The number of global environmental institutions has increased dramatically over the past decade. Yet environmental governance is widely seen as failing. Focusing on biodiversity politics, we argue that many key governance institutions, particularly those advancing market solutions, are themselves deeply implicated in this persistent failure. Drawing on the sociology of expertise, we show how two recently established institutions – the European Business and Nature Platform and the Network for Greening the Financial System – attempt to address the uncomfortable reality of biodiversity governance failures and the risks of their own future failures by creating a series of diversions to deflect attention and by displacing the focus of biodiversity governance from core issues to their own efforts to develop metrics. These dynamics render these institutions both ‘failure-proof’ and inherently ‘failure-prone’, ultimately reinforcing rather than resolving the problems they aim to address.

In this paper, we detail and critique dominant narratives of war crime apologia. These narratives portray the circumstances of a war crime, the perpetrator’s character and motives, and the broader context in which the crime occurred, in ways that minimise or negate the perpetrator’s moral, and sometimes legal, blameworthiness. In section one, we identify and critique three broad categories: (1) individualising narratives (‘uncommon practice’), (2) excusatory narratives (‘essence of war’), and (3) justificatory narratives (‘tragic necessity’). Drawing on a range of real world examples, we outline the features of these narratives and the underlying theory of moral responsibility and blameworthiness on which they implicitly depend. In section two, we elucidate the role of these narratives in the promotion and perpetuation of socially, politically, and legally harmful attitudes towards war crimes. By advancing self-serving perpetrator-centric views about responsibility and blame, these narratives cultivate a cultural and legal toleration and, in some cases, celebration, of atrocity. They also perpetuate a distorted image of war itself, as a space that cannot accommodate moral and legal restraints. This image of war, we argue, weakens the post-Geneva consensus about the reach and limits of battlefield violence and makes the future commission of war crimes more likely. In conclusion, we consider how these narratives could be challenged within military institutions, and in the political and social realm.

The political representation and agency of young people in international politics is still poorly understood, notwithstanding sustained interest in the pluralisation and diversification of transnational civil society and the ‘opening up’ of IOs in international relations (IR) scholarship. In this article, we put forward a theoretical framework for the study of youth representation in IR that is at once responsive to the specificities of youth and, at the same time, contributes to theory-building on political representation of newly recognised constituencies in international institutions overall. Theoretically, we build on constructivist and performative theories of representation, and we use our empirical insights to extend and qualify these theories. Empirically, we provide the first in-depth study of youth representation in global health governance. Based on an interpretive analysis of policy documents and qualitative interviews with youth participants at three major global health events, our study explores prevalent portrayals of youth as a constituency and problematises the legitimising effects of these portrayals. Moreover, we expose how multiple barriers and intersecting inequalities constrain young people’s encounters with exclusive spaces of global health policy-making and we point to the reflective and ambiguous ways in which young people embrace, enact, and question ‘youth’ as a political category.

This article argues that the role of surrender in shaping international legitimacy has been largely overlooked – particularly its symbolic dimension. Challenging dominant views that reduce victory and defeat to moments of rupture, it adopts a long-term, relational perspective, reframing surrender as embedded in ongoing processes that shape and reshape legitimacy over time. It explores how symbols that become central during surrender – including foreign and domestic leaders – can mediate tensions between coercion–consent, pride–stigma, autonomy–dependence, while fostering social cohesion across domestic and international societies. Drawing on case studies, process sociology, complexity theory, the English School, and Thucydides, it demonstrates how the symbolic management of surrender can lead to path dependencies that influence state-formation, a defeated state’s identity, and regional integration. Emphasising the fluidity and political weight of symbolic meanings, it advances a relational understanding of hegemonic legitimacy. In doing so, it links the origins of legitimacy to its continuous development and critiques both simplistic victor’s peace narratives and process-reductive histories. Ultimately, it illuminates not only the challenges but also the symbolic opportunities for constructing legitimacy in an interdependent world – underscoring that power endures through its symbolic anchoring in meaning and, with it, the hope for reconciliation despite defeat.

