Over recent decades, we have witnessed the consolidation of securitization as a framework for understanding state-led responses to migratory influxes, in particular focused on border impenetrability and territorial control. However, we have also seen growing tensions and contradictions between migration securitization practices on the ground, migration governance processes, and racialized regimes of capitalist production. This article highlights how the migration securitization literature often homogenizes and universalizes the relationship between security responses and borders, by bringing it into conversation with the literature on racial capitalism. We bridge this theoretical divide via a case study examination of Brazil’s “Operation Welcome” since 2018, which has worked to receive and resettle Venezuelan migrants and refugees away from the border state of Roraima to other parts of the country. We present how the militarization of Operation Welcome was carried out through a “bureaucratization of militarization,” instead of conventional military tactics seeking to contain migration. And we discuss how access to the national territory and legal employment for Venezuelans in Brazil facilitates their insertion into racial capitalist structures of labor exploitation. Employing extensive fieldwork data, interviews, and participant observations to sustain these claims, we present how migration securitization methods, processes, and outcomes are not simply the result of sovereignty anxieties or a need to reaffirm border security, but rather are also shaped by global and local structures of (racialized) exploitation and dispossession.

Rebel groups exhibit significant variation in their commitment to peace processes: some withdraw at the informal stage, others exit at the formal stage, some retreat after signing a peace agreement, and others implement the agreement. Existing scholarship often overlooks this variation, treating rebel commitment to peace processes as either present or absent. To address this gap, I conceptualize peace processes as sequential progression across four stages established in the literature. In turn, I define rebel commitment to peace processes as a long-term phenomenon shaped by a series of interdependent decisions, the cumulative impact of which determines a group’s commitment at any given stage. I argue that the patterns of these interdependent decisions are best understood through a systematic analysis of the rebel organization using the framework of Historical Institutionalism (HI). Applying this framework, the unit of analysis is rebel institutions, which I characterize along two primary dimensions: the centralization of power and internal cohesion. The HI framework explains how rebel institutions, formed by distinct combinations of these dimensions, shape group’s preferences regarding peace processes. HI’s temporal concepts—path dependency, critical junctures, and timing and sequencing—explain how these preferences evolve, showing how prior choices constrain subsequent decisions and make institutional change prohibitively costly. I empirically trace distinct institutional pathways across four case studies to demonstrate how the costs of institutional change lead rebel groups to withdraw at various stages of peace processes. The article offers two main contributions: it highlights the underexplored importance of rebel organizations in shaping decisions related to peace process, and it extends the application of HI to the often less formalized institutions of non-state actors.

From the late 1930s to today, the technological lure of hydroponics has inspired many geopolitical imaginations of planetary transformation. Hydroponics, or soilless farming, refers to a bundle of technologies to raise crops outside of arable land, using nutrient solutions in water, sand or gravel media. Envisioned as a technology with the potential to overcome food scarcity, soil exhaustion and climate limitations, hydroponics featured in many 20th-century geopolitical imaginations, often as a tool unlocking greater state power over formerly inhospitable regions and reducing territorial competition. In this article, we investigate three such geopolitical imaginations, as articulated by a raft of agronomists within the US Army, the Zionist movement, and the British Commonwealth. Engaging with these agronomists as international thinkers, we reveal how they fabricated geopolitical visions of hydroponics as part of new infrastructures of American transoceanic airpower, Israeli desert reclamation and postcolonial community development in South Asia and Africa. Through these three cases, we argue that geopolitical imaginations of hydroponics traded in distinctive geographical imaginations, epistemic politics and ideas of state power, placing emphasis on transforming frontiers, controlling plant productivity and enabling the contrasting politics of military hegemony, territorial occupation or postcolonial democracy alike. To conclude, we reflect on how hydroponics remains entangled with geopolitical speculation today, amid concerns with global climate change and agrarian shocks. Casting present-day anxieties through past futurisms, we suggest future avenues for the study of hydroponic imaginations within historical International Relations.

