This article attempts to demystify the Iran–Hizbullah relationship and to challenge the widespread conceptualisation of this partnership as one between a sponsor and proxy. I argue that the proxy model is not only politically irresponsible but also over simplistic in that it reduces a complex, multidimensional relationship that is bound by ideational and normative factors to a materially-driven, transactional relationship. I begin with a brief survey of the historic and cultural ties between Iran and Hizbullah, and then explore their shared ideology, and strategic culture. Using Bertil Dunér’s proxy theory, and his focus on power, I further assess the relationship against Realist criteria, and highlight Hizbullah’s autonomy from Iran, using several interviews with Hizbullah officials and commanders that I have conducted. Not only does Hizbullah’s independence from Iran defy the proxy label, but I go further to argue that the resistance movement has become a regional power in its own right, based on both Realist hard power criteria and constructivist ideational understandings of power. I conclude that given the organic nature of the relationship between them, and the power modalities Hizbullah offers the partnership, the Iran–Hizbullah relationship is better understood as an interdependent symbiosis between close allies.

This short piece responds to Saad’s ‘Challenging the sponsor-proxy model’. Saad’s article raises serious questions about the sponsor-proxy model. Saad successfully shows how the model reduces the ties between the sponsor and the proxy to material factors while striping the ‘proxy’ from its cultural and political agency. This, she shows, fails to capture the complex relationship that ties Iran to Hizbullah. While this attempt to problematise the model should be commended, the framework she proposes requires some further elucidation, which may offer important avenues to understand the Iran–Hizbullah connection.

This reply examines Erin Hinson’s ‘“Our Journey, Our Narrative”: Narratives of para(militarism) and conflict transformation in the ACT exhibition’. It argues that a study of heritage construction, such as Hinson’s is especially fruitful in societies like Northern Ireland where peace is a project of the recent past, because memories of conflict become the subsequent arena of struggle. Moreover, it asserts that Hinson’s work is at its strongest when she ties artefacts from the Action for Community Transformation (ACT) exhibition to a legitimising mission on the part of former loyalist paramilitaries as well as when she examines the motivations of ACT’s creators and artefact donors. In answer, this reply enunciates the strands of collective memory to which the ACT exhibition speaks. These include the official memories of scholars, the dismissive memory of non-combatants likely to view former paramilitaries as mindless thugs, and the competing memory of Irish republicans. The reply continues by bringing up questions engendered by Hinson’s research while suggesting possible ramifications of the answers to those questions. It concludes by reminding the reader of the importance of studies of this nature based on the fact that scholars have only recently begun to engage with the history of loyalism in Northern Ireland in a dispassionate way.

Jonathan Evershed presents a compelling account of the clear dangers that lie in forms of state-led remembrance. The danger is, of course, that, in commemorating, actual experience is lost. While I do not wish to challenge any of the core claims in the piece, I do think that there is one element that requires greater examination: Evershed’s claim that contemporary Irish conceptions of the First World War as ‘A war that stopped a war’ ‘contributes to a (post)colonial and militaristic nostalgia in British political culture’. While the dangers of that for Northern Ireland are clear, perhaps the greatest risks lie in England, since any such benign account of the conflict serves radically to distort the experience of those soldiers commonly regarded as identifying as British and painted as being motivated by patriotism. Drawing on experience from Tyneside, I argue that, in considering the nature of that conflict, we must remember the many diverse, and often banal, reasons for working class engagement in conflict.

In this reply, we question whether ‘the knot’ is the best way to describe the relationship between the discursive and the material. Our main objective is to show that the discursive and material are co-extensive and therefore emerge from within the same assemblage, prior to any ‘knot’ between them. To develop this idea, we draw on the new materialism of Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, especially their argument for how and why it makes sense to approach the discursive and the material as hyphenated (‘discursive-material’) as well as performatively constituted.

This article first sets out the value of the political discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe. It argues that this work was central to the development of cultural studies, in its theorisation of social and cultural practices as being part of ‘political discourse’. This confers a dignity, status, value and political importance on cultural practices of all kinds. However, the article seeks to probe the limits of this approach to cultural politics, and it does so through a necessarily unusual exploration. First, it takes an example of something ostensibly trivial from the realms of film and popular culture and explores it in terms of Laclau and Mouffe's categories, in two different ways. The ‘trivial’/pop cultural example is Bruce Lee. Could Bruce Lee be regarded as ‘politically’ significant or consequential? He was certainly an enormously influential film and popular cultural icon of the 1970s, one who arguably ignited a global ‘kung fu craze’. Moreover, Bruce Lee also had his own ‘hegemonic project’, seeking to transform and unify martial arts practices. In this paper, Bruce Lee's own ‘project’ is first examined in the terms of Laclauian categories. These are shown to be extremely useful for grasping both the project and the reasons for its failure. Then the article moves into a wider consideration of the emergence of globally popular cultural discourses of martial arts. However, Laclau and Mouffe's approach is shown to be somewhat less than satisfactory for perceiving at least some of the ‘political’ dimensions entailed in the spread martial arts culture and practices, from contexts of the global south into affluent contexts such as Hollywood film and Euro-American cultural practices. The paper argues that this is because Laclau and Mouffe's approach is logocentric, which leads it to look for and to perceive a very limited range of factors: specifically, political identities formed through political demands. However, to more fully perceive the political dimensions of culture, the paper argues that different kinds of perspective, paradigms and analysis are required. Adopting or developing some of these would enrich the field of political studies.