Earth orbit has become increasingly crowded, threatening fragile space systems and the natural environment. These challenges are generating an acute need to assess international norms regulating outer space security, safety, and sustainability. This article has two objectives. First, we systematically survey the contemporary international norm architecture of outer space, filling a gap in the academic literature by bringing outer space law and governance into dialogue with contemporary IR norms research. To do so, we refine Lantis and Wunderlich’s three-dimensional (3D) norm framework to demonstrate how space activities are governed by norms across three interconnected structural dimensions: individual policy norms, norm clusters, and foundational meta-norms. Second, we demonstrate the utility of the 3D framework to understand the dynamic relationship between norm structures and agency by detailing prominent contemporary initiatives where actors are leveraging vertical and horizontal norm synergies to interpret and reinforce existing norms and promote new norms to regulate outer space mining and anti-satellite weapons.

Why do leaders sometimes pursue aggressive policies driven by outrage rather than by rational calculation? Although anger has long been recognised in international relations as a source of conflict, existing accounts under-theorise its causal impact on state behaviour and overlook insights from evolutionary psychology. Drawing on recalibrational theory, I develop outrage balancing, a new theory of aggressive foreign policy, defined as an anger-driven response to perceived injustice whereby leaders adopt punitive policies to recalibrate an adversary’s disregard for their welfare. I specify the conditions under which outrage arises and demonstrate how it produces disproportionate, risk-prone, and morally framed foreign policies that diverge from rational expectations. As a plausibility probe, the article re-examines Japan’s 1941 decision to enter the Pacific War, arguing that the Hull Note acted as the proximate trigger, provoking elite outrage and shifting preferences toward war.

Accounts of the ‘crisis’ of the liberal international order abound. However, many of the anxieties surrounding the future of this order expose a subtle investment in a set of colonial-racial inequalities and hierarchies. In this paper, I explore this unacknowledged investment on the part of liberal internationalism in the domination, sovereignty, and rule of Whiteness. I do so by reading G. John Ikenberry’s latest account of crisis in the liberal international order as a crisis of White sovereignty, focusing on how it exposes the foundations of liberal international as constituted in part through racialising processes that designate some subjects as the source, origin, and trustees of order, and other as its passive recipients, or worse, as agents of disorder in need of ordering. In this way, I show how the construction and maintenance of liberal international order structurally relies on and is tacitly invested in the (re)production of White sovereignty.

Transnational networks of neoliberal think tanks have invested time and resources in creating cross-country strategy mobility to oppose climate action. Building on strategy mobility research directed against renewable energy policy, we ask how think tank studies circulate in media outlets both within and across borders, and what role the media plays in the effort to shape the energy transition. We examine the role of a US-based think tank, the Institute for Energy Research (IER), which financed studies in several countries in an attempt to make the case that public investment in renewables was not efficient or effective, and used them to counter green policies in other countries, particularly in the USA. By examining 115 articles in media outlets in five countries (Denmark, Germany, Italy, Spain, the USA), we show that these studies gained considerable transnational media traction in the USA and played an important role in creating opposition to President Obama’s climate policies in 2008–2009. In all but one country (Denmark), most media reporting amplified the studies’ messages. In line with recent research on the increasing transnational fragmentation of the public sphere, we find that right-wing media in particular presented a favorable treatment of the studies and generally did not question their methods or funding. By focusing on the transnational nexus between think tanks and media presence, we make an original contribution to the existing literature on critical policy mobility research, and show that climate obstructionism, in this manifestation of policy skepticism, was already very active in the 2000s.

Through most of its existence, Venezuela’s place in international relations has exceeded what might be expected from a mid-sized state on the global periphery. Simón Bolívar’s continental independence drives began in Venezuela and this regional leadership has long been a central element of Venezuelan national sentiment. Venezuela’s location at the northern edge of South America and the southern edge of the Caribbean gave it strategic importance to the powers of the Global North in the nineteenth century. Venezuela’s vast oil reserves made its geopolitical importance soar in the middle of the twentieth century. And Venezuela’s 1958 democracy resisted the collapse of other second-wave democracies and became a reference point for the region, as a Cold War counterpoint to Cuba. These elements: regional leadership, location, oil, and democracy have run through Venezuelan politics and foreign policy throughout its existence as a country, despite dramatic shifts in policies and allies in recent decades. This bibliography focuses not on foreign policy toward Venezuela but on Venezuela’s foreign policy, dipping into Venezuela’s politics to the degree that it is necessary for understanding its foreign policy.

