensive textbook on the study of IR theories in Bulgarian. The first volume surveys the essence of political research and philosophical aspects of social science, the grand debates in IR and the main approaches—realism, liberalism, and Marxism. It also reviews critical IR theory and examines the importance of international political economy in the discipline of IR. The second volume, which is a collection of essays written by six different US and European scholars, is organised in five different sections and focuses on a broad range of grand approaches to IR and middle-range theories. The former include constructivism, the English School, postmodernism and poststructuralism, feminism, and green theory; the latter deal with a broad set of frameworks, such as behavioural, psychological and integration theories, theories of foreign policy, cooperation, alliances, and international organisations. Special attention is paid to geopolitics.

Reflex to turn: the rise of turn-talk in International Relations

The field of International Relations (IR) is being spun around by a seemingly endless number of ‘turns’. Existing analyses of turning are few in number and predominantly concerned with the most prominent recent turns. By excavating the forgotten history of IR’s earliest turns from the 1980s and tracing the evolution of turn-talk over time, this article reveals a crucial yet overlooked internalist driver behind the phenomenon: the rise of reflexivity. Rather than emerging in the 21st century, turn-talk began at the end of the 1980s as a series of turns away from positivism and towards reflexivity. Cumulatively, this first wave of turns would denaturalise IR’s state-centric ontology while enshrining reflexivity as a canonical good among critical scholars. By the mid-1990s, however, these metatheoretical critiques of positivism had produced a substantial backlash. Charged with fostering an esoteric deconstructivism, a new generation of reflexivists set out to demonstrate the feasibility of post-positivist empirical research. As a result, IR’s turning also took on a different form from the 2000s: whereas the first wave of turns had mounted an epistemological and methodological attack against the positivist mainstream, the second wave set about bringing new ontological objects under the scrutiny of reflexivist scholars. This shift from anti-positivist to mostly intra-reflexivist turning was facilitated by the institutionalisation of critical IR as a major subfield of the discipline. It is the privileged position of reflexivity among critical IR scholars that is the condition of possibility for endless turning, accentuated by mounting pressures to demonstrate novelty in an increasingly competitive environment.

The Global Animal Advocacy Movement in International Relations: toward an animal-inclusive IR

International Relations (IR) scholarship on Global Social Movements (GSMs) has helped usher in post-realist theories, such as constructivism and critical IR. Despite its innovativeness, extant GSM research is limited because it ignores the relevance of the Global Animal Advocacy Movement (GAAM), which seeks to end animal exploitation. The omission of GAAM is emblematic of IR’s anthropocentric disregard of the relevance of animals in global politics. An emergent literature recognizes the importance of animals in IR, and this paper contributes to the establishment of this animal-inclusive IR by examining the significance of GAAM. First, it demonstrates that GAAM fits the criteria of a GSM; therefore, it is worthy of study in IR. Additionally, this paper argues that IR should recognize that nonhuman animals also participate in GAAM. Both arguments not only demonstrate GAAM’s relevance, but they should also contribute to the development of an animal-inclusive IR. The paper closes by advocating for a methodologically diverse research agenda on GAAM.

Contesting the Universality of the Refugee Convention: Decolonization and the Additional Protocol

AbstractRecent scholarship has insightfully explored the colonial roots of the UN Refugee Convention of 1951. In this work I seek to extend this line of argument by situating the adoption of the Additional Protocol of the Refugee Convention (1967) in relation to the transformations of international order following the Second World War. Contra the conventional account, this article shows that the Additional Protocol was created in no small part due to fears that the UN Refugee Convention would be unable to claim universal status due to competing ‘regional’ refugee conventions. Breaking down four meanings of ‘universal’ and drawing on archival documents of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, I explore efforts by newly independent African and Asian countries to find voice in an exclusionary international order. Reading the Bangkok Principles and OAU Convention as collective subaltern resistance against efforts to discipline newly independent states offers new insights into contemporary international struggles and brings refugee studies into productive dialogue with critical international relations.

