Police assistance is an important, albeit understudied aspect of foreign policy. While many scholars have studied international and transnational policing, it remains largely unknown why donor police forces often support their colleagues in fragile states in different ways. This article discusses a variety of potential explanations of police assistance: a domestic rational actor model; a constructivist focus on international norms; and theories on the use of force by democracies. While all of these explanations are relevant, this article shows that they remain incomplete without studying police organisations and how these implement assistance on the ground. As the organisational cultures of donor police agencies differ, so do their assistance practices. The case of German and Italian police assistance in Afghanistan illustrates the relevance of an organisational approach: despite operating in the same environment, German police officers promoted civilian and Italian Carabinieri militarised policing. The article stresses that explaining security assistance, an important form of indirect intervention in fragile states, requires zooming in on policy implementation and policy implementers.

In the EU accession literature, there is a tendency to downplay the role of discourse in facilitating norm diffusion, particularly when domestic resistance towards European norms is strong. The assumptions in this thinking are that critical deliberations and civil society activism simply lack the potency required to elicit norm conforming behaviour in accession states and that the only realistic hope for achieving this rests with the introduction of material incentives that make the costs of normative adaptation lower than its rewards. I focus on developments in the field of LGBT politics to challenge these assumptions and to specify the conditions under which discursive strategies are likely to stimulate the domestic uptake of contentious norms. I highlight shared identity as a crucial factor in the success of discursive influence, contending that under conditions of identity convergence, a cultural environment prevails in which norm promoters can more effectively ignite a process of deliberative reflection, shame norm-violators into conformance and cultivate resonance around controversial ideas. I develop these arguments through an analysis of LGBT and accession politics in Croatia and Serbia, contending that Croatia’s strong identification with Europe accelerated LGBT recognition there while Serbia’s relatively weaker identification with Europe slowed it down.

The 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict inspired the creation of over a dozen games for mobile phones and tablets. These games, which allowed players to Bomb Gaza City, operate the Iron Dome missile defence system, and direct rockets into Israeli settlements, marked an important shift in the mediatisation of war in three ways. First, whereas propaganda is frequently described as a top-down process by which elites influence mass audiences, the mobile war games about Gaza were created by non-elite indie game developers, thereby illustrating these games’ capacities for allowing new actors to participate in ideological contestation. Second, the games were not simply reflections on the conflict, but part of it. They were released while the fighting was in progress and helped to constitute the ideological battleground. Finally, the games reproduced established propaganda techniques in distinctive ways that were shaped by the mobile gaming medium.

It has become fashionable among International Relations scholars to draw on the concept of ‘autoimmunity’, which some call ‘the ultimate horizon in which contemporary politics inscribes itself’. To these scholars, most of whom draw on the thought of Jacques Derrida, such logics open systems up to a future to come. At the same time, they tend to identify such logics with Europe, America, Western modernity, and/or democracy. Implied, and sometimes explicit, in their accounts is the denial of autoimmune logics at work outside such an imagined configuration.

This article challenges that denial through arguing that the system of ‘harmony’, deployed in contemporary China, also works on an autoimmune logic. If autoimmunity opens up a system to the future, this is not only so for European democracy or its derivatives. Moreover, the expulsion of ‘non-Western’ others from accounts of autoimmunity undermines their rethinking of difference by falling back on an immunitary logic, denying China an open future. This exclusion is their condition of possibility. At the same time, this exclusion is what keeps open their promise of its future to come. Paradoxically, the exclusion of the ‘non-West’ is what keeps the idea of an autoimmune ‘Western’ or European democracy alive.

The democratic peace literature has convincingly shown that democracies do not fight other democracies. Theoretical explanations of this empirical phenomenon often claim that the citizenry in democracies prefers peaceful resolution of interstate conflicts. Still, there is a dearth of studies exploring the public’s preferences and values directly. We seek to rectify this by investigating, in a novel way, the relationship between regime type and citizens’ bellicosity. A comprehensive multilevel research design is employed, with data spanning 72 countries over the period of 1981–2008. This enables us to test one of the theoretical mainstays of the democratic peace thesis, viz., that regime type helps shape individuals’ attitudes toward war-fighting. Our results lend special support to normative democratic peace theory: Citizens of democracies are significantly more pacifistic than citizens of non-democracies. This result upholds when we rigorously control for other relevant factors, including specific characteristics of individuals and rival theoretical explanations.

An emerging research programme on diffusion across regional international organisations (RIOs) proposes that decisions taken in one RIO affect decision-making in other RIOs. This work has provided a welcome corrective to endogenously-focused accounts of RIOs. Nevertheless, by focusing on the final design of policies and institutional arrangements, it has been conceptually overly narrow. This has led to a truncated understanding of diffusion’s impact and to an unjustified view of convergence as its primary outcome. Drawing on public policy and sociological research, we offer a conceptual framework that seeks to remedy these weaknesses by disaggregating the decision-making process on the ‘receiving’ side. We suggest that policies and institutional arrangements in RIOs result from three decision-making stages: problematisation (identification of something as a political problem), framing (categorisation of the problem and possible solutions), and scripting (design of final solutions). Diffusion can affect any combination of these stages. Consequently, its effects are more varied and potentially extensive than is currently recognised, and convergence and persistent variation in scripting are both possible outcomes. We illustrate our framework by re-evaluating research on dispute settlement institutions in the EEC, NAFTA, and SADC. We conclude by discussing its theoretical implications and the conditions that likely promote diffusion.

Recently, the field of International Relations has seen increased interest in international hierarchy, and also an upswing in the analytical study of imperial logics of rule. Nonetheless, existing structural models of empire focus on core-periphery dynamics, and so cannot explain polities that display elements of both core and periphery. Therefore, I offer the new concept of ‘semi-cores’. Semi-cores are a specific form of historical political associations whereby certain imperial provinces are different from the others in terms of the close relationships it maintains with the imperial metropolis. Semi-cores are different by virtue of being relatively similar. The conceptualisation of semi-cores is followed by a section illustrating its logic, examining the relatively unfamiliar cases of Scotland and Norway and their position within the Danish and British empires, respectively. Although being separate imperial provinces, these were tightly connected to an imperial core. This concept helps us better understand imperial logics, and in the process shows how cultural factors can be formalised into accounts of structural logics of rule, impacting our understanding of both historical and contemporary hierarchical international affairs.