Chitralekha Zutshi is Class of 1962 Professor of History at William & Mary. She has written widely on nationalism, religious identities, and historical traditions in South Asia, primarily in the context of Kashmir. Her books include, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir; Kashmir’s Contested Pasts: Narratives, Sacred Geographies, and the Historical Imagination; Kashmir: Oxford India Short Introductions, and the edited volume, Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation.

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

Since my graduate student days, I’ve been part of a cohort of scholars seeking to define the region in South Asian history. Our primary objective was/is to disaggregate the region (and also religion) from its appropriation and disappearance into the history of the Indian nation. The resultant works on Maharashtra, Punjab, Kashmir, Bengal, and Gujarat, among others, were designed to help us understand how regional ideas and religious affiliations shaped the history—as well as the successes and failures—of the nationalist project and indeed the idea of South Asia, as well as that of India and of Pakistan. The study of regions continues to be a vibrant field; more recently, we have turned our attention to the processes that have contributed to the drawing of the contours of what we have always accepted as stable, established regional communities. This has yielded ground-breaking research into regional historical traditions and interactions among multiple linguistic and script communities.

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

When I initially began researching the history of Kashmir in the mid-1990s, the conflict did not particularly interest me on a scholarly level, although the insurgency against the Indian state was raging at the time in the Kashmir Valley. I was more interested in returning Kashmir to the mainstream of South Asian historiography, from which it had been absent. I became steeped in excavating Kashmir’s past, perusing government documents in state archives during the day, going door to door in the evenings collecting documents (letters, newspaper cuttings, prose treatises, poetical tracts, photographs, and so on), while also recording people’s memories of their forebears. Most of these materials had never before been seen or analyzed by any scholar; in fact, nobody, not least myself, had realized the existence of such a diversity of sources, especially in the regional vernacular Kashmiri, in Kashmir. It appeared that I had unearthed a completely new archive.

It was only after the publication and reception of my first book, Languages of Belonging, which stitched together these sources to produce a new narrative of Kashmir’s past, that I recognized the value of engaging with the conflict. Besides the complimentary academic reviews, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that a range of people—laypeople, policy makers, diplomats, and others—had benefited from the book’s long historical perspective and its insights on Islam and nationalism. Within Kashmir itself, the book had sparked intense debates over belonging and identity that were carried out in seminars and symposia. I realized that Kashmiris held the book in such high esteem because it helped them to understand themselves and brought some clarity to their past over the din of relentlessly competing narratives on their homeland that saturated public discourse in South Asia. Since then, I take my responsibility as a historian of a conflict zone much more seriously. This is reflected not only in my research and role as a speaker at academic and community events around the world, but also in the courses I teach.

What role do colonial history and historical memory play in re-imagining democratic institutions in South Asia?

History in general and historical memory contribute in both positive and negative ways towards re-imagining democratic institutions, since both can be deployed to sustain ideologies and further claims in the present. As historians we bear the responsibility to not allow history to become politics by another means, whether that is in service of ideologies on the left or the right. This is the only way that we can ensure the continuation of civil debate that will strengthen democratic institutions in South Asia.

What inspired you to study the historical narrative of the making of Kashmiri identity? What challenges did you face when conducting this research?

As I mentioned earlier, my work engages with the region as an object of study in South Asian historiography, and it is from this perspective that I approached the study of Kashmir, exploring its historical and historiographical constitution from a variety of social and intellectual locations and bases. The making of Kashmiri identities, regional and religious, was critical to the articulation of the idea of the region.

The initial challenge I encountered after I decided to work on Kashmir was that there was a paucity of scholarly literature on the region, which meant that I did not have access secondary sources that would provide the critical socio-economic and political contexts for the articulation of identities that I was interested in writing about. But this also meant that I had to provide this context myself, thus making the end product far more comprehensive and textured.

The conflict itself proved to be a serious challenge in terms of safely conducting research and accessing sources. The endless curfews, closures, and strikes, along with the neglect of archives and libraries, as well as the politics of the conflict were all major roadblocks that I had to surmount to be successful as a researcher.

How do regional politics, particularly relations between India and Pakistan, impact the narrative of the Kashmir conflict?

Regional politics between India and Pakistan have a major impact on the discourse about the Kashmir conflict, primarily because the two states have always deployed their nationalist narratives to assert their territorial claims on the region. For both India and Pakistan, their claim over Kashmir is tied in significant ways to their own nationalist self-imaginings—either as a secular (now Hindu) nation or an Islamic nation respectively.

Could you outline the constitutional changes made by the BJP in relation to Kashmir and Article 370 in 2019? What is the significance of these changes?

On August 5, 2019, the newly reelected BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government, by presidential order, abrogated Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which gave special status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). In addition, they pushed through a bill that stripped J&K of its status as a state, partitioning it into two union territories—Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh— to be ruled directly by the central government.

In 1949, Article 370 was enshrined into the Indian constitution as a means to explicate J&K’s relationship to the Indian Union. Like all princely states—as it was at the time of Indian independence in 1947—J&K acceded to India in only the three subjects of Defence, External Affairs, and Communications. In part because it was disputed territory and in part because its leadership negotiated for autonomy during constitutional talks, Article 370 allowed it special privileges. One such privilege was the establishment of its own constituent assembly, which had the power to frame the state’s constitution as well as make the decision about whether it wanted to accede to India in any further subjects.

Article 370 represented the federal, plural, and secular character of the Indian polity, which claimed Jammu and Kashmir precisely because it was a Muslim-majority state and was willing to make concessions to allow Kashmiri Muslims to feel secure in a Hindu-majority India. Article 370, however, became a shell of itself soon after it was promulgated. The Bharatiya Jan Sangh (the earlier incarnation of the BJP), joined hands with a movement in Jammu that emerged in the early 1950s to abolish the state’s special status and integrate it completely into India. This movement eventually led to the downfall of the first government of J&K—that had negotiated its special status—in 1953. Subsequent state governments in the 1950s and 1960s were willing to join hands with the central government to erode the Article. It nonetheless remained a powerful symbol of the pact between India and one of its constituent units that the BJP has consistently campaigned against.

The recent presidential order that extends all provisions of the Indian Constitution to Jammu and Kashmir has also rendered unconstitutional Article 35A of the Indian constitution. This article was introduced into the constitution through a 1954 presidential order, under Article 370, which gave the J&K state legislature the right to define permanent residents of the state. In effect, this article prevented outsiders from settling in and buying property in Jammu and Kashmir.

The BJP’s explanation for its move was that the special status has prevented the state’s economic development and thus encouraged disgruntlement among the local population. In this logic, the BJP is no different from earlier central governments, which have been throwing economic aid at J&K in the hopes that its population will be pacified. But this has not solved the underlying political grievances of the Kashmiri Muslim population, which has felt increasingly disenfranchised in and alienated from India, precisely because of the center’s high-handedness. The insurgency against the Indian state, which began more than thirty years ago, continues to rage, and is likely to strengthen as a result of this latest incursion. It confirms what Kashmiris have known for decades—that for India, Kashmir is a territory devoid of people.

You have always maintained that Kashmir should not be viewed just through the lens of conflict and security studies, given its interconnected past and diverse cultural identities. What would you want the global community to know about Kashmir?

Well, as a historian, I do not want Kashmir’s past to be read through its present. For that, one has to set aside the dispute between India and Pakistan, and the insurgency against India, so that one can study Kashmir’s history on its own terms. I want the global community to understand that there is nothing inevitable about the conflict in Kashmir, that there is nothing specific to Kashmir that predisposes it to being a disputed territory. Despite being the inhabitants of a small realm, Kashmiris have historically managed to negotiate a place for their realm within far mightier political entities. Given the right political conditions, that is possible to achieve in the future.

What is the most important advice that you would give to young scholars?

I would say that if you want to conduct serious research and produce textured scholarship, then you cannot rely simply on digital sources. Nothing can replace actual fieldwork and research in archives and libraries with a variety of sources in multiple languages.

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

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Jean Baudrillard’s contribution to the discussion about the content and meaning of the postmodern condition remains important (Best and Kellner 1991, 111–145). His reflexive insights on the economic, ideological, cultural and technological phenomenon of neo-capitalism and so-called globalisation (Ritzer 2007), or whatever now is classified under the label of platform capitalism (Srnicek 2017), must be regarded as an integral component of a broader philosophical and theoretical discourse on the specific form and operation of post-war capitalism on a global scale (Ritzer 1997, 76–118). Specifically, from the 1970s onwards, more and more, a bunch of new and dynamic disciplines, approaches and methodologies, to name amongst others poststructuralism, postmodern theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, cyborg feminism and ecology, have raised the question of the catalytic role of technology in contemporary Western societies, drawing our attention to the advent of a posthuman condition (Best and Kellner 2001).

In an innovative way, Baudrillard placed capitalist technology within the frame of digital virulence. Digitality is perceived as the ‘turbine’ of late capitalism, especially when it comes to the fields of information technology (IT), communication, mass media and social networks (Baudrillard 2012). It is not by chance that he speaks about a ‘turbo-capitalism’ (Makris 2018). The proliferation of digital technology has totally changed the epistemological, axiological, ideological, political and cultural characteristics of humanity. As in the similar cases of Haraway’s cyborg feminism (Haraway 2004) and Braidotti’s approach about a posthuman era (2013), Baudrillard brings to light the critical relation between man and machine or human and inhuman, stressing the process towards an anthropological shift in contemporary social ontology and phenomenology (Baudrillard 2000, 3–30).

IT, genetic cloning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) compose a basic analytical pillar in Baudrillard’s social and political theory about late capitalism (Baudrillard 2008). If, as Haraway claims, the contemporary human being has been transformed into a cybernetic organism; or a hybrid of machine and organism; or a science-fiction creature (Haraway 2004, 7) – then, cybernetics, digital screens and genetic engineering play a crucial part in the transition of modern humanity to a posthuman age. By the same token, Braidotti asserts that this development in late modernity does not concern a post-naturalistic assumption of the modern world. Instead, it modifies the whole relationship between Nature and culture and chiefly the way that humanity places itself within a new existential condition (Braidotti 2013, 1–12). In all these pioneering approaches, information, communication and genetics affect largely the epistemological structure of social and political life in late capitalism, especially how we perceive the axiological and ethical justification of truth (Audi 2011). It is now clear that digital technology alters rapidly the epistemological limits of modern axiology and truth, bringing to focus the burning question of post-truth (Stenmark et al. 2018). The proliferation of information and communication via global media, platforms and networks undermine the cohesive view of modernity, revealing the multiple regimes of truth in a postmodern world that reign in relativism and post-truth. Through digital pluralism ‘the real’ is turned into a chaotic and liquid spectrality (Bauman 2000).

Digital technology and post-truth are critically connected to both the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change. On the one hand, we are witnesses to the ongoing process of a deconstruction of the human cell via genetics, medicine and technology, as happens with the vaccination engineering (Rezaei 2021). Technology creates a posthuman being, introducing at the same time world into so-called post-truth age: everything has been surrendered to the virulence of untrust, conspiracy theory and populism (Axford 2021). The rhetoric of Covid-19 has toxically merged with post-truth hate speech coming through the digital networks of platform capitalism (Lilleker et al. 2021). On the other hand, Covid-19 pushes humanity deeper in the bubble of digitisation. Despite the fact that the new approaches connect Covid-19 with the phenomena of the Anthropocene, climate change and a political theology of catastrophe (Delanty 2021) – social distancing as well as the digital tones of post-truth led late modernity to a situation of a onto-theological saturation. It is like, as Baudrillard claims, we have now exhausted all our potentialities. The global system has been entrapped into a condition of inertia, although everything seems to travel around the globe in record time.

Doubtless, Baudrillard has built the science-fiction theory of pataphysics as a holistic approach to the relations between technology, capitalism and globalisation, by paying attention to the extreme phenomena of simulation, simulacra and digitality. Postmodern condition pushes the human body, truth and nature to their limits (Baudrillard 1983). Given that, the chapter consists of five sections. The first section explores how postmodern axiological crisis tends to be turned into a digital and ecological dystopia. The second section analyses the relationship between mass media, masses and global politics. The third section examines Baudrillard’s principle of reversibility with regard to reality and news. In the fourth section, cloning, AI and Baudrillard’s concept of the ‘Hell of the Same’ are put within the problématique of true and false. The fifth and final section displays the provocative simulacrum of a zombie digital world.

From modern certainties to a post-truth digital and ecological dystopia?

Baudrillard connects the orders of simulacra and industrial technology with the questions of representation, appearance and counterfeit. In that respect, it could be claimed that simulation concerns a whole economic, political, ideological and cultural process in contemporary capitalist societies that turns false and fake into a new kind or reality, more real than the real: the hyperreal (Baudrillard 1983). So, knowledge, truth and artificiality are interconnected within the excessive technological reproducibility of capitalism (Benjamin 2008, 19–55). From this point of view, both simulacra and simulation can be seen as the critical steps towards a theory of post-truth – where reality collapses under the explosion of information, communication and news. Post- truth arises as social entropy in the age of digital technology, globalisation and populism (Nicholls 2016; Overell, Nicholls, 2020). Digital technology and political discourse prevail in the social ontology of post-truth in late modernity (Block 2019, 1). In most of cases, the relevant discussion is unfolding as a reflexive interrogation about disinformation, fake news and lying in politics (Dalkir and Katz 2020). Actually, this is not a new theoretical trend. In the 1970s, Hannah Arendt (1972, 1–47) drew our attention to the relationship between lies, truth and power. However, this remains a mainstream approach, so to speak. This chapter delivers a radical philosophical and theoretical perspective on the phenomenon of post-truth that is articulated with postmodern scepticism (Sim 2019) and Baudrillard’s theory about simulacra and simulation (Kalpokas 2019, 103–104).

If we live in a postmodern condition, stigmatised by a new version of capitalism, i.e. ‘platform’, ‘turbo’ or ‘tele-capitalism’, Baudrillard (2011) builds a novel conceptual edifice that helps us to see things from a different point of view, revealing the catalytic role of IT, AI, genetics, mass media and digitality in contemporary social and political life (Baudrillard 1983). In fact, he has built a provocative science-fiction theory in which true and false are no longer considered as two separated situations, like good and evil in the conventional sense, but as the two faces of a new radical metaphysics: i.e. pataphysics (Baudrillard 1994, 1–9). In this new brave digital-driven postmodern and posthuman world, true and false are exchangeable either within a Manichean or a Nietzschean frame – where the reversibility principle and the pataphysical science-fiction theory of imaginary solutions dominate. Poetically speaking, he designates this onto-theological and anthropological metamorphosis of humanity in late capitalism as ‘telemorphosis’, pointing out that ‘television has shown itself to be the strongest power within the science of imaginary solutions’ (Baudrillard 2011, 29). Nothing anymore must be taken for granted. Everything attains its shape and meaning within a global network of digital circuits that has the pataphysical stamina to create entities without real referents. Living in a hyperreal world, in an ecstasy of communication (Baudrillard 2012, 19–30), or in a constant delirium of speed, as Paul Virilio (2006) claims from a similar viewpoint, in fact, we are travelling as object- signs through global digital platforms, desperately seeking for an Archimedean point. But, it is in vain.

For Baudrillard, since the 1980s, the postmodern world has entered into a dizzying orbital flight without a destination. Onto-theologically speaking, we live now in a condition emptied from meaning and reference. In Lefort’s lexicon (1988, 19), everything is governed by the cataclysmic ‘dissolution of the makers of certainty’. As information flows across the globe, through TV and digital screens, via demonic images (Baudrillard 2017, 13–31), true and false have become the blinking shades of a posthuman world that has been entirely sunk into the digital archipelago of indifference, contingency, obscenity and promiscuity. According to Baudrillard, this is not about good or bad. It is not a matter of ethics. Following in Nietzsche footsteps, he refers to an anthropological turn beyond good and evil, where the modern certainties no longer have any meaning or significance. In that respect, his analysis concerns a fatal condition that is dominated by extreme phenomena (Baudrillard 1993). Adopting Canetti’s position about a deadly leap of modern humanity beyond reality and history, he claims that we are travelling in a void without even noticing it (Baudrillard 1990, 14).

Instead of a simple science-fiction theory of pataphysics, his systematic approach could be seen as an innovative New Critical Theory focusing on the crucial economic, technological, social, political, ideological and cultural changes that are taking place in late modernity (Makris, 2021). In order to constructively and imaginatively read these extreme changes of Western neo- capitalism on a global scale, we need a new and radical conceptual armoury. In a nutshell, we need a radical thought (Baudrillard 2008, 95–106). For him, the postmodern world, flooded by simulacra, screens, virtual realities, clones, information platforms and ecstatic communication, is a pornographic and virulent universe, in which the spectres of true and false are reversible (Baudrillard 2003, 25–30). It is interesting how, in the posthuman age of simulation and digitality, Paul Preciado (2019) applies Baudrillard’s concepts of pornography and simulacra to human body, by placing artificial and modelled sexuality before anatomic reality itself.

Projecting our hyperreal existence through screens, circuits, platforms and networks, in fact, we occupy the perverse fortitude to make true and false according to the obscene needs of the moment. Baudrillard claims that the Cartesian ego lives now as a quasi-rational human being, lost in a chaotic and abyssal virtual space that he himself has diabolically overproduced. Putting an end to the modern binary realities of real and virtual, good and evil, true and false, etc., IT, AI, mass media, communication and simulation reinvent reality as a gigantic digital simulacrum amongst other extreme eventualities (Baudrillard 2006, 92–93). By doing so, post-humanity has almost been exhausted by her technological perversion. She looks like a contemporary Prometheus who has been transformed into a postmodern Frankenstein. The orgy of Western modernity has led the world into an artificial end of history (Baudrillard 1993, 3–13). The whole process seems like a vicious circle. To put it another way, it looks like a fatal strategy that brings to the fore a cool and ironic revenge coming from the side of the neglected objects themselves (Baudrillard 1990).

The excess of information and communication has turned into a condition of inertia – a bizarre immobility that appears like a frozen world. The posthuman world has already started the endless trek into the digital space of virtual redoubling, genetic cloning and AI (Baudrillard 2011a, 145–158). If we already live in a science-fiction future, without past and present, beyond reality and history, having exhausted all our human potentialities, then, it could be said that Baudrillard may reveal here the advent of a digital, as well as an ecological, dystopia. This is a critical situation we have to deal with, especially in light of new phenomena, such as Covid-19 and climate change, that exacerbate postmodern virulence.

Mass media, masses and the stupidity of politics in the age of globalisation

Trumpism, as an extreme transpolitical phenomenon, gives us the opportunity to move one step beyond the conventional wisdom of an allegedly moral and immoral power. For Baudrillard, this is pointless. Contemporary politics is not about honest politicians that speak the truth and vicious politicians that deceive the innocent people. This is a naïve approach that sees politics either as a romantic experience or as a way to manipulate crowds (Prado 2018). For him, global politics is nothing but a fatal strategy of a self-catastrophic stupidity. Contrary to mainstream Marxism and its alienation theory, Baudrillard (2007, 29–67) claims that in the age of globalisation the masses are accomplices to the perfect crime of politics. However, that is half the story. Actually, he claims that in late capitalism silent masses block hegemonic politics, through a process of involution that replaces the traditional problématique of revolution. Eventually, he comes to the conclusion that the masses have been nearly entrapped into the chaotic circuits of mass media and digital screens, leading the global system to ruins. This paradoxical and ironic situation, that saturating of the global system of power, destroys everything without an active rebellion, i.e. involution. For Baudrillard, in a postmodern world, we see the unfolding of two crucial procedures. First, politics and power are obsolete. In this vein, hegemon and masses are exchangeable simulacra via a fatal strategy of stupidity and involution. Second, hyperreality is rooted in global digital networks (Baudrillard 2007a).

Mass media constitutes the neuronal centre of hyperreality. As in Samuel Beckett’s theatrical absurdism, we dwell in a brain that has been trapped in its simulacrum. Transcendence of God has been replaced by the immanence of genetic and digital codes (Baudrillard 1983, 109). We are imprisoned into the Platonic cave. Covid-19 could be regarded as another episode to this long industrial process of mediatisation and digitisation of human life (Delanty 2021, 107–121). Having lost every feeling of exteriority and otherness (Makris 2017; Makris 2021a), we cannot only find a way to make true and false or axiological judgments, but, in fact, we have lost every sense of reality and reference. Mass media, masses and digitality compose the dystopian scenery of global autism. Nevertheless, when Baudrillard talks about the demon of digital images, he does not mean a kind of a misfortune that reigns upon the world. On the contrary, he tries to reveal the Manichaean structure of postmodern condition. At the end of the day, so-called ‘empire of good’ is proven to be evil itself (Baudrillard 2010 and 2010a). The global system of power gives birth to international terrorism (Baudrillard 2012a). Who is good and who is bad? What is true and what is false? No longer is possible for us to distinguish moral from immoral. This is a transparent, superficial and flat world. Behind digital screens haunts an onto-theological void (Makris 2020).

Hyperreal relativism leads to an axiological crisis (Stenmark et al. 2018, 141– 198). In the global age of transpolitics, transsexuality and transaesthetics, it is beyond our powers to judge good and bad, true and false or beautiful and ugly (Baudrillard 1993, 14–35). To the extent that postmodern world is flat, without transcendental depth – like a digital screen, packed with simulacra – this means that radical otherness has been eliminated in the fatal game of virtual copies. Ironically, the orgiastic passion for identity politics led to the tragic end of singularity. We dwell in a virtual void that seems like a huge digital pulp. Everything is distorted by the spectrality of digitality. As a huge black hole, simulacra absorb reality. The digital Minotaur devours humanity sending back a broadcasting version of hyperreality: i.e. artificial truths and lies of so-called ‘real time’. Our daily lives are running out at the 8pm news. This is not merely about post-truth and the like; this is about digitality, hyperreality, posthuman condition and pataphysics (Baudrillard 1994, 2–9).

Baudrillard reads the extreme phenomena of simulacra in late modernity drawing his inspiration from Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that medium dominates over the message (Baudrillard, 1996, 52). Message no longer expresses social ontology. Message is the medium itself (Baudrillard, 2019, 171–195). ‘From medium to medium’, he writes,

the real is volatilized; it becomes an allegory of death, but it is reinforced by its very destruction; it becomes the real for the real, fetish of the lost object – no longer object of representation, but ecstasy of denegation and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal (Baudrillard 1983, 141–142).

Undoubtedly, this is a turning point in his analysis to the extent that although the ideological usage of digitality varies, bringing to light a heterogeneous multitude of individual and collective attitudes and behaviours, many of them are absolutely violent and racist. For example: online vitriol, lack of civility in the cybersphere, and anti-feminist rhetoric in social media (Jane 2014; Cole 2015). For Baudrillard, medium has the pervasive force to homogenise everything. In fact, digital simulacrum transforms messages into pure operations, without any real connection (Baudrillard 1983, 100). By digitising social, political and cultural activity, IT, AI, mass media, screens and communication networks evacuate human life from content. Digital instantaneity, i.e. ‘real time’, decodes and denervates any referent. Digitality distorts and controls meaning (Baudrillard 1983, 115–123).

Masses are absorbed into a hermetically closed global virtual circuit that reproduces them as a silent object sign. But, as mentioned above, this is half the story. While mass media inactivates masses – at the same time, the masses block mass media and global politics. It is worth pointing out here that the mediatised hyperreal world, composed of digital screens and simulacra, does not function as a mirror of truth and lies, but as a transparent and depthless void that devours every negativity and singularity (Baudrillard 1993, 111–174). Mass media is not a rational mechanism of verification and falsification. Instead, it works as an operational system that overproduces digital virulence in ‘real time’. Having transformed masses into an enormous brain, without body and blood, mass media circulates in it the virtual viruses of pure simulacra on a 24/7 basis (Baudrillard 2000).

Despite the fact that Covid-19 brought to the fore the medical aspect of viruses, for Baudrillard, digital virulence stands in the very heart of late capitalism. It is no coincidence that he likens the ecstasy of communication to the situation of a cancerous metastasis. The excess of information destroys every possibility of meaning. The obscenity and promiscuity of mass media and digital screens nullifies every possibility to distinguish truth from falsehood. ‘The contradictory process of true and false’, he writes, ‘of real and the imaginary, is abolished in this hyperreal logic’ of mass media montage (Baudrillard 1983, 122). The exhaustion of reality murders the Real via the fatal strategy of perfect crime (Baudrillard 2008, 18). Nonetheless, it is important to remember that digitality means complicity. The masses participate in a post-orgy condition in which lies, fake news and trolling are not but the obese expression of a pornographic world (Happer et al. 2019). Digitality turns capitalism into a gigantic stage, where humanity exists performing in ‘real time’. As in a reality show, masses can only live through screen and simulacra. However, this is in vain. Digital hyperreality evacuates any message, distorts truth and false and corrupts axiological judgment. Only mass media, networks and platforms can deliver the pretext of objectivity.

In the postmodern and posthuman world, true and false are empty signifiers that are floating in the depthless space of global digitality. As pixels, they unstoppably change in a dizzying void full of bizarre simulacra. Paraphrasing Heraclitus, it could be said that everything is given birth through a digital war (Merrin 2019). Following in Baudrillard’s footsteps, Merrin (2005) asserts that the digital screen ‘is killing the art of symbolic exchange’. In other words, the electronic demon of simulacra turns human life into a delirious spectacle of non-events.

Reversibility principle, reality, and the political economy of TV fantasies

Globalisation, where a political economy of virtual news reigns, could be seen as a Manichaean digital war of principles. This is a key aspect in Baudrillard’s pataphysics that brings to the fore the principle of reversibility. The postmodern world is not a monistic universe. Instead, it looks like a pendulum that swings unstoppably between reversible positions. So, acceleration is turned into inertia. Good is turned into evil. Truth and falsehood are interchanging situations. Reversibility is the metonymy of excess. Henceforth, we dwell in a world that works in a state of existential and phenomenological exaggeration. It is an obscene world full of extreme phenomena (Baudrillard

1990, 25–70). The delirium of mass media digitality takes the form of an immanent deification in the fascinating and seductive ritual of evening news: i.e. TV fantasies (Baudrillard 2002, 186–190). However, it is not simply about virtuality. Digitality, as an accelerated spectrum of media news as a whole, operates into the void. TV, video, screens, multimedia, the internet, platforms and networks have cancelled any possibility of moral judgment (Baudrillard 2002, 176). Even the global system cannot control the exponential proliferation of information. Social media pushes it to its onto-theological limits: i.e. the agony of power (Baudrillard 2010a). True and false are being merged into a semantic confusion. Who has the fortitude to verify the validity of news, while they are running across the globe, through endless circuits, building an enormous pile of digital rubbish? Albert Camus says that humanity must pay the heavy price of her metaphysical rebellion (Camus 2000, 29). Modern Prometheus has been enslaved to the demonic space of virtual images and digital news. Reality has been replaced by the hyperrealism of simulation and simulacra. The hyperreal, Baudrillard asserts, means that the ‘contradiction between the real and the imaginary is effaced. The unreal is no longer that of dream or of fantasy, of a beyond or a within, it is that of a hallucinatory resemblance of the real with itself’ (Baudrillard 1983, 142).

As we have seen, Baudrillard (1990, 111–179) rejects the Marxist theory of alienation. In this brave new mediatised world, simulacra, TV fantasies and digitality compose a pataphysical order of objectivity. He repeatedly refers to a kind of objective irony that leads humanity to a situation of cool revenge. Object-signs reign upon human subjects. In that sense, the reversibility principle and turbo-capitalism reveal a postmodern Apocalypse. His provocative science-fiction theory may shed light on a digital dystopia that more and more turns into an ecological dystopia. As pointed out earlier, both Covid-19 and climate change could be regarded as new episodes towards this risky process of global virulence. On his paradoxical account, salvation is translated into a kind of self-catastrophe. It looks like an ancient Greek drama. Hubris via nemesis leads to catharsis. He places this chain of events on the basis of a radical onto-theological destiny. As a contemporary Luther, he approaches redemption of world through its ruin. Following Walter Benjamin’s messianic political theology, he crafts a postmodern Angelus Novus that leads humanity to heaven through hell. Provocatively speaking, he terms this pataphysical process the intelligence of evil (Baudrillard, 2005).

Baudrillard builds a theory of simulacra in which the object-sign of mass media news prevails. Since the 1960s he has drawn our attention to the catalytic role of information, communication and images in late capitalism. He places technological developments, and especially digitality, at the epicentre of postmodernity. Neo-capitalist reality brings to the fore hyperreality. By doing so, he displays the end of metaphysics and the advent of pataphysics.

Sometimes, he speaks as a postmodern physicist. In fact, through physics, he transforms metaphysics into a science-fiction theory. To put it another way, he uses physics and developments in IT, AI, communication and genetics in order to unveil the onto-theological limits of posthuman condition (Baudrillard 2000, 1–30). Hyperreality concerns the replacement of real life from ‘real time’, through a political economy of viral news and images. More specifically, digital technology transforms late capitalism into a laboratory of global simulacra. At the end of the day, the dizzying, speedy and chaotic character of digital technology leads to a new cosmogenesis. Having absorbed by the abyssal TV fantasies, mass media and digital screens, humanity loses not only her tangible body, but her brain, that is to say her rationalistic capability to translate social ontology and phenomenology into a stable, sensible and comprehensive axiological system of true and false connotations (Baudrillard 2008, 21–25).

From this perspective, the political economy of simulacra and simulation puts the postmodern world in peril. The lack of transcendental depth, even the depth of the human mind itself, leaves humanity without a steady system of cognitive and ethical reckoning. The new measure of things is a digital image that travels across the globe via screens, circuits, platforms and networks. Nihilism is no longer about a dead God or the so-called end of history. Posthuman nihilism concerns the implosion of meaning in the mass media; the implosion of the social in the silent masses; the parodic, ironic and fatal strategy of a more and more accelerated inertia (Baudrillard 1994a, 161). In Heideggerian terms, it seems like Dasein has dived into onto-theological oblivion. Trapped and lost in the Khôra of a digital coma, the world travels without moral guidance, meaning and essence. Being flat, meaningless and chaotic, postmodern humanity has been subjugated to the pataphysical destiny of an objective and cool irony. Poetically speaking, it could be claimed that a grotesque laughter is raised now above world, distorting every trace of human physicality. In Marx’s parlance, it could be said that a spectre haunts world: the spectre of digitality.

Cloning, AI and the apotheosis of the ‘Hell of the Same’

In a postmodern world that seems like an enormous media laboratory, Baudrillard (2000, 3–30) shifts his analysis to cloning in the sense of a generic category of phenomena, not only genetic but chiefly digital. For some social scientists, we have already entered into the global age of digital cloning, flooded by tones of human digital thought clones (Truby and Brown, 2021). For some other social analysts, this is the age of digital immortality and virtual humanity (Savin-Baden and Burden, 2019). In that respect, AI could be perceived as a gigantic digital brain that pointlessly stores every aspect of posthuman life (Baudrillard 2011a, 158).

Cloning and AI compose the essential processes of digitality in late capitalism. Both demonstrate the apotheosis of sameness, so to speak. In fact, the homogenisation of negativity and singularity via simulation and simulacra, with the exponential proliferation of social media communication, TV fantasies and IT, leads postmodern world to the ‘Hell of the Same’ (Baudrillard 1993, 113–123). Using so-called smart electronic devices all around the clock, we have been transformed into homogenised clones and replicas of virtual simulacra. In onto-theological terms, it is like we have achieved the Promethean feat to recreate cybernetic, cyborg and posthuman ourselves as an omnipresent and omnipotent digital god (Harari 2017). Digital cloning brings to the fore the axiological and ethical anxieties of social cloning, cloning cultures and socio-cultural sameness (Essed and Goldberg 2002). Cloning and AI pave the way for a homogenized world mindset. Everybody is technologically and virulently pushed to think and express themselves the same way, using the same digital software. Baudrillard speaks about a global ‘massage’ of human thinking, acting and judging (Baudrillard 1983, 124).

It is no longer about true and false, good and bad or beautiful and ugly. Modern cognitive, ethical and aesthetical pluralism is obsolete. Who cares about true and false when everyone immerses themselves into the digital habitat of sameness? Every single moment of the day, we offer ourselves as prey to this postmodern Minotaur: i.e. digital homogenisation. No more faces, only digital simulacra. No more events, only digital news. No more rationality, only AI. No more singularity, only the dread of sameness. Entering the age of digital posthumanity, flooded by electronic devices and virtual images, in fact, we have been entrapped into a digital enchantment, leaving behind every trace of human frail and reality (Bishop 2011, 349). Henceforth, human physicality seems like an abnormal exemption. The dominant trend is to live like a digital replica and think like a digital clone. This is the hyperreality of posthumanity. Transhumanists herald the advent of a digital religion. Digital sameness preaches a digital wellbeing, where every virtual human tends to look the same, behave the same and features the same digital operationalities. It is no coincidence that more and more the idea of a post- truth age is intertwined with mass media, IT, AI, cloning and digitality (Gibaroğlu 2019; Lacković 2020).

If in the final analysis the digital era is realised as a post-truth age – some invoke a sort of media literacy to distinguish truth from lies, to deconstruct information and communication disorder, and to achieve an axiological and ethical accuracy (Friesem 2019). In this vein, a post-truth condition in the digital era could be considered as an onto-theological and an epistemological crisis (Angermuller 2018). As posthumanity proceeds towards a new, radical and extreme technological context, i.e. the digital order of simulacra, it is difficult to keep her conventional metaphysical status. If we have passed the critical point of human horizon, as Canetti claims, travelling beyond historical time, we need a new metaphysical guidance. Given that, it can be claimed that Baudrillard builds the imaginative toolkit of pataphysics to help us cope with the postmodern complexities of hyperreality (Baudrillard 2003).

