Autonomous weapons systems (AWS) are emerging as key technologies of future warfare. So far, academic debate concentrates on the legal-ethical implications of AWS but these do not capture how AWS may shape norms through defining diverging standards of appropriateness in practice. In discussing AWS, the article formulates two critiques on constructivist models of norm emergence: first, constructivist approaches privilege the deliberative over the practical emergence of norms; and second, they overemphasise fundamental norms rather than also accounting for procedural norms, which we introduce in this article. Elaborating on these critiques allows us to respond to a significant gap in research: we examine how standards of procedural appropriateness emerging in the development and usage of AWS often contradict fundamental norms and public legitimacy expectations. Normative content may therefore be shaped procedurally, challenging conventional understandings of how norms are constructed and considered as relevant in International Relations. In this, we outline the contours of a research programme on the relationship of norms and AWS, arguing that AWS can have fundamental normative consequences by setting novel standards of appropriate action in international security policy.

Neo-Gramscians have made invaluable contributions to expanding traditional IR/IPE theory. Nevertheless, as the following article indicates, the ontological, epistemological, and methodological positions they adopt results in a rather one-sided interpretation of Antonio Gramsci and a partial, at times erroneous, account of the nature of the current global system. In highlighting these oversights, the neo neo-Gramscian approach presented here – rooted in a critical realist philosophy of science, specifically ‘emergentist materialism’, and involving a more complete reading of Gramsci – seeks to lay the basis for the elaboration of a more convincing theoretical and conceptual framework to analyse the changing dynamics of contemporary world order, without which the Coxian critical theory dream of engendering social emancipation cannot be fully realised.

This article critically examines recent works on resilience. In so doing, it argues that rather than representing some radical rupture with current practices heralding the dawn of a new era, as David Chandler claims, the emphasis on individuals as resilient subjects simply represents a new phase in the neoliberal shift from the state as provider to state as enabler and promoter of self-reliance. Indeed, our present preoccupation with complexity, uncertainty, and resilience can best be understood as reflecting the consequences of neoliberal policies Moreover, the article further argues that there is an attendant danger that resilience thinking may further promote neoliberal forms of governmentality and encourage a degree of political passivity. The emphasis on resilience is in danger of depoliticising highly political choices, shifting attention toward ex-post policies of survival and recovery rather than challenging the current economic order and resisting the further imposition of neoliberal policies on already beleaguered populations. This article therefore argues for shifting our emphasis towards a Foucauldian analysis of power and resistance.

In this article, the introduction to this Special Issue, we underline the importance of the dynamics of misrecognition for the study of world politics. We make the case for shifting the focus from ‘recognition’, where it has long been cast in social, political and, more recently, International Relations theory, to misrecognition. We do so by returning to the original theorisation of misrecognition, Hegel’s dialectic of the master and servant. Our point of departure is not only that the desire for recognition is key social dynamic, but that the failure to obtain this recognition is built into this very desire. It is a crucial factor for understanding how international actors behave, including, but not only, states.

Thus understood, the desire for recognition is not simply a desire for social goods, for status or for statehood, but for more agency – more capacity to act. We explore the logic of misrecognition and show how the international system is a symbolic structure that is ordained by an unrealisable ideal of what we call ‘sovereign agency’.

In recent years, satellite imagery, previously restricted to the defence and intelligence communities, has been made available to a range of non-state actors as well. Non-governmental organisations, journalists, and celebrities such as George Clooney now use remote sensing data like digital Sherlock Holmeses to investigate and reveal human rights abuses, political violence, environmental destruction, and eco-crimes from a distance. It is often said that the increasing availability and applicability of remote sensing technologies has contributed to the rise of what can be called ‘satellite-based activism’ empowering non-state groups to challenge state practices of seeing and showing. In this article we argue that NGO activism is not challenging the sovereign gaze of the state but, on the contrary, actually reinforcing it. We will bolster our arguments in this regard in two prominent fields of non-governmental remote sensing: human rights and environmental governance.

