*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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International election observation has long been a flagship tool to promote liberal ideas of democratic ordering. But what happens when observers no longer agree on what counts as a free and fair election? Drawing on my recent article in the Election Law Journal, this piece contends that parallel election monitoring creates that very situation. I argue that parallel election monitoring does not just compete with established missions – it mimics them, subtly rewriting the rules of legitimacy from within.

Once upon a time, in a Europe unimaginably far away, the Soviet Union and its allies agreed to establish a regional organization to facilitate the liberalization and democratization of their states. Though it seems unlikely today, the organization was granted a large mandate to execute these objectives — this is how the OSCE was born. Ever since the Charter of Paris (1990) established the framework for the practice, the so-called Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE-ODIHR) has conducted over 400 election observation missions to monitor the transition to and consolidation of democracy after the Cold War. Multinational missions encompassing observers from all over Europe, Central Asia, and North America have assessed campaigns, legal frameworks, media landscapes, civil society groups, and election days.

For some time, Western states and the OSCE believed (or wanted to believe) that Russia and others were going through a genuine liberal-democratic transition, as the earlier OSCE electoral mission statements on Russia show (e.g. "the 26 March 2000 election of the President marks further progress for the consolidation of democratic elections"). In fact, the OSCE was certain of their monopoly on election observation legitimacy -   a single organization tasked with identifying irregularities and bringing them together in a report that assessed whether voting had met democratic standards.  But they were mistaken.

In the 2000s, a new player emerged in the field of international election observation. The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a regional organization of post-Soviet states established under Russian leadership, began observing elections. CIS observers usually claim to use the same methodology as OSCE-ODIHR. As one of my OSCE interviewees described it: “if (OSCE-) ODIHR started, I don't know, wearing special hats, CIS, on the next mission, would be doing the same". Importantly, the CIS primarily monitors elections that have already been covered by OSCE missions. Therefore, the starting question of my research was simple: why bother establishing a parallel observation structure when one already exists—and even includes all CIS states?

This brings me to the core of my argument. Based on interviews with election observers and an analysis of preliminary mission statements, I argue that parallel election observation represents a power-political strategy of liberal mimicry. But what is mimicry and how does it work? The concept has been used in the International Relations literature in the context of norm contestation, and it is adjacent to concepts such as imitation, parody, and trickstery. In postcolonial studies, Homi Bhaba argued that mimicry is a form of resistance that draws power from being a "subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”

However, the most illustrative use of the term comes from natural sciences. Mimicry is an effective strategy of protecting oneself from predation through superficial resemblance to another species. For example, hoverflies developed a resemblance to wasps to signal that they can sting. Since they appear more dangerous than they are, they are less likely to be attacked. The essence of mimicry is the appearance of similarity that is not substantiated upon closer inspection. CIS observers may talk the talk of liberal democratization, but do they walk the walk?

Many Western authors have written about "shadow" or "zombie" observers and have largely dismissed them. According to their accounts, they facilitate a "mock-compliance strategy" and are not credible. However, much of this line of research is premised on the dichotomy between professional, impartial OSCE observers and unprofessional, biased CIS observers. In my research, I examined how the two practices differ and how their differences are constructed on an everyday basis. I analyzed the practice as parallel election observation, emphasizing the narrative of pluralization associated with its power-political mechanism.

Examining 16 CIS and OSCE statements on Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Serbia, and Azerbaijan between 2010 and 2023, I found that while the CIS uses similar methods and communication techniques as the OSCE, its election observation model is substantially different. For instance, they are much more likely to praise compliance with the election administration schedule and much less likely to address major shortcomings, fundamental freedoms, or checks and balances. When addressing irregularities, the CIS usually uses a variation of the following phrase: "We have observed a number of technical deficiencies, but they have not affected the overall result." While they follow a similar format, the conclusions of the two organizations often diverge sharply.

Thirteen interviews with high-level practitioners, including one from the CIS, enriched these findings by providing detailed descriptions of interactions and experiences among institutions. For example, according to several OSCE interviewees, the CIS usually waits for the politically crucial press conference to be announced by the OSCE after election day, just so they can announce their own an hour earlier — presumably to be the first to speak about the elections. Increasingly, OSCE missions are being excluded entirely, leaving CIS as the only voice in the room.

Another crucial difference between OSCE and CIS relates to the legal and methodological reference points used to justify their observations. OSCE observers usually strongly emphasize the organization's international agreements, such as the Paris Charter and the Copenhagen Document, as well as the International Declaration of Principles for Election Observers and the OSCE Code of Conduct for Observers. They also take national legislation into consideration as long as it does not contradict international standards. The CIS, on the other hand, seems to turn this hierarchy of norms upside down. First and foremost, observers must assess whether elections comply with national legislation; only then should they consider international standards. This reversal of priorities—putting national law above international standards—marks a fundamental departure from the OSCE model.

One of the key reasons why parallel observation works is because it mimics the language of pluralism. It gives the impression of healthy democratic debate—while muddying the waters of legitimacy with alternative truth claims. As my CIS interviewee described it: "The truth is usually somewhere in between – between the extremes." An anecdote from an OSCE observation practitioner illustrates this particularly well.

In the 2000s, a post-communist head of state met with observer groups after an election. Besides the OSCE and CIS, two NGO-led missions were represented. According to the OSCE observer, the two NGOs were government-friendly and overwhelmingly praised the electoral procedures and the head of state. The CIS participant argued that the mission had encountered some shortcomings that did not affect the overall result. The OSCE representative was the last to speak and outlined a number of serious deficiencies that the mission had encountered, which were incompatible with the principles of free and fair elections. The head of state thanked the observers present, and the door opened for TV cameras and domestic journalists to enter the room. The head of state addressed the audience, claiming that he had just met with the international observer groups and, with the exception of one, all groups were quite satisfied with how the election went. Rather than challenge liberal observation practices head-on, mimicry portrays CIS as part of a pluralist field—offering ‘just another view’ that an audience can choose from.

There is another reason why CIS mimicry works. It draws from the inherent tension of established OSCE practices. Over the last two decades, critical narratives toward liberal democracy promotion have gradually increased. Should Western liberal democrats really be the ones teaching the rest of the world how to govern itself? Clearly, democracy promotion has been strongly pushed through the foreign policy agendas of Western countries, particularly through the leadership and funding of the United States. Is it democracy promotion or democracy imposition? Where do we draw the line?

The CIS strongly leverages endogenous criticisms of liberal democracy promotion. Critics of Western liberal hegemony might find themselves sympathizing with the decolonial and anti-interventionist narratives associated with CIS observation (“the inadmissibility of a policy of exclusivity, domination, imposition of cultural values alien to peoples, interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states"). Can Western observers, who often do not speak the local language and rely on interpreters, reasonably assess the state of democracy in a country? I asked myself this exact question when I, an Austrian OSCE short-term observer, assessed Kazakh polling stations despite my partner and I not speaking any Kazakh or Russian. CIS' claim to local ownership may not deliver on its promises, but its appeal is rooted in tensions within OSCE practices. In its own depiction of the field, CIS claims to be committed to pluralism, local ownership, and providing a legitimate alternative voice on the international stage. These critiques gain traction when OSCE observers are perceived as out of touch with local realities.

Why should we examine this subtle form of contestation when the world is witnessing much more overt forms of disruption, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Mimicry is a subversive practice that continuously fragments the field responsible for determining the international attribution of legitimacy to elections. This is one of the main ways international actors distinguish between democracies and non-democracies. Determining the fairness and freedom of elections has also been central to domestic resistance movements, as evidenced by the Color Revolutions. Promoting democracy is a key feature of most accounts of the liberal international order in the post-Cold War era. My research shows that contestation does not require a directly visible challenge to the validity of the democratic narrative itself. As the case study of CIS election observation shows, practices of liberal ordering can be gradually undermined from within its own narrative.

Just as the hoverfly mimics the wasp to look more dangerous than it is, the CIS draws its legitimacy from resembling the OSCE and 'talking the talk' of promoting democracy. As elections are short-term events and most audiences pay attention to them only briefly, it might be enough to look like the OSCE after election day when issuing the preliminary statement – at the very moment when the international assessment of electoral truth is constructed. If one regional organization says one thing, and another says something different, then electoral integrity may have just been a mixed bag after all. And who knows what election observers really do anyway? Scholars of International Relations often focus on grand events, potentially overseeing the tacit tactics used to disrupt and fragment established international ordering practices. CIS parallel election observation can be a fruitful case study to illuminate the nuanced logics of contesting liberal international ordering on an everyday basis.

In the theater of international democracy promotion, not all actors follow the liberal-democratic script. Some wear the right costume, speak the right lines, and stand on the right stage—only to perform an entirely different play. The CIS has learned to mimic the OSCE, but it may instrumentalize these performances for very different purposes. The true power of mimicry lies not in open defiance, but in quiet subversion – reinterpreting and rewriting the script line by line, mission by mission, until the audience no longer knows which story to believe.

Markus Pollak is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the Doctoral School of Political Science at Central European University. His research focuses on liberal international ordering, election observation, democracy promotion, contestation, and international political sociology. He has served on four OSCE election observation missions (United States, Serbia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan).

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This is an excerpt from Global Politics in a Post-Truth Era. You can download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.

The term post-truth is by now so ubiquitous in describing the state of politics in the Western world and even beyond that the most pressing issue of the day appears to be about making democracy work in the era of post-truth rather than questioning the normalisation of the term itself in the first place. The critical turning point appeared to have occurred in 2016 when the term was chosen by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘The Word of the Year.’ On its website, the Dictionary notes the transformation of post-truth from ‘being a peripheral term to being a mainstay in political commentary and connects ‘the spike in frequency’ directly with the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald J. Trump in the United States – both occurring in 2016. Paired with the noun ‘politics,’ post-truth is defined as an adjective ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the term to a 1992 essay in The Nation by the playwright Steve Tesich as he reflected on the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal and the 1990–91 Gulf War:

We are rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totalitarian monsters could only drool about in their dreams. All the dictators up to now have had to work hard at suppressing the truth. We, by our actions, are saying that this is no longer necessary, that we have acquired a spiritual mechanism that can denude truth of any significance. In a very fundamental way we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world (Tesich 1992, 13; emphasis added).

He then continued,

The Gulf War is over but the war at home goes on. The gulf between rich and destitute widens – between those of us who live in a modern post-industrial nation and those of us who live in the Third World countries of our inner cities. The present administration’s response to this internal crisis has shifted from benign to malignant neglect. The current levels of misery and decomposition of our cities and the economic gulags of our ghettos are acceptable. Since there is only so much hope to go around, there is a freeze on hope. The have-nots have now been reclassified as never-will-haves (Tesich 1992, 13).

In the context of Tesich’s essay, truth includes both facts, as in what happens, and ‘moral absolutes,’ as in the ‘self-evident truths mentioned in our Constitution’ (Tesich 1992, 14). Together, these two notions of truth entail the obligation to both act and react. The two passages cited above show that even in the early post-Cold War years, Tesich was already deeply concerned that the American people are neither prepared to act on truth nor react to truth that is disconcerting, or what he calls ‘bad news’ (Tesich 1992, 12). Accordingly, Tesich’s insight as captured by the term post-truth is not that truth is irrelevant to what we know, but rather it is irrelevant to how we act. In contrast, ‘post-truth politics,’ as defined by Oxford as a term that pitches ‘objective facts’ against ‘emotion and personal belief’ such that the latter appears to have overtaken the former in shaping ‘public opinion’ and thereby, democratic politics. When Tesich’s post-truth politics and its current usage are juxtaposed, the two are in fact not identical in terms of what truth is and how it relates to politics.

Against such consideration, this chapter provides a critical survey of selected historical events and theoretical considerations for the purpose of gaining a more nuanced understanding of the relation between truth and politics.

Truth and Language

One notable impact of post-truth politics is that language is being overtly deployed as a political weapon not only by politicians and those in power, but among the general population. It seems that once facts are irrelevant to the validity of what is being said, language becomes the platform for an all-out political contest in which what is said is no more than an act of will expressed as an assertion of power and/or an exercise in defiance.

As early as in the writings of Thucydides (460–400 BCE), the vulnerability of logos – which is the human capacity for rational discourse in tumultuous times – was already noted. Thucydides belonged to a school of Greek thought which maintained that language is conventional and that the association between name and things is a result of ‘human use and habit’ rather than ‘nature or divine dispensation’ (Connor 1984, 99). The conventional nature of language means that it is incapable of providing its users with any independent criteria for judgement.

In Thucydides’ study of the Peloponnesian War (431–405 BCE), the subversion of logos as seen in the manipulation of language was introduced through his account of the civil war in Corcyra (Thucydides 1972, 236-245). The war first broke out in 427 BCE between the pro-Athenian democratic faction and the pro-Spartan oligarchic faction before it spread to the rest of the Greek world. There was a general breakdown of law and order, resulting in extreme violence and death. Language underwent changes that were reflective of the events of the time. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) translated Thucydides’ description of the situation as follows:

The received value of names imposed for signification of things, was changed into arbitrary. For inconsiderate boldness, was counted true-hearted manliness: provident deliberation, a handsome fear: modesty, the cloak of cowardice: to be wise in everything, to be lazy in everything... he that had been so provident as not to need to do the one or the other, was said to be a dissolver of society, and one that stood in fear of his adversary. In brief, he that could outstrip another in the doing of an evil act, or that could persuade another thereto that never meant it, was commended (Hobbes 1839–1845, 8: 348; Thucydides 1972, 242-243).

What concerned Thucydides most was that the meanings of words are no more than linguistic conventions that require logos to support them. The Corcyrean civil war was a reminder that such capacity cannot be assumed. This is why history understood as an authentic account of what happens matters. Guided by logos, the historian’s task is ‘the search after truth’, which is established through ‘the absence of the fabulous,’ including ‘the rejection of myth and unverifiable stories’ (de Jonge 2017, 2). Thus, history plays an important role in facilitating the stability of language – without which distinctions and judgements cannot be rendered communicable.

Just like Thucydides, Hobbes was a nominalist who subscribed to the view that there is no inherent meaning to words. Hobbes’ state of nature, where

there is no common authority, is precisely one in which distinctions cannot be made. As Hobbes put it, there is ‘no Mine and Thine distinct’ nor is there distinction between ‘the notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice’ (1968, 188; emphasis in original). This is clearly an unsustainable condition for everyone. Behind Hobbes’ famous words that life in the state of nature is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ is his uncompromising argument for the ‘Leviathan’, which is described by the late American political theorist, Sheldon Wolin (1922–2015), as the ‘sovereign definer’ (Hobbes 1968, 186; Wolin 2004, 238–243). Accordingly, the social contract is importantly a ‘linguistic contract’ that binds all parties to ‘general names agreed upon’ (Peters 1979, 125; Hobbes 1968, 111).

Through Thucydides and Hobbes, we can identify a line of thinking that sees politics as a contestation over the use of language, which is based on shared conventions and norms. Thus understood, politics is not a collective quest for the true nature of our being or an epistemological exercise in pursuit of true knowledge. Rather, politics is about humans living with one another by finding a shared language to communicate with one another on matters that affect them all. Truth is in that sense contingent on what is being said as opposed to setting the standard for it. In other words, truth is the embodiment of shareability among us. While truth as such ensures the viability of a political entity, truth by no means represents a normative standard to adjudicate among contesting actors in what they say, let alone in what they do.

During Thucydides’ times, ancient China was also experiencing a tumultuous time as the ruling Zhou dynasty deteriorated into the period of the Warring States (481–221 BCE). This was when the rulers of Zhou no longer presided over the territories brought under its control through conquest. Instead of professing allegiance to the Zhou royalty, the lords of these territories became kings themselves to rule over their own land. The period was one marked by endless military campaigns as each of the seven major states aimed to conquer the rest (Lewis 1999). Yet, the period was also known for its intellectual vibrancy as different thinkers challenged the restoring of order among these warring states – including offering ideas and advice to rulers on good governance. Among these thinkers was Confucius (551–479 BCE). His thought, which came to be known as Confucianism, went on to become the state ideology of China from the Han dynasty (206 BCE–222 CE) until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911 when China became a republic. The founding text of Confucianism was the Analects, which is a collection of dialogues between Confucius and his students as recorded by them.

One key concept Confucius advanced is the ‘rectification of names’. Though the term only appears in one exchange in the Analects, it is considered a major aspect of Confucius’ thought. Generations of Confucian scholars from past and present, including Western academics, have debated over its interpretation (Makeham 2003). The passage in question reads as follows:

Zi Lu said: ‘The monarch of the state of Wei wants you to govern the country, what is the first thing you plan on doing?’ Confucius said: ‘First it is necessary to rectify the names.’
Zi Lu said: ‘Is that really what has to be done? You are being too pedantic, aren’t you now? How will you rectify these names?’
Confucius said: ‘Zhong You, you are too unrefined. A gentleman, faced with a matter that he does not understand, takes a skeptical attitude. If names are not correct, one cannot speak smoothly and reasonably, and if one cannot speak smoothly and reasonably, affairs cannot be managed successfully. If affairs cannot be managed successfully, rites and music will not be conducted. If rites and music are not conducted, punishments will not be suitable. And if punishments are not suitable, the common people will not know what to do. So, when the gentleman uses names, it is necessary to be able to speak so that people understand. If one can say it, one can definitely do it. A gentleman should not be careless with words’ (Analects 13:3 in Cao 2016, 148).

This translation is offered by the contemporary philosopher Cao Feng. As Cao notes, the passage is what started the whole debate over ‘exactly what kind of names did Confucius... wish to rectify’ (Cao 2016, 148). Of the three major groups of interpretation examined by Cao, beginning with classical Confucian scholarship, one is arguably the most influential and certainly most pertinent to the issue of language and politics. This is the interpretation that was first associated with the Neo-Confucian master, Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who argued that the ‘rectification of names is simply the rectification of politics’ (Cao 2016, 149). Within this interpretive framework, rectification has the dual functions of correction and prescription by ensuring that predetermined hierarchical roles are strictly adhered to through following ‘the system of rites and propriety’ (Cao 2016, 151). In addition, the rectification of names entails ‘using names to rectify actuality’ (Cao 2016, 151). Yet Cao rejects this whole body of interpretive works by arguing that these were ideas developed later. Instead, Cao suggests the following:

The original meaning of Confucius’ rectification of names may, then, be quite simple. Confucius did not mean to establish a concrete, normative system of “names”; rather, Confucius was simply the first person in history to realize or remark upon the importance of language in politics. As a politician, he noticed and foresaw the impact that the indeterminacy, ambiguity, and arbitrariness of names would have on politics. Confucius recognized the political consequences of language’s not accurately expressing meaning or not being accurately received by people. He realized the great role that names, as a means of distinguishing right and wrong and establishing norms, could play in society and politics (Cao 2016, 168).

Scholarly debates aside, Cao’s view has the advantage of identifying an interpretation of this controversial exchange in the Analects that enables its readers to extrapolate from it the observation that the meaning of words depends as much on their users as on their interpreters; neither of which can be predetermined. Accordingly, a good ruler is someone who can speak without ambiguity to his subjects and make good his words through actions. Stated differently, Cao’s view on what concerned Confucius then, who was living through times of protracted political upheaval, is that language is an indispensable political tool for those in power and can be deployed by both good and bad rulers alike.

To sum up, this historical survey shows that politics as a war of words is by no means a distinctive marker of contemporary politics nor the Western world. Be it ancient or current, east or west, language is subject to manipulation to serve political purposes and when there is an outright war of words that defies existing norms, it is indicative of a political situation in which people no longer share a language and truth becomes irrelevant. Accordingly, political order entails stability in language use.

Truth and Politics

As previously noted, current use of the term post-truth as an adjective to the term ‘politics’ suggests that once there was a time when politics aligned with truth. Indeed, if we start with Plato’s Republic as the key founding text of Western political thought, we see that the ideal polis (city-state of ancient Greece) is where truth and politics converge, and justice is achieved. Written around 380 BCE when Athens was still coping with its defeat by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, the Republic is a defence of the rule of the ‘philosopher king’, defined as someone who is ‘guided by the truth’ and is ‘always and in every way’ in pursuit of the truth (Plato 1974, 490a). For Plato, truth converges with virtues and hence, letting the philosopher take charge of politics is to let the wisest and the most virtuous lead the less wise and the less virtuous even if it requires compulsion (Plato 1974, 499b). In Plato’s words, ‘…until the philosophers attain power in a city there will be no respite from evil for either city or citizens…’ (Plato 1974, 501e). The uncompromising rule of philosopher-kings is made palatable by the claim that we are all ‘earth- born brothers’ with random mixtures of gold, silver, bronze and iron, but only the gold can rule (Plato 1974, 414–415).

Understandably, academic debates over the interpretation of Plato’s Republic revolve around the question of whether truth as attained in philosophy can be realised in politics as action and whether such a connection is even desirable. Without getting into the details of these scholarly exchanges, I suggest that they all share the concern that truth acquired through the rigorous process of philosophical reasoning is not without problem when applied to the real world of living humans. This is because not all humans are philosophers – and indeed, in Plato’s view, not everyone is capable of becoming a philosopher given the protracted and arduous training that one needs to endure to become one. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), a highly influential political philosopher of the twentieth century, notes that ‘Plato was the first to introduce the division between those who know and do not act and those who act and do not know’ and that such a separation has remained ‘at the root of all theories of domination’ (Arendt 1958, 223, 225). What Arendt points out in this remark is not the gap between theory and practice, but rather that Plato provides the normative ground for those who know the truth to tell those who do not know what to do.

Arendt herself took on the challenge of understanding the relationship between truth and politics through her analysis of Nazism and Stalinism. Arendt’s insight, which was controversial when The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951, was to identify Nazism and Stalinism as representative of a new form of political rule – totalitarianism – making it distinct from ‘other forms of political oppression... such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship’ (Arendt 1973, 460). Arendt defines totalitarianism as a self- contained system of ideas driven by their ‘logic’ and marked by a mode of reasoning called ‘ideological thinking.’ Ideological thinking as such is a distinctive form of political reasoning defined by three characteristics. First, ideological thinking claims to provide a ‘total explanation’ of all historical happenings, encompassing the past, the present, and the future. Second, while ideological thinking is an attempt to account for ‘factual reality’ in its totality, this mode of thinking is paradoxically divorced from reality and experience. This is because experience, being rooted in specificity, is clearly limited in its claim to totality. It follows that as its third characteristic, ideological thinking aims to emancipate thought from the limitation imposed by experience through a ‘specific method of demonstration.’ The method involves arranging facts into an ‘absolutely logical procedure’ that starts from an ‘axiomatically accepted premise’. It is, in short, a ‘process of deduction from a premise’ – which is the only possible movement in the realm of logic that leads to one definitive conclusion. This is how the ‘logicality of ideological thinking’ provides the basis for total explanation and the ‘principle of action’ for totalitarian movement (Arendt 1973, 468–474).

Stated differently, totalitarianism is a form of uncompromising idealism that exists in one’s head irrespective of shared reality as experienced. It is the perverse form of what Arendt later refers to as ‘rational truth’, which is the product of the ‘speculative mind’ that belongs to philosophy, mathematics and the sciences. The ‘speculative mind’ is the mind working on its way to generate axioms and theories by relying on the cognitive capacity of the human brain (Arendt 1977, 231). The presence of others has no bearing whatsoever on rational truth. In contrast, ‘factual truth’ is what happens when humans are ‘living and acting together’ (Arendt 1977, 231). Factual truth is therefore particular and temporal by definition. But more importantly, factual truth is ‘political by nature’ because it can only be validated in the context of the human community (Arendt 1977, 238). In other words, factual truth is about humans in their plurality rather than in their singularity. For factual truth to be sustainable, we need what Arendt calls ‘common sense’ – understood as ‘community sense’ (Arendt 1982, 72).

There is also another distinction about truth that Arendt makes which is pertinent to understanding how totalitarianism works. The issue is whether the so-called totalitarian ideology is simply an unnecessarily cumbersome way of saying that it is an all-round and polished lie. Here, Arendt calls totalitarian ideology the ‘modern lie’ – in contrast to the ‘traditional lie’. The latter is restricted by two conditions: that it is a lie about the ‘particulars’ and that it deceives only the ‘enemy’ – which means that the liar is not engaged in self- deception. The modern lie, however, involves a ‘complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture’. It also intends to deceive everyone alike, to the extent that those who initiate the lie eventually ‘fall victims to their own falsehood’ (Arendt 1977, 249–254).

This distinction between the traditional and modern lie is important. It indicates that not only is totalitarianism a lie, but the lie is in fact too big to fit into the standard meaning of the word. To tell a lie from truth, we need a common standard. In the case of a traditional lie, the common standard is precisely ‘the fabric of factuality’. As such, a lie always appears as a ‘tear’ to that fabric. Yet, modern lies require making a surrogate reality with a completely different context for facts to fit ‘without seam, crack, or fissure, exactly as the facts fitted into their original context’. Arendt notes that as long as those who concoct the surrogate reality are prepared to engage in self- deception to ‘create a semblance of truthfulness’, there is nothing to prevent ‘these new stories, images, and non-facts from becoming an adequate substitute for reality and factuality’ (Arendt 1977, 253–254).

Totalitarianism therefore requires a person to stand outside of the system itself in order to make sense of it. Arendt points out that it is futile for us to argue with (for example) a Nazi or a Stalinist on race or class. To confront totalitarianism requires more than just a confrontation with specific facts. It is a more fundamental confrontation between reality as experienced and its total rejection. This means that Nazism and Stalinism are more than radical ways of conducting racial conflict or class struggle. Rather:

Totalitarian politics – far from being simply antisemitic or racist or imperialist or communist – use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of factual reality, from which the ideologies originally derived their propaganda value– the value of struggle, for instance, or the interest conflicts between Jews and their neighbours – have all but disappeared (Arendt 1973, xv).

Accordingly:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist (Arendt 1973, 474).

Who then is the ‘ideal subject’ of totalitarianism? Although there is a revival of interest in Arendt’s observation on truth and politics since the onset of post- truth politics, not enough has been said about her reply to the question (Hyvönen 2018; Klinkler 2018; Lee 2019; Zerilli 2020). Yet if we take a look at Arendt’s portrait of this ideal subject, her view is even more pertinent to our current challenge.

As a self-contained system of ideas that is detached from experience, totalitarian thinking offers consistency in ways that reality cannot. Arendt notes that this kind of consistency is especially appealing to those who have lost a sense of bearing in the world (Arendt 1973, 353). They constitute what she calls the ‘masses’. The ‘mass man’ is thus a highly isolated and atomised individual, who is ‘obsessed by a desire to escape from reality’ (Arendt 1973, 318, 352). In his ‘essential homelessness’ the mass man can ‘no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects’ (Arendt 1973, 352). This longing for escape from reality is a ‘verdict against the world’ in which one is ‘forced to live’ but ‘cannot exist’ (Arendt 1973, 352). Such a situation is ripe for the ‘revolt of the masses’ against ‘common sense,’ which is ‘the result of their atomisation, of their loss of social status’ and with it, the ‘whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense’ (Arendt 1973, 352). In short, the masses are people who are considered to be ‘superfluous or can be spared … [who] cannot be integrated into any organisation based on common interest’ (Arendt 1973, 311).

Whether one agrees with Arendt’s analysis of the social conditions in the interwar years that led to the formation of the ‘masses’, her portrait of the ‘mass man’ is a powerful account of what can happen to an individual who has become disposable to the society that they used to belong to. Hand in hand with this phenomenon is indeed the collapse of ‘common sense’ that leaves the dislodged individual scrambling for reconnection. By offering the masses a substitute reality validated by the ‘logic of an idea’ rather than by experience, totalitarianism makes it possible for them to live in a world where there is no condition of plurality. Between ‘facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay’ and ‘bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology’, the masses will likely ‘choose the latter’ (Arendt 1973, 352). A world created by ideology, then, is more attractive to the masses not because ‘they are stupid and wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self- respect’ by conjuring up ‘a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself’ (Arendt 1973, 353). Moreover, it is precisely this ability to guarantee consistency that makes it possible for the leaders of totalitarian movements to demand ‘total, unrestricted, unconditional and unalterable loyalty of the individual member’ (Arendt 1973, 323).

While this chapter is not a study of the social factors that led to specific contemporary developments such as the result of the Brexit referendum or the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Arendt’s ‘mass man’ seem to have found their counterparts among the supporters of Brexit and Trumpism. Studies of voters’ profiles in both events point to a disproportionate share of supporters from white male lower income backgrounds without university educations. These are individuals who have either already lost their jobs to globalisation or who are at high risk of losing their job with very little capacity to be retrained for the twenty-first century market economy of advanced industrialised states (BBC 2016; Pew Research Center 2018). In short, these displaced workers are part of the tapestry forming the modern equivalent of Arendt’s ‘mass man’ – ready to be the recruits of totalitarianism.

Conclusion

If we step back to take a more comprehensive approach to the relationship between truth and politics, both historically and theoretically, it is not so obvious that 2016 is a defining moment. From ancient China and ancient Greece to our so-called post-truth age, the indeterminacy of language appears to be a persistent political challenge. Language is always open to manipulation by its users to serve power. Nonetheless, the tendency these days is to single out the ubiquity of social media and the proliferation of Internet platforms as the incubator for the countless cyberwars of words that in turn fuel the real world of politics. In this context, language is no longer the conveyor of objective facts and accurate information, but rather the medium for expressing subjective opinions and feelings, as captured by the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of the term ‘post-truth politics’.

In contrast, the historical approach used in this chapter shows that it is in fact too easy to point the figure at the Internet and digital communication for the political challenge that we face today. What is being suggested here is that with or without the Internet, language, be it used to convey facts or emotions, is simply a tool for communication that humans have invented. While language per se cannot adjudicate what is true or not true, what is right or wrong, it embodies such capacity when language is a shared norm. That shared norm cannot be sustained without some semblance of cohesion in any given community. Any war of words, irrespective of its platform, is indicative of the breakdown of such cohesiveness.

Returning to the original context in which the term post-truth politics was first used by Steve Tesich helps to identify the important distinction between truth as the standard for knowledge and truth as the standard for action. The two do not necessarily coincide. Placed in the context of the history of political thought, this distinction is in fact at the heart of Plato’s Republic. Yet when the philosopher as the quintessential bearer of truth becomes king, the polis that he rules over is far from the ideal of a just state that it purports to be. Instead, it is one that is held together by lies and coercion. What Arendt reveals through her study of Nazism and Stalinism is that it is dangerous for the kind of truth that philosophy generates – ‘rational truth’ – to become the guide to politics. Politics guided by rational truth can only be uncompromising and follows a logic of its own that cannot afford the ambiguity and indeterminacy of reality as lived experiences of humans.

A world of post-truth politics can be an opportunity for a new kind of politics if it is indeed about dismantling the idea that truth is the ideal that politics should strive for. But as it stands, the post-truth politics of today is more about invoking a past that never exists to judge the presence as a crisis in naming when the real crisis is about rebuilding a shared space that has room for all – be they of the left, right or centre; cosmopolitan or parochial; civic-minded or self-centred; liberal-minded or bigoted. Politics is and always will be about striving for that space, without which no human can thrive.

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Arendt, Hannah. 1977. “Truth and Politics.” In Between Past and Future, 227–264. New York: Penguin Books.

