This paper seeks to reconstruct the worldview informing Iberian overseas expansion during the long sixteenth century, arguing that this worldview was more indebted to Renaissance cosmology than to a recognisably modern scientific worldview. The paper describes how this cosmology provided the intellectual resources necessary to justify overseas expansion to those who doubted its viability and legitimacy, and how the same cosmological beliefs were invoked to make sense of the New World and the people found there, if only to facilitate and justify the subjection of the latter to European rule. This story constitutes an important yet often neglected part of the prehistory of modern international thought insofar as it exposes its Iberian origins and Renaissance foundations and the role played by pre-modern ideas in the making of a modern international system.

In the field of International Relations, sovereignty refers to a state’s authority to govern itself without external interference, closely tied to the principle of non-intervention. Recent scholarship has illuminated sovereignty as socially constructed and dynamic, yet non-interference remains central to its conception. Catherine MacKinnon’s feminist critique exposes the patriarchal implications of fetishising non-interference, silencing marginalised voices, and perpetuating gendered power imbalances. This Forum examines whether Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty that prioritise non-interference are shaped by patriarchal ideologies, particularly through the emphasis on relationality – rooted in kinship – and the central role of consent in Indigenous understandings and practices of sovereignty. By examining the intersection of non-interference with systems of oppression, this paper contributes to a nuanced understanding of Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and gendered relations. It concludes with a discussion of the relationship between consent, non-interference, and non-domination.

A dominant narrative, produced and reproduced especially by terrorism scholars, holds that terrorism in its worst form is religious. The most dangerous and non-negotiable form of terrorism, in other words, is the religious kind. At the same time, there is a recurring implication, proposed by many terrorism scholars and reflected in public discourse, that terrorism, no matter its official designation, is always inherently ‘religious’ or ‘religious-like’. Both this implication and the dominant narrative about the uniquely dangerous character of ‘religious terrorism’ – which I summarise as the Religious Terrorism Thesis – builds on colonial knowledge and assumptions about ‘religion’. Religion is also, as I argue, written into the category ‘terrorism’ and enables its negative discursive power and the colonial imagination of ‘terrorism’ as racialised and a system-threat to (Western) modernity. Terrorism, therefore, can never constitute a neutral signifier of a specific kind of political violence. Instead, it functions as a negative ideograph to Western societies, which means it functions to uphold the project of Western modernity/coloniality. The Religious Terrorism Thesis, which I identify as the foundation for the dominant discourse on terrorism today, is a crucial element of coloniality and justifies many controversial and contemporary counterterrorism practices.

This article takes the practice of twinning as an entry point for problematising conventional accounts of ‘international friendship’ in the field of International Relations. In particular, the paper zeroes in on three examples of twinning practice, past and present, that have challenged the status quo: twinnings established in opposition to the Contra war in Nicaragua; twinning as an act of recognition for communities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories; and twinning as a vehicle for the recovery and return of sacred artefacts to post-colonial Kenya. Through these examples, it argues for an alternative conceptualisation of international friendship – one that pushes beyond the methodological nationalism and ontological rigidity of dominant approaches.

This article explores the promises and pitfalls of the colonial archives for the study of seeing and knowing contemporary violence. As an ethnographic field and a site of decolonial struggles, the colonial archive is increasingly mobilised in scholarship that seeks to historicise and disrupt conventional, Western-centric knowledge production. While using the colonial archives might reproduce asymmetrical power relations, they also hold the potential to unsettle the ‘toxic imperial debris’ of our time. How can the colonial archives challenge the post-colonial politics of erasing imperial violence and contribute to decolonial futures? Drawing on research in the African Archives in Belgium and fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this paper complicates problematic portrayals of the post-colonial state in the DRC and Congolese women as always already violated or silenced. We argue that the logics of the African Archives reveal a set of destabilising state anxieties that reflect the duality and instability of colonial rule itself and that infuse contemporary (international) politics. This recounting of the violence contained in the archives both narrates the concrete, violent manifestations of our ‘global coloniality’ and works towards its own demise as part of a broader ‘anticolonial archive’.

