Visual Appropriation: A Self-reflexive Qualitative Method for Visual Analysis of the International

This article introduces visual appropriation as a method in critical international political thinking and acting, contributing to the evolving repertoire of multiple, pluralist methods for visual analysis of international relations operating in a digital visual environment. We define appropriation as reuse of existing visual material—either in its entirety or in part—without substantially altering the immanent characteristics of the appropriated material. As appropriators, scholars are producers of images who capitalize on and actively participate in digital visuality (seeing–changing–sharing). Appropriators are both image-analysts and image-actors but distinct from both, contributing not only to the visual analysis, but also to the visual construction of international relations. Approaching the international through appropriation grants researchers increased agency and responsibility vis-à-vis existing visual materials “out-there.” Rather than exploring a digital space of visual images produced and appropriated by others, researchers consciously and deliberately partake in the production and dissemination of images. As a result, we highlight how we—as scholars and as citizens—are facing research-ethical problematiques linked to ways of showing and seeing inevitably emanating from appropriation.

Cold War Psychiatry, Extremism, and Expertise: The “Special Committee on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry”

Throughout the history of psychiatric ethical professionalization, the question of the “extremist” contextualizes and frames the limits of medical practice. Using archival research at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the article explores how professional committees debated medical ethics after evidence of psychiatric participation in national security measures against dissidents. British, American, and global professional associations organized a prominent struggle against Soviet membership of the World Psychiatric Association in the 1970s and 1980s—reconstituting the field of professional expertise through Cold War geopolitics. The Special Committee on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry was formed in 1978 at the British Royal College of Psychiatry to publicize the medical detention of dissidents in the USSR and to pursue the expulsion of the USSR delegation from global professional fora. In doing so, it constituted an identity for Global Mental Health (vis-à-vis Soviet abusive practice) as impartial, objective, and uncompromised. However, this article explores the many ambiguities that complicate the performative constitution of Western psychiatry as good, and Soviet psychiatry as bad—reflecting on the political dynamics, and philosophy of science, which underwrote the struggle for global expertise.

Thinking with Diplomacy: Within and Beyond Practice Theory

Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it goes beyond the conventional interactions that assume a fixed and singular identity for diplomacy. The Discussion aims, on the one hand, to pluralize the notion of diplomatic practice, and, on the other, to reflexively retrieve “theory” from the everyday and alternative practices of diplomacy that are often missed by the radar of practice theory. It thus seeks to reassess practice theory using insights from the very terrain of action it employs to develop its distinctive viewpoint. The Discussion contributes, moreover, to the rapidly changing field of Diplomatic Studies that has recently opened up to cross- and trans-disciplinary conversations with political geography, social anthropology, digital studies, visual studies, and new materialism.

Reporting Security: Postcolonial Governmentality in the United Nations’ Trusteeship System

This article examines the political rationality and governance practices that emerged in the course of the international politics of decolonization. It focuses primarily on the UN trusteeship system, within which the former League of Nations mandates were continued by the trusteeship powers. In this process, the trustees' policies were placed under international scrutiny. The article ties in with International Political Sociology's increased interest in historical perspectives. In particular, it asks how the political rationality of the trusteeship system differs from colonial governmentality. Two arguments are put forward: first, international governing, as can be seen from the trusteeship system, is characterized by a postcolonial governmentality that continues central elements of colonial governmentality, but transfers them to the international level. Second, following Latour, it is argued that trusteeship governance is constituted by forms of knowledge production and the bureaucratic circulation of information that continue to shape the governance of international organizations today. To this end, the article takes up in particular the reporting system of the trusteeship system as well as its central instruments of knowledge production: the visiting missions, the petition system, and the collection of data through questionnaires.

“We Closed the Ports to Protect Refugees.” Hygienic Borders and Deterrence Humanitarianism during Covid-19

This article investigates how the security-humanitarian rationale that underpins migration governmentality has been restructured by and inflected in light of hygienic-sanitary borders which enforce racialised confinement in the name of both migrants' and citizens' safety from infection by Covid-19. Focusing on the politics of migration containment along EUrope's frontiers, examining in particular border reinforcements carried out by Italy, Malta and Greece, we interrogate how the pandemic has been exploited to enact deterrence through hygienic-sanitary border enforcements. These enforcements are underpinned by an ambivalent security-humanitarian narrative that crafts migrants as subjects who cannot be protected by EU member states from the pandemic if allowed inside, and, at once, as potential vehicles of contagion - ‘Corona spreaders’ - and thus as dangers on a bacterial-hygienic level. Our article demonstrates that these EUropean border measures are more than temporary responses to an unprecedented health crisis. Rather, the pandemic has been seized as an opportunity to strengthen existing deterrence measures and hamper migrants' access to asylum through biopolitical and spatial tactics that aim to restructure the border regime. While emphasising the historical trajectories and continuities underwriting these current developments, we contend that the pandemic functions as an accelerator of dynamics of migrant incarceration and containment.