In this article, I develop the concept of “gatekeeping” as it is exerted in the “upstream” of knowledge production. “Upstream” denotes the stage of knowledge production where unprocessed data is scoped, extracted, and preliminarily analyzed, before it later—“downstream”—is published as results on the basis of which political decisions are made. The focus on the upstream of knowledge production and how it is gatekept is an argument to prompt theoretical work on global governance objects to pay attention to the physical data that underlies the formation of epistemic objects. Moreover, the concept of gatekeeping speaks to scholarship concerned with data sovereignty by showing how gatekeeping as a mechanism of control of raw climate data is also exerted by non-sovereign actors or by multiple state actors simultaneously. By following climate scientists around as they scope, extract, and analyze ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet, I show how climate science is full of institutional hierarchies, mutually exclusive scientific interests, and power struggles “inside” science with direct effects on the flow and content of knowledge produced. Conceptualizing gatekeeping as it is exerted by state actors and scientific institutions contributes to our understanding of how power, hierarchy, and political interests are imprinted on climate science from the point of extraction of its physical data. The article follows ice core science ethnographically and asks how and by whom data is extracted from the Greenland ice sheet, building on participant observation and semi-structured interviews during multi-sited fieldwork across Greenland, Germany, and Denmark.

This paper explores the geopolitical dimensions of the relationship between history and theory in International Relations in the context of the ‘return of geopolitics’ through an engagement with the work of German historian Reinhart Koselleck. The core argument of the paper is that history has a geopolitics. International order is a significant node in the relationship between conceptions of geographical and historical unity because of its political claim to and production of global space. The upshot of this is that International Relations are not simply an object of historical investigation but produce the conditions by which historical time is understood. At the same time, Koselleck’s critique of the philosophy of history is implicated in a classical geopolitical imaginary found in the work of Halford Mackinder and Carl Schmitt. The diagnosis of globalisation Koselleck shares with Schmitt and Mackinder informs his view of the mutability of transcendental spatial ideas that enable historical understanding. This geopolitical orientation conceives of globalisation as unification of ‘man’ and ‘nature’ in a manner that resonates with contemporary diagnoses of the reunification of human and natural histories in the context of the climate change. In this way Koselleck’s geopolitics of history both challenges and reinforces the relationship between a global international order and the philosophy of history. Koselleck’s work is thus indicative of wider difficulties in rethinking the relationship between history and theory in International Relations in the context of the return of geopolitics. Finally, this work suggests that advancing the critique of the philosophy of history requires challenging the claim of international order to global space.

Militarism, broadly defined as a set of social practices that highlight the utility of organised violence, plays a central role in global security and military affairs. Yet International Relations (IR) research has long struggled with militarism. This paper considers the capacity of existing conceptual and methodological approaches to engage with the concept, in turn assessing militarism’s candidacy to become a ‘core concept’ in the field. We first highlight the diverse and evolving usage of the concept of militarism over time and across different knowledge forms. From there, we move on to examine key tensions within IR accounts, suggesting that ‘historical’, ‘scientific’ and ‘political’ approaches stand to gain from a more rigorous engagement with each other. We conclude with an appeal for sustained attention to militarism as concept and its historical and political dimensions in particular.

