In a 2004 forum, Alexander Wendt, Patrick Jackson, Colin Wight and Iver Neumann asked two questions about state personhood: Are states real, or merely as-if? Are they people? I question the terms of their debate, which relies upon a problematic distinction between ‘real’ and ‘as if’. Drawing largely upon Foucault, I challenge that distinction. This challenge has important theoretical and normative implications. Theoretically, a discourse of state personhood is completely unnecessary to understand world politics. Normatively, by tightly linking personhood and responsibility, some of the authors obscure important dimensions of responsibility to and respect for the non-human world.

In October 2005, UNESCO’s General Conference adopted the Convention on the Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expressions. The intense debates around the Convention, the defeat of the US position, and the compromises reached illustrate the shifting nature of global politics and the importance of the ‘culture question’ in global governance, but also confirm a hierarchy in the mandates of intergovernmental organisations. In this article we describe the making of this particular international convention, what we define as the ‘liberal’ versus the ‘culturalist’ positions among UNESCO’s member-state delegations, and the relevance of world polity and world-systems theories with respect to the international order. The article draws on our observations, a close reading of relevant UNESCO documents, and interviews with UNESCO officials and delegates.

The International Relations discipline (IR) has been uniquely resistant to practices and knowledges aimed at broadening the horizons of IR’s subjects. The discipline has worked to incarcerate its subjects in a location of analysis – spatially Cartesian and politically state-oriented – conditioned to ignore the transnational and transversal formations that have become central to politics. However, this disciplining has also engendered counter-movements pressuring the well-rehearsed disciplinary horizons. This article explores such movements through the Kurdish diaspora in Europe. It regards Kurdish diasporic formations as transversal practices that communicate against the disciplinary boundaries imposed upon the political imagination through traditional IR.

Despite initial fanfare surrounding its launch in the White House Rose Garden, the War on Terrorist Finances (WOTF) has thus far languished as a sideshow, in the shadows of military campaigns against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. This neglect is unfortunate, for the WOTF reflects the other multilateral cooperative dimension of the US-led ‘war on terror’, quite contrary to conventional sweeping accusations of American unilateralism. Yet the existing academic literature has been confined mostly to niche specialist journals dedicated to technical, legalistic and financial regulatory aspects of the WOTF. Using the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) as a case study, this article seeks to steer discussions on the WOTF onto a broader theoretical IR perspective. Building upon emerging academic works that extend Foucauldian ideas of governmentality to the global level, we examine the interwoven overlapping national, regional and global regulatory practices emerging against terrorist financing, and the implications for notions of government, regulation and sovereignty.

Largely ignored by scholars of world politics, the global punk rock scene provides a fruitful basis for exploring the multiple circuits of exchange and circulation of goods, people, and messages that moves beyond the limitations of IR. Punk can also offer new ways of thinking about international relations and communication from the lived experiences of people’s daily lives. At its core, this essay has two arguments. First, punk offers the possibility for counter-hegemonic expression within systems of global communication. Punk has simultaneously worked within and against the hegemony of capitalist telecommunication networks, navigating an increasingly interconnected and mediated world. Second, punk is a subversive message in its own right. Focusing on punk’s Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos and the resource it offers for resisting the multiple forms of alienation in modern society, the story I construct here is one of agency and empowerment often overlooked by traditional IR.

Unfortunately, a number of small errors were published in this article. The corrected text appears below.

Programs to deploy weapons in orbital space have important implications for international relations. In this paper, we analyze the constitutive logic of three modes of space weaponization currently being pursued by the United States – space-based missile defense, space control, and force application from orbital space. We show that these technologies of killing, when bundled together, constitute a new form of centralized sovereign power in a context of de-territorialized sovereignty. This is a new type of international political society, which we call empire of the future, distinct from and more ominous than the de-centralized form of Empire theorized by Hardt and Negri and the modern expression of classical hegemony now widely debated in discussions of putative American empire.

In the aftermath of the 7th July 2005 bombings in London, communication with those searching desperately for relatives and friends was one-way or non-existent. The authorities dealing with the processes of the identification of the bodies of those killed or the treatment of those injured adopted procedures and protocols derived from emergency or disaster planning that were framed in terms of an instrumentalisation or objectification of persons. This article traces how these procedures reflect biopolitical forms of global governance that involve the production of life as ‘bare life’ and details how inappropriate and brutal these forms of governance seemed both to those searching for the missing and to the London Assembly 7th July Review Committee. It concludes that attention needs to be paid to the proliferation of such forms of politics as administration and the objectification they entail before we reach a stage where all life becomes nothing more than bare life, life with no political voice as such.

This article seeks to revise the concept of Positive Security. Although largely neglected by the existing Security Studies literature, Bill McSweeney’s work otherwise represents a significant contribution in this regard. The author argues, however, that although of great value, McSweeney’s positive security formulation is unduly restrictive in terms of the referent object and to the sectors of security it is applicable to, and cannot unproblematically be equated to ontological security, as McSweeney’s work tends to do. Employing Graham Smith’s notion of a ‘generic’ security conception, and placing positive security more firmly in the peace studies tradition, the author suggests rather that a revised concept be predicated on the defence of ‘just’ values.