Within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, millions of people had fled to neighbouring countries and across Europe. People throughout Europe were mobilised into action, and from the outset, the response to the unfolding humanitarian emergency in Ukraine was a complex and often messy web of private and public initiatives. In this article, we focus on the unique British humanitarian response to the greatest movement of refugees in Europe since the Second World War, known as ‘Homes for Ukraine’ (HfU). We develop our argument in three steps. First, we situate HfU within existing scholarship on ‘everyday humanitarianism’ and private refugee hosting in Europe, locating these within longer histories of private humanitarian action. Secondly, we show how HfU shifts the humanitarian space into the private and domestic sphere, a move reliant on particular conceptions of the ‘home’ as a space of sanctuary and safety. Finally, we unpack the gendered and racialised conceptions of the home and humanitarian hospitality more broadly, and how HfU sits within and outside of the broader bordering practices of the United Kingdom’s refugee response.

In recent decades, sovereignty has come under increased academic scrutiny for being a Eurocentric notion antithetical to emancipatory politics, leading critical theory scholars to call for an overcoming or even abandonment of the concept. Paradoxical as it may seem, it nonetheless remains an appealing ideal for many colonised peoples. Indigenous activists and scholars have actively re-appropriated the language of sovereignty to encapsulate and advance Indigenous political aspirations. This paper discusses how Māori, Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Indigenous people, navigate their relations to the concept in their contemporary political discourses pursuing self-governance. Building on interviews with Māori leaders, scholars, and activists, it offers empirical insights into Indigenous political thought’s engagement with the idea of sovereignty. It highlights an ambivalence oscillating between rejection and rearticulation present both in Indigenous theorising and Māori politics. From an analysis of Māori contemporary conceptual strategies, this paper suggests that Yarimar Bonilla’s notion of ‘strategic entanglement’ offers a productive account to comprehend the approached Māori actors’ deployment of the sovereignty concept, and possibly that of Indigenous peoples beyond Aotearoa. This paper thus highlights the continued relevance of the sovereignty framework, both analytically and politically, to meaningfully engage with contemporary Indigenous politics.

This article contributes to disciplinary histories of International Relations (IR) by revealing a little-known history: how a Nazi diplomat, Curt Max Prüfer, occupied the first chair in IR in India. While the paper documents how Prüfer, a discredited diplomat, landed in Delhi through his connections with peripatetic Indian anti-colonial networks and spent slightly over two years as the first IR chair at Delhi University, it also makes broader claims about how we narrate disciplinary histories. Intellectual genealogies, the predominant way in which disciplinary histories are written, often miss the contingent factors that play a considerable role in the fashioning of the discipline. Contingency-filled narratives also point towards the fact that International Relations/Affairs, at least in its early period of formation, operated as a term of mythical heft – a placeholder to fit anyone with academic or practical expertise in varied fields such as international law, colonial administration, anthropology, diplomacy, history, political economy, and military strategy.

Under the Convention against Torture, if states know of torture having taken place, they have obligations to provide redress and rehabilitation for victims and pursue prosecution of those responsible. Despite this, the United States continues to detain prisoners who were subjected to years of CIA torture in Guantánamo Bay. The United States is pursuing the death penalty through the Military Commissions (MC) system which falls far short of any international standards for fair trial. Ongoing systematic physical and psychological abuse prolongs torture’s effects. We argue that the ongoing arbitrary detention, abuse, denial of healthcare, and the MCs constitute a regime of torture that persists today, with the acquiescence of successive US administrations, and with the collusion of multiple agencies of the US state. This regime is deliberately intended to keep CIA torture victims incommunicado as long as possible to prevent evidence of the worst excesses of CIA torture from ever coming to light. This regime has profound implications for human rights accountability and the rule of law. Our argument offers an opportunity to revisit the prevailing narrative in International Relations literature, which tends to view the CIA torture programme as an aberration, and its closure an indicator of the restoration of the anti-torture norm.