Over the last decade, the Scottish Government have pursued a positive, highly visible immigration politics, despite Scotland lacking formal immigration powers and being enveloped within a United Kingdom that has simultaneously pursued an increasingly securitised approach. With securitisation intensifying globally, coupled with a rise in, and political success of, anti-immigration parties and actors, this article investigates the question of why the Scottish Government has pursued a desecuritising approach – a neglected strand of (de)securitisation studies that principally focuses on the how. We draw on insights from ontological security studies to investigate the Scottish Government’s desecuritisation activity between 2014 and 2024, demonstrating that, whilst there are rationalist-materialist explanations, desecuritisation was not inevitable. Instead, by exploring the relationship between immigration and the construction of the Scottish self at the ontological level we can more fully understand the drivers behind desecuritisation. Pursuing a desecuritised immigration politics is shown, first, to support the Scottish Government’s core autobiographical narrative about who ‘Scotland’ is (open, welcoming, and internationalist), and second, through nurturing a Lacanian fantasy, to be affectively rewarding. Last, the article contributes to the (re)conceptualisation of linearity and temporality in (de)securitisation studies, showcasing contemporary-orientated desecuritisation moves dovetailing with moves aimed at an institutional ‘future-proofing’ of desecuritised immigration governance.

Cultural heritage rests on imaginings of a shared humanity transcending national dividing lines. However, cultural heritage sites are frequently targeted in war. In this article I show that the politics of cultural protection is marked by tensions and contestations. A key argument is that the protection of cultural heritage in armed conflict is a militarised practice that informed by notions of protection that are broadly western-centred, masculinised. Therefore, I suggest they are insensitive to the gendered and colonial power relations that undergird the protection of cultural property. Informed by critical heritage studies, cosmopolitanism, and feminist IR scholarship, I elucidate the claims of this article through a feminist narrative analysis of the protection. I identify what is said and what is silenced in heritage protection narratives. First, I focus on the wider storytelling that surrounds heritage protection, unpacking the ethical, gendered, and colonial assumptions employed. Second, I turn to the narration of military protection in the UNESCO military manual. attending to its ethical underpinnings, protection logics, and privileging of distinctively western military knowledge. I conclude by calling for a more nuanced approach to cultural protection.

The study of populism has started to permeate international relations (IR) and foreign policy analysis (FPA). This literature is still characterised by a frequent focus on individual states’ foreign policies, (therefore) dearth of generalisable findings, and lack of integration with existing IR/FPA theory. This means that it struggles to explain recent findings that, in contrast to earlier assumptions that populist governments consistently disrupt international order, some populist governments are quite willing to compromise internationally and may switch between confrontation and compromise vis-à-vis those trappings of international order they perceive as representing a corrupt liberal elite. I suggest that a neoclassical realist model of populist foreign policy can help address both the larger theoretical as well as the particular empirical challenge. It explains the foreign policy of populist governments primarily by the permissiveness and threat level characterising the respective state’s international environment. However, the effect of these systemic constraints is mediated by the degree to which populist politics capture the state. Such capture is dependent on (1) decision-makers’ depth of commitment to populist ideas and their ability to (2) transform state institutions to remove checks on executive power.

Ethics are commonly invoked to mitigate the adverse effects of digitalization on international practices such as diplomacy, humanitarianism, or peacebuilding. However, their productive role in shaping global politics has received little attention. This article elucidates how policy and guidance documents containing ‘PeaceTech’ ethics discursively construct normative vectors, i.e., moral claims that frame risks, suggest responses, and attribute responsibilities. We identify five major tendencies through which this takes place, namely the internationalizing, outsourcing, delegating, localizing, and individualizing of PeaceTech-related risks. These vectors produce a cascade of responsibility that reaches from the international to the local, from the public to the private sector and civil society, and from organizations to end users. Agents placed higher in the cascade mainly deal with abstract and systemic risks, while agents placed lower are responsible for dealing with tangible and personal risks. Yet the latter often have the least resources to respond to these risks, and have to weigh up whether to accept them and maintain critical data collection and analysis functions, or to reduce these risks while potentially jeopardizing PeaceTech. We describe how this can amount to what we call ‘decentred dereliction’, i.e., the abandonment of goals in and through digital peacebuilding.

