This article seeks to advance our understanding of how intimate relations and racial logics are co-constituted and matter – subjectively, culturally, materially, and politically – in our colonial present of economic inequalities, nationalist populisms, anti-migrant discourses and xenophobic hostilities. Addressing these crisis conditions is urgent, yet critical interventions indicate that prevailing accounts inadequately address the scale, complexity, and fluidity of racisms operating today. This article proposes to think racial logics ‘otherwise’ by drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and intersectional analytics to produce a genealogy of state/nation formation processes, imperial encounters, and legitimating ideologies that illuminates how ‘intimacy builds worlds’.1 A deep history of political centralisation reveals that regulation of intimate, familial relations is a constitutive feature of successful state-making and crucial for understanding how modernity's ‘race difference’ is produced and how the racialisation of ‘Other’ (‘non-European’, undesirable) sexual/familial practices figures in contemporary crises. Locating intimate relations – ‘family’ – in (birthright) citizenship, immigration regimes, and political-economic frames helps clarify the amplification of global inequalities and the power of stigmatisations to fuel nationalist attachments and anti-migrant hostilities. Foregrounding intimacy and integrating typically disparate lines of inquiry advances our analyses of today's often opaque yet intense racisms and their globally problematic effects.

This article highlights Marysia Zalewski's scholarship as reflective and generative of the multifarious sources and contributions of feminist IR and its ‘scavenger methodologies’, which seek to centre subjects, processes, and practices historically excluded, ignored, and minimised. The productive depth of her scholarship is evident in the uniqueness of each article in this collection, all of which distinctly document the uses to which Zalewski's writings can be uniquely put. Each of the articles performs a ‘turning operation’ of sorts on the elementals of feminist IR (gender/women/power/difference) and brings further elaborations of masculinities, sexualities, silences as well as screams, that shift and change what is taken to be feminist research/method – at each point disordering our sensibilities and our assumptions as to what we do when we do feminist work.

The aim of this article is to examine whether and how diplomacy may be gendered, symbolically and rhetorically, using US representations of diplomacy as a case. Prior scholarship on gender and contemporary diplomacy is sparse but has shown that the symbolic figure of ‘the diplomat’ has come to overlap tightly with ‘man’ and be associated with traits often attributed to masculinity. Inspired by queer international relations methods, relying on the concept of ‘figuration’ and focused on US news media and biographies of diplomats from the past decade, this article uncovers and examines a palette of feminised figurations also at play in US representations of diplomacy, including the diplomat as ‘the “soft” non-fighter’, ‘the relationship builder’, ‘the gossip’, ‘the cookie-pusher’, and ‘the fancy Frenchman’. These feminised figurations alternate between configuring the diplomat as a woman and – more commonly – a (feminised) man. The analysis complicates rather than displaces existing claims, highlighting the importance of attention to slippages and challenges to dominant masculinised subject positions.

This article explores the way in which Russian and Chinese governments have rearticulated global trends towards active citizenship and participatory governance, and integrated them into pre-existing illiberal political traditions. The concept of ‘participatory authoritarianism’ is proposed in order to capture the resulting practices of local governance that, on the one hand enable citizens to engage directly with local officials in the policy process, but limit, direct, and control civic participation on the other. The article explores the emergence of discourses of active citizenship at the national level and the accompanying legislative development of government-organised participatory mechanisms, demonstrating how the twin logics of openness and control, pluralism and monism, are built into their rationale and implementation. It argues that as state bureaucracies have integrated into international financial markets, so new participatory mechanisms have become more important for local governance as government agencies have lost the monopoly of information for effective policymaking. Practices of participatory authoritarianism enable governments to implement public sector reform while directing increased civic agency into non-threatening channels.

Time constitutes social life and time management is central to the everyday conduct of international politics. For some reason, however, the practice turn in International Relations (IR) has produced knowledge about how past practices constitute international politics but not about how the future is also a constitutive feature in and on social life. Introducing a novel perspective on practice and temporality, the article argues that intersubjectively situated representations of the future by practitioners in international politics contribute substantially to our understanding of political processes and the making of international politics. To develop what appears a contradiction in terms – that ‘future-practices’ are driven by tacit know-how and conscious reflection simultaneously – the article develops the concept of doxic futures: representations of the future rooted in practical knowledge and tacit assumptions about the self-evident nature of the social world. The argument is illustrated with a case study of European security and defence diplomacy after the UK voted to leave the EU. Through the envisioning of two concrete doxic futures, a ‘Europe of buying together’ and the UK as a third country in EU defence, diplomats effectively tried to save European security and defence cooperation from the potentially disintegrating effects of Brexit.