Living as virtual zombies in a screen universe? A provocative prognosis

In Nietzschean terms, it is no longer about good and evil. In posthuman era, everything is about sameness and complicity. Virtual masses fervently take part in a fatal game of homogenisation. The global system of mass media and social networks – that is to say either ‘platform’ or ‘turbo’ or ‘tele-capitalism’ – does not concern the situation of servitude, but the condition of complicity. Contrary to the Marxist narrative of alienation, post-humanity is accomplice to the digitisation of everything. Everybody wants to play this fascinating game of digital cloning and virtual human. Talking about a perfect crime, Baudrillard (2008) means a bizarre condition, in which there is no crime, predators, victims and motivations. If the digital world is a neutral world, then no human singularity exists. Medically speaking, we are approaching the condition of a hyperreal media-driven death. Posthuman cardiogram seems like a straight line, but, in a paradoxical and ironic sense, we continue to live like zombies do. Don DeLillo and Neil Postman’s media dystopias are now fully alive (DeLillo 1999; Postman 2006).

Is this science-fiction prognosis of a digital-led human destiny true or false? Could it be the actual question of the so-called post-truth age? Is it feasible for contemporary humanity to cross over the historical horizon, by transforming herself into a postmodern digital replica? Is digitality, as Baudrillard constantly says (1996, 66), our new normality? Telling personal stories, or providing resistance against racism and sexism (Barlow and Awan 2016) in a dynamic virtual context, is regarded as a positive aspect of this massive digitality that overflows capitalism in the age of globalisation, post-truth, viruses and climate change (Dayter and Mühleisen 2016). On the other hand, there is an analytical tendency that sees the apocalyptic advent of a digital zombie world in these extreme technological and cultural developments. The provocative discourse about zombie media and ‘digital dead’ occupies a foundational position within the current debate about digitality, hyperreality and post-humanity (Schott 2010; Cameron 2012; Olofsson 2013; Iannella 2017).

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On 6 January 2021, a violent mob stormed the United States Capitol Hill in an attempt to stop the US Congress from formalising the victory of Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential election. A shock test of democratic institutions in the US, the events also represent a watershed moment in the analysis of post-truth politics that has been ongoing since the British ‘Brexit’ vote and the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. The acts witnessed on 6 January were incited by Trump, who in the preceding weeks had repeatedly made unfounded references to a ‘stolen election’. Adding fuel to the fire were many claims about widespread election fraud in social media. The riot itself was also planned on social media, including on public Facebook pages. Many insurrectionists taking part in the events on Capitol Hill were believers of the conspiracy theory known as QAnon. Originating in the anonymous imageboard 4chan, QAnon orbits around the idea of Trump’s secret battle against a cabalist elite of media, scholars, and (Democratic) politicians.

While neither Trump insisting on blatant falsehoods nor the role of social media in the diffusion of misinformation was new, the events in Washington seemed to prove for the first time how severe consequences these untruths could have. Slightly less drastically, a related point was made by President Biden six months later, when he accused Facebook of ‘killing people’ due to its failure to stem disinformation about Covid-19 (Kanno- Youngs and Kang 2021). In both cases, it was apparent that widely spread disinformation could affect not only the behaviour of citizens online, but also lead to physical consequences, even violence, and endanger democratic processes.

This chapter seeks to shed light on the structural conditions of post-truth politics – in particular, the emergence over the last decade of social media as a central platform of public discourse. I first clarify my take on the concept of post-truth, and how it differs from various forms of mendacity that have traditionally appeared in the democratic public sphere. I highlight two aspects in the post-truth phenomena – a rhetorical style I call ‘careless speech’ and a broader set of structural conditions that contribute to the devaluation of factual truth. I also introduce the metaphoric vocabulary of public and factual infrastructure/architecture that forms the backbone of my analysis. The rest of the chapter then inquires into the structural transformation of the public sphere, linking the role of platform capitalism to the tension-ridden history of privately-owned public fora.

Social media is capable, perhaps more than we realise, of ‘changing the ways that we act, perceive, feel, think, and live together’ (Han 2017, ix). But, technologies are never autonomous actors. Their meanings and repercussions emerge from the broader political, economic, and cultural environment. Hence, I will focus on the nature of platform capitalism as a part of a broader set of developments that constitute a threat to the prerequisites of democratic politics.

On truth and democracy

After being selected the word of the year in 2016 by the Oxford English Dictionary and by Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache, much has been written on post-truth and post-factuality. Political discussion has purportedly undergone a profound change and left facts and truth behind for good. The definition offered by the two dictionaries refers to the tyranny of emotions over cold facts. Many take a different stance altogether. Politics, especially democratic politics, is supposed to be about opinions and ideological struggle, so why worry about truth? Are we not projecting an imaginary golden age into the past, a time when truth reigned supreme? Moreover, what is truth except a petrified outcome of past political struggles? Is not the whole alleged crisis of truth and expertise merely a reflection of problematic melancholia for the waning (neo)liberal consensus of the post-Cold War era?

Let us address these concerns first from the viewpoint of democracy. A broadly accepted tenet in democratic theory is that democracy is an opinion- based form of government. However, as Nadia Urbinati argues, opinions are always ‘interpretations of specific facts and events’ (Urbinati 2014, 35). An exchange of opinions becomes a mere battle of forces if the opinions lack any point of reference outside themselves. Thus, as Hannah Arendt wrote, freedom of opinion means nothing if factual information is not guaranteed. Opinions, inspired by different interests, values, and emotions come in a plurality of shapes. Without anchorage in facts, their interaction is rendered into violent clash of passions (Arendt 2006, 234–237). At best, pluralistic democratic debate enhances our understanding of the shared world from various angles. A disagreement over the facts divides this shared ground into separate islands, inhabited by people distrustful of each other.

As this formulation suggests, the dictionary definitions of post-truth tend to downplay the legitimate role of emotions in politics, while the sceptics underestimate the need for shared factual ground in democratic debate. As such, the two stances reflect the poles often at play in the contemporary public sphere. On the one hand, there is a pronounced tendency to dissolve every factual question into a matter of opinion – hence destabilising the public sphere by depriving it of any common points of reference. On the other hand, an opposite but equally real threat to democracy is the attempt to reduce even legitimate disagreements to factual questions, thus subjecting them to the tribunal of expert knowledge.

I find it useful to compare factual truth to the physical infrastructure that colours our everyday experience. Life in a city, for instance, is enabled, guided, and limited by urban architecture and infrastructure. Which modes of transportation are available for my trip to uptown? Which spaces are open to the public, and which are private? In politics, we are similarly limited and enabled by a variety of tangible and intangible infrastructures and architectures.

Facts are one such enabling constraint, a limitation that at the same time facilitates, encourages and stimulates debate. This infrastructure is given form by various architectures, such as ways of accessing information. Like public infrastructure, the factual infrastructure of politics deteriorates, becomes meaningless, unless we constantly attend to it and make sense of it from our varying perspectives. No one would expect exact guidelines on what to do from the material environment, just as no one would completely ignore its limitations on our actions. Finally, urban architecture may very well support racist, sexist, classist, or ableist structures of domination, and often upholds ecologically unsustainable petroculture. Yet, few would find razing the city a plausible solution to these shortcomings – the task is to restructure, not to destruct.

It is worth noting that this conceptualisation does not hinge on any particular theory of truth. Because it approaches truth politically, and not epistemologically, it is equally compatible with critical realism and non-realist approaches. Any consideration of truth in politics has to acknowledge that truth never stands on its own feet in the plural world of public affairs. The ‘truthlikeness’ of scientific statements, highlighted by realists, is of little value if they are ignored in political decision-making. The non-realists, in turn, often conceive truth as ‘warranted assertability’ – or ‘what our peers will […] let us get away with saying’ (Rorty 1981, 176). The current political crisis indicates that such communities of justification are dispersing fast. Accepting what is an undisputed fact in the scientific community becomes, ironically, an indication of having failed to ‘do your own research’ in many online communities.

Post-truth politics, then, ought to be understood as a predicament in which the factual infrastructure is crumbling, while political speech continues to find new ways of detaching itself from it. Consequently, our ability to react to political events and to engage in a democratic process of opinion-formation is compromised. This definition combines a structural perspective with a viewpoint focused on a particular rhetorical style. The latter I call ‘careless speech’, by which I mean speech that not only does not care about truth, but also often does not devote any careful attention to the details of the untruths it contains. Unlike the classical lie, careless speech does not primarily serve to hide particular facts from view. It seeks to actively eliminate factuality from the criteria used to assess political opinions and decisions. It denotes the purposeful creation of ambiguity over whether people believe in the factuality of the things they say. Nothing is to be taken too seriously or literally. While available to all, careless speech is particularly forthcoming to white male politicians prone to masculine boasting and aggression. Amplifying these post-truth tendencies indicates an attitude of not caring about the democratic process, or the world we share with others (see Hyvönen 2018).

The structural transformation of the public sphere

To understand the erosion of factual infrastructure and the emergence of careless speech, these phenomena must be placed in a historical context. One particularly helpful tool for gaining such historical vantage point is Habermas’s 1962 work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Particularly when combined with later correctives and elaborations, the book is an indispensable resource for the critique of ‘actually existing democracy’, also in the digital sphere (Fraser 1990, 56; Wischmeyer 2019).

Habermas’s historical presentation revolves around the rebirth of the public from the seventeenth century onwards. The architecture around which the modern European public emerged was mostly privately owned – salons, coffeehouses, and later the pages of newspapers. In these spaces, private people could ‘come together as a public’, disregarding the exact societal status of the participants. At the centre of such public sphere was the critical assessment and evaluation, exercised by private persons, of matters of public interest (Habermas 1991, 27–36, 52, 158–164). As Rosenfeld has also argued, many of the ideals regarding fact-based public debate we take for granted, such as objective news reporting, emerged only in the modern public sphere, supported by Enlightenment values (Rosenfeld 2018, 10, 25–35).

The public architecture Habermas describes – not unrelated to the point made earlier about urban infrastructure – was largely premised on exclusions based on gender, race, and class status. The disregarding of social rank only applied within the cohort of white property-owning males and did not include women, colonial subjects or the poor. To a large extent, these structures of domination continue to be coded (both metaphorically and literally) into the architectures of contemporary public spaces, amplifying the voices of traditionally dominant groups over those of the oppressed. A different historical narrative could be told by focusing on the aspects of modern publicity ignored by Habermas, such as the physical assemblies that occasionally destabilise such exclusions. But, to understand the role of media platforms in the emergence of post-truth politics, it makes sense to follow in Habermas’ footsteps and trace historically the vicissitudes of privately-owned public spaces.

Importantly, Habermas’s narrative points towards an aspect in modern publicity loaded with irony. What started out as a form of protection from the state authorities – private ownership – has become a threat to ‘the critical functions of publicist institutions’ (Habermas 1991, 188). As physical publics wither, and the media becomes increasingly driven by advertising interests, passive consumption begins to replace critical public debate (Habermas 1991, 188, 159). In the twentieth century, Habermas argues, ‘the rational debate of private people becomes one of the production numbers of the stars in radio and television, a saleable package ready for the box office; it assumes commodity form’ (Habermas 1991, 164).

As we will see, Habermas’ history is crucial for democratic thought still today, as the shift in the fortunes, for the public, of privately-owned public spaces still defines our politics. Perceptive to what was to come, Habermas highlighted the emergence and increasing dominance of entertainment as a result of the aforementioned processes. Pivotally for us, entertainment by nature represents a shift away from fact-based debate, and ’instead of doing justice to reality, tends to present a substitute more palatable for consumption’ (Habermas 1991, 170).

In the twenty years that followed the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas’s ruminations about entertainment gathered more weight as television established its role as the dominant medium for daily consumption. It thus makes sense to read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) as something of a sequel to Habermas’s work on structural transformation – although this connection is not intended by either author. Postman’s focus lies on the tendency of television to turn everything into entertainment. For him, the dominant medium, whether printing press or TV, is not a passive machine – it is a structure for discourse. As such structure, TV by its very nature tends to fragmentise and trivialise all content. (Postman 2005, 43, 87).

Although the tendency has been present from the early years of television, there have also been radical changes over the past decades. First, while early TV channels had entertainment programmes, these were supposed to finance the economically less profitable news, which in turn granted credence to the network. From the late 1970s onwards, cable news, the 24-hour news cycle, and the idea of making a profit from news have turned news themselves into entertainment – hence further eroding the distinction between facts, opinions, and fictions (See McIntyre 2018, 63–65).

More recently, the financial struggles of the television networks have pressed them to develop a distinct and marketable brand. A run-of-the-mill aspect in the marketing of ordinary consumer products, brand differentiation in news and information is arguably alarming. According to his own testimony, Cass Sunstein thinks about the economy in terms mostly owing to the neoclassical Chicago school. Yet, even from this perspective it seems clear that ‘serious problems’ emerge when information is treated as a consumer good among others (Sunstein 2018, 149). The goal has shifted from offending the least number of viewers to creating outrage on purpose. One of the best ways to achieve this in an entertaining way is to include ‘panels of celebrity anchors and paid provocateurs making themselves, and their outrage, the “story” rather than the events they are discussing’ (Tanguay 2019, 28–30).

The triumph of candidates like Trump in the 2016 US presidential elections was dependent on news media that had become completely infused in the logic of reality television. News, reformatted after the model of reality TV and the attention economy, operate in ‘truth markets’ where the operational logic is not driven by public interest of any kind, but by ratings. Brazenness and frequency of lies, accompanied by sexists and racist proclamations that would have been out of bounds still a decade ago were turned into a recipe for success. They grasped the attention of radicals, while the more moderate supporters were not scared away by them because the reality TV-infused media logic hollowed them out and made them seem less real (Tanguay 2019, 23–24, 30–31).

Of course, the transformation of the media is not the sole culprit. A fuller picture of the developments culminating in post-truth politics would have to account for the impact of broader trends of democratic backsliding and erosion of representative institutions over the past decades, and the phenomenon of toxic white masculinity (Bennett and Livingston 2020). For example, the 1990s consensus around liberal democratic market society effectively narrowed the space for meaningful political disagreements or policy differences of elected governments. One consequence of this was that parties became increasingly reliant on public relations agencies and outright bullshit – ‘empty words you could hear anywhere’ but attract ‘no real believers’ (Spicer 2018; Frankfurt 2005). Combined with media transformations, the general decline of social trust, thirty decades of neoliberalism, the shocks of the 2008 financial crash and other factors, the widespread use of bullshit fertilised the ground for post-truth rhetors. Yet, this picture remains incomplete without factoring in the role of online platforms. We must continue the investigation of the structural transformation of the public sphere, delving into the dynamics of platform/surveillance capitalism, and particularly its mode of operation in social media.

The hybrid mediascape and the question of information supply

Critics from Aldous Huxley to Habermas and Postman were mainly worried about the reduction of the audience into a silent, passive recipient (Habermas 1991, 200–201). From this angle, the early enthusiasm about the internet and its potential for active engagement is understandable. Is it not preferable that people search for information independently, instead of just following the agenda set by the media? The development of the internet into a multimedia experience full of user generated content (known as Web 2.0) was greeted with an enthusiasm that likened it to a ‘second Gutenberg event’ that would radically democratise politics. Perhaps bathing in the naivete of liberal democracy’s triumphs after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was assumed (by some, at least) that the forces of free markets and civil society would always produce pro-democracy results.

The first step on the road to understanding why this has not been the case is recognising that social media functions as a part of a technological environment defined by a superabundance of information. The question is not merely one of substance (what information is available) – it is a matter of how we acquire information. The internet has replaced the television as the ‘meta- medium’ – the instrument that not only supplies us with information, but also directs our ways of knowing (Postman 2005, 78–79).

Psychological research suggests, for instance, that the instant availability of information online feeds our tendency to over-estimate our own understanding. The fast access to information blurs the boundary between internal (‘in the head’) and external (‘in a book’), leading to inflated ‘cognitive self-esteem’. In other words, we think we know much more than we actually do (Fisher et al. 2015). Often, the result resembles the image presented by Adorno and Horkheimer in 1944 (2007, xvii), according to which ‘the flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once’.

This has been vividly illuminated by the ‘infodemic’ that accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic. Traditionally, one of the major challenges for making sense of crisis situations has been the paucity of available information. To some extent, this still holds true for element of the Covid-19 pandemic. Arguably, however, for the meaning-making processes during the crisis, the main challenge for the populace has not been the absolute lack of information. It has been, instead, the ability to recognise the relevant, epistemologically sound, and politically utilisable knowledge from the flood of available information, misinformation, and disinformation. One manifestation of the disarray of information is the fact that disagreements are increasingly based on mutually contradictory bits of information first voiced by people claiming various degrees of expertise, and later amplified by political pundits and ordinary citizens. Hence, during the pandemic almost any decision or recommendation by public health authorities was vulnerable to criticism from a source, statistic, or expert pointing towards a different conclusion. Rather than fostering the democratic virtue of fallibilistic pluralism, public debate as a result becomes characterised by an aggressive need to ‘be right’ (see Lynch 2019; Arendt 1968, 28). In some cases, this buried any attempt to have a properly democratic debate – one where disagreement pertains to principled judgments, not to the possession of indisputable facts.

Social media platforms know that being buried under an unstructured flow of information is not an ideal user experience. As a solution, information the user encounters is typically filtered by algorithms. For O’Neil (2017), this can be compared to the editorial decisions of traditional media. But these decisions were clear and visible, being the same for everybody. Hence, they could form a shared ground for discussion. The ‘newsfeeds’ of social media, and the result pages of Google search, make similar ‘editorial decisions’ in a manner that is more individualised and less visible, hence evading the awareness of most users. This complicates the idea that the internet would enable liberation from an external agenda. If what individuals encounter in the newsfeed is algorithmically determined and personalised, even the members of the same political community can inhabit differently structured realities. We may then justifiably share the worry voiced by Sunstein (2018, 37–41) regarding the wilting of random encounters, shared experiences and somewhat overlapping conceptions of reality. During the impeachment hearings of President Trump, for example, the events appeared radically differently depending on whether they were followed via, say, CNN coverage or through a Facebook account whose ‘likes’ were exclusively on pro-Republican and pro-Trump pages.

Social media allows us to choose, or chooses for us, the sources of information in a way that buffs out the uncomfortable edges that facts tend to come with. A scholarly consensus on the true scale of filter bubbles does not exist as yet, but polarisation and conflicting views on facts and reality are nevertheless an established fact (Marietta and Barker 2019). For example, on YouTube, where the recommendation algorithm steers around 70 percent of viewing time, the recommendations tend to bolster political biases and favour sensationalist videos – often highlighting conspiracist content or other forms of disinformation (Starr 2020, 80). Filter bubbles raise the risk of people being divided ever more clearly into their own mutually hostile cliques, equating the truth with their own group (Urbinati 2014, 4). Meanwhile, growing tribalism also implies that lying becomes increasingly acceptable from one’s group, because it is seen as serving some higher end (Hendricks and Vestergaard 2018, 83; Rosenfeld 2018, 9). A manifestation of this that cuts through ideological divisions is the dominance of viral (often emotional) narratives weaved around first-person experiences. Such stories are all but immune to fact-checking due to their claim to representativeness that does not hinge on the factual accuracy of the particular story on which their appeal nevertheless rests (Mäkelä et al. 2021). Such divergence of experiences and reality conceptions erodes the basic respect between participants of a debate. No wonder that one characteristic phenomenon of social media is, in the words of Byung-Chul Han, a ‘shitstorm’ (Han 2017, 2–12).

The problems go beyond saying nasty things on the internet. Political theorists from Cicero to Rawls have alerted us to the potential threat of violence when disagreement relates primarily to truth (Urbinati 2014, 100). The events at Capitol Hill in 2021 proved this to be the case in the online era as well. However, the exact nature of polarisation – especially in the US – also attests to the link between the media and broader political trends. If it was merely a question of social media and algorithms, this would predict symmetrical polarisation of the media system. Notably, this is not the case. The US media ecosystem is characterised by asymmetric polarisation, where a niche has emerged on the right side of the political spectrum largely isolated from mainstream sources of news and strongly linked to various conspiracist agendas (Benkler 2020, 44–47). In the extreme, the information disorder allows for a strategy mastered by the likes of Steve Bannon and Roger Stone. For them, the point is no longer even upholding a certain political narrative by using lies, but rather emancipating politics from the horizon where adherence to facts is one vector in the critical evaluation of opinions and policies. This is done by disorienting the audience with a flood of stories and narratives, rather than sticking to only one. As Bannon famously described his strategy, the goal is to ‘flood the zone with shit’. This

exemplifies a strategic use of careless speech. The point is not to gain ground within the confines of a single policy issue as much as it is to eliminate the whole idea of a common world in the context of which political disagreements are played out according to the ‘rules of the game’. While Bannon certainly draws from the playbook of older ‘merchants of doubt’ (for example, the tobacco and oil industries), the move from the traditional to social media has eliminated much of the viscosity introduced by professional journalists with editorial standards (Starr 2020, 69–70).

Of course, social media can also be used for truth-telling. Unlike some, I use the term rather strictly to refer to speech that can actually be said to be truthful. For example, the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter campaigns successfully used social media for raising public awareness about the structural injustices of contemporary society. In this sense, social media creates space for what Fraser (1990, 67) has called ‘counterpublics’. By doing so, it also harbours the potential of restructuring the architecture of modern publics, i.e. challenging the historical exclusion of certain voices from democratic fora. Yet, the internet is also full of public and semi-public spaces used for the dissemination of disinformation and antidemocratic thinking. The period of the 2020 elections and the Capitol Hill riot in the US is the most flagrant example. Even after the most visible far-right ‘Stop the Steal’ group on Facebook was removed due to threats of violence, the movement continued to spread disinformation and plan the Capitol Hill riots across various Facebook pages. Through 2020, as the Tech Transparency Project (2021) summarises, ‘Facebook’s efforts to curb violent activity and disinformation were either too late or ineffective or both’. In less mainstream platforms, such as Parler, violent rhetoric and disinformation are even more prevalent, while generally reaching a smaller overall audience.

Blatant disinformation and violence are only one aspect of the phenomenon. Social media also serves as a platform for spaces dominated by hateful content – usually misogynist, racist, or homophobic in orientation and weaponised as a silencing tactic (Särmä 2020). The solution cannot lay merely in embracing the ’good’ and rejecting the ‘bad’ when it comes to social media. Neither can we rely exclusively on individual-level interventions, media literacy programs or fact-checking. While important, these approaches remain ineffective if we do not grasp the bull by the horns, analysing the issue from the viewpoint of the imperatives of platform capitalism.

Welcome to the era of platform capitalism

To gauge the problem accurately, we must understand the operational logic of the online platforms. Platforms are ‘digital infrastructures’ that position themselves as intermediaries between two or more groups (Srnicek 2016, 42–43, 48). Most of these firms build their success on the extraction and refinement of data. This union of data and capital is widely considered a new type of economic formation and has been called surveillance capitalism or platform capitalism among other labels. The logic of the accumulation of surveillance capitalism relies on turning all spheres of human experience into quarries of data extraction – i.e. expropriating ‘behavioural surplus’, which is then refined into instruments of behavioural prediction and modification (Zuboff 2019, 8–9, 99, 200; Srnicek 2016, 39–40). While the general tendency is to expand this operation to everyday ‘offline’ life (e.g. through the Internet of Things), for our purposes it suffices to note that every aspect of ‘the internet’s computer-mediated architecture […] is repurposed as an extraction architecture’ (Zuboff 2019, 129). Key interfaces of this extraction architecture are user engagements – the main unit of the online attention economy, which includes clicks, views, viewing time, and shares (Hendricks and Vestergaard 2018, 1–17). Prioritisation of engagements as the pivots of data extraction leaves the door ajar for actors following the Bannon ‘flooding’ strategy. It also helps us understand why organised disinformation campaigns and bot armies are potentially so effective. Provocations, viral stories, and careless speech – i.e. statements indifferent to their truth-value and often blatantly disrespectful of democratic norms – are excellent sources of engagement, whereas facts and critical, pluralistic debate typically are not.

The platform companies have little interest in stemming the flood. On the contrary, since operations involving data become more profitable the more raw material you have, their business model relies on what Zuboff calls ‘radical indifference’. In other words: ‘it doesn’t matter what is in the pipelines as long as they are full and flowing’. This acts as a constant invitation to, modifying Bannon’s metaphor only a little, fill the pipes with shit – that is, with disinformation, conflicting narratives, and rage-inciting content. The chances are that – except for content considered disturbing almost universally, like child pornography – Facebook and other platforms will not interfere heavily with such content unless forced to do so by legislation. In fact, it seems likely that Facebook could turn down most mis-/disinformation on its site if it wanted to. This, however, would directly intervene with its logic of accumulation, which relies on the maximum amount of users sharing the maximum amount of content (Zuboff 2019, 509–12; Srnicek 2016, 45). Less content means less data, which means less capital and lower profits.

Towards an expanded notion of critical infrastructure

This chapter has sought to add to the understanding of post-truth politics by providing a critical genealogy of the digital public sphere. As the recourse to Habermas’s notion of structural transformation suggests, having major parts of the architecture of public discourse in the hands of private ownership is not new in the context of modern history. The implications of private ownership for public discourse have always been ambivalent. Yet, it seems that the recent emergence of data-driven platform capitalism has introduced new threats that should be taken seriously. From the passive, sometimes mis- (or under-) informed citizens of the television era, we have moved to the polarised public of our hybrid era. Rather than reducing them to silence, the digital architecture of the contemporary public sphere invites citizens to consume disinformation, which has a high potential to inflame aggressive hyper- agitation either online or offline.

Thus far, legal regulation of the platforms has focused primarily on privacy concerns. As Zuboff’s argument about surveillance demonstrates, privacy is indeed a key concern also politically. However, over-emphasising the role of the consumer over that of the citizen can also mean that regulative action fails to address some of the pressing threats to the public interest. What is needed is more focus on the role of the platforms as de facto public spaces – in other words, infrastructures of democracy. In addition to protecting privacy, we need to protect and take care of publicity. Security political discourse of the past two decades has been dominated by the notion of ‘critical infrastructure’. Given that democracy is increasingly under attack globally, the factual basis of political decision-making should be considered a critical infrastructure in need of protection.

Caring for and protecting public discourse requires, among other things, a regulative framework that supports the diversity and plurality of online spaces and guarantees access to common sources of factual information (Dommett and Verovšek 2021). Pushing for such reforms is bound to incite resistance from the platform companies. They tend to consider ‘old institutions like the law’, to quote the Google CEO Larry Page, too viscous in principle to regulate digital technology. Any impediment to data extraction, in particular, is a direct threat to the platforms’ logic of accumulation, and data extraction is best served by content that produces engagements (Zuboff 2019, 60, 104–105). Yet, as with other parts of critical infrastructure, regulation must be enacted to guarantee not only the factual basis of debate, but also the broader horizon of shared experiences – without which the facts and democracy itself lose their meaning.

References

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Bennett, W.Lance and Steven Livingston, eds. 2020. The Disinformation Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dommett, Katharine, and Peter Verovšek. 2021. ‘Promoting Democracy in the Digital Public Sphere: Applying Theoretical Ideals to Online Political Communication’. Javnost – The Public. Online First.

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This case study is an excerpt from McGlinchey, Stephen. 2022. Foundations of International Relations (London: Bloomsbury).

When Merger (2018) wrote ‘when is terrorism not terrorism? when the political motivations are misogyny’ she was reacting to the reluctance to label Alek Minassian a terrorist after he drove a van into a group of people, killing ten, in Toronto in 2018. He had posted a video on YouTube just minutes before his attack, referring to an InCel rebellion. Like Elliot Rodger before him, who killed seven of his fellow students in 2014 because he was repeatedly denied sex, Minassian was part of a broader community of like-minded individuals who hold misogynist views so extreme that they feel violence is advocated and justified. They have built their own world of online men’s groups united in their belief that sex and level of attractiveness determine your place in society, which excludes men who are not regarded as good-looking enough to form any romantic or sexual relationship. Hence, they are ‘involuntarily celibate’ (InCel). They proclaim that feminism has ruined the world such that they are unable to get what they’re entitled to – status and power through sexual relationships with women.

The InCel community claimed and celebrated Minassian’s violence arguing that had women had sex with him, then lives would have been saved – something they think would have been possible prior to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. InCels consequently glorify mass violence. As one said, ‘I’m happy to see a few normies die… We need to see a little bit of variety. I’m tired of the same ol’ death count. How ’bout a rape count or an acid-in-her-fucking-face count?’ InCels regularly use language like this to minimise the significance of their violence in comparison to the perceived injustices that they face – as, for example, there are high rates of InCel suicide (see Baele et al 2019).

Members of the InCel community tend to be men under the age of 30, self-identify as introverts and cover a range of socio-economic groups. Their numbers are hard to calculate, with reports ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. The movement is heavily inflected with white supremacy, with their ideal ‘Alphas’ exhibiting finely chiselled jaw lines, white skin, ‘roman noses’ and a toned physique. This worldview is justified through a distorted appropriation of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology, relying on eugenic theories that were most commonly associated with the Nazis. The globalisation of communications has facilitated the spread of this ideology and a minority of non-white men beyond North America also identify as InCels – accepting this presumed racial hierarchy and their place within it.

InCel attacks appeared to be confined to North America, with at least four mass-murders linked to InCel activities and six other associated killings. A January 2020 report by the Texas Department of Public Safety warned that InCels are an, ‘emerging domestic terrorism threat’. In February 2020, a German man gunned down nine people near Frankfurt before killing himself and his mother and in doing so appeared to be the first InCel attacker outside of North America. He posted a manifesto online in which he called for the, ‘complete extermination’ of many ‘races or cultures in our midst’ and specifically targeted Muslims. He also wrote. ‘for my whole life, I haven’t had a wife or girlfriend, for the last 18 years exclusively because… I know I’m being surveilled.’

Some terrorism experts linked him to the InCel movement, as have a few InCels – claims that British and American (but less so German) media have seized upon to glorify his violence and minimise his neo-Nazi links. However, he never identified as an InCel, and did not appear to blame women for his lack of intimacy – but blamed governments. This highlights that caution is needed before categorising these events – in the same way that it is important to remember not every public act of violence by a Muslim is an act of Islamist terrorism.

The ubiquity of misogyny and the persistence of sexism and domestic violence worldwide, make the label of ‘terrorism’ hard to stick to InCel violence. The violence is disorganised, not spectacular and rarely sustains media attention. Individual acts of violence lack a strategic purpose as there is not symbolic or material value in the locations of their attacks. Often those who die are not those they purport to hate, and to date there has been no disproportionate state response against young white men (the majority of InCels). Additionally, the lack of organisation or structure to InCels outside of the online space, makes their ‘real world’ justifications – ‘martyrdom videos’ and rambling manifestos – weak attempts to glorify their self-interested violence.

The personal connections of these attacks to their life narratives blur the line between the public and the private, but also renders suspect their claim that they are seeking to change the world or sacrificing themselves for a grander cause. Instead the quest for significance and motive can be seen as a destructive manifestation of the quest for celebrity. The risk with labelling InCels as terrorists is that it gives more ‘real world’ power and credence to their ideology and online hatred than it may deserve.

Minassian certainly wants us to believe he belongs to a movement. But his actions raise more questions than answers. For example, is it possible to negotiate with InCels? Additionally, might identifying InCel violence as terrorism render the term ‘terrorism’ too elastic and subsequently empty of content and lacking utility? In other words, by doing so, it becomes impossible to differentiate between domestic violence, gang crimes, smuggling, and terrorism. As such the specifics of the forms of violence get missed and consequently overgeneralised (and therefore less effective) countermeasures are adopted.

For example, accepting InCels as terrorists instrumentalises violence against women. It suggests that violence against women only really matters, and is only taken seriously by governments and police, when it is given the status of ‘terrorism’, but also that such statements are symbolic yet not actioned, because the structure of counterterrorism is already hyper-securitised and hyper-masculine. We can see this in Australia, where the Victoria Police Department publicly declared it would treat domestic abusers as terrorists, and acknowledged the link between terrorism and domestic violence, yet when they opened up a $30 million centre a few months later to combat terrorism, it lacked experts on violence against women (Diaz and Valji 2019).

*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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The concept of an integrated justice approach to land reform aims to understand better and address agrarian concerns, particularly where gender justice is often overlooked by key actors, including the state, social movements, and even feminist organisations, in the context of land reform. This approach was developed by building on Fraser’s three-dimensional justice approach (1999, 2005). The concept was first introduced in my PhD manuscript (Bejeno 2021) and later developed in a working paper published by the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in October 2021 (Bejeno 2021).

Nearly four years later, I believe it is essential to revisit and expand on the idea, aiming to share it with a broader audience and sparking further conversation around the persistent issue of land injustice in the Philippines—and potentially beyond. This study examines the enduring problem of unjust land (re)distribution through two case studies in the Philippines. The core argument is that land injustices rooted in class and gender are deeply intertwined and shaped by economic maldistribution, cultural misrecognition, and political misrepresentation. As such, any meaningful response to the land reform question must integrate these three dimensions—economic, cultural, and political, or referred to here as the “integrated justice approach to land reform.”

This framework is especially relevant in the Philippine context, and possibly elsewhere, where agrarian structures remain marked by landlord violence, weak political will among reform implementers, and deeply entrenched gender norms. Addressing these challenges requires not just policy reform but a rethinking of justice itself.