Within the UN, there is a divide between NGO networks with differing stances on gender equality and women’s rights. Feminist and feminist-informed NGOs push for extensive women’s rights, including reproductive rights and protection against discrimination. In contrast, conservative NGOs uphold traditional gender roles and family structures, strongly opposing reproductive rights like abortion. Studies have examined these NGOs’ stances and advocacy tactics, but a detailed comparative analysis of their views of the UN – their key battleground – is missing. The paper addresses this gap by assessing how each group evaluates the UN’s legitimacy and identifying the underlying sources of legitimacy beliefs. By combining computational and qualitative text analysis, it reveals several trends: the UN is central in the discourse of both groups of NGOs, although it appears more in feminist NGOs’ communications, and feminist groups generally evaluate the UN’s legitimacy more positively. This positivity peaks when the UN actively supports feminist objectives and collaborates with these NGOs. Conservative NGOs, on the other hand, positively evaluate the UN when they can align the UN’s foundational texts with their views and when they garner support from conservative states. Their most negative evaluations occur when they believe the UN uses deception to promote progressive policies.

Guided by interviews with key protagonists and extensive archival research, this article reinterprets the escalation of the Colombian armed conflict during the critical period of the 1990s. It rejects conventional characterisations of the war as an ‘internal conflict’ and challenges dominant approaches based on state weakness and economic opportunity. Instead, the article situates the FARC’s rapid expansion against the background of the international political economy, linking the conflict’s escalation to changing social relations of production. Grounded in historical materialism, and particularly drawing on the concepts of uneven and combined development, passive revolution, crisis of authority, and war of movement, the article explains how the Colombian state’s reintegration into global capitalism deepened social fragmentation, displaced subaltern populations, generated new terrains of resistance, and provoked a spreading crisis of authority that the FARC strategically exploited. It is argued that the FARC’s expansion was not a symptom of criminal degeneration but a strategic political response enabled by Colombia’s passive revolutionary transformation within the uneven and combined dynamics of global capitalism. The article contributes to broader debates in security, international political economy, global development, historical sociology, and regional studies, inviting scholars to identify the underlying but not immediately visible dynamics shaping conflict and peace.

How does the international security environment influence whether and how military regimes democratise? This paper argues that for militaries in power, sustained external threats facilitate democratisation by credibly assuring the armed forces of continuing influence after leaving office. The credibility of this assurance stems from the military’s monopoly on the provision of national security and the reliance of all parties on the armed forces for the country’s defence. Militaries, confident of their continued influence after returning to the barracks, are more likely to cede power to democratisers when facing prolonged threats from abroad. Utilising a comparative case study of ruling militaries in Burma and South Korea, this paper tests four implications of the theory for how crises over democracy unfold between governing militaries and the opposition in contrasting security environments. It finds support for each of the implications.

This article addresses critical gaps in the literature on crisis-driven policy change in international organisations. While existing studies focus on elite decision-making and institutional resilience, the role of frontline crisis managers remains under-explored in International Relations. Using the European migration and refugee crisis as a case study and drawing on insights from organisation studies and the sociology of the professions, the article introduces a novel theoretical framework that foregrounds improvisation by first responders and the ex-post stabilisation of their spontaneous policy solutions at headquarters. In addition to reconstructing and illustrating the mechanisms that link frontline action to changed policies, the article identifies theoretical conditions shaping the likelihood and direction of informal policy change from the ground up. By highlighting bottom-up dynamics in crises, it not only advances theoretical debates on crisis politics, but also proposes a new research agenda for analysing the transformative role of field-level practices in global politics.