There is increasing recognition that Indigenous knowledges have considerable potential to enhance collective understandings of and improve responses to complex ecological threats, such as those to cultural heritage from climate change. At the same time, it appears that Indigenous peoples face structural barriers to participation in international organisations that advance knowledge about those problems. Using the conceptual framework of boundary organisations (BOs) theory and case studies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and UNESCO, I argue that the lack of meaningful Indigenous engagement in international knowledge institutions is not just an ethical problem; it also undermines the effectiveness of their assessments. The future success of their boundary work partly depends on further engagement with Indigenous stakeholders. At least at the heritage–climate change nexus, the salience, legitimacy, and credibility of IPCC and UNESCO assessments require substantive Indigenous representation alongside other state/non-state parties. Successful experiences in biodiversity governance indicate that incorporating the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) would enhance Indigenous engagement in UNESCO and the IPCC.

This article analyses the (post)colonial politics of UK bordering through the lens of monstrosity. Historicising contemporary bordering within colonial-era monsterisations of racialised people and their mobility, we identify four mechanisms through which migrants are constructed and policed as monsters today: animalisation, zombification, criminalisation, and barbarisation. We then examine how the state embodies monstrosity itself through border policies of deterrence and creating ‘hostile environments’. In addition to the instrumentalisation of horror, this entails extending the border’s reach domestically throughout everyday life and internationally through deportation and externalisation measures. We argue these developments embody a new form of state power, depicted as a headless, tentacled Leviathan. Doing so provides insights into monstrosity as a form of liberal statecraft, the local/global diffusion of bordering, the transnationalisation of sovereign power, and the racialisation of citizenship. It also raises important questions about the construction of border violence as a necessary and legitimate monstrosity in (post)colonial liberal societies, the everyday complicity of citizens, and the limits of efforts to humanise monsterised migrants or reform monstrous state institutions. Revealing how within liberal regimes of citizenship and humanitarianism values ‘there be monsters’, we argue, opens space for thinking about abolitionist alternatives in international politics.

Social Darwinism was a pathbreaker in the history of Chinese international thought. In this study, we explore the hitherto sparsely discussed process of the reception of social Darwinism in China, which led to a fundamental transformation in Chinese thinking about the international order and the position of China vis-à-vis Western powers. Drawing on the work of three leaders of that intellectual transformation – Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, and Liang Qichao – we analyse issues such as the struggle for existence and survival, national and racial competition, and statism. We demonstrate how the three aforementioned thinkers modified the original Darwinist thought, enriching it with voluntarism and radical collectivism, all in order for the emerging set of ideas to suit China’s historically determined needs. Overall, our analysis contributes to both the history of International Relations thought in China and the broader debate on the globalisation of IR theory and IR knowledge production.

This article argues that covert action is subordinate to security narratives, with covert action demanded by, empowered through, and used to decisively impact the narratives of security threat that concern a state’s key power-granting audiences. A narrative approach to analysing covert action is developed based on narratology and securitisation. This approach reconciles the paradoxical historical record of implausible deniability with International Relations theory, and challenges other risk-led approaches to understanding covert action. The narrative approach is supported by a class-severity model which updates existing ladder models of covert action escalation, enabling scholars to both detect occurrences of covert action and suggest attribution to an actor – a vital initial step for the study of non-Western covert action in particular. The narrative approach also enables the effectiveness of covert action to be measured in terms of its impact on security narratives, overcoming the limitations of existing approaches. The article employs these tools to analyse Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, delivering new insight and identifying areas for further study for a key non-Western user of covert action.