Concept of Justice, Gender Justice, and an Integrated Justice Approach

First, it is important to understand the basic concepts used here. The concept of (in)justice is defined as economic (mal)distribution, cultural (mis)recognition, and political (mis)representation. These injustices are shaped by agrarian structures, cultural structures (like patriarchy), and political subordination, which limit people's equal participation, particularly women's, leading to injustice. In the context of land reform and peasant struggles, justice is often a foundational demand; yet, its various dimensions are frequently overlooked, rendering gender (in)justice negligible.

Gender justice in this context means that peasant women (not solely men, as is often the case) are recognised with their right to own land independently or as co-owners with their husbands or partners in any agrarian land redistribution. This pertains to power relations, specifically between male and female peasants, with the ultimate goal of transforming it to advance gender equality and social justice in general. A just society, as conceptualised by Fraser (1999, 2005), means that people, including men and women, have equitable resources, standing, and voice. Thus, to overcome injustice means eliminating institutionalised barriers that hinder "parity of participation" in societal interactions among social classes and status orders. Fraser (2005) suggests that through parity of participation, people share in, partake of, and contribute to society by having access to the resources necessary to take an active and equal part in social interactions with others, enjoy equal social status among others, and have equal access to political decision-making. Hence, emancipation can only exist based on equal participation in all spheres of life. Consequently, I argue that pursuing gender justice on land necessitates an integrated approach that combines three spheres of land justice: economic distribution, cultural recognition, and political representation. The economic sphere of justice centres on the redistribution of resources, where class structure is the primary barrier. This aligns with the Marxian understanding of class as an economic relation between capitalists and the proletariat, focusing on exploitation and domination. In agrarian studies, this notion reveals a direct relationship between landlessness and the poverty and injustice experienced by peasants, as well as the domination and violence perpetrated by landowners. Feminist scholars linked women's landlessness to a lack of land redistribution and non-recognition of women's equal land rights. (see, for example, Agarwal 1994, Deere and Leon, 2001, Jacobs, 2013, Doss et.al, 2014, Alano 2015, Kieran et.al 2015, Levien, 2017, Morgan 2017, and Bejeno 2021).

The cultural sphere focuses on the recognition of status order, with gender relations (among other social status orders) being the main barrier. Gender injustice is produced and reproduced through patriarchy, the "institutional all-encompassing power that men have as a group over women, the systematic devaluation of all the roles and traits which the society has assigned to women" (Popkin, A., 1979). This power imbalance shapes societal practices, norms, and public policies, thereby perpetuating gender-based injustices, including land injustice. And the political sphere centers on the representation of people's voices and standing, with political structure serving as the primary barrier. Political misrepresentation, particularly in policymaking within people's organisations or state agencies, can jeopardise the advancement of marginalised or subordinated groups, including women. Therefore, the integrated justice approach simultaneously scrutinises and intervenes in economic redistribution, cultural recognition, and political representation, especially if the goal is gender justice on land.

Gender-Based Land Injustice in the Philippines and Elsewhere

Gender injustice on land is a persistent global issue. In the Philippines, for instance, female agrarian registered beneficiaries are less than half the number of men (Bejeno, 2021). Studies in other developing countries similarly show low female land ownership, with women owning as little as 11% in Brazil, 5% in Kenya, and three times less than men in Ghana (World Bank, 2012). In Asia, even where data is available such as in Vietnam, women are registered at only half the rate of men (Kieran et.al, 2015).

The persistent inequality in women's land rights across the world is attributed to various factors, including: discriminatory laws and policies that directly impede women's land rights; women's ignorance of their land rights; male bias and dominance within administrative, judicial, and other decision-making bodies; land distribution often being directed towards male household heads; strong opposition from men to women's land rights, coupled with a lack of assertion from women themselves; and historical premium placed on men in land redistribution processes and the underlying gender structure contribute to women's reduced access to and control over land.

For example, in South Asia, few women own land due to strong opposition from men, social constructions of gender roles, low female education levels, and male dominance in decision-making bodies (Agarwal, 1994). In Latin America, gender equality in land ownership is constrained by women's limited awareness of joint or direct ownership and the direct targeting of men or men's associations in land titling programs, as observed in Peru, Honduras, and Mexico (Deere and Leon, 2001). Jacobs’ study (2013) of 32 cases in Africa, Asia, and Latin America found that the direct targeting of household heads (i.e., men) in land redistribution persists. Similarly, men are often targeted as beneficiaries of compensation for land dispossession and in rehabilitation/resettlement programs in parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe (Levien, 2017). This direct targeting of men as land beneficiaries is also prevalent in Indonesia and the Philippines (Morgan, 2017; Bejeno, 2021; Leonard et.al, 2015; Alano, 2015). These patriarchal norms, practices, and policies profoundly impact women's participation in decision-making within and outside the household, their reproductive health choices, mobility, bargaining power, and children's welfare.

Moreover, secure access to land and tenure is crucial for the economic empowerment and social bargaining power of rural women, as land entitlement is often a prerequisite for accessing other productive resources and social inclusion. Without land titles, women often lack the necessary collateral for credit. They are denied access to essential inputs (like high-quality seeds and fertilisers), farming equipment, and extension services, which are critical for improving productivity (World Bank, 2012; Agarwal, 1994; Deere and Leon, 2001; Leonard et.al, 2015; Bejeno, 2021).

The significant gender disparities in access to inputs and asset ownership lead to a gender productivity gap. Studies suggest that providing women with the same access to productive resources as men could increase farm yields by 20-30% (or increase agricultural output by 2.5-4% in developing countries), potentially reducing world hunger by 12-17% (ADB, 2017 cited from FAO, 2010). Beyond economic benefits, women's ownership of at least 25% of household assets is linked to increased decision-making power within the household, including reproductive health decisions (ADB, 2013 cited from Beegle, Frankenberg, and Thomas, 2001). Land ownership also significantly reduces violence against women, as property can enable women to escape marital violence (ADB, 2013 cited from Agarwal and Panda, 2007; Friedemann-Sánchez, 2006; ICRW, 2006). It enhances women's mobility, decisions on employment, health, independent use of money, and positively impacts children's nutritional welfare (ADB, 2013 cited from Swaminathan, Lahoti, and Suchitra, 2012; Doss, 2005). On the contrary, countries where women lack the right to own land tend to have an average of 60% more malnourished children compared to those where women have some or equal access to credit and land (OECD, 2010).

Despite the crucial role of women's equal land entitlement, gender-based land injustice persists, largely rooted in women's subordinate position within the household. This subordination is reinforced by the higher regard given to production (often equated with men) versus reproduction (equated with women). This division often leads to the male household head being the primary target beneficiary of land redistribution programs, as seen in Latin America (Deere and Leon, 2001), South Asia (Agarwal, 1994), Asia (Kieran et.al), and the Philippines (Bejeno, 2021; Leonard et.al, 2015; Alano, 2015; Borras, 2007).  Furthermore, the disproportionate allocation of time for care and housework to women, regardless of income, impacts their access to land and income (ADB, 2013). In many societies, women's labour and contributions to production are undervalued or even devalued, with reproductive work often equated to 'unemployment' (Bejeno, 2021). Consequently, men are considered the primary farmworkers and household heads and thus remain the main beneficiaries of land reform (Bejeno, 2021; Leonard et al., 2015).

While efforts are ongoing in several countries, such as the Philippines, where the CARPER law and other legislation provide for women's individual or co-ownership land entitlement, progress is slow due to those underlying assumptions, especially regarding the household and the household head as the basis for identifying beneficiaries in land redistribution (Bejeno, 2021). In many instances, even when women are listed as independent household heads or beneficiaries, their land access may still be determined by patriarchal households, and they often retain fewer rights than men despite joint ownership (Walker, 2003; Doss et.al, 2014). Inheritance laws, for example, in sub-Saharan Africa, often prevent widows from inheriting from their husbands (Doss et.al, 2014). In summary, gender relations have a significant impact on women's control of assets, access to land, ownership, decision-making power within households (including reproductive rights), communities, mobility, and children's welfare.

Land Injustice and the Underlying Gendered Agrarian Structure

Landlessness or limited access to and control over land is a fundamental cause of injustice and poverty in many cases. In the Philippines, for example, studies indicate that limited land access, alongside social services, is a key driver of poverty and inequality, while access to land is a determinant of rural welfare (ADB, 2007; Quisumbing et.al, 2004; Balisacan, 2007). The concentration of land among the elite correlates highly with poverty among landless peasants and farmworkers. Despite over 30 years of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) in the Philippines, landlessness remains. In 2012, approximately 800,000 hectares remained to be redistributed, and strong opposition from landowners often led to violence and even deaths of peasants (Bejeno, 2021).

Moreover, while significant progress has been made in advancing gender justice, largely driven by the strong role of feminist activism and scholarship, social movements have often prioritised class or resource redistribution concerns, which has consequently stunted the advancement of gender justice (Bejeno, 2021). In many instances, the gender agenda is perceived as 'divisive' (Agarwal, 1994; Deere and Leon, 2001), despite women's active and often frontline roles in these movements (Bejeno, 2021). Rural social movements globally, including those in Brazil, the Philippines, Central America, India, and China, typically emphasize redistributive land reform and class concerns in their agrarian reform campaigns (Deere and Leon, 2003; Agarwal, 1994). As a result, the advancement of both land redistribution and the recognition of women's land rights often remains marginal or absent from the agendas and political strategies of social movements.

Overall, class and gender-based land injustices are fundamentally caused by class hierarchy (economic maldistribution) and gender structure and politics that do not uphold gender equality. These systems perpetuate economic, cultural, and political injustices, which in turn influence public policies and political representation, reinforcing and reproducing gender-based injustices, particularly concerning land. Thus, land injustice can be better understood and addressed by considering the interlinkages of economic, cultural, and political dimensions or an integrated justice approach. As Fraser (1999, 2005) had highlighted, injustice is produced by economic maldistribution, cultural misrecognition, and political misrepresentation. Thus, it should be understood and addressed through corresponding interventions: economic redistribution, cultural recognition, and political representation.

Conclusion

In conclusion, land justice is fundamentally a matter of social justice. Both theoretical insights and empirical evidence demonstrate that class and gender-based land injustices are primarily caused by agrarian and gender structures, which are often not adequately integrated into political actions. This perpetuates economic maldistribution, cultural misrecognition, and political misrepresentation. To effectively understand and address persistent land injustice, the paper identifies several key challenges that require attention. First, an integrated approach to justice is more helpful in analysing and discussing agrarian or land reform matters. Second, social movements and theorists must simultaneously consider examining all three dimensions of injustices: economic (mal)distribution, cultural (mis)recognition, and political (mis)representation. This reinforces the crucial point that "there is no justice without gender justice". Third, movements (social/women) should broaden alliances and utilise multiple strategies to challenge the agrarian structure and patriarchal system within institutions, including state agencies, civil society organisations, and society in general. Ultimately, integrating economic, cultural, and political dimensions in research, policy, and practice can be more effective in advancing land and gender justice.

Overall, transforming gender injustice on land necessitates challenging at least three existing power structures: the ideologies that justify and sustain gender inequality (beliefs, attitudes, and practices that uphold social hierarchies); the distribution and control of resources (material, financial, human, and intellectual); and the institutions and systems that reproduce unequal power relations (family, community, market, education, law, and state, among others).

References

Agarwal, B. (1994) A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge University Press.

Agarwal, B. (1994) ‘Gender, Resistance and Land: Interlinked Struggles Over Resources and Meanings in South Asia’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 22(1):81-125.

Alano, M.L. (2015) Gendered dynamics of land property relations within a large-scale sugarcane investment in Isabela, Philippines, paper presented at International academic conference, Chiang Mai University (5-6June) BRICS Initiatives for Critical Studies (BICAS).

Asian Development Bank (2013) Gender Equality and Food Security: Women’s Empowerment as a Tool against Hunger, Mandaluyong City, Philippines: Asian Development Bank., pp. v-83. Also available at: https://www.adb.org/publications/gender-equality-and-food-security-womens-empowerment-tool-against-hunger/.

Balisacan, A.M. (2007) ‘Why does Poverty Persist in the Philippines? Facts, Fancies, and Policies’, in Severino, R. and L. Salazar (eds) Whither the Philippines in the 21st Century: ISEAS Publishing accessed at https://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg/publication/1189.

Batliwala, S. (2008) Changing their World: Concepts and Practices of Women's Movements. Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID). Available at: https://www.eldis.org/document/A43785.

Bejeno, C.E.B. (2021) On the Frontlines: Peasant Women and Land Reform Struggles in the Philippines (forthcoming), PhD Thesis.

Bejeno, C.E.B (2021) Integrated Justice Approach to Land Reform, Why Is It Important and How? See here integrated-justice-approach-land-reform-why-it-important-and-how

Borras, S.M. (2007) Pro-poor Land Reform: A Critique, Ottawa: The University of Ottawa Press.

Borras, S.M. (1998) The Bibingka Strategy in Land Reform Implementation: Autonomous Peasant Movements and State Reformists in the Philippines. Vol. 274. Institute for Popular Democracy.

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Deere, C.D. (2017) ‘Women’s Land Rights, Rural Social Movements, and the State in the 21st century in Latin America’, Journal of Agrarian Change 17(2):258-278.

Deere, C.D., and M. Leon (2003) ‘The Gender Asset Gap: Land in Latin America’, World Development 31(6): 925-947.

Deere, C.D., and M. León del Leal (2001) Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Fraser, N. (2010) ‘Injustice at Intersecting Scales: On ‘Social Exclusion’ and the ‘Global Poor’, European Journal of Social Theory 13(3): 363–371.

Kieran, C. Kathryn S., Agnes Q. and Cheryl, D. (2017) ‘Gender Gaps in Landownership across and within Households in Four Asian Countries’, Land Economics 93(2):342-370.

Leonard, R., M. Osorio and Menguita-Feranil, M. (2015) ‘The case study of Unifrutti in Mindanao, Philippines’, Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: pp. i-72. Accessed http://www.fao.org/3/i4444e/i4444e.pdf.

Levien, M. (2017) ‘Gender and Land Dispossession: A Comparative Analysis’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 44(6):1111-1134.

Manahan, M.A. (2018) Repormang Agraryo at Pagbabago? Narratives on Agrarian Conflicts, Transitions and Transformations Focus on the Global South, Philippines, available online: https://focusweb.org/publications/repormang-agraryo-at-pagbabago-narratives-on-agrarian-conflicts-transitions-and-transformation/.

Manahan, M.A. (2013) The State of Agrarian Reform Under President Benigno Aquino III’s Government Beyond the Number: A Struggle for Social Justice and Inclusive Rural Development. Diliman, Quezon City: Focus on the Global South. Also available at: https://focusweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/the-state-of-agrarian-report.pdf.

Morgan (2017) ‘Women, Gender and Protest: Contesting Oil Palm Plantation Expansion in Indonesia’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(6):1177-1196.

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Dr. Cynthia Embido Bejeno earned her PhD with the dissertation On the Frontlines: Peasant Women and the Land Reform Struggles in the Philippines. Her research examines women’s land rights and their struggles in agrarian reform, highlighting both the opportunities and constraints in peasant women’s justice claims. She contributes to critical debates on social movements, gender, and agrarian studies.

Art for War: Heritage Looting, Blood Antiquities, and the International Fight against Terrorism Financing
By Constanza Musu
Stanford University Press (2026)

This important new book dissects the fate of physical heritage during periods of armed conflict, social upheaval or as a result of “terrorism-networks”. Ostensibly this may seem a relatively novel IR subject in IR, but pondering more, it is apparent that challenges to cultural patrimony are as old as IR itself. From the moment the first colonial explorer invaded foreign soil or tangled with the customs of indigenous peoples, acts of witting or unwitting cultural degradation swiftly followed. Even within the discipline of IR, colonisation and the de-colonization of museums are at least a sub-specialism for students. The most recent manifestation of that niche speciality is our concentration on the implications for “terrorist-proliferation”. Like many things in life, when we look forensically for the “financial-empire”, cultural antiquities lead us to the “money-trail” causing global insecurity (pp. 3-15.)

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Costanza Musu examines how global perceptions of cultural heritage shifted from a purely archaeological concern to a core issue of international security and counterterrorism. Its core themes dissect how the purportedly cultural is enmeshed in the formidable structures of global “terrorism-financing”. Musu traces the “securitization” of heritage protection—how illegal trade in looted artifacts (often simplified as “blood antiquities”) from conflict zones, end up as crucial staples of the terrorist “money-tree” (pp. 2-25.) We are accustomed to the “blood diamonds” controversies which plagued West Africa. Musu places the focus particularly on the Middle East where she shows that mis-appropriation of cultural heritage has been directly linked to funding terrorist groups, perpetuating further violence (pp. 16-33.) Musu first sets out the historical scene in how artworks/antiquities came to be part of terror funding.

There are five substantial and well-researched chapters. The first examines the looting and trafficking of antiquities. It offers a detailed resume of a familiar subject and includes something of a potted history of looting. Its refreshing novelty is Musu’s emphasis on the emerging contemporary threat, changing dynamically in response to “terrorist-financing” demands. When one anatomizes the financial experience of armed conflicts or “societal-breakdown” in counties in the past, we often identified a pattern of opportunistic exploitation through individualistic or modest-scale organized art thefts. Musu shows how this phenomenon has now metamorphosed into an industry- a key financing of terror networks.

The second chapter then plots the evolution of terrorism financing. It shows a pattern of criminal diversification in funding of regional and international terror networks as fund-sourcing has increasingly shifted from bank and post office robberies, financial exploitation, to systematic plundering of art and cultural artefacts. Illicit antiquities are now integral to the financing of localized and global terrorism.

Chapter three shows the dramatic pattern of change of the last decade. In particular it explores how when one looked at past opportunistic acts of cultural theft, it was difficult to detect any tangible pattern in the confiscation of valuable heritage. It was opportunistic, ill-organized and spasmodic. Today’s experience is of systemic, well-managed exploitation of weaknesses in the museological supply-chain. In that journey, terrorism has played an increasingly significant role, often based on sophisticated intelligence of site and museum-vulnerabilities. What had once been a challenge of localized heritage preservation, has become a component of a broader fight for human security.

In chapter four, “Stepping up the fight” (pp. 97-141) Musu shows how the increasingly rigor of policing and criminal intelligence services have mounted a challenge to the diverse skills of terror networks. In particular, there has been an increasingly impressive implementation of national and international policies since 9/11, As soon as American and other counter-terror expertise were able to validate the financial roots of terror spending (in the delivery of one of the world’s largest acts of mass terror), it was possible to step up the targeting of “art for war”. The likelihood that overseas intelligence-monitoring will isolate the funding trail of future Bin Ladens had been substantially enhanced. We now understand much more about how art theft percolates down to arms and technical purchasing, and to the delivery of terror-operations on a global scale.

These points are then explored at a field-level in chapter five, as Musu examines the instruments at the disposal of global crime-surveillance, and (conversely) the counter-resilience of terror networks. It is obvious that there remain numerous challenges to the effective implementation of anti-terror operations, not least the increasing efficacy of terrorist groups, in concealing their financial footprint. Not only do terror networks have access to a growing legal supply of vehicles of financial concealment, the world of “burner-financing” and of crypto-currency had so anonymised terror, that as fast as intelligence operations disclose the money trail, new subterfuge methods of financing are invented. Terrorists often host and exploit a sophisticated chain of legitimate sources of money with the end-users often being virtually impossible to trace. It is “terror-money” hiding in plain sight. The biggest enemy in this process is time. When police intelligence has disclosed the money tree, the chain of finance has been replanted and is blossoming somewhere else outside the forensic or jurisdictional reach of the authorities. Thus while we now have a plethora of instruments in the struggle against “art for war”, terror networks are equally developing circumventive methods, challenging police-effectiveness.

This leads Musu to conclude that policy towards the protection of cultural heritage has evolved through three distinct phases, each in turn modulated by altering international priorities and norms. Firstly, and notably during the 1990s, the prevailing ethos among the authorities was that the world’s heritage merited safeguarding primarily as a universal asset. The wholesale devastation of archaeological sites documented in popular movies like the 2014, The Monuments Men demonstrated the repercussions of systematic looting, as shown by the likes of Hitler’s and Stalin’s forces. This deeply traumatic experience galvanised post-war resolve to codify “cultural-property” safeguarding. This paved the way for foundational international conventions. Organisations like UNESCO were at the vanguard of a “protection and preservation first” stance, asserting the intrinsic heritage of cultural heritage and spawning genuinely effective methods of international cooperation and “heritage-listing”.

Secondly, and especially in the wake of ex-Yugoslavia, “human-security” infiltrated “heritage-protection” discourse, creating an increasingly expansive dimension of “cultural-property” protection. Thus the “collective-identity” of communities came to the fore, and was increasingly recognised as an impediment to societal post-conflict recovery. The destruction of religious and regional sites was utilised in ex-Yugoslavia as an effort to erode the cultural fabric of opposing groups. The intangible dimensions of memory and tradition got recognition in conceptualising our human security framework.

Thirdly, from the early 2000’s in the wake of 9/11 and ISIS, cultural preservation became increasingly integral to traditional “hard-security” priorities. Antiquities were recognised as a revenue-source for extremists, such as in the mounting evidence that ISIS have been systematically exploiting heritage sites. Inevitably, cultural heritage has had to be prioritised, not just for its intrinsic value or community salience, but also as a domain for counter-terrorism and national security. Thus in our current phase, the cultural or human priories have most likely been enhanced by our preoccupation with broader security strategy. Thus, Musu deftly exploits concepts borrowed from “securitization theory” (pp. 170-180) which will be familiar to IR students and scholars from our wider security-analysis frameworks.

Ultimately, Musu reveals this emergent, increasingly sophisticated challenge, threatens all three domains, namely the cultural integrity of artefacts, the preservation of “community-identity” and future global insecurity in the wake of ever-more evasive, terror-financing subterfuge. Way beyond the obvious financial incentives for criminal groups, the potential erasure of “cultural-identity” may devastate the very existence of integral communities, already damaged by atavistic conflict or societal destruction. Perhaps there is enough material there for several future books and this is both the minor weakness but also the future potential of this study. At times I wished there was less narrative-context and more original data. This aside, Musu offers a significant monograph. As she concludes:

preserving heritage is not a mere cultural or academic concern; it is also a question of global security, historical accountability, and respect for the shared narrative that binds communities together. (p. 180)

Alongside “terror-financing” through “blood antiquities”, Musu shows the insidious impact of “art for war” and how it devastates our physical and cultural footprint. Her third domain is highly original and exceptionally well-researched. The author agrees with the counter extremism expert, Hans-Jakob Schindler, that it is “both an analysis and a warning.” By tracking how cultural heritage trafficking intersects with terrorism financing, Musu’s work is highly relevant given the resurgence of groups like Al-Qaida and ISIS. As Donna Yates observes, Musu captures a critical turning point—the moment “heritage under threat became heritage as threat”—an under-researched area demonstrating the lasting policy and political consequences of pushing cultural heritage into the security landscape. Likewise as Giuseppe De Magistris suggests, it also contributes to our fight against antiquities trafficking that exploits regulatory gaps and threatens national and cultural identities. This wide-ranging analysis is a welcome addition to analyses of heritage protection.

The undeclared strategic alliance between the radical left and radical Islam has become so conspicuous that it demands a comprehensive dissection and analysis. This growing strategic and ideological affinity between the radical left in the West and radical Islamic organizations and regimes that have wrapped themselves up in anti-imperialism flag has not only trivialized the left’s vociferous commitment to democracy, social justice, and anti-oppression but has also turned the radical left into the “frontier guards” for fundamentalist and militant Islamic organizations and regimes. This strange symbiosis between these diametrically opposing movements not only contributes to the greater strangulation and stifling of democratic aspirations in Islamic societies but is also geared to embolden radical Islamists to foster illiberal values in the West.

*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Before analyzing the ramifications of the unusual alliance between two diametrically opposed ideological movements for democracy, it is essential to examine the basis for their mutual attraction. It has become mind-numbing to witness how the radical left that conceptualizes religion as “the opium of the masses” and displays a progressive view of gender and sexual orientation has gravitated toward radical Islam, which espouses principles that run counter to the values that the radical left stands for.  As will be demonstrated later, even though both movements raise the flag of social justice, equality, and fighting oppression, these are not necessarily the basis for their mutual attraction. The historical force of mutual attraction between these two ideologically different radical movements emanates from their shared hostility toward the US-led Western imperialism in particular and Western liberal democracy in general (Vidino, 2022; Salzman, 2025).

The roots of the radical left’s attraction to and fascination with radical Islam can be traced back to the 1979 revolution in Iran, which culminated in the collapse of the pro-Western monarchy and the ascendancy of the Islamic regime. The prevailing anti-American and anti-Western slogans during the revolution resonated with the Western leftist intellectuals' anti-imperialist crusade (Sixsmith, 2018). The Islamic Revolution in Iran was perceived by prominent Western leftist intellectuals, such as Edward Said and Richard Falk, as a harbinger of emancipation and freedom from the yoke of imperialism, colonialism, and Western hegemony (Zarnett, 2007). Even Michel Foucault, a known homosexual and utterly devoid of any religious beliefs, was infatuated with the Islamic revolution in Iran and vehemently envisaged radical Islam as the most effective revolutionary force to counter and challenge Western liberalism (Afray and Anderson, 2005). Noam Chomsky (2019), the renowned intellectual voice of the radical left, has envisioned the Islamic regime in Iran as an international fortification displaying a successful defiance against US imperialism. Within the radical left circle, there is a strong propensity to envision even Hezbollah and Hamas movements as parts of the axis of resistance against US imperialism and Israeli dominance (Babak, 2014).

Thus, anti-Americanism and anti-Western liberal democracy have served as a gravitational force in fostering the strategic alliance between these two ideologically distinct camps. Disillusioned and disappointed by the lack of an international working class to wage a revolutionary class struggle against capitalism and Western imperialism, the radical left views political Islam as the most effective revolutionary agent of transformation. On the other hand, Islamic fundamentalists view the radical left as a force that has the potential to not only challenge liberal democracy in the West but also oppose and slow down the wheels of Western intervention in Islamic countries. This is why, while radical Islam in power has already exhibited its willingness to violently suppress leftist activists at home, it has been incessantly striving to galvanize the leftist discourse around the globe as a strategy to undermine liberal democracy and weaken the US influence (Jose, 2022).

As Abbas Milani (2023), an Iranian scholar living in the USA, has pointed out, the Islamic regime in Iran has been spending millions of dollars in the West, particularly the US colleges and universities,

to create an intellectual proxy in the West to fight the 'culture war' and facilitate the 'Historic Turn.” … one that would bring about an end to the catastrophic era of Judeo-Christian Western hegemony and usher in the apocalyptic victory of Islam.

This confounding marriage of convenience between the radical left and political Islam has debilitating implications for the left, democratic struggles in Islamic societies, and the state of democracy in Western countries.

The radical left’s strategic alliance with the Islamic fundamentalists has trivialized the left’s anti-oppression commitment, which is, in turn, conducive to lending credence to the left’s critics who have questioned the sincerity of the radical left’s dedication to social justice and opposing any form of oppression. While the radical left has eagerly collaborated with the militant Islamists to sustain persistent demonstrations against Israel which is perceived by both sides as the outpost of Western imperialism, the radical left has been shockingly reticent on certain atrocities and inhuman situations such as the mistreatment of LGBTQ in Islamic societies, the suppression of Uyghur Muslims in China, the slaughtering of more than 500000 Syrians by the deposed Assad regime aided by the Islamic regime of Iran and Russia, and the ongoing violent suppression of progressive forces including leftist activists in Iran by the Islamic regime (International Workers League, 2012; Smith, 2018)).  The radical left’s selectivity in opposing oppression is bound to tarnish the left’s ideological underpinings and impugn the sincerity of its proclaimed commitment to fighting oppression. The selectivity of the radical left in opposing oppression raises a legitimate question. Would the radical left have still excoriated Israel if the latter were not an ally of the United States and the West? 

Another implication of the radical left’s affinity with radical Islam is stifling the aspiration for democracy in Islamic societies. Due to its excessive obsession with anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism, the radical left has expediently sacrificed its anti-oppression principle. Western-based anti-imperialist leftists have not only subordinated people’s struggle for democracy in non-liberal democratic countries to their preoccupation with fighting imperialism but have also intentionally or inadvertently condoned oppression and egregious atrocities committed by these authoritarian regimes, such as the Islamic regime of Iran, which have wrapped themselves up in the flag of anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism (Smith, 2018).

As Saeed Rahnema (2009), an Iranian scholar living in Canada, has observed, some Western leftist intellectuals have not only eschewed showing sympathy for Iranian progressive forces fighting for democracy, but they have sedulously endeavored to depict a positive picture of the Islamic regime in Iran. In other words, the radical left in the West has become an obstinate defender of the Islamic fundamentalist organizations (such as Hezbollah and Hamas) and regimes such as the Islamic regime in Iran, which utilize anti-Americanism and anti-Western liberal democracy as a certified license to oppress their population, including progressive and secular leftists which is bound to suppress aspiration for democracy. Thus, the radical left’s use of anti-US imperialism as a justification for ignoring the oppressive nature of the Islamic movements in general  and the Islamic regime in Iran in particular has been conducive to betraying the long-held socialist principle of international solidarity with all oppressed people of the world (Smith2018,)

In the quest for promoting inclusivity and protecting marginalized groups from harmful language and behaviors, the radical left has emerged as the enabler of radical Islam in the West.  While the left as a whole and the radical leftists in particular have no qualm in excoriating and even responding with hostility to any forms of extremism related to major religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, they have refrained from criticizing Islam and Islamic extremists (Walzer, 2016).  The radical left in academia and even Centre-left governments justify such a controversial stance as an essential bulwark against the spread of “Islamophobia” (defined as unreasonable fear of Islam that leads to discrimination against Muslims). However, the use of such an ambiguous definition of Islamophobia is tacitly geared to stifle freedom of expression, which is, in turn, conducive to engendering an auspicious environment for radical Islam to flourish in the West (Tatchell, 2019). In other words, while Islamic fundamentalists utilize the cherished civil liberties in the West to advance their agenda, they are protected from being censured and questioned for propagating illiberal values (Reid, 2011).

The radicalization of Muslims has already emerged as a pressing issue that Western countries have encountered (Azaam, 2007; Balzacq and Settoul, 2022). As the former French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, has pointed out, the charge of the Islamophobia label is convincingly harnessed by progressive elites and Islamists’ apologists as a tactical weapon to silence any legitimate criticisms of Islamists and Islamic organizations (Goldberg, 2015).  Pascal Bruckner (2010) argues that the term “Islamophobia” is “a clever invention because it amounts to making Islam a subject that one cannot touch without being accused of racism” (p.48).

Shielding radical Islam from even constructive criticisms constitutes an impending threat to democracy, as Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), alluded to in 2017.  In his insightful and bold speech at a public panel in Riyadh in 2017, which served as a wake-up call to the Western liberal democracies, he warned that:

There will come a day when we see far more radicals, extremists, and terrorists coming out from Europe because of a lack of decision-making and trying to be politically correct or assuming that they know the Middle East or Islam better than we do, and I am sorry that is pure ignorance (Cited in Salem, 2019).

Infatuation with Islamists’ anti-American imperialism and anti-Western liberal democracy slogans has gripped a substantial segment of the Left in the West since the Islamic revolution in Iran. The radical left’s attraction to and outright support of political Islam has not only been prone to tarnish socialist principles but has also been conducive to legitimizing the suppression of the democratic aspirations of progressive and secular forces in Islamic societies such as Iran. Furthermore, the radical left's insistence on the application of “Islamophobia” as a mechanism to shield radical Islamists from being criticized has emboldened and enabled the latter to propagate illiberal values.

The alliance between the Iranian left and radical Islamists during the Iranian revolution, which was accompanied by violent purges of the left by the governing Islamic regime, should provide a painful but valuable lesson to the radical left in the West. Given the destructive outcomes of the collaboration of leftists with Islamists in Iran, it is an illusion to assume that through its partnership with radical Islamists, the left in the West would bring about justice, peace, and democracy to the marginalized and oppressed people of the world.

References

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Afary Jent, Anderson, Kevin. (2005).  Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. University of Chicago Press.

Babak. (2024), The Axis of Resistance and the Fight Against American Imperialism: Where Does the Left Stand? The Call, Aug 26, https://socialistcall.com/2024/08/26/the-axis-of-resistance-and-the-fight-against-american-imperialism-where-does-the-left-stand/

Balzacq,Thierry, and Settoul, Elyamine (2022). Editors.  Radicalization in Theory and Practice: Understanding Religious Violence in Western Europe. University of Michigan Press.

