This article serves as the introduction to a Special Issue of the European Journal of International Security titled ‘What the War on Terror Leaves Behind’. In it, we seek to contextualise and summarise the diverse contributions of this collection, which is animated by four overarching questions: (i) More than 20 years after the attacks of 11 September 2001, is the War on Terror now, finally, over? (ii) What, if any, legacies remain from the post-9/11 way of thinking and doing counterterrorism? (iii) What is the significance of the War on Terror’s legacies or absence thereof? and, (iv) How do the War on Terror’s impacts and effects sit within other historical contexts and (dis)continuities? The article begins with a brief overview of some of the conceptual and political ambiguities of the War on Terror itself, before situating the issue in relation to issues of continuity and change anticipated by the four questions above. A second section then explores the urgency of these questions for academic debate, and in the ‘real world’ of international security as experienced by states, communities, and other subjects. A third section then summarises the argument and contributions of the articles in the issue –highlighting the lack of agreement on key issues within these debates.

For more than two decades, Iran’s nuclear programme has concerned policymakers and scholars alike. Whether speeding up uranium enrichment, slowing down international negotiations, or disrupting the timing of key initiatives, actions around Iran’s nuclear programme bear a clear time signature. Yet systematic accounts of the importance of time in shaping foreign and security policymaking have been largely neglected. Through foreign policy timing theory’s (FP4D) reconceptualisation of time we show how actors both constructed and then used time to pursue their strategic interests, creating, altering, and sabotaging the timing mechanism linking Iranian nuclear technology and international sanctions. These manipulations of time by both domestic and international actors resulted in prolonged international negotiations and fluctuating periods of crisis and produced a temporally flawed agreement frozen in time. We consider time’s impact on the current challenges and future direction of nuclear diplomacy with Iran as well as its importance for broader nuclear security issues.

According to conventional wisdom, a great power engaging in international retrenchment regularly incurs tremendous costs. Following its withdrawal from a commitment abroad, the argument goes, windows of opportunity emerge that rivals exploit to their benefit, thus imposing significant costs on the retrenching great power. I argue that pundits and policymakers consistently overestimate the dangers associated with strategic withdrawals: great powers can – and in the past frequently have – successfully engaged in international retrenchment without creating opportunities for their rivals to gain significant strategic benefits. To make this case, I develop a new typology of international retrenchment strategies based on the kind and degree of disengagement they entail and demonstrate that most types do not regularly pave the way for rival gains. I support my argument through a series of plausibility probes: the Soviet retrenchment from Romania in the 1950s; the US retrenchment from Korea in the 1970s; and the US retrenchment from Western Europe in the 1990s.

Irredentist disputes have produced distinct political ethnoterritories under the de jure sovereignty of recognised parent states, but the de facto political authority of external national homelands. This study problematises the relationship between national homeland and claimed ethnoterritory as a nested game in which, in addition to bargaining with each other, they face internal competition, outbidding, and changing costs of conflict, ultimately reducing commitment to external-facing bargains. This study contends that homelands pursuing irredentist conflict can reduce uncertainty and increase commitment from ethnoterritories by building hegemonic cross-border clientelist pyramids that link ethnoterritorial publics’ and elites’ political survival and livelihoods to supporting homelands’ preferences. Further, these structures marginalise alternative elites who may seek to contravene preferences by escalating conflict and increasing costs on homelands or bargaining across ethnic cleavages. Case studies of protracted conflicts in Cyprus, Kosovo, and Croatia support this argument and further find that public-sector distribution linked to the homeland is most effective in reducing competition and uncertainty, thereby increasing long-term commitment to preferences.

The integration of ‘AI’ technologies into weapon systems introduces a complex dimension to international relations and security, championing technological solutions for enduring warfare challenges, notably enhancing ‘situational awareness’ through advances such as automated ‘vision’. However, the discourse, particularly in Western militaries like that of the United States, often overlooks inherent limitations and issues in AI-based warfare. This paper explores ‘AI’s’ implications for military vision by inter alia scrutinising the US military’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) process. It argues that the US military actively transforms the observation, decision, and action apparatus, progressively substituting human vision and decision-making, leading to a multidimensional de-visualisation. This denotes fundamental changes in human perception, reshaping knowledge, control, and agency dynamics. In conclusion, the paper suggests an imminent era of de-visualisation in the military – a deliberate relinquishment of human control for perceived military efficiency and effectiveness. This marks a transformative shift, urging nuanced consideration of the profound impact of ‘AI’ technologies on warfare dynamics.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has moved attention within International Security back to Great Power Politics and interstate war, and away from phenomena like ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ and lone actor terrorism. Is the War on Terror paradigm receding? This paper argues that counter-radicalisation imaginaries and counter-extremism programming will all remain stubbornly present despite the shift back to interstate war. The resilience of domestic War on Terror policies will stem from their integration within local municipality activity and social policy during the second decade of the 21st century. These policy areas and levels are detached from the international security community, meaning that shifts in attention at the global level will have little effect upon localised national security practices. The paper then interrogates how counterterrorism agendas have so successfully entered the world of social policy and local public administration, using genealogical methods to trace how social security and crime prevention were historically prefaced upon defence. The paper traces the policy paradigm of ‘social defence’ which dominated mid-20th century international organisations, targeting non-criminal juveniles with pre-emptive interventions to prevent ‘dangerous persons’ imperilling society. Effectively, this untold history of crime prevention in Europe demonstrates the profound interlocking of national security, social policy and defence across the 20th century, with implications for the resilience of this triad.

