Who is recognised within the concept of ‘European Society’, and, more importantly, who or what remains unseen? This article critically examines European Society through a decolonial lens, arguing that EU law is detached from the lived and diverse realities of European Society. Drawing on the work of sociologist Manuela Boatcă, the authors propose a decolonial approach that excavates coloniality of power, knowledge and, especially, belonging within EU law to reimagine European Society. Analysing cases in migration and the rule of law, the article reveals how EU law perpetuates hierarchical structures of inclusion and exclusion, and invisibilises the liminal—often deploying “Western” norms, values, and lifestyles as gatekeeping tools, especially in post-colonial contexts. At the heart of this argument is the necessity to move beyond Eurocentric assumptions of universality, neutrality, and totality in legal scholarship, instead embracing plurality of perspective, creolisation, and reflexivity. The authors contend that European Society should not be treated as a rigid legal construct but rather as a dynamic and inclusive one that amplifies marginalised voices, acknowledges and accounts for the liminal, and critically examines the law’s inherent limitations. Ultimately, the article calls for a radical reimagining of European Society through its decolonisation—one that confronts historical injustices, disrupts entrenched power structures, and steers EU law toward a more just, equitable, accountable and reconstructive future.

Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) has often been criticised for its idealism. I discuss Lukács’s critique of reification in light of these charges, identifying two different idealist vocabularies of (neo-)Kantian and Hegelian origin, respectively. I show that the function of the former is critical: refracting Marx’s analysis of social form through a Kantian form/content distinction allows Lukács to critique capitalism as the domination of form over content. Lukács’s Hegelian leanings are more problematic, however, as they constrain his own insights into the conditioned and contingent character of political practice and history.

Our article sheds light on two enduring debates within the cooperative literature: the degeneration thesis and the spillover thesis. While the degeneration thesis suggests cooperatives are doomed to failure, the spillover thesis suggests otherwise, contending that the experience of democratic control furthers social change beyond the cooperative itself. By turning to critical theory, we are able to bring new insights into these conversations. The early Frankfurt School placed a primacy on the subjectivity of social actors, arguing that capitalism serves to impact the consciousness, rationality, and depth-psychology of subjects, acculturating them to market societies. By exploring this in conjunction with the literature on cooperatives, we are able to add weight to the degeneration thesis and to demand further concessions from advocates of the spillover thesis. Ultimately, the article stresses the lack of importance placed to date on subjectivity within cooperative studies and argues that this needs to be remedied.

We report qualitative findings from a study in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith city with high levels of deprivation. Primary research over 2 years consisted of three focus groups and 18 semi-structured interviews with food insecurity service providers followed by focus groups with 16 White British and Pakistani women in or at risk of food insecurity. We consider food insecurity using Habermas’s distinction between the system and lifeworld. We examine system definitions of the nature of need, approved food choices, the reification of selected skills associated with household management and the imposition of a construct of virtue. While lifeworld truths about food insecurity include understandings of structural causes and recognition that the potential of social solidarity to respond to them exist, they are not engaged with by the system. The gap between system rationalities and the experiential nature of lay knowledge generates individual and collective disempowerment and a corrosive sense of shame.

Enabled by the underpinnings of critical theory, this article discusses research methodology developed with the aim of empowering beneficiaries within Third Sector Organisations, through their participation in organisational evaluation processes. The discussion on methodology in this article occurs at three levels: conceptual, processual, and reflexive. The conceptual level explores ontological and epistemological assumptions that shape the critical approach. At the processual level, research methods are explored, drawing on case studies involving interviews with beneficiaries. In interviewing beneficiaries, Third Sector research becomes a means of representing this group. Finally, the reflexive level explores how findings from the processual level enable praxis through the development of approaches supporting beneficiaries’ participation in organisational evaluation processes. As such, Third Sector research can engage beneficiary participation, in order to promote more effective beneficiary participation organisationally.

We live in an era described as ‘fast-paced, fragmented, and data-drenched’. This article will state the case that a superabundance of information, particularly through the internet, is influencing the manner in which individuals learn, and this is creating problems. In particular, there is evidence that many people are accepting information without critical examination, with Donald Leu's study into students’ willingness to accept the existence of the Pacific Northwest ‘tree octopus’ as a celebrated example. Original research at Cardiff University suggests that Politics students are not immune. The concept most associated with attempts to address these problems is information literacy, but this article raises, again, the question whether this concept has become too ‘stretched’ to fulfil the task.

To encourage methodological pluralism in the field, this paper examines an illustrative sample of articles that apply critical approaches to third-sector studies focused on gender. Specifically, the paper analyzes three articles that were previously identified as among the most critical work on gender in the field between 1970 and 2009 to illustrate how critical research is produced and the value it brings to third-sector studies. We find this work: uncovers hidden assumptions and/or uncomfortable erasures that mask gender-based inequities and injustices; resists hegemonic scientific norms in doing and writing research; and rejects ‘woman’ as a uniform object of theorizing. We discuss against what methodological standards such work should be evaluated and suggest a wider understanding of these ‘alternative’ standards, which might derive significant benefits for the field through increased critical scholarship and the unique features it brings.

Drawing on the insights of critical security studies, this article argues that an understanding of emancipation as a process of freeing up space for dialogue and deliberation enables a focus on crucial questions, experiences and practices neglected in most orthodox accounts of security and terrorism. In particular, emancipation has the potential to serve as a philosophical anchorage for a nascent critical terrorism studies research agenda. The paper goes on to outline what a critical terrorism studies informed by a concern with emancipation might look like, focusing on a series of key questions that such an approach might encourage in the context of the post-2001 ‘war on terror’.

