As populists have formed governments all over the world, it becomes imperative to study the consequences of the rise of populism for International Relations. Yet, systematic academic analyses of the international impact of populist government formation are still missing, and political commentators tend to draw conclusions from few cases of right-wing populism in the Global North. But populism – conceptualised as a ‘thin’ ideology based on anti-elitism and anti-pluralism – takes different shapes across world regions as populists combine it with different ‘thick’ ideologies. To reflect such diversity and gain more systematic insights into the global implications of populism, we focus on cases of populist government formation in the Global South. We find that populists in power are not, per se, more belligerent or less willing to engage globally than their non-populist predecessors. Factors like status seeking or a country's embeddedness in international institutions mitigate the impact of populism. Its most immediate effect concerns procedural aspects: foreign policymaking becomes more centralised and personalised – yet, not entirely unpredictable, given the importance of ‘thick’ ideologies espoused by populist parties and leaders. Rather than changing course entirely, populists in power reinforce existing trends, especially a tendency towards diversifying international partnerships.

With RRW populist actors’ discovery of gender norms as a useful foreign policy tool, narratives constructed in terms of geographical value spaces have become central to the struggle for women's rights. Through a detailed examination of international and domestic actors’ engagement with the failed ratification process of the Istanbul Convention in Ukraine, this article aims to enhance understanding of the appropriateness of the use of these geographical value spaces when describing the struggle to combat GBV in Ukraine, and how connecting gender justice issues to geographically restricted value spaces impacts this fight. It finds that in practice neither the EU – despite Russia's allegations to the contrary – nor domestic political elites in favour of closer cooperation with Europe have provided meaningful support to the ratification of the Istanbul Convention. Faced with this situation, some Ukrainian feminists have increasingly sought to present the struggle to combat gender-based violence in a locally acceptable vernacular. This article, however, concludes that framing the struggle for women's rights in any type of geographical terms – be they of an international or domestic nature – increases the risk of either instrumentalisation of or selective engagement with the feminist agenda.

What does the New Right want from international relations? In this article, we argue that the philosophy of the New Right is not reducible to a negation of internationalism. The New Right coalesce around a conceptualisation of the international driven by analytics and critiques of specific subjects, norms and practices, that should be treated as a distinct international theoretical offering. We refer to this vision as Reactionary Internationalism. This article examines and locates this vision within the intellectual history of nationalism and internationalism by drawing on poststructuralist approaches to intellectual history and drawing evidence from a discourse analysis of recent Lega, Front National, Brexit, and Trump campaigns. We find that, rather than advocating for the end of internationalism, the New Right seeks to reconstitute its normative architecture on the basis of inequality among identities. This entails dismantling liberal economic and rights-based norms and reframing them around transactionalism and power grounded on identity. Reactionary Internationalism emerges as a distinct philosophy that identifies a hegemonic normative bind and advocates its unravelling so as to liberate subjects understood as defined by their birth-cultural identity.

The purpose of this article is to offer a feminist critique of populism, not as a distinct mode of politics, but as an analytical and political concept. As such, it seeks to redirect our attention away from populism, understood as a politics ‘out there’, towards the academic theoretical debates that have given this analytical term a new lease of life and propelled it beyond academic circles into the wider public discourse. In this context, the article develops two broad arguments. The first is that the two prevailing conceptions of populism are marred by anaemic conceptions of power, collective agency and subjectivity and, as such, are unable to present us with a convincing account of why this form of radical politics emerges in the first place, who its protagonists are, and how they come together in collective struggle. The second is that our current frenetic deployment of the term as a blanket descriptor for radical politics of all persuasions does not bode well for feminism politically. For both reasons, I conclude that feminists need to resist the current ‘populist hype’.

The aim of this article is to understand populism as a hegemonic project involving a struggle for power between different social forces. We take a critical realist approach in defining populism. This implies several things. We develop a new approach to understanding populist politics by taking neither a purely discursive (Laclau), nor a solely structural (Poulantzas), but a critical realist approach and analysing the three-way relationship between structural conditions, agency, and institutional framework. Second, it implies that populist politics is composed of complex and often contradictory dynamics and emergent features involving mainly domestic but also international processes. We develop this through a combination of three concepts – passive revolution, hegemonic depth, and partial hegemony. These indicate how a hegemonic project is situated in deeper social relations and how hegemonic leadership responds to this. We take the policies of AKP government in Turkey as a case in populist hegemonic project. We demonstrate that AKP has followed different hegemonic projects during its rule changing from an initial majoritarian populist politics to one of neoliberal authoritarian populism as it has consolidated its hegemonic depth. These different populist projects involve alternative visions of Turkey but are nevertheless all compatible with a global neoliberal agenda.