Field Heteronomy and Contingent Expertise: The Case of International Tax Justice

The international tax system is targeted by a diverse range of networked civil society actors, from critical professionals mobilizing their expertise to anti-austerity protestors targeting the consequences of tax dodging. The years following the 2008 financial crisis saw an increase in the range of these actors and their cooperation with one another. This paper argues that a transnational field analysis complements existing expertise-oriented approaches, by identifying the overarching objective of the tax justice agenda as increasing heteronomy in the international taxation field relative to political fields. This objective requires the mobilization of diverse resources across different fields, resulting in network relationships crossing field boundaries to contest inter-field relations, rather than any single bounded field struggle. The findings are supported by an analysis of tax justice advocacy after the 2008 financial crisis in the United Kingdom and Australia, including thirty-seven in-depth interviews with different organizations involved in the network.

Settler Military Politics: On the Inclusion and Recognition of Indigenous People in the Military

After decades of refusal, neglect, and tacit admittance, the service of Indigenous people in the national armed forces of settler colonial states such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States is finally gaining acknowledgment. Indigenous people are now integrated in the regular forces and represented in national war commemoration. This article maintains that while inclusion and recognition of Indigenous military service is a positive transformation in the direction of post-colonial reconciliation, it still operates within the logics of settler colonialism intended to eradicate Indigenous stories of connection to land and assimilate Indigenous people in settler society. Using the case study of Indigenous militarization in Australia, this article argues that, under conditions of settler colonialism, the inclusion and recognition of Indigenous people in national militaries advances the settler colonial project intended to dispossess Indigenous people from their land and assimilate them in the new settler society. It highlights that historically, military organization has supported settler colonialism, and positions the present inclusion and recognition of Indigenous people in the military as a continuation of this history.

Donor Love Will Tear Us Apart: How Complexity and Learning Marginalize Accountability in Peacebuilding Interventions

Complexity theory and systems thinking are increasingly popular in both academic and practitioner discourses to “improve” peacebuilding. Recently, they have also been considered to make peacebuilding interventions more bottom-up and less exclusive. Contributing to the debate in international political sociology on the role of (professional) knowledge in shaping interventions, I examine this claim with an analysis of professional peacebuilding discourse. Drawing on an extensive corpus of operational guidance, policy documents, and interview material, I situate the emerging uses of concepts of complexity in peacebuilding against the backdrop of the power struggles of its actors and institutions. Against the introduction of measures of managerial control, professional peacebuilding discourse has cast its interventions as exceptional and in need of different methods. Thus, learning replaces donors’ standardized measures of accountability. However, the peculiar conflation of accountability as learning that emerges from these struggles legitimizes self-referential expert rule and learning, and marginalizes debates on peacebuilders’ accountability. Rather than “de-colonizing” or making peacebuilding more inclusive, the way complexity concepts have emerged in peacebuilding discourse reproduces—rather than questions—the power structures of international interventions, and denies the people targeted by interventions the status of subjects to be accountable to.

Practice Theory and Postsocialist Civil Society: Toward a New Analytical Framework

When discussing postsocialist civil societies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), scholars have predominantly focused on the nonparticipatory and advocacy-oriented activities of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), effectively narrowing the concept of “civil society” to that of the “civic sector.” This actor-focused and normative approach has resulted in a systematic obfuscation of less structured forms of everyday resistance, civic engagement, active citizenship, contentious politics, and social movements, giving only a partial view of civil societies in the region. Through a critical dialogue between state-of-the-art research on postsocialist civil society and the practice turn in international political sociology (IPS), this article postulates an analytical distinction between contentious and compliant practices in order to arrive at a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the ways in which postsocialist civil societies are manifested, enacted, and actualized. On the one hand, the proposed practice turn moves the research agenda away from abstract, universalist, and normative assumptions of what civil society should be in favor of an embedded, contextual, and critical understanding of what it actually is; on the other hand, this shift opens venues for theorizing not only about, but also from the “postsocialist condition” of civil societies in the transnational space of CEE.