Retaining operational effectiveness in a low-carbon world will require military innovation and change. Indeed, there has been growing acknowledgement within some defence ministries that as the world decarbonises a military energy transition is essential. In this paper, we illustrate how calls for a military energy transition have gained renewed traction within the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) since 2018. Empirically, we draw on semi-structured interviews with 46 officials and armed forces personnel, conducted by the authors between June and October 2023. To structure our analysis, we adopt a multilevel perspective (MLP) from the field of Sustainability Transitions. Combining the MLP with insights from the literature on military innovation, we shed light on the ways proponents of ‘low-carbon warfare’ have challenged the ‘high-carbon’ sociotechnical regime that currently dominates the MoD. We also explain why more rapid and disruptive change has been stymied. By centring attention on the extent of ‘alignment’ between internal and external sources of change, our MLP makes a valuable contribution to understanding why the struggle for military change often unfolds in non-linear ways.

While there is literature on ‘populist securitisation’ and on the ‘securitisation of Islam’, the possibility that some populists may desecuritise Islam is not sufficiently explored. Left-wing populist parties have demonstrated solidarity towards Muslim minorities in Europe through a discourse based on inclusionary rhetoric and deconstruction of the securitising narratives promoted by mainstream and populist right-wing parties. However, their attitude towards Islam can be ambiguous. This paper argues that left-wing populists tend to desecuritise Islam. However, desecuritisation happens in ways that do not always accommodate Muslims’ religious freedoms. This happens because the driver of the left-wing populist desecuritisation of Islam lies in the left-wing thick ideology surrounding populism and not in the populist thin core. I illustrate this argument through the case study of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing populist party La France Insoumise. Through a discourse analysis of texts from 2009 to 2022, I show that Mélenchon has predominantly desecuritised Islam. While his desecuritisation is populist, it has not been truly emancipatory for Muslims. Although a more committed fight against Islamophobia has emerged since 2019, Mélenchon’s ideological attachment to laïcité hinders a full rearticulation of French political community based on genuine recognition of Muslims’ religious freedoms.

Lists have come to define terrorism. In the absence of an agreed-upon definition of what constitutes terrorism, proscription, or the inclusion of non-state armed groups on terrorist lists, has created a new category, a new reality. The material and symbolic consequences of these lists have been explored in human rights law and critical terrorism studies literature. But as the world seems to shift away from the terrorist framing, what happens to the ‘terrorists’ stuck on these lists?

Grounded in empirical research with listed non-state armed groups the article explores how listed actors themselves react to the listings. They should not be seen as mere passive recipients of these labels and lists – they are active agents and able to cope strategically with this stigma. Building on Rebecca Adler-Nissen’s work on stigma in world politics, the article shifts the focus from state to non-state actors and assesses how different listed groups cope using Adler-Nissen’s typology of stigma recognition, stigma rejection, and counter-stigmatisation. This diversity in reaction is unpacked through three case studies (ETA, Hezbollah, and FARC). While some armed groups have tried to explicitly reject the label imposed on them, others have embraced it.

The article traces what happens to the ‘terrorists’, how they are reacting, and whether they can ever escape their condition. Listing regimes have enabled the continuation of the war on terror through their embeddedness in the multilateral system, creating a permanence that can endlessly be reactivated.