The article examines the roles of NGOs in banning cluster munitions that resulted in the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions and the campaign against landmines in the 1990s. It argues that NGOs have managed to move questions about the use of force from the closed decision-making sphere of military commanders and arms control diplomats into open public debate. Thus NGOs have simultaneously desecuritised the use of force by states, securitised certain weapons technologies, and made human beings the referent object of security. This has marked a shift from state security and strategic disarmament to human security and humanitarian disarmament, without fundamentally challenging the laws of war. However, in contrast to realist views that only militarily useless weapons ever get banned and radical critical perspectives that see new legal regimes as legitimating war and US hegemony, I argue that NGOs have engaged in immanent critique of military arguments and practices based on prevailing principles of international humanitarian law. The resulting weapon ban treaties have both restrained US policy and undermined its legitimacy. The article explores the discursive choices that underpinned the remaking of the security agenda by NGOs and their role as de/securitising actors and emancipatory agents of change.

In this article I theorise the concept of misrecognition that we aim to bring to the study of international politics with this Special Issue. I draw upon three sources to do so: recognition theory, Hegel, and Jacques Lacan. I show that, while the seeds of an interest in misrecognition were laid in that interdisciplinary Hegelian scholarship known as recognition theory, it remains underdeveloped. To develop it into a concept I chart a path through recognition theory back to Hegel’s original dialectic of the master and servant in the Phenomenology of Spirit. What the dialectic captures, I argue, are the actual dynamics of misrecognition in social life, not an idealised form of recognition. This foundational, constitutive misrecognition is what Lacan also theorises by way of his concept of ‘fantasy’. Both Hegel and Lacan foreground a misrecognised, desiring subject that challenges the ways in which agency has been understood in international politics. Lastly, I show the purchase of a Hegelian-Lacanian analysis for IR by considering the relations between sovereignty and nuclear weapons under the lens of fantasy.

Law following and law breaking are often conceptualised as polar opposites. However, authorities in liberal democracies increasingly deploy a strategy of what I call plausible legality in order to secure immunity and legitimacy for proscribed practices. Rather than ignore or suspend law, they construct legal justifications for human rights abuses and other dubious policies, obscuring the distinction between legal compliance and non-compliance. I argue this is possible because instabilities in legal rules make them vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. By tracing American rationales for contentious ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, indefinite detention, and ‘targeted killing’ practices in the ‘Global War on Terror’, I show that law need not always be abandoned or radically reconstituted to achieve troubling ends and that rule structures enable certain patterns of violation while limiting others. The international prohibition on torture is robust and universal, but provides vague definitions open to interpretation. Detention and lethal targeting regulations are jurisdictionally layered and contextually complex, creating loopholes and gaps. The article concludes by reflecting on implications for the protection of human rights. While law is not wholly indeterminate, human rights advocates must constantly advocate shared legal understandings that constrain state violence.

The academic study of International Relations (IR) emerged in the context of transnational networks of scholars, diplomats, politicians, and activists. Contrary to conventional wisdom, women belonged to these networks in various capacities and, crucially, contributed to the intellectual formation of the discipline. Whether as members of pressure groups, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), as independent authors or academics, they discussed all major issues of IR. Drawing on a range of international authors – including Anna B. Eckstein, Agnes Headlam-Morley, Lucy Mair, Margery Perham, Helena Swanwick, and Louise Weiss – this article recovers the intellectual substance of their work, arguing that it constitutes a genuinely feminist approach to IR. Early feminist IR authors emphasised the interests of women, children, and other marginalised groups, they demanded female representation in government and diplomacy, they condemned imperialism and racism, opposed military capitalism, employed religious, emotional, and universalist rhetoric, and advocated the role of education. Despite widespread male domination, women taught at universities, published in academic journals, spoke at conferences, and organised international summer schools. This article explores the origins of feminist IR scholarship and contextualises this body of thought within the revisionist history of IR.

In a crisis-prone world, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) uprooted by both armed conflicts and environmental disasters has drastically increased and displacement risks have intensified. Despite the growing attention within global security and development agendas to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), there remain striking gaps in addressing SRHR in crisis situations, particularly among IDP women and girls. This article examines the continuum between social reproduction in times of crisis and the material and ideological conditions that restrict women’s bodily autonomy in everyday life. Using the case of the Philippines where millions of people are routinely affected by conflict and disaster-induced displacements, it argues that the failure to recognise the centrality of women’s health and bodily autonomy not only hinders the sustainable provision of care and domestic labour during and after crisis, but also fundamentally constrains how security is enacted within these spaces. Thus, the article highlights an urgent need to rethink the gendered political economy of crisis responses as a building block for stemming gendered violence and depletion of social reproductive labour at the household, state, and global levels.

