This article makes the case that gender and racial analyses of the constitutive interplay between nation branding and diplomacy advance understandings of how liberal states use feminist agendas in response to political crises. Adopting a feminist post-colonial approach and drawing on a discourse analysis of French diplomatic speeches made in the UN Security Council between July 2011 and December 2019, the article examines how male and female diplomats address France’s accountability failures when French peacekeepers sexually abused children in Central African Republic in 2014–15, widely known as the Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, or SEA crisis. Operating as embodied brand ambassadors, diplomats use affective and performative strategies to progress through the political crisis life cycle quickly and re-establish France’s ontological security. It is contended that while feminist foreign policy and feminist diplomacy serve as short-term solutions to reputational damage, France’s longer-term nation-branding project, which follows a masculine, white-supremacist neoliberal logic, stabilises the grand narrative of the middle power and its projected image as a legitimate strategic leader in global governance. Yet in attempting to control the narrative on the SEA crisis, French diplomats downplay the global crisis of accountability surrounding sexual exploitation and abuse and silence the personal crises of SEA survivors.

Drawing on recent debates in English School (ES) theory, this article develops an analytical framework for examining how states use multilateral institutions, or what ES theorists call ‘secondary institutions’, to reshape ‘primary institutions’, i.e. fundamental practices in international society. The framework highlights the role of states’ agency in international institutional change by shedding light on strategies that they employ to bring about changes in primary institutions. It posits that, although they can seek to directly remould primary institutions, states in practice often seek to bring about primary institutional changes through existing or newly formed secondary institutions and that this is especially the case at the level of regional international societies (RISs). The article demonstrates the utility of the framework by using it to analyse the case of Russia’s peacekeeping policy in the post-Soviet regional international society (PSRIS), focusing on its efforts to institutionalise the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) as an alternative ‘peacekeeping’ actor.

Dehumanisation is one of the most invoked factors in analyses of mass atrocities with many scholars focusing on its crucial role in enabling perpetrators to inflict violence on their victims. However, while its application is widespread, its relevance is often assumed a priori, with claims regarding its empirical relevance often asserted rather than argued for. Not only does its meaning, nature, and function remain amorphous, current scholarship also lacks a general conceptualisation of the basic features that bind the manifold appearances of dehumanisation together. It is this paucity of sustained reflection and particularly the lack of conceptual clarity that the present article seeks to address. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, it aims to deliver a more thoroughgoing appraisal of the nature of dehumanisation as a fundamental violation of plurality to conceptually consolidate and ground its meaning and bind together its diverse manifestations across cases of mass violence.

When should peacekeepers partially or fully withdraw from a country or region in which they are operating? This important question has received little scholarly attention. However, it has profound implications. If peacekeepers depart prematurely, as happened in Rwanda in 1994, the consequences can be disastrous with the potential to lead to widespread preventable deaths and human suffering. If they overstay, peacekeepers risk alienating the population they are seeking to protect and undercutting popular sovereignty at significant economic costs. Striking a balance, we propose a framework for just withdrawal that is both normatively compelling and empirically sound. It focuses on three aspects that are vital for understanding when peacekeepers can depart in an ethically justified manner: just cause, effectiveness, and legitimacy. By considering a number of objections, we also address critics who challenge the overarching premise of peacekeeping or might prefer different standards by which to suggest peacekeepers should stay or depart. Finally, we illustrate our argument with theoretical and empirical examples and a discussion of UN peacekeeping in East Timor.

How did the norm of discrimination become the dominant yardstick to measure the ethics of US airpower? Conventional accounts suggest that as elites and publics embraced norms of discrimination, this pushed US air forces to adopt a precision doctrine, one that demands accurately striking military, and not civilian, targets. Relying on a pragmatic reading of norm contestation and settling, we suggest that conventional explanations have the causal story reversed: it was not the strengthening of the norm of discrimination that led US air forces to commit to precision bombing. It was the commitment to precision bombing that led to the strengthening of the norm of discrimination. As precision technology became available during the interwar period, air-force officers co-opted the language of discrimination to justify their emerging doctrine. This co-optation of the language of discrimination would not only settle these norms as the guiding ethics of airpower. It would also transform them, redefining these norms in ways that privileged the process of precision targeting, rather than the outcome of civilian harm.