What are the legacies of the war on terror? This paper seeks to answer this question through an analysis of vernacular uses of terrorism discourse in political commentary on the Ukraine war. The paper describes how the set of tropes, ideas, and recurrent metaphors that constituted the historical backbone of narratives about terrorism before and after 9/11 is now being mobilised in the context of interstate conflict. Instead of rejecting such deployments of terrorism as lay misappropriations of an otherwise-objective concept, we argue that they evidence the aesthetic force of terrorism discourse in organising our ethical relationship to different experiences of (in)human suffering. The paper advances the concept of terrorism as an aesthetic signifier, to provide two contributions to terrorism studies. First, we argue that narrative approaches to the study of political violence in IR can only move forward if they bypass the field’s traditional framing of terrorism – which we dub the (il)legitimacy trap – and push the boundaries of critique beyond the idea of terrorism as unacceptable violence. Second, we contend that IR scholars must situate the signifiers orbiting the discourse on terror within wider racialised aesthetic regimes dictating the visibility and invisibility of collective suffering. With these two moves, we hope to bring more attention to the question of victimisation in terrorism studies, a field historically focused on perpetrators and the conditions of perpetration of violence.

Leaders play a central role in world politics, and threat perception is a crucial element in the study and practice of International Relations (IR). Yet existing accounts of how leaders perceive threats are inadequate, drawing on an incomplete notion of leaders as (ir)rational information processors that pays no attention to the leader’s experience of danger as it unfolds in time and how such experience is structured. By integrating a framework developed by linguist Ray Jackendoff to describe the experience of language with the study of danger in International Relations, and by employing an interpretive textual analysis technique to danger descriptions made by world leaders embedded in different historical and cultural settings constructing different security dangers, I develop and illustrate the ‘danger framework’. In describing the unique features with which leaders experience security dangers, the danger framework theorises the qualia of danger experience and how it is organised into the conscious field of leaders. In doing so, the paper makes progress on three problems for existing accounts of threat perception in IR, illuminates important research puzzles, and provides the literature on experience and Ontological Security Studies (OSS) with micro-foundations.

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.

What explains the revanchism of (post-)imperial states? This question has renewed salience amid Russia’s expanded war against Ukraine in 2022. In this article, we conceptualise revanchism as a foreign policy preference that involves reclaiming territory once controlled. We also advance a new explanation for revanchism that emphasises elite continuity in those states that experience territorial loss. Elite continuity matters because the ruling political class in (post-)imperial states, which was socialised under the old regime, preserves certain beliefs about world politics and the perceived legitimacy of their territorial claims. We show that elite continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet political leadership in Moscow helps explain Russia’s revanchism better than those alternative explanations that we derive from the International Relations literature. To substantiate our argument, we compile a novel dataset to operationalise elite continuity across regimes and use discursive evidence and other indicators of elite attitudes towards the desirability of reclaiming lost territory. We also discuss the applicability of our theory to other cases.

Two decades into the ‘war on terror’, attention is rapidly shifting away from terrorism. Increasing geopolitical competition between the US and China and Russia’s war in Ukraine prompted talk about a watershed moment in global politics marked by a return of great power competition. To what extent has this paradigm shift – from terrorism to ‘traditional’ considerations of military security from external invasion – taken place in Southeast Asia? Building on securitisation theory, this article argues that the war on terror did not mark a universal historical-political period as it is often presented. In Southeast Asia, so-called non-traditional threats such as terrorism have concerned states since their independence. Therefore, Southeast Asia continued to prioritise ‘traditional’ security threats alongside ‘non-traditional’ ones in what is commonly described as its comprehensive approach to security. Consequently, when the ‘return to geopolitics’ began influencing military doctrine and preparation amongst NATO countries, a similar shift was absent in Southeast Asia. We argue that the region has seen varied emphases on non-traditional versus traditional security threats but did not experience the paradigm shift suggested by the US-dominated security narrative. Southeast Asia’s comprehensive security constellation underscores the need for a more pluralistic and eclectic approach to the study of international relations.

This article brings a pragmatic perspective to the analysis of threat perception in two important ways. First, as does the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, the article joins perception (or knowledge) together with response (action). Perception and response, knowledge and action, are inextricably linked as people learn through the creation of knowledge what is useful in the world. It is in this sense that pragmatists understand the perception and response to threats as evolved practices that are conjoined. Second, the paper explores threat perception and response under the condition of radical uncertainty. I explore the kinds of strategies leaders can use to respond to perceived threat in a context of radical uncertainty, the defining characteristic of contemporary world politics, and explore the advantages of pragmatic strategies that proceed to look for ‘what works in the world’ as provisional responses to perceived threats through iterative, ongoing experimental processes.