Increasingly, private companies – including Twitter, airlines, and banks – find themselves in the frontline of fighting terrorism and other security threats, because they are obliged to mine and expel suspicious transactions. This analytical work of companies forms part of a chain, whereby transactions data are analysed, collected, reported, shared, and eventually deployed as a basis for intervention by police and prosecution. This article develops the notion of the Chain of Security in order to conceptualise the ways in which security judgements are made across public/private domains and on the basis of commercial transactions. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, this article understands the security chain as the set of practices whereby commercial transactions are collected, stored, transferred, and analysed, in order to arrive at security facts. Understanding the trajectory of the suspicious transaction as a series of translations across professional domains draws attention to the processes of sequencing, movement, and referral in the production of security judgements. The article uses the chain of financial suspicious transactions reporting as example to show how this research ‘thinking tool’ can work. In doing so, it aims to contribute to debates at the intersection between International Relations (IR) and Science-and-Technology Studies (STS).

The symbolic structure of the international system, organised around sovereignty, is sustained by an institutional infrastructure that shapes how states seek sovereign agency. We investigate how the modern legal category of the state is an institutional expression of the idea of the state as a liberal person, dependent on a one-off recognition in establishing the sovereign state. We then discuss how this institutional rule coexists with the ongoing frustrated search for recognition in terms of sociopolitical registers. While the first set of rules establishes a protective shield against others, regardless of behaviour, the second set of rules specify rules for behaviour of statehood, which produces a distinct form of misrecognition. States are, at one level, already recognised as sovereign and are granted rights akin to individuals in liberal thought, and yet they are continually misrecognised in their quest to actualise the sovereign agency they associate with statehood. We draw on examples from two contemporary phenomena – fragile states, and assertions of non-interference and sovereignty from the populist right and non-Western great powers, to discuss the misrecognition processes embedded in the bifurcated symbolic structure of sovereignty, and its implications for debates about hierarchy and sovereignty in world affairs.

In recent years there has been a ‘turn’ to thinking about war through the experiences of those touched by it. While this scholarship has generated numerous important insights, its focus has tended to remain on wars’ violences, those responsible for enacting them, and the effects of such violence. In this article, the experiences of pleasure and joy in war that simultaneously take place are placed centre stage. Drawing on three war novels, the article tracks three recurring themes of pleasurable and joyful experiences related to war: bodily pleasures, the ‘togetherness’ of war, and moments of joy that escape war’s reach. Through this focus, war is shown to work across a range of affective registers and as never totalising or universalising in its experience. The article argues that paying attention to joy and pleasure can work to displace war as a focus of analysis, directing attention instead to the experiences of those who live through war and how they survive, sustain, and resist it.

IR scholars have always invoked history as a valuable resource for understanding the present. However, the question of how should we go about investigating and interpreting the past is rarely asked, let alone answered. While most IR approaches are anchored to the attempt to situate oneself outside history – reading the past in terms of the present or in terms of a hypothetical future – this article strives to redress the kind of historical perspective adopted, if at all, by IR scholars. It does so by advancing a distinctive historicist approach that emphasises the importance of understanding past practices and discourses in their own historical and intellectual contexts. In order to substantiate this claim, the article goes on to critically engage with recent calls to historicise intervention in IR, arguing that a historicist mode of analysis represents a corrective to presentism as well as an alternative route into present-day debates.

This article makes two contributions. First, I argue that contrary to what was often assumed in the recognition literature, social hierarchies (as in the Hegelian master–slave dynamic) are very stable. Though social hierarchies are relationships of misrecognition, they nevertheless allow for the simulation of recognition for ‘the master’, and also trap ‘the slave’ in that role through stigmatisation. Second, I make a historical argument about the state and its role in recognition struggles. The modern state is relatively unique (historically speaking) in being tasked with solving the recognition problems of its citizens. At the same time, the modern state has to derive its own sovereignty from the recognition of those same citizens. There is an inherent tension between these two facts, which forces the modern state to turn increasingly outward for its own recognition. This is why ‘the master–slave dynamic’ was increasingly projected onto the international stage from nineteenth century onwards (along with the diffusion of the modern state model). As a result, international recognition came to play an even larger role in state sovereignty than domestic recognition (in contrast to common historical practice). This also explains how and why social hierarchies came to dominate international politics around the same time as the norm of sovereign equality.