Arendt, Hannah. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

British Broadcasting Corporation. 2016. “Brexit vote: The breakdown.” BBC News, December 7, 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-38227674

Cao, Feng. 2016. “A New Examination of Confucius’ Rectification of Names.” Journal of Chinese Humanities 2: 147–171. https://doi-org.subzero.lib. uoguelph.ca/ doi/ 10.1163/23521341-12340032.

Connor, W. Robert. 1984. Thucydides. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

de Jonge, Casper C. 2017. “Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Thucydides.” in The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides, edited by Sara Forsdyke, Edith Foster, and Ryan Balot. Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199340385.013.17 https://www-oxfordhandbooks-com.subzero. lib.uoguelph.ca/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199340385.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199340385

Hyvönen, Ari-Elmeri. 2018. “Careless Speech: Conceptualizing Post-Truth Politics.” New Perspectives 26 (3): 31–55. https://www.proquest.com/ scholarly-journals/careless-speech-conceptualizing-post-truth/ docview/2204515132/se-2?accountid=11233.

Hobbes, Thomas. 1839–1845. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by Sir William Molesworth. London: John Bohn. Vol. 8.

Klinkner, Melanie. 2018. “Reasonable Truth.” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 14 (3): 393–99. doi:10.1386/macp.14.3.393_7.

Lee, Haiyan. 2019. “When Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible: On Truth and Power by Way of Socialist Realism.” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 134 (5). Cambridge University Press: 1157–64. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.5.1157

Lewis, Mark E. 1999. “Warring States Political History.” In The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC, edited by Michael Loewe and Edward Shaughnessy, 587–650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Makeham, John. 2003. “Zheng ming (Rectification of names).” In RoutledgeCurzon Encyclopedia of Confucianism, edited by Xinzhong Yao. Vol. 2: 813-814. New York: Routledge.

Oxford Languages, n. d. “Word of the Year 2016.” Accessed 19 August 2017. https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/

Peters, Richard. 1979. Hobbes. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Pew Research Center. 2018. “An examination of the 2016 electorate, based on validated voters.” Report, August 9, 2018. https://www.pewresearch.org/ politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on- validated-voters/

Plato. 1974. Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Tesich, Steve. 1992. “Watergate Syndrome: A Government of Lies.” The Nation: 12-14. January 6/13, 1992.

Thucydides. 1972. The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Rex Warner. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.

Wolin, Sheldon. 2004. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Westen Political Thought. Expanded Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Zerilli, Linda M. G. 2020. ‘Fact-Checking and Truth-Telling in an Age of Alternative Facts.’ Le foucaldien 6, no. 1: 2, 1–22.

Theresa Man Ling Lee is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Guelph (Canada). Lee is a political theorist who specializes in contemporary political thought. Her research and teaching areas include continental philosophy, Marxism and critical theory, feminism, postmodernism, philosophy of social science, psychoanalysis, multiculturalism, human rights, disability studies, modern Chinese political thought and comparative political theory. Lee has published on a wide range of subjects in these areas, including intercultural pedagogy and the challenges of teaching as a person with multiple minority designations in a Canadian university classroom.

In the age of Homo digitalis, screens are indispensable; without them, comprehension itself seems impossible. Immediacy defines this new species—patience and waiting have become obsolete. Information must be instantly accessible, as fresh and abundant as the foods once sought in local markets: cheese, fish, vegetables, fruits, and flowers. Yet freshness now applies less to nourishment than to data. What humanity craves is information more perishable than food, more vital than rest. Haste defines this era, and fatigue is its inevitable consequence (González González 2021). As  Byung-Chul Han (2022) suggests in Infocracy, the digital condition cultivates a subtle nihilism: an age of information without truth, where immediacy replaces reflection.

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Although it encourages us to consider (incorrectly) a world economy that is not reliant on material resources, with digital activity being akin to an ethereal realm, it is undeniably true that no economy can exist without energy and matter, as key figures in ecological economics, such as Georgescu-Roegen (1979), have stated. This perception of immateriality contradicts a fundamental thermodynamic reality. Therefore, despite digital efficiency, meeting the rising demand for digital devices in the age of Homo digitalis requires increasing amounts of energy and resources. Thus, understanding how digitalisation influences energy use is crucial in assessing whether it supports or challenges environmental sustainability, especially in the context of climate change (Lange et al. 2020).

Over the past two centuries, human societies have undergone an unprecedented transformation in their energy use. The industrial age of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, powered first by coal and later by oil and electricity, saw per capita energy use quadruple and total global demand rise roughly twentyfold. A fundamental change in both the type and intensity of energy use emerged with the large-scale extraction and combustion of fossil fuels (Ritchie et al. 2020; Smil 2010). This expansion reshaped not only economies and landscapes but also temporalities and social relations (Urry 2014). Today, as the digital era unfolds, the imperative of sustainability is inextricably linked to it. Homo digitalis inherits this energetic legacy: every click, stream, and computation depends on extensive infrastructures of extraction, generation, and data circulation (Lange et al. 2020). The dematerialised appearance of digital life thus conceals an intensified material and energetic metabolism—one that binds the virtual and the geological in a single planetary circuit.

Energy Demand in the Homo Digitalis Age

Global electricity demand is projected to increase at its fastest pace in more than a decade through 2026, with anticipated growth rates of 3.3% in 2025 and 3.7% in 2026. This expansion is primarily driven (among others) by the increasing energy requirements associated with cooling systems, data centres, and the rapid adoption of electric vehicles. Current forecasts exceed the average growth observed between 2015 and 2023, signalling a structural intensification of global electricity consumption. On the supply side, by 2025 or 2026, depending on climatic conditions and fluctuations in fuel prices, renewable energy sources are expected to surpass coal as the leading source of electricity generation worldwide. Concurrently, nuclear power generation is projected to reach record levels, while natural gas continues to displace coal and oil in numerous regions (IEA 2025).

Electricity thus stands as the principal driver of the digital era, deeply intertwined with global efforts to advance sustainability and mitigate the escalating climate and socio-ecological crises. However, the pace of fossil fuel substitution remains insufficient to avert the worsening planetary crisis, revealing a persistent gap between the ambition of decarbonisation and the realities of material transformation. To date, the global energy transition has not replaced fossil fuels in absolute terms; instead, renewables have been added to the existing mix to meet ever-growing demand (York and Bell 2019; Thompson 2023).

Paradoxically, Homo digitalis remains largely oblivious to the energy that fuels its hyperconnected life, activating its digital devices without perceiving the invisible material flows that make such immediacy possible. As if that were not enough, as Bibri and Allam (2022) state, digital societies are rapidly adopting various invasive technologies, which have both immediate and long-term effects related to surveillance capitalism, often resulting in collective disadvantages.

The energetic dependence of Homo digitalis thus transcends the individual sphere, revealing a broader geopolitical condition. Behind the apparent autonomy of digital life lies a vast geography of extraction, production, and technological control. Servers, satellites, chips, and batteries are not only technical artefacts but strategic nodes in a global struggle for energy and technological sovereignty. As the 21^st century unfolds, power no longer resides solely in the possession of fossil resources but increasingly in the capacity to command renewable technologies, data infrastructures, and the critical minerals that sustain them. In this sense, the digital age reconfigures the old energy order, as it can intensify economic dependencies while redefining who holds the levers of power in a world still materially and energetically bound to the Earth.

Inequalities in the Energy Revolution and the Homo Digitalis Age

Historically, the development of electricity and electronics has undergone significant evolution, primarily since the 20^th century. Most individuals aged between thirty and eighty years, residing in urban environments today, have observed the evolution of cities from the use of public telephones to the adoption of modern smartphones. All of this occurred over just a small portion of decades! From a long-term historical perspective, electricity has been widely utilised for barely a century and a half. In other words, for more than 99% of human history, life unfolded entirely without it—a reminder of how recent, and yet how profoundly transformative, electrification has been for our species (Smil 2018).

Today, as access to electricity remains marked by global inequalities, the digital era could advance unevenly, distributing economic gains and ecological burdens asymmetrically across regions and societies. In many parts of the Global South, reliable access to electricity remains a significant challenge. Across African countries, for instance, a strong correlation exists between per capita income and electricity access: nations with lower incomes typically reach only about 12% of their populations (Roser 2020).

Conversely, wealthier populations in industrialised nations are significantly more energy-intensive, generating higher emissions and contributing disproportionately to the global climate and socio-ecological crisis. As Roser (2020) notes, the average U.S. resident emits more carbon dioxide in five days than an average resident of countries such as Ethiopia, Uganda, or Malawi does in an entire year. These disparities underscore the ongoing importance of access to energy and technology as a key driver of global inequality. In this sense, the Homo digitalis era could inherit and amplify the uneven geographies of electrification, where the capacity to participate in the digital world depends fundamentally on unequal material foundations.

The New Geopolitical Metabolism

2025 has marked a pivotal phase in global disputes over the development and deployment of technology. Artificial Intelligence exemplifies how the rivalry between the People’s Republic of China and the United States has transcended purely technical domains, extending into broader geopolitical struggles over the control of critical minerals and the governance of their global supply chains.

As documented by the Council on Foreign Relations (2025), two months into his second term, President Trump reignites the China trade war, imposing extensive tariff hikes—the largest since the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act —to achieve greater economic self-sufficiency. After market declines, he pauses tariffs for most countries but not China, prompting retaliation. By April 11, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods reach 145%, while China imposes 125% on U.S. goods and additional levies on energy, oil, machinery, and agriculture. However, as advertised by China Briefing (2025), after negotiations, the extreme highs (125%–145%) have been scaled back under the current truce.

The Chinese side exercises dominant control over key raw materials for tech production, such as rare earths that the U.S. desires, which constitutes a considerable advantage in this race. Meanwhile, pivotal companies, such as NVIDIA and AMD, have needed special treatment to maintain their operations (China Briefing 2025). The critical challenge of energy sovereignty has progressively expanded into a broader concern over technological sovereignty. As fossil fuel production and distribution chains cease to be the exclusive foundation of national development, digital and renewable energy technologies have emerged as equally decisive arenas of power. Mastery over these technologies now constitutes a strategic advantage, shaping not only energy security but also the geopolitical hierarchies of the emerging low-carbon world.

In this context, China’s expanding partnerships across the developing world—most notably through initiatives such as the BRICS framework—are shaping an emerging geopolitical pole through South-South collaboration (Vivoda et al. 2024). This new alignment is often viewed as a source of renewed hope, promoting industrial and technological advancement in economies that have either not yet achieved full industrialisation or have been historically marginalised by the Western, Global North–led model of development. Nonetheless, it is also seen as a double-edged sword, as Chinese dependence appears to be a new form of Sino-centric dependence.

Redistributing Benefits and Burdens

Data centres have become one of the most well-known pieces of infrastructure supporting the modern life of Homo digitalis. Data centres act as central hubs for the internet, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, covering extensive areas. Inside, they feature corridors lined with uniform rows of computer servers arranged systematically—known as a ‘cold aisle’ where cool air is drawn in, and a ‘hot aisle’ where exhaust air is expelled. Heat poses a significant threat to data operations, as it can diminish efficiency or cause systems to fail. To keep servers cool, various technologies are employed, with one, evaporative cooling, demanding significant amounts of water and energy (Barringer 2025). 

As of March 2024, the U.S. hosted 5,381 of the world’s data centres, followed by Germany (521), the United Kingdom (514), China (449), and Canada (336). By continent, North America (mainly the U.S. plus Canada), Europe, Asia, and Oceania dominate this infrastructure, with South America emerging primarily through Brazil (163) (Lu 2025). These patterns illustrate how the digitalised economy concentrates energy-intensive infrastructure in certain regions. In the U.S. alone, data centres consumed 4.4 per cent of national electricity in 2022, with projections reaching 6.7–12 per cent by 2028 (Barringer 2025).

On the other hand, the primary inputs for digital and renewable technologies—commonly referred to as critical minerals—are predominantly sourced from regions in the Global South (Poque González 2025). In fact, the current production of many energy transition minerals is more geographically concentrated than that of oil or natural gas. Over 40% of global copper production occurs in Chile and Peru, more than 40% of nickel is concentrated in Indonesia and the Philippines, and over 60% of cobalt is sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo (IEA 2022). This concentration could highlight a significant emerging global asymmetry: while high-income regions benefit from advanced digital and renewable technologies, the environmental and social burdens of extracting these critical resources could disproportionately be borne by countries in the Global South.

Conclusion

Upon concluding my reflections, I recall an episode from Brave New World, where Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne visit the ‘Savage Reservation’. In this secluded enclave, people live according to traditional, pre-industrial customs, largely untouched by the hyper-controlled, technologically advanced World State. There, ageing, illness, religion, familial bonds, and rituals shape life—elements absent or suppressed in the World State, where humans are conditioned from birth to prioritise stability, consumption, and pleasure.

This contrast mirrors, in an allegorical way, our contemporary world—though with a crucial difference. Unlike Huxley’s neatly divided societies, humanity shares a single planet, tightly interconnected through flows of energy and materials. Overconsumption in some regions drives ecological crises that ripple globally, while those with the fewest resources to adapt bear the harshest consequences. In this sense, our world resembles a single ‘planetary reservation’, where inequalities in wealth, energy access, and technological power determine who suffers most from the very systems that others exploit in the name of development.

The pursuit of more equitable societies is crucial in a world grappling with climate change, as energy systems and technological development are fundamentally intertwined with material flows within a unique global economic system. The Homo digitalis is a new face of a long-standing structure. The digital anxiety of Homo digitalis, rather than liberating humanity, risks deepening its entanglement with extractive material systems — unless equity, not efficiency, becomes the guiding principle of the energy-digital nexus.

References

Barringer, Felicity. 2025. ‘Thirsty for Power and Water, AI-Crunching Data Centers Sprout across the West’. Stanford.edu. Economic Development & the West. & the West, April 8. https://andthewest.stanford.edu/2025/thirsty-for-power-and-water-ai-crunching-data-centers-sprout-across-the-west/.

Bibri, Simon Elias, and Zaheer Allam. 2022. ‘The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Data-Driven Smart Urbanism: On Post-Pandemic Governance through the Prism of the Logic of Surveillance Capitalism’. Smart Cities 5 (2): 715–27. https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities5020037.

China Briefing. 2025. ‘US-China Relations in the Trump 2.0 Era: A Timeline - China Briefing’. China Briefing News, September 30. https://www.china-briefing.com/news/us-china-relations-in-the-trump-2-0-implications/.

Editors, C. F. R. 2025. ‘Timeline: U.S.-China Relations’. Cfr.org. Council on Foregin Relations. https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-china-relations.

Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. 1979. ‘Myth about Energy and Matter’. Growth and Change 10 (1): 16–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2257.1979.tb00819.x.

González González, Miguel Alberto. 2021. ‘Homo Digitalis’. Plumilla Educativa 27 (1): 9–13. https://doi.org/10.30554/pe.1.4196.2021.

Han, Byung-Chul. 2022. Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy. 1st edn. Polity. https://www.amazon.com/Infocracy-Digitization-Democracy-Byung-Chul-Han/dp/1509552987.

IEA. 2022. The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions. International Energy Agency.

IEA. 2025. ‘Electricity Mid-Year Update 2025 – Analysis’. Iea.Org, July 30. https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-mid-year-update-2025.

Lange, Steffen, Johanna Pohl, and Tilman Santarius. 2020. ‘Digitalization and Energy Consumption. Does ICT Reduce Energy Demand?’ Ecological Economics 176 (October): 106760. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106760.

Lu, Marcus. 2025. ‘Ranked: The Top 25 Countries With the Most Data Centers’. Visual Capitalist, January 21. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-top-25-countries-with-the-most-data-centers/.

Poque González, Axel Bastián. 2025. ‘Claves para entender el rol geopolítico de América Latina en la transición energética global. Una aproximación desde la teoría de la dependencia’. In Prefigurar el futuro. Dinámicas extractivas y energéticas en clave latinoamericana., 1st edn. Miradas Latinoamericanas. CLACSO. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392097400_Olmedo_Neri_R_A_Rivero_Corona_M_y_Gomez_Bonilla_A_Coords_2025_Prefigurar_el_futuro_Dinamicas_extractivas_y_energeticas_en_clave_latinoamericana_CLACSO.

Ritchie, Hannah, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser. 2020. ‘Energy Production and Consumption’. Our World in Data. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption.

Roser, Max. 2020. ‘The World’s Energy Problem’. Our World in Data, December 10. https://ourworldindata.org/worlds-energy-problem.

Smil, Vaclav. 2010. ‘Science, Energy, Ethics, and Civilization’. In Visions of Discovery: New Light on Physics, Cosmology, and Consciousness, edited by Raymond Y. Chiao, Marvin L. Cohen, Anthony J. Leggett, William D. Phillips, and Charles L. Harper, Jr. Cambridge University Press. https://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/smil-articles-science-energy-ethics-civilization.pdf.

Smil, Vaclav. 2018. Energy and Civilization: A History. MIT Press.

Thompson, Shirley. 2023. ‘Strategic Analysis of the Renewable Electricity Transition: Power to the World without Carbon Emissions?’ Energies 16 (17): 6183. https://doi.org/10.3390/en16176183.

Urry, John. 2014. ‘The Problem of Energy’. Theory, Culture & Society 31 (5): 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276414536747.

Vivoda, Vlado, Ron Matthews, and Neil McGregor. 2024. ‘A Critical Minerals Perspective on the Emergence of Geopolitical Trade Blocs’. Resources Policy 89 (February): 104587. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2023.104587.

York, Richard, and Shannon Elizabeth Bell. 2019. ‘Energy Transitions or Additions?’ Energy Research & Social Science 51 (May): 40–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2019.01.008.

Axel Poque González is a postdoctoral researcher at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. He holds a Doctorate in Environment and Society from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Additionally, he holds a master’s degree in engineering. An Electrical Engineer by training, his research explores the intersection of energy transition, environmental issues and societal dynamics.

On this week’s episode, Prof. Sarah Pink chats with Dr. Tusharika Deka (⁠@Tusharika24⁠) in this second episode of two about futures anthropology, emerging technologies, influencing policy, advice to early career researchers, and much more.

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Professor Sarah Pink is Professor and Director of FUTURES Hub and the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, where she engages and innovates interdisciplinary and international research approaches to offer fresh perspectives and realistic future visions and foresight about the role of human futures in shaping digital and net zero transitions. She has a joint appointment across the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture and the Faculty of Information Technology. She is an Australian Research Council Laureate Professor and has over 25 years of experience of working with academic and industry research partners internationally and frequently gives keynote and public lectures in academic and business environments. She has published numerous books, including Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future and Doing Visual Anthropology and has directed several documentaries. She is known for her career-long focus on innovating new research and dissemination methodologies, and engaging design futures, digital, visual and sensory methods in interdisciplinary projects to engage with contemporary issues and challenges.

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How Migration Really Works: A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics
By Hein de Haas
Penguin Random House, 2024

In How migration really works, Professor Hein de Haas ambitiously proposes a new paradigm, a new discourse, and a holistic vision of migration that bridges the gap between scientific knowledge and the public narratives embraced by politicians, journalists, and humanitarian organisations. He proves how an informed public debate on migration is not only possible but crucial, as the age-old strategy of waging a war on migration has long obscured political, economic, and social responsibilities – often resulting in major geopolitical shifts. Migration policies have indeed played a key role in Brexit, European and US elections, and provided justifications for skyrocketing budgets for border militarisation, just to name a few examples.

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Drawing on robust studies from history, economics, anthropology, sociology, geography, and demography, the book proceeds dismantling false or partial assumptions about migration – its causes, nature, and consequences. However, it avoids the trap of monolithic worldviews, acknowledging the absence of easy solutions to complex societal issues like migration. Evidence, facts, and information never speak for themselves, and this “guide” builds on decades of academic research to suggest a translation of this knowledge into an accessible, engaging format that makes the boundaries of social science more permeable to public debate and policymaking.

Structured in three parts, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of global migration patterns, examines their impact on both receiving and origin societies, and explores the role of propaganda in distorting migration issues. By debunking 22 myths, de Haas addresses topics such as social cohesion, crime, labor, and climate change, moving beyond the simplistic view of migration as either a threat or a solution. Below, I revisit four of the most enduring and impactful myths in public discourse, which provide valuable insights for reframing the debate on migration across various domains.

The notion that migration has reached unprecedented and alarming levels, as frequently asserted by governments and international organizations, is deconstructed from the first pages. As de Haas illustrates, international migration has remained relatively low and stable over the past decades, consistently comprising around 3% of the global population—far from the notion of an invasion. Despite global challenges like disasters, inequalities, and injustices, four-fifths of the world’s population still live in their native countries. Furthermore, most migrants move legally and are actively sought by destination societies, primarily for labor purposes.

In contrast, unsolicited border arrivals, including asylum seekers and those with no other viable option but to travel irregularly, are not on the rise and remain a small fraction of migration. de Haas suggests that politicians claiming their countries cannot bear the weight of the world's suffering can take a step back: if a refugee crisis exists, it is concentrated in the regions of origin. In Global North countries, the pattern is erratic, with the most critical crisis being the failure to recognize the political dimension of asylum.

Another persistent myth is that investing in the economic development of countries of origin will reduce migration. As de Hass points out, decades of research have shown that the relationship between migration and development follows a U-curve: migration increases as economic conditions improve, then decreases at higher development levels. Migration is, as de Haas asserts, an integral, inseparable, and inevitable component of development. While investing in origin countries’ development may not reduce migration in the short term, labor demand remains the primary driver of international migration.

In fact, migrants predominantly fill vacancies caused by labor shortages, and they do so with a negligible impact on the welfare state and on working and housing conditions for nationals. As de Haas effectively points out, governments—not migrants—should be held accountable for such conditions. This underscores how public discourse on migration often exaggerates minor effects as transformative, confusing cause with effect, and correlation with causation, ultimately leading to flawed paradigms.

Smuggling is not the root cause of illegal migration; rather, illegal migration is a direct response to stringent border control enforcement, which forces people to rely on intermediaries like smugglers. Misunderstanding this causal relationship has led to the popular but misguided 'war on smuggling,' a prime example of ineffective policy where politicians become complicit in the problem they aim to solve. Contrary to popular belief, smugglers rarely operate within organized criminal networks; they typically work independently on a local scale and do not constitute an 'immigration industry' that can be dismantled to curb migration.

The true industry profiting from border enforcement is the border surveillance sector, including arms and technology companies. The author demonstrates how border restrictions typically result in increased illegal migration and more smuggling, creating a vicious cycle that systematically undermines the goals of border enforcement (p.259). The anticipated implementation of stricter border controls actually triggers pre-emptive migration, discourages returns and circular mobility, and transforms temporary migration into permanent settlement. Harder-to-cross borders do not deter people; they simply make migration more dangerous and deadly.

Myths also persist within the pro-migration side of the debate. The notion that migration alone can resolve global inequality or address structural demographic trends, such as aging populations, is both misleading and unrealistic. Despite increased migration, inequalities endure, and immigration has minimal impact on birth rates. Additionally, the idea that borders are more fortified than ever is inaccurate. While legal barriers to migration have generally eased, the pace of migration liberalization has slowed significantly since the 1990s. At the same time, migrants today enjoy more rights than in the past.

This situation creates a paradox that often paralyzes modern liberal democracies, commonly referred to as the immigration trilemma: the conflicting imperatives of controlling migration, promoting economic interests, and upholding human rights cannot be achieved simultaneously. The increasingly prevalent response to this trilemma is to prevent 'unsolicited arrivals,' filter mobility, and exclude potential asylum seekers and other migrants entitled to protection. To accomplish this, destination countries engage in large-scale externalization policies, enlisting origin and transit countries in border enforcement and migration containment efforts. As a result, for those excluded from legal pathways, borders have become increasingly violent and dreadful.

In How Migration Really Works, de Haas dismantles entrenched myths about migration, deeply rooted in public discourse, through the use of robust scientific evidence, maps, charts, and data. Each myth is carefully analyzed, offering readers a solid foundation to challenge their preconceived notions and encouraging reflection beyond the book itself. However, one crucial aspect that remains somewhat understated is the critique of the widespread assumption that the violence and harsh realities of border practices—especially for those lacking access to internationally recognized means of travel—are somehow inevitable. This belief, intertwined with the securitization and militarization of borders along key migratory routes, fosters a misguided perception that viable alternatives to current approaches to human mobility do not exist. This solutionist perspective contributes to a policy path dependency that has consistently failed.

Further exploration of this dynamic could illuminate how migration, as a complex social phenomenon, is deeply intertwined with power relations and historical struggles rooted in colonialism, gender, class, and race—factors that often remain implicit yet are deeply embedded in migration discourses and policies. These underlying issues, which cut across the myths discussed, have profound implications that cannot be fully understood through a purely positivist lens. Overlooking them risks erasing local and individual stories that reflect systemic trends.

If How Migration Really Works proves how essential it is to build a non-polarised platform for debate, it is equally urgent to enlarge spaces of possibilities that venture outside trodden paths and consider radically different approaches to migration. As de Haas explains, such an approach requires understanding migration within its historical context, recognising it as a normal aspect of life, and viewing it through the lens of mobility justice, rather than merely an economic issue. Only by doing so can we begin to reconceptualise the policies that revolve around migration, thus moving to the question of “what should we do?”. We must understand how migration really works to define the directions we want to take as societies and properly allocate responsibilities for these directions.

In this week's episode of the Thinking Global podcast, Cynthia Enloe talks with the team. To begin with, Professor Enloe unfolds her claim that "The international is personal; the personal is international", before exploring the idea of 'womenandchildren' rhetoric in contemporary conflict. Following this, Professor Enloe discusses the marginalisation of Feminist International Relations and how Feminist International Relations can challenge the dominant narratives the discipline has constructed. Lastly, prior to a brief exploration of masculinity and militarisation, Professor Enloe talks about her new book 'Twelve Feminist Lessons of War', available from ⁠University of California Press⁠ and ⁠Footnotes Press⁠.

Professor Cynthia Enloe is a Research Professor in the Department of International Development, Community, and Environment, with affiliations with Women’s and Gender Studies and Political Science, all at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts (@ClarkUniversity⁠). Some of Professor Enloe’s books include: 'Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives' (2000), 'The Curious Feminist' (2004), 'Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War' (2010), 'Seriously!: Investigating Crashes and Crises as if Women Mattered' (2013), 'Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link' (2016), and of course her seminal work: 'Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics' (1989).

Thinking Global is available on all major podcast platforms.

*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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What ultimately enables armies to prevail on the battlefield? Competing hypotheses have been advanced to explain the sources of military doctrine, and the debate remains unsettled regarding the relative weight of material, organizational, and sociological variables in shaping doctrinal outcomes. At the core of this debate lies a fundamental question: how can one account for both the divergences and the convergences in the doctrinal development of military organizations? Some armies, when confronted with dire battlefield prospects, demonstrate remarkable resilience—launching counteroffensives and resisting the temptation to capitulate—while others disintegrate rapidly. Why are some forces able to maintain cohesion under extreme adversity whereas others collapse? Why did the North Vietnamese army, despite suffering vastly higher casualties, withstand the technologically superior United States military? Conversely, why did the French army in 1940—defending its homeland as in 1914—crumble in six weeks, suffering fewer than 100,000 combat deaths but losing over two million prisoners, while the army of 1914 endured staggering early losses yet recovered and fought on for years? (Castillo, 2014).

Two enduring imperatives in wartime are cost reduction and the cultivation of organizational agility. These imperatives underpin the necessity of continuous adaptation. Armies that fail to innovate are prone to defeat, even under materially advantageous conditions. History offers multiple illustrations: the United States in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; Russia in Ukraine; Israel in Lebanon; or France in Mali. A recurrent lesson emerges: the inability to innovate translates into operational ineffectiveness and structural capability gaps. Yet, like all bureaucracies, military institutions often display a strong inertia and resistance to change. The scholarly literature on innovation and military diffusion has largely examined why and how states pursue new technologies, doctrines, and practices, emphasizing material constraints, organizational cultures, and broader sociological dynamics. Neorealist perspectives in particular argue that diffusion stems from systemic security pressures: states adopt innovations to preserve survival, and success depends on their ability to allocate sufficient resources. The organizational and financial capital required for adoption ultimately conditions national choices, which aggregate to shape systemic patterns of diffusion and, consequently, the balance of power.

In many national contexts, defense innovation unfolds within a formalized process: national security priorities are assessed, defense policies are revised, and restructuring efforts reshape military institutions. Crises, however, can dramatically alter the pace and trajectory of change. Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 exemplifies how war can accelerate doctrinal and organizational transformation. Armed forces remain highly responsive to the evolving geostrategic environment and to the shifting character of warfare, including domestic political and societal conditions. Ultimately, military organizations operate under a dual imperative: they must (1) guarantee operational effectiveness in adapting to strategic change, while (2) remaining embedded within, and responsive to, the broader societal norms and values of the polity they serve. It is precisely the tensions generated by this dual framework—between military necessity and societal legitimacy—that have become increasingly visible in the post–Cold War era, and which continue to shape debates on the future of military effectiveness.

Civil-Military Tensions and the Limits of Doctrinal Change: Understanding the Mechanisms of Military Change

Particularly in democratic societies, the military institution often appears out of step with the wider society, as contemporary culture has eroded the traditional “warrior ethos” by devaluing martial values. In modern operational environments—where the support and perception of local populations can be decisive—the use of violence may not only be inappropriate but even counterproductive. As General Walter D. Kerwin noted in the 1970s, “the values necessary to defend society are often in contradiction with the values of society itself. To be an effective servant of the people, the military must focus not on the values of our liberal society, but on the hard values of the battlefield.” This tension highlights structural constraints that limit military freedom of action: the imperatives of victory often collide with liberal norms. Since the armed forces remain bound by the decisions of civilian leaders and by the broader values of society, the very rationality of doctrinal change is deeply affected (Hamel, 2023).

A broad range of socio-political transformations—both within the international system and across domestic economic and social structures—has progressively challenged traditional perspectives on the nature of war, vital interests, and prevailing notions of security and threat. Operational challenges and new technologies have historically acted as primary drivers of wartime innovation. As Farrell and Terriff (2002) argue, Major Military Change (MMC) occurs when technological innovation converges with organizational restructuring, new concepts of warfare, and revised visions of future conflict. Military change unfolds through three interrelated processes: innovation (the development of new technologies, strategies, and force structures), adaptation (adjusting existing military means and methods), and emulation (adopting practices through imitation of other military organizations). Whether a change is “major” or “minor” depends not only on the process but also on its long-term strategic outcome (Farrell & Terriff, 2002, pp. 5–6).

In peacetime, military innovators face the task of articulating what Stephen Rosen has termed a “new theory of victory”—an interpretive framework anticipating what the next war will look like and how it can be won (Rosen, 1991, p. 20). This theory provides the conceptual foundation for subsequent organizational and financial reforms. It requires systematic reflection on the evolving character of war, the identification of emerging military regimes, and the integration of these insights into state strategic practices. Such theorizing, a distinct intellectual enterprise, precedes the bureaucratic transformation of abstract ideas into concrete doctrine and operational concepts.