While the last few decades of political economic history give the impression that the logic of neoliberalism is inexorable, this article argues that once we look further backwards and dig into recently declassified archives documenting the early days of neoliberal theory and practice, we find a messier picture. Economic policymakers in Thatcher and Reagan's administrations in the early 1980s did not set out to ‘fail forwards’ by generating a crisis that would enable a statist kind of neoliberalism. The key ideas that they drew on and the policies that they used to put them into practice sought to transform the economy indirectly, through a set of performative policy devices that they believed would generate a dramatic shift in people's inflationary expectations, lowering inflation without provoking a major recession. Archival records make it clear that these efforts were not only a failure, but also one that policymakers were acutely aware of at the time. By examining these quiet failures in economic policy, we can better understand how these governments simultaneously failed in their early efforts to introduce neoliberal economics and yet ultimately succeeded in transforming their economies in important respects – and in legitimising those transformations by narrating failure as a kind of inevitable success.

The article revisits the problematic relationship between feminist theory and praxis through the writings of Marysia Zalewski, one of the foremost feminist theorists of IR. Zalewski has dealt with this relationship through her work on methodology. In three sections, the article explores: (a) her engagement with standpoint theory through her interventions in feminist IR debates with ‘the mainstream’; (b) her adoption of feminist postmodernism, embracing a deconstructive posture and in particular the notion of ‘hauntings’ as a methodological device; and (c) the development of a distinctive methodological attitude that seeks to involve, rather than explain or instruct. Crucially, for Zalewski, theory and praxis/politics cannot be separated methodologically: languages of mastery and an attitude of ‘doing something’ are of one cloth. The paper ends with a reflection about how L. H. M. Ling's method of ‘chatting’ could be enacted in engagements that cross the social fields of academia and policy.

Prevailing political and ethical approaches that have been used to both critique and propose alternatives to the existing food system are lacking. Although food security, food sovereignty, food justice, and food democracy all offer something important to our reflection on the global food system, none is adequate as an alternative to the status quo. This article analyses each in order to identify the prerequisites for such an alternative approach to food governance. These include a focus on goods like nutrition and health, equitable distribution, supporting livelihoods, environmental sustainability, and social justice. However, other goods, like the interests of non-human animals, are not presently represented. Moreover, incorporating all of these goods is incredibly demanding, and some are in tension. This raises the question of how each can be appropriately accommodated and balanced. The article proposes that this ought to be done through deliberative democratic processes that incorporate the interests of all relevant parties at the local, national, regional, and global levels. In other words, the article calls for a deliberative approach to the democratisation of food. It also proposes that one promising potential for incorporating the interests of all affected parties and addressing power imbalances lies in organising the scope and remit of deliberation around food type.

Despite the wide repository of knowledge about conflict-related sexual violence that now exists, there remains a lack of understanding about how victims/survivors of such violence themselves make sense of and frame their experiences in conversation with global and local discourses and with the categorisations that underpin support programmes. Such sense-making is important not only because the ways in which violence is categorised shape a victim/survivor's ability to access particular forms of recognition and support, but also because it is central in how shattered selves and worlds are remade in the aftermath of violence. Drawing on individual and group interviews conducted with refugees living in Kampala, Uganda, this article charts how framings of ‘torture’ and ‘sexual violence’ become meaningful in participants’ accounts in the (re)formation of themselves as subjects after violent victimisation. We trace how participants navigate the heteronormative societal and legal norms that shape their subjectivity and the effects of the violence they experienced through the deeply gendered and political work that these terms do in their narratives. Our analysis thus highlights and reminds us to pay attention to the political stakes involved in fluid processes of categorising injury.