Bruckner, Pascal. (2010).  The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chomsky, Noam. (2019), NoamChomsky: We Must Stop War with Iran Before It’s Too Late. In These Times. May 21, https://chomsky.info/20190521/

 Goldberg, Jeffery. (2015), French Prime Minister: 'I Refuse to Use This Term Islamophobia. The Atlantic. Jan 16, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/01/french-prime-minister-manuel-valls-on-islamophobia/384592/

Jose, Andrew. (2022). Expert: Iran Works on Mobilizing Extreme Left in Latin America to Expand Influence Network. JNS, Aug 11, https://www.jns.org/expert-iran-works-on-mobilizing-extreme-left-in-latin-america-to-expand-influence-network/

International Workers League. (2012), Erasing People Through Disinformation: Syria and the Anti-Imperialisms of Fools. Fourth International. April 1, https://litci.org/en/syriaandtheanti-imperialismoffools/

Milani, Abbas. (2023), Khamenei’s Muscular “Soft Power” in the US, Hoover Institution.  The caravan.   Dec 5, https://www.hoover.org/research/khameneis-muscular-soft-power-us

Rahnema Saeed.  (2009). The Tragedy of the Left’s Discourse on Iran Petras and others Misunderstand the Struggle. International Viewpoint. Online Socialist Magazine. July 19, https://internationalviewpoint.org/IMG/pdf/the-tragedy-of-the-left-s-discourse-on-iran_a1694.pdf

Reid, Sue. (2011). As Islamic extremists declare Britain's first Sharia law zone: The worrying social and moral implications. Daily Mail. July 29, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2020382/You-entering-Sharia-law-Britain-As-Islamic-extremists-declare-Sharia-law-zone-London-suburb-worrying-social-moral-implications.html

Salem, Ola. (2019), Arab Regimes Are the World’s Most Powerful Islamophobes. FP, March 29, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/29/arab-regimes-are-the-worlds-most-powerful-islamophobes/

Salzman, Philip Carl. (2025). How Radical Leftists and Islamists Unite Against Western Civilization.  the Kindersley Clarion. May 14, https://theclarion.ca/viewpoint/how-radical-leftists-and-islamists-united-against-western-civilization/

Sixsmith, Ben. (2018) Anti-Imperialism and Apologetics for Murder. Quillette.  Sept 15, https://quillette.com/2018/09/15/anti-imperialism-and-apologetics-for-murder/

Smith, Ashly. (2018), Why the Left Has to Stand with Iran’s Uprising. Socialist Workers.Org. Feb1, https://socialistworker.org/2018/02/01/why-the-left-has-to-stand-with-irans-uprising

Tatchell, Peter. (2019). MPs' Definition of Islamophobia Menaces Free Speech. Peter Tatchell Foundation. Aug 22, https://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/mps-definition-of-islamophobia-menaces-free-speech/

Vidino, Lorenzo. (2022). The Rise of “Woke” Islamism in the West. Hudson Institute. Jan 23, The Rise of “Woke” Islamism in the West | Hudson Institute

Walzer, Michael. (2016). Islamism and the Left. Dissent. Winter, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/islamism-and-the-left/

Zarnett, David. (2007).  Edward Said and the Iranian Revolution. Dissent. Summer. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya_article/edward-said-and-the-iranian-revolution

Dr. Sirvan Karimi is an Associate Professor at the School of Public Policy and Administration, York University, Toronto, Canada.

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

Since the end of the Cold War realism has returned to its roots. Realist scholars show renewed interest in their foundational thinkers, their tragic understanding of life and politics, their practical concern for ethics and their understanding of theory as the starting point for explanatory narratives or forward-looking forecasts that are highly context dependent. Despite their different perspectives on world politics, the writings of Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli, Edward Hallett Carr, Reinhold Niebuhr, Arnold Wolfers, John Herz, Hans Morgenthau and Hannah Arendt demonstrate a remarkable unity of thought as they were driven by similar concerns about ‘perennial problems’ (Morgenthau 1962, 19). One of these problems is the depoliticisation of societies. Realists were concerned that, in modern societies, people could no longer freely express their interests in public, losing the ability to collectively contribute to their societies. Consequently, realism can be perceived as a critique of and ‘corrective’ (Cozette 2008, 12) to this development. It may seem strange at first, but one way to see how realism relates to today’s world is to look back to its roots – via its earlier scholars – rather than dwell on some of the later developments in realist theory, such as neorealism. For this reason, this chapter will revisit realism to offer a contemporary perspective on what is, most probably, the oldest theory of IR and, most certainly, IR’s most significant theory family.

The basics of a contemporary perspective on realism

Mid-twentieth century realists, often called ‘classical’ realists, were a diverse group of scholars. Although their geographical centre was in the United States (with some exceptions), many of them were émigrés from Europe who had been forced to leave due to the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s. Although they shared a common humanistic worldview in the sense that they had received similar extensive secondary schooling in liberal arts   and believed that people can only experience themselves as human beings by engaging with others in the public sphere, their diversity is also evidenced  in their wide range of professions. Given that IR was only gradually institutionalised in Europe when the first chair was set up in light of the horrors of the First World War at the university in Aberystwyth in 1919, none   of them were trained as an IR scholar. Instead, they were historians, sociologists, philosophers, lawyers and even theologians. Only retrospectively were many of them linked to IR. Even Morgenthau, arguably the best- known realist, held a professorship for political science and history, not for International Relations. Despite this diversity, however, mid-twentieth century realists agreed on a tragic vision of life – a view they shared with many of  their predecessors (Lebow 2003; Williams 2005). This is because people, and more so leaders, have to make decisions on the basis of incomplete information, deal with unpredictability of their actions and cope with irreconcilable value conflicts within and among societies. Above all, they recognise that leaders must sometimes resort to unethical means (such as violence) to achieve laudable ends – and without prior knowledge that these means will accomplish the ends they seek.

This tragic outlook is understandable if we consider the contexts in which these classical realists wrote. Thucydides lived during the times of the Peloponnesian War in which Athens lost its pre-eminence in the ancient Greek world. Machiavelli’s life was also influenced by repetitive conflicts in which papal, French, Spanish and other forces aimed to seize control over Northern Italy during the Renaissance Wars (1494–1559). Modern realists finally experienced with the rise of ideologies the climax of a development    that had started almost two hundred years earlier. Since the Age of Enlightenment culminating in the French Revolution, people were freed from religious straightjackets. But simultaneously they had lost a sense of community that ideologies such as nationalism, liberalism or Marxism could only superficially restore – and often only at the cost of violent conflicts. Realists shared public sentiments that losing this sense of community caused a decline of commonly accepted values as exemplified in the German debate on a cultural crisis during the early decades of the twentieth century. This made them more susceptible to the temptations of ideologies. This is because ideologies provide what Arendt (1961, 469) called ‘world explanations’, enabling people to channel their human drives into them.

John Herz (1951) argued that the drive for self-preservation, which ensures that people care about their survival in the world by seeking food and shelter, provokes a security dilemma because people can never be certain to avoid attacks from others. Morgenthau (1930), by contrast, was more concerned about the drive to prove oneself, achieved by making contributions to one’s social-political life worlds. Success is difficult because people have incomplete knowledge about themselves and their life-worlds. Any political decision must always be temporary and subject to revision if circumstances change or knowledge is being advanced. In realising that their ambitions are in vain, another tragic aspect of life comes to the fore. For Morgenthau, accepting this tragic aspect is a first step toward transcending it; people can reflect critically about their existence and come to understand that only through their own efforts can life become meaningful. In modernity, however, having lost values as a basis to make informed judgements, peoples’ lives are characterised by what Steven Toulmin (1990, 35) called a ‘quest for certainty’, but very few manage to deal with the hardships self-critical contemplation entails. Most, as Nietzsche noted, content themselves with the illusions of being embedded in some form of community. Therefore, on the level of nation-states tragedy looms large because people live in political communities that are charac- terised by the same deficiencies that hamper the human condition.

Given that these drives affect people on every level, realists do not distinguish between domestic and international politics. Rather, they focus on political communities however they may be conceived because it is through peoples’ relations that these human drives start to affect politics. In these relations, power plays a decisive role. Due to the drive to prove oneself, a balance of power evolves in interpersonal, intergroup and international relations to counter ambitions of political actors to gain the ability to dominate others. This balance of power is not stable but evolving because actors face a security dilemma, meaning that, due to uncertainty, actors live in constant fear. This compels them to amass further power, only causing the same reaction in their potential adversaries. Hence, it is less physical or material constraints that lead to a balance of power and more emotional insecurity. Ironically, therefore, balance of power works best when needed least because if people and communities share some form of common identity, they can cooperate more easily and do not require a balance of power.

However, human drives have an even more dramatic effect on societies beyond the evolvement of a balance of power, as they can depoliticise them. This concern is central to the realist thought of Hans J. Morgenthau. He opposed the more common friend enemy/distinction and defined the political as a universal force that is inherent in every human and that necessarily focuses on others, while at the same time it only comes into being in inter- personal relationships. The resulting discussions, in which people express their interests, create an ‘arena of contestation’  (Galston 2010,  391). Realising their individual capabilities and experiencing power through acting together, people develop their identities, as they gain knowledge about themselves and their life-worlds.

The tragedy of human imperfection, however, endangers the political, as it fosters the development of ideologies. Given that most people cannot face their imperfections, ideologies offer some form of ontological security. This means that ideologies provide people with a sense of order and it helps them to conceal the initial meaninglessness of life, as ideologies offer explanations to historical and current socio-political events. Particularly fascism and communism occupied the minds of classical realists, as they were the most violent ideologies during their lifetime, but they were also critical of the hubris of American liberalism and nationalism in general.

For realists, ideologies aim to retain the socio-political status quo and any human activity is geared towards sustaining this reification. The current socio- political reality is perceived as given and it cannot be fundamentally altered. The development of the political as a realm in which people can voice their interests freely and share their thoughts about the composition and purpose of their political community endangers the socio-political status quo, as it potentially encourages socio-political change. To cope with this depoliticisation, realists put forward what can be called an ‘ethics of responsibility’, to   use Max Weber’s term. Although realists were convinced that most people would be unwilling or incapable of taking responsibility for their lives, they still argued for an ethics in which decision-making is guided by ‘intellectual honesty’ (Sigwart 2013, 429). Thoughts and beliefs have to be contextualised in a self-critical process that demonstrates empathy towards the position of others. The resulting ‘discourse ethic’, as Arendt called it, can only happen in collectivity. American town hall meetings provided the perfect setting for Arendt to illustrate this, as they allow all people who share a common interest to congregate. As a consequence, however, people have to be prepared to change their positions and be willing to take responsibility for the moral dilemmas of (inter)national politics.

Contrary to common assumptions, realists are not apologists of the nation- state, but critical of it, aiming to avoid its dangers and transcend its shortcomings by investigating the potential of a world-state (Scheuerman 2011). For a variety of reasons, classical realists considered states to be ‘blind and potent monster[s]’ (Morgenthau 1962, 61). They are blind because globalisation and technological advancements not only hinder them from fulfilling their role of providing security, but endanger life on earth altogether. Particularly strong versions of this critique can be found in Aron, Herz and Morgenthau. The latter provided a disenchanted view on the prospects of humanity in one of his last public appearances, arguing that we are living in a ‘dream world’ because nation-states can no longer uphold the claim to have a monopoly of power over a given territory due to the development of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the squandering of natural resources threatens the environment, leading to a ‘society of waste’ (Morgenthau 1972, 23). However, nation-states are also potent because in gaining sovereignty over a specific territory and a specific group of people, they exert violence on these people and on others. Nation-states universalise their own standards and even try to impose them onto others, as evidenced in the rise of fascism during the early twentieth century in Europe. After seizing power in countries like Italy, Germany, Spain and Croatia, fascist movements not only waged wars internationally (ultimately leading to the Second World War) but also exerted violence domestically by ostracising ethical, religious and socio-political minorities. Furthermore, technological advancements complicate human life- worlds, accelerating socio-political decision-making processes. This benefited the development of scientific elites, who are unaccountable to the public, but who in their attempt to socially plan the world affect people in their everyday lives greatly.

Classical realist perspectives on the European migration crisis

Since 2011, millions of people have become displaced from Syria due to the civil war there. This has been exacerbated by migration flows coming from other states in Africa and the Middle East due to various political and economic circumstances. By 2015 the issue had been declared a crisis in Europe – the destination for many of the migrants. Focusing on this crisis might not seem to be an obvious choice, but many realists were refugees or migrants themselves. Indeed, Herz (1984, 9) characterised himself as a ‘traveller between all worlds’ and Morgenthau was even a ‘double exile’ (Frankfurter 1937) after his expulsion from Germany and later Spain before arriving in the United States in 1937. Beyond this point, realism provides useful insights into this crisis as we can investigate the conditions for a peaceful coexistence of differences. This is important, as the refugee issue has been identified as one of the reasons why the British public voted to leave the European Union (EU) in the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum. It has also been implicated in the rise of right-wing parties throughout Europe and the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. Refugees and migrants are clearly being pictured in security discourses as a threat – and to measurable effects.

Relating the work of mid-twentieth century ‘classical’ realists to this modern development enables IR scholarship to understand that security is established in a discursive context, making it dependent on spatio-temporal conditions. This means security has different meanings in different contexts and therefore it is transformative (Behr 2013, 169). This puts realist thought into affinity with the critical theories that ostensibly seem opposed to it. Given that both groupings found stimulation in the same sources, one of which was Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1929), this is unsurprising. One of the key concepts in Mannheim’s book is the conditionality of knowledge. This means that knowledge is always bound to the socio-political environment in which it operates, stressing that universal knowledge is impossible. Applying this notion to the current refugee crisis, we understand that perceiving refugees as a threat to security is the result of human will and political agency. For example, the refugee crisis was one of the dominant drivers of British Brexit-discourses, although the UK received fewer than 40,000 asylum seekers in 2015. By comparison, approximately 890,000 refugees chose Germany as their destination the same year, making Germany the European country that accepts most refugees in relation to the overall population.

This is not to say that this process always takes place consciously as we can never be entirely sure how our writings or actions are perceived by others, but classical realism can help us to understand that humans are not only the objects of security but also its subjects. In public discourses, people have the opportunity to redefine the substance of security, instead of leaving it to international foreign policy elites. These discourses can evolve violently, as they include the interests of all involved people. To avoid this looming danger, realists stress the possibility of dialogical learning, as current scholarship calls it, to increase the potential to morph these discourses into a common good. This form of learning is based on continuous possibilities of exchange between refugees, migrants and local people and it requires all groups to demonstrate open-mindedness and empathy as well as the willingness to challenge one’s own positions. As a result, security can be redefined and what is perceived to be a crisis can be eventually understood as an opportunity to create something ‘which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination’ (Arendt 1961, 151).

Recall that classical realists were sceptical of the promises of modern nation-states and argued for the establishing of a world community, eventually leading to a world state. Such a global community would help to transcend the depolitisation in modern societies and even support ‘defenders of the global state to stay sober’ (Scheuerman 2011, 150). Such sobriety would be beneficial to add to the academic and political debate on migration. After all, the root of the migration crisis in Europe was that certain states, and certain influential groups within them, decided to enforce the metaphorical and physical walls of their borders and limit (or block) migrants from entering due to perceiving them as a security threat to their nation. By enabling people to get together on different levels, political spheres can extrapolate beyond national borders, allowing people to exchange their interests globally and gradually develop an identity that goes beyond that of the state. It also allows for different images of the migrant, or the refugee, to gain traction – to replace the negative ones that became widespread in Europe by 2015.

The flexibility found within the classical realist literature allows people to accommodate diverse human interests. The resulting self-reflexivity and open-mindedness helps life trajectories influenced by different historical, cultural, socio-political or religious factors to be accepted. In political spheres, people are acknowledged for their differences and, through discussion, a common ground is established that is at least acceptable to citizens at a basic level. If this can be done within each state, then it is possible that it can be done at the global level. If such an end can be attained then there will be no migration crises in the future as a global citizenry will exist. Classical realists did not arrive at this conclusion straight away. Rather, scholars like Morgenthau and Niebuhr were sceptical at first of international organisations like the United Nations and the early forms of the European Union. However, they soon realised that they provide the space (if used as they had hoped) for the political to gradually evolve, as different actors can get together peacefully and exchange their ideas at the international level.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have introduced a perspective on realism that is probably unlike what may be found in other IR theory textbooks. It was our ambition to introduce students to a more nuanced perspective on realism, to set it apart from neorealism, and to demonstrate that realism can help us to develop a more critical awareness of international politics. Realism, especially in its classical form, is therefore far from being ready for the dustbin of the history of IR theory – as some critics suggest. It can serve as a stepping stone to question some of the common assumptions held in the discipline, propose solutions to some of the contemporary problems in international relations and show us how we can create more inclusive societies.

This is an excerpt from Global Climate Justice: Theory and Practice. You can download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.

Climate change is happening, and its impacts are increasingly felt by all communities, especially the vulnerable ones that do not have enough resources to adapt to the changes. Global warming, sea-ice melting and sea- level rise have all been accelerating, and with them the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Human activities bear most of the responsibility for what we have been observing since the Industrial Revolution. Greenhouse gas emissions must be cut dramatically by about 5-8% every year starting now if we want to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040–2050, and limit global average warming to below 2°C above the pre-industrial level as agreed in Paris in 2015. Failure to act swiftly and effectively will cause even more severe impacts, as indicated by the climate projections generated using state-of-the-art Earth-system models.

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This chapter, firstly, presents the evidence for climate change and explains the role of human beings in causing it. Secondly, it explains the concept of an Earth-system model and discusses its role as a tool for understanding the past climate evolution and generating projections of the future climate. Thirdly, it discusses the per capita greenhouse gas emissions of different countries and economic sectors. Finally, it presents climate projections to illustrate how Earth’s climate could evolve under different emissions scenarios.

1. Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to provide a solid, objective and quantitative background to climate change. In Section 2 we will review the greenhouse effect, a key phenomenon that has made Earth a planet where complex lifeforms could evolve, and what are the main greenhouse gases. Understanding the greenhouse effect, the main gases that cause it and its role in the development of life on Earth is essential to be able to recognize what has been happening to Earth’s climate in the 100 years following the Industrial Revolution. Sections 3 and 4 analyse the observed trends in greenhouse gas emissions over time and discuss the observed climate variations and their impacts.

This first part of the chapter will provide a sound understanding of what has been happening to the Earth climate. Section 5 explains what an Earth-system model is and how it can be used to estimate future climate scenarios and their probabilities of occurrence. It discusses how these scenarios are generated and the role that emission assumptions play in determining the future climate. Section 6 presents an analysis of which countries have contributed mostly to the stock of greenhouse gases, and whether there is a clear link between greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere and global warming. Section 7 discusses the quasi-linear relationship between accumulated emissions and average global warming. It also discusses how we must constrain the emissions if we want to limit the global warming below 1.5°C or 2°C degrees. Finally, Section 8 summarizes the key points discussed in this chapter, and discusses the global warming that we could experience in 2050 under four possible emissions scenarios: one with a continuous future increase of greenhouse gas emissions of 1% per year, and three with a continuous future decrease of greenhouse gas emissions by 1%, 3% or 5%.

2. The Greenhouse Effect

The Earth’s temperature would be about 30°C colder if not for the atmosphere’s greenhouse effect. The problem we face today is that too strong a greenhouse effect has been warming the planet in an unprecedented way. And with the warming, we have been experiencing an increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and sea-level rise, which have had negative impacts on tens of millions of people who do not have always have sufficient resources to adapt to climate change.

Before discussing climate change and the actions we can take to control it, let us briefly review the greenhouse effect by considering the Earth as a very simple system in equilibrium. The Earth is a system that receives heat in the form of solar radiation and emits heat as a black body. If we apply the first law of thermodynamics (which says that energy must be conserved) to this simple model of the Earth, then there must be an equilibrium between the absorbed and the emitted energy.

The Earth, as any physical ‘body’ that has a temperature above absolute zero (–273.15°C), emits radiation with a certain characteristic (frequency, wavelength, spectrum). The sun, a much warmer body than the Earth, also emits radiation. We can apply the Stefan-Boltzmann law to compute the energy emitted per square meter by a black-body with a temperature T. Here, the term ‘black body’ means that we assume that the Earth and the sun behave as idealized, opaque and non-reflective bodies. The Stefan-Boltzmann law relates the emitted radiation per square meter to the black body’s temperature.

Thanks to the presence of the atmosphere, which absorbs most of the long-wave radiation emitted by Earth’s surface, and re-emits radiation as a black body, the Earth has an average surface temperature of 304°K, which is about 31°C. This temperature (31°C) is about 50°C higher than the temperature the Earth would have without a greenhouse effect.

We should point out that 31°C is higher than the observed average surface temperature, which is about 15°C. This difference is due to the fact that we have assumed that the Earth behaves as a simple system with a very simple atmosphere. In other words, we have over-simplified the Earth and did not consider the complexity of the Earth system. Thus, we should not be surprised if the completed and observed values are different. Despite this, this simple model highlights the important role that an atmosphere has on the Earth’s surface temperature. To make the model slightly more complex, we could assume that the atmosphere is compounded by few different layers instead of only one, with each layer characterized by a different temperature and find a solution for the Earth surface’s temperature that is closer to the observed one.

The atmosphere allows most short-wave solar radiation to reach Earth’s surface, while the amount of the long-wave radiation emitted by the Earth that it absorbs depends on its chemical composition. The principal greenhouse gases are water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases (Table 1). Note that their concentrations are very small, ranging from about 0.3% (in mass fraction with respect to dry air) for water vapour to much smaller values for carbon dioxide and methane.

There are two key differences between water vapour and the other gases. First, for any air mass, the water vapour concentration strongly depends on the pressure and the temperature of the air. If a mass of air that contains water vapour is cooled and/or compressed, water vapour would condense and precipitate; water continues to cycle, and as a consequence, the total concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere changes very little. Indeed, the time that a molecule of H₂O spends in the atmosphere is about 10 days. In the last 100 years, human beings have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere by more than 50%, from about 270 parts per million (ppm) at the end of the nineteenth century, to about 415 ppm today.

A further, important point to make is that the time that a molecule of CO₂ spends in the atmosphere is between 300 and 1,000 years, and the time that a molecule of CH₄ spends in the atmosphere is about 10 years. This means that greenhouse gases continue to exercise their effect long after they have been injected in the atmosphere. Because of these two differences, the continuous injection of large quantities of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has and will for many tens and hundreds of years influence the Earth’s climate.

3. Observed Trends in Greenhouse Gases

The concentration of the greenhouse gases has been increasing since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Figure 1.4 shows the annual mean concentrations of CO₂ and CH₄, computed using data collected at the Mauna Loa Observatory (Hawaii, United States).

Let us start by looking at CO₂. The atmospheric concentration of CO₂ has exceeded 400 ppm in 2015. It is worth stressing that the Earth has not seen such a high concentration in the past 2.5 million years (see, e.g., Wallace and Hobbs 2006; Hartmann 2016; IPCC 2021). Note also that the increase follows a roughly exponential curve, and that the annual percent increase has been growing nearly continuously. In fact, as shown in Figure 1.5, while in the 1960s and 1970s the annual percent increase in CO₂ was between 0.2-0.4%, in the last two decades it has been above 0.5%. Figure 1.5 also shows that the last two decades have seen a clear positive trend, with the growth rate increasing by about 0.01 every year, from about 0.47% in 2000 to about 0.65% in 2020.

CH₄ concentrations have also been increasing from about 1,645 ppb in 1985 (data before 1985 were not available) to 1,879 ppb in 2020 (Figure 1.4). Figure 1.5 shows that the annual growth rate decreased between 1985 and 2000, but since then values have been growing at a fast rate. The last two decades have seen a clear positive trend, with the growth rate increasing by about 0.03 every year, from about 0% in 2000 to 0.60% in 2020.

4. Observed Climate Change

As the concentration of the greenhouse gases increased, the atmosphere has been absorbing more long-wave radiation emitted by the Earth, and thus has been warming. A warmer atmosphere has been emitting more long-wave radiation towards the Earth’s surface, which thus has also been warming. This cause-and-effect mechanism between increasing emissions of greenhouse gases and the global average temperature is a direct consequence of the greenhouse effect that was discussed in Section 1.

Figure 1.6 shows the anomaly of the global annual mean temperature with respect to the pre-industrial value. In other words, for each year, the figure shows the difference between the global annual mean temperature of that year and the global annual-mean temperature of the period 1850-1900. The solid line shows the annual values, while the straight line (which has a slope of ~0.02°C/year) shows the long-term warming trend. Note that superimposed over this linear warming trend of ~0.2°C per decade are natural oscillations of about 0.1-0.2°C. These natural oscillations are due to natural variability, for example linked to large volcanic eruptions or heat exchanged between the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. In this latter case, the occurrence of large- scale episodes in the tropical Pacific Ocean that causes the ocean temperature to warm (during the El Niño event) or to cool (during La Niña events) produce are natural oscillations in temperature.

Figure 1.6 is based on a new dataset produced by the European Union Copernicus Climate Change Service, the ERA-5 reanalysis (Hersbach et al. 2020), constructed by assimilating all available observations of the Earth system in a state-of-the-art model at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). It covers the satellite era – the period from 1980 through the present, during which satellite data has allowed scientists to monitor the Earth’s temperature accurately. Figure 1.6 shows that in 2020 the global average temperature was about 1.2°C warmer than the pre-Industrial level, and that the six years from 2015 to 2020 have been the 6 warmest years since 1980.

This warming is not the only evidence that the climate is changing, as was very clearly summarized by the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published in August 2021. The Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) written by IPCC Working Group I confirms that many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years and that some of the changes already set in motion will continue to affect the climate over hundreds to thousands of years in the future (IPCC 2021). It also states, however, that strong and sustained reductions in emissions of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases could limit climate change.

The SPM provides updated estimates of the chances of crossing a global warming level of 1.5°C and 2°C (with respect to the pre-Industrial level) in the next decades. These two levels, 1.5°C and 2°C, were agreed by the 196 countries that signed the Paris Agreement in 2015 (UNFCCC 2015) as warming levels that should not be overcome. The SPM confirms that unless there are immediate and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to 2°C will be beyond reach. It also confirms that the emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1°C of warming since 1850-1900, and reports that global temperature could reach a warming of between 2°C and 5°C unless immediate and concrete measures are taken to reduce emissions.

These conclusions are not new. They confirm the results published in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and mentioned in earlier IPCC reports. What is new is that the SPM report of August 2021 is that it includes seven additional years of evidence (AR5 was published in 2014), it reports climate projections based on more realistic and higher resolution models, and it discusses results obtained using new techniques that merge different observations and allow scientists to assess the realism of Earth system models in a more sophisticated way. Furthermore, the report includes results from analyses that combine multi-model projections and thus provide more reliable uncertainty estimates.

It is worth summarizing some of the key impacts of climate change reported in the SPM:

• Climate change is intensifying the water cycle: this brings more intense rainfall and associated flooding, as well as more intense drought in many regions (examples are the floods that affected Central Europe in July 2021, Bangladesh and Australia in June/July 2022, and the forest fires linked to heat waves and droughts that have been affecting many countries during the past two summers of 2021 and 2022).

• Climate change is affecting rainfall patterns: at high latitudes, precipitation is likely to increase, while it is projected to decrease in the Tropics and the Mediterranean region.

• Climate change-induced sea-level rise has accelerated in the past decade, with sea-level rise rates reaching ~3.4mm/year: extreme events related to sea-level rise that previously occurred once every 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century.

• Climate change-induced warming will amplify permafrost thawing, the loss of seasonal snow cover, melting of glaciers (see, e.g., what has been happening in the Alps, including the disaster of the Marmolada glacier in July 2022) and ice sheets and the loss of Arctic Sea ice, which is projected to be ice-free in summer before the end of the century.

• Climate change led to ocean warming, ocean acidification and reduced oxygen levels that have affected ocean ecosystems.

• For cities, some aspects of climate change may be amplified, including heat waves (since urban areas are usually warmer than their surroundings), flooding from heavy precipitation events and sea-level rise in coastal cities.

The SPM also states that without immediate, drastic actions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, average global warming could reach more than 2.5°C by the end of the century, thus overtaking both warming levels that the 196 countries that signed the Paris Agreement in 2015 (UNFCCC 2015) agreed must not be overcome.

Let us now move to discuss, in the next sections, three key questions that will allow us to understand how we got here and by how much we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit warming to below 2°C.

• How can we estimate the warming levels we could reach in 10, 20, and 50 years?

• If we look back at the past, which countries have contributed most to greenhouse gas emissions?

• Is there a straightforward link between greenhouse gas emissions and average global warming?

5. Earth-System Models for Climate Studies

Climate projections, such as the ones reported in the IPCC assessment reports, are generated using state-of-the-art models of the Earth system. These models are designed to simulate as accurately as possible all the key processes that determine Earth’s climate. In particular, they aim to simulate the interactions between the atmosphere, the oceans, the cryosphere and land processes. They are based on the laws of physics, such as the conservation of mass and energy and the fact that if a force is applied to a mass of air, it will change its velocity and position. They simulate how clouds are formed, move and cause precipitation. They simulate the interaction between the short-wave solar radiation and the long-wave radiation emitted by the Earth and masses of air in the atmosphere to determine how much energy reaches the Earth surface, how much is absorbed or reflected by the atmosphere. They simulate how air flows pass mountains and how ocean waves affect the presence and/or shape of sea ice. These models see the Earth as a three-dimensional mesh of points with one point every few tens of kilometres on two horizontal axes and every few

hundred metres on a vertical axis (see, e.g., Flato 2011, Gettelmann and Rodd 2016). In total, a model with one grid point every 10 km and with vertical levels every 500 m will have about 109 grid points. At each grid point, the state of the Earth is represented by a set of variables, the so-called state variables. For the atmosphere, for example, these variables are temperature, pressure, wind, specific humidity and cloud types. At the land surface, these variables include information about the type of vegetation and soil, soil temperature and humidity and snow cover. In general, the state variables are chosen so that they are the smallest number of variables that, if they are known, are sufficient to describe in a realistic way the state of the Earth system (e.g., whether it will rain or not, whether intense convective systems will develop or not and whether tropical storms could develop into hurricanes or not). The model aims to represent the state of the Earth system at each grid point at fixed time intervals, say about every 10 minutes.

These Earth system models can be used to predict how the state of the Earth system changes over time, from a few days ahead to years and even decades. The same models are used daily to predict the weather over the next days, weeks and months. To be able to predict the future states of the Earth system, the first step is to know as accurately as possible the state of the system now. This can be estimated by collecting as many observations as possible and by merging them in an objective way that considers their relative accuracy.

To predict the future states of the Earth system, these models, or more precisely the equations that describe how the different model variables interact and change over time, need to be solved. Since the equations are complex and the number of grid points onto which they need to be solved is huge (we said it is about one billion, i.e., 109), they can be solved only numerically, using very fast super-computers. The faster the super-computers, the finer the mesh of the model can be, and the more detailed the description of the physical processes is. In the case of weather prediction, for example, every day more than 600 million observations are collected (95% using instruments on satellites) and about 100 million are assimilated to estimate the current state of the system. It takes between 2–4 hours for all observations to be received; then, the assimilation process (which uses an Earth system model) takes about one hour if one dedicates to it about half of the existing fastest super-computers.

Once the state of the atmosphere has been estimated, the model is integrated numerically on the super-computer and, in about one more hour (again, if one dedicates to this computation about half one of the fastest super-computers), one can generate a forecast valid for the next 10 days. Thus, if one has access to one of the fastest super-computers, in about two hours since all observations have been received (or about six hours since the observations have been collected), one could know the state of the Earth system over the whole globe and know how it will change in the next 10 days.

One of the main differences between making a weather forecast and predicting the climate for the next 10, 20 or 50 years, is the fact that the model has to be integrated numerically for a much longer time. For example, if one wants to generate a climate prediction for the next 50 years with the same model used to make a weather forecast (with a mesh with one grid point every 10 km on the horizontal and every 500 metres on the vertical), one will need about 3 months if they could dedicate to this task half of one of the fastest super-computers. The problem is that although one could dedicate half a super-computer for one hour to the generation of a weather forecast, it is practically impossible to dedicate half of a super-computer for one climate prediction. Thus, more realistically, one should multiply this estimate of 3 months by a factor between 2 and 5, which means that generating a climate prediction for the next 50 years with a mesh with one grid point every 10 km on the horizontal and every 500 metres on the vertical, would take between 0.5 and 2.5 years.

To reduce the time required to complete one climate prediction, one could reduce the resolution from 10 to 50 km on the horizontal, and from 500 to 1,000 metres on the vertical. This reduces the number of grid points by a factor of 50 (5x5x2) and thus makes the whole computation faster by at least that factor, which means that one could generate a climate prediction for the next 50 years in a few weeks. The negative impact of using a reduced resolution is that a climate prediction, compared to a weather prediction, contains less details. Losing these details can have an impact on the capability of a climate prediction to inform us on whether extreme and small- scale events, such as windstorms and flash floods, could become more intense or more frequent in the future.

Despite the fact that Earth system models, when used to make climate predictions, are today characterized by a resolution of about 50 km on the horizontal and 1,000 metres on the vertical, they are still the best tools we have to understand how the climate could change, and what the probabilities that different climate scenarios will occur in the future are. If the models are realistic and simulate future scenarios reliably, they can provide better information than statistics based on the past events, i.e., on the climate of the past decades. This is why many efforts are made by the scientific community to make them increasingly more realistic by including more relevant processes and by improving the simulation of the processes they already simulate.

A second key difference between weather and climate predictions is due to the fact that the climate is very sensitivity to changes in the concentration of the greenhouse gases. Thus, to generate a prediction, one has to assume how the concentration of greenhouse gases will change in the future. In other words, the climate predictions are ‘driven’ by emissions scenarios: high emissions will induce an acceleration of the greenhouse effect and thus an increased warming, while low emissions will slow down the warming rate.

The SPM (IPCC 2021) discusses five possible future climate scenarios, defined by considering a range of possible future developments in anthropogenic drivers of climate change found in the scientific literature. Emissions vary between scenarios depending on socioeconomic assumptions, population growth, levels of climate change mitigation and, for aerosols and non-methane ozone precursors, air pollution controls. Climate projections indicate that, depending on the emissions, the global mean temperature anomaly in 2050 could stay below 1.5°C degrees or increase up to 2.5°C degrees (see IPCC 2021, Figure SPM.8).

