Critical IR Research Articles

Forum: At the crossroads – Critical perspectives on the study of climate security

This discussion forum brings together some of the leading voices in the debate on climate change and security to reflect on the possibilities and limits of critical research in the face of global ecological crises. If we – as critical geography, IR, and security scholars – take the ongoing ecological crisis seriously, how must our questions, concepts, and methodologies change? How, if at all, can security be provided in a climate-changed world, for and by whom? How to come to terms with the unequal landscape of climate insecurity? What is left of security, and what comes instead: mere survival, resilience, or navigating through disasters?Seeking answers to these questions, the authors of these short forum pieces discuss and rethink core concepts and themes of human geography and neighboring disciplines. The reflection pieces trouble the racist imaginaries that often underpin existing policy debates on climate change, scarcity, and insecurity. They discuss the implications of climate security for the liberal international order, North-South relations as well as the relationship between humans and the non-human world. They reflect on the complicity of our research – both critical and problem-solving – in the violent transformation of the planet and the repression of the racialized “others” of colonial modernity. And they explore the emancipatory potential of alternative security discourses that center on the complex web of beings, practices, and relations endangered by the unfolding climate crisis.

By What Jurisdiction? Law, Settler Colonialism, and the Geographical Assumptions of IR Theory

Abstract In this article, I consider critical writings on territory in International Relations, focusing on recent work on U.S. practices of extraterritorial jurisdiction. I suggest that, while such work has importantly traced the multiple ways in which U.S. authority often exceeds the supposed territorial boundaries of the United States, it has nonetheless failed to reckon with the contested and uneven nature of U.S. authority within such supposed boundaries. In particular, IR scholarship has failed to engage with the ways in which U.S. authority has been, and continued to be, contested by Indigenous people and nations. This failure is the product of an assumption that lies at the heart of the discipline—the assumption that Indigenous people are internal to colonizing or settler states. I suggest that the internalization of Indigenous people and Indigenous political organization that is at play in much IR scholarship is not simply a product of a generalized “state-centrism” or a product of histories of settler colonialism, writ large. Rather, at the heart of the territorial assignations and allotments of IR scholarship are assumptions about legal authority or jurisdiction—about who has jurisdiction to define and assign land, about who does not, and what law means at all. Critiquing these assumptions and their political implications, I show the importance of asking: “by what jurisdiction”? That is, what is the legal authority that we implicitly accept and assert when we designate territory in particular ways? The question insists that there are multiple laws (including multiple international laws) at play in global politics and opens up space for critical and postcolonial IR scholars to better take responsibility for their (often implicit) choices between multiple laws.

Book forum: global libidinal economy

ABSTRACT This is a forum containing six short interventions on the 2023 co-authored book, Global Libidinal Economy. In the first intervention, the co-authors lay out their book’s key arguments. What follows are four critical commentaries on the book, focusing on the following question: ‘To what extent do you think unconscious excess and irrationality are integral to global political economy?’ Contributors comment from a variety of perspectives – Critical IR, Marxist value-theory, radicalism – taking up the book’s arguments by illustrating, refining, or disagreeing with them. The forum concludes with a response by the book’s co-authors to the questions and arguments raised by the four contributors.

Beyond unipolarity and the Euro–American horizons of IR thought:Reflections on the emergent world order

Amidst the continuing conflict in Ukraine, the Russian President Vladimir Putin made a notablepronouncement of the end of the US-led unipolar world and the rise of a multipolar world order. Againstthis backdrop of the debate on polarity, my research paper seeks to address the following questions. Towhat extent have global institutions, mainstream IRT and academia as well as policies reflected if notreinforced Euro-American norms and interests? Does this purported shift to multipolarity require a shift ininstitutional and theoretical practices reflecting the broad concerns of the Global South? Using global andregional case-studies like India (especially in regard to the representation within academia and the glassceiling affecting institutional practices like Young Professionals Programme), I draw from critical andpost-colonial theoretical IR frameworks to argue for a comprehensive reform of the prevalent globalinstitutional and theoretical structures.