Latin America has long been subjected to colonial development that has negated Indigenous territory. In the present conjuncture, the region is home to the largest volume of environmental conflicts in the world. These conflicts are intrinsically connected to the wider model of neo-extractivist development that has been embraced throughout the continent since the early 2000s. Indigenous communities have frequently been the victims of this model of extractive development, with their territories becoming the primary sites for the aggressive expansion of the resource frontier. This has generated new political conflicts, as Indigenous communities conversely assert claims to territory and resources. In this article, I link these conflicts to what I term the ‘coloniality of space’, whereby Indigenous territorial forms have been theoretically elided from traditional spatial imaginaries within International Relations and concretely negated through practices within the global political economy. Moving beyond the territorial trap of nation-state centrism, Indigenous forms of resistance raise important questions about the subject and actors of International Relations.

If critical thought is to contribute to liberatory struggle, it arguably requires a general, even structural, theorisation of the nature and sources of power and oppression. This appears to be at odds with the critical project of questioning the immanence of truth to power, as famously framed by Michel Foucault. Yet Foucault’s philosophical project in fact hinged upon his own attempts to grapple with this tension. What is more, his ultimate failure to resolve it led to ambiguities that might be considered generative (especially in light of increased rapprochement between Foucauldian, Marxian, and decolonial International Relations [IR]). Reading Indigenous and decolonial movement intellectuals in tandem with Foucault, alongside the philosophy of science of one of his major influences – Gaston Bachelard – we advocate attentiveness to the ‘experimental’ way in which struggles against capitalist extraction and (neo)colonialism hold together dissonant theoretical – and ontological – commitments when putting forward structural accounts of power. This leads us to an ethos of inquiry that starts from lived thought, as well as to a non-linear approach to the relations between method, theory, and associated ontological commitments, from which scholars are traditionally trained away in social science.

This article reads Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages series (1863–1905) through a worldmaking lens. It argues that, rather than simply reflecting 19th-century ideologies of progress, Verne was engaged in creative global ordering. The article argues that Verne constructed global order as technocratic, anti-political, and necessarily violent. This space was ambiguously but persistently appropriated by white, male engineers and scientists. This generates two important insights for International Relations (IR). First, Verne’s global order was not about states, sovereignty, or political community: it was about an elite vanguard of technocratic adventurers roaming the globe. At a time when colonial incursions frequently emerged out of interventions by explorers and engineers and other ‘people with projects’, this understanding resonated deeply. It is also worth recovering as a current of technocratic thought not centred on bureaucracy and strong government but on private enterprise. Second, Verne’s fiction constituted a powerful conception of global order, and contemporaries drew upon this as an inspiration for real-world interventions. At the French Société de Géographie, of which Verne was a long-time member, as well as among imperialists across Europe, the Voyages became a casual frame of reference in justification of colonial expansion. Better understanding this typically downplayed aspect of the modern international imagination not only promises to enrich IR’s understanding of the role of speculative fiction in global ordering but also puts the current revival of techno-colonial projects – from Seasteading to the colonisation of Mars – into needed perspective.

In International Relations (IR) scholarship, there is a growing body of research on the connections between emotions, stigma, and norm violations. It is often presumed that for stigma imposition to be successful, norm violators should feel shame. We argue instead that the emotional dynamics that inform the management of stigma are more complex and involve overlooked emotions such as anxiety, sadness, and hopelessness. We substantiate this by analysing the successful stigmatisation of anti-war voices in Azerbaijan during the 2020 Karabakh war. While the vast majority of the Azerbaijani population supported the war, a small minority contested its legitimacy and the related emotional obligation to express hatred against Armenians. However, these anti-war voices became stigmatised as ‘traitors to the homeland’, and were ultimately pushed to self-silence. We contribute to the growing IR scholarship on emotions and stigma in two ways. First, we show how successful stigmatisation of norm violators may involve emotional dynamics that go beyond shame. Second, we discuss the power of emotion norms of hatred, which, especially in times of war, can push ‘ordinary people’ to pro-actively and vehemently stigmatise norm-violators. In conclusion, we elaborate on the potential future implications of stigma on peacebuilding activities between Armenia and Azerbaijan.