This article presents a theoretical and methodological argument for employing a narrative-based approach to explore criminal organisations’ (COs) claims to political authority, accompanied by an empirical example. International Relations scholarship is increasingly interested in the role narratives play in political meaning-making processes, with violent non-state actors (VNSAs) beginning to occupy a central space in such investigations. This work has contributed important insights into how VNSAs, such as terrorists and insurgents, mobilise narratives to challenge state authority. However, this literature still needs to take stock of groups that do not directly challenge the state but rather live within it. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory and using the Sicilian Mafia as a case study, I show that COs exercise and construct their narratives of political authority by reappropriating the state’s key constitutive narratives of space, time, and identity. By reflecting the same form of (statist) political imagination via alternative spatial, temporal, and identity configurations, these groups simultaneously reject and reproduce modern articulations of political authority in their spatio-temporal and identity dimensions.

The term regional security dialogue brings to mind state-organised conferences and events; however, an under-appreciated subset of such dialogues are organised by non-state actors that have unique formal aspects. These quasi-formal dialogues operate alongside, and sometimes in competition to, state-sanctioned processes. Why do some of these forums appear to be more effective at fostering regional dialogue than strictly formal or informal processes with the same goals? Drawing from heterogenous discourse approaches, we address this question by identifying and expanding the concept of the quality of discursive space, as a key feature for the success of security dialogues. We then apply this concept to two of the most successful so-called Track 1.5 security dialogues: the Munich Security Conference (MSC) in Europe and the Shangri-La Dialogue (SLD) in Asia. We analyse these cases using a mix of interviews with participants and organisers, participant observation, and public outputs with the aim of improving the understanding of the role and impact of Track 1.5 diplomacy in the practice of international security. Our findings highlight that it is what we call the quality of discursive space, as a mix of different components in this space, which differentiates effective dialogues from mere policy ‘talk shops’.

This article examines the conditions under which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) gain access to defence administrations when campaigning for transparency around the use of military force. We theorise that gaining access in this traditionally secluded domain is a matter of supply and demand. NGOs can gain access through technical and political information, yet not without demand for these resources, dependent on the politicisation of concerns about the use of force. We focus on the activities of Airwars, an international NGO, and its campaign in the Netherlands (2015–20) to foster transparency about civilian casualties caused by Dutch airstrikes. Our analysis shows that their credible information about air strikes led to access to the defence administration and allowed them to effectively advocate for transparency, mediated by the politicisation of the issue through parliamentary and media attention. Our findings contribute both to the literature on NGO advocacy and to the field of civil-military relations.

This article explores the growth of international civilian-protection concepts since the 1990s and the question of what protection means in a qualitative sense. It makes a significant intervention in advancing a typology of positive and negative protection, allowing more systematic analysis of whether protective practices fulfil the normative goals of internationalised protection and creating openings for expanded imagination of possible protective practices. It is argued that practices of refugee protection during this period have been shaped by logics of externalisation that seek to maintain distance between protector and protected and attenuate cosmopolitan solidarity with vulnerable non-citizens, both of which have detrimental impacts on the depth of protective practices and the experience of protection. These practices occur at the intersection of conflicting interpretative backdrops – between the cosmopolitan-minded commitments to the protection of vulnerable non-citizens and backdrops that frame migration as a problem. Using the case of the United Kingdom (UK) asylum system, the article argues that this is generative of negative protection – practices providing immediate physical protection, but simultaneously constructing conditions of acute vulnerability. Conversely, positive protection might be found in practices that embody fuller solidarity with protected people and enable them to flourish as a socially embedded individuals.