Feminism: An Alternative Approach to International Relations

Almost half of the world's population is women, so how can it be possible that any discipline is one-sided or only male-oriented? Similarly, all meta-theories cannot impose rules and regulations on the whole world as international relations theories just by being malevolent. In this case, the only alternative is to foster feminist theory, not ignore them as often occurs in IR theories, which implies demeaning them through various conceptions. This can be considered a one-sided perspective or approach to understand the world, which divides men and women into supremacists and subordinates respectively. Feminist IR, therefore, stands as an alternative approach to understanding the masculine IR that questions it as well as provides ‘reflective theories’ from literature to psychology to history, and has been seeking a safe place in IR for the last four decades as a serious academic discipline. This article will try to examine the feminist theories of the IR discipline as an alternative approach, for which descriptive and analytical method was adopted for this explanatory research. As a result, it has been found that feminist IR has searched out the gap between IR theories and it has been given a new shape to IR discipline in the form of a critical feminist IR theory as an alternate.

Realism – Forgotten Theory for Peacebuilding

The article brings attention to the gap in the research on peacebuilding from the perspective of realist theories. Started by Johan Galtung, the peacebuilding field has been largely influenced by his understanding of peace and violence, as well as by the peace studies discipline itself. An Agenda for Peace turned the theoretical concept into international practice, and the liberal spirit accompanying it imprinted on the research approaches that guide peacebuilding activities. Executed in the form of democratic transformation and statebuilding, peacebuilding operations often did not bring the expected results and called on a lot of criticism. Besides, throughout the decades dominating approaches (liberalism complemented by institutional and critical IR theories) have not been able to explain the continuous unattainability of sustainable peace and exacerbation of violence. A little attention has been given to peacebuilding by the realist theory, which has limited interest in local conflicts. In this aspect, the article aims to discuss how the realist theories have been addressing the topic of peacebuilding so far, analyse what are the main assumptions related to peacebuilding from a realist perspective; and assess if the realist theories can be helpful in resolving the problem of peacebuilding ineffectiveness. The article opens further discussion on whether the realist perspective and its focus on states’ interests, rather than (democratic and liberal) values and institutions, can be used for analysing the problems of the peacebuilding process and can help to better understand situations, where it is ineffective.

Novel laser texturing of W-doped VO2 thin film for the improvement of luminous transmittance in smart windows application

Vanadium dioxide is a promising material for application in smart windows, which undergoes a metal-to-insulator transition, MIT, at 68 °C accompanied by a structural phase transformation, SPT, from VO2(M1) to VO2(R). In this study, two VO2 thin films, one W6+-doped and another one undoped, have been prepared. Both were synthesized via polymer-assisted sol–gel route. The effect of doping on thermochromic parameters was evaluated, giving rise to a reduction of the phase transition temperature by 21 °C with an IR modulation capability of 20 % in the doped sample. Additionally, doping effect on the thermochromic parameters and nanomechanical properties has been analyzed by Spectrophotometry and Atomic Force Microscopy. With the aim of recovering the luminous transmittance that decreased because of doping, the sample has been subjected to an innovative laser texturing process. This laser treatment is able to increase the luminous transmittance by almost 40 % without negatively affecting the other thermochromic parameters. Results show that the combination of both strategies, doping and laser texturing, leads to the production of VO2 thin films with low critical temperature, high solar and IR modulation capacity and enhanced luminous transmittance, with values close to those required for their real application in smart windows.

Killing in the name of: authors and authority in CSS

ABSTRACT Thirty-two years after the publication of Ashley and Walker’s (1990) article, ‘Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident Thought in International Studies’, critical IR still fails to de-centre structures of white, male authority. This essay will consider the charge of patricide (and related imputations) directed at those who have arguably done precisely this – insofar as they have explicitly, and without apology, illuminated the racist underpinnings of Foucauldian and Copenhagen School ontologies and, hence, the very foundations of a great deal of scholarship in Critical Security Studies (CSS). Far from just another barb in a fractious debate, this essay will argue that the charge of patricide deserves our attention. It reveals a great deal about what is at stake – not only in terms of what can be said, what can be heard, and who can speak, but also in terms of what drives these delimitations: our emotional attachments to authors in general and white, male authority structures in particular.