Non-Western Theories in International Relations Education and Research: The Case of Turkey/Turkish Academia

This study examines the usage of non-Western theories in research and education by International Relations (IR) scholars in Turkey. Our primary purpose is to understand the level of engagement with the non-Western IR debate, with its prospects and variations, in Turkish academia, and to evaluate the familiarity of Turkish IR scholars from different schools with non-Western IR theories. Relevant data were obtained from a questionnaire with 47 items designed to let participants, consisting of 116 academicians at IR departments from 57 Turkish Universities, provide their teaching experiences, views, and perceptions concerning non-Western IR Theory. While our findings based on this data confirm the literature on the scarcity of non-Western theories in Turkish IR scholarship, we have also furthered it with many details. Firstly, according to the findings, respondents who study and teach IR Theory at Turkish universities think that the IR theories of Western origin dominating the literature are not universal or objective in terms of their function as interpreters of IR issues. But interestingly, those considerations direct scholars to Western critical IR Theory schools rather than non-Western theories. The other key conclusion of this study confirms our expectations. The thoughts, concepts and theories emanating from the Turkish-Islamic world have much more recognition than other non-Western IR theories among Turkish IR scholars.

What Relations Matter?

AbstractWhat relations matter? This question sits at the heart of this article and addresses in a more thoroughgoing way the methodological and ethico-political problems that some relational thinkers have debated. We are interested in deep relationalism and the methodological problem of delineating which relations matter in a reality defined by an ever-unfolding web of relations. By acknowledging the relationality of critical international relations (IR) theories, this methodological puzzle is explored by recognizing the situatedness of relations that are being analyzed. Moreover, this helps us to start a conversation on the ethical and political dimensions of deeply relational approaches. By placing the ontological work of deep relationalism in dialogue with the epistemological and ethico-political aspects of critical theory, we are putting forth an account of critical relationalism. Furthermore, we are not only arguing for a critical approach to relationalism but also adding to one of the main methodological debates in relationalism that asks us to carefully consider which relations matter (for our analysis) and how we should access them? Finally, this piece advocates for more plural grounds for relationalism in IR to critically reflect on which relations our theoretical approaches can take us to and why this matters.

The Red Soil

Ever since Ladakh separated from the erstwhile Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and became the youngest Indian Union Territory in August 2019, there is a lingering ambiguity about what it means for its people. This poem – Red Soil – is an expression of feelings of insecurity faced by the people of Ladakh, especially its youth, as an alternative expression of marginalized voices as resistance to statist voices. Ever since the 1800s, Ladakh has been subject to colonization, when it was first captured by the Dogra Dynasty. Contextualizing Ladakh’s past, the poem is titled, Red Soil, which is the English translation of the ancient name of Ladakh – Maryul (Mar means red and Yul means a country in Bhoti/Ladakhi/Tibetan language). This poem, first presented at Millennium’s 2021 conference, is also a response to calls to subvert traditional styles of academic writing within critical international relations and is situated in the autoethnographic method (Brigg and Bleiker 2010).

‘The Citadel of Scholarship’: Rediscovering Critical IR in Millennium 1:1

‘Critical’ international relations (IR) is usually understood to have originated in the early 1980s. However, a close reading of Vithal Rajan’s ‘An Epitaph for Detached Scholarship’, published in the inaugural issue of Millennium in 1971, tells another story. Rajan’s article was not a work of critical theory per se, but it was in tune with demands, at this time, for establishing a ‘critical university’. Promising to open up university education to all, dispensing with traditional curricula and authoritarian modes of teaching, the critical university, like Rajan’s article, has long since been forgotten. Nevertheless, this moment set the scene for the professionalised establishment of ‘critical’ academia in the decades to come. Rediscovering Rajan’s ‘Epitaph’ thus offers to reconnect critical IR with an earlier, and perhaps more generative, moment of inception. Indeed, even today, Rajan’s creative, provocative, playful text stands out as a rewardingly undisciplined contribution to the discipline.

