Suchergebnisse

This paper offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the ways and extent to which the US president and UK prime minister have securitized the Covid-19 pandemic in their public speeches. This assessment rests on, and illustrates the merits of, both an overdue theoretical consolidation of Securitization Theory's (ST) conceptualization of securitizing language, and a new methodological blueprint for the study of 'securitizing semantic repertoire'. Comparing and contrasting the two leaders' respective securitizing semantic repertoires adopted in the early months of the coronavirus outbreak shows that securitizing language, while very limited, has been more intense in the UK, whose repertoire was structured by a biopolitical imperative to 'save lives' in contrast to the US repertoire centred on the 'war' metaphor.

The performance of ritual and the ritualisation of performance are the two main theoretical repertoires of ritual study in international politics and beyond. However, they also escalate tensions between those who insist on ritual's ability to operate by virtue of participants' presence and those who believe that global networks of media call for a representational turn, which must tie participants and audiences across borders. Should we fail to understand how these distinct theoretical repertoires interact, it would be difficult to study international ritual, identify its functions, and trace its effects. Anchored in the sociology of 'social occasions', this article weaves ritual's patterns, properties, and resources into a coherent analytical framework. The framework enables us to better to grasp how actors move between/within different worlds (ritual and performance) and to what effects. The comparative study of two post-terrorism ritual occasions (the 2011 Rose March in Oslo and the 2015 Republican Marches in France) illustrates the usefulness of this theoretical proposition and its related framework.

This paper offers an original theoretical framework for the study of insults in international relations (IR). Bringing into IR the two main theoretical approaches to aggravating language, slurs and dysphemisms, we conceptualize insults' disruptive impact on international interactions in a way that explains their logic, consequences, and risks. Specifically, we argue that insults constitute both at once tactical tools used by international actors to achieve their interests by disrupting an interaction and modifying the payoffs associated with it and linguistic artifacts constructing and sharpening self- and other identities. The components of our theoretical framework are illustrated with a wide range of empirical cases of international insults.

In the past two decades, calls for International Relations (IR) to 'turn' have multiplied. Having reflected on Philosophy's own linguistic turn in the 1980s and 1990s, IR appears today in the midst of taking – almost simultaneously – a range of different turns, from the aesthetic to the affective, from the historical to the practice, from the new material to the queer. This paper seeks to make sense of this puzzling development. Building on Bourdieu's sociology of science, we argue that although the turns ostensibly bring about (or resuscitate) ambitious philosophical, ontological, and epistemological questions to challenge what is deemed to constitute the 'mainstream' of IR, their impact is more likely to be felt at the 'margins' of the discipline. From this perspective, claiming a turn constitutes a position-enhancing move for scholars seeking to accumulate social capital, understood as scientific authority, and become 'established heretics' within the intellectual subfield of critical IR. We therefore expect the proliferation of turns to reshape more substantively what it means to do critical IR, rather than turning the whole discipline on its head.

"The Third Debate and Postpositivism" published on by Oxford University Press.

Securitization theory has developed into a fruitful research program on the construction of security threats. The theory has experienced growing sophistication, and empirical studies have produced stimulating insights on issues as varied as the politics of immigration, health, climate change, or cybersecurity. Understanding how social issues become perceived as threats seems timelier than ever given the rise in securitizing narratives in recent political elections across the globe. We propose that this research agenda would benefit from broadening its methodological diversity. In particular, the use of experiments could complement existing methods in securitization theory, mitigate some of the program's methodological weaknesses, and help explain when securitizing moves are likely to succeed or fail.

This text offers a comprehensive overview and analysis of the Islamic State's use of propaganda. Combining a range of different theoretical perspectives from across the social sciences, and using rigorous methods, the authors trace the origins of the Islamic State's message, laying bare the strategic logic guiding its evolution, examining each of its multi-media components, and showing how these elements work together to radicalize audiences' worldviews.

Violent extremist groups regularly use pictures in their propaganda. This practice, however, remains insufficiently understood. Conceptualizing visual images as amplifiers of narratives and emotions, the present article offers an original theoretical framework and measurement method for examining the synchronic and diachronic study of the manipulative use of images by violent extremist groups. We illustrate this framework and method with a systematic analysis of the 2,058 pictures contained in the Islamic State's propaganda magazines targeting Western audiences, exposing the "visual style" of the group, and highlighting the trends and shifts in the evolution of this style following developments on the ground.

Offering a framework for ethical assessment, this article draws attention to the ethical issues accompanying empirical research on security. Speaking to the various subfields and schools of broadly conceived applied security studies, we classify the many ethical issues specific to empirical research on security, conflict, and political violence into researcher-related problems, subject-related problems, and result-related problems. We evaluate the importance and variations of these issues and highlight potential mitigation pathways. This effort brings together an existing but fragmented literature and builds upon the authors' own experiences in several subfields and schools of "hands-on" research on security and political violence.

Over the past decade, rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed a range of areas, from medicine to strategic games and communication technologies, from art and culture to everyday office work. It would be naïve to assume that this evolution does not permeate and alter international affairs. Building on, and solidifying, a thriving yet still fragmented emerging literature on "AI IR," this forum gathers several critical diagnoses of the way AI technologies impact on various areas of international relations. Introducing new concepts and charting emerging empirical realities, contributors explore how AI advances, such as autonomous lethal systems, synthetic imagery and text, or intelligent systems, are already creating new landscapes of violent and nonviolent international interactions. Yet, behind their distinct takes, contributions together stress the need to correctly locate and evaluate specific sites of AI impact, thus offering a nuanced appraisal scrutinizing grand declarations of an "AI revolution" in global politics.