Middle Power Diplomacy Knowledge Production in South Korea: A Critical Interpretation

In this article we examine the ways in which middle power diplomacy (MPD) knowledge is produced in the South Korean IR community, specifically in the context of critical IR studies. In doing so, we attempt to address the questions of who produces MPD knowledge, why, for whom, and for what purposes, while also identifying the meta-theoretical underpinnings of MPD knowledge. Our critical review of the literature suggests that current South Korean MPD knowledge is a Korean version of hegemonic stability theory, which aims to secure the US liberal hegemony in world politics. We therefore argue that South Korean MPD knowledge may limit South Korea’s agency in IR as well as its scholarly thinking space for discerning novel ways of peacefully coexisting with others and sensing possible systemic transformations of global politics.

Problematising war: Towards a reconstructive critique of war as a problem of deviance

AbstractThis article redirects extant critiques of the modern problem of war at this problem's underlying logic of deviance. According to this logic, war constitutes a kind of international conduct that contravenes behavioural norms and that can be corrected through diagnostic and didactic means. Thereby, war is rendered into a problem falling within the scope of human agency. However, this agency rests on and reproduces this logic's constitutive blind spots. Therefore, it seems imperative to develop ways of problematising war otherwise. The article provides two starting points for (critical) IR scholarship seeking to undertake such a project. Firstly, it combines two Foucaultian tools, the concept of problematisation and the method of genealogy, to direct critique at the logics underlying our evaluative – analytical, ethical, and political – judgements. Secondly, it uses these tools to trace the contingent emergence of the logic of deviance in a crucial example within the wider genealogy of the problem of war: the Carnegie Endowment's commission of inquiry into the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Based on original archival research, I highlight different elements of this inquiry's problematisation of war – its frames, assumptions, ways of knowing, and subjects of knowledge – to make them available for reconstruction.

Foreign policy change as rhetorical politics: domestic-regional constellation of Global South states

Although the recent advancements in critical constructivist IR on political rhetoric has greatly improved our understanding of linguistic mechanisms of political action, we need a sharp understanding of how rhetoric explains foreign policy change. Here we conceptualize a link between rhetoric and foreign policy change by foregrounding distinct dynamics at the regional and domestic institutional environments. Analytically, at the regional level, we suggest examining whether norms of foreign policy engagement are explicitly coded in treaties and agreements or implicit in conventions and practices of actors. And at the domestic level, we suggest examining whether a particular foreign policy issue area is concurrent or contested among interlocutors. In this constellation, we clarify how four different rhetorical strategies underwrites foreign policy change – persuasion, mediation, explication and reconstruction – how it operates, and the processes through which it unfolds in relation to multiple audiences. Our principal argument is that grand foreign policy change requires continuous rhetorical deployments with varieties of politics to preserve and stabilize the boundaries in the ongoing fluid relations of states. We illustrate our argument with an analysis of Brazil’s South-South grand strategy under the Lula administration and contrast it against the rhetoric of subsequent administrations. Our study has implications for advancing critical foreign policy analysis on foreign policy change and generally for exploring new ways of studying foreign policies of nonwestern postcolonial states in international relations.

Critical long-range vector model in the UV

We study interacting critical UV regime of the long-range O(N) vector model with quartic coupling. Analyzing CFT data within the scope of ϵ- and 1/N-expansion, we collect evidence for the equivalence of this model and the critical IR limit of the cubic model coupled to a generalized free field O(N) vector multiplet.

