The European Union stands at a crossroads. Its founding promises of peace, convergence, and multilateralism are increasingly strained by debt, migration, sovereignty, and militarization. The introduction to this Special Issue begins with the question: who is the EU for? To stretch this question analytically we move beyond conventional debates on globalization and sovereignty foregrounding the colonial and racialized conditions that shape European integration. Colonialism, we argue, remains operative, structuring the production of race, racism, and anti-Blackness within and beyond Europe. Drawing on radical traditions of thought on colonialism and anti-Blackness, critical political economy, postcolonial theory, and institutional analysis, the introduction reframes the analytic of who the EU is for by showing how the Union’s commitment to universal values coexists with practices that reproduce hierarchies of life and death. We argue that the EU operates as a form of global power that mobilizes race and racism as constitutive mechanisms of legitimacy, authority, mobility, and value. Contemporary militarization, through defense integration, rearmament, and strategic autonomy, intensifies these dynamics by recoding racial hierarchies as security imperatives. Competing responses, from right-wing sovereign internationalism to left critiques of neoliberalism, rarely confront Europe’s colonial and racialized constitutive role in sustaining global inequalities. These unresolved contradictions and failures open up urgent questions about how Europe’s political and economic order continues to reproduce global hierarchies of power. It is precisely this tension that the special issue takes up, responding by engaging the intertwined colonial and racist projects in the EU. The contributors collectively frame crisis as a key site through which colonial violence is reconfigured, displaced, and normalized in contemporary EU governance. In so doing, they reposition the EU not as a neutral arbiter of order, but as an active geopolitical site where racialized and imperial forms of power are continuously produced, contested, and reimagined.

The ancient Greek author Thucydides is widely cited in discussions of international affairs and contemporary politics, such as the Russian-Ukraine War and relationships between the United States and China. However, he is often presented in such debates as a purveyor of universal theories or inspirational slogans. His reputation as an authoritative thinker, founded in the complexity and originality of his account of the past, is used to legitimise simplistic claims about the present. This article surveys three common examples of such readings—the Melian Dialogue and its relation to Realism, the Thucydides Trap, and the plague at Athens—to consider how they may offer a misleading idea of Thucydides’ work and what it could actually tell us about politics today.

Iran is one of the most stigmatised countries of the twenty-first century: having been sanctioned by the US since 1979, the Islamic Republic was declared part of the ‘axis of evil’ by President George W. Bush in 2002, and from 2006 onwards, it has been subject to multilateral, comprehensive and wide-reaching economic sanctions. In June 2025, this discursive and economic attack on Iran transitioned to direct military bombardment. For the United States and its allies, Iran is a pariah state. This stigmatisation of Iran is an example of the kinds of practices that contribute to the social construction of the international order, whereby some countries are designated as ‘inside’ and others as ‘outside’ the community of established states. Needless to say, Iran has been placed firmly in the ‘outside’ category ever since 1979. At the same time as accepting and even at times embracing this ‘outsider’ status, however, Iran has also sought to raise its own international standing and to be accepted as an ‘insider’.

Growing attention is given in IR theory and diplomatic circles to the ambivalent role of religion in world politics. However, there is a need for more analytical clarity, identifying at least four different domains: religions and inter-state relations; religions and internationalism; religions and trans-nationalism; and religions and globalism. The most promising approach is the one that concentrates on the transnational projection of religions, connecting it to the way religions address global issues to influence international actors.

The paper examines the challenges of teaching about the impact of nuclear weapons on international relations to students who were born after the Cold War and suggests a variety of pedagogical approaches for helping them understand this impact including readings, media, and simulations. We first discuss the value of a multi-methods approach to teaching about nuclear weapons and then discuss resources for these different approaches. For readings, we identify key writing framed as debates that have worked with undergraduates like Waltz and Sagan as well as key articles and literature reviews and historical literature about the actual use of nuclear weapons during World War II. We then discuss different multimedia such as movies and music. Finally, we discuss in class simulations with a focus on Nuclear Diplomacy, providing some examples of student reaction to playing these simulations.

This paper advocates a holistic approach to assessing international relations in undergraduate education, which revolves around: (a) essays and (b) active learning-related tasks, such as simulation reflective statements/reports and performance. The paper argues that, on the one hand, academic essays are far from irrelevant and it is difficult to overestimate their practical significance. On the other hand, active learning-related tasks are best utilised as a supplementary assessment, expanding the students’ range of transferable skills. The assessment structure advocated in this paper results from a holistic approach to assessment design, which includes teacher’s own experience, familiarity with pedagogical scholarship and input from students. This last element is the least common even though it makes sense to understand how students see their own assessment. To that end, the paper shares the results of a pilot project run at one of the UK universities, which engaged students as partners in rethinking their assessment.

The Hunger Games has become a pop culture phenomenon. To a greater extent than many of the other books in the young adult fiction genre, The Hunger Games series has themes relevant to the study of politics. This study explores the usefulness of The Hunger Games trilogy for teaching and learning about international relations. In particular, I examine The Hunger Games in relation to major paradigms of international relations and normative issues related to war. As a series rooted in conflict in the arena and more broadly in Panem, the trilogy raises a number of questions relevant to the study of war, peace, and justice.

This article introduces the Debate on editing and publishing (in) Political Science and International Relations journals in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The Debate brings together editors of PoliSci and IR journals published in four CEE countries to examine the practice of publishing (in) these disciplines and explore the diverse strategies journals, and their editors employ to navigate the semiperipheral context of CEE. Going beyond structuralist accounts of semiperipheral inferiority, we introduce CEE journals as institutions endowed with agency, self-reflection and responsibility towards their academic communities. The Debate discusses if and in which sense these journals try to become (limited) innovators, how they are bound by different conditions stemming from the national or regional contexts, how they work with or challenge them and which opportunities they exploit to advance their goals.

Analysing transatlantic relations from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (KP) to the 2009 Copenhagen accord, the article identifies underlying explanations for the divergences between the EU and US during international climate negotiations. It traces how a climate divide opened between the EU and the US in the early 2000s, involving confrontation over the implementation of the KP. However, a phase of EU–US rapprochement closed the climate gap in the late 2000s, leading to common positions during the 2009 COP-15 negotiations. Yet the Copenhagen Accord served to reinforce American influence, while undermining the coherence and credibility of the European stance. This led to multiple rifts in the post-Copenhagen landscape concerning climate treaty architecture, policy implementation and international relationships, jeopardising the success of future negotiations.

How do active learning environments—by means of simulations—enhance political science students’ learning outcomes regarding different levels of knowledge? This paper examines different UN simulations in political science courses to demonstrate their pedagogical value and provide empirical evidence for their effectiveness regarding three levels of knowledge (factual, procedural and soft skills). Despite comprehensive theoretical claims about the positive effects of active learning environments on learning outcomes, substantial empirical evidence is limited. Here, we focus on simulations to systematically test previous claims and demonstrate their pedagogical value. Model United Nations (MUNs) have been a popular teaching device in political science. To gain comprehensive data about the active learning effects of MUNs, we collect data and evaluate three simulations covering the whole range of simulation characteristics: a short in-class simulation of the UN Security Council, a regional MUN with different committees being simulated, and two delegations to the National Model United Nations, for which the students prepare for 1 year. Comparative results prove that simulations need to address certain characteristics in order to produce extensive learning outcomes. Only comprehensive simulations are able to achieve all envisioned learning outcomes regarding factual and procedural knowledge about the UN and soft skills.