This capacity depends largely on the intellectual and organizational work of military staffs engaged in strategic thought and operational art. Yet it cannot be assumed. As Hamel (2023) emphasizes, military organizations are state bureaucracies, and policymakers operate within constraints that often inhibit doctrinal or organizational change. Military thought and practice thus remain at once autonomous from, embedded within, and subordinated to the wider society in which they are situated. While war is inherently political, the relationship between political objectives and military means is rarely synchronized. As a result, armed forces frequently fail to adapt—conceptually and operationally—for reasons beyond their direct control, with significant consequences on the battlefield.

Military Diffusion and Globalization: An Asymmetric Process of Strategic Rebalancing

Innovation—technological and otherwise—remains one of the primary drivers of warfare. From the perspective of hegemonic stability theory, the development of war has historically resembled a “pack” dynamic in which followers emulate a small number of pioneers, since “there is an historical tendency for the military and economic techniques of the leading state or empire to be diffused to other states in the system” (Gilpin, 1981, pp. 176–177). Globalization and technological progress further facilitate and accelerate this process. First, dual-use technologies such as computing and software capabilities are not capital-intensive and therefore pose relatively low barriers to entry for new actors. Second, because commercial markets generally innovate at a faster rate than the defense sector, cutting-edge technologies are more easily accessible to a broader range of actors. Third, given the high level of integration in the global economy, recipients of foreign direct investment can leverage externally developed technologies and expertise to produce advanced military capabilities. In short, in the era of globalization, technology inevitably spreads and eventually becomes available to potential adversaries. This helps explain why military technologies tend to diffuse rapidly and broadly across the international system.

Systemic accounts, however, note the diversity of responses among international actors confronted with major military innovations. When a breakthrough begins to demonstrate its significance, states react in different ways: through adoption, countermeasure development, alliance formation, or neutrality. A range of factors—strategic, organizational, and political—shapes these choices, thereby determining the mechanisms by which military power diffuses within the international system (Goldman & Eliason, 2003, p. 9). As both a product of socialization and of competitive dynamics, diffusion—defined as “the introduction, application, and institutionalization of new technologies and practices” (Goldman & Eliason, 2003, p. 397)—produces convergence: the major weapons of principal competitors tend to resemble one another worldwide. Yet this raises a central question: why do only some innovations spread widely and reshape international politics?

The literature on diffusion in military affairs has focused on three key issues: how the process is defined, what causes it, and what patterns and effects it produces. Contrary to the neorealist view of diffusion as a straightforward process of emulation—where weaker states simply copy the behaviors and practices of stronger ones—empirical research shows that the mechanisms of diffusion are far more complex and contingent. Only a handful of military innovations diffuse both quickly and broadly. Weapons systems can spread through arms sales, commercial development of dual-use technologies, or imitation; yet the doctrines designed to integrate these weapons into operational practice rarely diffuse as quickly or easily. Scholars generally agree that “hardware” (weapons and technologies) is comparatively easy to acquire, whereas “software” (attitudes, doctrines, organizational structures, tactics, and related intangible factors) is far more difficult to develop and implement. The diffusion of military power is therefore mediated by a complex interplay of societal, cultural, institutional, organizational, bureaucratic, individual, doctrinal, and historical forces that shape both the pace and scope of innovation.

Adoption Capacity and Power Hierarchies: The Role of Financial Intensity and Organizational Capital

Diffusion/adoption theory posits that once states have registered an innovation, the spread of military power is determined primarily by two variables: financial intensity and organizational capital. Financial intensity refers to the level of investment required to develop and sustain an innovation, while organizational capital reflects the bureaucratic capacity of a state to restructure itself along the lines dictated by the innovation and to adapt to emerging strategic and operational realities (Horowitz, 2010, pp. 45–49). Together, these two factors shape whether a state can successfully adopt new military technologies.

History demonstrates that states often struggle to translate technological advantages on the battlefield into enduring strategic victories. New technologies only realize their full potential when embedded in new processes and executed through novel organizational structures. Thus, only those states that establish institutional arrangements enabling governments to exploit emerging technologies are able to emerge as dominant powers within the international system. The last five centuries of world history have been punctuated by successive revolutions in military technology. Those nations that mastered these revolutions—whether through naval innovations, mechanized warfare, or nuclear weapons—gained the capacity to reshape the global order (Boot, 2006).

Specific innovations have profoundly influenced the distribution of power, alliance patterns, and even the likelihood and duration of wars. The determinant of success lies in whether the financial and organizational requirements of a given innovation align with the capacities of the adopting state. For example, carrier warfare demanded extremely high levels of both financial and organizational capital. Nuclear weapons required extraordinary financial investment but relatively modest organizational adaptation. Suicide terrorism, by contrast, involved minimal financial costs but placed enormous demands on organizational capacity. Innovations in surface fleet warfare required mid-range commitments on both dimensions. As Horowitz notes, “the higher the financial intensity and organizational capital required to implement the innovation, the slower its diffusion at the systemic level and the lower the probability that a state will attempt to adopt it” (Horowitz, 2010, p. 49).

Financially intensive innovations tend to reinforce existing power hierarchies, while low-cost innovations pose greater risks to established powers by lowering entry barriers. Organizationally demanding innovations are more likely to generate enduring advantages for first movers compared to those that impose fewer structural requirements. In this sense, the diffusion of military innovations reshapes the strategic environment both through the distribution of systemic responses and through the first-mover advantages they confer. Yet, as history also shows, capacity to adopt innovation does not automatically translate into battlefield effectiveness.

Beyond Resources: Cohesion, Will to Fight, and Organization as Keys to Effectiveness

The resilience of Ukrainian forces has surprised many observers. The will to fight and unit cohesion on the battlefield have long been central concerns in research on military effectiveness. As numerous theorists have emphasized, the Greek commander Xenophon already recognized the primacy of will in war, remarking that “it is not numbers or strength that bring victory in war, but whichever army goes into battle stronger in soul, their enemies cannot withstand them” (Taylor, 2003, p. 32). For centuries, thinkers from Thucydides and Sun Tzu to Machiavelli and contemporary political scientists have sought to move beyond purely material explanations—such as the idea that larger armies with superior weaponry inevitably prevail—to incorporate non-material factors. Cultural, ideational, political, and social forces also shape the outcomes of wars and battles. Groups draw strength from motivation, while organizational structures and unit composition influence cohesion. Cohesion itself has two aspects:

1. Endurance refers to the capacity of an army “to remain disciplined and able to operate as the likelihood of victory decreases.” When confronted with battlefield setbacks, can an army remain a coherent and effective fighting force? Do soldiers continue to fight and obey orders, or do mutinies, mass desertions, and refusals to fight occur?

2. Battlefield performance, by contrast, denotes the “willingness of units to fight with determination and flexibility.” Determined units respond to setbacks, high casualties, or prolonged bombardment by continuing to resist, sustaining morale, and even launching counterattacks. Flexible units resist panic, reconstitute broken formations, and improvise when plans collapse or communications with higher command are severed.

The study of military effectiveness has advanced considerably. Scholars have investigated the martial weaknesses of dictatorships (Castillo, 2015), the battlefield virtues of democracies (Reiter & Stam, 2002), the links between civil-military relations and the preparation and conduct of hostilities (Brooks, 2008), and the critical importance of the “modern system of force employment.” According to Biddle (2004), armed forces are more likely to succeed on the contemporary battlefield when they adopt specific organizational practices: decentralized command, open communication, merit-based promotion, and rigorous, realistic training. The modern system does not guarantee victory, but functions as a causal mechanism linking regime type and material resources to combat capability. Organizational-level variables thus shape both unit-level effectiveness and aggregate military power. After initial failures in planning, organization, command, and intelligence, Moscow quickly began learning from its mistakes (Baldor, 2022).

A shared conclusion in this literature is skepticism toward the realist claim that states build and optimize their militaries simply to face external threats, and that military power can be measured by counting soldiers or tanks. Morale is as decisive as material resources, and the values defended by an army can boost motivation and cohesion. Napoleon famously quipped that “God is on the side of the big battalions,” but also insisted that “in war, morale is to the physical as three to one” (Greene, 2007). With motivated soldiers, he claimed, he could defeat armies three times his size. Military power is therefore more than the accumulation of material resources; it is the product of how states mobilize, allocate, and employ those resources, and how forces are commanded and used in the field. Tactical and political levels intersect: organizational choices, officer competence, and domestic stability all affect battlefield outcomes.

Although the modern system represents an optimal approach to tactical effectiveness, many states do not adopt it. Why, then, are only a few armies skilled enough to implement it? Since the system of force employment varies across states, scholarship has focused on national-level variables: regime type, civil-military relations, organizational culture, and “military inequality” within armed forces (Lyall, 2020). A particularly influential argument stresses rulers’ fear of military coups. Where internal threats outweigh external ones, regimes often prioritize coup-proofing over battlefield effectiveness (Talmadge, 2015). Civil-military relations can thus shape combat effectiveness: frictions may lead to flawed strategic assessments, undermining flexibility and survivability on the battlefield. Authoritarian leaders often compromise officer competence by promoting loyalty over merit, restricting initiative, and limiting training, all to reduce coup risks (Pollack, 2002; Talmadge, 2015). Yet these measures carry a heavy cost, leaving armies poorly equipped to fight conventional wars. In such cases, fear of domestic threats directly undermines battlefield performance, leading to military failure.

Technology as Promise and Illusion: Between Real Transformations and Strategic Myths

Technology evolves constantly, and in doing so it transforms the character of war. Politics, economics, ideology, culture, strategy, tactics, and philosophy have all shaped the conduct of war, yet no factor has had as profound an impact on its evolution as technology. It is not only military practices and organizations that are reshaped by scientific and technological advances, but also the wider political, economic, and social environments in which armed forces operate. Technology should not be understood merely as an artifact; rather, it embodies systems of knowledge and the prerogatives of elites, who articulate national interests and arbitrate the instrumental means through which they are pursued (Latour, 1999, p. 214). As Deleuze and Guattari famously observed, “we are sociotechnical animals, and every human interaction is sociotechnical” (2003, p. 397).

In this sense, the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) of the 1990s stimulated the technoscientific imaginary of the West (Marcus, 1995), heightening confidence in its ability to shape a new world order. Post–Cold War defense cuts reinforced reliance on technology in wartime, as smaller armies sought to leverage technological superiority to compensate for reduced mass. The RMA also contributed to the social construction of what Martin Shaw has described as “riskless war” (Hamel, 2021, p. 6), in which Western states could strike from afar with minimal risk to their soldiers.

Throughout history, technological innovation has been central in determining battlefield outcomes. From gunpowder (ninth century) to armored ships (1860s), machine guns (1890s), aircraft and tanks (1920s–30s), aircraft carriers and radar (1930s–40s), and nuclear weapons (1940s–50s), successive breakthroughs reshaped the conduct of war. Each of these innovations had profound consequences. Yet history is also marked by long periods of technological stagnation punctuated by episodes of revolutionary change. Naval technology, for instance, remained largely static in Europe from 1560 to 1850, illustrating the longue durée of stability. But the Industrial Revolution radically altered this pattern, accelerating technological change across all domains, including war (Bousquet, 2009).

The relationship between war and technology has always been reciprocal: technology has been harnessed to produce new tools of war, while wars have accelerated industrialization. The Industrial Revolution unleashed the second great wave of transformation in warfare, characterized by mass production of weapons, mass mobilization of national armies, and the standardization of training, doctrine, and organization. The Second World War was the first conflict in history in which the weapons used at the end were markedly different from those employed at the outset: the atomic bomb, jet aircraft, guided missiles, and microwave radar exemplify this leap. More broadly, recent technological trends converge around five attributes: (1) greater lethality, (2) increased precision and volume of fire, (3) enhanced integration and efficiency, (4) expanded capabilities for small units to generate decisive effects, and (5) improved stealth and survivability (Chin, 2019).

Technology has always served economic as well as military ends: nations wage war in ways consistent with how they create wealth. Just as agrarian and industrial eras produced distinctive modes of warfare, the information age brings about a new form of “chaoplexic warfare” characterized by networks (Bousquet, 2009, p. 30). The RMA was expected to redefine the global “kill chain” from sensors to shooters, much as globalization reshaped supply chains. The defense community embraced concepts of “electronic battlefields” and “network-centric warfare,” where networked forces could recognize, communicate, and coordinate faster than their adversaries. Cyberspace now enables cyber-mobilization, adding a new dimension to war at a distance. As Hamel (2016, p. 64) argues, contemporary “electronic levées en masse” transform both the means of participation and the purposes for which wars are fought.

In this context, information warfare has emerged as the primary operational form, shaping all other domains. It entails efforts to secure “information dominance” through cyber capabilities, social media manipulation, and cognitive targeting. Information is not merely a new domain but the connective tissue linking land, sea, air, and space, understood not in terms of “bits and bytes” but as a system of pragmatic relations between representation and referent, humans and machines, allies and adversaries (Lindsay, 2020, p. 7). The cognitive domain, exemplified in the Russia–Ukraine war, is increasingly central: the battle to shape national, adversary, and global opinion has become integral to modern war, with private actors such as Elon Musk’s Starlink or the Wagner Group playing direct roles. Emerging technologies—artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, big data, 5G networks, and the Internet of Things—herald a shift from “information dominance” to “cognitive dominance.” Cognitive warfare involves three interlinked battles: influencing public opinion, conducting psychological operations to demoralize the enemy, and weaponizing law to gain legitimacy. As Sun Tzu taught, the highest form of excellence is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

The Ukraine war illustrates the material limits of high-tech war. NATO states have faced major challenges in sustaining Ukraine’s needs for advanced weaponry, revealing their own vulnerabilities in a prolonged, high-intensity conflict. Industrial capacity and supply chains—rare earths, semiconductors, and munitions—have become as decisive as battlefield tactics (Vershinin, 2022). Western stockpiles of precision munitions have been rapidly depleted; Lockheed Martin and Raytheon warned in 2022 that replenishing U.S. missile inventories would take years. Britain, in a war game, exhausted critical ammunition stocks in just eight days. Russia, by contrast, maintained reserves of cruise and ballistic missiles and expanded production despite sanctions.

The proliferation of drones has further disrupted assumptions about twenty-first-century great-power war. While NATO, China, and Russia had invested heavily in costly autonomous systems, the Ukraine conflict demonstrated the disruptive potential of cheap loitering munitions deployed in swarms. In this respect, technology reshapes war only when it alters the political and economic costs of sustaining conflict. Cheap drones undermine expensive air defense systems, changing the cost equation. More broadly, the outcome of protracted wars depends not only on technological sophistication but on industrial resilience and coalition resources, as in the World Wars.

The United States’ own experience underscores the paradox of technological warfare. Over two decades and at a cost exceeding $10 trillion, it waged high-tech wars with advanced drones, stealth aircraft, and satellite networks, only to be outmaneuvered by insurgents wielding improvised explosive devices costing a fraction of U.S. systems (Merle, 2004). Technology reduced casualties but not costs, nor did it ensure rapid or decisive victories. As a result, analysts stress that no matter how advanced, “big complex programs are useless if there are no bullets for the rifles” (RUSI, 2022). Autonomous unmanned systems may hold the greatest promise in reducing both political and economic costs by providing scalable firepower and minimizing human risk. Yet decisive technology must do more than confer temporary battlefield advantages: it must reinforce political will and economic sustainability over time.

In sum, technology and war have always been co-constitutive. But in the contemporary era, effectiveness lies not in the mere accumulation of cutting-edge tools, but in how these tools reshape the costs—and thereby the sustainability—of conflict. States that ignore the long-term political and economic implications of military technology risk discovering that advanced weapons, however effective tactically, are insufficient for strategic success.

Conclusion: The Illusion of the Decisive Battle: Between Technological Fascination and the Return of Wars of Attrition

World leaders have long been captivated by stories of decisive battles and by generals whose genius could overcome overwhelming odds. Some of the most enduring misconceptions about war date back to the Napoleonic era. The study of figures such as Frederick the Great and Napoleon—whose battle-centric approaches fostered a veneration of aggressive tactics—became central to officer training, while historians and the media produced compelling narratives around their maneuvers. This obsession with the decisive stroke reflected what Nolan has termed the “allure of battle”: the idea that rapid, decisive campaigns could deliver clear outcomes and durable political settlements—a future in which wars would be brief and peace enduring (Nolan, 2017). Technological progress has reinforced this fascination with decisive battle, as political and military leaders came to see technology as a means of ensuring quick, cheap, and clean victory. Yet this is largely an illusion: as the First World War revealed, after the opening battles, the rationale for fighting often becomes the need to justify the blood already shed. Great powers then grind each other down until one collapses—usually just before the other was about to do the same (Howard, 1991, p. 98).

In the modern era, the fantasy of short, decisive wars has too often led to protracted wars of attrition. Not only President Putin, but “almost everyone was wrong in assuming the war [in Ukraine] would be short—and the reason is simple: modern wars do not only engage armies; they engage entire societies and the passions of entire societies. Once blood is spilled and treasure spent, everything changes” (Nolan, 2017). Today’s military environment—echoing 1914—illustrates that “contemporary military technologies favor the defender of the status quo” (Freedman, 2017, p. 8). Strategic interests continue to motivate both offensive and defensive measures, as great powers seek to mitigate threats and neutralize adversaries’ advantages.

The war in Ukraine, like the protracted trench warfare of the Great War, has undermined Antoine-Henri Jomini’s classical model of warfare, itself rooted in the Napoleonic assumption that wars could be resolved through a well-constructed campaign culminating in a decisive battle (Snyder, 1991, pp. 111–112). That model assumed that superior firepower and a breakthrough would allow the invader to defeat the defender’s last line, seize territory, and cut vital supply lines. But without such a breakthrough, wars degenerate into long, bloody campaigns of attrition. While political objectives can sometimes be achieved through prolonged conflict, invaders generally prefer quicker alternatives. This was clearly Putin’s intention at the onset of the Ukraine invasion. Short wars attract strategists precisely because they preserve the link between political objectives and organized violence before war takes on a life of its own. No leader wishes to be trapped in a grinding war of attrition in which the costs outweigh the value of the political object. Yet the danger is equally that of rapid and catastrophic defeat: national security is precarious if armed forces are vulnerable to sudden collapse. As in 1914, today’s danger lies in the mistaken belief that a preemptive, disarming strike is both feasible and necessary for ensuring security (Snyder, 1991, p. 112).

Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other recent conflicts underscore the fallacy of assuming that a first strike or superior technology guarantees quick victory. The decisive blow rarely produces the effective triumph it promises, and technology, far from predicting the outcome of wars, only offers insight into how wars may be fought (Freedman, 2017). As Nolan observes, soldiers fighting in Ukraine are acutely aware that they are engaged in what may become “a new thirty years’ war, even a new hundred years’ war” (Nolan, 2017).

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Snyder, Jack. “Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive – 1914 and 1984.” In Steven E. Miller et al. (dir.), Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991, pp. 111–112.

Taylor, Philip M. Munitions of the Mind. 3e éd., Manchester University Press, New York, 2003.

Talmadge, Caitlin. The Dictator’s Army. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2015.

Vershinin, Alex. “The Return of Industrial Warfare.” Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), 17 juin 2022.

Dr. Tewfik Hamel is a researcher and lecturer specializing in strategic studies, military history, and geopolitics. He holds a PhD in History from Paul-Valéry University (Montpellier, France), a Master’s degree in Political and Social Sciences and the Interdisciplinary Diploma in European Studies from the University of Strasbourg, and a Maîtrise in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Algiers. He is also an associate researcher at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (France), the Initiative for Peace and Security in Africa (Senegal), and the Institute for Applied Geopolitical Studies (France). His recent work focuses on contemporary military doctrines, security dynamics in the MENA region, and the interplay between technology and warfare.

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This is an excerpt from Foundations of International Relations (Bloomsbury, 2022).

The world today may seem to be in disarray. However, by historical standards, it is actually relatively orderly and fixed into place. Those that were born in the early part of the last century lived (if they were fortunate enough to survive) through a global pandemic, a global recession and two world wars. Life in prior centuries was even more perilous. Hence, there is no better place to start with International Relations than by explaining how the modern global system came into being, primarily out of the ashes of such events. This chapter deals with what can be described as the conventional origin story of International Relations. It sets out that International Relations as a discipline, and the global system it seeks to understand, was (and still is) dominated by warring nation-states that over time became somewhat moderated by international organisations and the characteristics that they embody – such as diplomacy and trade. Late in the story, individual human beings began to have limited agency. As the two chapters that follow this one will later detail, this origin story is under significant critique due to its limitations. Yet, it remains important as a starting point in any journey through International Relations to understand the history of the academic discipline by overlaying it on significant global events – as this chapter does.

The foundations of International Relations

You may have been drawn to studying International Relations for many reasons. But it is likely that part of what shaped your thinking began with a memorable event – perhaps one that occurred in your own lived experience or made it to the headlines. Such events are diverse and fall into many categories. As the book progresses, we will focus on those more. However, historically, significant events have typically involved violence between peoples through warfare and to a lesser extent large-scale regional or global economic events (Box 2.1). Indeed, it was the issue of warfare, and the seemingly endless occurrences of it, that birthed the discipline of International Relations in 1919 in the United Kingdom at Aberystwyth, University of Wales. Later that same year, Georgetown University in the United States followed suit and a trend had thus been established that universities should study and teach International Relations. Before long, there were groups of scholars spread across different continents working on one principal issue: how to build a discipline that could explain, and potentially solve, the problem of warfare.

The year 1919 was a landmark for many reasons. Not only was it the birth-year of International Relations as a discipline, but it also followed the end of the First World War (1914–18) which involved over thirty states and resulted in over 20 million deaths. Building on this, a common feeling at the time was that a war of such scale would not, or could not, happen again due to the financial costs and the toll it took on human life. Despite this, it was surpassed only twenty years later by an even more deadly conflict, the Second World War (1939–45), which took the lives of approximately 75 million people, 2.5–3 per cent of the world’s population at the time. The Second World War is the most significant war in history due to its scale and impact. It reinforced to scholars that warfare seemed to be endemic to humankind’s past and was therefore likely to be a central problem in our future. This reflected the so-called first ‘great debate’. Firstly, there were those who sought to develop the discipline with scholarship that sought to manage warfare. This would be done by developing and promoting strategies to help states manage their participation and survival in the inevitable wars of the future. Secondly, there were scholars who sought to focus on how war could be gradually replaced, or downscaled, by emphasising the benefits of established patterns of peaceful interaction (mainly trade) and building new structures that would restrict war and formalise diplomacy (international organisations) such as the United Nations.

This early period left us with a discipline that focused on two key actors within the global system: (1) nation-states, the formal name for the political communities in which each of us lives and (2) international organisations, which provided a forum for states to discuss their differences whilst also helping to facilitate international trade. Gradually over time, a third element would emerge within the system: individual human beings. This was due to the rising issue of human rights, inspired by the atrocities of the Second World War and a desire to prevent that kind of mass suffering and death from happening again. Yet, it would take many more decades for individuals and the non-state groups they sometimes form to more fully rise to prominence. These three key actors of International Relations – nation-states, international organisations and individuals – were all in place by the mid- twentieth century and they still encompass the basic shape of how we make sense of the world today.

In attempting to make sense of history in all its complexity, scholars often use a simplification device to break the last 100+ years into different ‘eras’ (defined periods of time) as seen in Box 2.1. For example, the post-9/11 era consumed much of the debate in International Relations for the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In a darker sense than with human rights, it reinforced the growing importance over time of the actions of individuals – this time manifested through non-state terrorist groups. It is hard to say what the characteristics of our ‘present’ era are, that will only emerge in hindsight. However, we can say it is likely to be defined by responses to shared threats and shared opportunities beyond terrorism, which is no longer a top order global issue when taken against pandemic disease, climate change and new patterns of state rivalries.

The making of the modern world

Of all International Relations’ key actors historically, the emergence of the nation-state is the most important in terms of how the global system is shaped. Today, there are 193 defined and internationally recognised territories, which we formally call nation-states (or more commonly just ‘states’). To fully understand their importance, we need to look further back in history.

In Westphalia in 1648, part of today’s Germany, a peace treaty was agreed between a set of warring parties that had won the Thirty Years War (1618–48). With over 8 million dead, the so-called ‘Peace of Westphalia’ was notable not just for ending what had been a brutal war, but also for providing the origins of our modern global system. Prior to Westphalia, Europe had been comprised of a fluid set of city states and smaller territories, many of which were overseen in some way by the church (under the guise of the ‘Holy Roman Empire’), which provided a guiding set of principles to each ruler (see Ringmar 2017). Under this arrangement, borders and the distribution of power were unclear and often undefined. The Peace of Westphalia set out a system whereby authority going forward would be based on the political idea of sovereignty, rather than religious structures. Formalising this, each participant in the Treaty agreed on a set of defined borders marking their territory, which the others recognised in turn. This led to the redrawing of the European map and the gradual emergence of the idea of today’s nation- states as territorially bound units, recognised by other such units as mutually sovereign. Sovereignty came hand in hand with the principle of non-intervention of a foreign power in another state. Nevertheless, non-intervention has always been a point of tension – especially when relations between states break down.

Of course, peace did not come to Europe for long. In fact, Europe saw an ever-escalating series of wars for several hundred years thereafter, ultimately culminating in the two world wars. As power was (post-Westphalia) seen in the accumulation of territory, and the resources and peoples therein, many leaders sought to expand their territory by taking over the territory of others. This led to frequent conflicts that regularly redrew the European map as existing states grew (or shrank) in size, new states were created, and others vanished entirely. It escalated further as European powers exported their continental rivalry to Africa, Asia and the Americas, which they raced to colonise (control a foreign territory and its people). As a result, by 1945, one third of the world’s population were living under colonial rulers.

Following the Second World War, the global system began shifting to incorporate ideas of human rights and to recognise the illegitimacy of empire. This change was broadly inspired by the growing power of the United States, which had emerged from the Second World War in a stronger economic and political position relative to the other powers. It sought to use that leverage to influence a different world order beyond empire. Considering that the United States had freed itself from the colonialism of the British in the late 1700s during its own struggle for independence, its ideas when matched with its growing influence had sufficient gravity to reorder the system. Scholars have called this the beginning of a period of ‘pax Americana’ denoting the United States’ key role internationally from this point forwards.

The process of decolonialisation did not happen overnight, but gradually through the second half of the twentieth century empires were almost entirely dissolved. A system of establishing self-determination for formerly colonised peoples was overseen by the newly formed United Nations. In that system, those colonised peoples had only one path to independence – becoming nation-states along the very lines Europeans had established in 1648. This process gradually gave us the world map we recognise today as new borders were drawn worldwide. As had been the case in Europe, this was not always a peaceful process and a range of challenges to sovereignty, both internal and external, continue to this day across all continents. In that sense, our world map undergoes occasional updates as this process evolves with time.

The ubiquity of sovereignty in today’s global system, embodied in the nation-state and the quest for peoples who do not have a state to form one, is best represented numerically. In 1945 there were fewer than seventy nation-states. Today, there are almost 200. In that sense, today’s global system – represented by the division of the earth into territorially sovereign units – is a system made first in Europe and then exported to the rest of the world. It overrode pre-modern and alternative forms of arranging peoples and distributing power. It endures to this day as the so-called global ‘Westphalian’ system, as key elements of the logic and structure trace back to 1648.

Beyond the understanding of the Westphalian system and the ever-increasing patterns of historical conflict it led to, the Cold War, which emerged in parallel to the decolonisation process, is of central importance in reminding us that large-scale war was not over in 1945. Pax Americana translates from Latin as ‘American peace’, suggesting that the new values of the global system would lead to a more peaceful world than the one overseen by the frequently warring European colonial powers. However, while there has been no third world war, large-scale state conflict would evolve to take on different forms – primarily due to the arrival of a new technology, nuclear weapons. After the first uses of an atomic bomb by the United States on Japan in August 1945, reports and pictures of the devastation caused by the two bombs that the United States dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima confirmed that the nature of warfare had changed forever. As one reporter described the scene: ‘There is no way of comparing the Atom Bomb damage with anything we’ve ever seen before. Whereas bombs leave gutted buildings and framework standing, the Atom bomb leaves nothing’ (Hoffman 1945).

Nuclear weapons were soon developed by other states, resulting in an entirely new set of conditions in the global system. It may seem strange but, despite their offensive power, nuclear weapons are primarily held as defensive tools – unlikely to be ever used. This is due to a concept central to IR known as ‘deterrence’. By holding a weapon that can (if used) endanger the very existence of an opponent by potentially wiping them out, such an opponent is unlikely to attack you as the risk is too high. Especially if your nuclear weapons can (at least partially) survive that attack and allow you to retaliate. This is why states frequently move their nuclear weapons around, place them in submarines or aircraft, and even sometimes install them beyond their borders by agreement with an allied host state. In an environment as insecure as the Cold War, gaining a nuclear arsenal was a way to achieve deterrence from being attacked and thereby a measure of security that was not otherwise attainable. And tens of thousands of nuclear weapons were built and stockpiled by states during the Cold War. Underlining the logic of deterrence, nuclear weapons were never again used in anger after their initial use by the United States in 1945. Yet, in recognising the danger of the unmoderated spread of these weapons, a norm of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons became one of the central ideas of our global system, which is explored later in the chapter in the first case study.

The Cold War was responsible for the historical image of a world divided into three zones. The ‘First World’ was the ‘Western’ nations (this is where the term ‘the West’ comes from). These states were allied with the United States, broadly followed an economic system of capitalism, and (at least aspirationally) a political system of liberal democracy. The ‘Second World’ was the Soviet Union and a range of ‘Eastern’ states that were governed predominantly by communist (or socialist) parties who rejected capitalism as an economic model. This conflict between the first and second world went beyond economics and created two irreconcilable international systems – leaving other states a stark choice to operate within one system or the other. That led to some states opting out and declaring themselves ‘non-aligned’ – creating a ‘Third World’. As most of those states were newly formed and/or developing it became a term often used to describe economically poorer states and is still sometimes used as such.

Despite the added ideological element of communism versus capitalism, the Cold War resembled other wars before it in that it became a battle for control over territory. Instead of meeting directly on the battlefield, both sides took part in ‘proxy wars’ as they fought to either support or oppose elements within states who sought to (or appeared to) move between the First and Second Worlds. The most well-known instances of this occurred in Asia, in Korea (1950–3) and Vietnam (1955–75), each of which resulted in several million deaths. As this took place in a time of decolonisation, the goal in this period was not to be seen to directly conquer other states, but to influence their political and economic development and in doing so increase the power of one ‘World’ and diminish the other.

The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union collapsed internally between 1989 and 1991 due to endemic corruption, popular resistance and economic decline. The ‘Second World’ was therefore no more, having lost its anchor. Virtually all of the world’s states then transitioned to capitalism, if they had not already done so. At this point, the term ‘globalisation’ became widely used by scholars and policymakers more generally to describe the process of the First World’s image gradually becoming representative of the entire world. For the first time in history a truly ‘global’ system had been born. States then became categorised more loosely within that global system by their economic levels of development post-1991, with ‘Global North’ sometimes used to represent the most historically developed economies, and ‘Global South’ essentially replacing the term ‘Third World’.

The Cold War is therefore an interesting culmination in our journey of understanding the global system as being one comprised of historically warring nation-states. In this period, and continuing into the present, nuclear weapons helped prohibit the type of large-scale war seen pre-1945. In that sense, although the Cold War is over, it demonstrated a point in history where the global system changed materially in terms of how states can act internationally, especially when in conflict. This materially shaped the development of the discipline of IR and also gave way to the modern image of a world embodied by one global system. Not only has this changed the nature of warfare, it has also emphasised the importance of non-violent forms of engagement by states, allowing us to explore other elements in the system.