Ideational variables have frequently been employed in positivist-minded and materialist analyses of state behaviour. Almost inevitably, because of these commitments, such studies run into theoretical challenges relating to the use of ideas. In this article, I suggest that integrating ideational factors in positivist and materialist approaches to state behaviour requires: (1) distinguishing conceptually between interests and ideation as well as between individual beliefs and social ideas; and (2) addressing challenges of operationalisation and measurability. To that end, I employ neoclassical realism as a case study. I argue that a re-conceptualisation of ideas as externalised individual beliefs employed in political deliberation allows neoclassical realists to focus on how ideas and ideational competition intervene in the transmission belt from materially given interests to foreign policy choice. At the same time, it more clearly operationalises ideas as identifiable in language and communication. I suggest this reconceptualisation, while consistent with realist paradigmatic assumptions, need not be limited to neoclassical realism. Instead, transposed to different paradigms, it would similarly allow positivist-minded constructivists and institutionalists to avoid a conceptually and methodologically awkward equation of different ideational factors.

My current interest in silence, gender, and power owes much to discussions with Marysia Zalewski over the years. Much of my work has focused on masculinity, gender relations, and gender hierarchies with a focus on security and development in conflict zones. More recently, I have begun to explore silence not as a sign of disempowerment, but as a powerful force that can be used in many ways. This approach enables a more multi-levelled understanding of silence and voice and their many interactions. It has much to tell the Global North, where we prize voice and often underestimate the power of silence.

Edward Snowden exposed the discrepancy between the official US defence discourse of liberal values in cyberspace and secret surveillance and cyber exploitation practices. Situated in the critical literature on security and surveillance, the article proposes that more attention needs to be paid to the constitutive role of transgressive practices for security communities. The article introduces a Lacanian strategy for studying transgression in the US cyber defence community. Through this strategy, a transgressive other – in this case, China in cyberspace – enters the fantasy of the US cyber defence community as the symptom that conceals more fundamental tensions in the US cyber defence. But the community's representation of China in cyberspace represents more than that; China is a fantasmatic object that structures and gives content to a desire for transgressing the official ideals of the US cyber defence. This is why the excessive cyber practices that China is criticised for conducting mirror the secret, disavowed transgressions of the US cyber defence. Transgressions, the article concludes through Lacan, provide the necessary (partial) enjoyment that sustains the US cyber defence community as a solidarity-in-guilt and the official US cyber defence discourse.

This article aims to uncover the socially constructed normative foundation for the alternative East Asian economic development paradigm to neoliberalism in the context of civilisational politics. The question I seek to address is why East Asian states make value claims when promoting their alternative method of economic development. In addressing this question, I make two interrelated arguments. First, I argue that the politics of Asian values can be understood as another case of non-Western society's struggle to demonstrate multiple paths to modernity. Second, on a deeper level, I show that the discourse and narratives on Asian values is part of civilisation politics aimed to recalibrate the place of East Asia in a world consisting of the civilised and the uncivilised, a divide that still remains today in various forms following European expansion in the nineteenth century. In so doing, I shed light on the performative power of ‘the standard of civilisation’, which naturalises the temporal and sequential hierarchy of civilisational identities in world politics. On the basis of this article's findings, I draw out implications of a recalibrated East Asia for the ideas of hierarchy and progress in world politics.

This article proposes the methodological framework of visual narrative analysis through the study of images and narratives. We are interested in the appeal of political storytelling. In applying an approach of layered interpretation, we study images and slogans to consider the more complex underlying narratives in their political and cultural context. Our exploratory case studies draw on material from right-wing populist parties, namely election campaign posters from Germany and the UK as material for the analysis. We find that narratives operate with a ‘fantasmatic logic’, which adds fantasy to politics, to depoliticise and camouflage their radical intent and gain approval by making consent desirable. We identify two exemplary narratives (honest men under threat; proud mothers) that entrench traditional gender roles in accordance with patriarchy and nationalism. Theoretically, our approach contributes to debates in IR on cultural underpinnings in international politics and the construction of collective identities through shared/divided narratives. Visual narrative analysis provides a promising methodological tool for analysing visual representations in their productive relationship with text. This perspective foregrounds the power of political storytelling through fantasmatic appeal and fosters a better understanding of the global rise of populism.

While structural models of empire have recently re-emerged in the theoretical debates in the field of International Relations, a lack of attention has been paid to peripheral actors therein. This is particularly true for the analysis of the peripheries’ relations with polities outside the imperial structure of which the peripheries are a part. In this article, I build a framework to better understand how these extra-imperial ties are translated into peripheral positional power. This framework is constructed on the basis of three core arguments. First, to theorise peripheral power, peripheries need to be positioned in networks outside the imperial structure. Second, the positional power of peripheries depends on the quality of the ties they have to external actors. Peripheries with dense and exclusive ties to external actors are more powerful than those with only sparse and non-exclusive ties. Third, from the different combinations of density and exclusivity arise not only variations in positional power, but also the likely strategies that are engaged in forming alliances with external actors. These logics are illustrated through the study of two cases of the diplomacy of decolonisation: the American Revolutionary War and the Angolan War of Independence.

