Despite growing interest in environmental peacebuilding in recent years, there has been limited research exploring the conditions that contribute to local environmental peacebuilding. Existing empirical studies are predominantly qualitative single-case studies, valued for their theoretical insights but criticized for their limited external validity. Cross-case comparisons, although scarce, often rely on secondary data, leading to definitional and methodological inconsistencies. This study addresses this gap by employing multi-site fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify under what conditions local environmental cooperation is initiated and sustained over renewable resources in politically fragile contexts. We collected primary data through semistructured interviews on 22 intercommunal cases in which two communities engaged either in cooperation or in conflict over water access points in Puntland State, Somalia, covering the period from 2015 to 2023. The results highlight the relevance of the simultaneous presence of three conditions: preexisting trust, mutual interdependence, and traditional institutions. These conditions do not operate in isolation; they interact to enable cooperation and build peace related to the environment and natural resources. Our findings suggest that even in politically fragile, environmentally stressed, and highly climate-vulnerable places, local communities can find cooperative solutions to renewable resource disputes if specific conditions are met.

Although both violent and nonviolent campaigns for political change come in many varieties, scholars of civil resistance have thus far overwhelmingly focused on large campaigns seeking maximalist goals such as the overthrow of a regime, the removal of a foreign occupier, or secession. Most mass movements, however, have reformist goals—like economic, political, environmental, or social policy change—rather than maximalist ones. This article introduces the Major Episodes of Contention data, which identifies the onset, outcomes, and additional variables of 2,734 reformist and maximalist contentious episodes globally from 1955–2018. The dataset relies on English language sources to capture all reported episodes lasting over a week and involving at least a thousand participants. Comparable to the NAVCO v1 Data Series, episodes are classified according to size, goals, duration, defection and/or repression by the incumbent government, and their outcomes. The dataset therefore allows for more differentiation and comparability between like and unlike campaigns. The article presents the major features of the dataset and describes patterns and trends for a more nuanced understanding of different types and forms of contentious mobilization.

Authoritarianism, populism, and radicalism are considered important risks to citizens’ support for democratic institutions. Most studies have so far analyzed varying combinations of these, making it difficult to understand the potentially damaging effects of either of these separately. Analyzing a survey of 14,000 British, French, German, and Italian citizens, I show that studying authoritarianism, populism, and radicalism together reveals important differences in citizens’ support for and understandings of democracy. Authoritarians do not support democracy. Populists support democracy as much as non-populists, while they are highly critical of its real-world implementation. Their open-ended responses refer less often to liberal democracy than those of other respondents. Radicalism in itself correlates little with citizens’ democratic attitudes. Importantly, findings differ for left- and right-wing radicals. These findings urge us not to overlook the harmful effects of authoritarianism. We should not underestimate the extent to which some citizens, in particular authoritarians, consciously reject liberal democracy.

In this article, we invest in the conceptual development of transversality to establish it as the key analytical tool for examining the international from the perspective of international political sociology. We engage in this work for two main reasons. First, to strengthen IPS as a field with unique concepts that facilitate a new understanding of international relations, serving as more than just a common ground for various critical perspectives. We believe transversality is one of the key concepts that shape IPS’s approach to international issues and which remains underexplored in our field. Our second motivation concerns the challenge of exploring the potential of transversality to conceptualize the international in an alternative manner. As transversality has largely been mobilized descriptively, IPS has struggled to sustain a critical engagement with the international as a problem. This limitation has contributed to a tendency to presume the obsolescence of the international and to replace it with ostensibly “alternative” spatialities that often reproduce the global as an unexamined background condition. We propose transversality as a concept capable of reactivating the critical purchase of IPS by overcoming the slumber into which “the problematization of the international” has fallen over the past 20 years.

International Political Sociology has played a crucial role in foregrounding the question of expertise in global politics, bringing under critical scrutiny the social processes that are central to the politics of expertise. In doing so, however, questions pertaining to the political–economic conditions that intersect with these have often been left aside. We show that attending to the political–economic conditions that contain and shape the politics of expertise and cut through its “micro” elements enables us to identify three shifts. First, we identify a shift in epistemic sites, which tend to move away from international organizations and public research infrastructures toward powerful private epistemic centers that not only become core providers of knowledge that is seen as “expert,” but also shape the criteria through which knowledge is validated and even the aesthetics of expertise. Second, it enables us to see that knowledge is not only valued through social processes, but through economic imperatives, so that expertise has become a seductive “commodity” like any other, even when deployed by public institutions. Third, turning to the contestation of expertise, we show that despite the preponderance of spaces of “counter-expertise,” these also need to filter through market-aligned evidentiary cultures and aesthetics, to become visible.