Beyond a world of warfare?

When military theorist Carl von Clausewitz remarked in the early 1800s that war was the continuation of policy by other means, he sought to normalise the idea of war in politics. Indeed, his words were reflective of the world at that time, as has been explored earlier in the chapter. But his words also indicated that actions short of war are available to help states achieve their objectives. These are typically the actions of diplomats. Their work is often far less expensive, far more effective and much more predictable a strategy than war. In fact, unlike in centuries gone by when war was common, diplomacy is what we understand today as the normal state of affairs governing international relations. When understood in tandem with the growing importance of international trade and the associated links between individuals in today’s global system it allows us to expand our journey through history while also adding more analysis to account for why we have not had a third world war after witnessing two in short succession in the twentieth century.

While you will now be familiar with the concept of war in its varying forms, diplomacy, due to its nature, may present itself as something alien or distant. Diplomacy is most often an act carried out by representatives of a state, usually behind closed doors. In these instances, diplomacy is a silent process working along in its routine (and often highly complex) form, carried out by rank-and-file diplomats and representatives. More rarely, diplomatic engagements can drift into the public consciousness when they involve critical international issues and draw in high-ranking officials – and in tandem the media. An example of this would be a high-profile event marking a major peace agreement such as the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978, in which the respective leaders appeared together and shook hands – an unexpected gesture considering the deep tensions between both nations which had led to several wars over prior decades.

Records of regular contact via envoys travelling between neighbouring civilisations date back at least 2500 years. They lacked many of the characteristics and commonalities of modern diplomacy such as embassies, international law and professional diplomatic services. Yet, communities of people, however they may have been organised, have usually found ways to communicate during peacetime and have established a wide range of practices for doing so. The benefits are clear when you consider that diplomacy can promote exchanges that enhance trade, culture, wealth and knowledge. The applicable international law that governs diplomacy – the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) – references only states as diplomatic actors. Yet, the global system also involves powerful actors that are not nation-states. These include international organisations, which regularly partake in areas of diplomacy and often materially shape outcomes. For example, the United Nations materially shaped diplomacy in the regulation of nuclear weapons – which will be covered in the first case study later in this chapter.

Building on diplomacy, trade is another means to mitigate war. When the Cold War ended in 1991 the idea of global trade came of age. There were no more images of different worlds but instead an image of one world open for business. Still a world of nation-states, but one where the barriers between them were at a historical low and a system of shared practices (such as resolving disputes diplomatically) was enshrined in international organisations. The complex nature of global trade, where each nation-state’s economy is dependent on imports and exports to other states, is another development that makes war less likely. This is especially evident amongst the bigger powers in the global system who would likely be near-bankrupt and devoid of important commodities without the trade they generate between their peoples and businesses. The Covid-19 pandemic underlined this as, despite the unprecedented shutdowns of borders and restrictions on the movement of people, global trade – seen via the movements of goods and services – continued due to its necessity. Even the vaccines that were developed by pharmaceutical companies in certain states could not be manufactured at any scale without the materials and services found elsewhere.

What also makes war less likely is the fact that due to the instant communications we now enjoy via smartphones and global media, we can more easily see ‘the other’ as fellow human beings and as a result, it is much harder to justify acts of state aggression and to rally citizens to support a war. It is also easier to see (and therefore empathise with) individual human suffering, whether from war or from other manmade or natural factors, in other parts of the world. In this sense, the arrival of the globalised world in the 1990s also coincided with the gradual mainstreaming of ideas such as human security that took place both in the world of policymaking and in International Relations scholarship. It was as the twentieth century ended, the bloodiest century in recorded history, that individuals (and the groups they sometimes comprise) rose to prominence in the global system. In that sense you might view history as a dark place for people, but the foundations laid in the 1940s to emphasise the importance of human beings within the global system are gradually becoming more visible, as is explored further in the second case study later in the chapter.

Globalisation, especially when taken to be an unstoppable process within today’s global system, raises a number of questions. When we try to answer these questions, we quickly find new ones emerging. For example, if we settle on an idea of globalisation as the emergence of a shared global culture where we all recognise the same symbols, brands and ideals, what does that mean for local products and customs that may be squashed out of existence? Examples like this build around the question of whether globalisation is more negative than positive. In this sense, it can be seen to represent the imposition of Western political ideas and neoliberal capitalist economics – which can be viewed as unrepresentative and/or exploitative. Critiques such as this have inspired an anti-globalist (or ‘alter-globalism’) movement which is active in society and academia (see Chang 2002). The wide-ranging debate that just one term evokes is characteristic of the discipline of International Relations itself and the complexity it attempts to navigate. As noted earlier, globalisation also comes with a darker side via the opportunities it provides for criminals and terrorists to operate more effectively. Yet, beyond these issues, it is a useful way to visualise the importance of global trade and interconnectedness in a tangible sense. When taken alongside diplomacy it offers a more holistic picture of the ways states have options beyond war in today’s global system.

Adding trade and diplomacy, and the international organisations that facilitate them, allows us to see the world as one that is not static. New elements can sometimes appear and when they do, they can alter the nature of the system. Indeed, when recalling the presence of nuclear weapons, another factor within our system that disincentivises major war, it is clear to see that there are many reasons why today’s world is more peaceful in absolute terms than it has been historically. This does not take away from the reality that war still occurs, both between states (interstate war) and within states (civil war or intrastate war). Indeed, there are hundreds of instances of these post-1945. Yet, unlike in historical situations, these have not escalated to become systemic events (large-scale regional or world wars). All of this does not mean that major war is impossible. It just indicates that due to the shape of today’s global system, such a large-scale conflict is less likely to occur than in the different systems of the past.

It would be deceptive to end the origin story of International Relations without re-emphasising the role of the nation-state. Despite the other key actors that have emerged within the system, it is still only the state that holds sovereignty. This remains the true bottom line in terms of power, and this is also reflected in International Relations scholarship which has traditionally been very state centric. When Covid-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (denoting an epidemic occurring in multiple places) the decentralised and individualistic behaviour of states in response was more reminiscent of historical patterns than that of a supposed interconnected, globalised world. Rather than work together, states acted individually – often at odds, or in competition, with each other. This served as a reminder of their unmatched power to shape events within the global system. Later in the crisis when the race to deploy vaccines became the dominant objective, most states continued this path by competing to secure doses for their own populations first rather than prioritising international schemes (such as COVAX) to ensure everyone had equal access to vaccination.

Yet, a note of optimism. Major historical events, especially those that involve global crises (as noted throughout this chapter), do tend on average to result in shifts over the longer arc of history that come to improve how international relations operates. This typically only becomes clear in hindsight once the instinctual behaviour of states for short-term actions and reactions to crises gives way to opportunities for collective measures and working together.

CASE STUDY 1: Regulating nuclear weapons

The quest to regulate nuclear weapons offers a glimpse of interactions between states that were sworn enemies and had little in common due to incompatible economic and political systems. Yet, through diplomacy and the influence of the United Nations, they were able to avoid war and find ways to achieve progress in the most critical of areas. It also gives us one possible answer to the question posed at the start of this chapter as to why there has not been a third world war.

Although the United States was the first state to successfully detonate a nuclear weapon, others soon followed – the Soviet Union (1949), the United Kingdom (1952), France (1960) and China (1964). As the number of nations possessing nuclear weapons increased from one to five, there were fears that these weapons would proliferate (spread rapidly). This was not only a numbers issue. As the weapons developed, they became many orders of magnitude more destructive. By the early 1960s, nuclear weapons had been built that could cause devastation across over one hundred square kilometres. Recognising the danger, the United Nations attempted in vain to outlaw nuclear weapons in the late 1940s. Following that failure, a series of less absolute goals were advanced, most notably to regulate the testing of nuclear weapons. Weapons that were being developed required test detonations – each releasing large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere, endangering ecosystems and human health. By the late 1950s, diplomacy under a United Nations framework had managed to establish a moratorium (suspension) on nuclear testing by the United States and the Soviet Union. However, by 1961 a climate of mistrust and heightened Cold War tensions between the two nations caused testing to resume.

One year later, in 1962, the world came to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the Soviet Union placed nuclear warheads in Cuba, a communist island nation-state approximately 150 kilometres off the southern coast of the United States. Cuban leader Fidel Castro had requested the weapons to deter the United States from meddling in Cuban politics following a failed US-sponsored invasion by anti-Castro forces in 1961. As Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev (1962) put it, ‘the two most powerful nations had been squared off against each other, each with its finger on the button’. After pushing each other to the brink of a nuclear war, US President John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev found that via diplomacy, they could agree to a compromise that satisfied the basic security needs of the other. Over a series of negotiations, Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba in return for the United States agreeing to remove missiles they had deployed in Turkey and Italy. As the two sides could not fully trust each other due to their rivalry, the diplomacy was based (and succeeded) on the principle of verification by the United Nations, which independently checked for compliance. Building further on the momentum, in July 1963 the Partial Test Ban Treaty was agreed, confining nuclear testing to underground sites only. It was not a perfect solution, but it was progress. And, in this case it was driven by the leaders of two superpowers who wanted to de-escalate a tense state of affairs.

Although early moves to regulate nuclear weapons were a mixed affair, the faith that Kennedy and Khrushchev put in building diplomacy facilitated further progress in finding areas of agreement. In the years that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cold War diplomacy entered a high-water-mark phase in what became known as a period of ‘détente’ between the superpowers as they sought to engage diplomatically with each other on a variety of issues, including a major arms limitation treaty. In that climate, progress was made on restricting nuclear proliferation.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1970) – often known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty – sought to channel nuclear technology into civilian uses and to recognise the destabilising effect of further nuclear proliferation. It was a triumph of diplomacy. The genius of the treaty was that it was aware of the realities of the international politics of the time. It was not a disarmament treaty as great powers would simply not give up their nuclear weapons, fearful their security would be diminished. So, instead of pursuing an impossible goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, the Treaty sought to freeze the number of nations that had nuclear weapons at the five states that already possessed them. Simultaneously, those five nations were encouraged to share non-military nuclear technology with other states – such as nuclear energy and nuclear medicine – so that others would not feel tempted to pursue nuclear weapons. In short, those who had nuclear weapons could keep them. Those who did not have them would be allowed to benefit from the non-military research and innovation of the existing nuclear powers.

Due to the well-considered design of the treaty and its enforcement, it has been highly successful. Following the end of the Cold War, the Non-Proliferation Treaty was permanently extended in 1995. Granted, it has not kept the number of nuclear nations to five, but there are still fewer than ten – which is far from the twenty or more projected before the treaty entered into force. States with nascent nuclear weapons programmes, such as Brazil and South Africa, gave them up due to international pressure. Today, only a small number of states are outside its bounds. India, Pakistan and Israel never joined as they (controversially in each case) had nuclear ambitions that they were not prepared to give up due to national security priorities. Underlining the weight of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in 2003, when North Korea decided to rekindle earlier plans to develop nuclear weapons, they withdrew from the treaty rather than violate it. To date, North Korea remains the only state to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The non-proliferation regime is not perfect, of course – a situation best underlined today by North Korea. It is also a system with an inherent bias, since a number of states are allowed to have nuclear weapons simply because they were among the first to develop them, and this continues to be the case regardless of their behaviour. Yet, while humankind has developed the ultimate weapon in the nuclear bomb, diplomacy has managed to prevail in moderating its spread. When a state is rumoured to be developing a nuclear bomb, as in the case of North Korea, the reaction of the international community is always one of common alarm. We call ideas that have become commonplace ‘norms’ and non-proliferation has become one of the central norms within our global system.

CASE STUDY 2: Human rights and sovereignty

During the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime that had ruled Germany since 1933 had been discovered to have undertaken a programme of exterminating Jews and other unwanted peoples such as homosexuals, political opponents and the disabled. In what is now known as the Holocaust, an estimated 17 million people were killed by the Nazis through overwork in labour camps, undernourishment and various forms of execution – which included gas chambers and firing squads. Of those, approximately six million were Jewish – two-thirds of the European Jewish population. Especially with reference to the fate of Jewish people, the phrase ‘never again’ became synonymous with these events. Not only was there a desire to prevent mass slaughter of human beings in a third world war – which would likely be nuclear – there was also a pressing desire to establish an international standard of human rights that would protect people from atrocities like the Holocaust and from unnecessary large-scale warfare.

Set up to represent all the earth’s recognised nation-states, the United Nations became ground zero for discussion of human rights. Just three years after the organisation was created, the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (1948, pictured being held by Eleanor Roosevelt in Photo 2.5) had been agreed by virtually all of the United Nations’ member states outlining thirty articles that – in principle – extended to all the earth’s people. As a snapshot, the first three articles are as follows:

Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self- governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Upon reading this, three thoughts may cross your mind. The first is that it represents a step change in history. For the first time, an international document existed that sets all nation-states a set of benchmarks upon which their behaviour towards individuals will be judged. Secondly, the aforementioned comes from an international organisation that is now part of the global system, in addition to states. Here, it is important to understand the limits of the United Nations and the principles and declarations it may proffer. The United Nations is not sovereign. It does not have a territory, or a people. Instead it is an organisation run by, and through, the voluntary participation of its members. In that sense, it appends rather than replaces nation-state power. This leads us to the third thing that may have crossed your mind upon reading the articles above – that even with the most basic understanding they do not reflect today’s global system, which remains one scarred by warfare and well- publicised failures to protect human rights. In that sense, it is easy to regard human rights as a failure because, much like international organisations, individuals have not become sovereign the way nation-states are.

Such a conclusion, while factually true and the product of our global system’s enduring foregrounding of the nation-state, risks betraying the momentum that has gathered around human rights. Firstly, if we reverse to the pre-1945 period, states often acted with impunity by waging ever-escalating wars for selfish reasons – and also by colonising or enslaving human beings. There may be no international sovereign to impose legal punishment on states in the way a person would be prosecuted by the legal system within a state for a crime. But, the normative power of human rights is a growing element within our global system that has made such historical violations a rarity today. We can account for this further by looking at a range of international crimes that have been named and developed – with the bulk highlighting cases where states directly cause (or indirectly allow) unacceptable harm to people, including in times of war. Of these, perhaps the most well known is genocide, which denotes the deliberate killing of a defined group of people (usually defined by nationality, religion or ethnicity) – precisely what the Nazis did to Jewish people.

Building on the momentum of establishing a range of legal norms, the Responsibility to Protect (2001), sometimes referred to as ‘R2P’, was endorsed by all member states of the United Nations in 2005. It sought to build further on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent documents by establishing higher levels of punishment for the worst violations by states. In principle, this involves a reinterpretation of sovereignty (at times) to the level of the individual. To illustrate this, under the Responsibility to Protect, sovereignty can be imagined as similar to a mortgage given by a bank (the United Nations) to a homeowner (a nation-state). Should states keep up their repayments (by treating their people well) then the bank will never trouble the homeowner. However, if the state does not keep up its repayments (by acting in ways that cause its people undue harm and suffering) then that state may be repossessed by the international community, under the authority of the United Nations. In practice, this could mean that a state comes under an increasing level of actions, up to and including a regime being forcibly removed from power through invasion. The caveat is, as with any major issue involving international security, it has to be agreed by the world’s major powers – again reinforcing where the real bottom line of sovereignty lies.

The Responsibility to Protect has been invoked in well over a hundred resolutions at various levels within the United Nations, signifying that it is not just something that exists on paper, but that human rights in the decades since the Universal Declaration have come a long way. During the 2021 coup in Myanmar pro-democracy protesters even held up ‘R2P’ signs (Photo 2.6) showing how deeply and widely understandings and expectations of this norm have proliferated. Of course, some states still mistreat their people and international action is often insufficient to prevent it or stop it, or agreement on an action cannot be reached – as prolonged civil wars in Yemen and Syria demonstrate. Yet, understanding how the global system incorporates human rights in ways that go beyond the merely aspirational, and the related place of international organisations, is to understand that both the aforementioned exist in a position that is gradually challenging the once absolute monopoly on sovereignty held by states. It also adds further weight to the layer cake of reasons why there has not been a third world war – in this case adding a legal and normative architecture that restrains states from endangering human security on the scale that has been evident in history.

Conclusion

Our global system, in reality and as understood intellectually by International Relations scholars, is built on historical events. These events have resulted in a world dominated by nation-states which are influenced by international organisations in a dynamic system that has also opened a growing space for the voices and concerns of individuals. Future events will most likely continue to alter the system, just as past ones – such as the Treaty of Westphalia, the invention of nuclear weapons and the emergence of a global economic system of capitalism – have left indelible marks. Critiquing this origin story is our next step in the chapters ahead, which look deeper into our history and also ask questions of our present. We hope this will encourage you to not see this book, or the discipline it introduces to you, as something you can memorise as a series of events or static concepts. Instead, you should see International Relations as a living, challenging and sometimes confrontational journey of different perspectives. There are no correct answers for how we should understand the world. Indeed, there is no correct answer for the question considered earlier in the chapter of why we have not had a third world war. It may be because of nuclear weapons, it may be because the United Nations exists, perhaps it is born from a commercial desire to protect the global economy from a major disruption, or it may be because we just don’t want to solve disputes in that way any more due a rising norm of human rights. Each of these are relevant starting points and each may lead to different, yet legitimate, answers.

KEY TERMS: The global system

The phrase ‘international relations’ – not capitalised – is used to describe relations between nation-states, organisations and individuals at the global level. Lowercase ‘international relations’ is interchangeable with terms such as ‘global politics’, ‘world politics’ or ‘international politics’. What all these commonly used terms refer to are activities within the global system that both overlay, and undergird, life on planet earth. Traditionally, International Relations has understood the system at its most basic level as a dynamic between three key actors: (1) nation-states, (2) international organisations and (3) individuals. These key actors react to, are subject to, and sometimes shape, the events and issues that drive international relations. In reality, the picture is more complex than this and things will be unpacked further as the book progresses. Yet, simplification devices such as this, illustrated in Figure 1.1, are helpful to orient yourself.

KEY TERMS: The nation-state

‘Nation-state’ is a compound noun that joins two separate political entities together. A ‘nation’ is a group of people who share many things in common, such as language, territory, ethnicity or culture. Typically, a nation is forged over a longer period of history and shared experiences. When that nation is ruled by one system of governance, a ‘state’, the two join and form a ‘nation-state’. A state is a set of institutions, with a defined leadership, that has uncontested authority over the nation (the people). This authority is superior to any local, federal or regional government structures, which exist only through the consent of the state. A state’s power is typically expressed in political, military and legal power – but it can also include other categories such as religion. Historically, states came to rule over nations of people for many reasons, and they have taken many forms through history – often through patterns of domination rather than consent. But, taken broadly, it is most useful at this early stage to see establishing a state as a compromise that allows a nation of people to live under defined shared rules and structures, and thereby achieve a basic sense of security that allows their shared culture to endure in an insecure world.

KEY INSIGHTS: Landmark eras for International Relations

The First World War (1914–18). Before 1914, a system of agreements and actions known as the ‘concert of Europe’ was orchestrated between the larger powers in Europe aimed at preserving the status quo (keeping things as they are) in the continent. The collapse of this system led to war and the European powers, divided in two broad groupings, drew their overseas colonies and other great powers such as Japan and the United States into the conflict. At the time, it was known as the ‘Great War’ as its global scale was unprecedented.

The Interwar Years (1919–38). An initially optimistic period in which the first attempts at global governance were built, watermarked by the creation of the League of Nations, based in Geneva, which provided a forum to manage disputes through negotiation rather than war. During this period a stock market crash occurred in the United States in 1929, causing the ‘Great Depression’ that spread worldwide during the early 1930s and brought significant economic decline. This event marked out the importance of economics to the global system, especially in terms of how quickly it can cause negative effects spreading from one place to another.

The Second World War (1939–45). Certain states were unhappy with the status quo in the interwar years, most notably Germany and Japan, which sought to grow their power and acquire more territory by invading neighbouring states. This led to the collapse of the League of Nations and another world war as a group of states (the United States, China, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union) formed an alliance to oppose the expansionist powers, eventually triumphing following the occupation of Germany and the surrender of Japan in 1945.

The Cold War (1947–91). The Cold War was known as such because the presence of nuclear weapons made a traditional war between the rival parties (in this case the United States and the Soviet Union) unlikely as they each had the power to destroy each other and in doing so jeopardise human civilisation as a whole. This was known as ‘Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)’. For that reason, smaller-scale conflict and competition existed but a major ‘hot’ war, such as those in prior decades, was avoided. This period also underlined the importance of ideology in shaping global conflict, principally between capitalism and communism, which produced two incompatible international systems.

The New World Order (1991–2000). A short period following the end of the Cold War in which it was assumed that the international organisations built post-1945 (such as the United Nations) would finally come of age and provide a more secure and peaceful order based on globally shared ideas and practices. Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the ‘end of history’ (1989, 1992), in which he posited that liberal democracy was the only viable long-term political system to complement a capitalist world, watermarked the era. Yet, critics of such ideas highlighted their shortcomings as an overly Western image of world order.

The post-9/11 era (2001–19). On 11 September 2001, al-Qaeda – a terrorist group opposed to Western (chiefly American) dominance in the global system – attacked the United States by hijacking four commercial airliners and crashing two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and a third into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the US Military in Arlington, Virginia). The fourth plane crashed before hitting its target, which was presumed to be a political building in Washington, DC. The event led to the United States starting its ‘War on Terror’, seeking to rid the world of terrorists and governments that supported or enabled them. United States actions – together with further operations by al-Qaeda and similar terrorist groups – shaped the first two decades of the twenty-first century and led to material changes in the nature of both domestic, and international, politics.

The post-Covid-19 era (2020–). People have always travelled from place to place and exchanged goods and cultural artefacts. What has changed, due to advances in technology and transportation, is the speed and intensity of this process. Embodying this shrinkage of time and space, the term ‘globalisation’ is a major part of how we perceive today’s world. When the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 became a pandemic in 2020 it brought two points into focus. Firstly, transnational terrorism was no longer the central issue that it once was. Secondly, the pandemic questioned images of an interlinked, interdependent world as borders closed and most states initially turned inwards to tackle the problem for themselves rather than look outwards to pursue a global solution for all. Consequently, it is likely that the era that emerges from this crisis will be one where the global system’s resilience, and the very nature of globalisation, are stress tested for an extended period.

KEY TERMS: Sovereignty

When you look at a map of the world today all the earth’s landmasses are divided by lines (borders). Each of these borders are made (and remade) through historical events reflecting the key ordering principle of our global system – ‘sovereignty’ – which must be in place for a people to be recognised as a nation-state. Sovereignty has two benchmarks, both of which must exist simultaneously. First, there must be no major internal competition over who or what rules the territory. In practice this could be a parliament (or a similar set of institutions) in which power is regularly transferred to different elected officials. Or, it could be a monarch or dictator who rules until they are succeeded in some way by an equivalent figure. Second, there must be no significant external competition for that people’s territory. In practice this means that no overseas power claims ownership.

In practice, sovereignty is fluid. For example, should a state be attacked by another (an external competitor) it may result in that state being absorbed into the aggressor’s territory should they lose. In the modern day this is uncommon, but not unheard of. For example, Russia ‘annexed’ Crimea – part of Ukraine – in 2014. Additionally, if a group of people within a state start a movement (an internal competitor) and succeed this may sometimes create a differently composed state (carrying a new name and/or a new flag) occupying the same territory. We can see this in the case of China in 1949, which became the People’s Republic of China, and later in Iran in 1979, which became the Islamic Republic of Iran – both after successful revolutions. In these cases, other states gradually recognised the sovereignty of the new leadership as the internal competition had been settled. Finally, sometimes groups of people within states seek to break away and form an entirely new state. This occurred most recently when South Sudan seceded (legally broke away) from Sudan. As the existing state of Sudan did not contest this (removing the factor of internal competition) and no external competitor existed, South Sudan became the world’s newest nation-state in 2011.

There are territories often represented on maps which are described by terms such as ‘self- declared’ or ‘partially recognised’ because the two benchmarks of sovereignty are not yet fulfilled due to ongoing internal or external challenges. Among others, these include Taiwan, Kosovo and the Republic of Somaliland.

KEY TERMS: Diplomacy

Diplomacy is a process between actors (diplomats, usually representing a state) who exist within a system (international relations) and engage in private and public dialogue (diplomacy) to pursue their objectives in a peaceful manner. Diplomacy is part of the broader category of foreign policy. When a nation-state makes foreign policy, it does so for its own national interests. And these interests are shaped by a wide range of factors. In basic terms, a state’s foreign policy has two key ingredients: its actions and its strategies for achieving its goals. The interaction one state has with another is considered the act of its foreign policy. This act typically takes place via interactions between government personnel, sometimes the leaders of states themselves – as pictured in the image celebrating the Camp David Accords. Historically, to interact without diplomacy would limit a state’s foreign policy actions to conflict (usually war, but also economic sanctions) or espionage. In that sense, diplomacy is an essential tool required to operate successfully in today’s global system and a major explanatory factor that accounts for what Gaddis (1989) called the ‘long peace’ due to the absence of major war since 1945.

KEY TERMS: Polarity

The Cold War represented a global system of bipolarity. A bipolar system is one where two powers dominate. In that case, it was the United States on one side, and the Soviet Union on the other – with each side assembling their allies into their sphere of influence.

When the Cold War ended, a debate raged over how to describe the system. Some maintained that it was a system of unipolarity – as there was only one superpower remaining, the United States. This idea was captured by Krauthammer (1991) when he described it as a ‘unipolar moment’ in which the United States stood in an unprecedented historical situation where one state was significantly more economically, militarily and politically powerful to the extent that it would take a generation or more for a competitor of equal stature (a peer) to emerge.

Others have argued that the world has entered a period of multipolarity. Multipolarity is the historical norm as it describes a system with multiple competing powers. The last defined multipolar system ended shortly after the Second World War, which had left the European powers depleted – giving way to the Cold War bipolar system. Multipolarity today can be represented not just by rivalling states as it was in the past, but by the emergence of ideas of global governance through international organisations which compete with, and often constrain, the power of states.

Some suggest that bipolarity may return with the growing rivalry between the United States and a rising China shaping the twenty-first century. Others have suggested that a system of tripolarity may emerge, adding a resurgent Russia (or perhaps a different rising power) into the United States-China picture. While these perspectives draw on historical patterns for their inspiration, Acharya (2017) describes today’s system as one of multiplexity – a new type of order in which several systems exist independently at the same time, but not necessarily in conflict, much like the idea of different movies screening under one roof in a multiplex cinema.

END OF CHAPTER QUESTIONS

1. In what ways has warfare been central to International Relations from its inception as a discipline?

2. What is the ‘Westphalian system’ and why is it so important?

3. With diplomacy, and the international organisations underpinning it, do we now have the tools we need to mitigate major war?

4. What type of ‘polarity’ do you think best represents today’s global system?

5. The post-Covid-19 era is hard to describe as it has only just begun, and we do not (yet) have the benefit of hindsight. Since you are living through it, what are your own impressions of it so far and how would you describe it?

Dr Stephen McGlinchey is the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of E-International Relations, and Senior Lecturer of International Relations at UWE Bristol. His publications include Foundations of International Relations (Bloomsbury 2022), Global Politics in a Post Truth Age (2022), International Relations (2017), International Relations Theory (2017) and US Arms Policies Towards the Shah’s Iran (Routledge 2021, 2014).

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This is an excerpt from International Relations Theory. Free to download from E-International Relations.

In the 1960s there was public recognition of the global environmental crisis arising from the ‘tragedy of the commons’, which is the idea that as self- interested individuals, humans will overuse shared resources such as land, fresh water and fish. In the 1970s the first United Nations conference on the subject was held and by the 1980s green political parties and public policies had emerged. This coincided with a demand for a green theory to help explain and understand these political issues. By the 1990s, International Relations had come to recognise the natural environment as an increasingly significant source of questions for the discipline, requiring theoretical as well as practical attention – especially in the wake of mounting evidence that human actions were significantly changing our global climate and presenting security problems as well as ecological ones.

The basics of green theory

Ecological thought addresses the interests of nature itself rather than only the interests of humanity in nature. Green theory captures this orientation in political terms of value and agency (Goodin 1992) – what is to be valued, by whom and how to get it. Green theory belongs to the critical theory tradition, in the sense that environmental issues evoke questions about relations between and among ourselves and others in the context of community and collective decision-making. In turn this has always raised the question of where the boundaries of political community are. For environmental problems, which transcend boundaries, these questions take the form of asking at what level of political community we should seek a solution. For green theorists, the answers are found in alternative ideas about political association based on our ecological relationships.

The introduction of environmental issues into IR has had some influence, but their theoretical significance and practical policy implications may be viewed either as compatible or as irreconcilable with traditional assumptions and current practices. If viewed traditionally, then environmental issues can simply be added to the list of issues dealt with by existing means, for existing ends. If viewed alternatively, then these issues may lead to theoretical and practical transformation. Because theory and practice are linked, when environmental issues challenge existing practice they also raise new questions that IR theory must contend with. The obvious practical challenges of environmental change have not yet transformed IR theory – or even practice very much. The continued prevalence of competitive state relations is not conducive to environmental cooperation or encouraging to green thought. However, there has been theoretical development and some practical progress and a wide- ranging literature has emerged viewing a variety of environmental issues from different theoretical perspectives. If this doesn’t amount to a single clear vision, it certainly represents a longer-term view about humankind’s common future.

Typically, environmental issues are buried in IR texts under other headings and with little acknowledgement of their unique theoretical significance. Environmentalism-themed scholarship is generally accepting of the existing framework of political, social and economic structures of world politics. While there are of course established forms of critical thought, these address relations within and between human communities, rather than human relations with the non-human environment. For example, liberalism emphasises individual rights of choice and consumption but is not fundamentally concerned with the environmental consequences of that consumption. Consequently, most forms of environmentalism seek to establish theoretical positions and practical solutions through existing structures, or in line with existing critiques of such structures. If less critical in orientation, then these views are likely to be compatible with a liberal position in IR (viewing international cooperation as being of general benefit to states). If more critical in orientation, then environmentalism may align itself to a critique of the capitalist world system (maldistribution of benefits to people), if not challenging its commitment to production and consumption per se. An environmentalist perspective, while identifying environmental change as an issue, attempts to find room for the environment among our existing categories of other concerns, rather than considering it to be definitional or transformational.

Those frustrated by the lack of recognition of the environmental challenge in international relations turned to the interdisciplinary science of ecology.  Political ecology has allowed both an ecological perspective to inform political thought and a political understanding of our environmental circumstances. In particular, our circumstances have long been determined by a particular developmental path that depends on the over-consumption of natural resources. Specifically, our political-economic practices of production, distribution and consumption are intended to meet our immediate human needs and desires. However, these practices are reflected in a growth- dependent global market economy that is not designed to achieve environmental sustainability or recognise ecological limits. This economy has provided material development of a kind, but with such uneven benefits and widespread collateral damage – including to the environment – that it has not provided human development in an ecological context. From an ecological perspective, there has been a general criticism of development and even apparently progressive sustainable development practices. The well-known model of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin 1968), in which our short-term, individual, rational choices destroy our environmental resources, has thus been applied to the planet as a whole. It is tragic because we can see it coming but seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it. That inability is more than a practical problem; it is a profound theoretical challenge. Hardin pointed out that such issues cannot be solved by technical means, but require a change in human values.