The result of these efforts is better knowledge of how the system could behave in the future. For example, the SPM report talks explicitly about the probability that tipping points could be reached and irreversible changes to the Earth system could occur in the future. Tipping points, such as the ones linked to the melting of the Greenland ice sheets or to the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest, can trigger an acceleration of global warming and are now mentioned more commonly because the scientific community has confidence that the Earth system models used today are capable of simulating how these key Earth system components could realistically evolve in the future.

Let us consider the first question we posed in Section 3: How do we know what level of warming we will reach in 10, 20, and 50 years? The answer is: by integrating state-of-the-art Earth system models and using them to predict possible future scenarios that could occur as a function of assumed greenhouse gas emissions based on an estimated probability that each scenario could occur.

6. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Per Capita Between 1990–2016

Let us now address the second question that was posed in Section 3: If we look back at the past, which countries have contributed mostly to greenhouse gas emissions? We will answer this question by looking at the CO₂ emissions data available from the World Bank between 1990 (a year that is often chosen as the reference with respect to which emission reduction targets are set) and 2016 (the last data point available in the World Bank data archive).

We often read that China is the major emitter of CO₂, and that Europe contributes to only about 9% of the total emissions. When we read these sentences, often it is not clear whether they refer to the total emissions of a country or a group of countries or to per capita emissions, and it is also not obvious whether they refer to a specific year or to emissions accumulated over a long time period.

Figure 1.7 shows both the total and per capita CO₂ emissions the top seven emitters accumulated between 1990–2016 (1990 was chosen since emission reduction targets are often based on a 1990 baseline; 2016 has been chosen since it is the last data point available in the World Bank data). The per capita values have been computed by dividing total emissions by total mid-year population.

In terms of total emissions (Figure 7, left panel), these seven countries (or groups of countries) emitted 68% of the world CO₂ emissions during the 1990–2016 period. China and the US contributed the most: 21% and 20% of the CO₂ emissions injected into the atmosphere during those 26 years came from these two countries. They are followed by the European Union, which injected about 12% of the world’s total CO₂ emissions. The other major emitters followed, with contributions ranging from about 1% (Australia) to about 7% (Russian Federation).

By comparing these values, it should be evident that it is difficult to compare total emissions of countries with different populations, and that one should also consider per capita emissions. It should be noted that emissions per capita are a more ‘just’ measure of emissions since they reflect better whether each person has been given access to the same amount of energy.

The right panel of Figure 1.7 shows the accumulated per capita emissions, for the same period, 1990–2016. Note that now there is a wider difference between the countries. With respect to this measure, one person living in the US has emitted 500 tonnes of CO₂ over those 26 years, compared to about 120 tonnes for a person living in China. Australia, Canada and Russia now rank second, third and fourth among the major emitters. Note that an average person living in India has emitted only 30 tonnes of CO₂ in 26 years, about the same amount that persons living in the top four polluters injected in the atmosphere in just two years.

It is interesting to compare these numbers with the world average CO₂ emissions per capita – 115 tonnes: note that a person living in the top four polluters emitted about four times more than the world average, a person living in the European Union about two times more, a person living in China the same as the average and a person living in India four times less.

As economies developed and transformed throughout the years, the emission ranking changed. Figure 1.8 gives a snapshot of the most recent year, 2016, for which the data are available in the World Bank database. It shows that, in 2016 and in terms of total emissions, China is the top contributor with a contribution of about 29% of the world emissions, followed by the US with about 15% and the European Union with about 8.5%. But if we look at emissions per capita, the US, Canada and Australia remains the top polluters, with emissions per capita of about 15 tonnes in 2016, compared to about seven tonnes for a person living in China, 6.5 tonnes for a person living in the European Union and 1.8 tonnes for a person living in India. In 2016, the world average CO₂ emissions per capita was about 4.5 tonnes. Thus, it is evident that there are still countries that emit about four times more than the average and countries that emit about four times less.

Let us consider the second question posed in Section 3: If we look back at the past, which countries have contributed most to greenhouse gas emissions? The answer depends on whether we use total or per capita emissions. China, the US and the European Union have contributed the most if we look at total emissions accumulated between 1990–2016. By contrast, if we look at per capita emissions accumulated between 1990–2016, the top emitters are the US, Australia, Canada and Russia, which emitted twice as much as an average person living in the European Union and four times as much as a person living in China.

7. Link between Greenhouse Gases and Global Warming

Let us know address the third of the three questions posed in Section 3: Is there a straightforward link between greenhouse gas emissions and average global warming? The latest IPCC report (IPCC 2021) talks about a quasi-linear relationship between the amount of greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere and global warming. Indeed, if we contrast global warming, measured by the global annual average surface temperature anomaly from 1980 until the present (Figure 1.6) against the greenhouse gases accumulated since 1980 (Figure 1.9), we can detect a quasi-linear trend.

The fitted straight line shown in Figure 1.9 has a slope of 0.5°C/1,000 Gt, which means that during this period, each additional 1,000 Gt of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has led to 0.5°C of warming on average. Note that the coefficient of determination of the linear fit, R2 = 0.82, confirms the existence of a robust linear relationship. Note that there are variations around this linear relationship, reflecting the fact that each year’s climate is influenced not only by greenhouse gas concentrations, but also by atmosphere and ocean dynamics (e.g., whether the year was characterized by a strong El Niño or La Niña event and whether other changes in the large- scale circulation caused heat waves over large areas of the globe).

The SPM talks about a slope of about 0.45°C/1,000 Gt, which is close to the relationship we found. We can use this quasi-liner relationship to estimate how much we could emit to limit warming. For example, given that in 2018 the average global warming was 1.1°C above pre-Industrial levels, we can only emit about 2,000 Gt more of greenhouse gases if we want to keep warming below 2°C. In 2019, we emitted about 45 Gt of greenhouse gases (of which ~30 Gt was CO₂ and ~15 Gt was CH₄ and other greenhouse gases). If we continue to emit, on average, about 45 Gt per year, in about 45 years we would reach that amount. If instead we want to keep global warming below 1.5°C, we have to limit emissions to less than 900 Gt. If we continue to emit as we did in 2019, i.e., about 45 Gt/year, we will surpass that value by 2038.

Let us consider the third of the three questions posed in Section 3: Is there a straightforward link between greenhouse gas emissions and average global warming? The answer is yes: since there is a quasi-linear relationship between accumulated emissions and global average warming, we can estimate in a straightforward way how the climate will look like in the future.

8. Concluding Remarks

We started our discussion in Section 1 by examining the greenhouse effect and the key role it has played in the development of complex lifeforms on planet Earth. Then, in Section 2, we discussed the observed, continued acceleration of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This acceleration is mainly due to human activities, as stated in the latest SPM report (IPCC 2021, see also Fig. SPM.1): ‘It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred’.

In Section 3, we documented the impact of the continued increase in greenhouse gas concentrations on the average global surface temperature between 1980 and 2020. We also briefly discussed some uncontroversial impacts of climate change, e.g., sea-level rise, sea-ice extension (especially in the Arctic) and increasingly intense and frequent extreme events.

In Section 4, we summarized the state of the climate, and discussed what has been happening to the global surface temperature since the Industrial revolution, and the impact of global warming on sea-level rise, the melting of sea-ice and glaciers and extreme weather events.

We then posed three key questions:

• How can we estimate the warming levels we could reach in 10, 20, and 50 years?

• If we look back at the past, which countries have contributed most to greenhouse gas emissions?

• Is there a straightforward link between greenhouse gas emissions and average global warming?

In Section 5, we addressed the first question and found that Earth system models are the best tools we have to predict future scenarios and their probabilities of occurrence. We have illustrated what an Earth system model is, the fact that they are based on the laws of physics and how they can be integrated numerically on super-computers to provide us with reliable information about the future climate.

In Section 6, we addressed the second question and found that the answer depends on how we measure emissions and whether emissions are accumulated over a long time period (in our case, we accumulated the emission over the 26 years, between 1990–2016) or over a short time period, such as the year 2016. We also said that the answer depends on whether one compares countries’ and groups-of-countries’ total emissions or their per capita emissions. We showed that if one looks at per capita emissions between 1990–2016, the ranking sees the US as the top contributor to climate change, followed by Australia, Canada, the Russian Federation, the European Union and then China.

In Section 7, we discussed the third question and showed that there is a quasi-linear relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. This relationship was also pointed out explicitly in the SPM report of 2021. Looking at data from 1980 to 2020, we showed that each additional 1,000 Gt of greenhouse gas emissions led 0.5°C of warming on average. This relationship can be used to make a simple, zero-dimensional prediction of the future climate. If we apply it, considering that the world injected about 45 Gt of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in 2019, and if we assume that emissions will continue at this level on average for the next few decades, we can predict that in about 13 years the warming will be about 1.5°C warmer on average than it was before the Industrial Revolution. We can also estimate that in about 40 years the rate of global warming will be about 2°C.

It should now be clear what has been happening to the climate, and why it is necessary to start immediately reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. If we want to keep warming below 2°C, we have to reduce the emissions substantially – by 5-8% per year on average, until we reach net-zero emissions in 2050. We can apply this simple quasi-linear relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and average global warming to look ahead into the future. If we look at the last 10 years, annual emissions grew from 39.8 Gt in 2009 to 45.8 Gt in 2018 (data from the World Bank).

Figure 1.10 shows, with the black diamonds, total greenhouse gas emissions and projected warming in 2050 computed applying the linear relationship discussed in Section 6, under four different emission scenarios:

• A continued average increase of 1% a year, as was the case between 2009–2018: this would cause a further 1,738 Gt of greenhouse gases to be injected into the atmosphere, which would reach 3,173 Gt and a warming of 2°C in 2050;

• A continued average decrease of 1% a year, starting from 2019: this would cause a further 1,249 Gt of greenhouse gases to be injected into the atmosphere, which would reach 2,684 Gt and a warming of 1.75°C in 2050;

• A continued average decrease of 3% a year, starting from 2019: this would cause a further 9994 Gt of greenhouse gases to be injected into the atmosphere, which would reach 2,429 Gt and a warming of 1.61°C in 2050;

• A continued average decrease of 5% a year, starting from 2019: this would cause a further 703 Gt of greenhouse gases to be injected into the atmosphere, which would reach 2,138 Gt and a warming of 1.47°C in 2050.

Thus, only by decreasing the emissions on average by ≥5% every year can we limit average global warming to below 1.5°C above pre-Industrial levels. But it is worth mentioning that even in this scenario, we will still be injecting about 9 Gt of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year by 2050. If we want to achieve ‘almost’ net-zero emissions, we must reduce average emissions by ≥8% every year: an average annual reduction of 8% a year would lower the emissions from the 45 Gt emitted in 2019, to about 3 Gt in 2050.

References

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Gettelmann, A. and Rodd, R.B. 2016. Demystifying climate models. A User Guide to Earth System Models. Berlin: Springer.

Hartmann, D. L. 2016: Global Physical Climatology. Second edition. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Hersbach, H., Bell, B., Berrisford, P., Hirahara, S., Horanyi, A., Munoz- Sabater, J., Nicolas, J., Peubey, C., Radu, R., Schepers, D., Simmons, A., Soci, C., Abdalla, S., Abellan, X., Balsamo, G., Bechtond, P., Biavati, G., Bonavita, M., De Chiara, G., Dahlgren, P., Dee, D., Diamantakis, M., Dragani, R., Flemming, J., Forbes, R., Fuentes, M., Geer, A., Haimberger, L., Healy, S., Hogan, R. J., Holm, E., Janiskove, M., Keeley, S., Laloyaux, P., Lopez, P., Lupu, C., Radnoti, G., de Rosnay, P., Rozum, I., Vamborg, F., Villaume, S., Thepaut, J.-N., 2020: The ERA5 global reanalysis. Q. J. Roy. Meteorol. Soc., 146, 1999–2049. https://www.doi.org/10.1002/qj.3830

IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson- Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger,

N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy,

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The November 2026 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Shenzhen, which US President Donald Trump has indicated he will attend, marks a critical juncture in the ongoing restructuring of the global system. Given the timing and context, and the exclusion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the prospect of an agreement coming from a trilateral summit between Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin may represent a temporary, tactical stabilisation of an increasingly fractured interstate system. But, it may also sideline important alliance structures in Europe and Asia, mark the revival of traditional balance of power logic and great power diplomacy, and present a stark reality for peripheral states like Ukraine.

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The fractures emerging within NATO over this impending Sino-American-Russian dialogue underscore an already existing structural decoupling between Washington’s geopolitical calculations and the deeply entrenched security anxieties within Europe. The UK has opposed unilateral bilateralism under the Trump administration, most notably the recent US-Russia diesel procurement accord. Characterising this transaction as a fundamental transgression of collective security frameworks, British Defence Secretary Wes Streeting argued that the transatlantic alliance must use its economic levers against the Russian Federation to fortify Ukrainian sovereignty rather than dilute the existing sanctions regime. Similarly, European allies interpret the proposed summit as a meeting that could sideline Europe and embolden Russia’s war strategy. Some commentary even draws comparisons to the 1945 Yalta Conference where great powers negotiated the fate of smaller nations.

Media discourse surrounding Ukraine still remains trapped within a reductive, binary, paradigm that positions diplomatic concessions of territory against absolute military victory. This fails to grasp the structural material realities of contemporary geopolitics and the shifting correlation of forces within the global system. From a systemic perspective, it is evident that achieving a total military defeat of the Russian Federation on the battlefield is implausible without unprecedented, long-term escalation of Euro-Atlantic material support. While so-called red lines set by the Kremlin have been continually crossed by Western military aid and weapons systems, the ever-present structural risk of escalation (nuclear or conventional) imposes a deliberate, systemic brake on Western tactical velocity. Consequently, the primary Euro-Atlantic objective is the containment of Moscow’s revisionist capabilities, managed carefully to avoid driving the Kremlin into a regional nuclear option born of systemic desperation. Concurrently, the conflict acts as a powerful material drain on Moscow, severely limiting its capacity to project power across other critical global fault-lines.

Despite the volume of Euro-Atlantic military assistance to Ukraine, the structural probability of a decisive Russian defeat remains unlikely. Russian casualties are rising, but the regime still commands a large reserve of fighting-age men. At the same time, the war’s protracted attrition yields incremental geographic consolidation for the regime around Putin. While Western-led economic sanctions initially strained Russia’s financial architecture, they have failed to alter the Kremlin’s strategic plans. After a multi-year adjustment period, Russia’s productive forces remain operational, hydrocarbon exports remain robust despite sanctions, and the domestic labour force has adapted. Consequently, despite the fact that economic stress is high, and there are increasing discrepancies between official military, economic and social narratives and observable realities, Putin’s authority over the state apparatus still remains firmly in place.

Stripped of its ideological framing, the mainstream discourse surrounding a potential land swap mechanism is irrelevant because Ukraine doesn’t control significant Russian territory. Ukraine’s attempt to take Russia’s Kursk Oblast in August 2024 proved ineffective and exposed the severe asymmetric attrition inherent in this proxy conflict, inflicting unsustainable casualty rates on Ukrainian forces and ultimately forcing a strategic withdrawal. The main goal of the Ukrainian offensive, to distract the Russian troops from their Donetsk advance, failed as Russia’s offensive in the east accelerated instead. While drone strikes on Russian energy infrastructure and military assets caused havoc and triggered localised panic, they have not yet produced decisive military results on the front lines. Ceding the eastern territories is structurally untenable for Kyiv as it would leave the remaining Ukrainian state and society vulnerable to external imperialist encroachments, economic strangulation and further internal divisions. For Ukraine, resisting territorial fragmentation is a material necessity to prevent it from being permanently relegated to a balkanised periphery.

Central to the geopolitical contestation prior to 2022, and even before Russian annexation of Crimea in 2015, were Moscow’s concerns regarding the structural disenfranchisement and ethno-linguistic marginalisation of the significant Russian-speaking populace residing within Ukraine’s eastern borderlands, and in Crimea. To address these deep-seated sub-national anxieties any negotiated settlement must look beyond zero-sum geopolitical realignments. A plausible avenue is an internationally monitored referendum – under the stewardship of external institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union – to asses local autonomy demands in contested peripheral zones. By preserving de jure state borders while legally codifying an asymmetric federal arrangement or autonomous constitutional status, this addresses some of the internal contradictions of Ukrainian state spatiality and could mitigate the historical West-East regional cleavage, offering a sustainable constitutional equilibrium that neutralises internal polarisation and shields local populations from the chaos of conflict – and secures Kiev’s control over the regions.

A comparable system can be applied to the Crimean peninsula, a region defined by its predominantly ethnic Russian demographic and long-standing role as a pivot of post-Soviet geopolitical tension. Under the 1997 Partition Treaty, Moscow secured maritime control by leasing Sevastopol’s strategic naval infrastructure – an arrangement later extended to 2042 – underlining its importance for Russia. While Ukraine’s recent tactical successes in compelling Russia’s Black Sea fleet to relocate mark a notable back down for Russia, the Russian military high command’s long-term interests remain bound to Sevastopol. Consequently, a diplomatic settlement based on a return to the pre-2014 status quo could defuse the existential flashpoint over Crimea’s status; it could therefore still stay as part of Ukrainian territory while at the same time be used by the Russian navy. Such an arrangement would naturally reproduce the structural contradictions and diplomatic frictions inherent to the pre-2014 era, yet it offers a pragmatic architecture for ceasefire and the start of negotiations.

Concurrently, Ukraine’s accession to NATO – which the Kremlin has persistently leveraged as a foundational casus belli to justify its military intervention – must also be considered through the lens of shifting Western strategies and internal fractures within the alliance. Key political figures within major NATO member states, most notably Donald Trump, have consistently rejected the viability of integrating Ukraine into the transatlantic military apparatus. Recent shifts in Washington’s rhetoric underscore this, favouring regional, multi-state security guarantees outside the formal Article 5 architecture and (at best) deferring Ukraine’s institutional integration into the broader Western security sphere to a later date. According to some reports, even Kyiv has indicated willingness to forego NATO membership in exchange for strong bilateral security guarantees.

Ukraine’s immediate strategic priority is to end hostilities and stabilise its deeply strained socio‑economic system by combining political reform, humanitarian support, and long‑term recovery planning. Achieving this level of stabilisation depends on substantial financial injections and macroeconomic support from Western states and international financial institutions, particularly the core elements of the Western-led coalition. At the same time, proposals for a United Nations-mandated multinational mission, backed by US air superiority and intelligence capabilities, are proposed as a deterrent against future Russian attacks. While Moscow has historically instrumentalised peacekeeping rhetoric to legitimise its asymmetric interventions, the evolving global security architecture, in particular combined interests of the US and Chinese leadership, may alter this calculus. If China and the US both insist on ending the war in Ukraine, and if a UN-supported peace keeping force is considered essential for this, Putin may not be able to object.

The bedrock of institutionalised Euro-Atlanticism, which has anchored Western hegemony for decades, is fast giving way to a naked great-power diplomacy. By bypassing multilateral structures and engaging in unmediated, direct negotiations with Moscow in the upcoming summit, the US is laying bare the profound geopolitical fault lines that have fractured the international system since the end of the Cold War. This structural destabilisation stems from the intersection of two massive historical forces: Firstly, China’s state-directed economic ascent – a formidable, non-Western systemic rival to the core hegemony of the Euro-American empire; and secondly, Russia’s aggressive military pushback against NATO expansion. Together, these two revisionist developments have forced a re-evaluation of American grand strategy. The unravelling of the transatlantic alliance, an ongoing process accelerated since the first Trump administration, is now a defining material reality of the current global power shift from the North and West to the East and South.

From a long-term geopolitical perspective, analysts widely agree that any sustainable framework for European security remains structurally unviable if it excludes the Russian state – either as a constrained actor or a future partner. Europe’s security environment has been historically and structurally shaped by Russia’s capabilities and geopolitical behaviour. Persisting in a dogmatically confrontational posture threatens an alliance between Moscow and Beijing that further accelerates the erosion of Euro-Atlantic alliance. At this critical juncture, the Trump administration’s strategic prioritisation of an arbitrated end to the Russo-Ukrainian war can therefore be understood as a calculated geopolitical manoeuvre to arrest, or at least slow down, the disintegration of Western hegemony by de-escalating tensions with Moscow and enabling Washington to redirect its remaining hegemonic capacity toward countering China’s economic and technological ascendance.

Bulent Gokay is a professor of International Political Economy at the University of East London.

In the past 20 years, critical scholars repeatedly argued that International Relations (IR) is a racist discipline, as its original raison d’être was not peace but colonial administration (Vitalis 2000; Anievas et al. 2014). The discipline, to many critical scholars (Henderson 2013; Barder 2017; Hobson 2022), was at best silent on race and at worst racist. Once at the margins, this critique in recent years filled special issues in major journals such as Security Dialogue (Salter et al. 2021), International Affairs (Acharya 2022), and Security Studies (Krebs 2023). Were the political thinkers that helped to establish IR as an academic discipline silent about race? Did they advance racist theories about world politics? Is IR, as a result, racist? Drawing on archival research on one of the discipline’s founding thinkers, Hans J. Morgenthau, we challenge the conventional wisdom among contemporary critical scholars. We argue that racial justice was important to Morgenthau’s realism and his conception of the national interest.

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The racism charge against classical realism draws on two premises. We challenge both premises. The first premise is that realism draws on Hobbesian thinking, which itself is racist. Henderson (2013) notes that the Hobbesian state of nature was never intended to describe the relations among ‘white’ people. Instead, it was reserved for ‘non-whites’, whose ‘state of nature’—i.e., reality of living in a lawless jungle—justified intervention and war. But Morgenthau rejected ‘Hobbesian thinking’. In a letter to International Affairs, Morgenthau explicitly rejected Hobbesian interpretations of his work. ‘I was trying to establish the point’, Morgenthau writes to Martin Wight, ‘in contrast to Hobbes’s, that moral principles are universal and, hence, are not created by the state (Morgenthau 1959, 52).

The second premise draws on classical realism’s silence on imperial aggression against former colonies, prioritising instead the ‘national interest’. Nicolas Guilhot (2014, 714) writes: ‘realist critique of imperial adventurism, which finds its model in Morgenthau’s 1965 denunciation of US policy in Vietnam, is not based on a principled opposition to imperialism, but on a clear discernment of what constitutes, at a given historical moment, the national interest of the United States’. In reality, however, as we argue elsewhere, ‘the Vietnam War had convinced [Morgenthau] that American foreign policy was involved in the enforcement of a paternalistic, even racist worldview’ (Karkour and Rösch 2024, 9). This can be seen in Morgenthau’s lectures on Aristotle, recently edited by Anthony Lang, where Morgenthau explains to his students American imperialism in Vietnam in the following terms:

The paternalistic conception of the justification of slavery was based upon the Aristotelian principle; that is, to take good care of the slave was regarded as a moral principle. The master took care of the slave because the slave couldn’t take care of himself. So you have here an assimilation of the relationship between a father and a child…. If you look at the justification for colonialism in Great Britain you find a very similar conception. If you read for instance the essay of John Stuart Mill on non-intervention, you’ll find it the most fantastic ideological justification of British policy…. Mill makes a point that Britain has never interfered in the affairs of other nations, and when it has as in the case of India, it was only for the good of the barbarians. Here were again people who could not take care of their own affairs and were in a semi-barbaric state. The British would bring the enlightened principles of human life to those disadvantaged barbarians (Morgenthau 2004, 34).

A lecture that may as well have been delivered by a critical IR scholar.

Our contention, however, is not simply that key assumptions in critical scholarship are wrong. The Morgenthau archives, rather, tell us a more interesting story about a political thinker who helped to institutionalise IR as an academic discipline after the Second World War. Morgenthau wrote about racial justice, and it was integral to his thinking about the national interest; a concept that today is mistakenly reduced to material power. The failure of the national interest in Vietnam, according to Morgenthau, was America’s failure to define its sense of purpose. This purpose was ‘equality in freedom’. ‘When we speak of equality in freedom in America’, Morgenthau (1960, 306) wrote, ‘we cannot ignore what has been a hindrance to its full achievement—that is, the denial of racial equality’. In failing to negotiate its sense of purpose, America failed both in Vietnam and as a democracy at home. The national interest became defined in terms of raw power. America itself was transformed into ‘a soulless giant, armed to the teeth and producing abundantly, but for no other end than to stay ahead of the Russians’ (Morgenthau 1960, 299). ‘Our national purpose’, Morgenthau objected, ‘is not to stay ahead of the Russians quantitatively... but to be different from, and superior to, them in those qualities which are peculiarly our own’ (Morgenthau 1960, 299).

To Morgenthau, America’s support of a colonial war in Vietnam was the mirror image of its denial of racial justice to minorities at home. ‘The racial minorities of America’, Morgenthau wrote, ‘are in the process of merging into that vast movement of non-white peoples, comprising four fifths of mankind who demand equality’ (Morgenthau 1960, 307). ‘These peoples’, Morgenthau added, ‘have undertaken to achieve for themselves and in relation to the white man what America has offered to the world as its purpose: equality in freedom’ (Morgenthau 1960, 307). In a letter to the Democratic Senator Joseph S. Clark from January 7, 1967 that has been archived in the Library of Congress (Morgenthau 1967, HJM Papers, Box 9), Morgenthau complained that a Defence Department propaganda movie distributed to American schools omitted Vietnamese anti-colonial struggles from its narrative. Morgenthau wrote: ‘I don’t need to point to the ominous meaning that such a development [the ideological interference of the Department of Defense in public opinion-making] could have for the future of American democracy’.

What does this reading of Morgenthau’s realism mean for the discipline of IR? From our standpoint, it means that, at best, the picture is more complex than the blanket racism charge. Morgenthau, a Jew who escaped Nazi Germany and a defender of liberal democracy, including the rights of racial minorities in America, was certainly not a racist. But there is more to our argument: we invite IR scholars to a ‘fifth debate’ on race. Why stop with Morgenthau? Do other thinkers and theories hold racial assumptions? What do the archives say? What do these assumptions mean for IR and the world? To many critical scholars the answers seem settled. To us, less so: we call for more interrogation, more research, and more debate.

References

Acharya, Amitav. 2022. “Race and Racism in the Founding of the Modern World Order.’’ International Affairs 98 (1): 23–43.

Anievas, Alexander, Manchanda, Nivi. and Shilliam, Robbie (eds.) 2015. Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line. Abingdon: Routledge.

Barder, Alexander. 2017. “Race and International Relations.” International Studies Review 19 (3): 509–16.

Guilhot, Nicholas. 2014. “Imperial Realism: Post-War IR Theory and Decolonisation.” International History Review 36 (4): 698–720.

Henderson, Errol. 2013. “Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism in International Relations Theory.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26 (1): 71–92.

Hobson, John. 2022. “Unmasking the Racism of Orthodox International Relations/International Political Economy Theory.” Security Dialogue 53 (1): 3–20.

Karkour, Haro. and Rösch, Felix. 2024. “Toward IR’s ‘Fifth Debate’: Racial Justice and the National Interest in Classical Realism.” International Studies Review 26 (2): 1-20.

Krebs, Ronald R. 2023. “Introducing the Special Issue on ‘Race and Security’.’’ Security Studies 32 (4-5):589–592.

Morgenthau, Hans. 1959. “Correspondence. Dilemmas of Politics. To the Editor.” International Affairs 35 (4): 52.

Morgenthau, Hans. 1960. The Purpose of American Politics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Morgenthau, Hans. 1967. “Letter to Senator Joseph S. Clark.” Hans J. Morgenthau Papers, Manuscript Division. Washington, DC, Box 9: Library of Congress.

Morgenthau, Hans. 2004. Political Theory and International Affairs: Hans J. Morgenthau on Aristotle’s the Politics, edited by Anthony F. Lang, Jr. Westport: Praeger.

Salter, Mark B., Emily Gilbert, Jairus Grove, Jana Hönke, Doerthe Rosenow, Anna Stavrianakis, and Maria Stern. 2021. “Race and Racism in Critical Security Studies.’’ Security Dialogue 52 (1): 3–7.

Vitalis, Robert. 2000. “The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29 (2): 331–56.

Haro Karkour is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Cardiff University (UK). With Felix Rösch, he is the 2026 recipient of the Merze Tate Prize for Best Article in Historical International Relations of the International Studies Association (ISA).

Felix Rösch is Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Sussex (UK). He is also the Director of the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT). With Haro Karkour, he is the 2026 recipient of the Merze Tate Prize for Best Article in Historical International Relations of the International Studies Association (ISA). He is also the 2026 recipient of the Distinguished Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize of the British International Studies Association (BISA).

In order to celebrate having produced over one hundred episodes of the Thinking Global podcast, this week Professor Alexander Wendt chats with Kieran (⁠⁠⁠@kieranjomeara⁠⁠⁠) and Daniel Drury about the ontological security threat to the state and the state system posed by Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), his career trajectory, writing his award winning books, international relations theory and so much more.

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Alexander Wendt is Mershon Professor of International Security and Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University. Wendt is interested in philosophical aspects of social science, with special reference to international relations. He is most well-known for his work on constructivism in world politics, including Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), which received the International Studies Association’s “Best Book of the Decade” award in 2006. In 2017 Wendt was named the most influential scholar in International Relations over the past 20 years in a TRIP survey of 1400 IR faculty. And in 2023, for their contributions to constructivism Wendt and Martha Finnemore were awarded the prestigious Skytte Prize in Political Science. In his more recent work, Quantum Mind and Social Science (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and beyond, Wendt explores some implications for social science of the finding that the Kahneman-Tversky anomalies in rational decision-making can all be resolved if quantum theory is used as a baseline rather than an expected-utility model based on classical probability theory. If the human mind is actually a quantum phenomenon, that could revolutionize today’s classical social sciences in the same way that quantum theory did physics in the 1920s. Taking a short break from quantum, Wendt’s most recent book The Last Humans (Oxford University Press, 2026) explores Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) and human security, in light of the 2021 Pentagon Report confirming that UAP (formerly “UFOs”) are real and a “potential threat to national security.”

Alongside that, we always enjoy hearing from you! Which Thinking Global Podcast episodes have you been listening to? Which articles on E-International Relations have you enjoyed reading? What are you currently publishing on? Send us your letters to thinkingglobal.eir@gmail.com and have them read out on the podcast! If you enjoy the output of E-International Relations, please consider a ⁠donation⁠.

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Scientists, scholars, and space enthusiasts have long envisioned humans traveling to distant galaxies and settling on different planets, making space exploration a subject of much interest to scientists and social scientists. The technological feasibility of space travel, alongside the fears of imminent global destruction, has prompted thinkers such as Arthur C. Clarke (1959) and Buckminster Fuller (1969) to write about the inevitability of humans colonizing other planets (Spencer, 2017). However, in the last century, scientists have also been trying to pursue such ambitions seriously.  It was indeed around World War I, the Russian Revolution, and economic depression in the USSR that the Soviet Engineer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had begun to conceptualize early ideas of space travel and rocketry. He believed that the “cosmos could offer an alternative space for human settlement” (Cornish, 2019, para. 4). Space was consequently described as a ‘new frontier’ that “represented the zenith of human accomplishment” (Cornish, 2019).

*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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The First Space Age began with the launch of the Soviet Union’s ‘Sputnik 1’ in 1957. This was followed by the US’s Apollo missions in the 1960s, officially heralding an era when the two superpowers competed feverishly amidst the Cold War ideological rivalry to secure technological and military supremacy in space. This era also gave traction to concerns related to the “modes and kinds” of space projects that would be undertaken. These concerns were ratcheted up primarily because the foray into the space age was being driven by the Cold War arms race (Bormann and Sheehan, 2009:1). Until the end of the Cold War, the activities associated with space were driven by the “bipolar nuclear confrontation”. These early years were overshadowed by the US underlining the need to militarize and securitize outer space against the threat of a ‘communist cosmos’. This totalizing vision of space for half a century raised pertinent questions related to humanity’s relations to outer space that encompassed the realms of “the global, the international, the political, the ethical, the scientific,” and so on (Bormann and Sheehan, 2009:1).

While this totalizing view of seeking supremacy in space persisted even after the end of the Cold War, which marked the beginning of the second space age, it was conjoined by the ‘urgency’ to redefine the modes of space activities. The last three decades have witnessed a sharp increase in the privatization of space projects. The most glaring example of this endeavor is evident from the attempts made by states to ‘revitalize’ their space policies. For instance, in 2004, US President George Bush proclaimed the importance of a “new vision for America’s civilian and scientific space programme” (Bormann and Sheehan, 2009:2). This eventually led to the Report of the President’s Commission on Implementation of the United States Space Exploration Policy, A Journey to Inspire, Innovate, and Discover (2004).

The commission generated debate over its implicit call for colonization of space and the explicit recommendation for privatization and commercialization of space exploration. It also endorsed the presence of private actors in outer space (Bormann and Sheehan, 2009:2). Consequently, a decade later, contemporary technocrats such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are spending billions of dollars on space exploration projects that may eventually lead to colonizing other planets such as Mars (Holland and Burns, 2018). However, recent discussions among scholars and scientists have pointed towards taking another look at how we approach the idea of space exploration. The questions such as “who gets to go, who will be in control, how new resources will be obtained and distributed, and the very language we use when talking about ‘exploration’, ‘discovery’ and colonization’” are being debated (Mandelbaum, 2018).

