International Political Sociology Research Articles

International Political Sociology through the Colonial Mirror: A Contrapuntal Reading of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract This paper invokes Edward Said’s notion of counterpoint to present a transnational sociological account of the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. This contrapuntal reading raises questions of sovereignty, violence, and identity, which—filtered through a political sociological lens—offer novel perspectives on the power of empire and colonialism in relation to these key IR categories. Specifically, I argue that the Spanish colonial frontier in Morocco served as a laboratory for distinctive expressions of transnational state-building, violence, and identity-formation, which were reproduced in the metropolitan heartlands of the Iberian Peninsula during the interwar years. The complex interaction between core and periphery in this period had momentous implications for both Spanish and Moroccan history, many of which continue to play out in contemporary politics across the Gibraltar Strait.

Memory Fusion, Diplomatic Agency, and Armenian Genocide Recognition in the Czech Republic

Abstract Scholars often emphasize how right-wing political actors in Europe use memory laws to undermine democratic traditions and revise historical accounts. But a broad range of political actors (with diverse motivations) support memory laws. Synthesizing research in international political sociology and memory politics, this analysis examines the relational and social practices of diplomats from small states and the creative strategies of center-left political insiders in the creation and passage of memory laws. Based on data collected in the Czech Republic, the article investigates how relational and social dynamics, in part, inspired members of parliament (from the Czech Social Democratic Party) to insert Armenian Genocide recognition into memory laws about the Holocaust and Second World War in the Chamber of Deputies (2017) and the Senate (2020) – a strategy I refer to as memory fusion. In developing the framework of memory fusion, however, the findings also explore how Turkish diplomats use a similar strategy to pursue their own goals.

Reconceptualizing Advocacy through the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Embodiment, Relationality, and Power

Abstract This article critically examines the embodied and relational politics of networked advocacy in the case of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda in the United Kingdom. Moving beyond liberal framings that position WPS advocacy as an attempt to overcome gender exclusion from peace and security policymaking, this article is concerned instead with the gendered, racialized, and classed logics and hierarchies (re)produced through the practice of WPS advocacy. Toward this end, this article conceptualizes advocacy as an embodied, relational practice where WPS meanings are shaped, power is negotiated, and individuals are interpolated into subject positions. This conceptual claim is substantiated through an initial, exploratory analysis of interviews conducted with UK NGO professionals and government officials. Examining the figures of the “critical friends” and the “shouty NGOs,” I demonstrate how modes of advocating for WPS are ascribed and inscribed to certain bodies, which, in turn, reproduce power relations that affect the possibilities of the agenda. By reconceptualizing advocacy, the article contributes not only to WPS scholarship on civil society and advocacy but to wider debates within international political sociology around embodiment, relationality, and power. Additionally, it contributes empirically by highlighting how NGOs advocate for the WPS agenda.

Curated Power: The Performative Politics of (Industry) Events

Abstract Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an increased interest in the social performance of power in international political sociology. At the same time, recent years have seen the growing popularity of event ethnographic research approaches. In this article, we develop the concept of “curated power” as a tool to explore the performative enactment of power at and through conferences and events. A focus on curated power, we argue, can orient scholars of performative power toward conferences and events as an analytical entry point, and orient event ethnographic approaches toward the performance of classed, gendered, and racialized hierarchies as a central research concern. To develop these points, and to illustrate the analytical purchase of the concept, we provide a concrete example of its application by analyzing the performative enactment of social hierarchies at industry events in two alternative financial subsectors: FinTech and Islamic finance. In both sectors, we show that curated power can provide a situated and nuanced understanding of why and how corporate efforts to change finance for the better—whether on the basis of religious principles or advanced technological capabilities—often remain complicit in perpetuating classed, gendered, and racialized hierarchies.

