Refugees are often considered as a source of disorder if not fundamental threat to international society. In contrast, and drawing from an English School approach, this article argues that the figure of the refugee is foundational to the constitution of both modern international society and its agent, the sovereign territorial state; hence refugee protection represents a primary institution of international society. Starting with conceptual and methodological considerations for studying primary institutions, the article then highlights the longstanding and widespread state practice of granting asylum. It is shown that on the one hand, the figure of the refugee serves to consolidate and naturalise the nation/state/territory trinity underpinning the modern state system; and on the other hand, protecting refugees plays a central role in the construction of statist self-identities as liberal, humanitarian, and altruistic agents. The last section of the article turns to the politics of contestation of refugee protection, examining domestic, regional, and international reactions to ‘anti-refugee’ policies in the United States, Hungary, and Australia. The considerable amount of criticism generated by these restrictive policies, it is argued, evidence the enduring importance and relevance of refugee protection in (and for) international society.

Marysia Zalewski's Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse on feminism and global politics directly addresses matters of style, that is, questions of language and representation that foreground the invisible yet so palpable aspect of how meanings circulate. This article puts Zalewski's work in conversation with Trinh Minh-ha's D-Passage: The Digital Way and Lynda Barry's What It Is that similarly push the limits of how we craft feminist arguments. These feminists show how styles of writing and thinking, and how ideas gain shape to circulate matter in academic sites of knowledge as much as in art and culture. Building on these works, I put forward the thesis: to theorise is to feel out boundaries and question the questions we encounter that perennially relegate women as taint and malaise. I further explore this thesis by highlighting the visual dimensions of writing and thinking, in particular, what drawing, and drawing lines that shape ideas do. I focus on caricatures from the currently evolving North Korean nuclear crisis to loosen up the ways we go about thinking about war and politics wherein thinking is recognised not so much as a craft to be perfected but a democratic form of being in the world.

Tragedy is one of the oldest metaphorical lenses of International Relations. The tragic vision of politics, from Thucydides to contemporary realist theorists, lies at the core of classical realism. However, it is striking how rarely the concept of tragedy has been applied to the discourse of humanitarian intervention. This lacuna is a weakness on both the intellectual and political levels, as nowhere are clashes between competing ethical perspectives more glaring. An examination of the concept of tragedy, as conceived from its Greek origins, can illuminate an understanding of the morally contradictory imperatives created by armed intervention. Using the Bosnian War as a case study, Greek classical tragedy provides a framework to grasp the agonising choices and insoluble ethical dilemmas brought about by humanitarian intervention, in contrast to mere narratives of salvation. The argument conveyed in this article seeks to reconcile a tragic vision with the idea of progress and political action. It concludes by suggesting that the fundamental lessons that lie at the heart of tragedy should be associated with another major concept in Greek culture, namely, the Aristotelian idea of phronesis or ‘practical wisdom’.

Contrary to common assumptions that the liberal world order was ‘made in the West’, this article argues that it was produced in interaction with Pan-African ideology and actors. Developing a morphological analysis, it identifies three contending visions of world order within Pan-Africanism: a world of continental unity and transnational solidarity; a world of national sovereignty; and a world of racially defined units. It concludes that Pan-Africanism contains intellectual and political resources for the defence, reinvigoration, and invention of a more just, equal and rule-bound multilateral world, but that this cannot be taken for granted. Pan-Africanism is neither inherently progressive, nor reactionary, and can support multilateralism and sovereigntism in equal measure. Pan-Africanism's nativism also carries particular risks at a time when similar identitarian viewpoints are promoted by Radical Right movements. Understanding the manner in which Pan-Africanism informs and legitimises diverse political agendas is thus of crucial importance for IR, for Pan-Africanists, and for the future of world order.