The use of the veto by Security Council members has played a central role in the international community’s failure to prevent atrocity situations. As a result, proposals have been put forward to restrain the use of the veto and are commonly referred to as the ‘responsibility not to veto’ (RNTV). So far, existing research has focused on the history of the RNTV and the strengths and weaknesses of specific proposals. However, this article is interested in a different question: does the RNTV constitute an emerging norm that is progressively leading to behavioural change from veto users and other members of the international community? Drawing on norm research and an extensive discourse analysis of over 5,500 statements made during Security Council and General Assembly debates between 1990 and 2023, this article argues that it does. To do so, it clarifies what an emerging norm is, the impact it can have, and how to trace it. Through this analysis, this article not only contributes to our understanding of the RNTV and broader debates on the Security Council but also promotes a stronger understanding of ongoing change in international relations by emphasising the impact emerging norms can have and ways to trace them.

What happens when states’ gender identity is endangered? How may a state actor’s gender identity be conceived of and (de)stabilised in the first place? What are the ontological effects of such disruptions? And how do states respond to ruptures in their gender identities or selves? Despite growing attention to gendered narratives in ontological security studies (OSS), the extant scholarship has engaged with gender issues more within states and societies than between them in making sense of state identity and behaviour in international relations. Building upon the existing literature and the theoretical works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, this article attempts to contribute towards theorising gender more systematically into OSS by demonstrating how it constitutes collective subjectivities and orders imagined state selves in relation to others. Introducing the concept of ontological dislocation, it adopts a non-essentialist performative view of statehood as well as of gender and investigates how states pursue ontological security through gendering themselves and others and what ensues when critical facets of these gendered selves are distorted and disrupted. To illustrate the theorisation empirically, the research focuses on the gender dynamics of Iran’s revolutionary identity and nuclear behaviour to show how destabilisation of gender identity can cause ontological dislocation and lead to a restless scramble to relocate the self.

States increasingly confront security threats from exiled economic elites who retain power through offshore wealth, political influence, and informational leverage. This paper introduces the concept of weaponised legal dependence to explain why and how states file commercial lawsuits against their own citizens in foreign courts – particularly in global legal hubs like London – to neutralise these transnational plutocratic threats. While conventional tools of transnational repression (e.g., extradition, abduction, information warfare) target dissidents’ legitimacy or messaging power, only foreign litigation can directly constrain the material assets that underpin a plutocrat’s influence. However, initiating extraterritorial claims is costly, risky, and entails a partial surrender of sovereignty to liberal jurisdictions. I argue that states resort to these legal strategies when they face power parity with plutocrats – situations where neither side has hierarchical control, prompting political conflict to spill into foreign legal systems under the guise of commercial dispute. Drawing on 60 interviews with legal practitioners and case studies from Russia and Kazakhstan, this paper shows how states instrumentalise the credibility of liberal legal institutions to reclaim offshore assets and delegitimise their rivals. In doing so, illiberal regimes exploit liberal infrastructure, turning courts meant to enforce commercial norms into battlegrounds of domestic power politics.

How do populist publics visually represent themselves, and how have shifts in visual technologies altered this process? While research on the visual politics of populism has largely focused on ‘top-down’ uses of imagery by populist leaders and parties, less attention has been paid to how ‘the people’ depict themselves from the ‘bottom up’. This article addresses this gap by theorising the concept of the visual self-mediation of ‘the people’ and tracing its evolution across two emblematic episodes in which contested claims to popular sovereignty were visually enacted: the 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt against Hugo Chávez and the 2021 US Capitol riots. Through a structured, diachronic comparison, the article identifies a broader historical shift – from televisual mediation of ‘the people’, dependent on elite controlled platforms, to digitally enabled self-mediation, wherein publics broadcast themselves as ‘the people’ in real time via smartphones and social media. It analyses how populist publics visually presented themselves, as well as the intended and unintended audiences for these visuals. In foregrounding this transformation, the article contributes to ongoing debates in visual politics, media ecologies, and populism by illustrating how digital infrastructures have reconfigured the visibility, performativity, and legitimacy of populist publics in the twenty-first century.