Do local authorities take human rights seriously? Lessons from the French case

ABSTRACT The central government has the primary responsibility for the protection of human rights. However, several factors such as decentralisation raise questions about the role of local authorities in this area. Our paper examines this issue through an interdisciplinary approach, combining international law and political sociology. Our focus lies on the case of France, the ‘homeland’ of human rights: do French local elected authorities always take human rights seriously? Our research design combines qualitative and quantitative methods. After providing a background of the international legal context, this paper will present the findings on human rights local perceptions and practices of elected representatives. Human rights’ perceptions of these subnational political actors strongly depend on their educational qualifications and personal commitments. The same applies to the hierarchy that they draw between fundamental freedoms, social rights, and environmental rights. By contrast, local practices in favour of human rights vary most importantly according to the local authorities’ status and demographic weight, rather than their political hue. When human and financial resources are scarce, the goodwill showcased by local elected representatives is not sufficient to foster the proper implementation of human rights.

Towards a theory of dependent democracy

Democracy is seen today as being in erosion or crisis both in the Global North and South. This article puts forward the concept of ‘dependent democracy’ in order to explain that much of the lack of success of democracy in the South in guaranteeing political participation and economic inclusion and wellbeing for the majority of the population is due to a specific tendency of democracy there. Adapting some insights from the more economics focused Dependency theory towards a more contemporary point of view from political sociology and international political sociology, dependent democracy is understood as a democracy that exists in a subaltern position within the hierarchical, post-imperial and neo-imperial global capitalist order. Dependent democracies thus tend to be less ‘democracies’ and more ‘oligarchies’ within a form of government in the South that can be understood as existing in a global pyramid of semi-peripheries, middle peripheries and outer peripheries.

Movement fracturing “the international” —or, what does it mean to give primacy to movement?

Movement fracturing “the international” —or, what does it mean to give primacy to movement?

Against ‘resistance’? Towards a conception of differential politics in international political sociology

‘Resistance’ and related concepts like ‘counter-conduct’, ‘counter-politics’ and ‘revolution’ continue to gain an intense interest and use. At the same time, however, we observe an intensified questioning of the concept of resistance and in particular the logic of negativity that it inscribes into our understanding of difference and its politics. Engaging with contributions that have pushed the concept of resistance and its dialectic logic of negativity to its limits in order to explore what it yields for analysing different political practices, we look for new interventions into modes of thinking about critical politics. To that purpose, we introduce the concepts of ‘folds’ and ‘folding’. They allow for understanding how differences work not through opposition to something but through enveloping in dynamic structures of multiple connections that generate a specific social field. We speak loosely of ‘against resistance?’ not as a claim that the concept of resistance has or should be moved to the dustbin of history but rather to argue for experimenting in International Political Sociology with conceptions of non-dialectic critical politics that work in a perspective of co-existence in heterogeneity and multiplicity and the conditions for openness and social possibility that it creates.

Critique of Ontological Militarism

Abstract War metaphors permeate the world we live in. From wildlife documentaries (natural war) to the curbing of academic freedom (war on woke), it seems that anything can be described in an essential likeness to warfare. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this paper investigates the ubiquity of war metaphors in critiques of violence within Critical Security Studies and International Political Sociology. The analysis focuses on three concepts recently advanced as alternatives to the shortcomings of securitization theory and its reliance on a mythological idea of liberal peace: fighting, martial politics, and struggles. The paper investigates how each of these concepts is built in relation to war metaphors and explains this as revealing of an underlying symptom, a form of ontological militarism, which these alternatives to securitization cannot properly work through. It advances the concept of ontological militarism as the attribution of heuristic privilege to war turning it into the cypher of all social relations by investment in an assumed indistinction between war/peace and war/struggle. The paper invites critiques of liberal civility in International Relations (IR) to take seriously the point whereby the resort to war metaphors becomes the symptom of an inability to escape the symbolic horizons of a violent militaristic order.

Touristic security: not a ‘win-win’ global security practice

ABSTRACT Touristic security – the practice of securing tourists to sustain tourism – has become a highly pertinent and powerful global security practice. Many organisations, governments, industry stakeholders, consultants, and scholars claim touristic security to be a ‘win-win’ security practice supportive of global sustainable development for all. But is this true? This paper interrogates this claim in two steps. First, it sets out an international political sociology inspired approach to theorising security as a global practice shaped by and shaping of the continued coloniality of power, and, second, it uses this approach to select, connect, and analyse diverse critical studies of tourism for the emergence, enactment, and consequences of touristic security in the Global South. Put together, the critical studies of tourism analysed suggest that touristic security is a neoliberal security practice that centres international – often white Western – tourists’ fears and vulnerabilities, and, following, that it is (re)producing the coloniality of inequalities, insecurities, and immobilities. Far from a ‘win-win’ security practice, then, critical studies of tourism imply that touristic security is feeding into an endless process of (in)securitisation that is antithetical to global sustainable development.