International migrants are subject to many types of violence, such as trafficking, detention, and forced labour. We need an improved understanding of what protects migrants from such violence. The concept of ‘migrant protection regimes’ draws our attention away from formal rights advocacy and to both the informal dimensions of protection and the way migrants help determine the quality of protection they receive. ‘Migrant protection regimes’ are sets of rules and practices regarding who ought to protect whom. These regimes include formal rights to protection in the law and informal relationships that protect migrants from lawful violence by the state. They may be changed by ‘power grabs’, when sovereign actors seek to monopolise protection relationships, but also by ‘exits’, when migrants refuse to accept the protection on offer. The study demonstrates the value of these concepts by using them to explain an unlikely case: a change in laws concerning migrant protection in an authoritarian state: Thailand. Drawing on rich qualitative sources, the article reveals how, after a human rights advocacy campaign had placed migrants’ protection in jeopardy, a mass migrant exodus compelled the country's junta to offer migrants protection on better terms.

How are images, emotions, and international politics connected? This article develops a theoretical framework contributing to visuality and emotions research in International Relations. Correcting the understanding that images cause particular emotional responses, this article claims that emotionally laden responses to images should be seen as performed in foreign policy discourses. We theorise images as objects of interpretation and contestation, and emotions as socially constituted rather than as individual ‘inner states’. Emotional bundling – the coupling of different emotions in discourse – helps constitute political subjectivities that both politicise and depoliticise. Through emotional bundling political leaders express their experiences of feelings shared by all humans, and simultaneously articulate themselves in authoritative and gendered subject positions such as ‘the father’. We illustrate the value of our framework by analysing the photographs of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian-Kurdish boy who drowned in September 2015. ‘Kurdi’ became an instant global icon of the Syrian refugee crisis. World leaders expressed their personal grief and determination to act, but within a year, policies adopted with direct reference to Kurdi's tragic death changed from an open-door approach to attempts to stop refugees from arriving. A discursive-performative approach opens up new avenues for research on visuality, emotionality, and world politics.

What is the role of rhetoric and argumentation in international relations? Some argue that it is little more than ‘cheap talk’, while others say that it may play a role in persuasion or coordination. However, why states deploy certain arguments, and why these arguments succeed or fail, is less well understood. I argue that, in international negotiations, certain types of legal frames are particularly useful for creating winning arguments. When a state bases its arguments on constitutive legal claims, opponents are more likely to become trapped by the law: unable to develop sustainable rebuttals or advance their preferred policy. To evaluate this theory, I apply qualitative discourse analysis to the US arguments on the crime of aggression at the Kampala Review Conference of the International Criminal Court – where the US advanced numerous arguments intended to reshape the crime to align with US interests. The analysis supports the theoretical propositions – arguments framed on codified legal grounds had greater success, while arguments framed on more political grounds were less sustainable, failing to achieve the desired outcomes. These findings further develop our understanding of the use of international law in rhetoric, argumentation, and negotiation.

How did the transition from a world of empire to a global international system organised around the sovereign state play out? This article traces the transition over the past two centuries through an examination of membership debates in two prominent intergovernmental organisations (IGOs). IGOs are sites of contestation that play a role in the constitution of the international system. Discussions within IGOs reflect and shape broader international norms, and are one mechanism through which the international system determines questions of membership and attendant rights and obligations. The article reveals that IGO membership policies during this period reflected different compromises between the three competing principles of great power privilege, the ‘standard of civilisation’, and universal sovereign equality. The article contributes to Global IR as it confirms that non-Western agency was crucial in bringing about this transition. States in Africa, Asia, and Latin America championed the adoption of the sovereignty criterion. In this, paradoxically, one of the core constitutional norms of the ‘European’ international system – the principle of sovereign equality – was realised at the hands of non-European actors.

As it has been written, the history of humanitarian intervention is all too Whiggish and all too white. By conceptualising humanitarian intervention in the way that they do, orthodox histories should be seen as entangled in debates about the origins of human rights but also, perhaps more crucially, debates about the various formations and reinventions of human rights. Alternative codifications of rights reveal the historical possibility of a Southern practice of what we would almost certainly call ‘humanitarian intervention’. The record of a radical Third World practice to save strangers from the atrocities of colonialism and extreme racism is also a record of Western states playing staunchly sovereigntist roles, of the West's late devotion to Westphalia. To sketch out such a counterhistory is to argue the following: at a threshold moment in the international-political life of the Responsibility to Protect, it is the terms, range, and domain of the intervention debate that must be re-formulated and re-evaluated.