This article further theorises and develops the notion of a threat of abandonment while trying to elucidate the applicability and usefulness of this concept in the case of Ukraine in its fight against Russia since 2014. If Ukraine perceives the European Union (EU) as weakened by multiple crises, it may translate this image into a scenario of less attention to Ukraine and its problems, and – ultimately – to a threat of abandonment, of being left alone with a powerful aggressor. Theoretically, we employ a perceptual approach. We contribute to the literature on threats of abandonment, linking it to the existence of critical expectation gaps and introducing amplifying conditions that tend to result in such gaps: a broken frame of involvement and a perceived moral injury. We also introduce a set of key factors behind a perceived risk or threat of abandonment. Empirically, we investigate how Ukrainian elites think, feel, and speak about the threat of abandonment and to what extent the two amplifying conditions were perceived to be present. Our data come from 50 in-depth interviews with Ukrainian decision makers (2016–17, C3EU Jean Monnet Network) and 53 experts’ comments published in 2022 by a Ukrainian leading social research group, Razumkov’s Centre.

This article critically examines the major shortcomings in multi-country security investments in East Africa during the war on terror. It argues that these investments have not only failed to adequately recognise African contexts but also falls short of recognising the agency of local communities in counterterrorism efforts. Drawing on critical terrorism and security studies, as well as excerpts from interviews with practitioners in Kenya, the article identifies gaps in the prevailing approach that treats Africa as a unitary entity and critiques the notion of universality of knowledge ingrained in these interventions. By taking a decolonial perspective, the article challenges some prevailing constructions about Africa, linked to the war on terror, as the source of this notion of universality of knowledge. By highlighting the connection of counterterrorism strategies to coloniality and the systemic exclusion of subaltern voices, the discussion suggests that a more contextually informed approach is a precursor to envisioning Africa positioned beyond the war on terror.

Dominant debates about China’s growing presence in the Pacific Islands – through infrastructure, aid, trade, and investment – suggest that Chinese material power directly translates to influence and effective interference in Pacific states’ domestic and foreign affairs. These perspectives fail to clarify the causal link between Chinese economic statecraft and Pacific governments’ alignment with Beijing’s interests. They also deny Pacific people agency, overlooking how power relations are mediated by Pacific state and non-state actors operating across complex political and socio-economic structures. We challenge such rationalist conceptualisations of Chinese power by developing a constructivist taxonomy of power as presence (dormant capability), influence (socialisation), and interference (incentives), and applying it to the Melanesian subregion. We argue that Chinese power is not merely material, causal, and unidirectional. Chinese power can also (re)shape the identities and interests of Pacific elites and publics in a constitutive manner, potentially aligning their ideas about substantive norms, rules, and practices guiding their foreign relations with Chinese ‘core interests’ and perspectives on regional and global politics.

Recent critical scholarship on terrorism has centred on matters of race, class, and gender regarding how counterterrorism policies are connected to multiple systems of hierarchical power relations. This article builds upon this scholarship and looks towards the future. It engages with understandings of emancipatory futures in critical scholarship on terrorism while drawing upon abolitionist and anarchist political thought to expand understandings of such futures. Anarchist and abolitionist thinking are useful for considering futures beyond the ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) because of their anti-state and anti-domination orientations and focus on building alternatives to prevent and manage violence apart from contemporary ‘counterterrorism’. After providing an outline of anarchist and abolitionist thought, the article connects these to contemporary examples drawn from the United States and Nepal. In doing so, it theorises and imagines futures for preventing violence and building public security that are linkedto anarchist and abolitionist understandings of violence and the state. In contrast to ‘power politics’ which centres on the state, an anarchist abolitionist approach explores how safety and security can be reimagined and remadein the absence of a state.

Threat perception provokes a range of behaviour, from cooperation to conflict. Correctly interpreting others’ behaviour, and responding optimally, is thought to be aided by ‘stepping into their shoes’ (i.e. mentalising) to understand the threats they have perceived. But IR scholarship on the effects of attempting this exercise has yielded mixed findings. One missing component in this research is a clear understanding of the link between effort and accuracy. I use a US-based survey experiment (study N = 839; pilot N = 297) and a novel analytic approach to study mentalising accuracy in the domain of threat perception. I find that accurately estimating why someone feels threatened by either climate change or illegal immigration is conditional on sharing a belief in the issue’s overall dangerousness. Similar beliefs about dangerousness are not proxies for shared political identities, and accuracy for those with dissimilar beliefs does not exceed chance. Focusing first on the emotional states of those who felt threatened did not significantly improve accuracy. These findings suggest that: (1) effort does not guarantee accuracy in estimating the threats others see; (2) emotion understanding may not be a solution to threat mis-estimation; and (3) misperception can arise from basic task difficulty, even without information constraints or deception.