Moving beyond environmentalism and political ecology, green theory more radically challenges existing political, social and economic structures. In particular, it challenges mainstream liberal political and economic assumptions, including those extending beyond the boundaries of existing political communities (for conventional IR, this means states). Goodin (1992) suggests that a distinguishing feature of green theory is its reference to a coherent   moral vision – a ‘green theory of value’ – which operates independently of a theory of practices or political agency. For example, a green morality might suggest that human material development should be curtailed in the interest    of preserving non-human nature. This would limit our freedom to consume however much we can acquire. The need to put some limits on traditional liberties suggests an approach that puts nature before people. Green theory, in this sense, is ecocentric.

Ecocentrism (ecology-centred thought) stands against anthropocentrism (human-centred thought). This is not because ecocentrism ignores human needs and desires, but rather because it includes those within a wider ecological perspective. Ecocentrism prioritises healthy ecosystems because they are a prerequisite to human health and wellbeing. In contrast, anthropocentrism sees only the short-term instrumental value of nature to humans. This ecocentric/anthropocentric distinction is at the heart of green theory. The holistic ecocentric perspective implies a rejection of the split between domestic and international politics, given that arbitrary boundaries between nations do not coincide with ecosystems. For example, air and water pollution can cross a border and climate change cuts across all borders and populations. Simply, human populations are ecologically interconnected. This impacts on how we understand and deal with transboundary and global environmental issues collectively, setting aside national self-interest.

The traditional IR concern with the state, in an international system of states, is a challenge to thinking about environmental issues. As a central feature of the historical Westphalian model of sovereign (self-determining) nation-states, the concept of sovereignty (ultimate authority) has been particularly troubling. Sovereignty neither describes the modern reality of political control nor offers   a reliable basis for human identity or wellbeing. Global environmental problems require global solutions. This requires that we develop our under- standing of the ‘global’ as an alternative organising principle and perhaps look to green social movements rather than states for theoretical insights.  This gives rise to the question of whether we need to give up on the idea of countries with borders as still being relevant to people’s lives, or recast them   in some more ecologically appropriate way with reference to how people live   in relation to their environment. This will likely entail a more global than local kind of ethics. In part this hinges on our view of the need for political structures (big government, small government or no government) and the level or extent of their development. For example, we could promote centralised global political structures, such as an institution for governing environmental issues (Biermann 2001), or allow a variety of decentralised, even anarchical, interconnected local structures to emerge as circumstances require (Dyer 2014).

Decentralisation, or the transfer of authority and decision-making from central to local bodies, has certain attractive features, such as self-determination and democratic accountability. Ecologically there seem to be advantages as well, since small communities may depend more on immediate local resources and so be more likely to care for their environment. Local communities are more likely to conceive of the natural environment and their relationship to it in less instrumental terms, viewing it more as their home, thus addressing one of the key reasons for the environmental crisis.

For example, the concept of ‘bioregionalism’, where human society is organised within ecological rather than political boundaries, raises intriguing issues of knowledge, science, history, culture, space and place in an ecological context (McGinnis 1999). For instance, our sense of identity might derive more from familiar environmental surroundings than from the idea of nationality, such that we have greater inherited knowledge and understanding of our local environment than of our political location. However, there are also a number of objections to decentralisation, or greater localisation of decision- making. These include the concern that it would not promote cross- community cooperation as it is too parochial (too exclusively local; the problem of nationalism), and this would mean little chance of developing effective mechanisms to deal with global problems. In effect, it might just reproduce a troublesome sovereign-state model of politics on a smaller scale.

To date IR theory has shown concern with transformations in our political communities but somewhat less concern with transformations in our ecological communities. Perhaps this is because we are not yet sure how a cosmopolitan global sense of community colours our local relationships.

Green theory and climate change

Climate change is the dominant environmental issue of our age, caused by   our dangerous reliance on fossil fuels. Green theory helps us to understand this in terms of long-term ecological values rather than short-term human interests. These interests are generally pursued by states through investments in technology, but there is no easy technical solution to human-induced climate change. From the perspective of green theory, this technical impasse requires a change in human values and behaviour and therefore presents an opportunity for political innovation or even a transformative shift in global politics. IR theory can explain why climate change is a difficult problem for states to solve because of economic competition and disincentives to cooperation. However, it cannot provide an alternative framework to explain how this might be addressed. IR remains overly focused on states and their national interests rather than other actors that may be more cooperative, such as cities and communities or non-governmental organisations and green social movements.

A green theory perspective on climate change understands it as a direct consequence of human collective choices. Specifically, these choices have   led to historically anthropocentric economic practices of historically arbitrary political groups (states), who have exploited nature in their own short-term interests. Climate change presents a clear case of injustice to both present   and future humans who are not responsible for causing it and to the ecosystem as a whole. Therefore, a solution requires an ecocentric theory of value and a more ethical than instrumental attitude to human relations in our common future. Green theory helps us to redefine issues such as climate change in terms of long-term ecological values rather than short-term political interests.

At the international level efforts have been underway since before the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio, which gave rise to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and other environmental agreements. As with many issues caught up in the direct tension between environmental goals and developmental goals, any bargains struck are inadequate compromises.

For green theory there is no such tension in an ecological path to development, even if that path seems more costly in the short term. This is not least because some countries have developing still to do and hold already developed countries historically responsible for climate change – and no national actor is willing to bear global costs. After faltering efforts to address climate change through the terms of the UNFCCC’s Kyoto Protocol, an outline agreement was eventually achieved in the Paris Accords of December 2015. Whether or not this effort will actually address the sources and consequences of climate change remains to be seen, but green theory suggests   that a focus on human values and choices in communities is better than a focus on bargaining between states.

In a world of states with primary responsibilities to their own citizens, finding acceptable trade-offs between immediate economic wellbeing and longer-  term ecological wellbeing is difficult. There is some prospect of powerful states (like China) or groups of states (like the European Union) leading the way and altering the structural parameters. However, the common ground available from an IR perspective of competing states is unlikely to be anywhere near the common ground envisioned by green theory. More fundamentally, it is unlikely to meet the challenge of climate change. Even with some political agreement, there remain significant differences about responsibility for historic climate change and the costs of adapting to an already changing climate that is affecting the least developed populations hardest. While it is possible for states to cooperate in order to make helpful environmental commitments, this is not directly related to action or change.

In any case, while international agreements are formally implemented by governments and other constitutional bodies, the key agents of change are a much wider range of non-state actors, smaller groups and individuals, which may suggest a kind of anarchy rather than hierarchy. In sum, a green solution to climate change could involve global governance institutions and communities working together – largely bypassing the state – in order to reduce damaging emissions, protect the climate and preserve the planetary ecology on which humans depend.

Green theory equips us with a new vantage point for analysing these developments. It also allows a broader ecological perspective on our common human interests and emphasises choices made within the ecological boundaries of climate change, rather than the political boundaries of economic advantage.

Conclusion

For IR, the contribution of green theory helps us re-examine the relationship between the state, the economy and the environment. IR normally sets this in the context of globalisation viewed from the limited perspective of states and markets – but globalisation also involves opportunities for developing shared global ecological values. Green theory has the potential to radically challenge the idea of sovereign nation states operating in competition and is thus part of the post-Westphalian trend in IR thought. Of course, the greater contribution of green theory, or its capacity for critical engagement with IR, lies in its very different origins – taking planetary ecology as a starting point and looking beyond our current political-economic structures. Green theory is thus able to offer not just an alternative description of our world but also a different logic for understanding it – and how we might act to change it. IR theory is likely to be disrupted and re-oriented by green theory, not so much because greens will win the arguments but because IR theorists will inevitably have to provide a coherent account of how we all live sustainably on our planet. This means that at some point we may have to stop theorising about the state-centric ‘inter-national’ and find another political point of reference in human relationships, such as policy networks or social movements.

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Taiwan’s absence from multilateral institutions is often narrated as a diplomatic anomaly, a by-product of great power rivalry or a legal issue of statehood. But there is something more quietly corrosive at work—an exclusion that does not merely affect Taiwan as a political entity but shapes the lives, rights, and bodily integrity of its people in profoundly unequal ways. What is often left unsaid in accounts of Taiwan’s marginalisation is how its absence from international fora like the World Health Organization (WHO) or Interpol disproportionately impacts women, LGBTQ+ people, and other socially vulnerable populations.

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Global governance institutions are not simply venues for states to project power or resolve disputes. They are mechanisms through which knowledge is shared, crises coordinated, standards set, and human needs addressed. When an entire population is denied formal access to such institutions, it is not just the nation-state that is excluded. It is the gendered body seeking health care, the queer teenager facing violence, the migrant woman escaping abuse. These lived experiences do not fall neatly within the frameworks of sovereignty or recognition, but they are no less real, and no less urgent.

Consider Taiwan’s exclusion from the WHO. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan was barred from participating in the World Health Assembly, despite being one of the first to detect and respond to the outbreak. Taiwan recorded only 7 COVID-19 deaths in all of 2020, an extraordinary figure that went largely unacknowledged by global institutions. Its early alert to the WHO in late December 2019 about human-to-human transmission in Wuhan was ignored and even denied. While Taiwan independently managed its health response, the costs of exclusion have reverberated in less visible ways. WHO programmes targeting maternal health, HIV prevention, gender-based violence, and reproductive rights are designed to function through national governments and international coordination. By default, Taiwan is excluded from these.

This has tangible effects. In 2024, Taiwan reported rising HIV infection rates among men who have sex with men (MSM), despite prior years of decline. It is possible that this is partly due to pandemic-era disruptions in international coordination and stigma-related barriers in access to testing and care. Without WHO support, Taiwan cannot participate in Global Fund initiatives, nor can it engage in WHO’s technical cooperation on LGBTQ+ health. Women—especially in rural and indigenous communities—lack access to WHO-endorsed guidance on gender-sensitive mental health services and post-rape care protocols.

The issue extends beyond health. Taiwan’s exclusion from Interpol creates security risks for all, with particularly acute consequences for women and LGBTQ+ individuals, especially in the context of human trafficking and cybercrime. The US Department of State’s 2023 Trafficking in Persons Report placed Taiwan in Tier 1 for its anti-trafficking efforts but there are gaps in international police cooperation due to its exclusion from Interpol’s I-24/7 global criminal database. Taiwan has documented numerous cases of women trafficked to Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe for sexual exploitation. Yet without real-time access to Interpol alerts or cross-border data-sharing, Taiwanese authorities must rely on informal channels, which delay responses and hinder victim recovery.

One recent case involved hundreds of Taiwanese including women lured to Cambodia under false job offers and forced into online scam centres. While police forces helped repatriate some of them, Taiwan’s lack of formal Interpol channels slowed the process. Recently, some Taiwanese victims were rescued from similar trafficking rings in Southeast Asia, but instead of being returned to Taiwan, they were transferred to the People’s Republic of China. This raised serious concerns about due process and the risk of arbitrary detention or coercive interrogation, especially in politically sensitive cases where victims may face fraud or national security charges under PRC law.

Taiwan’s inability to access UN human rights mechanisms further compounds these challenges. Although Taiwan has domestically adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), it cannot formally become a signatory due to its exclusion from the United Nations, and it is therefore unable to submit reports to the UN Committee. The lack of international oversight weakens enforcement and limits Taiwan’s influence in shaping global gender equality norms.

The exclusion also plays out in global development frameworks. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are increasingly used as policy benchmarks across issue areas, including gender equality (Goal 5) and health (Goal 3). Yet Taiwan’s government is unable to submit Voluntary National Reviews to the UN High-Level Political Forum. Instead, it publishes parallel SDG reports that circulate outside formal channels. This prevents Taiwan’s experiences—such as its efforts to address gender pay gaps, improve access to childcare, or reduce rural health disparities—from informing global best practices. Conversely, it also restricts Taiwanese policymakers from engaging with the innovations and findings of other states via institutional feedback loops.

One might argue that Taiwan has developed internal capacities to fill the gaps left by exclusion. Indeed, the island has built a dynamic civil society, a responsive health care system, and one of Asia’s most progressive legal frameworks for LGBTQ+ people. Taiwan ranks close to first in Asia in the Equaldex LGBTQ+ Rights Index, and its Gender Equality Index scores exceed the OECD average. But resilience does not absolve exclusion. Nor should success be mistaken for immunity—clearly. Its civil society actors must expend disproportionate effort to gain international attention. Its police must work around missing links in transnational crime databases. These structural disadvantages are borne unevenly, often falling most heavily on those already marginalised by gender, sexuality, disability, or poverty.

Moreover, the symbolic dimensions of exclusion matter. When Taiwan is excluded from bodies that shape the global conversation on rights, health, or development, its people are rendered invisible in those arenas. For queer Taiwanese youth, the message is clear: your struggles are not seen at the UN. For indigenous women facing health disparities, the message is that international accountability is unavailable. This invisibility reinforces a global order in which statehood is a prerequisite for personhood in international law—a condition that runs counter to the spirit of human rights universality.

What is particularly troubling is the complicity of many international actors in this exclusion. Institutions that claim to prioritise gender equality, protect human rights, or promote health equity routinely accept Taiwan’s absence as a cost of diplomatic pragmatism. The WHO’s constitution proclaims the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being, yet it excludes ~23 million people from formal participation. Interpol claims to coordinate global efforts to combat exploitation and trafficking yet turns away a territory with significant policing needs and capabilities. This is not neutrality. It is a political choice that reifies power imbalances at the expense of the vulnerable.

A gendered lens reveals that Taiwan’s exclusion is not a passive condition but an active structuring of inequality. It shows how multilateralism, when constrained by rigid state-based logic, can produce outcomes that contradict its normative commitments. To address this, it is not enough to argue that Taiwan “deserves” inclusion because it is democratic or competent. These may be true, but they leave intact a hierarchy in which recognition is conditional. What must be foregrounded instead are the lives disrupted, the rights denied, and the safety compromised by exclusion. Inclusion is not a reward. It is a necessity for equitable governance.

This is not a call for the international community to abandon the one-China policy overnight. It is, however, a demand to rethink the ways in which that policy is operationalised within multilateral institutions. Observer status, flexible participation mechanisms, and engagement with Taiwanese civil society are all feasible interim steps. Some precedents already exist: Taiwan attended the World Health Assembly as an observer from 2009 to 2016; its NGOs regularly participate in UN side events; its academics are active in global professional networks. But these ad hoc arrangements are not enough. What is needed is a shift in mindset—from viewing Taiwan’s inclusion as a geopolitical flashpoint to recognising it as a gendered governance imperative.

Joseph Black holds a Juris Doctor from the University of Sydney and is currently pursuing a master’s in international affairs at King’s College London and a PhD in gender studies at Chiang Mai University. He also serves as a research officer at the University of New South Wales.

In this week's episode of Thinking Global, Wendy Brown speaks with the Thinking Global team. First, Professor Brown explores Nihilism as contemporary political condition, discussing her new book 'Nihilistic Times', which can be found on the ⁠Harvard University Press⁠ Website. From here, the team explore the central thesis of 'Walled States, Waning Sovereignty' (2010) and reflect on Professor Brown's well-known article 'Resisting Left Melancholy' (1999), prior to a short concluding discussion on Neoliberalism in the contemporary world.

Professor Wendy Brown is Professor Emerita in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley (@UCBerkeley). Professor Brown’s fields of interest include the history of political theory, feminist theory, contemporary critical theories of law, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, and contemporary American political culture. She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies.

Thinking Global is available on all major podcast platforms.

*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Between the multi-state reinforcement of apartheid and the ramifications of its applied realpolitik, the genocide of Palestinians unequivocally deserves political foregrounding. Realising an end to the genocide and a beginning to official accountability requires us to move through single-issue thinking, let alone alterity, and into a politics of complex care and consistent respect. As a queer theorist and researcher, one way I understand this politics of plurality and connectivity, or a queer politics, is the honouring of life as it is expressed by any identity. This article draws from the ever-growing corpus that contextualises the ethical obligation behind “Queers for Palestine” despite additional top-down and normative constraints. My goal, however, is to show how misusing assertions of proportionality at the expense of the trans community (and a queer politics) affects Palestinian liberation. If proportionality at its core is a harmony of multiples, it is crucial to consider how further disrespecting one side of a promising coalition destabilises the other.  

Foundational to contemporary international humanitarian law (IHL) is the concept of proportionality, which proscribes undue injury to non-combatants during conflict. Principally, if the anticipated civilian injury exceeds the anticipated martial advantage of the attack, the attack must not be made. The active genocide against Palestinians has become one of the most extensively reported violations of the principle of proportionality. Although the Israeli government has left unratified the Geneva Convention’s first and second protocols expounding the proportionality principle, proportionality—even in its most tacit form—is as much an aspect of customary law as it is an intuitive social obligation in philosophy and psychology. Seemingly only a modicum of empathy would be necessary to recognise that Israel’s brutality does not just contradict the socioethical precedent but actively pulverises proportionality through an international network of actors willing to more broadly distort it.

For me, there is a reason why Zionist assertions of anti-Semitism as justification for genocide sound homophonic to the claims that denying trans people legal, medical, presentational, and linguistic access to their gender will somehow protect cis-women and children. These pretences of proportionality play in the same time signature of the ontological colonialism that rhythmises violent interventionism and securitisation of the Levant and standardises queerphobia, trans-exclusionary ideology, and exorsexism. The very manner by which Palestinians and their queer comrades have been vilified instantiates the zero-sum rhetorical devices that are gaining favour amidst our current democratic and information crises. From student sit-ins to gender-diverse support lines, mainstream media has monetised and marketed the eisegesis of these two groups and their nonviolent forms of effective political action.

Discourse surrounding Palestinians and queer folks has thus become a training ground for the latest and necessarily insidious grammar of disproportionality. Its syntax is derived from the same logical fallacies it repurposes to rationalise some of the most well-documented human rights abuses to date and to reshape the wider Overton window. Those in fear of burning alive in their homes or being killed for the basic civil liberty of self-expression must now defend themselves against genocide-excusing red herrings like “Hamas is funded by Iran” and strawmen as ludicrous as “trans activism distracts from human trafficking.”

We must also acknowledge the broader parallels between the Palestinians and transgender injustices. Both groups have experienced a kind of discrimination rooted in denial of symmetrical agencies. Palestinians and trans folks experience erasure from and interpolation into dominant culture, denying them the legitimacy of their social and personal identities. Despite the need to re-establish the borders of self and community, both are denied self-determination and security. Denial of life-saving resources and opportunity threatens both collectives.

Palestinian and trans bodies have ultimately been thrust into the crossfire of proxy wars (of culture and capital), intensifying their scapegoating whilst downplaying their truths. Palestinians and their kaleidoscope kin have been subsequently denied basic proportional considerations relative to their needs, such as sanctuary from mounting dehumanisation, threats, and violence, as well as the ability to cultivate union with a safe home uniquely knowable to them.

Understandably, trust in (neo)liberal governments to have a proportional response to systemic violence has been irrevocably compromised. But within the online public commentary surrounding the ‘Macron vs Owens’ lawsuit, it was revealed how this misuse of proportionality has also further compromised the collective psyche and a queer politics. For all who have avoided the controversy, the US conservative and anti-trans commentator Candace Owens has frequently and openly claimed that Brigitte Macron, the wife of the French President, is trans. The Macrons served Owens a defamation lawsuit in July 2025, citing disrepute and subsequent commercial loss. Between Emmanuel Macron’s waiving of wealth taxes and contention that muckraking has been the biggest burden of international leadership, I found that the charges proved less noteworthy than the online discourse they generated.

In the comments beneath the articles I read, few fully sided with the Macrons. One particularly astute commenter pointed out that while Owens’ forced assignment of trans identity onto Brigitte was objectionable, Macron’s defamation case reinforces claims of trans-beinghood not as spurious gossip, but as something shameful to deny. Comments sympathetic to Owens ranged from expressions of anti-elitism to full-blown conspiracy. However, many commended Owens’ consistent Palestinian rights advocacy. It appears that Owens’ stance has felt remarkable for two primary reasons. Firstly, many of Owens’ fellow hard-right pundits and “pro-life” ideologues remain committed to operational collusion with Israel nearly two years after the genocide began. Moreover, Owens’ constancy of jus in bello has contrasted with Western politicians' doublespeak and passivity regarding the genocide until they could no longer ignore the European and American electorate’s disapproval of Israel.

Further descriptions of the lawsuit married the words “waste” and “distraction”. When so few “othered” communities are afforded the opportunity to challenge the medial and administrative mouthpieces tirelessly propagandising and fearmongering against them, these comments once again spoke to the psychological intuitiveness of proportionality. To boot, it makes sense that international litigation over misrepresenting rumours felt wildly disproportionate to the many pro-Palestine commenters amidst the violent irredentism and indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants (human and non-human). But what was troubling to me was how many of the comments rightly seeking to hold Macron accountable in his response to the genocide were using transmisia as the denunciatory basis. I found it impossible to understand why the Palestinian flag emoji abutted the intentional misgendering of Brigitte Macron and comments that earnestly conflated the trans community with child abusers.

I thought of a loved one who reallocated their top surgery funds to a Palestinian family and of a young, genderqueer acquaintance who continued to show up to each anti-genocide protest even after being outed and unhoused by family members. I reflected on my Palestinian friends and comrades who have fed my belly with vegetable makloubeh and my queer soul with polychromatic nail polish. My Palestinian loved ones are testaments to the fact of queer Palestinians and Palestinian cishet allies. Prejudice is a learnt malady (and can be unlearnt), with anti-trans sentiment proving itself equally exogenous and infectious to vulnerable spaces and psyches. Digital footprints and algorithmic memories linking transphobia with Palestine only aggravate the security of queer Palestinians inside and outside of their imagined community and their effectiveness in the struggle for a free Palestine.

In addition to reproducing a kind of close-heartedness qualitatively similar to prejudice toward a host of other systemically undercut demographics, associating transphobia and Palestinian activism is plainly nonstrategic. It is not the transgender community who pinkwashes Israel to account for ethnic cleansing; every comment wielding transphobia in support of Palestine ultimately plays into the stereotyping of an entire nation. Furthermore, believing that trans disempowerment is a valid indictment of world leaders only distracts from the gravity of genocide itself, as if videos of the elderly collapsing from starvation shouldn’t be enough to chill our bones and boil our blood.

Just as it can be argued that it is unreasonable for a world leader to use the limited time, energy, and power available during a planetary polycrisis to retaliate against petty misrepresentation, it is politically and psychologically disproportionate to further disempower one group in the fight to legitimise another. It is disproportionate to generalise, scapegoat, and make casualties of innocent others on behalf of an Indigenous-led movement enunciating political solidarity, non-discrimination, and isonomy. It is disproportionate to exacerbate the struggle of a global demographic with unique networks of mutual aid and practical solidarities with Palestine that are neither transactional nor conditional to mounting the pink, blue, and white flag. And when any oppressor is a shared oppressor, it is disproportionate to mislead others from the true origins of and key stakeholders in their oppression.

The transgender refusal to devalue the lives of those who have been taught to hate them due to personal, religious, or political prejudice is a flame we must stoke rather than attempt (in vain) to smother. The fires of liberation are oxygenated—burning brighter, faster, hotter—the more we save our breath for the decaying stump of disempowerment that encumbers all of us.

Gray Black is an International Relations PhD Candidate and St Leonard’s College Associate Fellow at the University of St Andrews. Their doctoral research explores the latent eco-political potential of queer and posthuman countercultures.

*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Across the globe, decolonising the curriculum (DtC) has been the buzzword in higher education institutions as a result of movements such as Rhodes Must Fall (2015) at the University of Cape Town,  with similar iterations in the UK. The Black Lives Matter movement (2020) further pushed for challenging the centricity of whiteness in the narratives that have shaped how we come to learn about the world. Many universities in the global north addressed the probing question: ‘why is my curriculum white?’ by establishing toolkits for module convenors, drafting manifestos and holding meetings and seminars addressing demands of BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) students. Scholars within the discipline of International Relations have been quite vocal in expressing concerns about the anglo-centric production and dissemination of knowledge claims in International Relations (Bhambra 2021; Go 2018; Santos 2014; Shilliam 2021; Smith 2012;  Quijano 2007). Their attempts at decolonisation are based on acknowledging the racialised, capitalist and heteropatriarchal structures of power modeling global politics.

Decolonisation, entails challenging the intellectual mono-cultures stemming from positional superiority accorded to western knowledge systems that have treated (and continue to treat) indigenous and non-western knowledge(s) as raw materials and commodities to be discovered, extracted, appropriated and distributed (Smith 2012). Colonisation might be part of history but its afterlives model our classrooms in indelible ways. Whether engaging with international political economy through global financial imperialism or teaching security studies with reference to the Global War on Terror, the dominant frameworks of international politics remain tethered in western theories, histories and methodologies rooted in colonial legacies. The canon we teach as universal knowledge, the stories of conquest and echoes of empire are reflected in the hegemonic discourses taught in ‘standard’ courses.

This is a reflective piece on what decolonising the IR curriculum at an elite private university in India looks like? It is an exercise in contradictions. The efforts to decolonise though necessary, unfold within institutions that are shaped by the structures of privilege and inequality that decolonisation seeks to dismantle. Neoliberal ideals defined by intensified marketisation, focused on delivering products and outputs enabled through economic rationalism and managerialism leave little space for critical thinking (Smith 2022). Often institutions in the global south emulate other ‘core’ institutions to achieve recognition; feel a sense of belonging and compete for rankings and in the process end up reproducing the dominant structures of knowledge production. It is important to reinstate that knowledge hierarchies are enacted and experienced differently in different sites. Rather than approaching decolonisation as an ‘one size fits all’ checklist of tokenistic diversification of reading lists, the author argues for the need to reimagine what decolonising the curriculum means in relation to the socio-political-economic context in which we teach and engage with global politics.

In my introductory module on International Relations last semester, students partook in a seemingly fun group activity: filling the world map with as many country names they could recall. As their scribbled sheets were collected, the gaps were quite glaring. Europe was complete, USA, Canada and Australia were marked with precision. But Africa? South America? Middle East- only a handful names scattered across. In retrospect, the activity became an unintentional yet powerful demonstration of how their world was already hierarchical with certain regions being the centre and hyper-visible while others were peripheral, neglected, forgotten conveniently. This knowledge gap wasn’t an accident; the omissions were not just geographical but epistemic: a result of the foundational ways in which International Relations is imagined. This imagination is curated in their social settings - in the MUNs they participate, the peers they hang with and the aspirations they hold, their world view is colored by a glamorous great power rivalry with a dash of nationalist fervour. The map-activity exposed how all knowledge is situated, shaped by context and power. As we finished the class, watching a TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie on the ‘Danger of a Single Story’, the realization that decolonising entails unlearning our biases and the first step was to recognise where the silences lie dawned upon me.

As an early-career teacher, the question of whether to retain or abandon the canon always lingers while thinking about the curriculum design. It is a question that doesn’t simply reside in the academic domain but extends to broader anxieties of being taken seriously in academia. What really counts as successful decolonisation? The decision to teach, regardless of our rigorous endeavour to remain neutral facilitators, is never innocent of power. Curricula, by their very nature, are exclusionary articulations that are shaped by definitive decisions on what should be incorporated and what should be left out. This may favour certain elite voices from the periphery and further exclude those who are marginalised among the marginalised. We subconsciously erect signposts and are complicit in guiding our students towards meaning-making.

The call for multi-epistemic literacy and pluralising knowledge systems encompasses not just what we learn but also how and where we learn from. The syllabus for the Introduction to IR course diligently covers the canon: John Mearsheimer, John Ikenberry and Alexander Wendt but also includes works from Sankaran Krishna, Pinar Bilgin, Siba Grovogui among others. However, a truly decolonised curriculum needs to move beyond the famous scholars treated as ‘ethnographic trophies of display’ (Puwar 2020). As Anibal Quijano (2007: 174) points out ‘not all peripheral knowledge is created equal.’ It would be impossible to decolonise without incorporating adivasi and dalit contributions in challenging oppressive power structures. Much of this knowledge exists in oral traditions, folk narratives, community memory and activist movements - forms that are often excluded as not being ‘proper’ scholarship. The exclusion one enacts is a function of many structural constraints - not just due to the finite nature of the semester but also shaped by concerns regarding accessibility and translation.  Decolonisation thus remains an incomplete project - one that continues to exclude, even as it seems inclusive.

In one of the instances during a class discussion, a student raised their hand with an impassioned question: ‘Why do we study Morgenthau? Shouldn’t it be replaced with Kautiliya?’ Another chimed in: ‘Shouldn’t we be objective? Isn’t this just political?’ These questions reflect a common misinterpretation of decolonization as an absolute rejection of western ideas rather than critiquing its dominance and the structures that privileged these ideas over other traditions. Decolonial interventions formulated in a top-down manner as part of a political project, often perpetuate what they seek to undo, in part because non-western knowledge(s) have imperial tendencies themselves, thus replacing one form of hegemony with another.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) published a report on Guidelines for Incorporating Indian Knowledge in Higher Education Curriculum in 2023 as part of New Education Policy (NEP). Framed as a step towards decolonising the curricula, there is a troubling conflation between decolonisation and indigenisation. The call to decolonize the curriculum, at its core is a redressal of the hierarchies that efface marginalised knowledge systems. However, there is a related danger of decolonisation being co-opted for promoting nationalist revivalism. The nationalist co-optation of decolonial discourses tends to selectively target ‘foreign’ influences leaving domestic hierarchies intact. Rather than challenging the existing structures of knowledge production, decolonisation risks becoming a smokescreen for cultural exceptionalism, a call to return to an imagined glorious past and reinforcing majoritarian ideologies (Acharya 2014; Hurrell 2016).

Classrooms reproduce epistemicide through the enactment of canon-obscuring and devaluing alternative ways of viewing and studying the world (Hutchings 2023; Paraskeva 2011). Students don’t experience education by being part of silo courses but as overarching programmes. If decolonisation is to be meaningful, it must be woven into the very fabric of academic experience.  Students who sit in the classrooms are poised to work in think tanks, diplomatic circles and multinational institutions. The way they are trained - the texts they read, whose voices they consider as authoritative will influence their understanding of the world. Decolonial praxis involves engaged reflexivity that encourages students and instructors to critically reflect on their own positionalities and power dynamics inherent in their epistemological assumptions. One can’t singularly take on the role of ‘decolonial killjoy’ (borrowed from Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy).

In attempting to decolonise the classroom, one shifts from top-down teaching models to participatory and dialogic pedagogies which enables students to co-create knowledge. The classroom does not necessarily emerge as a space with answers but trains students to ask sharper, more unsettling questions. These questions demand experiential learning based on collaborative projects, interacting with local communities to ground theoretical discussions in real-world contexts. It is important to introspectively locate the inadequacies, limitations and contradictions that inadvertently perpetuates the status quo rather than dismantling it. The challenges of decolonising do not invalidate the pursuit of critical pedagogical approach, rather they underscore the need for continuous introspection, recalibration and dialogue.

Ananya Sharma is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Ashoka University. Her research interests include decolonial thought, intellectual histories of IR and popular culture in the global south.