Scholars of Kant have long been critical of International Relations’ appropriation of his Toward Perpetual Peace, in particular as it informed democratic peace theory. Now, with democratic backsliding occurring even at the core of the ‘separate peace’ the theory claims developed between democracies, that critique gains newfound salience. This essay demonstrates how the theory is unable to understand democratic backsliding, especially as it is occurring in the United States, but would have been able to if not for misinterpretations of certain substantive elements of Kant’s schema, and, more crucially, a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and proper use of it. Grounding a reading of Toward Perpetual Peace more thoroughly in Kant’s philosophical system, I develop the idea of conceiving of and utilizing the essay’s schema in terms of what I call a critical cosmology of peace – a holistic and evolving vision of interrelated practices, conditions, and mechanisms encompassing all of humanity through time and space, and meant mainly to act as a tool of perpetual critique of whatever existing form and degree of democratic peace is currently in existence.

A critique of capitalism, in order to count as such, must identify a problem that is not shared by all other feasible economic systems, for this would amount to little more than a complaint (or kvetch) about the human condition. The distinction between critique and kvetch raises the question of what constitutes a feasible alternative to capitalism. Although it sounds as though this is a pragmatic or technical question, I will argue that it is usually normative. With this clarification in place, I will consider whether Waheed Hussain’s concerns about capitalism amount to a critique or a kvetch.

Does music sound all the same nowadays? This article revives the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry by recontextualizing it within contemporary financialized platform capitalism. We argue that Digital Streaming Platforms (DSPs) like Spotify showcase the proliferation of the future-oriented asset logic inherent to both financialization and platformization. This process intensifies the standardization of music that was first recognized by Theodor Adorno. The playlist is the central device of this assetization of music, contributing to a noticeable decrease in sonic and stylistic diversity in music. We illustrate this novel development through a diachronic content analysis of hip-hop music, comparing Apple Music’s Hip-Hop/R&B Hits: 2002 playlist based on hip-hop charts from the pre-DSP era and Spotify’s largest in-house curated playlist RapCaviar (from 2022). Rather than democratizing the music market, as Spotify is often hailed to do, the twenty-first-century culture industry facilitates further homogenization of artistic expression. Our findings contribute to ongoing political economy debates about the effects of financialization, platformization, and assetization on music, culture, and the everyday.

Critical International Relations Theory (CIRT) is in ‘crisis’. Some argue for a recovery of ‘the inspirational quality’ of Horkheimer and Adorno’s first-generation negative critique. Certainly the challenge of right-wing populism begs questions of CIRT’s ‘consolatory’ cosmopolitanism. I have two concerns however. First, these proposals underplay the reasons why first-generation theorising failed; secondly, CIRT risks throwing the second-generation Habermas–Linklater ‘baby’ out with the ‘bathwater’ at the moment it has particular value. I do two things. I look back to pre-Habermasian Critical Theory, but I set a future agenda based on the Pragmatism of John Dewey. This helps CIRT realise the emancipatory potential in IR’s recent ‘practice turn’, addressing concerns that CIRT is disengaged. It also brings balance to negative and positive critiques, offering a novel challenge to critical/problem-solving binaries in ways that speak to real-world challenges like climate change. Second, I look forward from Habermasian-inspired theory to the third-generation (and Pragmatist-inspired) ‘recognition theory’ of Honneth. This brings a critical edge to IR ontological security studies, further develops the praxeological branch of CIRT, and better informs the political left’s response to the alienating effects of the liberal international order and the rise of right-wing populism.

The breakdown of liberal hegemony, the rise of the New Right, and the violent realignment of world order have been accompanied by a retreat from traditional humanist concerns in critical international theory, including emancipation, political subjectivity, social totality, universal history, and the anticipatory-utopian dimension of critique. Scholars have identified numerous shortcomings in first-generation and contemporary critical International Relations (IR), and our discipline still questions its purpose and object of study. This article proposes a more radical and realistic approach to critical international theory based on a reappraisal of Andrew Linklater’s oeuvre. It frames the critical project in IR as a Lakatosian research programme and calls for a progressive problem shift that foregrounds what Linklater, drawing from Kant and Marx, calls the necessarily tripartite structure of critical theory. I argue that by tracing an alternative path through classical sources of the tradition, pivoting from Hegel and the deep social relationalism that follows, while integrating a tripartite commitment with a more rigorous reflexive methodology, we can revitalise the emancipatory approach to IR and provide renewed purpose and direction to the discipline. Grounded in a left-Hegelian tradition of thought, the argument aspires to resonate with other critical theoretical traditions both within and beyond IR.

Frankfurt School Critical Theory emerged to challenge systems of oppression, but it carries a fatal flaw: it’s stuck in the Enlightenment mindset that birthed colonialism. It talks about freedom – but only from a Eurocentric lens, ignoring the wisdom of the Global South. Enter Neo-Vedanta, a revolutionary reinterpretation of ancient Indian philosophy, propelled by Swami Vivekananda’s call for a spiritual and social awakening. While Critical Theory exposes power structures, Neo-Vedanta goes deeper, arguing that real freedom starts within. It dismantles the ego – the root of domination – and replaces it with seva, selfless service. For Vivekananda, liberation wasn’t about personal enlightenment or Western-style progress; it was about merging the self with humanity’s collective struggle. This isn’t about picking sides – it’s about creating something new: a world where liberation isn’t a Western export but a global conversation. True freedom, Neo-Vedanta reminds us, isn’t just about breaking chains. It’s about dissolving the very idea of control – and finding power in service, not domination. Liberation was never meant to belong to one civilization alone.