This article examines the role of antisemitism in international politics. Drawing on a genealogy of European antisemitism, it proposes the analytic framework of the ‘enemy within’ to foreground instances when Jewish ‘enemy’ figures are positioned on both sides of the boundaries organising international political orders. This particular permutation of (racial) bordering is porous and ambivalent, even or especially as ‘hard’ and binary racial borders are simultaneously enforced. The article identifies four characteristics of the Jewish ‘enemy within’: a shared origin story with European Christendom; simultaneous presence on both sides of a (racial) boundary; a prompting of fears around contagion, infiltration and assimilation; and deployment to legitimise strategies of hyper-vigilance, surveillance and purification. The genealogy traces how the Jewish ‘enemy within’ is mobilised in consolidation or defence of, first, Christian medieval order and, second, raced nation-states, economies, and bodies, in modernity. In both periods, the Jewish ‘enemy within’ appears as both an insider and outsider whose perceived ambivalence threatens, and is mobilised to defend, religious, racial and political international orders. Finally, the article applies this framework to contemporary antisemitism. Overall, the article offers a novel engagement with antisemitism in International Relations and a tool for analysing complex forms of racial bordering in global politics.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) was founded to end impunity for war crimes, such as violence against civilians, but its legitimacy as an impartial institution is often questioned. Previous research has suggested that even though the ICC gets involved in the worst atrocities, investigations and prosecutions are influenced by political interests. We show that member state interests are critical already at the selection stage of initiating preliminary examinations. We theorize that incentives and drivers of ICC involvement move through two pathways. On the one hand, the Prosecutor seeks to maintain public legitimacy through performance; it does so by getting involved in the worst situations and thereby meeting the expectations on the Court as outlined in the Rome Statute. On the other hand, states can refer situations to the ICC as a way of managing their own domestic military challengers; the Prosecutor seeks to maintain cooperation from member states by examining such situations, even if the crimes are less severe. These pathways to examinations matter because state-referrals are more likely to move to investigations. We examine this argument through a global analysis, covering the period 2002–2019, using a multinomial regression model for the two pathways. Our findings support these claims. We also provide additional qualitative descriptions of how domestic challenges have clearly preceded self-referrals by governments in all cases but one. By differentiating the two pathways, we accommodate conflicting claims about the politicization of ICC involvement versus attention to the most severe situations.

Film and visual methods have increasingly become significant focus areas of International Relations (IR) and feminist research. Feminist filmmakers have put particular emphasis on co-production and participatory filmmaking as more symmetrical approaches to research, which can provide visibility for marginalized voices and can challenge dominant perceptions. In this article, I reflect on my experience of making Hidden Voices , an eighty-minute documentary film about everyday experiences of living with disappearances in North-eastern Sri Lanka and the complex ways in which individuals and communities navigate legacies of violence and recovery. I emphasize the ethnographic value of film in bringing out the less visible relational and embodied everyday. As part of this, I discuss film as a type of ‘tour’, which can open opportunities for self-direction from participants and can offer a unique affective medium and way of seeing. While some present film narratives as a ‘microcosm’ of specific local experiences, I used Hidden Voices to explore diverse experiences and at times diverging standpoints. I also highlight the ongoing dialogical and didactic social value of film. While visual methods can be powerful tools for ethnographic research, I also discuss ethical and epistemological tensions inherent in making a research-based film.

This article develops a post-Hegelian social and political theory of human rights. To do this, it moves past two legacies that can be traced back to Hegel’s philosophy: his theory of recognition and his views about the embeddedness of rights within states. IR often misinterprets Hegel’s recognition theory as applying within a public world of state action. However, Hegel argues that recognition occurs before rather than within a social world. Instead, I show how and why Hegel’s analysis of Sophocles’ play Antigone is a more fruitful starting point for theorising contemporary international practices. I mobilise a Hegelian social ontology of ‘ethical life’ and a post-Hegelian critique of statism and Eurocentrism to argue that human rights should be understood as an independent field of action in which agency is embedded, rather than as a practice that is tied to sovereignty and states. Several conclusions about the ontology and epistemology of human rights stem from this analysis. Human rights practice brings forms of action and obligation into being. It enables collective (not only individual) action. It requires the exercise of humility rather than hubris. Finally, it invites a discussion of how agents can bridge external and internal perspectives to evaluate the actions that seem to be required by their practices. This critical exploration and re-interpretation of Hegel’s early work corrects IR’s tendency to use his later and more statist writings to locate and concretise the grounds for ethics.