This article broadens the understanding and empirical study of regime complexes by shifting the focus from the negotiation outcome to the processes of negotiating new international agreements. Although they are important to regime-complex formation and delimitation, the sites where states negotiate new agreements are rather neglected. We aim to enhance the methodological toolbox available to scholars studying global governance in two ways: (1) by demonstrating how dynamic relationships between states and international organisations (IOs) unfolding within the social space of international treaty negotiations contribute to regime-complex formation; and (2) how social network analysis (SNA) can help us to detect patterns in these relationships. Combining participant observation and collaborative event ethnography (CEE) with social network analysis, we present new empirical material illustrating how we delimited a regime complex and how IOs interact throughout the negotiation process. We applied our methodology to the case of marine-biodiversity governance and use observational data collected during three intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) (2018–19) on a new treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) for our analysis. We discuss the results in relation to our approach’s strengths and weaknesses and implications for future research on regime complexity.

The war in Syria has been communicated to global audiences through images of dead and injured children, decapitated and tortured bodies, and ruined cities. The article shows how news media coverage of the war's impact on the city of Aleppo invoked a Gothic tradition. Drawing on Kristeva and Freud's concepts of the abject and the uncanny, the article argues that the Gothic tradition can further International Relations research on the constitution of Selves and Others. The Gothic Other is constituted through the (Gothic) Self's repulsion, fascination, and desire, and the Gothic tradition revolves around an understanding of the invisible as an in-between space of fear and anticipation. The ability to recognise Gothic themes in an image depends on one's familiarity with the Gothic tradition, hence images are theorised as having a Gothic potentiality. The article focuses on how the Anglo-Saxon Gothic tradition enabled Western readers to identify Gothic themes in news coverage of the war in Aleppo. The article adopts a multimethod strategy including a content analysis of 457 images published by Western news media; a discourse analysis of news stories; an analysis of three Gothic, uncanny iconic motifs; and an author-created comic drawing on Gothic elements from the published photographs.

This article further develops and illustrates the argument that relationships between individuals help to explain the success of human rights advocacy in international institutions. Drawing from advocacy theory and socio-legal studies, I shift the attention from collective forms of advocacy to the importance of interpersonal relationships of advocates with individuals in international institutions to influence the development of human rights. I introduce a framework consisting of three analytical steps – mapping the key actors in a network, process-tracing, and biographical research – and apply the framework to three cases of norm development by a United Nations human rights treaty body. My findings highlight the power of interpersonal relationships for the making of human rights, and they inform scholarship on transnational elites, human rights advocacy, and the politics of international law.

Despite the increasing centrality of Internet memes for everyday political circulations and practices, their emergent implications as low-cultural artefacts of global politics have received little theoretical attention. In this article, I develop a critical theory of memes to provide a conceptual apparatus to understand the global political implications and possibilities of this pop-cultural phenomenon. I argue that, in order to attend to the emergent implications of memes and consider their differentiations from other pop-cultural phenomena, we need to unpack the spatial logic through which memes emerge and circulate. Analysing this spatial logic through the concept of the ‘memescape’ and deploying Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of striated and smooth spaces, this article articulates the spatial logic of the memescape as comprising rhizomatic, decentralised circulations of digital content; nomadic, playful, and humorous disruptions of once-stable signs; and affective congregations of a multiplicity of subjects. Through two examples exploring how these smooth spatial tendencies produce divergent political potentials in the resistant memes of Indigenous digital communities and reactionary memes of the Alt-Right, I conclude that the global politics of the memescape is open-ended and undetermined which requires careful and nuanced political and ethical attention to actualise its futures for emancipatory horizons.

This paper is interested in the role and function of memories in United Nations Security Council debates about humanitarian intervention. It posits that historical experiences and their lessons serve as interpretative devices for the abstract international norms and principles under discussion. The paper speaks of ‘international memories’ where the meaning and lessons derived from the past coalesce among a group of states. Empirically, its case study explores how the memories of totalitarianism/fascism and colonialism were employed in United Nations (UN) representatives’ verbal pleas to intervene in Libya and Syria after the Arab Spring. It finds that those who supported or opposed humanitarian intervention held different interpretations of these memories and their lessons. In each case, however, memories provided essential normative guidance to states when it came to implementing the abstract international principles, norms, and rights that underlie humanitarian intervention.

