Amidst the transition to the fifth generation of mobile telecommunications (5G), the US has launched a diplomatic campaign to prevent other states from acquiring such technologies from Chinese providers. In reply, China has launched a similar campaign to rebut being perceived as a security threat. However, the outcomes of such influencing campaigns in other states have been varied. This article argues that mediated public diplomacy and securitisation theory offer complementary ways to research the competition between the US and China in terms of influencing the policies of foreign states. Empirically, it examines the cases of Brazil and Chile, where the US campaign against Chinese 5G suppliers was successful in setting the agenda. However, neither the increased economic interdependence of Brazil and Chile with China nor their close political cultural congruency with the US, though, are enough to explain the different outcomes of the US campaign against Chinese 5G providers in each country. Indeed, Chile rejected the US securitisation move, while in Brazil it was successful, but partial in that it only refers to government 5G, not commercial 5G. The article argues that the degree of consensus among national political elites and other non-state actors to endorse or reject the US narrative explains such differences.

Critical security studies have shed invaluable light on the diffuse governmental technologies and pernicious effects of the EU’s bordering practices. While scholars have focused upon the experience of precarious migrant groups, this article suggests that extending our critical gaze to include seemingly privileged migrants can further understanding of just how far the insecurity produced by the EU’s migration regime reaches. Focusing on the migration process of international students in Norway, this article inquires into how these migrants experience, theorize and negotiate the EU’s visa regime and its governmental technologies. We show how their subjective understandings of ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ hierarchies of the visa regime play out in their bureaucratic encounters, influencing their everyday lives. Ultimately, the article shows how the regime’s disciplinary effects extend further than prior critical research has appreciated.

Why do particular foreign policy strategies persist even when they fail to achieve their objectives? And how do such policies eventually come to change? Incorporating policy paradigms as a unifying unit-level intervening variable within a Type II neoclassical realist framework, we account for extended periods of foreign policy continuity despite ongoing policy failure, and theorise the structural conditions necessary to override intervening paradigmatic imperatives. The article illustrates the argument through an analysis of the ‘Obama thaw’, after 50 years of hostile policy towards Havana. Drawing on interviews with key officials, we show that emerging structural pressures in the Western hemisphere brought about the administration’s decision to normalise relations with Cuba.

Theories can either have something to say about the future or provide foundations for making judgments about the future. In either case, however, a theory remains inadequate for obtaining insights about the future which no amount of advancements in information access and quality or methodologies can overcome. This article suggests that inadequacy persists and cannot be completely overcome because of the long-term and short-term time perspectives embedded within a theory. Using illustrative examples of time perspectives from Morgenthau’s theory of international politics, this article illustrates and analyses how long-term and short-term time perspectives within a theory delimit claims or judgments about the future made within or derived from a theory. Subsequently, readers gain insights on how to conceptualise long-term and short-term time perspectives, methods for identifying and differentiating between time perspectives within a theory and the distinct work time perspectives perform within a theory when multiple time perspectives are present.

Neoclassical Realism’s (NCR) theoretical relevance is on the line. The structural realist variant of the paradigm, tasked to explain why states react inefficiently to systemic stimuli is threatened with triviality by being assigned to explain a few cases of deviance. This is given the usual lack of ability on the part of those stimuli to point to a single optimal state response. In acknowledgement of the permissiveness of systemic stimuli, a second generation of NCR scholarship has proposed the development of a general theory of explaining foreign policy as the joint result of the limits imposed by them and the function of non-systemic factors – ideas and domestic politics – in selecting outcomes from within those limits. But this endeavour has been charged with the ‘crime’ of striping NCR of its theoretical distinctiveness, based on the argument that both types of causes are prima facie symmetrical. Accepting the view that NCR faces such an impasse, this article points towards a third pathway, termed transitive NCR. What is proposed under the latter is the longitudinal study of policy trends and patterns as the outcome of the transitive interplay between systemic and non-systemic factors; that is, the careful study of the ways in which systemic factors activate a number of non-systemic causal mechanisms, leading to the explained trends and patterns. In this way, the paradigm acquires distinctiveness and sufficient explanatory breadth while building bridges with other paradigms committed to the multicausal study of long-time periods.

This bibliography reviews the scholarly literature on the meaning, causes, and consequences of nuclear proliferation. Specifically, the bibliography focuses on “horizontal” nuclear weapons proliferation, which can be defined as the acquisition of nuclear weapons by states and other political entities that did not previously have them. Overshadowed by the superpower nuclear arms race during the Cold War, nuclear proliferation has become a major field of interdisciplinary international relations (IR) research since the 1990s. Much nuclear proliferation research has revolved around the empirical puzzle of why so many states that could build nuclear weapons have refrained from doing so. Despite proliferation’s surprisingly slow pace, however, the number of de facto nuclear-weapon states has gradually grown larger over time, and a slow pace in the past does not guarantee a slow pace in the future. On the other side of the coin, proliferation reversal, also known as nuclear renunciation, is also possible. In addition to studying the causes of nuclear proliferation, scholars have also investigated the effects of nuclear proliferation on numerous dimensions of policy and politics. But the literature on the consequences of proliferation remains much thinner than the literature on its causes.