The definers and standard setters of security: mapping the security field’s regulators through European football

ABSTRACT By drawing upon and attaching a new layer to the “security field” concept, this article examines and conceptualizes European security practices and challenges through the lens of European football. At a critical juncture for security in both Europe and football, this article questions (i) how the supranational regulation informing European football’s security field has evolved since 1985 and (ii) how exactly the security field’s regulators – the Council of Europe, Council of the EU, and UEFA – set the standards for the remainder of the security field. Relatedly, it asks what this tells us about the power to define security. Drawing upon theoretical perspectives located in International Political Sociology, the sociology of leisure and sport, and publicly available documents and conventions, this conceptual article contributes to our understanding of security in Europe. It argues, first, that the security field in European football is indicative of wider security transformations. Second, that the security field’s regulators configure and dictate the wider field and possess the power to standardize security and the prioritization of threats. This remains important because, to fully understand and analytically capture the security field in European football, one must conceptually account for its standard setting organizations.

Frames of war and welfare

Frames of war and welfare

Transversal Politics of Big Tech

Abstract Our everyday life is entangled with products and services of so-called Big Tech companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook. International relations (IR) scholars increasingly seek to reflect on the relationships between Big Tech, capitalism, and institutionalized politics, and they engage with the practices of algorithmic governance and platformization that shape and are shaped by Big Tech. This collective discussion advances these emerging debates by approaching Big Tech transversally, meaning that we problematize Big Tech as an object of study and raise a range of fundamental questions about its politics. The contributions demonstrate how a transversal perspective that cuts across sociomaterial, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries and framings opens up the study of the politics of Big Tech. The discussion brings to the fore perspectives on the ontologies of Big Tech, the politics of the aesthetics and credibility of Big Tech and rethinks the concepts of legitimacy and responsibility. The article thereby provides several inroads for how IR and international political sociology can leverage their analytical engagement with Big Tech and nurture imaginaries of alternative and subversive technopolitical futures.

Scales, Reefs and Bureaucracies – International Political Fieldworks

Abstract The political sociology of the international, because it refers, at least in part, to practices and configurations in which the routine superposition of a society and a state is even more problematic than it already is when the investigation is confined within national borders, may call for the deployment of particular empirical and theoretical strategies. This article outlines some of these strategies, which relate to the question of identification of the field and processes of internationalization, access to the bureaucracies of foreign affairs and war, and the question of secrecy. The article reflects on ways to capture the division of labor among and in these international organizations, and on the tracing of individual paths as a means of reconstructing the milieux of international activism. It examines the possibilities opened up by collective investigations of international events. Rooted in the idea of the unity of social sciences, the article hopes to show how the ordinary methods and tools of sociology can contribute to enriching the study of international fieldworks (and how in return the development of international political sociology can contribute to the renewal of social sciences practiced on a national scale).

Civic education in post-conflict societies: The case of Serbia

Our main goal is to provide a preliminary, descriptive, and thematic overview of civic education courses in Serbia until 2020 from the perspectives of international political sociology, critical pedagogy and critical curriculum studies. After clarifying pertinent conceptual assumptions of curriculum analysis, we review the methodology employed to examine the curriculum. Firstly, our task is to describe how a civic education course in Serbia looks in relevant educational aspects. Secondly, we explore the role civic education plays in postsocialist and post-conflict Serbian society within the educational system and policies, considering transformative processes and reconciliation goals. Among the main findings, we emphasise the inadequacy of the initial phase of implementation of civic education in Serbia. There is insufficient recognition in the broader public regarding the cosmopolitan and social justice values crucial for generating a democratic political culture.

Iconic 21st Century Activist "T-Shirt and Tote-Bag" Combination Is Hard to Miss These Days!

Iconic 21st Century Activist "T-Shirt and Tote-Bag" Combination Is Hard to Miss These Days!