The article explores the complicity of children’s picturebooks in the construction and critique of world politics. Focusing on The Gruffalo, it argues that this spectacularly successful book: (1) stories the international as a pessimistic, anarchical world populated by self-interested, survival-seekers; (2) disrupts this reading and its assumptions through evocation of the social production of threat; and, (3) provides a more fundamental decolonial critique of the international through parochial privileging of its protagonist’s journey through a ‘deep dark wood’. In doing this, we argue, the book vividly demonstrates the world’s susceptibility to multiple incompatible readings, while rendering visible the assumptions, framing, and occlusions of competing understandings of the international. As such, it theorises both world politics and knowledge thereof as contingent and unstable. In making this argument, three contributions are made. First, empirically, we expand research on popular culture and world politics through investigating a surprisingly neglected example of the former. Second, theoretically, we demonstrate the work such texts perform in (re)creating and (de)stabilising (knowledge of) global politics. Third, we offer a composite methodological framework for future research into the context, content, and framing of complex texts like The Gruffalo.

The rights of people who are marginalised by their sexual orientation and gender identity (LGBTI) have improved in many countries. Largely, these achievements can be traced back to the ‘spiral model’ of factors including transnational mobilisation by the LGBTI rights movement, the actions of a few pioneering governments, and advances in the human rights frameworks of some international organisations (IOs). Yet a rising and increasingly globally connected resistance works against LGBTI rights. It rests predominantly in the hands of a transnational advocacy network (TAN) that attempts to lay claim to international human rights law by reinterpreting it. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork and 240 interviews with LGBTI, anti-LGBTI, and state and IO actors, this article explores how the conservative TAN functions, in terms of who comprises it and how its agenda is constructed. We argue that this TAN has employed many of the same transnational tools that garnered LGBTIQ people their widespread recognition. It also conforms to the spiral model of rights diffusion, but in a process we call a double helix. As the double-helix metaphor suggests, rival TANs have a reciprocal relationship, having to navigate each other’s presence in an interactive space and thus using related strategies and instruments for mutually exclusive ends.

To what extent has the glass ceiling in global governance been shattered? To answer this question, we need to look beyond the numbers on women’s representation and study how far women are perceived as inspiring and visionary leaders in global governance. This article offers an analysis of perceptions of inspiring and visionary leadership in global multistakeholder initiatives from a gender perspective. Based on 467 interviews with participants in a leading multistakeholder initiative, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), it presents four findings: (1) respondents identify more men than women as inspiring and visionary leaders, with the difference roughly corresponding to the share of women in leadership roles; (2) respondents tend to ascribe more leadership attributes to women than to men when explaining why they find them inspiring and visionary; (3) both feminine and masculine leadership traits are appreciated in relation to both men and women leaders at ICANN; (4) female respondents identify more women as inspiring and visionary leaders than male respondents. These findings contribute novel insights into gendered perceptions around leadership and the importance of role models in global governance. They also shed much-needed light on the demands and expectations from leadership in global multistakeholder arrangements.

Proposals for large-scale technical interventions into the Earth system to mitigate global warming – or climate engineering – have sparked considerable debate about their potential implications for international security and global governance. The article furthers this debate by bringing it into dialogue with the literature on visual global politics to develop a more ‘imagistic’ concept of climate engineering imaginaries. Based on a novel visual dataset, three major visual clusters in the public discourse on climate engineering are identified: images of the human–nature relationship, of climate engineering as tangible infrastructure, and of the actors involved in climate engineering projects. The analysis shows how images and other visuals do not only shape the dominant understanding of climate engineering but also competing imaginaries of future political orders in which such approaches might be deployed. Three main results of this analysis stand out. First, dominant ways of seeing climate engineering can further reinforce already dominant discursive frames by adding ‘visual proof’ to their underlying claims. Second, climate engineering visuality can also enable the politicisation of climate engineering by rendering concrete projects visible and hence contestable. Third, climate engineering images can paradoxically limit the scope of imagination as they often revolve around powerful visual icons and symbols of the past and present.