Militant Islamism, which is often referred to as “jihadism” (though there is arguably not a single “jihadism” but rather multiple types), continues to be a key international security issue across multiple regions and continents. The term “jihadi” (or “jihadist”) refers to individuals and organizations adhering to a set of religio-political ideologies that share much in common, including a hyper-focus on theological and creedal (ʿaqida) “purity,” an insular and exclusivist worldview hostile to both other/non-jihadi Muslims and non-Muslims, opposition to democracy because it supposedly enables human beings to overrule God’s commands and law, and an emphasis on armed struggle (al-jihad al-askari) as the primary means through which to bring about social, political, and economic change. The scholarly and policy literatures on jihadism dramatically expanded in the aftermath of al-Qaeda Central’s hijackings and suicide plane attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001 (9/11). Research published since 9/11 has also expanded our knowledge about the earliest jihadi, or mujahideen, groups, such as Egyptian militant Islamist organizations in the 1960s to the 1980s, as well as Afghan and “Afghan Arab” (Arab foreign fighter) mujahidin in Afghanistan during the 1970s and 1980s. Today, the study of jihadism and jihadi organizations continues to grow and cover a wider geographical area of study, branching out from the Middle East and South Asia, the two areas that have dominated the literature for much of the past two decades since 9/11. More recently, research on African, Caucasus and Central Asian, and Southeast Asian jihadi organizations, as well as on Western jihadi foreign fighters from Europe, the Americas, and Australia, continues to grow. The study of jihadism has also expanded to include organizational cultures, the contours and formation of jihadi theologies and ideologies, the role played by women in jihadi groups and jihadi views on gender roles, and how social movement, political economy, and critical terrorism studies can help explain the continuing appeal, to some people, of jihadisms and jihadi groups. This article seeks to provide an overview of some of the best literature available on the historical development and evolution of Sunni and Shiʿite jihadi thought and organizations as well as on specific jihadi organizations, including al-Qaeda Central and its regional affiliates, Islamic State and its regional branches and affiliates, the Taliban movement in South Asia, Palestinian jihadi groups, jihadi ideology and theology, women and jihadism, jihadi culture, Western jihadism, and African, Caucasus, and Central and Southeast Asian jihadi groups.

The recognition of natural entities like rivers, forests, and mountains as subjects of rights is becoming an important trend throughout the world. It is a result of efforts by legal and environmental activists, Indigenous groups, and civil society organizations united under – among others – the Rights of Nature (RoN) movement that contest the binary separation between human and nature. The International Tribunals of Rights of Nature (ITRN) play a unique role by issuing judgments based on this perspective. But are they pluriversal in the sense that allow the coexistence of different worlds? The argument here is that they can open spaces for the pluriverse, of different worlds relationally interconnected. This does not happen without complications, for hearings and proceedings can also be interpreted as pertaining to or coopted as modern/Western (liberal) understandings of rights. Yet, saying that tribunals are hybrid would be reductionist. This paper seeks to address this drawing from pluriversal relationality, political ontology, and cosmopolitics to identify the relational nuances that reveal the pluriverse. For this it focuses on the ways participants engage in the hearings, the roles they play, and the worlds they bring with them. This paper conducts an analysis proposing alternative viewpoints that can reframe and reground IR through relational approaches.

This article translates Michael Mann’s notion of infrastructural power into the foreign policy realm and develops a conceptual framework that allows for the systematic treatment of states’ strategic efforts at mobilising domestic non-state actors. Despite the common rationales underlying such efforts across regime types, the article argues that states’ systemic features matter greatly. It generates two ideal types of infrastructural power in foreign policy – bureaucratic and authoritarian – to capture the distinct mobilisational modes and trajectories of each. Using a typical case study design, it scrutinises Turkey’s shifting Africa policies under AKP rule. The empirical discussion supports two initial assumptions: first, the concept, partly by dint of its underlying organisational approach, introduces a novel take on power in IR, yet one complementary to the relational understanding prevailing in the discipline; second, it provides an original tool with which to systematically analyse crucial components in the foreign policies of democracies and autocracies.

The field of international relations is recently witnessing an inflation of attention toward political leaders and personalities. Yet, while political leaders mattered to understand foreign policy behaviors, the question is how much they do and under what conditions. This article argues that how leaders and personalities affect foreign policy is up to the variables that can be analyzed at the state and international levels. To illustrate this argument, I use the example of two strong, influential, and revisionist Turkish leaders: Turgut Özal and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The results point out that the main determinative on Turkish foreign policy on these leaders’ period is not their personality as argued. Instead, the main variables we should analyze are the presence domestic and international constraints such as dominant foreign policy actors, economic capacity, political polarization, and international conjunctures.

In 2017 US president Trump announced the intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. This was widely perceived as a major challenge to continued cooperation to counter climate change. A feared consequence was further member withdrawal leading to the weakening of the Paris agreement and thus, the climate change action norm. Yet instead, states and non-state actors recommitted to the agreement and further legitimated the norm. How did this contestation of the US withdrawal announcement contribute to the further legitimation of the climate change action norm? I argue that this is due to climate change action being established as a legitimate, institutionalized norm within a diverse community in the global climate regime, especially by the UNFCCC’s effort. Contestation and legitimation are connected in a holistic process. Trump’s contestation therefore triggered legitimation rather than de-legitimation. Based on 26 interviews with UNFCCC officials, COP negotiators and non-state actors, I show that the announcement can be perceived as catalyst to the norm legitimation. This article contributes to the literature on the legitimation and contestation of norms, especially those facilitated by international organizations in the global climate regime.