Cristina Masters (CM): The articles in this forum speak to how influential and inspiring your work is for scholars in the discipline of International Relations (IR), not least feminist scholars. Particularly, I think, for encouraging us to (re)think and (re)work with deeply familiar ‘things’ in deeply unusual – yet troublingly fecund – ways. Blood, for example, comes up quite frequently in your writing on methodology, even though it appears, as you say, an ‘unlikely candidate for methodological use’. What is so promising about blood for making sense of global politics?

The persistence and strength of international norms are thought to depend partly on the willingness of actors to punish their violation, but norm enforcement is often inconsistent. This article investigates states’ use of economic sanctions in order to gain insight into the role of metanorms (norms about enforcing norms) in international politics and explain this inconsistency. The quantitative analyses examine patterns of economic sanctions and arms embargo practices across different security norms and reveal two central findings. First, international metanorms may accommodate important interstate relationships. Although severe human rights abuse, conflict, nuclear weapons development, and support for terrorist organisations tend to attract sanctions, they are infrequent in comparison with norm violations. Valued relationships between senders and targets seem to be an accepted limit to the pursuit of costly norm enforcement. Second, norm violations nevertheless remain rare, suggesting that factors other than the prospect of material punishment may encourage compliance. Indeed, by preserving interstate relationships, international metanorms may facilitate the engagement needed for socialisation and social pressures as alternative compliance mechanisms.

Feminist International Relations (IR) theory is haunted by a radical feminist ghost. From Enloe's suggestion that the personal is both political and international, often seen as the foundation of feminist IR, feminist IR scholarship has been built on the intellectual contributions of a body of theory it has long left for dead. Though Enloe's sentiment directly references the Hanisch's radical feminist rallying call, there is little direct engagement with the radical feminist thinkers who popularised the sentiment in IR. Rather, since its inception, the field has been built on radical feminist thought it has left for dead. This has left feminist IR troubled by its radical feminist roots and the conceptual baggage that feminist IR has unreflectively carried from second-wave feminism into its contemporary scholarship. By returning to the roots of radical feminism we believe IR can gain valuable insights regarding the system of sex-class oppression, the central role of heterosexuality in maintaining this system, and the feminist case for revolutionary political action in order to dismantle it.

Within international relations the normative agency of African actors is often downplayed or derided. This article develops the concept of bricolage to offer a novel understanding of norm development and contestation in international relations, including the role African actors play in this. We contend that a norm's core hypothesis can be thought of as the nucleus of a norm. In the case of complex international norms, if this core hypothesis is sufficiently vague and malleable, the norm will continue to attract a range of actors who may claim to share a commitment to enacting the core hypothesis even if they simultaneously promote a variety of potentially conflicting and contradictory meanings-in-use of the norm when doing so. Each meaning-in-use, we argue, might be thought of as a product of bricolage: a process of combining and adapting both new and second-hand materials, knowledges, values, and practices by an actor to address a problem in hand. Through a detailed study of the contestation of transitional justice between South Africa and the International Criminal Court, we elucidate how bricolage can help to illuminate the normative agency of African actors in shaping transitional justice. Processes of bricolage add complexity and potentially confusion to a norm's development, but bricolage also offers the potential for a creative and dynamic means by which a range of actors can inject pluralism, dexterity, and vitality into debates about a norm's meaning and operationalisation.