As discourses on future world orders conjure up increasingly catastrophic visions of climate disasters, human extinction and techno-war, dominant understandings of the future in International Relations (IR) and International Political Sociology (IPS) remain problematically human-centric. This article builds on critical insights in Environmental Studies, Black Studies, and Indigenous scholarship to develop a posthumanist understanding of time in world politics. We argue that thinking critically about the futures of world politics means envisioning deep global futures—futures where global political time is detached from fantasies of anthropocentrism, colonial violence and human survival. These futures are deep because they are not bound by human histories, but stretch time both forward and backwards to account for non-human temporalities. They are also global insofar as they de-universalise racialised, gendered, classed, and ableist understandings of the human, exposing the political nature not only of time, but also of its (human) masters. As an intellectual resource, deep global futures enable IPS to take seriously the role of time in shaping the subjects, limits, and trajectories of world politics.

The thriving field of international political sociology (IPS) has expanded explorations of the world while challenging the apparent abstractions of the international—and increasingly abandoning it altogether. Yet what early IPS called “the problem of the international”—the apparent productivity, ambiguity, and resilience of the concept—has lingered in the background, thus also provoking new responses to come to terms with it. While some call for “fracturing the international” for good, others reinstate “multiplicity” (of one kind or another) as foundational ontology. In this article, we bring these rival metatheoretical stances, or meta-moves, to the fore. Drawing on a typology of “epistemic modes” by Isaac Reed, we read fracturing and ontologizing as projecting particular “normativist” and (critical-)“realist” stances, respectively. As we argue, however, these moves have not so much engaged with as bypassed the conceptualization, production, and effects of the international—by assuming that it is either always already there or never should be. By contrast, “interpretivism,” a third epistemic mode inspiring approaches in the field, highlights how the world and understandings of it are inevitably entangled, thus promoting a meta-move aimed at reconstructing the international, not once and for all, but in myriad and changing constellations, contexts, and perspectives.

The rise of big tech companies marks a profound reconfiguration of the social, political, and economic foundation of global life. As these companies have grown, they have destabilized the very categories through which we understand International Relations, challenging its ontological, epistemological, and normative foundations. Big tech companies are active in the (re)making of global orders, across the public and private, national and global, state and nonstate domains. Their hardware, algorithms, and platforms shape what counts as knowledge and whose voices are heard, and their imaginaries produce new articulations of security, sovereignty, identity and global politics. Yet, their influence is neither uniform nor unidirectional. International Political Sociology (IPS) is uniquely positioned to explore this dynamic. We call for a research agenda that treats big tech as both a subject and an object of world-making, embracing IPS’ strengths—disciplinary openness, reflexivity, methodological pluralism, and global orientation—to interrogate these dynamics sociologically and critically. In doing so, we seek not only to promote studies of how big tech reshapes the world, but also to reflect on how it transforms the very possibilities for studying, producing and imagining global politics.

This article traces how, despite protracted violence in Syria under the Assad regime, deportation-oriented rhetoric and practices targeting Syrian refugees proliferated among EU countries and regional host states—focusing particularly on Denmark, Lebanon, and Jordan. Theoretically, the article draws on scholarly debates on migration diplomacy and deportation regimes and international political sociology literature on norm diffusion to grasp a growing phenomenon within international refugee governance that we term deportation diplomacy. We build on our collective empirical research on the interregional dynamics of Syrian refugee return to trace the rhetoric, practices, platforms, and networks through which deportation discourses and refoulement normalization travel interregionally. The article thereby offers novel insights into how norm erosion on non-refoulement in one location expands and is emulated by states in other contexts. This shows how the externalization of refugee hosting risks transforming into the externalization of refugee deportation. We advance debates within return migration diplomacy by foregrounding the coercion and violence associated with refugee return and offering an operationalized analytical framework to unpack the mechanisms through which mutually reinforcing norm erosion operates. These contributions contribute to a decentered analysis of migration diplomacy by going beyond Eurocentric, unidirectional, rational, formal perspectives to include interregional, circular, normative, and informal dimensions.

This paper critically explores the ontological underpinning of AI, situating it within the broader quest for certainty that characterizes the Western onto-political imaginary. We argue that AI is a technology of certainty, which is moored in the fragmentation and standardization of language that started with the invention of the Greek alphabet. We question conceptualizations of AI as a “thing” and reconceptualize it as a paradoxical hyperobject (Morton), a world-making apparatus (Barad), and a pharmakon (Plato, Derrida, Stengers). As a hyperpharmakon AI can work as a poison and as a cure with no spatial or temporal limits. Designed to achieve control, it produces the paradoxical effect of generating uncertainty. We challenge the assumption that AI paradoxical effects can be tamed through prescriptive regulatory practices and rely on the conceptual tools of quantum social science to argue for an ethics of practice attentive to resonance and responsibility for navigating the radical ambiguity of AI.

How do European Union members balance national and common European Union positions when acting in international organisations? This article studies the rhetoric of national and European Union diplomats in the United Nations General Assembly, examining the influence of domestic and European Union-level factors on revealed foreign policy priorities. Analysing almost 40,000 speeches from 1993 to 2022, we identify a latent dimension that pits countries that emphasise multilateral cooperation against those that focus on national security and sovereignty. Our results suggest that member states with a higher quality of democracy and left-leaning governments are more prone to emphasising multilateral cooperation. Furthermore, we identify a division of labour between national and European Union diplomats. This division became even more important after the Lisbon Treaty, which significantly extended the mandate of European Union diplomats.