Coloniality in Space Exploration

While interplanetary travel is presented as a valuable endeavor, in which space explorers will visit other planets and colonize them, it has also been termed by some scholars as a ‘renewed form of settler colonialism’—the legacy of colonization on Earth that had led to disastrous consequences such as genocide, displacement of Indigenous communities and cultures, economic inequalities and the degradation of the environment (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Saini, 2019; Painter, 2010; Bhandar, 2018). It is, therefore, imperative for space explorers to understand the history and legacy of colonialism on Earth to help discern how seemingly innocent curiosity to explore space is entrenched in colonial behaviors (Mandelbaum, 2018).

In The Half Life of Empire in Outer Space, Peter Redfield underscores the colonial impulse in space exploration “through and beyond the age of empire” (Redfield, 2002:791). Along the lines of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, he provincializes outer space, which provided a prospect for a new form of settler colonialism, as an arena supposedly free from the history of imperialism on earth. The French colony Kourou, French Guiana, with its legacy of centuries of colonialism, has long served as a launching pad for the French space programmes, and is a case in point. It was a former penal colony of France, called ‘Devil’s Island’, that later became a ‘department’ of France. It is currently one of the few territories under European control in the Americas that continues to be used for space launches. This colony represents an uneasy bridge between modernity, represented by the space projects and the space centre, and perennial issues of inequalities and poverty (Redfield, 2002). In 2017, the people of French Guiana protested at the site of the Guiana Space Centre, chanting “we’ve had enough” in response to the inflation and poor living conditions (D’Auria and Fernholz, 2017, para. 2). In other words, French Guiana may well be considered as a space colony on earth, which evinces the consequences of coloniality in space exploration.

After the end of the Cold War, the domination of space based solely on ideology—the fear of a communist cosmos—was no longer viable. In the 1990s, the argument for American technological supremacy in space was justified on the grounds of imminent competition from European and East Asia countries. This new era saw the invocation of the imperial era’s concept of ‘frontierism’—proposed initially by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 in his essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History—supposedly an inherent part of the individualism in the US’s political and economic thought.

Alan Marshall describes frontierism as:

A belief in the individual to surmount the challenges of a new situation, territory, or environment and carve out an existence. Once the individual has done this, they deservedly call that territory or environment their own” (Marshall, 1995:46).

This new frontier then contributes to the economic and territorial wealth of the state “by turning unproductive land into an economic resource” (Marshall, 1995:46). This idea is similar to the imperial era’s description of far-off lands being characterised as ‘terra nullius’ (empty land), that negated the prior existence of native populations inhabiting those areas. In the ‘New World’ nations such as the US, frontierism was a policy that was used to “tame the wilderness’’ (Marshall, 1995:46). For space frontierists, the cosmos and the celestial objects are valueless, unless humans occupy them and extract economic and political value from them.

The use of such language—‘wild west’, ‘terra nullius’—that invokes the legacy of colonialism, in relation to space, has become a part of the contemporary lexicon. Technocrats such as Elon Musk, politicians, and analysts have long described the plans for a human settlement on Mars as a ‘Mars colony’ since the beginning. Ted Cruz, heading the subcommittee on space, science, and competitiveness entitled Destination Mars - Putting American Boots on the Surface of the Red Planet (2018), contended that, “I don’t know who it will be, and I don’t know what they will discover, or what they will accomplish, [b]ut I think it is every bit as vast and promising a frontier as the New World was some centuries ago” (Haskins, 2018).

This signals the ‘whitewashing’ and diminishing of centuries of colonial and settler colonial history and a failure to comprehend their own history of colonial suppression and domination (Haskins, 2018). The use of such terminologies as ‘wild west’, ‘frontier’, and ‘colony’ seems to legitimize space exploration while diminishing or even outright ignoring the history of genocide and the displacement of indigenous populations. Lucianne Walkowicz contends that these narratives have specific implications on how space activities will be conducted; “[s]pace is not just built for nothing, it's built for people” (Haskins, 2018).

Michael Ralph also argues that,

the effort to colonize space is likely to involve new forms of inequality: shifts in tax revenues and administrative priorities devoted to that, [a]s opposed to [supporting] other social institutions that benefit people like health care, education, infrastructure (Haskins, 2018).

Space Exploration as ‘Pure Science’

After World War II, the post-war climate allowed the two superpowers of the Cold War—the USA and USSR—to use science and technology as a tool for hegemony. The US, especially, invested in other countries such as Europe to develop an ‘Americanized’ version of science that would appear as truly global. However, John Krige, in his work, pointed out the inequalities in economic and military strength, especially in scientific and technological capabilities. He notes that the “US was not simply the mightiest economic and military power in 1945; it was also the mightiest scientific (and technological power)” (Krige, 2008:1-2). He further noted that given the “basic inequalities of resources for science globally, it is to be expected that any system of linkage with the US would be a part and parcel of an ‘international structure analogous to empire’” (Krige, 2008:1-2).

The scientific and technological relations with other states signalled the beginning of an American scientific and technological hegemony that would take multiple forms in the decades to come. This also took the form of the popular modernization theory and the description of scientific and technological developments as ‘progress’. This modernization project was supposedly a part of American liberal capitalist-democratic values whose ‘universal endpoint’ was peace (Krige, 2008; Kadia, 2019).

However, these talks of progress and modernization do not remove the deeply entrenched exploitative practices that are a part of the science of space exploration. Activities like those of Western nations during the Cold War reinforce exclusionary practices. Wernher von Braun, the scientist of early rocketry, described his fantasies for space travel in his works such as Project Mars: A Technical Tale (initially published in 1949 as Marsprojekt), all the while he used victims, during the Nazi regime in Germany, in a concentration camp to construct rockets that were used to attack England and were later redesigned for Lunar missions (Neufeld, 2002; Garza, 2019). These activities expose the logic of coloniality—the divide between who is exploited and who gains from such technological developments.

Gerard K. O’Neill in 1974 argued that “new ideas are controversial when they challenge orthodoxy, but orthodoxy changes with time, often surprisingly fast” (O’Neill, 1974:32). He contended that “it is orthodox, for example, to believe that earth is the only practical habitat for man and that the human race is close to its ultimate size limits. But I believe that we have now reached the point where we can, if we choose, build new habitats far more comfortable, productive, and attractive than is most of the earth” (O’Neill, 1974:32). The caveat here is the difference between exploration and colonization and how merging them together is harmful.

While colonialism almost always happens through violence—methods including exploitation, displacement, genocide, rape, slavery, forced religious conversions and so on—exploration can happen in a variety of ways that do not involve violence. For instance, when Europe colonized the US beginning in the sixteenth century, it destroyed most of the indigenous population. The land was declared ‘terra nullius’ (empty land). This practice was similarly used for the colonization of Australia in the 18th century, and the violence against indigenous Australians continues to this day. In 2015, the Australian Government sought to displace thousands of Aboriginal Australians off their ancestral lands. The Australian Government has been criticized severely since its constitution does not recognize the rights of the Aboriginal population (Zevallos, 2015; BBC News, 2017).

Historically, Western science has been responsible for reinforcing the lie of racial difference that became one of the rationales for colonial expansion, the slave trade, genocide, and the displacement of the Indigenous population (Saini, 2019; Painter, 2010). The Black Lives Matter movement that rocked the United States in 2020 was not just about American society. It was a global crisis that was concerned with the inequalities and violence faced by Black people. Though private companies like SpaceX are focused on colonizing another planet, “it is nonetheless implicated in these contestations about racism” (McKinson, 2020).

Traditionally, the majority of the NASA workforce has been White males. In his essay on ‘Afrofuturism’, Mark Dery pointed out that these men “seem to believe they possess the power to design, own and control ‘the unreal estate of the future’” (Dery, 1994:180; McKinson, 2020). This evokes narratives of Western colonization on earth, which included the exclusion, exploitation, and dehumanization of people of colour, with the excuse of expansion, development, and being harbingers of modernity. The contemporary explorers, such as Musk, Bezos, and Branson, are not politicians and do not necessarily belong to any ideological camps, but they are very much wealthy, privileged, and White men (McKinson, 2020).

While scientists often focus on issues regarding “feasibility, scalability and affordability”, they rarely, if ever, think about questions of morality, inclusivity, and problems of inequalities (Renstrom, 2021). Some scientists believe that astronomy and planetary science are “benign science” since they use observation to provide “basic human knowledge” which is universally applicable, such as “human anatomy” (Smiles, 2020). However, such simplification ignores the “cultural bias” in traditional notions of what is considered “human” and “knowledge”. Failure to recognize the bias in this Westernized version of knowledge leads to Western science being seen as universal and “self-evident” (Smiles, 2020).

The tendency to frame space exploration as science also reinforces problematic narratives. While NASA considers Mars “devoid of past or present life,” it also considers Mars exploration an optional endeavour for human travel in space (Schaberg, 2021). The rover landings on Mars achieved space exploration without the physical presence of humans. However, they laid the groundwork for future human spaceflight and colonization. However, the seemingly scientific exploration of outer space is far from neutral.

As Maria Koren argued, NASA’s Perseverance mission is “reminiscent of an older way of doing science [where] naturalists and other explorers travelled, welcome or not, to faraway places to gather trunkfuls of specimens for closer study” (Koren, 2021). As such, while human presence on Mars is still a future possibility, “a pattern of entitlement via science is being established” (Schaberg, 2021). These narratives of space exploration also reinforce the fantasies of resources and territories that can be privatized, claimed, and owned. The inhabitability of Mars does not stop the fantasies of “desolate horizons and rocky terrains” waiting to be taken over by space explorers (Schaberg, 2021).

Indigenous Lands as ‘Terra Nullius’

In his 2020 State of the Union Address, US President Donald Trump stated,

[i]n reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must always remember that America has always been a frontier nation… we must embrace the next frontier… America’s Manifest Destiny in the stars… Our ancestors braved the unknown, tamed the wilderness, settled the Wild West… We are Americans. We are pioneers. We are the pathfinders. We settled the New World. We built the modern world (The New York Times, 2020).

For scholars and communities of indigenous populations, it is a fact that the USA was established through the displacement, destruction, and genocide of indigenous people and their lands. Trump’s address seemed to forward the same devastating logic of settler colonialism. Foregrounding concepts such as ‘frontier’, ‘taming the wilderness’, and ‘Manifest Destiny’ point to the violent history of the creation of the USA (Smiles, 2020). The usage of such phrases and terms is deeply problematic, since it preserves the myth that the American settler state has better uses for lands rather than the indigenous people belonging to those lands, presumably because they are wild and uncivilized. Outer space is yet another ‘wilderness’ that needs to be conquered and brought to heel.

However, it is crucial to understand that space exploration does not exist independently of the colonial legacies associated with the violence against indigenous populations and their lands. Smiles argues that “a scientific venture such as space exploration does not exist in a vacuum, but instead draws from settler colonialism and feeds back into it through the prioritization of ‘science’ over indigenous ‘epistemologies’”(Smiles, 2020). Historically, settler colonialism has had dangerous consequences for the native populations, since settler colonialism reinforces control over a particular territory. In the words of Wolfe, “[l]and is life—or at least, land is necessary for life. Thus, contests for land can be—indeed, often are—contests for life” (Wolfe, 2006:387).

The capture of a particular territory by settler colonists constitutes the remaking of that territory through either residential plans, farming and agriculture, mining, and so on—practices that will ensure the survival of settler colonists. The racist proposition that only settler colonists know the ‘proper’ use for such territories reinforces settler colonialism. This closely follows the idea that before the occupation of lands by Europeans, those lands were considered ‘terra nullius’ (empty land), completely ignoring the presence of indigenous populations that had called those lands their homes for centuries. The contention here is that this logic of settler colonialism in outer space can lead to wiping out Indigenous presence in outer space (Smiles, 2020).

The commodification of and encroachment on these indigenous lands have greatly destroyed the ecosystems that have historically served as a source of livelihood for the indigenous communities. The extraction of gold and rare minerals mining in Central and South America and Africa are contemporary examples of such colonial practices. Historically, exploiting cotton fields in South America and rubber tappers in Brazil and using the lands and people of these countries has contributed significantly to the expansion of Western nations (Tavares et al, 2020; Bhandar, 2018). The US also used the islands surrounding the Americas to establish the Global Positioning System (GPS). These islands have for long been occupied by the US as part of their imperial expansionism and have displaced indigenous communities belonging to those islands. One such territory, the Marshall Islands, is home to the Space Fence, which monitors spacecraft and debris in orbit. Evidently, space exploration depends upon imperialist expansion on such territories and resources (Oldenziel, 2011; Lockheed Martin, 2020; Warren, 2015; Mitchell, 2018).

Thus, we must carefully analyze our intentions behind space exploration and how we should eschew “deeply entrenched colonial behaviors as we seek to better understand our solar system,” including the language used to describe such endeavors (Mandelbaum, 2018). As Penny Griffin (2009: 60) appropriately describes it, “outer space is conceptual, political and material space, a place for collisions and collusions (literally and metaphorically) between objects, ideas, identities and discourses… [and] is a global space always socially and locally embedded”.

References

BBC News. 2017. “Why Doesn't Australia Have an Indigenous Treaty?” BBC News, May 24, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-40024622.

Bhandar, Brenna. 2018. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bormann, Natalie, and Michael Sheehan, eds. 2009. Securing Outer Space: International Relations Theory and the Politics of Space. London: Routledge.

Cornish, Gabrielle. 2019. "How Imperialism Shaped the Race to the Moon." The Washington Post, July 22, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/22/how-imperialism-shaped-race-moon/.

D'Auria, Peter, and Tim Fernholz. 2017. "How a Handful of South American Protestors Took Europe’s Space Program Hostage." Quartz, April 17, 2017. https://qz.com/960817/how-a-handful-of-south-american-protestors-in-french-guiana-took-arianespace-and-europes-space-program-hostage/.

Dery, Mark, ed. 1994. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. 2014. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.

Garza, Alejandro De La. 2019. "How Historians Are Reckoning with the Former Nazi Who Launched America's Space Program." Time, July 18, 2019. https://time.com/5627637/nasa-nazi-von-braun/.

Griffin, Penny. 2009. "The Spaces Between Us: The Gendered Politics of Outer Space." In Securing Outer Space, edited by Natalie Bormann and Michael Sheehan, 133–53. London: Routledge.

Haskins, Caroline. 2018. "Trump Insists on Creating a Space Force." The Outline, June 19, 2018.

Holland, Dora, and Jack O. Burns. 2018. "The American Space Exploration Narrative from the Cold War Through the Obama Administration." Space Policy 46: 9–17.

Kadia, Miriam Kingsberg. 2019. "Transnational Knowledge, American Hegemony: Social Scientists in US-Occupied Japan." In How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology, edited by John Krige. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Koren, Marina. 2021. "Scientists Really, Really Want a Piece of Mars." The Atlantic, February 18, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/02/mars-rover-peserverance-rocks-shipping/618039/.

Krige, John. 2008. "Basic Science and the Coproduction of American Hegemony." In American Hegemony and the Post-War Reconstruction of Science in Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lockheed Martin. 2020. “Space Fence.” https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/space-fence.html.

Mandelbaum, Ryan F. 2018. “Decolonizing Mars: Are We Thinking About Space Exploration All Wrong?” Gizmodo, November 20, 2018. https://gizmodo.com/decolonizing-mars-are-we-thinking-about-space-explorat-1830348568.

Marshall, Alan. 1995. "Development and Imperialism in Space." Space Policy 11 (1): 41–52.

McKinson, Kimberley D. 2020. "Do Black Lives Matter in Outer Space?" Sapiens, September 30, 2020. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/space-colonization-racism/.

Mitchel, Seat T. 2018. Constellations of Inequality: Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Neufeld, Michael J. 2002. "Wernher von Braun, the SS, and Concentration Camp Labor: Questions of Moral, Political, and Criminal Responsibility." German Studies Review 25 (1): 57–78.

New York Times. 2020. “Trump’s 2020 State of the Union Address.” New York Times, February 5, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/us/politics/state-of-union-transcript.html.

O'Neill, Gerard K. 1974. "The Colonization of Space." Physics Today 27 (9): 32–40.

Oldenziel, Ruth. 2011. "Islands: The United States as a Networked Empire." In Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, edited by Gabrielle Hecht. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Painter, Nell Irvin. 2010. The History of White People. New York: W.W. Norton.

Redfield, Peter. 2002. "The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space." Social Studies of Science 32 (5–6): 791–825.

Saini, Angela. 2019. Superior: The Return of Race Science. Boston: Beacon Press.

Schaberg, Christopher. 2021. “We’re Already Colonizing Mars.” Slate, March 30, 2021. https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/mars-colonization-is-already-happening.html.

Smiles, Deondre. 2020. "The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space." Society and Space, October 6, 2020. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-settler-logics-of-outer-space.

Spencer, Keith A. 2017. "Keep the Red Planet Red." Jacobin, February 2017. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/mars-elon-musk-space-exploration-nasa-colonization.

Tavares, Frank, et al. 2020. "Ethical Exploration and the Role of Planetary Protection in Disrupting Colonial Practices." Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey 2023–2032. Cornell University Press. https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.08344.

Warren, Ferster. 2015. "Space Fence Passes Critical Design Review." Space News, September 29, 2015. https://spacenews.com/space-fence-passes-critical-design-review/.

Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native." Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409.

Zevallos, Zuleyka. 2015. "Rethinking the Narrative of Mars Colonisation." Other Sociologist, March 26, 2015. https://othersociologist.com/2015/03/26/rethinking-the-narrative-of-mars-colonisation/.

Bhargavi PBA is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Delhi. Her research explores the intersections of decolonial theory, space exploration, and technology governance.

On 12^th and 13^th September 2026, leaders from 11 countries representing nearly half the world’s population and 40 per cent of the global economy gathered in India for the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi. Chaired by Indian Prime Minister Modi, marking BRICS’s 20th anniversary and India’s fourth time hosting, the summit was structured around the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” With a focus on a people-centric and humanity-first approach, India’s year-long chairship hosted over 350 meetings centred on economic growth, trade, finance, technology, and sustainable development, alongside geopolitical issues including those in West Asia and Ukraine.

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Interestingly, the summit is comprised of countries that have competing visions and geopolitical alignments. India and China, for instance, the founding members of BRICS, have had persistent border tensions, escalating most seriously in the Galwan Valley in 2020 and leading to fatalities on both sides. The UAE and Iran were present as well, both members of BRICS and who are continuing to be directly affected by the West Asian war. There are also other contentious issues around BRICS, such as ‘de-dollarization’, or reducing the reliance on the US Dollar for trade and financing, which has led BRICS to be seen as a vehicle for countering Western financial dominance.

In this context, the most interesting outcome was perhaps the summit itself: BRICS offered an institutional space where countries could communicate and hold meetings despite strategic competition. Modi held separate bilateral talks with both Xi and the Iranian President Pezeshkian on the sidelines. The adoption of the New Delhi Declaration also saw the consensus between Iran and the UAE on “exercising maximum restraint, as well as avoiding actions that could further aggravate the situation,” which is being hailed as an unambiguous victory for diplomacy. The Declaration also condemned the April 2025 Pahalgam attack (a diplomatic victory for India), criticised unilateral tariffs/sanctions without naming the US, endorsed local-currency payment interoperability (and steered clear of mentions of de-dollarization). The Declaration called for global governance reform, with India’s UNSC membership bid being backed up by both Russia and China.

The successful conduct of the BRICS summit amidst turbulent global affairs and testing rivalries prompts a closer look at what the institutional space offered by BRICS signifies for multilateralism, and whether cooperation between strategic rivals can be achieved without convergence on all issues. Bomassi and Bava argue that India’s BRICS presidency shows that states now operate across overlapping and sometimes contradictory institutions (e.g., G20, BRICS, Quad, SCO) and cooperate issue-by-issue rather than bloc-by-bloc: “even where they may disagree profoundly on questions of security or geopolitical alignment, they may still find sufficient common interest to cooperate on other issues….” This implies that issues can be decided on a case-by-case basis, without countries having to give up their positions. The Indian Express makes the case that BRICS offers room for sustaining conversations between countries that may or may not agree with one another. According to Associate Professor Elizabeth Roche, BRICS also highlights India’s convening power, especially if it could bring adversaries to the same table, hinting at potential mediation roles India could play in the future.

However, others are less optimistic, observing that the New Delhi Declaration offers little indication of how the shortcomings of the existing order—like unilateral sanctions, protectionism, and the unequal representation of developing countries in global institutions—should be dealt with. Professor Aftab Alam points out that BRICS is less an independent force shaping international politics, and more a forum where states respond to power changes and pursue converging interests. Analyst Vrinda Sahai contends that BRICS leaves much to be resolved, like the undefined membership criteria (Saudi Arabia’s unresolved status), the difficulty in achieving a consensus, and the establishment of credible financial procedures. In a similar vein, Dr Chietigj Bajpaee writes that there is little clarity on what BRICS stands for, and BRICS must move beyond vague calls and statements toward more substantive changes, if it wants to have a deeper impact on global governance.

The New Delhi Declaration, while institutionalising the consensus of the grouping, also reflects the tension in reconciling the interests of its members, evident in its carefully negotiated language. This binary is why the BRICS sustains: the summit points toward an institution that endures through ambiguity rather than genuine convergence over all issues.

This is, in effect, hedging behaviour on the part of the members. IR scholarship defines hedging through three features: a state’s insistence on not taking sides, its pursuit of deliberately opposite or contradictory measures to offset multiple risks at once, and its inclination to diversify partnerships to keep fallback positions available. Hedging is caused by uncertainty rather than the other way around. Scholar Cheng-Chwee Kuik uses India as an example to explain this: Modi met Xi in 2018 and institutionalised an informal bilateral summit just before delivering a keynote at the Shangri-La Dialogue on India’s vision of a “free, open and inclusive” Indo-Pacific. Another instance is seen in Modi’s insistence on non-alignment that kept the Quad a non-alliance partnership, even though tensions with China escalated during the Galwan clash. This pattern of simultaneously courting and distancing is what plays out at BRICS today.

This raises the question of whether multilateralism itself has become a hedging venue, with genuine progress reserved for bilateral channels instead. IR scholar Kuik’s later work on institutions offers a useful distinction here: he separates “institutional hedging,” which is impartial, inclusive, and aims to mitigate a broad range of risks, from “institutional balancing,” which is partial, exclusive, and aims to counter one specific threat. The latter is visible in China and Russia’s use of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation against perceived US pressure, while BRICS functions closer to institutional hedging: it survives by not picking sides, and not by uniting against a common adversary. That ambiguity secures room for manoeuvre, but it does not mean that no priority issues exist, or that progress doesn’t take place. The New Development Bank, for instance, had approved 141 projects worth roughly $44 billion by mid-2026, with $25 billion disbursed across infrastructure, renewable energy, and water projects. Therefore, ambiguity on contested political questions coexists in BRICS alongside concrete institutional progress on economic issues.

Perhaps then the significance of BRICS lies less in how much it has achieved and more in what its continued functioning signals: a recognition of shared global concerns without explicitly isolating any single member, and a positioning as non-Western rather than anti-Western. Some progress is better than none, and getting rival states onto the same table is worth more than leaving them with no seat at all, as when the UAE’s crown prince met Iran’s president on BRICS’s margins even as the war continues, or when Egypt and Ethiopia, both at odds over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, sit inside the same structure. This logic extends beyond BRICS itself: writing in Foreign Policy on the 2026 Iran war, analyst Amir Handjani argues that Washington cannot end the conflict alone, and Russia, China and India each bring something distinct: Russia acts as security guarantor, China as an economic alternative to US sanctions, and India as a trusted broker precisely because it maintains functioning ties with both the US-led security architecture and Iran itself. That cross-cutting position is only available to states that have spent years hedging and promoting dialogue with all sides.

Ambiguity, in today’s multilateralism, functions as a way of keeping national interests safe, and hedging is the strategy that protects that safety. There is real value, too, in the discipline of a structured institutional calendar. Kuik’s framework identifies “binding” as one of the core functions institutions serve for hedging states: the deliberate institutionalisation of engagement through regularised dialogue mechanisms to keep channels of communication open with all sides, as opposed to ad hoc or one-off meetings. Multilateral cooperation runs on “diffuse reciprocity,” implying that member states expect a rough balance of benefits over time, not from any single meeting, which is precisely why states tolerate a summit that produces modest or ambiguous outcomes. Read this way, an annual BRICS summit does not only succeed or fail on its own terms; it is the repetition and continuation itself that makes hedging legible and durable as a strategy. That logic worked in India and China’s favour at the 2026 New Delhi summit, with Xi’s visit continuing a reset in relations that has unfolded gradually across successive BRICS gatherings since Galwan.

Dr Neha Tetali (she/her) is an independent policy researcher and analyst and holds a PhD in Peace Studies from Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on Indian foreign policy, multilateralism in the Global South and feminism in global politics. Her research has been published in journals including Millennium: Journal of International Studies and Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding. She has also published with India’s World and the International Peace Institute (IPI) Global Observatory. She has presented her work at international conferences and has years of teaching experience in the politics of peace and conflict.

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Introducing the Major International Relations Theories
– Stephen McGlinchey, Rosie Walters and Dana Gold

Interview – Gillian Youngs

A Decolonial Critique of R2P and Humanitarian Intervention in MENA
– Mojtaba Mahdavi

Review – Stormy Seas: Taiwan Under the Shadow of China in the 21st Century
– Martin Duffy

Is Continued US-Iran Hostility Inevitable? Rereading Walt’s ‘Revolution and War’ Thirty Years Later
– Mark N. Katz

“Slow Horses” and the Slow Decay of Cold War Traces
– Khaliun Enkhbaatar

Advice on Attending Your First International Studies Academic Conference
– İpek Nil Ozat, Jenni Rall, Genevieve Gunn and Iris Magne

The Inverted Logic Behind China’s Transnational Repression of Hongkongers
– Ka Hang Wong

Review – Autocracy, Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
– Stephen G. F. Hall

Argentine Territorial Nationalism in an Era of Trump and Milei
– Matthew C. Benwell and Klaus Dodds

Defending a Partner: Air Defense as Diplomacy in Israel–UAE Relations
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Critical Terrorism Dictionary: Terrorism and Terrorist
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Opinion – Javier Milei, Hypermasculinity and Foreign Policy
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Between Pax Silica and WAICO: Latin American States’ Place in the AI Order
– Mateus Bilhar

Review – Cooperative Complexity: The Next Level of Global Economic Governance
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EU Membership for Russia: A Brief History of a Fantastical Idea
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Neorealism’s Regional Blindspot: The Arctic and South China Sea
– Anthony Heron

This week on Thinking Global we interviewed Yongjin Zhang about Chinese world ordering, the international society approach, irresponsible powers and more.

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If any ongoing TV series has captured the question “Was the Cold War ever over?”, it must be Slow Horses. Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman, is the embodiment of the MI5 intelligence officer. His decaying, worm-like old body raises the question: why is he still there? Why is he still alive? Why is he working with the band of losers, known as the Slow Horses, who are sent to Slough House because they made career-ending mistakes in the field? The question has come closer in this sixth season, in which the killing of old spies has become a cycle of retaliation between Russia and the head of MI5. This short article focuses on the remnants of the Cold War: how spies on both the Russian and British sides, through these slow and invisible bodies, so often raise the question of the Cold War’s continuation – as if it were never over.

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In recent years many have raised a parallel question in the form of the Cold War analogy: that the technological race between China and the US mirrors, to some extent, the US–Soviet arms race of the last century, and that the two may eventually confront each other. What would that look like? This is the utopian imagination, the very legacy of the Cold War. Of course, many question the analogy, arguing that this is simply a different scenario and that we need a better imagination of world politics (Jo and Weiss 2026; Zarakol 2026).

What we, as scholars or lay people, are unaware of and so often neglect are spies – people like Jackson Lamb. How is he alive? Why is he alive? Why hasn’t he been shot dead like his old friend, or developed dementia like his colleague, so that he no longer remembers those brutal histories, or, worse, become paranoid? His very existence and his robust health despite a bad diet, constant smoking and drinking, poor hygiene, a deliberately worm-like appearance day and night, and, not least, a nasty personality symbolize the slow decay of the long-forgotten but still-living body of the Cold War spy. As the MI5 director herself says of him, “he will be important for us because he has several years of field experience.” The intelligence service has made use of him, and often, but he has also used it in return.

MI5 has twice tried to kill its own people, the second time this season: for having seen classified information in previous seasons, and for “getting in the way” of “killing a Russian agent on Russian soil.” This might be dismissed as bureaucratic error, or however people choose to box it, as if there is always something wrong and evil within that sort of institution. That may be so. But the most interesting thing Slow Horses never fails to deliver is how intelligence services are always part and parcel of the race between great powers. The US was the only one able to identify who was developing the bomb during the intense nuclear race of the 1960s. Spying is delicate work and requires constant technological improvement. So when it comes to intelligence services, we have to look more closely at this very old war, the Cold War, which no one remembers now, yet from which we constantly draw analogies at the level of the big picture, but never at the level of the slow and invisible bodies, both living and dead.

This political thriller, with its good humor, bad mentoring, and one-sided bromance, traces legacies that are still very much alive. Most of the seasons features at least one Russian, or someone connected to Russia. It is as if the author of the Slough House novels, on which the series is based, has some connection to this part of history, or simply that lay people like me have no idea what goes on in Britain’s security world. This Russian link is never initiated by the Russian side; it usually looks like retaliation against something the UK has done, a misunderstanding, or part of some bigger money business. In any case, viewers get the sense that the UK has only one neighbor, a very big one, and that everything in between, the vast landmass of Europe, Germany and France included, has completely disappeared and been forgotten, as on a Cold War political map (with France disagreeing with the US and UK on nuclear issues, and Germany simply in shambles).

In season 4, there is a character who trains mass killers in France from a very young age, and you will see him in later seasons up to at least season 6. But even he is American: a former CIA officer turned contract killer. A bad American. This forgetfulness, this playing with Europe’s popular enemy while forgetting your old friends from the old war, seems a perfect fit for the Cold War analogy: two men running a masculine race against each other, often with advanced techniques and often behind the curtain. It is thus no coincidence that the series fits poorly with Europe after the open war and clean break with Russia since 2022, and fits well with the last century, when the huge landmass separating Russia and the UK (socialist allied states, even half of Germany) was not worth naming. France, too, seems unnamable. It should be named, and so it is, but only in the form of gatekeeping. Indeed, the series’ ill fit with post–Cold War Europe’s distribution of power so often raises the question: how are they alive? How is Jackson Lamb alive?

When I wonder how he is alive, I mean precisely how he is alive: alive, fresh, and able to think through more scenarios than anyone else in the UK’s security service, including assessing and pointing out the “bad decisions” of the head of MI5, and forgiving and forgetting her mistakes simply because they have a big bargain to strike. This is why the slow decay of the Cold War is so often visible in Slow Horses. This may well be the central question that Russia, the UK, and everyone else have to answer: which game are we playing? Is this a new war, or the old war, now out in the open? But one has to acknowledge that being neutral on the Russia-Ukraine war is itself siding with the old war’s playbook. If it’s done, it’s done. As Ayşe Zarakol’s recent essay (like much of her scholarly work) captures, claiming past goods in the present does not remove the issue from politics; the essay urges us to be mindful of old Cold War imaginaries.

Slow Horses has been highly focused on the slow decay of MI5 as an institutional holdover that plays by the old Cold War playbook but now faces the risks of privatized security (especially emphasized this season), whilst often flirting with the idea of a Cold War truce with Russia. Then it returns to MI5, a new season begins, and it flirts once again with the slow decay of Cold War traces (as I anticipate in the coming season), killing old bodies but never eliminating its protagonist.

References

Jo, Eun A, and Jessica Chen Weiss. 2026. “The Ideology Trap: China and the Limits of Cold War Analogies.” International Security 50 (4): 7–35. https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC.a.403.

Zarakol, Ayşe. 2026. “The Myth of Eurasia: Why Russia Can’t Shed Its Imperial Delusions.” Foreign Affairs 105 (5), September/October 2026.

Khaliun Enkhbaatar is a final year PhD student in International Politics at Fudan University. Her work has been previously published in Global Studies Quarterly. She is currently working on Sino-Soviet nuclear antagonism in the 1960s and how third states (Cuba, Mongolia, North Korea and North Vietnam) shifted alliances and managed rifts within the socialist alliance, proposing oscillation as a key technique. For this project, she has drawn on extensive multi-source archival research on the Cold War. She can be found on Linkedin.

On 30 June 2020, the Chinese government imposed a National Security Law (NSL) on Hong Kong. This imposition violated the Sino-British Joint Declaration. In response to this violation, the British government has opened a bespoke pathway for holders of British National (Overseas) (BN(O)) status and their dependents to resettle in the United Kingdom and eventually gain full British citizenship. Adult children of BN(O) status holders can also independently apply by providing proof of their parentage. Over 500,000 people have left Hong Kong since the NSL’s imposition, among which 187,552 individuals have been granted BN(O) visa. Australia and Canada similarly offered immigration routes for the people of Hong Kong escaping China’s political repression.

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But since China’s assault on Hong Kong, there has been increasing incidents of transnational repression not only in the UK but also in other parts of the world. A Hong Kong protester was beaten and violently dragged into the Manchester Chinese embassy. Letters offering a reward were sent to neighbours of Hong Kong activists to bring them to Chinese officials. Hong Kong Watch and its founder Benedict Rogers were threatened under the NSL. Jimmy Lai, a British citizen, received a 20-year sentence for exercising political expression. Former secretary-general of Demosistō Joshua Wong was similarly charged with collusion with foreign forces. My own PhD supervisor, Chongyi Feng, an Australian citizen, scholar-activist, and critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was issued an arrest warrant in 2025 for helping to set up the Hong Kong Parliament. Feng is no stranger to political persecution from the CCP. In 2017, he was detained by national security police for endangering national security during a research trip to China. These examples illustrate not only the increasing intensity of transnational repression, but that political repression extends beyond civil society to legitimate scholarly activities.