As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign showed, walls are a hot topic. While ‘globalisation’, with its free flow of capital and goods, characterised world politics after the end of the Cold War, the twenty-first century has witnessed a reassertion of cultural, legal, and physical barriers. It is common to criticise such post-Cold War walls, especially the US-Mexico Barrier and Israel’s West Bank Barrier, as ineffective and immoral. This article problematises such critical discourse by using unlikely juxtapositions (the Great Wall of China) and new conceptual frameworks (gaps, critical aesthetics) to explore: (1) how walls can be a rational security policy; (2) how they are not simply barriers, but can be complex sites of flows; and (3) how walls are not simply texts waiting to be decoded: they are also sites of non-narrative affective experience that can even excite the sublime. This critical juxtaposition of walls first explores what they can tell us about the politics of borders, identity, and foreign policy, and then considers how walls, as concrete visual artefacts, can be examples not simply of ideology, but also of affect. The article aims to understand walls in a different register as active embodiments of political debate – and of political resistance.

This article argues that public expressions of Islamophobia are best understood as securitising requests (that is, calls on powerful figures/bodies to treat an issue in security mode so that extraordinary measures can be used to combat it), especially in those cases where Muslims are feared and disliked because of the perception that Islamic people are prone to terrorism. This article argues that harmful and derogatory securitising requests targeting racial, ethnic, or religious minorities are on par with hate speech and it highlights the fact that many contemporary societies are now seeking legal protections against such security speech (expressed most notably in the desire to ban Islamophobia). It is from this perspective that this article poses an important research question: With a view to protecting those adversely affected, are legal protections against harmful and offensive securitising requests justified? The research question can be answered by drawing parallels to the existing hate speech debate in legal and political theory. The research reveals that, although the case against legal protections of harmful and defamatory security speech is ultimately more convincing, security speech alone can be so damaging that it should be informed by a number of ethical considerations. This article goes on to suggest three criteria for governing the ethics of requesting securitisation. As such this article fills a lacuna in the ‘positive/negative debate’ on the ethics of security that has engaged with securitisation, but that has failed to consider the ethics of speaking security.

This article aims to show the added value of studying transnational advocacy networks through a discursive approach in order to better understand the outcomes of norm diffusion in postconflict contexts. I argue that constructivist approaches to norm diffusion fall short as an explanation of norm adoption because they assume an automatic process of norm propagation through socialisation mechanisms. The first goal of the article is then to discuss how the internal dynamics of discourse negotiation in transnational advocacy networks impact the diffusion and implementation of international norms. The second goal is to propose the concept of the rebound effect and to explore the conditions under which it takes place. Through data collected during extended fieldwork, the article examines a prominent case, namely the transnational campaign for the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security in Burundi and Liberia. I ask why and how the campaign was understood as a success in Liberia and as a failure in Burundi. I argue that there is another way of looking at these cases in less dichotomised ways. Crucially, my findings demonstrate how in both cases a very particular discourse on gender security is (re)produced through power relations between local and transnational activists limiting the type of policies that are advocated for and depoliticising the grassroots.

Debates over ‘modernity’ have been central to the development of historical-sociological approaches to International Relations (IR). Within the bourgeoning subfield of International Historical Sociology (IHS), much work has been done to formulate a historically dynamic conception of international relations, which is then used to undermine unilinear conceptions of global modernity. Nevertheless, this article argues that IHS has not proceeded far enough in successfully remedying the problem of unilinearism. The problem remains that historical narratives, informed by IHS, tend to transhistoricise capitalism, which, in turn, obscures the generative nature of international relations, as well as the fundamental heterogeneity of diverging paths to modernity both within and beyond western Europe. Based on the theory of Uneven and Combined Development, Political Marxism, and Robbie Shilliam’s discussion of ‘Jacobinism’, this article first reinterprets the radical multilinearity of modernity within western Europe, and then utilises this reinterpretation to provide a new reading of the Ottoman path to modernity (1839–1918). Such a historical critique and reconstruction will highlight the significance of Jacobinism for a more accurate theorisation of the origin and development of the modern international order, hence contributing to a deeper understanding of the international relations of modernity.