Although Critical Security Studies (CSS) has done much to advance security debates, some shortcomings remain. Its excessive focus on the individual – which we term ‘me’ – reduces CSS' capacity to propose solutions to current global security problems such as pandemics and climate change. This paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on the potential of relational ontologies in Security Studies by introducing Buen Vivir Indigenous cosmopraxes into the debate. Indigenous cosmopraxes such as Sumak Kawsay, Suma Qamaña, and Teko Kavi, we argue, can inform CSS by providing alternative considerations to the pluriverse of ideas that address security crises. These cosmopraxes, which make up the broad notion of Buen Vivir, provide a way to think and enact security from a collective perspective, one that emphasises ‘we’ instead of the liberal self. In that sense, these cosmopraxes allow us to conceive security differently and face insecurities together.

What role do national icons play in a political community’s drive for ontological security? And what implications does this have for global politics? This article situates national icons in service of state ontological security. Icons both unify and divide political communities; therefore they serve, but also disrupt, ontological security-seeking of collectives. Building on research on ontological security and status in International Relations, we examine two case studies of national icons – Vesna Vulović, the celebrated Serbian flight attendant who miraculously survived a major plane crash, and Muhammad Ali, the American boxing legend. Both Vulović and Ali initially generated, and then countered, ontological security for their national communities as they transformed from popular culture celebrities into anti-regime political activists. We conclude the article by discussing opportunities for future avenues of research on icons and the politics of identity going forward.

Recent scholarship on militarisation suggests that Western democracies are threatened by military influence spreading into civilian domains. I contend that this research has identified problematic forms of militarisation, but that more careful attention should be given to different manifestations of this phenomenon. I borrow Herbert Marcuse’s distinction between necessary and surplus repression to show that militarisation can be excusable or excessive, depending on the context and its extent. Militarisation is potentially harmful and should be opposed when it is coercive or promotes militarism. By contrast, militarisation may be necessary if it is beneficial or ineliminable. A degree of militarisation may be desirable insofar as contact between civilians and soldiers promotes the spread of information, ensures that civilians have some influence on the military, and prevents members of the military from feeling detached and resentful. Some militarisation may also be indispensable for guarding against plausible threats or promoting social stability. Thus, militarisation should be treated as a process that has mixed costs and benefits depending on how it is enacted.

The emergence of new nuclear aspirants has posed a great threat to the post-Cold War global non-proliferation regime. These states have adopted a nuclear hedging strategy that has been deemed both strategically risky and politically difficult to maintain. Yet, hedging has not automatically resulted in nuclearisation. We analyse the conditions under which a nuclear hedger shifts its nuclear policy towards one of restraint. Drawing insights from prospect theory, we argue that a nuclear policy shift occurs when a nuclear hedger gains an asymmetric leverage vis-à-vis its adversary. Specifically, a hedging strategy that is based on loss aversion will only be abandoned when a shift in the nuclear aspirant's reference point occurs during negotiations. To test our theoretical arguments, we conduct an in-depth case study of North Korea's nuclear policies throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The empirical study of the changes in North Korea's negotiating stance during the Agreed Framework negotiations and the Six-Party Talks supports our asymmetric leverage thesis. We conclude with broad policy implications for the non-proliferation regime.

The European Union's cooperation with Middle Eastern regimes to counter terrorism and prevent violent extremism has received increased scholarly attention following several terrorist attacks in Europe the last decade. Despite the EU's emphasis on good governance, democracy, and human rights to prevent violent extremism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), I argue that the Union is in fact declining as a ‘normative power’ as it has prioritised a ‘security first’ centred approach. This article demonstrates how the EU's normative projects have, first, appropriated a logic of securitisation; and second, how the Union downplays democracy and good governance in fear of alienating authoritarian key partners in the region. There are consequently inherent limitations to, and contradictions in, the EU's Counter-Terrorism (CT) and Preventing Violent Extremism (PvE) efforts. These conclusions are based on interviews with EU representatives and implementing partners on the ground. The interviews are complemented by an analysis of the scope and focus of the EU's CT and PvE projects. The findings have implications for our understanding of normative powers’ priorities when facing a perceived dilemma of choosing between its security, on the one hand, and its identity and value aspirations, on the other.

