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This research underscores the complexities of constructing hegemonic narratives in the face of geopolitical dynamics surrounding military crises. Departing from conventional analyses focused on securitization theory, strategic narratives, or David Campbell's framework of identity construction in response to external perils, this study draws upon the concept of hegemonic practices as elucidated by Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Through an exploration of how political actors employ discursive strategies to construct hegemony, the research centers on the Western political elites' efforts to establish political hegemony to rationalize military intervention in the Middle East. Utilizing the notion of the antagonistic Other, which posits two mutually constitutive Others where one is perceived as the source of violence against the other, representing civilians, this paper examines the political discourse surrounding two concurrent events in the Middle East: the conflicts in Syria and Libya. The analysis reveals that while the Western political class constructed a political hegemony around Libya by portraying Muammar Gaddafi and the victimized civilians as opposing Others, a similar narrative failed to materialize for Syria: Western powers encountered expected challenges in articulating a clear antagonistic Other, on account of the position of Russia and other countries representing non-Western political culture. Throughout the period of 2011– 2014, Bashar al-Assad, despite his role as the Syrian president, was not consistently portrayed as the source of antagonism towards civilians.

The Caucasus has always been a formative region for Russian foreign policy-making. While the North Caucasus has retained its position as Russia's most fragile and politically instable region, the South Caucasus provided the most pressing security challenges shaping Russian foreign policy since the early nineteenth century. In this article, we argue that the Caucasus comprises a distinct environment that exposes the underlying features of the Russian grand strategy, namely its propensity to hard power and balancing, and yet, at the same time, the fragility of Russia's position within such a turbulent region. The historical strategic equation with Turkey and Iran has in recent decades been supplemented with a competitive Russia-NATO security dynamic in the Black sea. The threat of possible NATO enlargement in the South Caucasus forces Moscow to draw particular attention to the southern direction of its defences. The situation has become even more complicated with the onset of the Ukraine crisis and Russian engagement in Syria. Historical experience teaches Russia to cease any other foreign policy endeavours until the Caucasus is at peace or at least does not threaten a spill-over of instability. For now, this is a very distant prospect.

This article contributes to the debate on how an international crisis may contribute to ontological security. We argue that ontological security can paradoxically be achieved through escalating practices capable of provoking international crises. By merging 'practices', a fairly distinct theoretical perspective of International Relations, with ontological security, we seek to expand Jennifer Mitzen's premise that "even dangerous routines provide ontological security" and consider practices as a source of attaining ontological security. To partake in the practical turn in ontological security studies, we borrow the concepts of Practice Turn in IR, habitus (disposition), and field (environment). After substantiating the connection between the two theories, we take the demise of the INF Treaty as an example of a crisis. We argue that the INF Treaty, as a field, has become a source of ontological threat to both the U.S. and Russia. Following the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia have constantly changed their habitus by developing key missile technologies and deteriorating bilateral relations. Accordingly, the changed habitus no longer conformed to the realities of the field, making its delegitimization by both sides self-evident.

We revisit and empirically evaluate crucial yet under-examined arguments articulated in "God Gave Physics the Easy Problems" (2000), the authors of which emphasized that, in International Relations (IR) predictions, predominant nomothetic approaches should be supplemented with concrete scenario thinking. We test whether the IR predictive toolkit is in fact dominated by nomothetic generalizations and, more broadly, map the methodological profile of this subfield. We build on the TRIP database, supplementing it with extensive original coding to operationalize the nuances of predictive research. In particular, we differentiate between nomoscopic predictions (predictive generalizations) and idioscopic predictions (predictions for concrete situations), showing that this distinction is not reducible to other methodological cleavages. We find that even though in contemporary IR an increasing number of articles seek to provide predictions, they consistently avoid predictions about concrete situations. The proportion of idioscopic predictions is stably small, with an even smaller proportion of predictions that develop concrete narratives or specify any determinate time period. Furthermore, those idioscopic studies are mostly limited to a niche with specialized themes and aims. Thus, our research shows that the critical claims from 20 years ago are still relevant for contemporary IR, as the "difficult problem" of developing predictive scenarios is still consistently overlooked in favor of other objectives. Ultimately, the types of predictions that IR scholars develop depend on their specific aims and constraints, but the discipline-wide result is a situation in which international studies' ambition to provide predictions grows, but they tend to reproduce the same limitations as they did in 2000.

We revisit and empirically evaluate crucial yet under-examined arguments articulated in "God Gave Physics the Easy Problems" (2000), the authors of which emphasized that, in International Relations (IR) predictions, predominant nomothetic approaches should be supplemented with concrete scenario thinking. We test whether the IR predictive toolkit is in fact dominated by nomothetic generalizations and, more broadly, map the methodological profile of this subfield. We build on the TRIP database, supplementing it with extensive original coding to operationalize the nuances of predictive research. In particular, we differentiate between nomoscopic predictions (predictive generalizations) and idioscopic predictions (predictions for concrete situations), showing that this distinction is not reducible to other methodological cleavages. We find that even though in contemporary IR an increasing number of articles seek to provide predictions, they consistently avoid predictions about concrete situations. The proportion of idioscopic predictions is stably small, with an even smaller proportion of predictions that develop concrete narratives or specify any determinate time period. Furthermore, those idioscopic studies are mostly limited to a niche with specialized themes and aims. Thus, our research shows that the critical claims from 20 years ago are still relevant for contemporary IR, as the "difficult problem" of developing predictive scenarios is still consistently overlooked in favor of other objectives. Ultimately, the types of predictions that IR scholars develop depend on their specific aims and constraints, but the discipline-wide result is a situation in which international studies' ambition to provide predictions grows, but they tend to reproduce the same limitations as they did in 2000.