Volume 99, Issue 2, March 2023

This article examines India's quest to become vishwaguru or ‘world teacher’, aiming to transform unequal global hierarchies. As western states recognize India as a democratic partner, this endorses the vishwaguru project of the contemporary Hindu nationalist rule, with consequences for the international liberal order.

This article traces the aesthetic tropes deployed by India, such as yoga and the idea of Mother India, to bolster its image as a civilizational state in international politics. ‘New’ India's rise as a civilizational state has important implications for its commitment towards democracy and liberal values.

Examining India's civilizational arguments in south Asia, this article argues that while there is no official corroboration of the Hindutva ideology in India's foreign policy, its increasing domestic salience is raising anxieties among south Asian countries over India's cultural hegemony.

By examining the World Hindu Economic Forum (WHEF), this article shows that the Hindu civilizational rhetoric is used by nationalist business circles to construct strategies that reinforce Hindu nationalist sentiments and neo-liberal-oriented market ideas.

This article examines the political appropriation of heritage in India. It demonstrates how India's civilizational discourses circulate at the international level through UNESCO in benign ways and yet, simultaneously, advance the populist politics now familiar to the Hindutva movement.

This article analyses how and why India and Turkey position themselves as civilizational forces in international affairs. Despite contextual differences, Indian and Turkish claims to civilizational exceptionalism serve two distinct but interrelated political aims: to overcome international marginalization and to fortify authoritarian rule domestically.

Policy hybrids combining neo-liberal and national-developmentalist goals are rising. Examining India's policy hybrids, this article argues that a ‘paternalist political rationality’ driven by neo-liberalism and Hindutva civilizationalism underpins India's flagship economic policies and may ultimately undermine its global ambitions.

The article argues that the 2003 Iraq War constituted a ‘critical juncture’ in shaping the Middle Eastern order and wider international relations. It shows the war's enduring significance in three spheres: the region's international alignments, its balance of power and its institutional environment.

This article offers the first comprehensive study of the emigration of non-Muslim minorities after the 2003 intervention in Iraq. It argues that the intervention set in motion a process of nation-destroying instead of nation-building as Iraqi nationhood was divided along primordial lines.

This article contrasts Joe Biden and Donald Trump's personalities to argue that the current unified western response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine would have been unlikely had Trump been re-elected. This exemplifies that counterfactuals are helpful to study how personalities influence foreign policy.

What happens to the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda under illiberal populist politics? Examining the Czech, Polish and Slovakian efforts through a postcolonial and feminist institutionalist lens, this article argues that despite understanding WPS as key to its ‘western belongingness’, these central European countries have failed to address gendered insecurities.

Arguing for the importance of territorial dynamics in the study of interstate conflicts, this article offers a reconceptualization of ‘buffer zones’. It provides a renewed typology of buffer zones using examples from Ukraine to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.

The deepening climate crisis is provoking new thinking about the carbon costs of wielding military force in a net-zero world. The article introduces the term ‘low-carbon warfare’ to account for the growing pressure on militaries to reduce their carbon emissions.

The article studies how China disseminated narratives of its supremacy and the world order to the Gulf during the COVID–19 pandemic, and how these ideas have been received and contested by local audiences. Beyond material power, authoritarian actors utilize narratives for the transregional diffusion of their power.

Introducing the concept of transactional forced migration (TFM), this article examines cases of migration ‘deal-making’, such as the 2022 UK–Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership. It identifies the under-appreciated connections between TFM and other dimensions of diplomacy and international politics.

Despite the prominence of ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) in global governance, there is little scholarly understanding about how to recognize or categorize them. The article provides a rigorous foundation for identifying AHCs and studying their effects, by drawing attention to three characteristics: their short notice creation, task specificity and initial temporality.

This article explores the transforming relationship between the Catholic church and states in west Africa. In response to its diminishing influence in national politics, the church is increasingly participating in regional organizations like the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

This article examines the clash between the legal vision of European integration and the political vision. Two crises illustrate this: Poland's democratic backsliding and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The authors conclude that European leaders will need to work within the constraints the union faces.

This article argues that, even in an emergent realist international order which downgrades commitments to human rights, states will intervene to halt genocide. These interventions are more likely to be military in nature, carried out by regional and local actors and motivated by self-interested security concerns.

Why did Latvia's parliament pass a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide in 2021 despite having only a small domestic Armenian population? This article studies how diverse actors engage in ‘constructivist memory politics’ by creating new associations with a historical event for a broad range of goals.