As associate professor and co-convener of the Asia-Pacific Research Group at the University of Technology Sydney, Feng hosted a conference on resistance against political repression, where I presented on this topic last year. I argue that the CCP targets Hong Kong dissidents to silence competing understandings of Hong Kong’s sovereignty. The CCP does this through discursive inversion. By reversing the roles of perpetrator and victim, the Chinese government seeks to maintain its legitimacy. This article will first outline the history of political repression in and beyond Hong Kong, then illustrate how the CCP uses the mechanism of discursive inversion to maintain its political survival, and finally, conclude with some recommendations for future political resistance against the CCP.

Hong Kong’s History of Political Repression

Hong Kong was an anomaly during British decolonisation in the twentieth century (Wong 2026). While other British colonies became independent, Hong Kong was the only colony that was transferred to another sovereign state without the people’s consent. Self-determination, in this sense, was not completed under the framework of UN’s decolonisation principles. Instead, Hong Kong’s self-determination was managed through the promise “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong”. This arrangement became known as “one country, two systems”, under which Hong Kong would have the autonomy to run its own affairs as an independent political entity for fifty years, with the exception of foreign affairs and defence, ministries which are managed by China on Hong Kong’s behalf. Under the Joint Declaration, the people of Hong Kong were promised a democratically elected local government and legislature.

But the Joint Declaration was China’s strategic deception. The document did not specify the method of election for the future democratic government. As Hong Kong was a British colony, it is not difficult to surmise that this future electoral system would have been widely understood as a Westminster-type system, with open and fair elections. Indeed, Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, fully democratised the legislature in 1995. But at the 1997 handover, this fully elected legislature was dismantled by the CCP, which accused Patten of violating prior agreements, and replaced the elected legislature with a “provisional” legislature, itself a creation appointed in exile.

But perhaps the first significant repudiation on the Joint Declaration post-handover was the 2014 White Paper, which claimed China had “comprehensive jurisdiction” over Hong Kong. Its subsequent Decision Paper set out the framework for this democratisation: 2-3 candidates would be “nominated” by a pro-Beijing committee for the public to elect to the office of the Chief Executive. This was widely regarded as fake democracy and led to the 79-day Umbrella Movement. Hong Kong’s own legislature subsequently rejected the Beijing package in 2015. It was then that many localist and Hong Kong independence groups sprung up in Hong Kong’s political landscape in resistance to the totalitarian party-state’s interference with local affairs. In 2016, Nathan Law was elected as the youngest legislator in Hong Kong’s history. Demosistō, formed together with Joshua Wong, advocated self-determination of Hong Kong before the end of the fifty-year agreement.

But Beijing decided to silence him. The government disqualified Law a year later, with the official reason being his insincere oath. Xi Jinping came to Hong Kong first the first time in 2017, and told Hongkongers that they must not cross the “red line”. Xi did not specify what that meant at the time. In the ensuing years, advocating for self-determination became increasingly difficult, with these pro-democracy candidates not being allowed to run for election. When Hongkongers threw black paint at the PRC emblem on the night of 21 July 2019, the red line rhetoric intensified, and Beijing imposed the NSL on Hong Kong in 2020. Following this imposition, exile from Hong Kong was largely facilitated by the BN(O) scheme. Since then, many Hong Kong diasporic organisations have been established overseas, and the Hong Kong Parliament, an exile parliament, was globally elected in 2025.

From this history, we can see that the justification of political repression appears to rest, at its core, on China’s distorted narrative of Hong Kong’s sovereignty status, which the CCP tries to maintain through discursive hegemony, as illustrated by the CCP’s claim of comprehensive jurisdiction over Hong Kong. This distorted understanding effectively reinterpreted the original agreement, under which China would have its sovereignty restricted to areas of defence and foreign affairs. The claim is thus a direct contradiction of the promise of Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong.

The Inverted Logic Behind China’s Transnational Repression

To silence competing understandings of Hong Kong’s sovereignty, China discursively maintains control of the distorted narrative that Hong Kong is an internal affair of China (Wong 2025). In pragmatics, if one repeats a contested phrase enough times, for instance “Hong Kong is an inalienable part of China”, it becomes naturalised (Flowerdew 2004). But what that claim has essentially done is to conflate “inalienability” – a concept that refers only to territory – with the political identity of the people living within the territory and beyond it. As Vice Minister Le Yucheng stated, in the context of Hong Kong’s sovereignty, that “Hong Kong compatriots are genuine Chinese people” [香港同胞是地地道道的中国人].

The derecognition of the BN(O) passport as an identity document in Hong Kong reveals this conflation. To illustrate this, let us return to 2019. At the height of the Hong Kong protests, the British parliament was considering options for BN(O) status holders. The then Ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming told British politicians to “regard Hong Kong as a part of China, not as a part of the UK”. Liu accused the UK of interfering with the internal affairs of China, a standard phrase which has been repeated by China time and again whenever it does not like what other states are doing. But Liu Xiaoming has committed precisely what he accused the UK of doing. BN(O) status is a form of British nationality, and the UK was debating internally what to do with its own people in light of China’s repression of BN(O) status holders. Thus, instead of the British interfering, China was the state that was interfering with UK’s internal parliamentary debate by telling the UK to stop. This episode demonstrates Liu Xiaoming’s ignorance of history, his inverted logic, and his conflation of China’s claimed sovereignty with Hong Kong people’s political identity. If China’s claim of inalienability were only about territory, the BN(O) debate would have been of no concern to China, since supposedly only the territory is inalienable, and people can choose to leave and be “a part of the UK” if they so choose.

Let’s suppose the UK decided to grant all BN(O) status holders and their families full British citizenship immediately, rather than just offering a repatriation pathway to it. In that hypothetical scenario, which was a possible option debated in 2019, it would have been even more difficult for China to justify its claim in its opposition to the BN(O) route. Instead, it would have exposed to the world the falsehood of a legal fiction that China has perpetuated for decades, since 5.4 million eligible people would have become British overnight. The idea of granting full British citizenship to the entire Hong Kong population was seriously considered by the UK as early as the 1980s and also after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, but the British government only granted this privilege to a select group of elites, totalling 225,000 individuals, through the British Nationality Selection Scheme.

Notwithstanding China’s position that the Sino-British Joint Declaration is a “historical document”, China has accused the UK of violating the same treaty. To make this accusation, the Chinese state relies on the British memorandum appended to the Joint Declaration, which states that the UK shall not grant the right of abode to BN(O) status holders. However, the final policy implemented following parliamentary debate is a five-year visa pathway, after which the BN(O) applicant has the option of applying for settled status under certain criteria, among which is English language proficiency. The five-year visa itself has to be applied for, and the bespoke pathway is far from an automatic grant of right of entry. On the other hand, the Basic Law, which codifies the Joint Declaration, has stated that Hong Kong shall have the autonomy to implement a national security legislation “on its own” under Article 23. Thus, contrary to Beijing’s portrayal of the issue, China was in fact the co-signatory that violated the Joint Declaration in the first place by imposing the NSL on Hong Kong (J. Chan 2020).

This kind of inverted logic is not new in the history of the CCP. The framing of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre on June 4 demonstrates this. Patriots were framed as counter-revolutionaries, and the mass murder committed by the Chinese government was framed as protecting the state. The subsequent banning of any discussion about the Massacre in the mainland and more recently in Hong Kong suggests that the CCP knows its own narrative would not survive. It is this same inverted logic that China now uses to frame the 2019 protests as “unpatriotic, un-Chinese, ungrateful for Chinese support, and dupes of foreign meddling and incitement” (Zhao 2021, 154).

This framing rests on a presupposition that Hong Kong people are Chinese. However, the framing ignores the reality that the majority of Hongkongers do not regard themselves as Chinese. It makes a presupposition that Hong Kong is an inalienable part of China, and, therefore, the nation to which one must be patriotic is assumed to be the Chinese nation. Not the UK, and not Hong Kong itself. But for the entirety of its civilisation, except three years of Japanese occupation, Hong Kong has developed a British civic identity based on a free market, freedom of the individual, rule of law, and, most crucially, democratic institutions (Flowerdew 2016). These values are known as Hong Kong’s bedrock principles. Chris Patten said in a BBC interview:

Here is an example of freedom, and the sort of freedom we take for granted in most Western societies, being under assault. If we allow it to go under, if we allow it to be buried in Hong Kong, then sooner or later it would threaten everyone.

We can notice that the pronoun “we” aligns Hong Kong with Western democracies. Patten’s view is that Western societies should not allow China to assault the democratic free world, under which Hong Kong falls under. Here, we can similarly see China’s inverted logic: the CCP repeatedly claims Hong Kong is Chinese when, in reality, Hong Kong’s values align with the UK (Yu 2022, 2023). Thus, far from being an “internal affair”, China’s violation of the Joint Declaration is not only a matter between Britain and China, but also of international relations. The vocal support of the Hong Kong Parliament by the G7 Rapid Response Mechanism challenges precisely this narrative. It shows a growing sympathy for the exile parliament, which seeks to protect Hong Kong’s civic values inherited through British colonial rule.

Takeaways and Recommendations

Transnational repression originates from China’s distorted narrative of Hong Kong’s sovereignty. China maintains this distortion by conflating territory with people, reversing the roles of perpetrator and victim, and through legal instruments such as the NSL, and, more recently, Hong Kong’s home-grown Article 23. The Chinese state does this in order to silence competing understandings of Hong Kong’s sovereignty. Against China’s hegemony, the concept of self-determination is a commonly accepted principle under “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong”. This is evidenced by the Occupy Movement in 2014, the successful election of a Demosistō candidate into Hong Kong’s legislature in 2016, and the symbolic rejection of Chinese encroachment during the 2019 Hong Kong protests. The post-NSL political repression has extended transnationally not only to Hong Kong diaspora communities and civic organisations, but also to academia and exile political institutions. The irony is that had a self-determination referendum been held for Hong Kong, a plausible outcome could have been for Hong Kong to remain under Chinese governance. The CCP likely fears that a referendum would not result in its favour.

In 2017, Bruce Gilley caused controversy by publishing “The Case for Colonialism” in Third World Quarterly. In that article, he asserted that failed states can (a) invite former colonisers to recolonise some regions; (b) replicate colonial systems; (c) create colonies from scratch. The article was withdrawn following threats and intimidation against the editors but republished in 2018 by another publisher (Gilley 2018). If we were to apply Gilley’s framework to Hong Kong, China would be that failed state, since it has failed to govern Hong Kong according to the Sino-British Joint Declaration. I have argued in my thesis that (a) has been achieved, albeit in a reverse way, as the UK opens the door to 5.4 million colonial subjects and their families to come under its governance again; (b) has also been achieved, albeit only partially, as the virtual parliament has been elected in exile but currently exists without territory. The online election largely followed a democratic system that was bestowed upon Hong Kong by the British government, which was the only signatory to the Joint Declaration to ever fulfil the promise of democracy, however only for a brief time. With only 15,000 votes, the lack of votes was more likely a result of political repression rather than a failure of the idea. Prior to the post-NSL era, Hongkongers had successfully organised an unofficial referendum in 2014 and an unofficial primary election in 2020 with large turnouts. It is therefore not difficult to surmise that the primary reason for the lack of support for the Hong Kong Parliament could be the intimidation and threats resulting from the NSL.

Nevertheless, BN(O) status holders remain second class citizens. The BN(O) visa does not allow access to public funds. Some may become permanent colonial citizens if they do not meet the criteria, for instance English language proficiency, to apply for indefinite leave to remain at the expiry of their five-year visa. This situation is a grim reminder of the unequal tiers of British nationality within Hong Kong during the colonial era, where elites were granted full British citizenship, while ordinary people were left with BN(O) status. The reality is that Hongkongers are not willing to live under a totalitarian government, but BN(O) status holders are not equal citizens within the metropole. They have chosen the least worst option by living under a beacon of democracy.

Abandoned by Britain, persecuted by the totalitarian party-state, and reconnected with the mother country in a renewed but different relationship, the Hong Kong story is ultimately a story of loss, grief, and hope. It is what Fong (2020) calls a stateless nation. Hong Kong has a distinct political identity inherited from the British Empire, which promised Hong Kong democracy and autonomy. At the end of British colonial rule, Hong Kong’s beloved British governor said, “Now, Hong Kong people are to run Hong Kong. That is the promise. And that is the unshakable destiny”. Yet that promise never came and the destiny never arrived. Instead, Hongkongers have been forced to leave their beloved homeland and suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a consequence (Liang 2022). Young people who cannot afford to leave are grieving for the loss of their hometown (W. Chan 2024). Many have not found suitable work since arriving in the UK. With the exception of the elites and their families who were granted full British citizenship in the 1990s, the majority of Hong Kong people were left with a British nationality status that does not grant them any access to privileges normally afforded to British citizens. Like other stateless nations within China, Hong Kong and Hongkongers are vulnerable to political repression by the CCP.

So I want to offer a political solution, a kind of a New Jerusalem for Hong Kong people – a place of refuge, hope, and freedom. Just as the UK took a courageous step to open its door to Hong Kong, it could also be the leading state in recognising the Hong Kong Parliament, which may ultimately evolve into a government-in-exile. As I have argued in my thesis and elsewhere, the UK could provide land to host this government-in-exile in a similar way to India hosting the Tibetans, which could transform Hongkongers in the UK from second class colonial citizens within the metropole to full members of a self-governing Crown Dependency under the British Crown. In this sense, Gilley’s vision of creating colonies from scratch can be adapted to create a democratic-resistance hub on UK soil. Within this new colony, Hongkongers could conduct its own referendum to gauge what they want for their political future. This place in exile could host a people preparing and hoping for a day when the Chinese government is overthrown. Likewise, the city-state in exile could host a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) to investigate past British policies relating to nationality, especially during the post-Tiananmen era.

A Crown Dependency, together with the referendum and TRC, may not resolve all psychological traumas resulting from China’s assault on Hong Kong. However, an institutional solution could provide hope by acknowledging past injustices and creating a framework for political redress. As I have argued previously, Hongkongers have long suffered injustices fundamentally because the British government, in response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, separated those who were selected for full British citizenship from those who were not. Had the British offered a blanket grant of full British citizenship to Hong Kong before the handover, the resulting repression by the CCP may not have been as intense. A people confident in their national identity as British might have turned out to be less susceptible to intimidation by a bullying state. Without institutional recognition, Hong Kong, as a people, may carry the unresolved grief of historical injustice to the grave.

References

Chan, Johannes. 2020. “Five Reasons to Question the Legality of a National Security Law for Hong Kong.” Verfassungsblog on Matters Constitutional, June 1. https://verfassungsblog.de/five-reasons-to-question-the-legality-of-a-national-security-law-for-hong-kong/.

Chan, Wallace. 2024. “Loss of Hometown: Young Hongkongers’ Collective Grief following the 2019 Social Movement.” Journal of Loss & Trauma, 29 (3): 313-330. https://doi.org/10.1080/15325024.2023.2256226.

Flowerdew, John. 2004. “Identity Politics and Hong Kong’s Return to Chinese Sovereignty: Analysing the Discourse of Hong Kong’s First Chief Executive.” Journal of Pragmatics 36 (9): 1551-1578. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2004.03.002.

Flowerdew, John. 2016. “A Historiographical Approach to Hong Kong Occupy.” Journal of Language and Politics 15 (5): 529-548. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.15.5.02flo.

Fong, Brian. 2020. “Stateless Nation within a Nationless State: The Political Past, Present, and Future of Hongkongers, 1949–2019.” Nations and Nationalism 26 (4): 1069-1086. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12556.

Gilley, Bruce. (2018). “The Case for colonialism.” Academic Questions 31 (2): 167-185. https://academicquestions.org/the-case-for-colonialism/.

Liang, Mark. 2022. “Politics and PTSD: The Case of Hong Kong BN(O) Visa Arrivals in the UK.” Anthropology Today 38 (5): 4-8. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12751.

Wong, Ka Hang. 2025. “Discursive Sovereignty: How China Constructs Hong Kong as an ‘Internal Affair.’” Journal of Pragmatics Research 8 (1): 116–137. https://doi.org/10.18326/jopr.v8i1.116-137.

Wong, Ka Hang. 2026. “The Irony of Thatcher’s Political Miscalculation: A Critical Discourse Historiographical Analysis of British Nationality Classes in Hong Kong.” CADAAD Journal 18 (1): 37-53. https://doi.org/10.21827/cadaad.18.1.42479.

Yu, Andrew. 2022. “Hong Kong, CANZUK, and Commonwealth: The United Kingdom’s Role in Defending Freedom and the Global Order under ‘Global Britain’”. Round Table (London) 111 (4): 516-521. https://doi.org/10.1080/00358533.2022.2105532.

Yu, Andrew. 2023. “British Values, Hong Kong Voices: Tracing Hong Kong’s Britishness and its Influences on British Immigration Policies.” African and Asian Studies 22 (4): 418-451. https://doi.org/10.1163/15692108-12341616.

Zhao, Suisheng. 2021. “From Affirmative to Assertive Patriots: Nationalism in Xi Jinping’s China.” The Washington Quarterly, 44 (4): 141-161. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2021.2018795.

Ka Hang Wong is an English language educator and researcher with over a decade of experience teaching English for Academic Purposes and IELTS across China and Australia. He received his PhD from the University of Technology Sydney in March 2026 with a thesis tracing the historical evolution of BN(O) status from a token of British nationality into a tool of political resistance against a totalitarian party-state’s assault on Hong Kong. He has published research on Hong Kong, focusing on postcolonial linguistics, pragmatics, and English language teaching.

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

Poststructuralism encourages a way of looking at the world that challenges what comes to be accepted as ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’. Poststructuralists always call into question how certain accepted ‘facts’ and ‘beliefs’ actually work to reinforce the dominance and power of particular actors within international relations. Poststructuralism doubts the possibility of attaining universal laws or truths as there is no world that exists independently of our own interpretations. This viewpoint is underscored by Foucault’s (1984, 127) assertion that ‘we must not imagine the world turns towards us a legible face which we would only have to decipher’. For this reason, poststructuralists encourage researchers to be sceptical of universal narratives that attempt to offer an objective worldview, as these assumptions are heavily influenced by pre-existing assumptions of what is true – and usually underlined by the views of those in power. This renders poststructuralism openly critical of any theory that claims to be able to identify objective fact – as truth and knowledge are subjective entities that are produced rather than discovered. Therefore, by design, poststructuralism conflicts with the bulk of other IR theories as it finds them unable (or unwilling) to fully account for the true diversity of international relations.

The basics of poststructuralism

Poststructuralists argue that ‘knowledge’ comes to be accepted as such due   to the power and prominence of certain actors in society known as ‘elites’, who then impose it upon others. Elites take on a range of forms and occupy many different roles in contemporary society. For instance, they include government ministers who decide policy focus and direction for a state, business leaders who leverage vast financial resources to shape market direction, and media outlets that decide how a person is portrayed while reporting a story. Additionally, elites are often also categorised as ‘experts’ within society, giving them the authority to further reinforce the viewpoints that serve their best interests to a wide audience. Jenny Edkins (2006) uses the example of famines to show that when elite actors refer to famine as a natural disaster, they are removing the event from its political context. Therefore, the ways that famines occur as a result of elites taking particular forms of political action, through processes of exploitation or inaction due to profits on increased food prices, are lost when they are presented as unavoidable natural disasters.

Although great emphasis and focus is placed upon the authority of the elite actors to decide what we count as valid knowledge and assumptions within society, poststructuralism asserts that the way in which this power is achieved is through the manipulation of discourse. Discourses facilitate the process by which certain information comes to be accepted as unquestionable truth. Discourses which augment the power of elites are called dominant or official discourses by poststructuralists. The strength of dominant discourses lies in their ability to shut out other options or opinions to the extent that thinking outside the realms set by the discourse is seen as irrational.

An example of this can be found in the security versus liberty debate. The wish to increase security levels across society – in response to crime, irregular migration and terrorist threats – has been presented as a sliding scale whereby if a state wishes to be secure then the public must endure a reduction in personal freedoms. Personal freedoms – such as the freedom of expression and freedom of assembly – have been placed as the limit against which security exists. In this discursive construct, then, people are presented with the choice between a state that respects civil liberties but is left potentially insecure or a state that must curb personal freedoms in order to be secure and protected. In practice, the dominant discourse of securing the state often works to silence any concerns about enhanced state power. An elite programme to restrict civil liberties can be justified to a society conditioned by the ‘expert’ repetition of this discourse by appealing to the objective logic it asserts and discounting all other interpretations. Therefore, the move to achieve increased levels of security without the infringement upon personal or civil liberties is excluded from the argument, as the two are constantly being positioned in direct opposition to each other.

For poststructuralists, language is one of the most crucial elements for the creation and perpetuation of a dominant discourse. Through language, certain actors, concepts and events are placed in hierarchical pairs, named binary oppositions, whereby one element of the set is favoured over the other in order to create or perpetuate meaning. The power relation that is embedded within this relationship (for example, good versus evil or developed versus undeveloped) serves to reinforce the preferred meaning within the discursive construct. International Relations as a discipline is full of these oppositions and they are used by elites to both create favourable meaning out of certain events and to allow for this meaning to be easily absorbed and accepted by the wider public. One of the most common binary oppositions is to establish different groups or countries in terms of ‘them’ versus ‘us’.

If we look to the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001 (commonly known as 9/11) we can see these categories of differentiation and their influence begin to manifest themselves. President George W. Bush described Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’ – making these countries the ‘them’ that were rhetorically and politically positioned as international pariahs in contrast to the innocent ‘us’ of the United States and its allies. Hence, this binary opposition enabled Bush to claim that the United States was opposite to all that this trio represented and would be justified in taking various actions during a global campaign against states that were judged to sponsor, or harbour, terrorists.

If we look to the work of one of the leading scholars of poststructuralism, Michel Foucault, then the concepts of elites, discourses and the power of language and binary oppositions all tie together to create what he labels a ‘regime of truth’. This model applies to the ruling discourse that operates unquestioned within society, masquerading as the truth or fact. A regime of truth, then, is constituted by the dominant discourse, elite actors and the language that is used to create and sustain meaning and truth that serves the interest of the favoured actors.

The importance of poststructuralism is to highlight existing regimes of truth   and show that conventional ways of thinking and analysis in international relations are unable to point out how certain other possibilities are excluded by these discourses from the very start. Butler (2003) builds upon this idea of discourses excluding other possibilities by proposing that certain lives, in certain conflicts or terrorist atrocities, are deemed as more ‘grievable’ than others. Butler argues that thousands of people are lost to conflict in countries such as Palestine and Afghanistan, often at the hands of Western powers, and yet these people are not mourned or memorialised or even heard of within Western reports of war.

This hierarchy of grief can also be seen in the outpouring of sympathy for victims of terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 and Nice in July 2016. Yet, similar attacks in Beirut and Nigeria in November 2015 and Baghdad in July 2016 (to name but a few) went largely unnoticed and were silenced within regimes of truth that mourned for, or favoured, the ‘innocent’ Western victim.

Poststructuralism and media representations of terrorists

The media is a prime example of a site where discourses within regimes of truth are (re)produced and can be identified. How we receive information and the way that news events are presented to a society shapes how we conceptualise and react to political events. As such, if we want to observe   how people have come to conceive and frame both terrorism and terrorists, the poststructuralist can analyse media accounts in order to analyse the discursive construction of these political actors and associated terrorist events.

As the defining global terrorist attack of the twenty-first century, the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the United States can be used to convey how dominant discourses, instigated by governmental elites, were perpetuated and reinforced by the media.

In newspaper reports – specifically, in the week after the attacks – the terrorists were presented as evil and irrational, their stated political motivations were effaced and instead terrorists were repeatedly spoken of as crazed and apolitical. The terrorists were plagued by ‘inexplicable neurosis’ and driven by ‘ethnic, superstitious and tribal madnesses’ (Toynbee 2001). Additionally, these terrorists were set apart as different from more traditional forms of terrorism that the world had previously witnessed through the highlighting of the lethality and deadliness of mass murdering transnational terrorism – a move which heightened the emotions of fear and anxiety further.

To underscore this link to death and destruction, the media narrative also consistently linked both the acts and actors of 9/11 to images and metaphors of pestilence and disease. In contrast to this, was the cultivation of the idea of ‘American innocence’ (Boswell 2001) that was ‘vulnerable to hate’ (Boyd 2001), coupled with the persistent repetition and reminder of the suffering of the victims of 9/11 and the heroism of the first responders. Interspersed with this, the widespread international outcry to the attacks simultaneously worked to further emphasise the immorality and inhumanity of these actors. Themes of patriotism and civility were deployed within the media to further distance the cohesive ‘us’ from the generic barbarian terrorist. The reactions of the public that gathered together to pray, support each other, volunteer and eventually join the military juxtaposed radically with the destructive actions of the terrorists. Moreover, the emotions that the narratives of these actions evoked related back to feelings of love, empathy and altruism that the media utilised to engender further cohesion in society against the ‘other’ of the terrorist.

The importance of the recognition of this discourse is not to attempt to present these political actors – the terrorists – in a better light, but to recognise how the consistent and universal portrayal of them as evil and irrational made certain reactions and foreign policy actions more amenable and immediately cut off other methods of responding to  these  terrorist  attacks. From this, poststructuralism critically questions what purpose did the construction, by both the media and the government, of a dominant discourse that posited the terrorists and the society that they belonged to as evil and barbaric serve? How did the positing of an unbridgeable chasm between the civilised society and the primeval terrorist, within this regime of truth, favour elite agendas? One answer has been the identification of how this ‘good versus evil’ construct prepared and almost rallied the American public for war. It certainly prevented the chance of dealing with these attacks through diplomacy, as the overarching discourse stated that these terrorists merely wanted to destroy the world before them. While some may support the wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) that followed these attacks, the poststructuralist contribution deconstructs how this militaristic and aggressive response to 9/11 was legitimised by the discursive construction of the terrorists, the emotions that were manipulated and the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that was fashioned.

The pervasion of this discourse also served to conflate the motivations and acts of these terrorists with the construction of a wider Muslim and Arab society. With the simplistic interpretation of the historical relations between the ‘West’ and ‘East’ that was encouraged in this discursive construction, the regime of truth played upon and amplified the notion of the Muslim or Arab world as backward and primordial. Within the regime of truth of the War on Terror, then, this emotive discourse was extended to every Muslim, every Arab, and, eventually, every non-Westerner.

With the passage of time, we are also able to trace the gradual disruption to and destabilising of this regime of truth. As the United States was drawn further into destructive and protracted conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the public opinion that had supported intervention began to wane. Over time, the discursive construction of terrorists by the media was not strong enough to override the concurrent media accounts of large numbers of casualties resulting from the intervention. Along with these fatalities, as the media began to report on the abuses that were carried out, the regime of truth that had been centred on the foreign policy directives of the Bush presidency started to falter. Thus, the official discourse regarding terrorism and intervention was changing and this shift can be identified by a shift to more clandestine forms of intervention in the Middle East from 2009 onwards – watermarked by the presidency of Barack Obama. The increased use of special forces and drone strikes allowed Obama to continue to exert influence over the region without overtly declaring war – while also distancing his administration from the military intervention that defined that of his predecessor.

The official discourse across an event, although powerful, never fully accounts for the reading of the entire situation. While the presentation of terrorists as irrational and evil has found solid ground and the dominant perceptions of terrorism and terrorists are of an illogical and apolitical act and actor, there always will be deviation from this conceptualisation. As such, the official discourse as crafted by elites never fully accounts for or subsumes the whole of a society. For example, despite the warmongering in the wake of 9/11, there were large-scale anti-war protests by members of the public across many nations. This messy entanglement of the everyday and the elite shows that a plethora of discourses can coexist and craft the view of international relations that we are offered. From this we must recognise that elite and everyday discourses co-exist and, although one assumes a dominant position, there are still many other competing discourses at play that shape international relations and have the potential to contribute to under- standings commonly seen as ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’.

Conclusion

The impact of poststructuralism within IR theory comes from its ability to not only identify and uncover power relations that dictate political events but also make space for alternative discourses to emerge that can also affect the course of events. By examining elite actors, we can see how commonly accepted facts about the political system are not ‘natural’ but, instead, constructed in order to favour a dominant discourse. Furthermore, by tracing the rise and fall of regimes of truth as they take on new forms and favour new actors, poststructuralism shows how discourses can change over time and be destabilised. Most importantly, poststructuralism allows you to become care- fully attuned to – and interrogate – the many ways that power is exercised.

This is an excerpt from McGlinchey, Stephen. 2022. Foundations of International Relations (London: Bloomsbury).

International Relations theory allows us to ask questions of our history, our present, and even gain insights into our future. It gives us a toolkit that forms an essential part of International Relations as an academic discipline. This extract from Foundations of International Relations (McGlinchey 2022) is designed with three objectives. First, to show when and why each successive theory emerged. Second, to outline the central features of each theory so that you can understand the basics of how they work and get an appreciation of the insights they offer. Finally, to unpack certain elements of the theories to reveal some of their complexity. Due to its complexity and diversity, newcomers often have difficulty in grasping International Relations theory. So, in order to consider the field as a whole for beginners it is necessary to simplify International Relations theory. Here, we do so by splitting theory into three categories – ‘traditional’, ‘middle ground’ and ‘critical’. In order to simplify further, the various named theories will be presented as theory families. Much like real families, theory families have members who disagree on many things – but they still share core commonalities.

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Theories allow us to understand and try to make sense of the world around us through different perspectives – each of which are ways to simplify a complicated world. Theories are like maps. Each map is made for a certain purpose and what is included in the map is based on what is necessary to direct the map’s user in a clear, and useful, manner. Embarking on the study of International Relations without an understanding of theory is like setting off on a journey without a map. You might arrive at your destination, or somewhere else very interesting, but you will have no idea where you are or how you got there. And you will have no response to someone who insists that their route would have been better or more direct. Each different theory puts different things on its map, based on what its theorists believe to be important. Variables to plot on an International Relations map would be such things as states, organisations, individuals, economics, history, class, power, gender and so on. Theorists then use their chosen variables, and omit the others, to construct a simplified view of the world that can be used to analyse events – and in some cases to have a degree of predictive ability.

The 'traditional' theories: liberalism and realism

As International Relations itself was born out of the need to address the causes of war in the early twentieth century, the two traditional theories of the discipline – liberalism and realism – offered their own unique contrasting responses. Both theory families have been robustly challenged in the modern era, essentially because of their focus on issues at the system and state levels – like war and peace, for example – at the expense of other issues at the group and individual levels. Yet, despite these challenges, both liberalism and realism remain central to the discipline because of the distinctive insights that they offer.

Liberalism grew out of a set of principles based in idealism, which asserted that a better world was possible. Liberals view human beings as innately good and believe peace and harmony between nations is not only achievable, but desirable. Immanuel Kant developed the idea in the late eighteenth century that states that shared liberal values should have no reason for going to war against one another. In Kant’s eyes, the more liberal states there were, the more peaceful the world would become, since liberal states are ruled by their citizens and citizens are rarely disposed to desire war. This is in contrast to the rule of kings and other non-elected rulers (who today we may call dictators or autocrats), who frequently have selfish desires out of step with citizens and are typically quicker of mind to make decisions that would send ordinary people into danger. Kant’s ideas have resonated and continue to be developed by liberals, most notably in the democratic peace theory which posits that democracies do not go to war with each other – for the very reasons Kant outlined. To take this idea further, the theory argues that the more democracies there are, the more peace there will be in the international system. A common misunderstanding is often found here: democratic peace theory does not mean that war will end, but that its occurrences will shrink in number over time as more liberal democracies emerge. It also does not exclude the fact that liberal democracies will sometimes go to war with illiberal/non-democratic states for perceived security reasons – an example of which can be seen in the two US-led invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

Liberals do not just base their arguments on the spread of democracy. They also focus on two key elements of interaction between nation-states: trade and international organisations. For liberals trade is how states, and their peoples, interact during times of peace. They do this by exchanging products and services back and forth, often things that other states do not possess. This is a positive-sum interaction for both parties and inevitably also leads to the sharing of culture, ideas and the movement of people due to the literal and figurative pathways that are opened between nations. Positive-sum interactions are also important to liberals in a general sense as they prove that interactions between peoples and states can benefit both sides, rather than just one. As long as each party benefits to some degree (in the case of trade those states participating) then the result is a net positive for all. Everyone gains something. This may be that one side benefits financially from selling tea, and the other side benefits in a non-financial way by adding tea to their culture as tea leaves do not grow well in their climate or geography. In this sense, trade enriches all that come into contact with it, either directly, or indirectly. This positive-sum interaction does not have to be equal for both sides so long as something is gained by each party. For liberals, trade, being positive-sum, opens up communication links and shows the benefits of peaceful interactions across cultures that offer yet one more way to avoid war, as should a war occur then trade ceases between the warring parties and the benefits are lost.

The second element of interaction between states, international organisations, is a much newer phenomenon. Different cultures have been shown to have been trading since historical records began thousands of years ago. Yet we have only witnessed international organisations becoming a permanent structural component of the global system in the twentieth century, principally with the establishment of the United Nations in October 1945, although there were notable, and largely unsuccessful, earlier attempts at using organisations to establish order on a more limited scale. For liberals, international organisations provide a second element that underlines their theory. Simply by having a permanent ‘big table’ around which to interact and conduct diplomacy – and in the modern era there are many tables of this kind at regional and global levels – states can find ways to solve disputes. This lessens the need for war and provides a forum for diplomacy which, although rooted in compromise, can offer solutions that are acceptable to those who are in arbitration. International organisations are, therefore, central to the modern liberal account of International Relations.