Nuclear Stigma and Deviance in Global Governance: A New Research Agenda

AbstractIn contemporary times, scholars have increasingly turned to the research on norms to study behavior and identity transformation in international politics. This has led to understanding stigma as attached to global actors refusing to follow normatively shared expectations of social conduct. However, the field of nuclear politics has largely ignored this research in particularly identifying how noncompliant states manage their stigmatized identities, after engaging in acts of nuclear deviance against hegemonic norms. By combining and advancing the existing literature on international political sociology, constructivist approaches in international relations theory, and nuclear governance, this paper first argues that stigma should be understood as a position of relational power dynamics that recalcitrant states occupy in contesting dominant norms. Second, it conceptualizes a new category of stigma management as stigma redaction, whereby noncompliant nuclear states occasionally engage in corrective conduct to prevent their identities being permanently cemented as rogue by dominant powers. To contextualize both these arguments, this paper examines the empirical case of India's relationship with the United States, post India's nuclear test in 1974. In doing so, it furthers our understanding of sociological deviance in international politics through an interdisciplinary lens and contributes to the field of international security studies.

Subjects of Quantum Measurement: Surveillance and Affect in the War on Terror

Abstract The idea of measurement (of bodies and identities) is a guiding principle of globalized surveillance in the War on Terror. Nevertheless, this inherently scientific notion is so naturalized in public and academic discourse that its meaning and implications are left undiscussed. This paper builds on quantum theory to present an immanent critique of measurement in surveillance. Foregrounding surveillance's transdisciplinary conceptual foundations, it argues that a notion of identity measurement centered on ambiguity and embodiment, rather than fixity and abstraction, reshapes the scope for political action and opens new avenues for critique. I suggest that a lack of critical engagement with the concept of measurement accounts for Surveillance Studies’ and International Political Sociology's difficulty in exploring the relation between the material–affective dimension of surveillance and its identity-fixing function. Challenging unquestioned notions of measurement in social science, quantum theory highlights the interconnected importance of ambiguity and embodiment in processes of identity measurement. Through the case of airport security, I illustrate how quantum measurement departs from recent critical accounts of surveillance—concerned with the fixity of unambiguous identities and the digital abstraction of bodies—and foregrounds the ambiguity of affect to postulate new forms of agency and resistance to the politics of surveillance.

From the Myth ofSelf-Governmentto the Rise ofHoloptism: Another Genealogy of Liberal Governmentality

AbstractA long-standing critique of liberalism is that it is both amoral and anti-communitarian. Bound to the totemic figures of the Law and the Market, the “liberal art of governing” is unable to conceive of social regulations outside this twin rational framework. However, the 1990s saw the international dissemination of State managerial reform—embodied by the slogan “doing better with less”—where entrepreneurial practices coexist with participatory and decentralizing policies. In the context of State redeployment, an emerging strategy is evolving as economic neoliberalism merges with cooperative liberalism inspired by the American myth of self-government. By establishing a genealogy for this other side of liberal governmentality, this paper demonstrates how contemporary neo-progressivism emphasizes “holoptic” technologies. By encouraging a “proactive citizenship” through moral and community coercion, holoptic technologies can provide new resources to resurgent authoritarianism. Thus, the study of governmentality within the field of international political sociology should take into account a power architecture that is based on the local scale and implemented by States in a context of convergence of global political orders.

Perceiving and Controlling Maritime Flows. Technology, Kinopolitics, and the Governmentalization of Vision

Abstract This article speaks to debates in international political sociology that critically interrogate the ongoing digitization of border controls through the deployment of surveillance technologies that render mobility intelligible and governable. Our contribution to these debates is both empirical and conceptual. Empirically, we explore not only how surveillance is enacted but also how it is contested and fails to meet its stated objectives. We do so by focusing on two technologies that support the visibilization of maritime borderzones and mobilities: satellites and drones. Conceptually, our contribution revolves around the kinopolitical character of maritime surveillance and the productive power of technologically mediated vision. We synthesize Nail's work on kinopolitics with ideas inspired by Foucauldian studies on governmentality to develop the following argument: satellites and drones are technologies of power embedded within a kinopolitical regime of maritime surveillance, which strategizes vision in attempts to govern subjects and objects on the move—attempts that challenge any clear-cut distinction between security controls and humanitarian interventions in the field of border management.