The state’s role in the perpetration or tolerance of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) is not inevitable, even in conflicts where the state may lack the capacity to prevent such violence or protect populations effectively. Prevention and protection by state institutions, including the military, requires reform that addresses not only CRSV behaviour and crimes but also gendered norms that condone this violence in existing legal and social frameworks of state institutions. This paper examines the development of the Joint Communiqués (JCs) as a rare example of an international-led security sector reform initiative between the UN and signatory states to implement reforms and practices to prevent CRSV. We examine the JCs signed to date with states that have militaries that have committed CRSV crimes. Our study of the JCs provides an opportunity to explore how reform to state-level institutional norms and practices proceeds in an environment with heavy dependence on the military state sector to cooperate in preventing CRSV. However, our findings call into question the conditions under which JCs should be promoted, especially when a signatory state refuses or resists including measures in JCs that address their institutional culpability for perpetrating CRSV and adopt survivor-centred gender-inclusive reforms.

Drawing on recent scholarship on international criminalisation, this article demonstrates how this concept is not only critical for explaining why certain global atrocities were recognised as international crimes but also why others failed to be criminalised in world politics. To do so, it focuses on piracy, an act that has been conventionally depicted as the first international crime to have been established within the international legal order but was subsequently excluded from the existing list of current international crimes. Guided by a conceptualisation of international criminalisation as a process that embraces, firstly, the emergence of an international criminal norm and, secondly, the translation of such a norm into an international legal proscription, the article analyses four historical periods across the twentieth century during which piracy was the subject of international debate amongst legal diplomats. Through a close analysis of primary documents from this period, it shows how piracy failed to be recognised as an international crime principally because an international criminal norm against piracy failed to emerge in world politics across this period.

This piece argues that to understand how cultural heritage functions as a form of power at the international level, it is essential to deconstruct the ‘productive politics’ that surround and shape the material and symbolic spatial formations of heritage and heritagisation. To this aim, by integrating critical accounts on heritage politics, geopolitics, and biopolitics, this piece deconstructs the dynamics of Turkey’s heritagisation of traditional Turkish archery (TTA) in Turkey and beyond. We introduce heritage geopolitics as a novel analytical framework to unpack the role of these multiple intertwined scales of spaces in heritagisation and the ‘productive politics’ behind it. Heritage geopolitics, explained through the heritagisation of TTA, helps to illustrate how heritagisation becomes a multiscalar hegemonic process that shapes various features of the domestic and international orders, from the biopolitical to the geopolitical, attempting to challenge existing narratives of power and moral authority. We demonstrate that heritage geopolitics differs from other uses of heritage in world politics (such as cultural diplomacy, heritage diplomacy, or soft power) by foregrounding the domestic and embodied moral foundations of biopolitical and geopolitical imaginations embedded in the heritagisation processes.

This article advances research on ‘collective securitisation’ by theorising how ostensibly separate securitisation processes within different international organisations (IOs) interact and shape each other’s policy outcomes. Focusing on climate change adaptation within the United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU), the study uses an extensive database of documents (1972–2023) and interviews with officials to trace these dynamics. The analysis reveals that the UN initially securitised climate change through a risk-oriented approach emphasising long-term risk management, subsequently influencing the EU’s adaptation policies. Conversely, the EU intermittently reintroduced threat-based framing into the UN, highlighting recursive interactions between these organisations. Findings suggest key moments of cross-organisational influence, notably during the audience acceptance and policy output stages. By incorporating insights from transnational policy learning and norm diffusion, the paper theorises precisely how and when these interactions occur, enriching the analytical framework of Collective Securitisation. This article contributes to understanding how international organisations’ securitisation processes interact and shape climate adaptation policies, emphasising the nuanced interplay between threat-based and risk-based logics.