*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have reignited intense global debates over the role and use of weapons on the battlefield. The articulation between the ‘classic’ (airpower, artillery) and ‘new’ (drones, AI) technologies of war is a central dimension of these discussions. In a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), War and the Modern Battlefield: Insights from Ukraine and the Middle East, the chapter on airpower evolution notes that “the tools and tactics used to perform these functions [of air power superiority] are constantly changing, having experienced a particularly rapid evolution on the battlefield in Ukraine” (p. 92). Such statement exemplifies this larger, dominant, and yet largely unquestioned, instrumental conception of weapons in strategic and military discourse, where armaments are routinely framed as ‘tools’ or ‘instruments’ used to achieve political objectives. This framing, rooted in classical strategic thought, especially Clausewitzian theory, treats war as a rational extension of politics by other means. Weapons are the means through which political will is enforced when diplomacy fails. Nevertheless, to call weapons ‘tools’ or even ‘instruments’ is to obscure their unique and irreversible effects. Military weapons are not neutral entities in the hands of rational decision-makers, nor do they passively submit to human will. The capacity of weapons to override human intent arises from a property intrinsic to their design and function: they are designed to kill, to destroy, to terrorize at an industrial scale. A hammer or a wrench does not provoke cycles of retaliation. But missile strikes, artillery rounds, air bombings, automatic fire form machine gun do. Their use does not just ‘serve’ political ends. Weapons generate mass death and destruction, and with it, a cascade of (un)expected consequences that no other ‘tool’ can produce: the hardening of political positions, the rise of vengeance, the escalation of violence.

This is precisely why the ‘instrument’ metaphor is flawed and ideologically biased. More than a metaphor, it embodies a dominant vision of what weapons are. It perpetuates the notion that the ethical and political implications of weapons’ violence structurally depend on how they are used. By continually reaffirming the possibility of control, the ‘tool’ metaphor legitimizes the expansion of military technologies and infrastructures under the guise of strategic necessity. As Elke Schwarz shows in Death Machines (2018, chapter 4), this core-concept of control in strategic thinking naturalizes the presence of weapons in political life and sustains the belief that more advanced tools will yield better outcomes. In doing so, it contributes to the normalization, and even the eternalization, of militarization, embedding violence deeper into the structures of governance and technological development.

But if weapons are not simply strategic tools, then what are they? Addressing this question requires moving beyond the conventional frameworks of strategic analysis, which tend to seeing weapons in terms of their intended functions or their operational effectiveness. To engage with the social nature of weapons, we must begin not with what they are designed to achieve, but with what they consistently produce: large-scale destruction. From this perspective, my point is that the reality of weapons in modern warfare is shaped less by coherent strategic reasoning than by a pervasive technological fetishism. More precisely, by a political-military mystification of destruction that the technological power of weapons induces. Contemporary scholarship on war and armaments should more seriously engage with the proposition that the development and deployment of weapons are often driven not by rational strategic calculus, but by a more elemental belief in the inherent value of technologically enhanced violence. This belief manifests as a conviction that increased lethality and destructive capacity are synonymous with military progress and the promise of victory. In this context, brute force is more than a tactical preference, or a perverse effect of some conflictual configurations like attrition, but a foundational ideology of modern warfare, that conflates technological advancement with strategic efficacy, regardless of its actual political utility.

In historical terms, the valorisation of brute force has significantly influenced the evolution of warfare since the early twentieth century, showing the depth with which human intent and control has been alienated and subsumed by the modern technological condition. World War I stands as a poignant and emblematic illustration of this modern militaristic fetishism. The dramatic escalation in firepower, particularly through artillery and machine guns, was both a principal cause of the strategic deadlock and the proposed solution to the mass slaughter that characterized the Western Front. Although World War II witnessed a renewed emphasis on maneuver warfare, facilitated by the integration of motorized technology into military operations, this shift did not fundamentally alter the underlying reliance on overwhelming force. As Michael Sherry aptly characterized in his analysis of US strategic bombing, these campaigns represent the “triumphs of technological fanaticism” (The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon, 1987). The systematic targeting and incineration of German and Japanese urban centers during World War II exemplified an approach of maximal destruction against both civilian populations and industrial capacity.

In subsequent conflicts such as the Korean, Indochina and Vietnam Wars, France and the United States largely retained this paradigm. Despite being labelled ‘limited’ or ‘small’ wars during the bipolar era, the scale and intensity of violence deployed were anything but. These engagements were marked by a persistent adherence to a quantitative and technological conception of military power, wherein superiority in firepower and advanced weaponry was presumed to ensure strategic success. The US air campaign in Korea was in pure continuity with the carpet bombings of WWII. As Bruce Cumings has documented (The Korean War, 2010, p. 159), American forces dropped more tonnage of bombs on North Korea – 635 000 tons -  than in the entire Pacific theater during WWII – 503 000 tons, targeting not only military infrastructure but also dams, factories, and civilian centers. Dozens of cities were partially or nearly-completely razed. The Korean War exemplified the continuous brutal logic of total war, in which technological superiority was wielded for devastation. As I recently demonstrated regarding the two Indochina wars, French and American military practices were shaped by a technocratic vision of efficiency, that prioritized the statistical optimization of weapons’ firepower and operational tempo over political or ethical restraint. This economy of force rendered devastation not only permissible but procedurally necessary, embedding mass violence into the strategic fabric of counterinsurgency and transforming pure brutality into a rationalized feature of military conduct. However, technological escalation failed to yield decisive outcomes. Instead, and as Nick Turse as extensively documented (Kill everything that moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, 2013), it resulted in prolonged devastation of the Indochinese environment, extensive civilian casualties and war crimes, inflicted through both aerial bombardment and ground operations.

In the late-modern era, the fetish of force as a central organizing principle of warfare continues unabated. Although contemporary conflicts involving Western forces often exhibit greater civil/combatants discrimination and a more reasonable use of firepower than in the twentieth century, the underlying mystification of brutality remains largely unchanged. The protracted counterinsurgency campaigns associated with the War on Terror were predicated on the belief that Western technological superiority could overcome irregular and less-equipped insurgent forces. Consequently, much of the strategic discourse surrounding interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq centred on the optimization and allocation of military resources. This technocentric vision culminated in initiatives such as the troop surge in Afghanistan, which, despite its scale, yielded few substantive outcomes beyond an intensification of military operations in the early 2010s.

More recently, the war in Ukraine has devolved into a war of attrition, wherein strategic success is measured by the relentless accumulation of destruction, manifested through missile strikes, drone warfare, and sustained artillery bombardments targeting both military and civilian infrastructures. The drone’s trajectory is particularly revealing of the unexpected and destructive path that military technology can take. Initially marketed during the War on Terror as instruments of surgical precision and ethical warfare (yet responsible for a significant number of civil casualties), the use of drones has now escalated further. Russia is deploying massive salvos of unmanned aerial systems to bombard Ukrainian cities, transforming what was once framed as a precision tool into a mechanism of indiscriminate attrition and terror.

Similarly, the war in Gaza exemplifies a stark application of overwhelming force. Airpower and artillery fires have been used at gigantic levels, especially with regards to the very small geographical surface of the war. Full-scale destruction has constituted the explicit orientation of the war. Also, Gaza shows how the fetish of force is now augmented by algorithmic targeting and artificial intelligence. These technologies have been integrated into a military logic that prioritizes efficiency in destruction over discrimination in targeting. And the much-vaunted precision of AI-assisted strikes does not reflect restraint, but rather the accuracy of firepower deployed to fulfill a generalized objective of devastation. The AI promise of precision, in this context, becomes a technical virtue divorced from ethical constraint, serving the fetish of force by accelerating devastation rather than to limit it.

These cases collectively underscore the persistence of a militaristic ethos that equates technological and kinetic dominance with strategic efficacy, at the expense of ethical and political considerations. What links these conflicts, from the trenches of the Great War to the devastation in Gaza, is not a coherent set of strategic rationales, but a persistent belief in the redemptive power of organized violence. Strategy, in the lens of this history of weapons in war, appears less as a guide to political action than as a military-centric attempt to lend coherence to the relentless cascade of firepower that defines modernity. This belief in the redemption of brute force, however, is not only misguided; it is profoundly dangerous. The past 110 years of continuous mass devastation since the beginning of WWI reasonably suggests that the cult of technological superiority in warfare does not resolve instability and suffering but rather deepens and perpetuates them. This historical trajectory suggests that far from being a corrective force, the fetish of force often functions as a catalyst for prolonged violence and systemic destruction.

In this context, resisting the fetish of force requires more than appeals to diplomacy or humanitarian ideals. It demands a scientific and political confrontation with the institutional, cultural, and economic structures that sustain and normalize organized violence. The idea that diplomacy, justice, or human security can simply be ‘foregrounded’ overlooks the entrenched interests and strategic logics that privilege military solutions. To properly think war and prevent it, we must not only rethink weapons, but also the systems of thought and power that render them central to political action. The imperative to resist the fetish of force is further heightened by the immense environmental and health toll of modern warfare. From the contamination of soil and water by explosives to the vast carbon emissions generated by armed operations and weapons production, the ecological footprint of armed conflict and military activity overall is staggering. And the ongoing global remilitarization will only exacerbate the climate catastrophe we are fabricating. The instrumental view of weapons not only naturalizes organized violence but also obscures the long-term environmental degradation it entails. It makes the critique of militarized technological supremacy not just a scientific and political necessity, but an eco-existential one.

Julien Pomarède is Associate Professor of International Politics at the University of Liège (Belgium).

This is an excerpt from The Praeter-Colonial Mind: An Intellectual Journey Through the Back Alleys of Empire by Francisco Lobo. Download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.

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The world is a strange place. A generalized sense of despondency and malaise fill the very air we breathe. Many are unhappy. Not just the poor, the disenfranchised, the oppressed. Those who are on top are also not happy. It was comedian Bill Burr who pointed out that billionaires aren’t happy with a billion dollars. But there is more. Countries endowed with a massive landmass, like Russia, are not happy with their territorial allotment. They want more. They want more land, land that does not belong to them. And, perhaps strangest of all, the first economy of the world, the country with the mightiest military forces this planet has ever seen, believes it has lost its greatness. And they want it back. They want to ‘Make America Great Again’. Enter the church of MAGA, and its prophet Donald J. Trump. In this final chapter, I will explore the impact of Trump, Trumpism, and MAGA in the rest of the world – that is, humanity or the portion of the global population that, if America is always put first, will invariably come second. This chapter should be read in tandem with Chapter Two, as it is a corollary to those initial reflections on the US as the Reluctant Empire.

As we have seen throughout this study, the praeter-colonial mind is the outlook that attempts to make sense of the many legacies of colonialism in our supposedly post-colonial world, in accordance with the varied meanings of the prefix ‘praeter’ (namely ‘past, by, beyond, above, more than, in addition to, besides’). Thus, the praeter-colonial mind sees colonialism simultaneously as past and present as it is confronted with the evidence of its many legacies. It is a mind that, ultimately, attempts to step aside to gain perspective and go above and beyond colonialism for the sake of the present and the future.

Now, if MAGA was indeed the isolationist movement many of its followers believe it to be, then the praeter-colonial mind would have very little to say about it. It would merely be a domestic phenomenon with no impact on the rest of the world. Yet, MAGA’s prophet has chosen a different path. Instead of retreating to the inner citadel of the North American landmass, to ‘Fortress America’ standing in splendid isolation, Trump has embarked on a campaign to remake the international order, seeking not only a realignment of alliances but even a redrawing of borders the likes of which we have not seen since the days of the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference or the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. How the praeter-colonial mind can make sense of what is happening to the world today is the subject of this chapter. Before that, however, a few thoughts on the domestic situation in the US are needed to lay the groundwork for further praeter-colonial reflections.

Transitional Fantasies

Thomas Matthew Crooks was born in Pennsylvania on 20 September 2003. He died in his home state on 13 July 2024, at age 20. The cause of death: a sniper bullet. It was fired at him as a direct and immediate response to his own sniper bullet aimed at one man speaking to a crowd gathered in the small town of Butler. Had Crooks succeeded in his mission that day, and regardless of his own fate after, the world would be a very different place today. It would be a world without Donald Trump.

Such a world would be a much quieter place, for sure. As Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, remarked during an interview in April of 2025, ‘President Trump as we know exists loudly, and his loud existence has awakened Europe with respect to its economy, and its national defense’ (The Post Millennial 2025). Trump did survive that assassination attempt, and he went on to win the presidency that year. He remains his usual loud self. However, what is most deafening about this episode that confronted a quiet Gen-Zer with a loud Baby Boomer that summer day is, ironically, how little we talk about this young man whose actions could have changed the course of history. How quiet we are about Crooks.

Indeed, after the expected frenzy of the ensuing news cycle that week, the media went completely silent about him. No books, documentaries, or movies have been released about that fateful day in which a tragic existence ended. Not even the experts who are increasingly turning to study the phenomenon of the left-behind, angry young men to explain the political violence of our times have taken an interest in the ballad of Tom Crooks, a sad story indeed. This story is weaved into the general canvas of our dark times, days when not only those who have everything to be happy are unhappy, but also times when many quiet, ordinary people suddenly find themselves harboring dark feelings in their hearts. In the face of the unprecedented political blitzkrieg Trump unleashed in the US and the rest of the world during the first months of his second presidency, many a liberal humanist fantasized about Trump’s demise. If not left to a misguided implementation of the Second Amendment (‘the right to bear arms’), the demurely desired outcome could be delivered by something far more prosaic – say, a heart failure, or a brain aneurism. Sad times indeed if political difference cannot be handled other than by fantasizing about the death of another human being.

A Trump-free world would be undoubtedly less loud. But would it be all that different? Comedian and political commentator Jon Stewart has shown how, for over a decade, liberals in the US have been trying to make the case for a ‘fever dream’ theory whereby Trump, Trumpism and MAGA are but an anomaly, an exception in an otherwise well-ordered polity that can boast over two centuries of democratic government. Someday, the theory goes, the ‘fever will break’ and America will come back to its senses. But as Stewart remarks: ‘If someone’s been running a fever since the aughts, that’s not a fever. That is their default resting temperature’ (The Daily Show 2025, at 0:54). That is what Annie Karni, White House correspondent and author of Mad House, also pointed out in an interview in the middle of Trump’s first 100 days in office: ‘Most Democrats and voters have come around to the idea that MAGA is bigger than Trump. There is no reverting, there is really no evidence that anything is going back’ (The Bulwark 2025, at 13:40). Have we ever seen anything like this in US history?

A Century of Un-American Experiments

Even though Americans like to repeat the self-reassuring mantra that they live in the greatest country on earth, the fact is that they have been adrift for a while, even before Covid (Galloway 2022). They are struggling, and the solutions they have found for their malaise have not always been the best. In an attempt to explain what is happening in Trump’s America in 2025, some are looking back into US history to draw parallels and sound the alarm previous generations were not able to, before it is too late.

Amidst a climate of political persecution and witch-hunts, naturally, the days of McCarthyism in the 1950s are called into mind by some. In his latest book, Red Scare, Clay Risen introduces the following hypothesis in the Preface:

In his novel The Plague, Albert Camus writes that the “plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves,” ready to spring to life again. Something similar happened in the 1950s, which is to say also the 1960s and ‘70s and, I believe, on up through today. There is a lineage to the American hard right of today, and to understand it, we need to understand its roots in the Red Scare. It did not originate then, nor is Trumpism and the MAGA movement the same as McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. But there is a line linking them (Risen 2025, xiii).

Others have looked a little farther back to alert us as to all the many parallels the rise of fascism in Europe and the US has with our current times, most notably Rachel Maddow in her recent book Prequel. An American Fight Against Fascism (Maddow 2023). Maddow traces back the trajectory of a homebrewed variant of fascism in the 1930s and the 1940s, which was in part advanced by the original ‘America First Committee’ , a political organization that convened a rally at Madison Square Garden in new York on 23 May 1941 with the specific purpose of keeping the US out of World War II (Ibid, 217) – that is, until Pearl Harbor after which the Committee dissolved (Ibid, 247).

With the exception of the so-called ‘Silver Shirts’ (Ibid, 60), no major paramilitary forces or ‘praetorian guards’ were created back then in America, a usual development wherever fascism takes hold in order to ensure the loyalty of the armed forces to the leader. Yet, that does not mean that it can’t happen there too – Trump’s profligate use of the National Guard for domestic law-enforcement is a sobering reminder of this. Maddow ultimately concludes this thorough study by extending the following invitation to the reader: ‘If we’re willing to take the harder look at our American history with fascism, the truth is that our own history in this wild, uncertain twenty-first century has not an echo in the past but a prequel’ (Ibid, 309). Likewise, other intellectuals, including Yale professors Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley, published an open letter in The New York Times decrying the arrival of fascism in Trump’s America, prompting them to leave the country and relocate to Canada (Shore, Snyder and Stanley 2025).

Now, without prejudice to the ‘Red Scare’ and the ‘fascist’ lines of criticism as useful lenses through which the events unfolding in the US today can be understood, I believe there is another notable precedent in American history that may better explain how a movement such a MAGA came to be, how long it might last and how impactful its effects may become. It is the case of a remarkable experience within the greater American experiment. Some even know it as the ‘Noble Experiment’. But most people call it simply ‘Prohibition’, the nationwide ban of alcohol between 1920 and 1933.

In a famous study of this particular chapter of American history titled Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition – a book that would also inspire the documentary series by Ken Burns on the same topic – Daniel Okrent explains how such a seemingly un-American phenomenon took place in one of the most freedom-loving places on earth:

In fact, Americans had had several decades’ warning, decades during which a popular movement like none the nation had ever seen – a mighty alliance of moralists and progressives, suffragists and xenophobes – had legally seized the Constitution, bending it to a new purpose (Okrent 2010, 1).

Indeed, the political movement preceding the 1919 introduction of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution (the amendment legally enacting the ban of alcohol at the federal level and its companion legislative instrument, the Volstead Act), can be dated back at least to the 1870s.

As Okrent further explains, it would be a remarkable combination of political forces and unlikely alliances (known as the ‘drys’ as opposed to the ‘wets’) that would bring about this unusually illiberal restriction to an otherwise quintessentially liberal document such as the US Constitution: ‘In the two decades leading up to Prohibition’s enactment, five distinct, if occasionally overlapping, components made up its unspoken coalition: racists, progressives, suffragists, populists (…) and nativists’ (Ibid, 42).

This true ‘people’s movement’ believed that ‘their cause had been sanctified by the long, long march to ratification’ (Ibid, 112). Further, the prohibitionist ethos was far from being a uniquely American phenomenon. Before the Great War, many European countries (all of them northern and non-Catholic, Okrent notes) were home to what a French economist described as ‘le delirium anti- alcoolique’ (Ibid, 75). In the UK, Lord Curzon would refer to the dry movement as ‘Puritanism run mad’ (Ibid, 172), while Winston Churchill would call it ‘an affront to the whole history of mankind’ (Ibid, 172) and ‘at once comic and pathetic’ (Ibid, 185). Aside from the obvious fact that Trump is a notorious teetotaler, I believe that many structural parallels can be drawn between today’s MAGA movement and the crusade of Prohibition. By this I mean that the parallels are not of a substantive kind, for the simple reason that MAGA is not a reaction to any kind of poison or dangerous, intoxicating substance – unless we are willing to concede Elon Musk’s outlandish theory of the so- called ‘woke mind virus’.

As Tocqueville eloquently observed, democratic centuries sometimes overdo it with their obsession over equality, even to the extent that it can turn into a form of orthodoxy among liberals. But whether metaphorical intoxication or true political commitment to a bona fides principle of the Enlightenment – égalité – the reaction to such a political force has come in the form of a violent backlash, just as militant and inflexible as Prohibition once was. Enter MAGA, ‘le delirium anti-woke’. The structural parallels I speak of can be found, first, in MAGA’s composition. Just like the Prohibition movement, MAGA in 2025 is a strange collection of political forces, almost the exact same as those who a century ago rallied behind the ‘dry’ banner. Indeed, MAGA has its own racists, nativists, and populists. If not the female suffragists of old, MAGA at least commands the loyalty of another perceived disenfranchised gendered group of our day – young male voters, or the so- called ‘bro-vote’. As for progressives, they are represented by the techno- futurist elements of the MAGA movement, led by Elon Musk (not unlike another antisemitic automobile magnate who supported the drys, Henry Ford).

On the opposite side of the aisle, the Democrats of today find themselves in a similar situation to that of the ‘wets’ of the last century: ‘Disorganized, dysfunctional, and disbelieving, the wets had watched the approach of Prohibition (…) “in a dumb stupor”’ (Ibid, 113).

Second, in terms of its lifespan, the MAGA movement can be said to have been five decades in the making before it got into the halls of federal power in Washington D.C., just like Prohibition found its way into the most sacred document of the land, the US Constitution, since its humble origins in the 1870s when the first bills were proposed and rejected (Ibid, 62). Similarly, the intellectual origins of the MAGA movement have been traced back to an obscure, yet momentous, memorandum published in 1971 by a conservative lawyer, Lewis F. Powell (Powell 1971). This manifesto, which ends with an ominous closing (‘the hour is late’), decries an open assault on the American economic system by socialism, communism and fascism. It further highlights the importance of reconquering universities and the media as neglected spaces by conservatives. The Powell Memo is said to have inspired the infamous ‘Project 2025’ document that the Trump administration is striving to implement (Heer 2024). A seed planted in 1971 and bearing fruit in 2025. A long fever dream indeed.

Will the MAGA lifespan equal that of the Prohibition movement, that is, more than half a century from the time the first dry amendments were proposed in the 1870s until the 21st Amendment finally repealed the 18th Amendment in 1933? It is hard to tell. Since MAGA and Trumpism are now a phenomenon that transcends the life of a sole individual, it is safe to assume that after Donald Trump leaves office the movement will stay strong and live on – probably carried forward on the shoulders of J.D. Vance. And MAGA has not even attempted to enact a constitutional amendment at the time of writing, an accomplishment that, if successful, would equal the Prohibition feat of inserting an illiberal pathogen into an otherwise liberal host.

What happens after that, and how MAGA ends, is also something difficult to predict, not least because predictions can be wrong, almost comically so as Okrent also reminds us:

In September 1930 Morris Sheppard, author of the Eighteenth Amendment, said, “There is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail”. (…) It was one of those moments when all the experts are wrong and wisdom arises from unlikely sources (Ibid, 330).

Whether we draw our lessons from any of these un-American experiments (Prohibition, Fascism, or the Red Scare), or from all of them, and whatever ‘un-American’ means in substantive terms, methodologically there is one thing that cannot be up for debate: no one person in the US has or should have the power to designate another person as un-American in keeping with that country’s own democratic tradition. It is, ultimately, a collective decision made over generations. As the Supreme Court decided decades ago: ‘The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship’ (US Supreme Court 1967).

The Anti-Antonines: ‘Malice Toward All’

Perhaps it is inaccurate and misleading to call these experiments ‘un- American’. After all, they have all been homebrewed. No alien or external force possessed Americans to ban alcohol, flirt with fascism, or hunt down suspected communists. Could it be that there is something underneath the marbled halls of neo-classic Washington DC, something lurking in the shadows behind the scenes of the great constitutional drama that has been put on display for the past 250 years?

When trying to make sense of similarly dark days in a supposedly highly civilized place, a refugee from Nazi Germany came up with an explanation as to how an otherwise sophisticated society, where there is rule of law and science and art thrive, can at the same time produce some of the most monstruous manifestations of our human nature, turbocharged by the totalitarian state. Our refugee, Hannah Arendt, postulated that after World War II: ‘The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition’ (Arendt 1962, ix). She was specifically referring to the unholy alliance between antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism (Ibid), all of which converged to maximum catastrophic effect in the 1930s and 1940s.

Is there an equivalent ‘subterranean stream’ in US history? Antisemitism has its own record in the US, and its instrumentalization for political gain (for instance, by the Trump administration in its feud against Harvard University) does not belie the fact of its existence in the country. And totalitarianism, arguably the most sophisticated form of illiberalism harnessing all the tools at the disposal of the modern state, is something the US has flirted with in the past (for example, with the concentration camps where thousands of citizens of Japanese descent were forcibly interned during World War II).

However, there is another subterranean stream that runs deep beneath the tides of American history. Its roots are medieval, yet its manifestations are modern. It combines the worst of all traditions. It refers to the way politics are conducted in that country, a tradition that does not begin with Trump but arguably culminates in his rise to power. It can be characterized as the opposite of the spirit of reconciliation and magnanimity towards defeated enemies, the ‘malice toward none’ creed of President Abraham Lincoln (Maddow 2025, 297). With Trump, it becomes the exact opposite: ‘malice toward all’.

A scholar of the Middle Ages once described the spirit of medieval times as one of ‘passionate intensity of life’ (Huizinga 1996, 1), a time when a ‘fervent pathos’ (Ibid, 9) animated people in everything they did, including politics: ‘The blind passion with which a man supported his party and his lord and, at the same time, pursued his own interests was, in part, an expression of an unmistakable, stone-hard sense of right that medieval man thought proper’ (Ibid, 20).

I believe that, in some ways, perhaps due to the lack of a war of religion like those Europe once had (the Civil War of 1861–65 in reality an example of modern warfare) the US has still not come out of this medieval frame of mind carried across the Atlantic by the pilgrims and settlers, with its distinctive blind passion and intensity – not least when it comes to the fraught politics of the culture wars (on which I said more in Chapter Six). It is a stylistic medievalism, a ‘folk-feudalism’ of sorts to go with what has been called ‘techno-feudalism’ as a system of post-capitalist exploitation (Varoufakis 2024).

Donald Trump epitomizes this folk-feudalistic blind passion. He learned from the very best. Indeed, he was mentored in the dark arts of dirty politics by that Mephistophelian figure called Roy Cohn, an extremely well-connected and corrupt New York attorney who ‘galloped through the second half of the twentieth century like a malevolent Forrest Gump’ (Bruney 2020, para. 2). Cohn, in turn, assisted Senator McCarthy in his infamous witch-hunt against alleged communists, known as the Red Scare.

Like his heirs, Cohn and Trump, McCarthy was a controversial character. Risen describes him in a way that would be completely suited for the 47th President of the United States today: "McCarthy attacked with abandon. He became part of the political landscape, a reliable source for outrageous quotes and a bellwether for the insanity of the moment. Facts, accuracy, and consistency did not matter (Risen 2025, 266)." Concerning Cohn, Risen remarks that he was a distillation of everything people loved about McCarthy: ‘his viciousness, his vindictiveness, his willingness to lie’ (Ibid, 279). Next in line in this hapless dynasty is Donald Trump, an adoptive son to a vicious political father (Cohn) and adoptive grandson to an equally venomous grandfather (McCarthy). Only time will tell whether the ‘talented Mr. Vance’ (Packer 2025) will enroll his chameleonic political persona to become next in line after he is done fulfilling his constitutional duties as Vice-President.

Thus, just as Rome had its good Antonine emperors, America got its ‘anti- Antonines’ spanning a century of national history carried by the subterranean stream of folk-feudalism and periodically emerging on the surface, ‘flooding the zone’ and mudding the waters as they pervaded everything. It was only a matter of time before these uncontainable hydrodynamic forces started overflowing into the rest of the world.

Trump’s Codicil to the Monroe Doctrine: The Reluctant Empire Revisited

Donald Trump is not a learned man. He might be clever – enough to get himself elected President of the United States twice – but he is most certainly not a knowledgeable person. He has been called ‘uneducable’ by the media, his mind described as ‘full of mush’ by a former advisor (Irwin 2025). He is an ignorant man, and proudly so. That is why he has no problem picking a fight with one of the oldest, most revered academic institutions of his country, Harvard University, as he has no respect, or need, for knowledge. Further, it is also baffling that his ignorance includes one of the areas where he is supposed to be savvier – business – as he is apparently convinced that tariffs are an entry fee that countries magically send his way for the privilege of doing business with the US instead of the sales tax on the American consumer that they actually are.

Trump’s self-assured ignorance extends, of course, to history as well. He does not understand history, and therefore he does not understand how the world works. ‘He lives from day to day’, in Goethe’s words, blithefully unaware of all the many paths the present has taken to come to be. His is not a praeter-colonial mind, not even a colonial one; his is an ‘ahistorical mind’. But what does it matter what goes on in the mind of Trump? Reflecting on his first months in office, Zoe Williams has written that: ‘One of the many indignities of the US spectacle is having to lose hours analyzing the hidden meaning and augurs of the acts of men who don’t, themselves, give one second’s thought to anything’ (Williams 2025).

Commentators advise to take Donald Trump seriously, but not literally – a phrase that has become a mantra of our hapless times. I believe, however, that although Trumpism must be taken seriously for all of the above- mentioned considerations, a mind as ignorant and impressionable as Trump’s must always be taken literally, just like the words of a child, if it is intent what we are inquiring about. Take Trump literally, and Trumpism seriously.

It is only when the world offers resistance – with all its annoying facts and laws of physics and economics and politics – that the designs of a childish mind like Trump’s are thwarted and he, expectedly, gives up or moves on to the next shiny object in sight. A mind that does not care or think about history – a mind that has no grasp of the workings of the world around it – is a mind that truly believes that the world can be carved out and remade like a lab experiment or a tragicomic pantomime of the imperial divisions of old. It is a mind that truly believes disputed biblical lands can be turned into a ‘riviera of the Middle East’; that historic bodies of water shared with other nations can be renamed at a whim; that he can snatch an entire country from the Commonwealth of Nations and turn it into his 51st state; or seize a chunk of an old northern kingdom all in the name of securing his own hemisphere – that is, his own side of the gameboard.

It is indeed an actively imaginative mind the way only children playing a game of Risk can be. Enter Trump’s Codicil to the Monroe Doctrine. President James Monroe declared in 1823 that America would be henceforth for ‘Americans’ – whether North our South, arguably, and certainly to the exclusion of European imperialism. Subsequently, at the turn of the twentieth century President Teddy Roosevelt added his famous ‘Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine, namely, his willingness to enforce such a doctrine in the hemisphere up to and including the use of force (Allison 2017, 208–209).

Today, Trump keeps a portrait of President James Monroe in the Oval Office, and although he does not truly understand why or what the Monroe Doctrine really is – he has referred to the portrait as ‘Monroe from the Monroe document’ – he has accidentally walked down the path of Monroe and Roosevelt before him by following, if not proper foreign policy principles, at least his blind, predatory impulses telling him to grab as much as he can of everything in his immediate vicinity.

This is Trump’s, and MAGA’s, own version of imperialism (Collinson 2025), admittedly a continuation of an expansionist tradition dating back to the days of ‘Manifest Destiny’ (the doctrine underpinning US expansion westward) and even Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Irish Tactics’ to subdue neighboring Ireland and ‘Western Design’ to take the Americas from Spain in the seventeenth century (Grandin 2025, 85; 106).

Thus, Trump’s neo-imperialist inclinations towards everything located in his immediate sphere of influence, the Western Hemisphere, has so far spared no one – not Panama, not Mexico, not Colombia, not Greenland, not even as close an economic and political ally as Canada. Since his ahistorical mind believes these are not real countries with real borders, and that the world around him can be redrawn at a whim, there is no need to acknowledge the basic fact of the sovereignty or territorial integrity of any of them. The same applies for other (real or perceived) powerful countries in their own ‘spheres of influence’ – a doctrinal concept that is making a comeback in international relations (Foreign Policy 2025) – namely China and Russia. That is why Trump does not really care about Ukraine, or about Taiwan for that matter.