From Policy Relevance to Present Relevance: Entanglement, Scholarly Responsibility, and the Ethics of Quantum Social Theory

Abstract Debates about the role of international relations (IR) scholarship in contemporary politics historically privilege “policy relevance” as both a goal and site of debate. The role of scholarship, scholars, and scholarly collectives has become increasingly resonant given the overlapping crises of white supremacy, police violence, and state repression in the United States, the worldwide pandemic, and the antidemocratic nationalist politics throughout Europe and the United States. Critical IR and critical security studies typically resist policy engagement entirely, positioning critical thought and inquiry as political intervention in and of itself. Here, I explore that claim using quantum concepts that foreground the inextricability of entanglement in thinking politics, ethics, and action. Ultimately, I argue that IR should move toward engaging and being responsible to the/a political present. Drawing on the temporality in IR literature, I argue that we are always already entangled with a heterotemporal present. Framing the question of political relevance as a binary of for/against precludes an effective assessment of the politics and normative meaning of scholarly interventions into contemporary politics. By reformulating our understanding of scholarship as produced by and reproducing a political present, something with which we are inevitably entangled whether we choose to be or not, the question of relevance becomes reoriented toward scholarly relationships with a/many presents, and consequently, a/many pasts and futures. Negotiating this dynamic is a more complex question than the narrow formulation of policy and/or political recommendations, and requires a fundamental rethinking of the presumption that scholarship in and of itself is sufficient.

Fantastic Theories and Where to Find Them: Rethinking Interlocutors in Global IR

How can we appreciate non-Western agency in theorising world politics without reintroducing parochialism and exceptionalism, thus reproducing the very problem that motivated global international relations (IR) in the first place? In this article, I explore an alternative approach to engaging with non-Western IR theories, which I refer to as the embedded observer approach. First, taking the scholarship on Chinese IR as an example, I argue that the present predicament of global IR is in part attributable to the way scholars engage with non-Western political thought. Drawing from discussions in critical IR and Comparative Political Theory, I propose a methodological adjustment for the study of non-Western theories. Specifically, I argue that by shifting focus from isolated scholars and texts to critical dialogues among autochthonous intellectuals, the researcher has the chance to learn about and appreciate the clashes of ideas, analytical perspectives, and methodological tools that together constitute the living intellectual tradition in a non-Western society. As a demonstration, I analyse the People’s Republic of China (PRC) scholars’ critical reaction to Zhao Tingyang’s Tianxia System through the lens of three key topics in the debate over the thesis. The discussion highlights the need to rethink interlocutors in global IR and the utility of an embedded observer approach for engaging with knowledge traditions beyond the West, both in IR and beyond. 神奇理论在哪里？反思全球国际关系学中的对话者

The Persistent Poverty of Diversity in International Relations and the Emergence of a Critical Canon

Abstract Discussions about diversifying the discipline of international relations (IR) are often met with limited evidence in practice. Employing the concepts of epistemic oppression and academic dependency, this article contributes to filling the existing knowledge gap by examining what the pedagogical practices of IR professors, particularly in terms of syllabi design and content, tell us about the state of disciplinary diversity. The article examines results from a preliminary study that analyzes different graduate-level IR syllabi from leading universities in the Global North (represented by United States and United Kingdom) and Global South (Africa in particular) in order to determine how their design, including required readings and other pedagogical choices in the classroom, contributes to the explicit diversity needed to push IR beyond its usual canon. The findings suggest that although more perspectives have become accepted or recognized, what is considered essential for graduate students to study and further propagate is still primarily mainstream. Another point is that what has become known as “critical IR” cannot automatically be equated with diversity. This means there is the need to further interrogate and open up more avenues that go beyond what can be characterized as a “critical canon” of IR.