This article examines the visual politics of complicity within war, conflict, and military occupation in International Relations (IR). By arguing that complicity is a social relation through which actors navigate violence while drawing on power and resources that are distributed unevenly, it explores the production, articulation, and reception of complicity within the Israeli television series Fauda, which addresses complicit behaviour under the Israeli occupation of Palestine. By building on Feminist IR's engagement with emotions, gender, and visual representations, this article provides a twofold contribution to the study of complicity in international politics. Firstly, the complicit entanglement between creators, distributors, and viewers of Fauda spotlights the cultural workers’ role in shaping public knowledge of war, violence, and military occupation, particularly by creating and circulating cultural representations that facilitate the complicity of audiences with the violence that they consume through certain emotional logics (empathy, compassion, fear). Secondly, this article examines representations of complicity within Fauda to shed light on complicit actors’ embodied experiences of navigating between different identities while caught in the middle of violence (perpetrator, victim, witness, bystander). To this end, this article develops our understanding of emotions, resistance, and domination in international politics.

Scholarship on global environmental assessments call for these organisations to become more reflexive to address challenges around participation, inclusivity of perspectives, and responsivity to the policy domains they inform. However, there has been less call for reflexivity in IPCC scholarship or closer examination of how routine concepts condition scholarly understanding by focusing on science and politics over other social dynamics. In this article, I suggest that scholarly reflexivity could advance new analytical approaches that provide practical insights for changing organisational structures. Through reflecting on my understanding of the IPCC, I develop actors, activities, and forms of authority as a new analytical framework for studying international organisations and knowledge bodies. Through its application, I describe the social order of the IPCC within and between the panel, the bureau, the technical support units, the secretariat and the authors, which is revealing of which actors, on the basis of what authority, have symbolic power over the writing of climate change. The fine-grained analysis of organisations enabled by this analytical framework reveals how dominance can and is being remade through intergovernmental relations and potentially, identifies avenues that managers of these bodies can pursue to challenge it.

In the debate on the (de-)judicialisation of international affairs and the International Criminal Court (ICC) specifically, the distinctions between legality and politics and between state sovereignty and the international remain contested. While realist and legalist approaches discuss the transformation of international politics by international criminal law, sociological and critical-legal perspectives instead highlight the politics of international criminal law. In this contribution, we focus on how the distinctions between (international) law and politics matter, not as substantively opposed spheres, but as boundaries that the ICC itself contingently and flexibly draws when considering particular situations. These meta-politics of invoking and reproducing key boundaries in seemingly technical elaborations of the interest of justice, the scope of its jurisdiction, or the application of complementarity reflect the Court’s particular authority but also its predicament of pushing for an international criminal law serving humanity, rather than states, while reproducing the distinctions between (international) law and politics. We illustrate the Court’s meta-politics by revisiting three recent decisions of the ICC to (not) investigate alleged international crimes committed by British forces in Iraq, by the Taliban, governmental, and US forces in Afghanistan, and by Israeli authorities and Palestinian groups in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

This study explores how the Academy Award for A Fantastic Woman facilitated the adoption of Chile's Gender Identity Law. Approved in 2018 after languishing for over five years in Congress, the law establishes individuals’ right to modify their national identification documents without the need to change their physical appearance or receive prior court authorisation. While trans rights activists extensively lobbied for a law that guaranteed access to gender marker changes, conservatives rejected the initiative, framing their opposition in terms of Christian values and against the ‘gender ideology’ that purportedly informed the bill. We argue that this backlash dissipated in the wake of the award. International recognition made support for trans rights temporarily a matter of national pride, thereby opening a window of opportunity for the approval of the law. The case of Chile's Gender Identity Law illustrates how international status cues can foster normative change by mobilising affect in domestic audiences. It contributes to recent debates on status and domestic political change, and the role that emotion and affect play in world politics.