To reiterate: Trump and his followers do not care about history or facts. That is also why he will likely continue to throw ridiculous distractions at the American public exploiting longstanding pop culture obsessions, like the Kennedy assassination or the Fort Knox gold. Conceivably, before his term is up, he will dangle more such stories at the public, for example UFOs in Roswell, New Mexico; or treating Cuba, which is dangerously close to his beloved Mar-a-Lago residence, as a place that needs to be ‘liberated’ from its own history. These things may never come to pass; but if they do, none of us will be surprised. Anything is possible.

In a way, the ahistorical mind is the opposite of the praeter-colonial mind. The former is tragically unaware of colonialism and its impact on the present, whereas the latter tries to make sense of all of colonialism’s many legacies and checkered past. Yet, that does not mean that the ahistorical mind cannot accommodate paradoxes. In fact, it is a place where contradiction thrives, where a bi-polar empire fits perfectly well within a multi-polar world.

Otherwise, how could it be explained that America must be made great again (the implication being: that America was once great, and that this is no longer the case), and at the same time that it already is the greatest country? How to make sense of demands for equal treatment after decades of the world ‘ripping America off’ while at the same time believing it is indeed a country that deserves special treatment, special respect? Only in a paradoxical mind can greatness and equality be both true at the same time. As Zakaria notes:

The United States has always had two fundamental attitudes. One, we are too good to participate in the world. Or we are so good that we should completely transform the world. But to actually engage in the world as it exists has always been difficult for the United States because it’s an ideological nation. It believes it is exceptional and all that. And I think you see some of that in the Trump attitude (Klein and Zakaria 2025, para. 192).

Further, the ahistorical mind truly believes that America can thrive in splendid isolation and at the same time dictate what others can or cannot do, at least when it comes to its own sphere of influence, but certainly also beyond that space. However, by definition, an empire cannot remain in isolation.

Isolation is further negative for the world the US helped to build for the past eight decades, as pointed out by a Republican hawk like Condoleezza Rice during the last presidential race (Rice 2024). Such an order has, others believe, greatly benefited the country that exists at its very center, the US (Klein and Zakaria 2025). It is not that the US was not imperialistic while building and enforcing such a world order; but, as Grandin points out, it managed to navigate this contradiction without hypocrisy by way of ‘figuring the most efficient mix … of empire and law, domination and arbitration – of going alone and working together’ (Grandin 2025, 330). Trump’s bulldozer- like approach to the international negates this very legacy.

One of the main architects of the post-war order, Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, titled his memoirs Present at the Creation, complete with an epigraph by Alphonso X, the Learned of Spain: ‘Had I been present at the creation I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe’ (Acheson 1987). Present at the dismantling of the same order, it seems Donald the Builder can’t be bothered with any hints or advice to aid him in the cavalier destruction he is presiding over.

The New Athenians

At the Shangri-La Dialogue event held in Singapore between May and June of 2025, the host Defense Minister addressed the following message to his American counterpart, Pete Hegseth, playing the Melian islander to his Athenian ambassador: "If we have to choose sides, may we choose the side of principles — principles that uphold a global order where we do not descend into the law of the jungle, where the mighty do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must (Tharoor 2025, para. 15)."

In the age of Trump, however, such lofty language is probably completely lost on the likes of Hegseth, Rubio, Vance, or Trump himself. What these new Athenians have in common is not only that they are all men; it is the new brand of masculinity that they celebrate, promote and bring to the table of diplomatic affairs that is interesting, if not for its originality, at least for the perils it entails.

Indeed, we have seen this style of what Zakaria calls ‘macho realism’ (Klein and Zakaria 2025, para. 250) before in the US, in an iteration brought to us by another one of those spawns of McCarthyism, Richard Nixon. In his 1975 book The Male Machine (complete with an Introduction by the iconic feminist thinker Gloria Steinem), Marc Feigen Fasteau included a chapter titled ‘Vietnam and the Cult of Toughness in Foreign Policy’ where he summarizes this style of macho diplomacy as follows:

In short, the search for “peace with honor” in Vietnam, after Kissinger’s sophisticated intellectual gloss and skilled diplomatic tactics are stripped away, was shaped and governed by the same tired, dangerous, arbitrary, and “masculine” first principles: one must never back away once a line is drawn in the dust; every battle must be won; and, if one fails to observe the first two injunctions and by some fluke the rest of the world doesn’t care, the domestic right – the “real men” – will get you for being too soft (Fargen Fasteau 1975, 180).

This is very similar to what Acheson reports is the Soviet style of diplomacy, the same style today’s Russia seems to follow in its negotiations on the war against Ukraine. According to Acheson, the Soviets were not compelled by eloquence or reasoned arguments, but only by the ‘calculation of forces’:

Theirs is a more primitive form of political method. They cling stubbornly to a position, hoping to force an opponent to accept it. When and if action by the opponent demonstrates the Soviet position to be untenable, they hastily abandon it – after asking and having been refused an unwarranted price – and hastily take up a new position, which may or may not represent a move toward greater mutual stability (Acheson 1987, 274).

The resemblance between the Soviet (and Russian) way of negotiating and Trump’s absurd tariff wars of the present is simply uncanny. The echoes of the Nixonian ‘mad man theory’ (i.e. calculated unpredictability) in conducting international affairs can also be seen in Trump’s approach.

Further, there is more to MAGA diplomacy than just residual Cold War macho energy. There is also a critical entertainment value to it. Historian Niall Ferguson calls it ‘Reality TV Politik’ (Ferguson 2025). Trump’s background as a TV star before politics is, of course, sufficiently known, including his active involvement in the worlds of professional wrestling and mixed martial arts. Testosterone infused and male dominated, there is something of the theatrical in both. Particularly in wrestling, the concept of ‘kayfabe’ becomes crucial, that is the understanding that everything that goes on between the different ‘characters’ is taken as genuine – no matter how little or no clothes the emperor dons on the ring.

This performativity in Trump’s and MAGA political style was vociferously decried during the 2024 presidential race by journalist Craig Copetas, who even called for the serious media to stop covering then candidate Trump altogether given the artificiality of his entire campaign. Like Tom Crooks, however, Copetas was vastly ignored and his message forgotten.

Stop the Planet – We Want Off!

In 1958, a decade before the first human being set foot on the Moon, Hannah Arendt manifested her perplexity at the eagerness her fellow Earthlings displayed to leave the planet. She commented on the excitement around a human-made satellite orbiting the planet, reportedly a ‘first step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth’ (Arendt 1998, 1). She did not understand why people where so eager to leave a place so essential to our human condition:

Although Christians have spoken of the earth as a vale of tears and philosophers have looked upon their body as a prison of mind or soul, nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men’s bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon. Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky? (Ibid, 2).

Fast forward to our present, what can the praeter-colonial mind do in light of all of these ominous developments, whereby the most powerful country in the world is dismantling the world order it helped create and ostensibly retreating to its inner citadel – not without rekindling old ideas about spheres of influence and regional imperialism?

The rest of us, that is humanity, all those who have been axiomatically made a second priority by way of ‘America First’, will just have to wait and see what happens after Trump, and Trumpism, spend out their Prohibition-like momentum. We may have to host some political and intellectual refugees as well, like the Yale professors fleeing fascism, although it is more likely that most Americans will stay put hoping they still get to, to quote comedian Dave Chappelle, ‘wear the Nikes and not make them’. Some are optimistic that, after the trade wars, more sound economic policies will return (Galloway 2025). Others are more pessimistic in light of the political polarization in the US, even referring to the different social worlds where people inhabit as ‘Earth One’ and ‘Earth Two’ (MSNBC 2023). But there is really one planet Earth, and we are stuck in it for the time being. Or are we?

There is one person who is actively working on trying to get us off this planet before we ruin it completely: Elon Musk. Just like the Prohibitionist Henry Ford started his own political experiment in the Amazon in the late 1920s, an industrial citadel called ‘Fordlandia’ (Lost in Context 2025), Musk has created a new administrative unit in the south of Texas to build his own gateway into Mars. This new ‘Cádiz’ (the main port from where hundreds of Spanish vessels departed to the Americas to build an empire) is called ‘Starbase’ (Laughland 2025). Perhaps before rushing towards a new planet that we will surely also ruin (considering human nature is a ‘firmware’ problem that we carry within us wherever we go), it might be better to reflect on how we got to this particular point in time and what it means for us by exercising the faculties of the praeter-colonial mind. As Arendt prompted us all those decades ago: ‘What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing’ (Arendt 1998, 5).

In his 1968 study Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Yale social psychologist Robert Jay Lifton (1926-2025) speculated on the role that preoccupation with legacy played for Mao Zedong (1893-1976) in unleashing the Cultural Revolution in May 1966. Lifton distilled his hypothesis on Mao’s mindset in a single observation: “for a man in Mao’s position—of his age and special commitments—the affirmation of a sense of immortality becomes crucial. The overwhelming threat is not so much death itself as the suggestion that his ‘revolutionary works’ will not endure.” Fifty years on, if Mao retains any claim to immortality, it is largely owed to one of his lieutenants whom he marginalized and dismissed for harboring revisionist views. Deng Xiaoping (1904-1992) both loosened the reins and tightened them as circumstances required following his ascent to leadership in the years after Mao’s passing on September 9, 1976, recognizing Mao’s views and policies as having been “seventy percent correct.”

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How Beijing manages Mao’s legacy has never been a domestic issue alone; it is also reflected in China’s approach to foreign policy. Mao’s late opening to the West in his final years was not a break with the revolution but an effort to preserve it—a strategic decision that Deng and his successors inherited and fine-tuned. Foreign policy under President Xi, however, has undergone a radical shift that defies the foreign policy positions that resulted from Mao’s outreach to the United States and other Western powers.

In the seven years prior to his death, supported by Premier and consummate diplomat Zhou Enlai (1898-1976), Mao opened China’s path to re-engagement with the West after two decades of isolation. The relationship with Moscow had been uneasy from the start: as Adam Ulam recounts, Mao came away from his first meeting with Stalin in December 1949 feeling slighted—received less as the leader of a great revolution than as a junior supplicant. Ties deteriorated further over the decade and a half that followed, notably exacerbated by Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” on Stalin to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU where he denounced the former Soviet Leader for the cult of personality that surrounded him and his persistent purges. Mao denounced Khrushchev for the Twentieth Congress speech and the revisionist course it invited.

Tensions heightened with China’s official denunciation of Khrushchev in June 1960 at the Bucharest Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties. This was further exacerbated with the CCP Central Committee’s July 1964 letter “On Khrushchev’s Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World: An Open letter of the Central Committee to the CPSU.” Mao’s explicit animus continued with the onset of the Cultural Revolution, where PRC President Liu Shaoqi (1898-1969) and other alleged opponents to Mao were branded “Chinese Khrushchevs,” a lingering pejorative still in use two years after the Soviet leader had been forced out of office.

In March 1969, a border clash took place between Chinese and Soviet forces for what China decried as an intrusion into Chinese territory by Soviets patrolling Zhenbao Island, located in the Ussuri River along China’s northeastern border with the USSR — territory the Soviets also claimed as theirs and called Damansky Island. The Chinese ambushed the Soviet patrol, killing about a dozen troops. As tensions rose in the year that followed, Mao, with the essential support of Zhou Enlai, began to reach out to the United States that responded, in accord with the Sanskrit dictum “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Deng would build on that foundation in the post-Mao era, establishing the defense, economic, and trade ties that opened China’s path to becoming a major world power and a state with which others could credibly engage. Where Mao had dismissed the United States as “a paper tiger,” Deng’s strategy going forward was to “hide our capacities and bide our time.”

The Passing of the Great Helmsman

Mao survived more than a decade beyond a January 1965 interview with journalist Edgar Snow where he anticipated his death telling Snow that he was “getting ready to see God very soon.” Afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, Mao’s health steadily diminished and, following a heart attack, he died on September 9, 1976. On September 18, 1976, before a throng estimated at between 750,000 and one million mourners, Hua Guofeng, Premier of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Mao’s designated heir, delivered the eulogy. A few paragraphs in, Hua extolled Mao for his leadership role in the protracted war against Japan, followed by his resounding defeat of the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), reminding mourners that Mao had “long ago put forward the famous thesis that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Hua’s eulogy also included two discrete denunciations of Deng Xiaoping: Hua first branded him, alongside Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao (1907-1971)—both eliminated during the Cultural Revolution—as the leaders of a “counterrevolutionary deviationist line” that Mao had silenced. He singled out Deng once more toward the end of the eulogy, blaming him for “the right deviationist attempt to reverse” the “victories of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”

The New York Times report on the ceremony noted that the image on screen during the eulogy fixed on Hua and on Wang Hongwen (1935-1992), the second-ranking member of the Communist Party. Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing (1914-1991), also figured prominently, described by the New York Times as “grief-stricken, though she maintained the composure that she had displayed all week.” Vice Premier Zhang Chunqiao (1917–2005) and de facto propaganda chief and politburo member Yao Wenyuan (1931–2005), both members of the Funeral Committee, likewise stood near Wang Hongwen on the stage. Less than three weeks later, Hua ordered the arrest of Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan—the so-called “Gang of Four”—for the excesses and abuses of the Cultural Revolution.

Immediately after Mao’s death, Hua laid claim to the key positions of power in the PRC: Chairman of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and Premier. Yet, as James Carter observed, “Though he held formal power, Hua had little support beneath the surface, in part because his power was built on a fundamental contradiction.” Hua alienated those who hailed his arrest of the Gang of Four when he later aligned himself with the “Two Whatevers,” of a February 7, 1977 editorial published in the People’s Daily, Red Flag, and the Liberation Army Daily entitled “Study the Documents Well and Grasp the Key Link,” which contained a doctrinaire profession of faith in Mao: “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.”

The arrest of the Gang of Four cleared the way for the full rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping—who, between 1978 and 1981 engineered Hua’s fall from power. Hua submitted to this, understanding that he lacked sufficient backing in the ranks to move forward as Premier and CCP Chair. Deng arranged the appointment of Zhao Ziyang (1919-2005) as Premier of the State Council and Hu Yaobang (1915-1989) as Chairman of the CCP, counting on them to drive the economic reforms that were viewed as critical in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Deng secured and retained the roles of Chairman of the Central Military Commission and Chairman of the Central Advisory Commission and was recognized nationally and internationally as de facto maximum leader of China. Under Deng came a revival, with a slight revision in the cat colors of his July 1962 dictum on the need for flexibility in the economic model that China adopted: “it does not matter if it is a yellow cat or a black cat, as long as it catches mice.”

Deng inherited the country that Mao’s campaigns had left impoverished, terrorized, and marginalized. His decision to open China to the world over the next two decades led to epic transformations, even though the gap grew between China’s economic and political development, as the spring 1989 events in Tiananmen would make plain. Deng stood solidly behind his loyal Hu and Zhao, while navigating radical challenges to Mao’s worldview. On December 7, 1984, an editorial in the Renmin Ribao declared that “one cannot expect the works of Marx and Lenin written in their time to solve today’s problems,” hastily corrected to read “to solve all of today’s problems.” The New York Times took this critical statement on Marxism to reflect Deng’s views, though Time Magazine attributed it to Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang.

Deng adopted a conciliatory yet firm approach in his rapprochement with Western powers. In the December 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, even while he insisted that Britain had no choice but to surrender sovereignty, Deng’s government gave written assurances that “the current social and economic systems in Hong Kong would remain unchanged, along with its lifestyle, and that rights and freedoms—of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of travel, of correspondence, of strike, of occupation, of academic research, and of religious belief—would be ensured by law in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.”

Deng at Tiananmen

On Mao’s legacy, Deng remained resolute. In his 1980 interview with Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006), he told her: “Write this down: we will never do to Mao Zedong what Khrushchev did to Stalin at the twentieth Congress of the CPSU.” In spite of Mao’s record during his Great Leap Forward alone (1958-1962) where “at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China,” Deng still scored Mao’s performance as Chairman at seventy percent correct and thirty percent wrong. Interestingly this was the same assessment that Mao and his Central Committee had made of Stalin’s rule: “It is the opinion of the Central Committee that Stalin’s mistakes amounted to only 30 per cent of the whole and his achievements to 70 per cent, and that all things considered, Stalin was nonetheless a great Marxist.” Deng told Oriana Fallaci that Mao had evaluated Deng’s own leadership performance 30% for his errors and 70% for his merits. Deng’s defense of Mao was not merely payback to the man who—by Deng’s own account—had recalled him to Beijing in 1973 and handed him the vice-premiership; it was also his defense of the legitimacy of the Party and the revolution itself.

Deng’s test before the international community came at Tiananmen. Following the April 15, 1989 death of Hu Yaobang, students pressed for reforms that would end the CCP’s monopoly on politics. General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, Hu’s successor and a key architect of Deng’s reforms, advocated in favor of dialogue with the student leaders of the demonstrations; hardliners held that need for the preservation of order mandated an immediate, decisive police action. By mid-May Deng was paying more attention to Premier Li Peng (1928-2019), a hardliner, than to Zhao. As the declaration of martial law became imminent, Zhao met the Tiananmen protesters on May 19, 1989, pleading with them to end a seven-day fast and to disperse, hinting that if they did not, a crackdown would follow. The students empathized with Zhao—but they did not heed his counsel and remained adamantly at Tiananmen. Zhao was placed under house arrest following his visit to Tiananmen and would remain so for the remaining sixteen years of his life.

On June 2, 1989, on the eve of the People’s Liberation Army crackdown, protest leaders announced a new seventy-two-hour fast. Their statement singled out Li Peng, whose hardline stance, they felt, provoked the impasse and the declaration of martial law on May 20, 1989. In the clampdown that followed, New York Times correspondent Nicholas Kristof, who reported there in real time, estimated the dead at four hundred to eight hundred. The U.S. State Department historian notes Beijing’s claim of two hundred dead, adding that Western sources were “skeptical” of the official figure and most often cite hundreds or even thousands killed. A secret British diplomatic cable estimated the death toll at 10,000.

Where Deng stood on the handling of Tiananmen remained unclear—hardliner, moderate, or something between? He outlined his position in his June 9, 1989 address to the officers commanding the martial-law troops. He opened expressing his condolences for the “officers and men of the People’s Liberation Army, the People’s Armed Police Force and the Public Security Police who have died heroically in this struggle.” He claimed that “a handful of bad people were mingled with so many young students and crowds of onlookers,” so that “for the moment we were not able to distinguish between innocent and guilty.” Those bad people, he said, had “two basic slogans: overthrow the Communist Party and demolish the socialist system,” their goal being “to establish a bourgeois republic, an out-and-out vassal of the West.”

Deng closed his talk to the officers by reaffirming the Four Cardinal Principles he had set out on March 30, 1979: keep to the socialist road; uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat; uphold the leadership of the Communist Party; and uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. The fourth principle was the mandate to preserve Mao’s legacy—and Deng had defended his commitment to that before the army. Nonetheless, Deng tapped Jiang Zemin (1926-2022), Party Chief in Shanghai, rather than Premier Li Peng, to assume the role of General Secretary of the CCP. Jiang, as Party Chief in Shanghai, had managed to engage the demonstrators and disperse the June 1989 Shanghai mass protests without involvement of the military or reliance on the repressive methods resorted to in Beijing.

The Legacy of Mao in the Post-Deng Era

The tough stance taken by Deng at Tiananmen kept Mao’s revolution intact as the centerpiece of China’s identity, and Deng’s blueprint for China’s future was inherited by the two successors he installed. Jiang Zemin was chosen after Tiananmen to replace the disgraced Zhao Ziyang, who had put Mao’s legacy at risk; Hu Jintao was tapped by Deng in 1992 as a potential successor to Jiang and only arose to his intended role in 2003, six years after Deng’s passing. Like Deng, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao preserved Mao’s centrality while letting ideology quietly recede and the economy surge, and by 2010, China had become the world’s second-largest economy.

The same collective-leadership model that disciplined succession at home also set China’s tempo abroad: Jiang held to Deng’s patient, low-profile course, and Hu dressed it up in the reassuring language of the “peaceful rise of China” and the pursuit of a “harmonious world.” Yet the restraint was never on China’s ambition to rise as a player on the world scene. What Deng’s collective leadership model actually restrained was the ruler—fixed terms, managed succession, a check on any single man aspiring to seize absolute control. That, and not any softening of aims, was Deng’s addition to Mao’s bequest. So long as it held, so did Mao as the People’s Republic of China’s undisputed founder and inspiration for its policies at home and abroad.

The Xi Jinping Era and the End of Collective Leadership

In 2013 Xi Jinping came to power, and, as Susan L. Shirk observed in 2018, Xi ended Deng’s emphasis on collective leadership, designated succession, and fixed terms of office. Xi, as she puts it, “grasped all the levers of power in the Party and the state (including the military and police).” Where Marxism had held its place in the Deng era with an unspoken understanding of its practical limitations—serving, nevertheless, as the pretense for continued one-party rule during the socialist stage of PRC’s development—Xi, unlike his post-Mao predecessors once again moved ideology front and center, posturing himself as the foremost expert on Marxism and “socialism with Chinese characteristics;” leading to the enshrinement of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” in the 2018 Constitution on a par with Mao Zedong Thought. At China’s grandiose May 2018 celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, Xi called Marx “the greatest thinker of the modern era” and signaled through his one hour address that he knew his Marxism, intimating his role not only as chief executive but as exegete-in-chief.

In 2023, Xi visited Mao’s Mausoleum on the one hundred thirtieth anniversary of Mao’s birth and delivered a long, laudatory address on Mao’s contributions to China. The homage was genuine, but so was its symbolism. Guarding Mao’s reputation is not necessarily the same as protecting his revolutionary immortality by recognizing his singular role in China’s past, present, and future. For his part, Xi has shown himself willing to keep Mao’s portrait on the wall while deftly increasing the size and the importance of his own portrait.

The Resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century, written under Xi and adopted in November 2021—the first such resolution since Mao’s in 1945 and Deng’s in 1981—is a telling document. The Spectator wrote at the time that the resolution largely commemorates the Mao years, lays out the ambitions of the Xi era but grants Deng little more than a nod for initiating reforms and the opening of China. In the official text, Xi Jinping is named twenty-two times, Mao eighteen, and Deng only six; strip away the eponymous doctrines—Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, Xi Jinping Thought—and Deng the man appears just three times, against eleven for Mao and seventeen for Xi.

The diminishment of Deng was deliberate and calculated. As he prepared his mausoleum visit, Radio Free Asia reported that state media had produced a documentary earlier that month crediting Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, a key leader under Mao, with playing a leading role in launching China’s free economic zones that stimulated international investment and tourism. Indeed, Xi Zhongxun did deserve credit for the leading role that he played in pioneering the establishment of the Shenzhen free economic zone in 1979 as well as two other zones in the Guangdong region where he served at the time as first secretary of the Guangdong Provincial Committee; however, the notion of him being a competitor to Deng is a novel and self-serving one, retrofitted more than four decades after Deng’s pioneering of the opening of China in a PRC-controlled CCTV documentary meant to highlight Xi’s father and Xi himself. Deng, an effective and candid communicator who won a significant measure of trust and engagement both abroad and at home, is being written out of or at least greatly diminished in the changing historical narrative of China, and that has consequences.

Hide Capacities and Bide Time or Not?

The through-line of Deng’s statecraft was to “hide our capacities and bide our time;” a patient, low-profile course his successors held to for two decades. Xi has largely traded it in for brinkmanship and military build-ups. Where Deng in April 1988 urged Philippine President Corazon Aquino (1933-2009) to set aside the Spratly Islands dispute and “take the approach of pursuing joint development,” Xi has militarized artificial islands across those same contested waters while tightening pressure on Taiwan. Fifty years after Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping’s star has waned in the small war on legacy; Deng’s collective leadership model that kept Mao’s leading historical role in place for decades has evaporated, leaving Xi alone to determine Mao’s place in history, to weigh it against his own, and to define, adjust, and deliver his “China Dream” in ways that will impact us all.

The sharpest measure of that shift lies in China’s own founding word to the world. On April 10, 1974, Deng Xiaoping—then a vice premier, heading the first PRC delegation to address the Sixth Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly after the restoration of China’s seat—spoke on behalf of Chairman Mao, laying out China’s place among nations in Mao’s own anti-hegemonic voice:

If one day China should change her color and turn into a superpower, if she too should play the tyrant in the world, and everywhere subject others to her bullying, aggression and exploitation, the people of the world should identify her as social-imperialism, expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.

The warning was Mao’s as much as Deng’s. Xi appears ready to set the caution aside. What becomes of Mao’s revolutionary immortality now falls to a single heir who venerates the founder in the abstract but has reserved to himself alone the judgment that Deng, in 1974, was prepared to leave to the people of the world.

Thomas J. Ward is Distinguished Dean Emeritus of the University of Bridgeport’s College of Public and International Affairs and currently serves as Professor of Peace and Development Studies at HJ International Graduate School for Peace and Public Leadership in Manhattan, New York. A Fulbright Alumnus and a Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs former Visiting Research Fellow, Ward’s work has been published by E-International Relations, Cambridge University Press, East Asia Quarterly, Small Wars Journal, among other venues.

Dr Koen Slootmaeckers is a Reader in International Politics at City St George’s, University of London. He is the EDI officer and trustee for UACES. He has previously held leadership roles in professional associations as co-chair and executive board member of the Council of European Studies' Gender and Sexuality Research Network. As an international political sociologist, Koen's research is broadly focused on the ways in which boundaries, inclusion and exclusion are maintained in society and within international relations. He has done extensive research on the promotion of and resistance to LGBT equality in international politics. Koen has extensively researched the EU accession of Serbia and how this process affects LGBT politics and activism. This research ultimately culminated in his book ‘Coming In: Sexual politics and EU accession in Serbia’ (2023, Manchester University Press), for which he was awarded the 2025 EUSA Best Book Prize. His current research focuses on the place of Pride events within the LGBTI movement and engages in several theoretical querying of different politics embedded in Pride. For example, he has published on the geo-temporalities of Pride (with Mike Bosia). Other recent publications include: a piece examining the unexpected politics of ILGA-Europe’s rainbow maps (with Francesca Ammaturo), a piece examining the role of LGBT rights within the EU’s identity processes, and relational theorisation of the ways in which masculinities and nationalism as intertwined. 

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Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

To be honest, I find this probably the most difficult question one can ask me. One, because it makes me question whether I do belong to a field or whether I even know a field. As a scholar who has moved disciplines over the course of my career and now happily sits within the liminal space of disciplinary boundaries as well as subject matters, I struggle to identify what would be the most exciting research. That being said, I do think there is a political need to highlight some of the work that is being done within the sphere of sex and sexuality at a time when the space for doing this work is increasingly under attack. To me, the excitement comes from the new generation of scholars emerging that remain adamant to query the world and to challenge power by interrogating how gender and sexuality shape our collective and the world. Seeing a new generation question what has been taken for granted to and stay bold in their determination to challenge structures of power to generate something new is what gives me hope and excitement. This is even more meaningful and important, I believe, as we live in a world where issues and sexuality are increasingly put under pressure and come under intense political scrutiny and vicious political attacks – both within our everyday (by the dismantling of Equality Diversity and Inclusion work by Trump, or the banning of Pride by Orban) and the Academy (by the so-called gender critical scholars and those using academic freedom to stifle progressive politics).

But if I were to answer, I would do so by thinking about some of the recent discussions, writings and publications that have stayed with me over the last few years. Amongst those, I think it is incredibly important to query some of the ways in which sexuality is used within international politics. Here, I think about the kind of politics pursued by the anti-gender movement/campaigns who engage in a wider international politics of what Dean Cooper-Cunningham (forthcoming) would call, “heteronormative internationalism”, but also the ways in which sexuality is folded into politics of modernity that creates new, and reinforces old, hierarchies. Here, I think about the work that unpacks and showcases the different ways in which the embrace of LGBTQI rights by the EU has been folded into a variety of other politics. For example, the work by Laura Eigenmann who beautifully excavated the evolution and elevation of LGBTQI rights within the EU’s identity work, whilst also querying how this process has shaped how the EU imagines LGBTQI equality within a homonormative project. Or the work by Lucrecia Rubio Grundell, who, in one of the most brilliant pieces of I have read over the years, argued that the inclusion of LGBT rights within the EU project happened on the back of sex workers. With great grace, she demonstrates how the EU’s LGBTI policies exclude sex work as a constitutive other so that the neoliberal and homonormative sexual subject of rights and new sexual respectability could be constructed – a subject worthy of protection by the EU.

I am also always super excited to read the excellent work on sexual violence in war time, and particularly the work on conflict related sexual violence against men and boys by Heleen Touquet, Philipp Schulz, Henri Myrtinnen, and others. Their new Routledge Handbook of Masculinities, Conflict, and Peacebuilding is a must read, as are their reflection on self-care for scholars working on gender-based violence issues.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

My thinking has changed a lot over time and there have been many influences that have shaped me – both through encounters in my career as well as the freedom that job security has given me to trust myself and start believing in my own perspectives and path. I see academia and scholarly work as a collective endeavour, where we can each achieve more if we support and learn from each other. As such, I believe my world view is shaped by the incredible encounters I have had over the years, especially those coming from the many fantastic feminist and queer scholars I have met over the years. There are too many to name, but I do want to highlight some, as their influence in my academic career and my thinking are deeply felt. My conversations with Heleen Touquet have always been ones of intellectual cross-fertilisation, but Heleen is the one who, in many ways, not only opened the door for me to the Balkan region (a place in which I found myself) but also made me feel that there is space for my critical thinking. Phillip Ayoub has been a core feature in my work and has been such a kind figure within queer IR and EU studies – he truly embodies what a kind academia can look like, and I try to follow the example set by him. Similarly, Francesca Romana Ammaturo’s work on The Pink Agenda has been foundational to my thinking about homonationalism within the EU. Reading her work gave me the words needed to understand my own research and meeting her generated an academic friendship where we flourish together. Moreover, her reminder to allow myself to write my own story into my work has been such a key moment for the way I think. Similarly, the friendship and intense conversations on queer politics with Dean Cooper-Cunningham, as well as his work in general, not only carried me through the times I burned-out, but have also been instrumental in finding my own queer politics. 

If I were to describe one foundational moment, I would say it when I discovered the words for my relational ontology. The seeds to my world view were probably embedded as part of my initial training as a sociologist (I think the sociological lens quite lends itself to relational thinking) yet it never really had an active place within my work as I was too wrapped up in dominant (positivist) narratives of what good science would look like – perhaps I was too focused on what I though was required of me. It was not until my PhD examiners, professors Kelly Kollman and Denisa Kostovicova, pointed me towards the practice turn in IR (which led me to relational IR and relational sociology) that I found the words that described how I see the world. The following ‘aha’-moment I experienced has been revolutionary for my work and my thinking. Suddenly, all the tensions I experienced made sense, especially as I used the practice turn as a jumping off point to embrace relational approaches to IR. From then onwards, I had found my own intellectual homebase.