The International Relations (IR) literature has strongly criticised the invasive and top-down nature of liberal peace, facilitating a reinterpretation of the practice of international intervention in conflict-affected societies. Today, sustaining peace policy approaches advance longer-term missions, give a secondary role to external practitioners, and increasingly accept risks and failures. What is striking is that even when these policy discourses hold out the promise of liberating peacebuilding from dominant and top-down models of liberal intervention, the mood in the field is one of despair. By drawing on John Dewey's work on pragmatism and interviewing practitioners in Bosnia and Kosovo, the article reflects on the morass practitioners find themselves, diagnoses the source of the frustrations, and anticipates the direction of sustaining peace. Pragmatism adumbrates the idea of ‘peacebuilding without peace’, encouraging practitioners to experiment, give primacy to their doings and explore this world without hope of success and dreams of otherworldliness.

In this article, I argue that much of the discourse observable within the UN constitutes neither unnecessary and unproductive ‘talk’ nor efforts to convince outside audiences of its legitimacy, but actually a form of institutional self-legitimation that is key to its ability to function. Using the case of the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), I show that because the organisation has a multifaceted organisational identity, it faces situations where it is forced to choose between multiple but equally appropriate courses of action, and it uses self-legitimation alongside other mechanisms to overcome these tensions. I specify three sets of circumstances in which this occurs, showing how DPKO uses discourse that simplifies and exceptionalises in a bid to reconcile or downplay these contradictions and reassert a cohesive and legitimate organisational identity internally. This simplification and exceptionalisation in turn serve an enabling function, allowing DPKO to continue operating in conditions of complexity by decreasing risk aversion and instilling a deep sense of professional loyalty in staff. At the same time, such discursive processes are costly and may entrench inefficient practices, rendering the effects of self-legitimising discourse paradoxical: they may enable action, but they reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of that action.

Soft power and hard power are conceptualised in International Relations as empirically and normatively dichotomous, and practically opposite – one intangible, attractive, and legitimate, the other tangible, coercive, and less legitimate. This article critiques this binary conceptualisation, arguing that it is discursively constructed with and for the construction of Self and Other. It further demonstrates that practices commonly labelled and understood as soft power and hard power are closely interconnected. Best understood as ‘representational force’ and ‘physical force’ respectively, soft and hard power intertwine through the operation of productive and disciplinary forms of power. We illustrate this argument by analysing the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Both governments exercise representational force in constructing their respective versions of events and Self/Other. The soft/hard power binary itself plays a performative role as the Self is typically associated with soft power and the Other with hard power. The operation of productive power, moreover, privileges the attractiveness of the former and the repellence of the latter, and disciplinary power physically enforces these distinctions on subjects in both states. Finally, reinforced Self/Other distinctions legitimise preparations for violence against the Other on both sides, thus exposing how fundamentally entangled soft and hard power are in practice.

Forestalling sureties about what constitutes violence and feminism and the relationships between violence and feminism have been significant themes in the work of feminist International Relations theorist Marysia Zalewski. I follow how Zalewski, through her work and work with others including myself, interrupts well-trodden ‘trails’ of violence and feminism to open up thinking about both. I consider how her provocative work on violence and particularly feminist violence prefigures and advances cutting-edge critical thought on violence as represented in the ‘Histories of Violence’ project. What I call her ‘palimpsestic’ or multilayered and intertextual approach to violence reveals it as not only destructive, but also productive in terms of breaking with deadening conventions. I also consider her conceptualisation of feminist violence as both epistemic and militant over time in relation to some contemporary feminist insurgencies, the kinds of insurgencies that serve as her muses for breaking out of forms of ‘secured’ feminism and opening space for unbounded feminist thought. Consistent with her insistence that theory (and writing) should provide uncomfortable openings, not comforting foreclosures, I end not with a conclusion about her work, but rather echo her call to resist the kind of ‘knowing’ that suffocates critical thinking and (re)generative feminist thought.