After a genocide, leaders compete to fill the postwar power vacuum and establish their preferred story of the past. Memorialisation, including through building memorials, provides a cornerstone of political power. The dominant public narrative determines the plotline; it labels victims and perpetrators, interprets history, assigns meaning to suffering, and sets the post-atrocity political agenda. Therefore, ownership of the past, in terms of the public account, is deeply contested. Although many factors affect the emergence of a dominant atrocity narrative, this article highlights the role of international interactions with genocide memorials, particularly how Western visitors, funders, and consultants influence the government's narrative. Western consumption of memorials often reinforces aspects of dark tourism that dehumanise victims and discourage adequate context for the uninformed visitor. Funding and consultation provided by Western states and organisations – while offering distinct benefits – tends to encourage a homogenised atrocity narrative, which reflects the values of the global human rights regime and existing standards of memorial design rather than privileging the local particularities of the atrocity experience. As shown in the cases of Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia, Western involvement in public memory projects often strengthens the power of government narratives, which control the present by controlling the past.

Over the past two decades, constructivist International Relations (IR) scholars have produced substantial knowledge on the diffusion and adoption of global norms, emphasising the role of Western norm entrepreneurs in constructing and promoting new norms to passive, generally non-Western, norm takers. An emergent literature on norm dynamics unsettles this narrative of linear progress, highlighting the agency of diverse actors, including the agency of non-Western norm entrepreneurs, in normative change. This article contributes to this recent norm research by exploring the normative agency of local actors in the Turkish context, who have actively engaged in normative contestation over the meaning of gender equality. More specifically, the article reveals the crucial role of a pro-government, conservative women's organisation in subverting global gender equality norms and in promoting a local norm of ‘gender justice’ as an alternative. The article furthers research on norm contestation by analysing the discursive strategies and justifications local norm makers have adopted in the Turkish context upon encountering norms that challenged their normative beliefs and practices. Finally, the article critically engages with postsecular feminism, highlighting the agency of a religiously informed, conservative women's organisation as a non-Western norm entrepreneur.

This article employs a postcolonial historical sociological approach to studying state formation in Iraq between 1914–24. In doing so, it synthesises insights from the ‘historical’ and ‘imperial’ turns in International Relations (IR), to understand the state as a processual and relational entity shaped by the imperial relations through which it emerged. Drawing on the case of Iraq, this article demonstrates how British imperial relations (‘international’) interlaced with anti-colonial struggles (‘domestic’) to foster a historically specific pattern of Iraqi state formation. In making these claims, this article contributes to bridging IR's analytical divide between ‘international’ and ‘domestic’ spaces, while undermining IR's universalist assumptions about the ‘spread’ of the state from Europe to the Arab world. Rather, this article demonstrates that the imperial encounter was constitutive of the type of state that emerged, thereby highlighting the agency of anti-colonial struggles in producing historically specific patterns of state domination.

Traditional approaches to questions about nomos in IR typically focus upon either its establishment and the formal structures that emerge through interaction within a clearly delineated spatial area, or an exploration of US hegemony in the post-2003 world. In this article I posit a different approach, building on the ideas of Giorgio Agamben, which grounds nomos as a spatialisation of the exception within conditions of neoliberal modernity. I suggest that within the global nomos are more localised nomoi. These localised nomoi are a consequence of the spatialisation of the exception and a fundamental tension between localisation and ordering. I argue that while sovereign power has been a source of contemporary scholarship, such explorations have paid scant attention to the regulatory power of normative values and their capacity to create order within space. Such norms allow for a greater awareness of how sovereign power can be mobilised in and of itself as a form of contestation. Locating such debates in the Middle East, I explore the concept of nomos to understand how struggle over the localisation and ordering of space helps us to better understand contemporary political life.

While the study of games and gaming has increased in International Relations in recent years, a corresponding exploration of play has yet to be developed in the field. While play features in several key areas – including game theory, videogames and popular culture, and pedagogical role-plays and simulations – little work has been done to analyse its presence in, and potentials for, the discipline. The aim of this article is to introduce the study of play to IR. It does this by demonstrating that play is political, and that it is at work across the global arena. Drawing on the deconstructive tradition associated with Jacques Derrida, its core contribution is a theorisation of play. The central argument developed is that play is (auto)deconstructive. By this I mean (1) that play precipitates an unravelling of any attempt at its conceptualisation, and (2) that this illustrates the value of a deconstructive approach to international theory. This claim is substantiated through an analysis of four key binary oppositions derived from Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens. Having shown how play powerfully deconstructs its own conceptual foundations, I argue that a playful approach offers a robust challenge to entrenched assumptions in international theory.