Whilst this has been a profound moment in my intellectual journey, I often find new ways of thinking from the most random places – whether it is the clinical work my brother does as a therapist or whether it is through my holiday reading of high fantasy novels. Whereas the first is shaping my current work, the latter, and in particularly Raymond E. Feist’s novel Magician’s End, has had profound impact on my conceptualisation of time and how time shapes politics – ultimately resulting in a piece I co-wrote on the Geo-Temporalities of Pride. 

How are LGBTQ+ politics being used by EU politicians, both on the right and left side of the spectrum, to serve their agendas?

The idea that LGBTQ+ politics have been actively used by EU politicians on both sides of the isle is perhaps a strong statement. Of course, I do think LGBTQ+ issues have become a key arena in which politics are being created and generated, as we see a clear point of contestation over LGBTQ+ rights. For example, LGBTQ+ rights is one of the areas through which the meaning of so-called European values is contested within the EU structures. I would offer a bit of caution to this sweeping statement, however, because to say that LGBTQ+ issues are used by both type of actors – even though it does happen – would erase the work by those politicians who genuinely seek to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people. Nevertheless, because they are situated within the complex set of relations between those contesting the homonationalist moment and those embracing it, LGBTQ+ politics inevitably (whether intentionally or not) serve the function of demarking boundaries between different groups. While progressive voices’ support for LGBTQ+ rights (whether instrumental or genuine) is often voiced through a declarative and constitutive homophobic Other (whether it be Russia, Eastern Europe, or others), anti-gender campaigns and other voices similarly express their support for so-called family values through the opposition of a constitutive ‘perverse’/oversexualised Other. What ends up happening is that the lives of LGBTQ+ people become embroiled and captured in bigger political projects (whether they are nationalist and/or racist projects). We are stuck in a period in which seemingly bigger civilisational politics are played out on the bodies of queer people. And I think it is important we develop analytical tools and ways of describing this that do not reproduce these processes – to avoid our academic analysis adds to the structure of violence to which queer people are currently subjected.

Are LGBTQ+ politics currently relevant in the EU’s political landscape, or are they being abandoned? Why is this the case?

Because of what I explained above, I think LGBTQ+ politics are very central to the EU’s political agenda – at least discursively. This is perhaps best shown by the existing dispute between the European Commission and Hungary over its so-called anti-gay propaganda law. The current court case between the Commission and Hungary over this law is significant, as it is the first that actively uses Article 2 of the Treaty on the European Union (which defined, albeit vaguely, the EU’s values) in an infringement procedure. As I explained elsewhere, the outcome of this case will have significant consequences for LGBTQ+ politics in the EU and the role of values within the EU’s architecture. If the EU had hoped this case would dampen Hungary’s attack on LGBTQ+ people, it seemed to have been misguided, as Orban has escalated his anti-LGBTQ+ politics by purposefully defying the EU and banning any public assembly that violates the law on the protection of children (and thus effectively banning Pride). This episode clearly demonstrates that LGBTQ+ politics is central within wider EU politics and is the current battle ground to define the future of the EU.

Yet, whilst LGBTQ+ rights have taken up a very symbolic space within the EU, we also witness the downgrading of equality within the new Von Der Leyen Commission. After presiding over a commission that had dubbed the EU as a Union of Equality, the new Commission, at first glance, seems to be less committed to equality than before. No longer is there a Commissioner solely responsible for Equality, as the Von Der Leyen II has combined the Equality portfolio with a portfolio for ‘Preparedness and Crisis Management’. Whilst it is yet to be seen what this means for the actual work done by the Commission, what we have already observed is the withdrawal of the so-called horizontal anti-discrimination directive proposal. Although this proposal has been stalled for over 15 years in the Council, its withdrawal may signal that whilst LGBTQ+ rights are increasingly symbolic in EU politics, the window for material and legislative change seems to be closing.

Would you say that conservative anti-LGBTQ+ stances in the EU differ depending on the country, or is it a unified, transnational movement?

As the recent literature on anti-gender campaigns has been demonstrating, we can perhaps think about the opposition to LGBTQ+ and feminist politics as something modular. There are a lot of shared strategies, tactics, discourses, and ways of mobilising, yet countries in their differing national context have their own particularities of how their campaigns unfold and what they target. Whilst I would be reluctant to call them unified (as they all have their own national projects), I do believe we should not underestimate how strong the transnational ties of these campaigns are, not only in terms of how they are organised and how they mobilise, but also in terms of funding and political linkages. Whilst more and more scholars, including one of my PhD students, are actively studying the transnationalisation of these campaigns, I wonder whether we may ever fully know the scope of these links, as these actors are incredibly difficult to research, and are able to keep researchers out of their core inner workings.

What role does the ideological chasm on LGBTQ+ rights play in relations between conservative countries, such as Meloni’s Italy, and more socially liberal countries, such as Macron’s France?

This is a difficult question, and I guess the answer would depend on who you would ask. I think many of those clinging on to the notion of a liberal international order would like to believe that these chasms are important factors shaping international politics and bilateral movements. However, such hopes and assumptions rely on the fact that state actors have a strong belief and attachment to LGBTQ+ rights and would act accordingly. Such belief, I am afraid, may be rather naïve. Perhaps I am too sceptical of state actors proclaiming a pro-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, since too often in international relations, I have seen how normative stances are nothing more than a shell, with little meaningful actions being taken. They too are often performative and symbolic, rather than real convictions. As far as I have seen, LGBTQ+ rights are often being sacrificed if other national interests are threatened. So, I am sure that ideological chasm plays a vital role in bilateral relations (especially as international politics is currently deeply shaped through such chasms), but I think they may be less about actual LGBTQ+ rights themselves and more about a deeper function of state power – what that may be exactly depends on the relationship and context of said relationship.

In your book “Coming in” on LGBT rights in Serbia, you explain that the EU promotes LGBTQ+ rights through its enlargement process as a fundamental right for EU candidate-states. Has this process been successful? What more can governments do to ensure these rights are respected?

The EU does indeed seek to promote LGBTQ+ rights as part of the enlargement process. In my work, I argue that we should step away from an EU-centred analysis of the development of LGBT rights and politics in candidate countries. This is particularly important, because assuming that it is the EU that is responsible for the adoption of LGBT rights in candidate countries quickly erases the hard work being done by the country’s activists, often having started long before the EU entered the political arena. Yes, of course the EU enlargement process has been key for many activists to gain access to governments and to be able to get important laws on the books. However, solely focussing on the legal developments is limiting, in my view.

In my book, I argue for a relational conceptualisation of the EU enlargement process, so as to emphasise the political nature of the process. I call Europeanisation a process of negotiated transitions. Negotiated, not because the process involves formal negotiations, but rather because through the relationship between the EU and candidate countries, the content and meaning of LGBTQ+ rights/politics are negotiated. This push and pull process, and the different ways in which both the EU and Serbia have engaged with each other when tensions on LGBTQ+ issues arose, have created a political contest in which LGBTQ+ rights and their meaning have become hollowed out and instrumentalised by both parties. This politicisation of LGBTQ+ rights and the way in which the Serbian government engages in double-speak in which it internationally seemingly complies with EU requests, yet domestically ramps up its heteronormative and nationalist political project, has real consequences for LGBTQ+ people in the country. Indeed, in recent years, we have seen a serious increase in violence against the queer community.

As such, in my book, I argue that “as scholars [of political science and IR], we must recentre our attention on the people about whom we write, their experience and their realities, as progress in law without a change in their lived experience remains hypothetical.” (p.14)

What were the key factors in the development of the LGBTQ+ movement within the EU?

What movement are we talking about? Are we talking about movements within countries or are we talking about the European level movement? I am not sure I am the right person to pin-point the key factors in the movement, but there are certainly some tensions and issues that are worth thinking about when considering where the movement goes next. The first and most obvious issue is the pervasiveness of anti-gender campaigns and how anti-EDI politics actively seeks to reverse some of the recent gains made. This means that cross-cause solidarity will be a vital issue for most movements, in order to find ways to counter the political attacks on our rights and the increased social positions. Such solidarity is incredibly important considering the divide and conquer tactics that are being played by those opposing gender issues. For example, the spread of gender critical propaganda and the mainstreaming through which trans* lives are erased from social life under the guise of protecting women is actively creating the notion that there is a zero-sum game to be played in which improvements in the liveability of trans* lives come at costs of women. Of course, we know this is not the case. Anyone paying close attention to anti-trans politics can see that what is really happening is an intense battle trying to define womanhood – not to protect women, but to control women’s bodies.

To overcome the divide and conquer tactics being used against us, we need to not only counter them, but also short-circuit the power structures that feed them. We need new politics that see the various power structures of oppression as intertwined and a shared target. We need to see that the way we have made progress in the past has been on the back of others. We can no longer rely on trying to fold people into the protection of an otherwise violent system – instead we must come up with an alternative. In the time we are currently living in, it is time we develop a politics that creates a future in which we all can thrive.

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

With academia being the extractive institution it is (and increasingly more so given the dire state of higher education across many contexts), I think it is important to know for yourself what sacrifices you are willing to make and which ones you are not. I do not say this to be doom and gloomy, but rather because I want to use it as a starting point for advocating for self-care in one’s pursuit of scholarship. Because our scholarship is so personal, we often experience rejections as something deeply personal – professional failures or setbacks along the way are easily experienced as an indication of personal worth, as a reflection that we do not belong.

I would advocate for young scholars to find strength in their own work and their thinking. The discipline has its way of creeping in and making you feel that what you are doing may not be IR enough, and there will always be voices that will make you feel that you are not good enough or that what you do is not worth pursuing, particularly if you come from marginalised backgrounds or work on topics related to challenging existing power structures (whether they be racial, gendered, or based on sexuality). And whilst this may be true, there will be at least an equal amount of people who will be championing your work, and show and remind you of your worth. So, my second piece of advice would be to seek your own little community of care and mutual support in academia. Find your bubble where you feel safe, where you can explore and where you can be vulnerable with your ideas. And above all, listen, feel and accept when people are singing your praise. It is easy to focus on the negative, but this is where academia gets us – we must believe in ourselves to generate change.

This brings me to a third bit of advice – do not practice the academia that is (where we are often expected to build our own career by tearing down someone else; or where we believe ideas work within a zero-sum game). Instead, practice the academia that you want it to be. Draw on those feminist or queer practices that are rooted in love and care. Celebrate colleagues’ successes, and share in failures and provide support where needed. Together we can stand tall and be a spark of change. I have such hopes for a kind academia, and I believe it all starts with ourselves.

Of course, this advice is perhaps derived from my hopes and aspirations for academia, and I am aware that it may not always be easy to remind ourselves of them. In fact, I struggle with them on an everyday basis. Being on recovery from a burn-out, practicing kindness to myself is a continuous struggle – so is the need to find ways to not reproduce the violences inherently embedded within the academic structure. Kindness is work, and we get it wrong as we inevitably cause harm, even when being well-meaning. Luckily, I have surrounded myself with my academic friends and co-travellers who are willing to point out when I err in my practice, and provide support and security to learn from mistakes. By practicing vulnerability and kindness, I do believe we can make a change.

Thus, trust in yourself (don’t let the discipline discipline you), be kind to yourself and others, and above all, find (or build) your community in which you can practice the academy you wish we had, not the one we are currently living in. And whenever you are able to, pay it forward and be a force of good in the academy, and stay humble along the way.  

*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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How do we understand the emerging world order under the twin shocks of war in Europe and an American president determined to put “America First”? A forum on the English School approach, organized under the aegis of the Institute for International Economic Affairs in Athens on 27 May 2025 (IIER 2025) considered the question in terms of changes in the primary institutions of international society, including the balance of power, diplomacy, the regulation of war, great power management and the market. A summary of the findings follows, with an introduction on how the English School theorizes change in international society. 

The ‘New Institutionalism’: How to Discern Change and Continuity in International Order

Relations between states traditionally are conceptualised as taking place within an international society, or a society of states. If states are members of a club, they need to participate in upholding a few common institutions, such as diplomacy, the balance of power, international law, management by the great powers, and war (Bull 1977). In the more recent literature, such institutions are often called primary institutions, distinguishing them from secondary institutions which are formalised versions of primary institutions (Buzan 2004), generally found in international organisations (Knudsen and Navari 2019). As a paradigmatic example, the primary institution of great power management is formalised as a secondary institution within the UN Security Council, especially the veto right of the P5. International society has often been seen as a rather static, historically established institutional settlement, dominated by the Western (especially European) powers.  States from the rest of the world, if they wanted to join, had to conform to the "standard of civilization" defined by European insiders (Gong 1984). However, the more this process has been studied, the more the moving aspect of the standard has come to be emphasised, and the more the evolution of the rules and institutions of international society has been studied, the more mutual recognition, renegotiation and change have been emphasised.  Similarly, the interplay between primary and secondary institutions is significant for understanding change and continuity in international society, and in international order more broadly (Friedner Parrat 2024).

Primary institutions, conceptualised as practices and their discursive legitimation – that is, how statespeople and influential observers justify them – remain stable when those agents reproduce the same practices and discursive legitimations, and change when they are practiced and legitimised differently. This brings the agents of international society to the centre-stage. The international society tradition is neither a structural theory, nor a theory in which agents are free to act as they wish. Instead, the situated agents induce change by questioning the premises they have been handed, or by manoeuvring creatively within the space that they have (Navari 2020). Secondary institutions can make things remain much as they were when the secondary institution was formalised – but also contribute to pushing rules in a certain direction before locking them in. International organisations function as arenas where primary institutions are negotiated and reproduced in an ongoing fashion, and where secondary institutions are sedimented (Friedner Parrat 2017). As such, they function as stabilisers of international order, but they also register changes within the order.

Applied to the twin shocks of war in Europe and a US president withdrawing from alliances and pursuing a narrow concept of national interest, the approach draws attention to the upending of the balance of power; to the emergence of Europe as a military power; to new practices of diplomacy, to challenges to the embedded norms on the use of forceand to the erosion of the liberal trading order in the global economy.

The Balance of Power

Martin Wight (1979), Hedley Bull (1977) and James Mayall (2000) have regarded the balance of power as one of the fundamental institutions of international society. For Hedley Bull (p. 106), the balance of power was fundamental for maintaining order in international society, to prevent the dominance of any single state or outright empire. According to the ‘nested hierarchy’ of international institutions, advanced by Barry Buzan (2004, 184), the balance of power is a “master institution” with anti-hegemonism, alliances, guarantees, neutrality, war and great power management viewed as its derivative ones. In theoretical terms, we should expect that today’s great powers will seek to manage their relations by preserving the general balance of power, avoiding and controlling crises, limiting the impact of war, unilaterally exercising local preponderance, and seeking to identify and maintain spheres of influence, interest, and responsibility. In any case, the balance of power is an essential institution of international society and one which other primary institutions depend on, such as international law. According to Emerich de Vattel, a balance of power reflects “a state of affairs such that no one power is in a position where it is preponderant and can lay down the law to others” (cited in J.B. Scott, 1916, 40). However, since the end of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States has sought to establish a global hegemony or primacy and therefore, Washington DC has been uninterested in pursuing a balance of power policy. The U.S. has sought to achieve primacy and establish a hegemonic international order “with no more than the ordinary degree of disregard for norms of sovereignty, equality and independence” (Bull 1977, 208), but, if necessary, by resorting to occasional and often reluctant use of force and the threat of force (p. 209).

Despite his sporadic rhetoric, President Trump has not differed from his predecessors. During his 2024 presidential campaign, he was surrounded by people who were proponents of either a balance of power policy or a concert of powers approach. However, following his election, President Trump has chosen to work with people with a neoconservative agenda, who seek to promote U.S. global hegemony and/or ensure U.S. primacy. Moreover, it seems that President Trump is also prepared to promote U.S. dominance by a habitual use of military force or the threat of force, as well as by using economic means, such as sanctions and tariffs. In so doing, he has recently demonstrated a “habitual disregard of the universal norms of interstate behavior that confer rights of sovereignty, equality and independence upon other states” (Bull 1977, 207).

Bull makes a distinction between a “simple” balance of power, which is made up of two powers, from a “complex” one consisting of three or more (Bull 1977, 97). He also distinguishes between a balance of power that is “fortuitous” and one that is “contrived” (p.100). A fortuitous balance of power is one that arises without any conscious effort on the part of either of the parties to bring it into being. A contrived balance of power is one that owes its existence at least partly to the conscious policies of one or both sides. As a result of the U.S. efforts to maintain its global hegemony and primacy, China and Russia, and with the possible inclusion of India, will pursue an anti-hegemonic balance of power. This will be a complex balance of power that will be contrived by Russia, China and perhaps India, and to which the U.S. must react. If we consider the balance of power as a master institution, then we should expect that it will impact its derivative institutions, such as alliances (i.e., NATO, CSTO, and SCO), war and great power management. Moreover, the pursuance of balance of power will have an impact – both positive and negative - on the institutions of diplomacy and international law, and as an extension to secondary institutions, such as the United Nations and/or sub-global or regional international organizations. The effects on the institution of diplomacy follow.

Pariah Diplomacy and the Trump Presidency

As a primary institution of international society, diplomacy sustains order by managing estrangement, facilitating recognition, and negotiating the terms of coexistence among sovereign states (Berridge 2022). Yet diplomacy is not always practiced in ways that reinforce order. Its opposite could be termed Pariah diplomacy and refers to those instances when states engage in behavior that constitutes a source of disorder, whether by contravening binding legal commitments or flouting the shared, though nonbinding, norms and values that underpin membership in international society (Banai 2016). It is less a rejection of diplomacy than it is as a tool of disruption: a mode of engagement through which states dramatize grievances, justify extra-legal or disruptive conduct, and press for alternative terms of legitimacy and coexistence.

President Trump embodies this practice with unusual clarity. From his first term, the “America First” agenda recast alliances and agreements as constraints to be shaken off or monetized, while secondary institutions such as NATO and the WTO were treated less as key pillars of international society than as obstacles to national autonomy. Thus far in his second term, these tendencies have sharpened into a methodical, albeit chaotically executed, agenda to remake international order. The roll-out of sweeping tariffs on allies and rivals alike have disrupted global trade flows and financial markets, not to mention the mockery they have made of trade and commercial agreements championed by the United States itself. At the same time, Trump has publicly and repeatedly suggested that Canada should become America’s fifty-first state, entertained annexation of Greenland, and threatened to seize the Panama Canal. These postures – both material and rhetorical – not only have set in motion the dismantling of the postwar liberal international order that helped nourish and sustain American primacy for more than a century but also give permission to other states to behave in a similar manner, thus hastening the demise of common rules, norms, and practices that sustained international order.

Trump’s pariah diplomacy augurs a troubling future for international legitimacy. In international society, legitimacy rests on shared understandings of rightful membership and rightful conduct, however contingent and contested these may be. By flouting multilateral norms, withdrawing from collective agreements, and elevating coercion and spectacle over reciprocity and restraint, the Trump administration demonstrates how easily these foundations can erode when great powers themselves disregard them. The result is not the collapse of international society but its reconfiguration around thinner, more transactional forms of legitimacy, where sheer power and ad hoc bargains outweigh rules and norms. Legitimacy, once anchored in a commitment to order and mutual recognition, becomes conditional, shifting with the preferences of dominant actors.

The Trump presidency demonstrates that diplomacy can endure as an institution even as it becomes a vehicle for disruption. Disorder does not arise solely from outsiders at the margins of international society; it can also be generated by great powers at its very core. In such moments, diplomacy is not abandoned but reshaped through pariah practices that unsettle established rules, norms, and values, placing the prospects for cooperation and coexistence under significant strain. Taken together, these dynamics reveal not only the corrosion of diplomatic norms but also the emboldening of conduct that openly defies the legal and moral restraints underpinning international order. As diplomacy is instrumentalised to justify coercion and spectacle, the distinction between persuasion and force begins to blur. It is to this erosion of the prohibition on the use of force – and its implications for the survival of international society – that the discussion turns.

The Use of Force

The rules governing the use of force hold a central position in the conception of society. Hedley Bull, when contemplating the nature of order in world politics, theorised security as one of the elementary goals of social life, for "unless men enjoy some measure of security …, they are not able to devote energy or attention enough to other objects to be able to accomplish them" (Bull 1977, 5). Over the past 200 years, international society has developed extensive legal regimes for regulating and governing armed conflict among its members, with the prohibition of the use of force in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter as the core norm. According to much of the international law community, recent events suggest that the prohibition is unraveling, facing its greatest challenges yet (Hathaway and Stewart 2025):

The combination of rising multipolarity, declining American hegemony, and increasingly brazen violations threatens to transform the prohibition on the use of force from a foundational principle of international order into what skeptics always claimed it was: a paper tiger that collapses when confronted with raw power politics.

The English School helps to frame this argument in two ways. The first frame has to do with the constitutive nature of international law, understood as a primary (or fundamental) institution. As a historically evolved social practice that connects political ordering to discourse about war and violence, the laws of war have become deeply entrenched in the normative fabric of contemporary international society. Blatant violations of Article 2(4), such as the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, but also the US and Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, are "brazen violations" of the rules in play, but they do not themselves carry the sufficient discursive weight to transform institutional practices of ordering. Much of this, it seems, will depend on how coalitions of key states are willing to defend key rules around non-use of force as a basic practice of legitimate conduct in the face of great power contestation. The EU has notably proved willing, alongside the ASEAN group. 

The second frame has to do with the significant structure of secondary institutions concerned with the nature and regulation of war. International courts, most notably the ICJ and the ICC, and the institutions of the United Nations have played active parts in the current conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. As public forums of discursive practice, they can help to apply, reaffirm, and clarify the fundamental principles governing the use of force, which has reciprocal effects on deeper-seated normative developments. Again, much will hinge on the extent to which members of international society are willing to rely on the secondary institutional architecture they have created.

With regard to the latter, on 23 February 2023, the UN General Assembly, taking over the role of the Security Council, passed A/RES/ES-11/6 (Ukraine) reaffirming by 141 to 7 Article 2 of the Charter that obliges all states to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, reaffirming the non-use of force by states outside of self-defense. On 27 October 2023 by a vote of 121 to 14, theGeneral Assembly passed A/Res/ES-10/21 calling for an "immediate and sustained" humanitarian truce and cessation of hostilities and condemning "all acts of violence aimed at Palestinian and Israeli civilians", reaffirming the humanitarian war codes with reference to civilian immunity, voting again on12 December 2023 by a large majority for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. Given the uncertain status of the GA in respect of acting for a divided Security Council, these are not sufficient for securing the humanitarian war codes. One key question is how actors that have traditionally promoted international humanitarian law and strict interpretations of Article 2(4) will behave. As a self-declared "normative power" (Manners 2002), the EU will be a case in point.

The EU and the New World Order: Joining the Balance of Power

In English School theory, the EU counts as a secondary institution in international society, a derivative of the primary institutions of the balance of power, diplomacy and law, but also instantiating basic principles of sovereignty and the market (Bull 1977; Holsti 2004; Buzan 2004). Secondary institutions like the EU have the capacity to socialize member states, partners and other states into the rules and practices of international society and, importantly, to introduce change into the more fundamental ones (Wendt and Duval 1989; Knudsen and Navari 2019). The ongoing power transition, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the promotion of anti-liberal values by state leaders like Putin, Xi, Modi, Erdogan and Trump have triggered profound changes within the EU including a massive rearmament, direct military support to Ukraine and a drive for strategic autonomy from competing power centers including the US (Jørgensen, Knudsen and Landorff 2025). The EU has played a key role in the mobilization of a collective European response to Russian aggression, the organization of economic and military support to Ukraine, and broader European rearmament. The White Paper for European Defence Readiness 2030 (the ‘ReArm Europe’ plan), by which the European Commission (2025) proposed to leverage more than 800 billion Euro for European defense, is a cornerstone in this process. Among other things, the plan supports collective defense investments (with priority to European production) and allows member states and partners to apply for EU-backed loans for national rearmaments as well as military donations to Ukraine.

These developments have had important ramifications for the fundamental institutions of international society and thereby the world order. First, the EU has joined the balance of power as a great-power player rather than a “civilian power” (Bull 1982; Manners 2002). This means military, economic and political balancing against Russian power and aggression, a delicate attempt to obtain greater military autonomy from the US without endangering the NATO-alliance, and a still unresolved dilemma of how to situate EU-Europe in the full-scale rivalry between the US and China. Second, the EU has come to the obvious conclusion that the ideal of a great-power concert seems unrealistic in anything but the long run. Instead, member states have set a new course in which balancing and counter balancing is a necessary condition for great-power compromises and international order. Third, the EU has embarked on a collective defense of basic, pluralist principles of international law, including sovereignty, non-intervention and non-aggression, rather than the post-Cold War promotion of democracy (Navari 2022). Solidarist principles of humanitarian intervention, humanitarian law and the Responsibility to Protect still matter, but depend on cooperation with especially African organizations (Jakobsen and Knudsen 2025) and the ability of member states to agree, as in the critical case of Gaza.

As evident, the EU is developing a new grand strategy for the defense of a rule-based world order and liberal-internationalist values, as well as for its own security. From an institutionalist perspective, the EU seeks to shape the evolving world order by means of a full engagement in the balance of power, great power management and the use of force alongside international law and diplomacy (Jørgensen, Knudsen and Landorff 2025). The EU holds on to its liberal-internationalist foreign policy paradigm but seeks to defend and promote it also by military means. However, the EU is facing numerous challenges stemming from a changing world order and new institutional dynamics. In the market, these include a rising economic nationalism, tough competition with the US and China among others, and the problem of aligning economic interests with liberal values.

The Market

The global market is a historically changing institution with differing governing principles (Buzan and Falkner 2024). Its present emerging form is an economic nationalism aimed at "catch[ing] up" and protecting export markets, “utilizing both mercantilist and liberal policies” (Falkner 2025). Its new institutions are regionalization, trade diversion and sustained efforts at ‘de-dollarisation’.  Accelerated by the weaponisation of the international financial system under former US President Biden (the seizure of Russian assets and the exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT international payments system), economic nationalism has now been further advanced  by the United States’ decision under Trump to end America’s long history of trade liberalization and to impose a global system of tariffs.

Regionalization has not upended the WTO trade rules. According to Eero Palmujoki (2022) both the new Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) have adapted evolving WTO trade rules to regional settings. The same may be observed in the EU’s move to limit the number of Chinese electric vehicles entering its market via a tariff determined by strict adherence to WTO subsidy rules. Countries continue to take their trade disputes to The World Trade Organization whose panels continue to issue judgments. In 2022, the WTO had warned that the Russo-Ukrainian war could lead to global trade fragmentation into two blocs that set their own rules. In the event, Trump’s trade policies targeting friend and foe alike shut down that prospect and, judging by initiatives on the part of the EU, the present direction appears to be a potential expansion of the RCEP as a working alternative to the WTO.

The BRICS, acting under Russian initiatives, implemented some alternative and competing global banking and other financial institutions following the 2014 sanctions imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea.  A New Development Bank was set up in July 2015 giving every member one vote and with no veto powers, in contrast to the IMF arrangements. (China contributed 41% to the original capitalization and can draw on 21% of the facility while South Africa contributed 5% and can draw 10%.) The weaponising of the global financial system following Russia’s attack on Ukraine led to more energetic efforts to diversify the methods for currency exchanges and payments. Russia immediately demanded that Europe pay for Russian gas in rubles and has finalized agreements with Iran, India and Indonesia to trade in local currencies.

Alternative payments systems have grown apace. The Chinese Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), created in 2015 to ease international use of the Yuan and operational from 2019, had gained 168 Direct Participants (central banks) by December 2024. The African Union (AU) launched the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) in January 2022 and a Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) that allows for secure and instant cross-border payments in Africa. During their summit in 2024 in Kazan, the BRICS leaders announced an alternative named “Unit”, potentially backed by a basket of local currencies and gold that could circumvent dollar domination.

The WTO (2025) has proposed that world trade would drop by 1.8% in 2026, and that exports from North America would drop by 12.6%. The McKinsey Global Institute has forecast that trade channels between Asian destinations, such as China–ASEAN and India–ASEAN are likely to be least affected by trade diversion, while channels between US–China, EU–China, South Korea–China and Japan–China are likely to be most affected (White et al. 2025). These changes suggest an emerging market order of plural payment systems that supplement, rather than displace the role of the dollar and a fragmented trading order, where coalitions of countries maintain rules-based trade despite US and Chinese disengagement. The new market order reflects the failure of Great Power management.

The Great Irresponsibles? The (Limited) Prospects for Great Power Cooperation

The starting point for this conclusion is the basic assumption that relations among the great powers are crucial to comprehend peace, war, and international order. Great power management embodies one of the ‘primary’ institutions of the international society. This is the case because great powers are not only associated with power, but also, they bear a certain degree of organizational responsibility and international legitimacy. Conversely, the great powers have been also the most irresponsible actors in international relations, being the perpetrators of the most violent wars with the highest casualties, from the two world wars to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (Chan 2021; Kacowicz 2025, 49-51).  Although great powers tend to prefer stability to change, they resort to war to change the status quo within their spheres of influence, out of ideological concerns, or strategic (mis)calculations. Thus, there has been a tendency for great powers to intervene militarily in regional theatres, often based upon strategic myths and lack of proper exit plans, evidentially in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and presently Ukraine.

For great powers to manage and cooperate in the international system, three conditions should be in place: (a) a stable and agreed distribution of power in the international system; (b) a minimal normative consensus among the great powers; and (c) clear and explicit rules of the game, as an expression of great power management. When assessing the current turbulent and uncertain international order, we can tentatively conclude that these conditions are not in place.  First, it is difficult to speculate and forecast about the future of great power management, due to the end of the U.S. unipolarity and the uncertain power transition(s) taking place, considering the number of important regional powers from the Global South that are not taking part in the ideological and geopolitical contests between the West (the United States and Europe) vs. Russia and China, alongside the U.S. giving up its mantle in leading the post-World War II order.  Second, there is not much of a minimal consensus among the great powers in normative terms regarding international law, tarnished by the wars between Russia and Ukraine and Israel-Hamas in Gaza.  Third, the rules of the game are neither clear nor explicit. Yet, there seems to be a predilection for a ‘transactional approach,’ which might circumvent ideological differences and recreate, potentially, some kind of Great Power diplomacy.

The erratic behaviour of President Trump and his push for MAGA might unintentionally result in a Chinese century of MCGA (Make China Great Again). In any case, rational blueprints for recreating a Concert as a way of managing great power relations will have to wait until the aftermath of the Russian-Ukraine war and the insertion of Russia back into the international community, if at all.  Meanwhile, the prospects for great power cooperation will remain very limited. The Global International Society will survive, though it will be neither under the aegis of the hegemonic Liberal International Order nor a bipolar Cold War-type order. Instead, we are moving into the uncharted waters of a ‘multi-aligned’ world, with the rise of middle and regional powers (such as India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, and South Africa) hedging their bets and shying from rigid alignments. This will be, after all, “no one’s world” (Kupchan 2012).

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Cornelia Navari was Senior Lecturer at Birmingham University and Visiting Professor at the University of Buckingham, UK

Charlotta Friedner Parrat is Senior Lecturer at the Swedish Defence University. 

Ioannis Stivachtis is Professor of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Tonny Brems Knudsen is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Dennis Schmidt is Assistant Professor in International Relations at Durham University, UK.

Huss Banai is Associate Professor of International Studies in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University.

Arie M. Kacowiczis the Chaim Weizmann Chair in International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.