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe about Gender and Global Politics

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe about Gender and Global Politics

Denials ‘From Seabed to Space’: Assemblages of (In)Security and Denial in the Politics of Security

Despite critiques of denials broadly underlying Critical International Relations deconstructions of state, security and subjectivity, there is little explicit exploration of the ontological status of denial, and how denials operate in the politics of (in)security. Animated by the question, why and how web of actors and interests traversing the public and private spheres involved in the provision of security endure despite long-running critique, this article problematises = denials. An explicit theorisation of denial needs to be put centre stage in the study of security. Drawing on Dillon’s theorisation of the unstable duality of (in)security and synthesising it with a Deleuze and Guattarian assemblage approach, it theorises denial in two forms – denial of complicity and denial of the impossibility of security – as ontologically necessary for the politics of (in)security; then proposes that we scrutinise and expose assemblages of (in)security. These assemblages form, endure and expand, by thriving on denials of the impossibility of security and its attendant complicities; forming symbioses of denial traversing the public-private realms. Assemblages of (in)security adapt, expand, and propagate new technologies of (in)security, often ironically by responding to demands from critique. Without an assemblage-based thinking, we are methodologically ill-equipped to trace, expose and critique the politics of (in)security, without unwittingly partaking in denials sustaining it. Des dénis « du fond des océans jusqu’à l’espace » : agencements d’(in)sécurité et déni dans la politique de sécurité

A crítica ainda é possível na Teoria das Relações Internacionais? Um engajamento crítico com a vocação de RI

Abstract The article offers a critique of recent efforts to read international relations theory – and its theorists – as especially positioned to offer a critique of international politics. It does so by engaging Daniel Levine’s claim that international relations theory has a special vocation for critique which is unparalleled by other disciplines. By problematizing Levine’s political, ethical and epistemological approach to sustainable critique, I argue that international relations theory has been particularly engaged with a politics of crisis that centers Western modes of subjectivity as the only frame of reference for thinking about politics and history. As a consequence, Western international relations theory has become both inadequate and dispensable for many critical theorists of international politics in much of the world, even when it comes to its most critical approaches. By way of conclusion, I offer an approach to critical international relations theory that starts from the politics of colonialism, instead of crisis.

Como Gramsci viaja na América Latina? Antes e depois da Teoria Crítica das Relações Internacionais.

Abstract In the last 40 years, Critical International Relations Theory (CIRT) has influenced scholars in the Global North as well as the South. Latin America shows particular features. On the one hand, conceptualisation did not divorce the domestic from the international, as in dependency theory. On the other, Gramsci was widely read much before Robert W. Cox and even before International Relations was constituted as a discipline in its own right. In this context, this article aims to present possible contributions of (neo)Gramscian approaches to the understanding of Latin America as a region. It does so by establishing a dialectical relationship between a few topics that offer insights (and the theoretical reflection they provoke) and some (neo)Gramscian concepts. Hence, we want to re-read, in a dialectical vein, both CIRT and some aspects of how Gramscian thought has travelled in Latin America. We intend to analyse how such thinking is thriving, if at all, and discuss the possible relevance of rescuing Gramscian international thought to think about the region.

The Politics of Virtual Security

As one of the first attempts in critical international relations (IR) scholarship to explore the political and ideological intent of visual simulations, François Debrix’s <em>Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping</em> has a lot to offer critical IR studies and critical security studies. More than twenty years after its publication, Debrix’s theoretical and methodological insights into the study of global (dis)order and the virtualization of security still remain relevant in many ways. In this essay, I will first focus on Debrix’s deployment of the virtual in relation to reality, security, and ideology, and I will argue that his understanding of virtual reality taps well into and transgresses the ongoing divide/debate between positivist and post-positivist approaches to reality in IR and security studies. Second, I will briefly touch upon the recent local turn in peacekeeping studies vis-à-vis Debrix’s critical world order project. By doing so, I will highlight that Debrix’s project provides novel insights also into the study of the local with its call for an anti-imperialist spirit by stressing the oscillation of discipline and ideology in reordering and recolonizing the subjects of international politics in the guise of the “New World Order” vision mobilized through techniques of simulations.