The social sciences and humanities in general and International Relations (IR) specifically are organised around what has been called ‘analytic bifurcation’. Analytic bifurcations artificially structure and divide analytic spaces into, for example, Europe/non-Europe, inside/outside, state/empire, and metropole/colony. Recently, these bifurcations have been problematised within IR and adjacent fields. Our article contributes to and extends these discussions by foregrounding two interrelated aspects that have not received sufficient attention: first, connections between colonies rather than between metropole and colony and, second, the construction and reproduction of the bifurcation of Europe/non-Europe. We explore how technologies of power, in our case mapping and the use of ‘blank spaces’, were used to create imaginaries of colonisable land. To do so, we trace two episodes from nineteenth-century German colonial discourse. The first episode analyses imaginaries of exploration in the Humboldtian tradition and how these imaginaries depict spaces outside of Europe, namely in Africa, as blank spaces. The second episode reconstructs the cartographic work of Paul Langhans, who focused on mapping ‘Germandom’ (Deutschtum) in Central and Eastern Europe. Juxtaposing these two episodes shows the interconnectedness between these spaces (Africa and the European East) and how techniques such as blank spaces were applied to create colonisable land.

International crises, most recently the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, often radically change our view of the world and our place within it. The European Union (EU) has been particularly impacted by these developments because these crises have accentuated some of its ontological and epistemological uncertainties and insecurities. While the EU’s resilience turn initiated by the EU Global Strategy of 2016 aimed at strengthening the EU’s ability to prepare and recover from external shocks and crises, since then, the concept of resilience has undergone a transformation. In recent years, we have seen the EU turning back in on itself and abandoning the radical aspects of resilience. Hence a paradox has emerged – the more complex the problems faced by the EU, the more it turns away from the logics of complexity present in the idea of resilience. In this article, we examine this conceptual shift through the lenses of concepts in action and the way these have reflected changes in the external context, but also power coalitions and institutional path dependencies. This argument will be explored by examining the recently adopted Strategic Compass and the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).

What is the basis of status in world order? Status is assumed to come from strength, even if strength is reconfigured to be social and normative, not just material. Status, however, can also come from perceived weakness – it is conferred to those recognised as ‘victims’. We make four theoretical contributions to the scholarship on status in world affairs. First, we examine how the category of victim is produced. Two, we expand the possible sources of status in world affairs by adding the category of victim. Three, focus on victimhood status further demonstrates that status is independent of material power. Lastly, victimhood as status exhibits the paradox that power depends on perceived powerlessness. We illustrate these arguments with three features of victim status in modern international politics: the changing desirability of victim status in Israel, the gendered construction of ideal victim in the Congo, and the hierarchy of victimhood in Bosnia.

This article examines ‘parental harm’ – a harm that occurs when a parent loses or faces the threat of losing a child. We contend that the manipulation and severing of relationships between parents and children has played a central role in war and oppression across historical contexts. Parental harm has long-term and pervasive effects and results in complex legacies for carers and their communities. Despite its grave impact, there is little research within International Relations into parental harm and understanding of its effects. We conceptualise parental harm through two frames – the ‘harm of separation’ and ‘harm to the ability to parent’ – and theorise gendered dimensions of how it is perpetuated and experienced. As such, we advance feminist understandings of family as a gendered institution that shapes the conduct of war and institutionalises racialised oppression. Our conception of parental harm offers novel insights into the relationship between intimate relations, the family, and state power and practices. We illustrate our conceptual arguments through two examples: the control and manipulation of family in antebellum slavery in the United States and the targeting of Tamil children in disappearances in Sri Lanka. These examples demonstrate the pervasiveness of parental harm across contexts and forms of violence.

The representatives of contested states – that is, territories whose claim to sovereign statehood is not, or is not fully, recognised by the international society of states – often make significant efforts to engage in diplomacy. Two literatures have recently begun to explore these diplomatic activities, one focusing on the ‘rebel diplomacy’ of insurgents and secessionist movements, the other on ‘liminal actors’ in global politics. However, these two literatures have defined the phenomenon in very different ways, namely, as either instrumental action or cultural performance, and study it largely without regard to each other's insights. My argument in this article is that contested state diplomacy can be better understood if we appreciate the nature of modern diplomacy as a set of bureaucratic practices. As a routinised process within a bureaucratic organisation, modern diplomacy both gives rise to specific decisions and sustains the reality of the state as the locus of legitimate power. The representatives of contested states therefore have strong reasons to set up more or less rudimentary bureaucracies for their diplomacy. I use the history of Kosovo's foreign policy institutions as a paradigmatic case to demonstrate how everyday bureaucratic practices fuse instrumental action and cultural performance and further theorise the interplay of ‘political’ and ‘technical’ conduct in contested state diplomacy.