It is no surprise that the liberal account is one that points towards a world of peace and harmony, and this has always been the case for liberals, who see that as their desired end goal for the global system. Yet, for liberals this is not philosophical idealism, but a conclusion that comes by virtue of manifestly real phenomena such as trade, international organisations and the spread of democracy. Each of these provides proof for their central idea that alternatives to war exist. Of course, having read the prior chapters of this book, you will know that our world has seen a lot of war and that warfare has become more deadly. So it is clear that despite the evidence for their claims, liberals have opposition. To help explain this, we can track back to US President Woodrow Wilson who addressed his famous ‘Fourteen Points’ to the US Congress in January 1918 during the final year of the First World War. As he presented his ideas for a rebuilt world beyond the war, the last of his points was to create a general association of nations, which became the League of Nations – essentially a prototype for today’s United Nations. Dating back to 1920, the League of Nations was created largely for the purpose of overseeing affairs between states and implementing, as well as maintaining, international peace. However, when the League was unable to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, its failure became difficult for liberals to comprehend, as events seemed to contradict their theories. Indeed it was analysing this timeline that the phrase ‘idealist’ came to be used widely as a pejorative to mock liberals for their apparently misplaced optimism, most notably by Carr (1939).

Despite the efforts of prominent liberal scholars and politicians, liberalism failed to retain a strong hold and another theory emerged to explain the continuing presence of war. That theory became known as realism. Realism gained momentum during the Second World War when it appeared to offer a convincing account for how and why the worst conflict in known history commenced after a period of supposed peace and optimism between 1918 and 1938. Although it originated in named form in the twentieth century, many realists have traced its origins to earlier writings. Indeed, realists have looked as far back as to the ancient world to the writings of the Greek historian Thucydides (460–400 BCE) where they detected similar patterns of human behaviour as those evident in our modern world.

As its name suggests, advocates of realism purport it reflects the ‘reality’ of the world and more effectively accounts for change in international politics. Thomas Hobbes is another historical figure often mentioned in discussions of realism due to his description of the brutality of life during the English Civil War of 1642–51. Hobbes described human beings as living in an orderless ‘state of nature’ that he perceived as a war of all against all. To remedy this, he proposed that a ‘social contract’ was required between a ruler and the people of a state to maintain relative order. Today, we take such ideas for granted as it is usually clear who rules our states. Each leader, or ‘sovereign’ (a monarch or a parliament, for example) sets the rules and establishes a system of punishments for those who break them. We accept this in our respective states so that our lives can function with a sense of security and order. It may not be ideal, but it is better than a state of nature where chaos and anarchy (the lack of a higher authority) prevail. As no such contract exists internationally and there is no sovereign in charge of the world, disorder and fear rules international relations. That is why war seems more common than peace to realists, indeed they see war as inevitable. When they examine history they see a world that may change in shape, but is always characterised by a system of what they call ‘international anarchy’ as the global system lacks the kind of hierarchical order that we experience within our domestic societies.

The best way to understand realism and how it views the global system is to break it into elements, as we have already done with liberalism. Dunne and Schmidt (2020) have helpfully described these as the three Ss of realism: statism, survival and self-help. Statism helps us understand what realists mean by ‘international anarchy’ as it focuses us on the idea that the central actors in the global system are nation-states who compete on a technically level playing field. There is no higher power beyond a nation-state, and for any group of people to become a ‘player’ in international relations they need to secure their sovereignty and form their own state. Once statehood is achieved, the next order of business is survival. As there is no higher power regulating the global system, states will frequently clash and seek to dominate each other. For this reason, for realists, whatever needs to be done to ensure the security of the state against the threats (actual or potential) is warranted. Finally, realists argue that as a state pursues its survival over time, it can only ensure the best chances of surviving by understanding the necessity of self-help. Trusting in an international organisation like the United Nations, or relying on the promises of another state, is potentially perilous because it puts your fate in the hands of an external actor, which is unwise. So, each state must take the required steps to help itself. This may be in the form of growing its military, forming fair-weather (temporary) alliances, or by developing other attributes that may deter an attack by another state.

The best way to understand realism and how it views the global system is to break it into elements, as we have already done with liberalism. Dunne and Schmidt (2020) have helpfully described these as the three Ss of realism: statism, survival and self-help. These core elements are at odds with liberalism, as when a realist looks at the world, they see a world of danger. To go back to the liberal idea of positive-sum outcomes, realists invert this concept and see most interactions through zero-sum logic, where they are more concerned with the idea of relative gains. For example, a liberal would see trade as an interaction where all parties gain something, and in that sense a scenario of absolute gains when measured for its overall effect. Trade, then, gives all parties mutual enrichment – such as the trading of tea analogy from above. But, seeing this from a realist point of view, should that tea-rich state decide to use the profits of their tea trade to build a massive military and attempt to grow their power and territory by dominating other states, then trading with them actually enables them to (potentially) become a future mortal enemy. For reasons such as this, realists see most interactions between states as zero-sum. Any interaction where a rival state gains in a relative sense, even if they only gain something small, is a loss to your state as it has made a competitor richer, and potentially more powerful. And, as the global system is anarchical and based on self-help, that interaction may at some point prove to be one that is regretted.

Realists are sometimes confused with isolationists – those who seek to put up barriers to interactions and pursue national self-sufficiency by removing themselves from international affairs. Realists are not isolationists. They simply caution that interactions should always be carefully entered into, always taken with a strong pinch of salt, and measured through the logic of their three Ss. Contrary to isolationism, realists recognise the necessity for all states to continually engage in international relations so they can assess their relative power and security against that of other states – which is constantly in flux.

Another central area that sets realism and liberalism apart is how they view human nature. Realists do not typically believe that human beings are inherently good, or have the potential for good, as liberals do. Instead, they claim individuals act in their own self-interests. For realists, people (and states by extension) are selfish and behave according to their own needs without necessarily taking into account the needs of others. Therefore, realists believe conflict is unavoidable and perpetual, and so war is common and inherent to humankind. Underlining this further, Hans Morgenthau, a prominent realist, is known for his famous statement ‘all politics is a struggle for power’ (Morgenthau 1948). This demonstrates the typical realist view that politics is primarily about domination as opposed to cooperation between states.

Here, it is useful to recall the idea of theories being maps. Realists and liberals see a similar global system, but they draw different conclusions from what they see. When viewing that system through realist eyes, it appears to reveal a terrain of domination and power. The realist worldview therefore magnifies instances of war and conflict and uses those to map out a certain picture of the world, one of an ever-changing dynamic of competing states of varying power and influence. Essentially, all that is on the realist map is terrain and spheres of influence divided among states. Liberals, when looking at the same world, adjust their view of the very same terrain to blur out areas of domination and instead bring areas of cooperation into focus. They do this by adding a transparent layer on top of the realist map that overlays additional features such as international organisations and global trade that sit above and between competing states. When that additional layer is overlaid, the map takes on a very different meaning. Leaving this analogy behind, you may realise the subjective nature of such worldviews. This may seem arbitrary, but these theories have significant real-world impact and often influence how leaders see the world. The reason that realism and liberalism have remained central to International Relations despite their age is that they remain relevant to policy and offer valid (albeit competing) roadmaps to politicians seeking to navigate their state’s way through the global system.

It is important to understand that there is no single liberal or realist theory, and this will become apparent as you progress in your studies and engage with the primary works of the theorists. Each scholar has a particular interpretation of the world, which includes ideas of peace, war and the role of the state in relation to individuals. Furthermore, both realism and liberalism have been updated to more modern versions (neoliberalism and neorealism) that represent a shift in emphasis from their roots. And those updated versions each have themselves many subdivisions. Nevertheless, these perspectives can still be grouped into theory ‘families’. For example, if we think of the simple contrast of optimism and pessimism we can see the familial relationship in all branches of realism and liberalism. Liberals share an optimistic view of International Relations, believing that the world order can be improved, with peace and progress gradually replacing war. They may not agree on the details, but this optimistic view generally unites them. Conversely, realists tend to dismiss optimism as a form of misplaced idealism and instead they arrive at a more pessimistic view. This is due to their focus on the centrality of the state and its need for security and survival in an anarchical system where it can only truly rely on itself. As a result, realists reach an array of accounts that describe a system where war and conflict are common, and periods of peace are merely times when states are preparing for future conflict.

Another point to keep in mind is that each of the overarching approaches possesses a different perspective on the nature of the state. In what may be a familial similarity rather than a difference, both liberalism and realism consider the state to be the dominant actor in the system – possessing ultimate power. This includes the capacity to enforce decisions, such as declaring war on another state, or agreeing treaties that may bind states to certain agreements. The traditional theories analyse, and also recognise, the basic structure that was put in place after the Treaty of Westphalia when the modern state system came to embody Europe, and later the world. Yet, digging a little deeper, differences soon present themselves when we consider how each theory considers international organisations and trade relationships in relation to states. In terms of liberalism, its proponents argue that the global governance capabilities provided by international organisations, and the opportunities offered by trade, are valuable. These assist states in formulating decisions, build relationships, and formalise cooperation that leads to more peaceful outcomes. Realists on the other hand believe states partake in international organisations and trade only when it is in their self-interest to do so.

The 'middle ground' theories: The English school and constructivism

An increasing number of scholars have begun to reject the traditional theories because of their obsession with the state and the status quo. In doing so they have opened up a middle ground between realism and liberalism on the one hand, and between the traditional theories and a range of critical theories on the other hand (these will be explored later). The thinking of the English school is often viewed as the first attempt to establish a middle ground in International Relations theory, albeit in this case a middle ground between liberal and realist theories. The English school involves the idea of a society of states existing at the international level. Hedley Bull, one of the core figures of the English school, agreed with the traditional theories that the global system was anarchic. However, he insisted this does not mean the absence of norms (expected behaviours), thus claiming a societal aspect to international politics. In this sense, states form an ‘Anarchical Society’ (Bull 1977) where a type of order does exist, based on shared norms and behaviours.

The English school is useful to help flag up a general misunderstanding that students often have that anarchy means chaos. The work of Bull and others in the English school draws attention to how international anarchy has its own unique type of order. After all, the world is not in a state of perpetual chaos despite its state of anarchy. It is not unfair to describe this as liberal realism, as it essentially posits (in its basic form) that the global order – as anarchic as it is – is not as pessimistic as the realists make out, yet not quite as optimistic as the liberals assert. English school theorists continue to develop their arguments beyond these observations (see Murray 2015), but for our purposes the central importance was that it showed that theoretical development beyond realism and liberalism was both welcome and possible.

Constructivism is another theory that can be viewed as a middle ground, but this time between the traditional theories and the critical theories that we will explore in the next chapter. It also has some familial links with the English school. But, it goes further and offers up new tools and insights in our theory toolkit. Constructivists highlight the importance of values and shared interests between individuals who interact on the global stage, as well as social norms that bring them together. Additionally, constructivists are interested in emphasising the agency of individuals, which in other words refers to people’s ability to seek and implement change. As you may have already picked up when recalling the themes of the previous chapter, this breaks theory out of its focus on the system and state levels of analysis and reaches into the group and individual levels.

Alexander Wendt, a prominent constructivist, described the relationship between agents (individuals) and structures (such as the state) as one in which structures not only constrain agents but also construct their identities and interests. His phrase ‘anarchy is what states make of it’ (Wendt 1992) sums this up well and helps to advance some of the points made by English school theorists. Another way to explain this, and to explain the core of constructivism, is that the essence of international relations exists in the interactions between individuals. After all, states do not interact; it is agents of those states – such as politicians and diplomats – who interact, leading to a greater likelihood of mutual cooperation. Since those interacting on the world stage have accepted international anarchy as its defining principle, it has become part of our reality. However, if anarchy is what we make of it, then states and their agents can perceive anarchy differently and the qualities of anarchy can change over time. International anarchy could even be replaced by a different system if an influential group of individuals (and by proxy the states they represent) accepted the idea. To understand constructivism is to understand that certain ideas, or ‘norms’ as they are often called once those ideas become expected behaviours, have power. As such, constructivists seek to study the process by which existing norms emerge, and then are challenged and potentially replaced with new norms.

To explore this issue in a more tangible way we can look at the basic idea of the existence of the nation-state. Sovereignty was an idea that was accepted in Europe in the mid-1600s, and then gradually took hold over the ensuing centuries until it became a global ‘norm’. There is simply no other accepted way to organise peoples that is currently recognised internationally. Today, when we look at a world map, the entire landmass of the earth (with the exception of Antarctica which has no native population) is divided into sovereign nation-states separated by physical borders. Understanding the value of constructivism is understanding that all those things that we take for granted, like the states we belong to and where they end geographically and another state begins, are simply constructs of human beings: they were agreed upon and built at a certain time and they will endure for as long as we want to keep them and invest in them. If a better idea takes hold, then we will see systemic change as we adjust to it and adopt it.

Constructivists examine the process of how new ideas emerge from within the policy-making machines of states, and also sometimes from individuals that they call ‘norm entrepreneurs’. Then they track when and how these ideas become adopted – or when they do not. It is even possible to see the construction of your own nationality this way. At some point, a sovereign established control of a defined territory (your nation-state), then created a flag, an anthem, adopted a national language and perhaps even a state religion – amongst other things. These were all choices made by someone, somewhere, that became meaningful over time and are usually taken for granted today. However, once you realise the constructed nature of everything in the political world, even your own nationality in which you may be very invested, you can appreciate the value of what constructivism brings to the table.

Identity is, then, another key component of constructivism. When individuals (agents) interact, usually on behalf of a state, they do so in a social environment. This is why constructivism is sometimes referred to as ‘social constructivism’. Put simply, identity is social, it exists between people via their interactions. Think of it this way, you would not know much about who you were and what makes you distinctive unless you could compare yourself to others. That may be others within your own society, or other states. That awareness of identity as being socially constructed completes the basic picture of what constructivism offers. It also indicates why constructivists often find their attention drawn to international organisations. For example, if the United Nations can be pictured as a ‘big table’ around which representatives of states sit, this can be visualised as the place where the world’s norms (expected behaviours) are constructed through social interactions between elite actors representing their respective states. Then those norms can be regularly tested, challenged and sometimes changed. If you want to look at this in a more human sense – people make, and then remake, our global system. Everything is built by individuals making their ideas reality. The only barrier is that an idea must become a norm, signifying it has been accepted by others in the system.

It is hopefully clear how constructivism diverges from liberalism and realism by opening up International Relations theory beyond a simple argument between optimism and pessimism broadly focused on the system and state levels of analysis. It moves International Relations theory into a more holistic position, which over time has become a middle ground that offers a message that can be more appealing than other theories. Namely, everything is socially constructed. So, if aspects of the global order are flawed or troubling, they are not fixed in place or inevitable – they can be remade. This disrupts the rather unchanging world that realists, for example, see. So, if, as for many students and scholars, realism and liberalism do not put enough variables on their maps, constructivism offers a welcome alternative.

The 'critical' theories

As our global system has grown in complexity, the family of theories that International Relations offers in response has grown in number. Recalling the previous sections, a debate between realism and liberalism has been raging since the foundation of the discipline. We also learned that the English school attempted to open up a middle ground between these two duelling theory families, a trend that was expanded when constructivism emerged. While developments like these held court for much of the twentieth century, a growing number of voices began to enter the discipline expressing dissatisfaction with the range of possibilities that International Relations theory was offering. By the end of the Cold War in 1991 – and considering the resulting changes in world order – a range of theories emerged that were critical of the journey that International Relations had taken thus far. These were Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism and poststructuralism. The uniting thread between these approaches was a perception that there was a need to examine alternative ways of ordering our world, and in doing so expose factors that the traditional theories have chosen to downplay or ignore. The critical approaches are to varying degrees ‘revolutionary’ in the sense that they seek material changes to the status quo.

To help us understand why theoretical shifts take place we can refer to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). This book set the stage for understanding, in general, how and why certain theories are legitimised and widely accepted. Kuhn also identified the process that takes place when theories are no longer relevant and new theories emerge. For example, the vast majority of human beings were once convinced that the earth was flat. With the advancement of science and technology, there was a significant discovery that led humans to discard this belief. When such a discovery takes place, a ‘paradigm shift’ results and the former ways of thinking are replaced by new ones. Although changes in International Relations theory are not as dramatic as the example above, there have been significant evolutions in the discipline. This is important to keep in mind when we consider how theories play a role in explaining the world and how, based upon different time periods and our personal contexts, one approach may speak to us more than another.

When we discuss ‘critical’ approaches to International Relations theory, much as we did when we labelled the prior theories ‘traditional’ and ‘middle ground’, we are using a simplifying device to refer to (and make sense of) a wide spectrum of theories that have been established. The 'critical' theory families share one particular trait – they are critical of commonly held assumptions in the discipline that have been central since its establishment. To borrow a common distinction, the traditional theories are built on simply observing the world ‘as it is’ rather than reaching for images of the world as it ‘ought to be’ and putting many more variables and investigations on the theoretical map. For those with a critical approach, the altered circumstances of the global system since the end of the Cold War called for approaches that are better suited to understand, as well as question, the more complex world we find ourselves in. Such theories are valuable because they identify things that have typically been ignored or overlooked and also seek out ways to transform our world. In that sense, the critical approaches also generally reject middle ground approaches as they do not usually go far enough in providing a voice to individuals who have frequently been marginalised, particularly women and those from the Global South.

Marxism

Marxism is a good place to start with critical theories. It is a disparate theoretical family held together by one key point: the global system should be replaced. Therefore, Marxism is unabashedly a revolutionary theory. The theory is based upon the ideas of Karl Marx and consequently is the only theory of International Relations that is named after a person. Although Marx is a historical figure, his writings have lived on and inspired a modern vein of critical theories that relate directly to contemporary issues. As Marx himself famously stated, philosophical writings typically only interpret the world rather than outline how to change it. Answering that call, Marxists today – and the wide range of critical theoretical families they inspire – are interested in understanding all the historical elements of today’s global system. Taking that knowledge, which spans economic, political and social critique, they focus on how our global system empowers some groups (mainly the elite, or ‘the 1 per cent’) and simultaneously disempowers others (the everyday person, or ‘the 99 per cent’). For this to change, the legitimacy of the state must be questioned and then it must be ultimately dissolved. In that sense, emancipation from the state in some form is the essence of the system change Marxists seek. Marxists believe that we are not born free – instead we need to be freed via the proliferation of revolutionary thinking that raises awareness of the injustices of the global system.

This critique, and dismissal, of the central unit of International Relations – the nation-state – is what makes Marxism so relevant as the major underpinning critical theory. The traditional theories take a world of nation-states as a given and therefore fail to envision what a global order would look like if formulated differently. Worse, by taking the state for granted, there is little or no incentive to critique the role of the state and the negative effects it has. For example, the state has a monopoly on warfare, deciding how and when to conquer territory or kill another state’s citizens. It also has the exclusive right to tax people, decide what ‘the law’ is and to demand allegiance from its citizens under penalties that range from fines, to imprisonment, to death. In addition, states partake in, and therefore legitimise, globalised capitalist trade systems that have led to ever-growing inequalities across the world. The rich seem to get richer, while the bulk of humanity remains exploited. Marxists believe this is a corrupt arrangement, and it is only with the dissolution of states from the world map that humankind will free itself of the chains of domination and inequality.

As the global system grew through the twentieth century to incorporate powerful international organisations in addition to states, such as the United Nations, Marxists saw further problems. In particular, Marxists view the globalisation project of the 1990s onwards as one that legitimised and locked in the very patterns of inequality that Marx had exposed more than a century earlier. This is because the United Nations, and the other organisations associated with it, only represent states, not people. To Marxists, the supposed grand projects within the United Nations – such as the establishment of human rights – are no more than band aids over a deeper corruption that has become all-encompassing.

It must be noted that modern Marxism does not have one clear idea of what a stateless world would look like. This is all the more complex as prior experiments with variants of Marx’s own solution, communism, gradually fell apart in each of approximately twenty-five states in which it was tried during the twentieth century. Therefore, while the course of history and human experience has muted communism as a viable system, it did not kill Marx’s longevity as the source of a body of work that provides the bedrock for critiquing the modern global system. In other words, the real-world failures of communism as a viable political and economic system did not take away from the vitality of Marx’s theoretical critique that power is not fairly distributed.

Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism differs from Marxism by focusing its critique on the inequality between states or regions, as opposed to classes. The effects of colonialism are still felt in many regions of the world today as local populations continue to deal with the challenges created and left behind by the former colonial powers. Postcolonialism’s origins can be traced to the Cold War period when much international activity centred around decolonisation and the ambition to undo the legacies of European imperialism. With the independence movements of the twentieth century, the peoples of the Global South rebelled ‘against the false belief that providence created some to be menials of others’ (Nkrumah 1963, ix). Central to postcolonial scholarship is the idea that the prejudices, biases, ideas and understandings that made colonialism possible in the first place did not disappear overnight with the granting of independence to former colonies. While they may have been forced to renounce most of their territorial claims, Western states are far from treating the former colonies as their equals – despite what the principle of sovereignty asserts. Postcolonial theory offers a way to identify these ‘neocolonial’ practices that create and then reproduce global inequalities.

For postcolonial scholars, an important endeavour is to highlight the colonial legacies that created current inequalities and the neocolonial power structures that reproduce them. Take, for example, a dominant image in the West of the continent of Africa as a place in need of financial aid, a moral burden, a drain on resources. Yet, Africa is also a place of great wealth and resources that have consistently been extracted (taken) by outsiders. Underlining the postcolonial critique further, while they may no longer be under direct colonial control, two-thirds of the world’s poor live in states that are rich in natural resources. One of the main reasons for this is that cash crops and valuable minerals are still extracted and exported to the Global North – now by transnational corporations instead of colonial governments. Struggling economies of the Global South compete to attract transnational corporations for the employment and revenues they will bring. Yet in order to do so, they join a ‘race to the bottom’, pitting countries against one another for who can offer the lowest taxes and cheapest labour and thus the greatest profits.

Take, for example, Ghana, home to the so-called ‘Gold Coast’, rich in minerals and petroleum. Between 2004 and 2008, mineral exports from Ghana increased by 50 per cent and yet during that period its tax revenues from mining actually decreased (Besada, Lisk and Martin 2015). If a state increases its taxes on a corporation (thereby reducing its net profits), there is the danger that it will just move its business elsewhere – leaving thousands unemployed. The same structural scenario leads to a lack of incentive to fully regulate and monitor tax compliance and payments – which provides a fertile ground for tax evasion and corruption. One study found that the amount of money that leaves Africa each year through illicit tax practices by corporations based in the West is nearly three times the total amount of aid and grants the continent receives (Global Justice Now 2017). Another study shows that in 2010 alone, states of the Global South lost over US$1 trillion to illicit financial practices, mostly in the form of tax evasion (Hickel 2014). This discussion suggests that the exploitation of the Global South did not end with independence, it just took on different forms.

Key works in postcolonialism have explored how representations of the Global South have fuelled imperialism by analysing enduring orientalism in Western discourse. For example, in Western depictions of the War on Terror, the depiction of the Eastern woman as a passive victim in need of rescue was used as part of the justification for certain interventions. This can be seen when US First Lady Laura Bush claimed that the War on Terror was ‘a fight for the rights and dignity of women’. Orientalism divides the world into ‘West versus East, us versus Muslims, cultures in which First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in burqas' (Abu-Lughod 2002, 784); a world of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’, as Spivak (1985) once put it.

In colonial times, Orientalist representations were made possible by the West’s exploration into, and domination over, the Orient. They also made continuing exploration and domination possible by constructing the Orient in the Western imagination as a barbaric place in need of ‘civilisation’. Present-day Orientalism is made possible by the cultural and political dominance of the West, and it makes possible continuing military intervention in the Middle East, in regions that are not seen as capable of governing themselves and protecting their own citizens – especially women – and are seen as a threat to the West. This is a crucial point in postcolonialism: that representations of former colonies can tell us much more about the West’s power over them than they can about the societies themselves. Orientalism leads to the assumption that the West knows best and that any intervention by the West in the East will be not only benevolent, but also beneficial. Of course, as the example of Iraq shows – a state that has been marred by instability since the US-led invasions in 1991 and 2003 – this can often be far from true.

Postcolonialism therefore laments that the discipline has historically been dominated by flawed perspectives, principally written by white Western scholars and published in the English language. It challenges International Relations to reflect on the kinds of knowledge this produces. It shows that scholarship produced in the West that does not challenge centuries-old Western assumptions about the ‘other’ is in danger not only of failing to recognise the historical legacies of colonialism that influence current inequalities, but also of actually reproducing those inequalities. Postcolonial scholars are, therefore, important contributors to the field as their critique widens the focus of enquiry beyond International Relations’ traditionally Western mindset and reflects the more diverse perspectives of our world.

Feminism

Another theory that critiques the inequality inherent in the global system is feminism. Feminism entered the field in the 1980s as part of the emerging movement critiquing the traditional theories. It focused on explaining why so few women seemed to be in positions of power and examining the implications of this on how international relations were structured. Recognising this introduces a ‘gendered’ reading of International Relations, where we place gender as the prime object in focus.

Once we have answered the question of where the women are (certainly not in political power relative to men) feminism will invite a deeper question that asks us to consider how we can reconstruct international relations so it can account for the experiences of all people. For some feminists this can be achieved by adding women to areas where they have been excluded, for example, all-women candidate lists in elections to ensure more women are elected, and some governments having gender-balanced cabinets. Developments like these, while a sign of progress, are often felt to not be enough to address what feminists refer to as a patriarchal culture – the male-driven environment that created such things as politics (and business) and led to the structural exclusion of women in the first place. In this sense, it is not men that are the problem per se, but a certain manifestation of the male gender that has enabled a distorted political and economic system to emerge across the world.

There are various different branches of feminism that each frame gender in different ways and place a greater emphasis on certain inequalities. Examples of early liberal feminists include nineteenth-century campaigners such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Taylor Mill and the early-twentieth-century suffragette movement, which used activism and civil disobedience to campaign for women’s rights to vote in the United Kingdom (which was passed into law in 1928), and in doing so inspired movements elsewhere. Contemporary liberal feminists prioritise issues such as equal representation in political office, equal representation in corporate governance and equal pay – arguing that these will help to catalyse wider change. Marxist feminists, by contrast, are interested in how current economic and political structures depend on, exploit and undervalue women’s labour, both in factories and workplaces and in the home. For example, Cynthia Enloe (1989) wrote about how women’s labour is exploited everywhere from banana plantations, to military bases, to tourist beaches, and is essential to the global economy. Postcolonial feminists are interested in how new forms of colonialism impact women of the Global South. For example, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1988) argues that white Western feminists frequently reproduce colonial discourses of rescue towards women of the Global South, as already explored above in the section on postcolonialism. Poststructuralist feminists are interested in how our understandings of what it is to be a man, or a woman, shape the different roles we are able to take on in the world and the very structures of power that govern us. Carol Cohn (1987), for example, analysed how sexist and sexualised language used by US defence intellectuals to describe nuclear weapons masks the potential atrocities these weapons could cause and even makes them seem desirable.

To bring our discussion of feminism back to its familial roots, whatever variant it may take, feminism at its core unites to challenge International Relations to reflect on its historical dominance by men and the exclusion, until recently, of the experiences, perspectives and qualities of women. Sometimes this is as explicit as the language used in many of the discipline’s foundational texts, which refer to ‘man’ to describe all of humankind (mankind). It can also be seen in the qualities that traditional theories, especially realism, put forward as universal truths about the nature of ‘man’ – rational, calculating and aggressive to name a few – which have historically been perceived as masculine qualities in almost every culture in the world. Feminists ask why these have been valued above supposedly feminine ones such as emotion, compassion and pacifism – which are equally ‘human’ in their nature. Of course, most feminists would argue that these are not inherently masculine or feminine qualities, but rather that (to borrow constructivist terminology) they have been socially constructed as such for centuries.

The crucial point here is that only the qualities deemed to be masculine have been taken to be relevant to theorising about human nature and statecraft in the traditional theory families. This results in theories, such as realism, which not only ignore the experiences of large parts of the population, but also become self-fulfilling prophecies as they create the aggressive, competitive political system that they claim to be describing. As V. Spike Peterson (1992) argues, as long as gender remains ‘invisible’ it may be unclear what ‘taking gender seriously’ means. Ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman – the social construction of gender – permeate every aspect of international politics and of our daily lives. In seeking to understand how and why that happens, and with what effects, feminism hopes to make the world a fairer place for everyone. Here, you might again see some overlaps – with constructivism in this case, for example.

Poststructuralism

Poststructuralism is perhaps the most controversial of the critical theories as it questions the very beliefs we have all come to know and feel as being ‘real’. Poststructuralists do this by critiquing the dominant narratives that have been widely accepted by other theories. These, they believe, have evolved into metanarratives – complex accounts explaining how the world works that are unquestioned by most people, but are really just convincing stories created by those in power. For instance, liberals and realists both accept the idea of the state and for the most part take it for granted. Such assumptions are foundational ‘truths’ on which those traditional theories rest – becoming ‘structures’ (or metanarratives) around which they build their account of reality. So, although these two theoretical families may seem to be in opposition, they actually share a general understanding of the world. Neither realism nor liberalism in their modern forms seek to challenge the existence of the state nor attempt to think beyond it – they simply count it as part of their reality. Poststructuralism seeks to question these commonly held assumptions of reality that are taken for granted, such as the state – but also more widely the nature of power.

Jacques Derrida’s contribution in this area was in how he showed that you could deconstruct language to identify deeper, or alternative, meanings in texts. If you can deconstruct language (expose its hidden meanings and the power it has), then you can do the same with fundamental ideas that shape international relations – such as the state. By introducing doubt over why the state exists, and who it exists for, poststructuralists unlock questions about central components of our political world that traditional theories would rather avoid. If you can shake the foundations of a structure, be that a word or an idea, you can move beyond it in your thinking and become free of the power it has over you. This approach introduces doubt to the reality we assume to share and exposes the often thin foundations that some commonly held ‘truths’ stand upon as we live in a world of metanarratives that can each be dissected, if so desired.

You might ask why someone would want to do such a thing, and for that we can turn to Michel Foucault. Through the 1960s to 1980s he wrote prolifically about the idea that power and knowledge are mutually constitutive – that is, they create and reinforce one another. Within societies, only some groups of people – elites such as politicians, journalists and academic experts – have the power to shape our common understandings of a particular subject. And those common understandings in society come to influence how we act on any given issue, who we trust as an expert on it and who we choose to govern us, thus reinforcing the positions of power of those elites. You might (again) be seeing some overlaps here, this time with Marxism – for example via the idea of how elites control society – but poststructuralists take critiques such as this to a deeper level and reach results that go beyond the critique found in Marxism.

Discourses – our shared understandings – shape how we as a society respond to issues. For example, da Silva and Crilley (2017) analysed comments on newspaper websites and social media by British people discussing the choice of some British citizens to travel to Syria and join Islamic State. They concluded that the majority of people posting believed foreign fighters were motivated primarily by religion and had been brainwashed into unwavering support for a violent ideology. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the most popular prescriptions for how the UK government should respond to these fighters were to revoke their passports and criminally punish them. Poststructuralists recognise this as evidence of a particular discourse that had become dominant in a society – in this case displaying an understanding of terrorists as being irrational and unable to be reasoned with. While that may be true in some cases, perhaps some of these foreign fighters were motivated by more complex causes such as disillusionment with British foreign policy in the Middle East, Islamophobia in the UK, unemployment, poverty, functional illiteracy, or boredom. Research suggests that media coverage of measures such as harsh legal punishments and revocation of passports only serve to deepen the feelings of exclusion, the very feelings that can make somebody vulnerable to radicalisation (Lister 2015).

Poststructuralism does not focus on ethical judgements about issues such as terrorism. Instead, it shows how dominant discourses close down the options available in responding to such issues. For example, the understanding of terrorists as irrational rules out any possibility of their rehabilitation and reintegration into society through efforts to better understand the causes of their radicalisation. This not only leads to lost human potential, but also to a more violent world as only military and security measures seem like rational responses to terrorism and these in turn exacerbate many of the causes of radicalisation. In turn, these measures enhance the power of the state by giving it yet more power over the individual in the name of counterterrorism.

For poststructuralists, we can never experience anything outside discourse – that is through shared understandings that dominate our societies. As poststructuralists seek to question universal truths and metanarratives, the core of their theory is to actively choose not to take ideas as we know them for granted, nor to see certain paths of action as inevitable. Above all, poststructuralism encourages us to question how those in positions of power frame a particular issue and how doing so might serve to represent their interests and to shore up that position of power. Again, you may see some overlap here with the other theories in this chapter, such as feminism and postcolonialism. In fact, all of the theories discussed in this chapter explore in one way or another how power operates in international relations to oppress certain peoples.

Conclusion

There are many more theory families in International Relations than the ones explored in this excerpt (see McGlinchey, Walters and Scheinpflug 2017). Yet, the theories covered so far offer a solid starting point for achieving an understanding of where the most common approaches are situated and what they bring to International Relations. It is fair to say that the critical theories are usually regarded by students as more difficult to grasp than the traditional and middle ground theories. However, this is a reflection of the fact that today’s world is much more complex than at any time prior and so we need more complex tools to deal with this. Each of the theories covered forms a tool kit that provides the foundations for opening up ways to ask questions about International Relations.

Figure 1