How do combat missions, defined as an armed confrontation that causes casualties, shape civil-military relations and military’s role conception? This article argues that militaries that incur combat casualties gain a stronger hand in the civil-military equilibrium. This is because casualties affect domestic political opinion and give prominence to the views expressed by military officials. Civilians are then more deferential to professional military advice. In turn, the military obtains considerable operational freedom, and can pick and choose missions which they find desirable. Second, the military’s role conception – an important determinant of military missions, is shaped most prominently by its combat experience. Militaries sustaining casualties obtain leverage vis-à-vis civilians and based on their institutional preference, they either prioritise or avoid non-traditional missions. While making these arguments, this article examines combat casualties, role conception, and civilian control in India. These concepts as a whole and, the Indian case study especially are surprisingly understudied considering it is among the few non-Western democracies with firm civilian control, a record of overseas intervention operations and a military with varying roles and missions. Analysing India’s experience therefore adds to the literature and illuminates the mechanism through which casualties affect civil-military relations.

The idea of integrative pluralism offers a promising path for the development of theory in international security and international relations. Instead of either trying to shoehorn all theorising into a single, limited paradigm or giving up entirely on theoretical progress, the integrative pluralist approach calls for bringing diverse approaches together. More precisely, integrative pluralism involves explaining specific phenomena by linking causal processes across multiple layers of reality, and then using the findings to inform broader theoretical constructs such as IR theory paradigms. Elements of the integrative pluralism approach are already visible in the work of mainstream scholars such as Snyder and Katzenstein, as well as of critical scholars such as Sjoberg and Hansen, but the field has tended to overlook these scholars’ efforts at theoretical integration. To more explicitly develop integrative pluralism for our field, this article first draws on critical realist philosophy and social theory. It then illustrates how further steps in this direction might be taken, in particular by highlighting the integrative pluralist aspects of Kaufman's applications of symbolic politics theory to explaining ethnic conflict and war more generally.

In this article, I critically examine the ‘Cyber Kill Chain’, a methodological framework for thought and action that shapes both contemporary cybersecurity practice and the discursive construction of security threats. The history and epistemology of the Cyber Kill Chain provide unique insight into the practice of contemporary cybersecurity, insofar as the Kill Chain provides cybersecurity practitioners with predetermined categories and indicators of threat that shape how threats are conceptualised and understood by defenders and suggests actions to secure against them. Locating the origins of the kill chain concept in US military operational logics, its transformation through the anticipatory inquiries of intelligence, and its automation in computational networks, this article argues that the Cyber Kill Chain is emblematic of a vigilant socio-technical logic of security, where human perception, technical sensing, and automation all respond to and co-produce the (in)security through which political security concerns are articulated. This practice makes politics; it excludes, includes, and shapes what is perceived to be dangerous and not, directly impacting the security constructed. Through a critical reading of the Cyber Kill Chain, this article provides insight into cybersecurity practitioners’ epistemic practice and as such contributes to discussions of cybersecurity expertise, threat construction, and the way in which cybersecurity is understood and practised as a global security concern.

Looming decisions on arms control and strategic weapon procurements in a range of nuclear-armed states are set to shape the international security environment for decades to come. In this context, it is crucial to understand the concepts, theories, and debates that condition nuclear policymaking. This review essay dissects the four editions of The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, the authoritative intellectual history of its subject. Using this widely acclaimed work as a looking glass into the broader field of nuclear security studies, we interrogate the field's underlying assumptions and question the correspondence between theory and practice in the realm of nuclear policy. The study of nuclear strategy, we maintain, remains largely committed to an interpretive approach that invites analysts to search for universal axioms and to abstract strategic arguments from the precise circumstances of their occurrence. While this approach is useful for analysing the locutionary dimension of strategic debates, it risks obscuring the power structures, vested interests, and illocutionary forces shaping nuclear discourse. In the conclusion, we lay out avenues for future scholarship.