The Climate Crisis, Renewable Energy, and the Changing Landscape of Global Energy Politics

Abstract This essay reviews three recent books on the changing landscape of global energy politics in the era of climate change. Key questions that the authors investigate include: how will the renewable energy transition reshape the global balance of power? How will political-economic interdependencies and geopolitical alignments shift? Will contemporary petro-states adapt or collapse? And what new patterns of peace and conflict may emerge in a decarbonized world order? The authors provide different perspectives on the likely speed of the energy transition and its geopolitical implications. However, they occlude deeper questions about the depth of the transformations needed to prevent climate catastrophe—particularly in the nature of capitalism and military power—and the potential for more radical perspectives on energy futures. In contrast, I will argue that we should advance a critical research agenda on the global energy transition that accounts for the possibility of more far-reaching transformations in the political-economic, military, and ideological bases of world politics and highlights diverse movements fighting for their realization. These possible transformations include (1) transitions to post-growth political economies; (2) a radical shrinkage of emissions-intensive military–industrial complexes; and (3) decolonizing ideologies of “progress.” If struggles for alternative energy futures beyond the hegemony of economic growth and Western-style modernization are at the forefront of radical politics today, then these struggles deserve greater attention from critical IR scholars.

Disciplinary Neoliberalism and the Simulation of Freedom

If we take seriously François Debrix’s position in <em>Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping</em> that it is the “disciplinary” part of disciplinary neoliberalism that matters, then we can turn our attention to something that is still largely missing in studies of neoliberalism: an examination of neoliberalism, not on the level of the state and its actors, but on the level of the day-to-day minutiae of neoliberal subjects. Drawing from Baudrillard, Foucault, and Althusser, Debrix uses simulation, discipline, and ideology as analytics through which we can make sense of hegemonic world orders like neoliberalism. He offers provocation and destabilization as methods for disrupting hegemony when he reads the real/visual as simulation rather than as representation. This essay will focus in particular on Debrix’s use of simulation, ideology, and discipline to consider how his deployment of these analytics can help us examine neoliberal subjectivity and its everyday practices understood as freedom. And I will consider the productive and disruptive paths that Debrix’s deployment of visual simulation and destabilization can offer critical IR studies and political theory. I suggest here that we need to consider the ways in which neoliberal subjects do the work of neoliberalism, often understood as techniques or strategies of the state, as they simulate a core requirement of disciplinary neoliberalism: freedom.

De-worlding IR theory

ABSTRACT The literature on ‘worlding IR’ that aims to recognize the possibility of the subject position of the non-West is growing. Offering a textual analysis, this article aims to contribute to critical IR debates by applying cinematographic apparatus theory to identify how the dominant subject position in IR is still reserved for the Western author and how the Western subject remains intact in worlding IR theorizing. The article treats worlding IR theorizing as if it functions as a camera connected to the ‘Western eye’, which turns the postcolonial usage of ‘worlding’ into an illusion that is reified and alienated. The peril of the IR adaptation of ‘worlding’ is the positioning of the West as a signifier that allows the theorist to forget that the non-West is a construct that gains meaning only in the terms of the prevailing colonial semiotics of the IR discipline. Worlding IR practices maintain the monocular Western perspective that they are trying to dis- or re-place. Therefore, this article concludes that ‘seeing IR in a new light’ is hardly possible as long as the theorist is positioned like an eye-camera, an ideological apparatus, seeing the world from a particular perspective centred by Western epistemology, projecting the world as imagined by the Western eye.

Where exactly am I sitting at that table? Race, Prejudice, and Perpetual (In)security in Global Politics

ABSTRACT Who hasn’t heard about women must sit at the table? In this sense, the table is a place of influence and power. Critical IR, particularly those focussing on women’s participation in peace negotiations, in security discourses, and advocacy campaigns emphasise women must have a seat at the table to contribute to meaningful change. In this piece, I reflect on my everyday experiences of (in)security in teaching and practising security. I argue that structural measures of inclusion and diversity in the discipline of critical IR and security studies depoliticise meaningful and truly transformative inclusion by focussing on indicators, deliverables, action plans, and outcomes. These make gender hyper-visible rendering race, class, linguistic and other markers invisible. In this sense, having a seat at the table means nothing, as individuals could still remain powerless in the absence of genuine commitment of others occupying key positions in that table.