This article considers how we can develop a reflexive reading of the theological contours of global politics through Carl Schmitt's account of sovereignty. In doing this it seeks to generate a critical architecture to understand the pluralistic registers of sovereignty within world politics. This article examines the theological dimensions of sovereignty, calling for a closer reading of the theopolitical discourses of legality and legitimacy at work within the largely secular discipline of International Relations. Tracing the pluralistic dimensions of sovereignty – juristic, popular, and theopolitical – allows us to see how sovereignty is operationalised through a range of distinct political registers. When the study of sovereignty is confused with questions of preference for modes of governing (whether secular, religious, democratic, and/or juristic) the complex historical sociology of sovereignty is overlooked. Contemporary scholarship in International Relations can benefit from closer engagement with the multiple, overlapping registers of sovereignty in global politics. We may disagree with Schmitt's reading of sovereignty as ‘theopolitics’ but there is real methodological value in engaging secular scholarship in thinking about religion as a constitutive domain for global order – alongside a rich range of critical approaches.

Post-truth politics poses a specific problem for critical theories. The problem is that the relativisation of facts – the claim that knowledge is merely a product of power, history, and perspective – is a core aspect of present-day ideological thinking. Critical theories have been unable to respond to this challenge, because their critique has been directed against the opposite claim, namely the naturalisation of facts. While acknowledging this problem, this article argues that post-truth discourse actually combines relativisation and naturalisation. It does not simply relativise truth, but also naturalises the belief in specific ‘facts’ – notably the belief that ‘conspiracies are behind it all’. Once we recognise the twin character of post-truth, we must reject the view of Bruno Latour and others who have made critique responsible for the crisis. Instead, it then becomes apparent that there are deep and disconcerting similarities between post-truth politics and the totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies of the twentieth century. The task of critique is to confront and counter this resurgent ideology, thereby providing direction and orientation in the struggle for emancipation.

This article seeks to question the epistemological monopoly of territory and scale in analyses of the Syrian conflict. It does so to both challenge static conceptualisations of space in the study of politics and analyse how seemingly remote actors influence wartime outcomes. Since 2011, NGOs, government bodies, and merchants have worked to connect Damascus to Tehran, Idlib to Istanbul, London to Dara‘a. These connections have proven crucial to the reliable supply of food, funds, and firepower. Yet rather than reveal the importance of foreign patrons or proxies on the ground, such dynamics speak to a world in which relationships matter more than distance, practices more than geopolitical position or a priori forms of alliance. Drawing on the work of John Allen, I suggest why thinking topologically about these dynamics better equips us to understand the political outcomes they help engender. To demonstrate the promise of this approach, I hone in on the partnerships, intermediaries, and connections that shape performances of political authority in Syria by examining one object crucial to its enactment: bread.

Demands for apology are a prominent rhetorical means for pointing out transgressions in contemporary world politics. They transform ‘seen but unnoticed’ conduct into ‘seen and noticed’ transgression and attach a price tag to the restoration of damaged relations. Nevertheless, compared to the widely discussed practice of apologising, demands for apologies have received scant scholarly attention. In this article we adopt an actor-oriented perspective in order to situate the speech act of demanding an apology within the delicate management of interstate relations. In-depth content analysis of 57 cases of demands made by various state actors in a variety of diplomatic contexts between 1999 and 2019 let us delineate the discursive construction of transgressions, the normative scripts that inform acts of demands, the types of sought-after remedies, and their discursive consequences. We conclude by discussing the normative diplomatic scripts that guide demands for apology and how these speech acts reconfigure power relations in international politics.

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in how International Relations theory can contribute to our understanding of the impact of technology on global politics, underpinned mainly by an engagement with Science and Technology Studies (STS). However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which international society shapes technology. Building on sociological and historical studies of science and technology, this article outlines one way through which international society has constituted technology by developing a synthetic account of the emergence of technological advancement as a ‘standard of civilisation’ in the nineteenth century that differentiated the ‘society of civilised states’ from non-European societies, with a particular focus on China and India. In doing so, this article also highlights how this process has had a powerful and enduring influence on Chinese and Indian conceptions about science and technology. Thus, by shifting the focus from how technology shapes global politics to how international society shapes technology, this article provides new insights into the relationship between technology, power, and modernity in an interdisciplinary context. It also offers a new way of thinking about the complex dynamics of today's global politics of technology.