What is a minor international theory? On the limits of ‘Critical International Relations’

This article argues that ‘Critical International Relations’, often counterpoised to ‘mainstream IR’, has come to function as a major theoretical category in its own right. It argues that critique involves ‘minor theorising’, defined as the practice of disturbing settled theoretical assumptions in the discipline. The article examines the role and significance of ‘minor theories’ in the context of ongoing debates about Critical IR. It argues that critique is defined by context, and is politically and ethically ambiguous. The article concludes that the scope for critique could be advanced if the terms ‘Critical IR’ and ‘Critical IR Scholar’ are dropped from scholarly parlance.

Walking in (a) Bordertown: Sorjonen, Liminality, and the Spatial Imaginary of Lappeenranta

Finnish programming is increasingly finding success beyond the country’s borders. Sorjonen - or as it is known internationally, Bordertown - is perhaps the best example of this trend, having been distributed with subtitles in multiple languages via Netflix. Set in the idyllic lakeside resort of Lappeenranta, which is also Finland’s closest city to St. Petersburg, Russia, Bordertown revolves around Detective Inspector Kari Sorjonen (Ville Virtanen) following his relocation there in the wake of his wife’s illness. Hoping to leave major crimes behind in the capital of Helsinki, Sorjonen is soon investigating horrific violence and gruesome events. The criminal networks he discovers often extend far beyond tiny Lappeenranta, thus placing the city at the nexus of illicit flows that link Russia to continental Europe. While Bordertown does not engage in the crass Russophobia of many other screened geopolitical interventions, the series does deploy its setting’s geopolitical liminality to engage with a variety of challenges to Europe. This essay interrogates Bordertown’s use of a real place, i.e. Lappeenranta, to sculpt a geopolitical imaginary that can tell a story. Focussing on a variety of elements from water to windmills and from the city council to the cellar, I employ various scales of engagement (i.e. the local, border, state, land and nation) to examine the series’ narrative, dramaturgical and visual “scaping” of a chimerical “border town” that maps on to the “real” city of Lappeenranta. Informed by my June 2018 Bordertown TV-Series Walking Tour, my analysis synthesises approaches from cultural geography, critical IR and television studies to assess the Bordertown’s intervention in the everyday, lived and embodied geopolitics of this south-eastern Finnish city.

Reading technocratic exceptionalism through economic theology: Giorgio Agamben, Jacqueline Best, and the completion of the ‘double paradigm’ of sovereignty

While Giorgio Agamben’s political theory of the exception received a great deal of attention in the early 2000s, he is once again riding a wave in International Relations theory as the growing community of “theologies of the International” investigates the many contributions of theological inquiry for world politics. At the same time as his works provide a common point of conversation between critical IR and political theology, the latter field is undergoing a profound shift to answer to Agamben’s call for a “double paradigm” of political and economic theology. This article investigates Jacqueline (Int Polit Sociol 12:328–345, 2018) theory of technocratic exceptionalism as a moment where these waters meet. At the very moment where IR theorists seek to draw lessons from political theology, Best’s concept of technocratic exceptionalism offers an opportunity for the completion of the double paradigm of sovereignty.

Ethnography and international relations: situating recent trends, debates and limitations from an interdisciplinary perspective

As a relatively recent academic discipline, international relations engage with ethnography in specific ways, especially since its ethnographic turn starting in the mid-1990s. Conceived as a methodology that may open up the field to new perspectives on studying world politics, ethnography is deployed by critical IR scholars in order to ground everyday life as a credible source of knowledge about the international realm. Despite disciplinary and logistical challenges, recent attempts to integrate ethnography into IR can be found in practice-focused research, autoethnography and multi-sited studies. Following an examination of how ethnography has been interpreted and utilised in these cases, the paper will highlight commonalities with debates in other fields, especially social anthropology, to offer new avenues for a richer engagement with ethnography in IR.