Dehumanisation is one of the most invoked factors in analyses of mass atrocities with many scholars focusing on its crucial role in enabling perpetrators to inflict violence on their victims. However, while its application is widespread, its relevance is often assumed a priori, with claims regarding its empirical relevance often asserted rather than argued for. Not only does its meaning, nature, and function remain amorphous, current scholarship also lacks a general conceptualisation of the basic features that bind the manifold appearances of dehumanisation together. It is this paucity of sustained reflection and particularly the lack of conceptual clarity that the present article seeks to address. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, it aims to deliver a more thoroughgoing appraisal of the nature of dehumanisation as a fundamental violation of plurality to conceptually consolidate and ground its meaning and bind together its diverse manifestations across cases of mass violence.

State responses to repatriation of Islamic State (ISIS) foreign fighters and their children detained across Syria and Iraq are highly diverse. Repatriation policies implemented between 2018 and 2020 range from denying repatriation of nationals and revocation of citizenship to repatriation and subsequent gender-responsive rehabilitation programmes. What explains the variation in state responses? This article seeks to explain why repatriation policies differ despite the global challenges faced by all states. It investigates and categorises the repatriation policies for foreign fighters across 69 countries ranging from unconditional repatriation to denying repatriation. To explain the state responses to a common security and human rights dilemma, a mixed-method approach is employed involving an explorative statistical analysis to test key explanations and a narrative analysis. The findings reveal how diverse social constructions of gendered and racialised ‘threat narratives’ of foreign fighters in policy documents and the media explain variation in foreign fighter repatriation policies.

Authoritarian regimes increasingly resort to surveillance and malware attacks to extend their coercive reach into the territory of other states and silence dissidents abroad. Recent scholarship has examined the methods of digital transnational repression and their detrimental effects on the fundamental rights and security of targeted individuals. However, the broader normative and security dimensions of these practices remain underexplored, especially with regard to the states hosting the affected exiles. Addressing this gap, our article investigates digital transnational repression as a potential violation of host state sovereignty. Mobilising emerging research on digital sovereignty and cybersecurity, we argue that digital repression can violate host state sovereignty in that it constitutes extraterritorial enforcement jurisdiction; interferes with open debate and national self-determination; impedes the host state's adherence to fundamental norms of international humanitarian law; and undermines host state authority, domestic sovereignty, and integrative capacities. We outline possible pathways to counter digital transnational repression, focusing notably on distributed cyber deterrence, punitive measures like sanctions, and norms and regulations restricting the global proliferation of offensive cyber capabilities. Building on a post-territorial notion of sovereignty that centres on the effects of state actions in and beyond cyberspace, our article contributes to reflections on a human-centric approach to cybersecurity.

Ontological security studies (OSS) has been established as a significant area of study in critical security studies (CSS) to describe the ways in which social groups sustain and secure a stable sense of self. Although the self is the central figure of OSS, the subfield is yet to engage in a sustained interrogation of subjectivity in a way that questions its colonial foundations. In this article, I return to Jef Huysmans’s seminal understanding of security as a ‘thick signifier’ to analyse the ways in which OSS upholds the colonial activity of ordering, particularly an ordering of the self. By introducing Sylvia Wynter’s account of the emergence of Man-as-human, I question OSS’s conventional understandings of the self as constituted by identity. Analysing the self as a sociogenic being governed by autopoetics uncovers the ways in which understandings of the self that collapse into ‘identity’ serve to uphold coloniality. By redeploying Huysmans’s understanding of ontological security as that which simultaneously orders and guarantees the activity of ordering, I interrogate the ways in which doing OSS has real-world implications for those denied humanness in our colonial present. This analytic, termed a ‘demonic’ approach by Wynter, unlocks radically alternative understandings of being human that can be operationalized in service of collective liberation.

The conflicts in Iraq and Syria have led to concerns in the West over ‘foreign fighters’. Although states are anxious about the role these individuals play in the conflicts they join, their primary concern relates to the perceived ‘terrorist’ threat they pose on their return. This fear has led to an evolution in the international policymaking arena, with foreign fighters now often referred to as ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ (FTFs). A Critical Theory-inspired immanent critique is offered to highlight various problems that exist with the FTF term and to argue policymakers should resist its use. The article demonstrates the importance of language by showing how the invocation of the FTF threat has strengthened the ongoing development of globally coordinated counterterrorism action. Specifically, it argues UN Security Council Resolution 2178, agreed in 2014, generates a legal obligation upon UN member states to implement new counterterrorism laws at national level to combat the perceived threat from FTFs. The article highlights the negative effect these laws have on human rights. It is argued institutions like the UN need to ensure new counterterrorism legal instruments are built from a human rights rather than security-first perspective if commitments to human rights in transnational counterterrorism are to be fully realised.

When should peacekeepers partially or fully withdraw from a country or region in which they are operating? This important question has received little scholarly attention. However, it has profound implications. If peacekeepers depart prematurely, as happened in Rwanda in 1994, the consequences can be disastrous with the potential to lead to widespread preventable deaths and human suffering. If they overstay, peacekeepers risk alienating the population they are seeking to protect and undercutting popular sovereignty at significant economic costs. Striking a balance, we propose a framework for just withdrawal that is both normatively compelling and empirically sound. It focuses on three aspects that are vital for understanding when peacekeepers can depart in an ethically justified manner: just cause, effectiveness, and legitimacy. By considering a number of objections, we also address critics who challenge the overarching premise of peacekeeping or might prefer different standards by which to suggest peacekeepers should stay or depart. Finally, we illustrate our argument with theoretical and empirical examples and a discussion of UN peacekeeping in East Timor.

Amidst the resurgence of scholarship on pacifism, this essay seeks to critically interrogate certain influential sections within pacifism which characterise Gandhi as a pacifist, and his philosophy as pacifism. After pointing out the shortcomings of existing attempts to problematise the pacifist connotations of Gandhi, I adopt a cosmological approach to reading Gandhi. I argue that such an approach enables us to view the uncritical equation of both strands of thought as symptomatic of the deep-rooted ontological, epistemological, and other biases informing Western cosmology. This is demonstrated by the channels through which Gandhian discourses are framed as pacifism (especially in their diffusion into the American context), via a distinct set of interactions with both the religious and secular cosmological background assumptions underpinning pacifism. In the subsequent section, I continue this approach by highlighting how an alternate relational cosmology – Gandhian hypophysics – with a radically different set of background assumptions results in an idiosyncratic notion of Gandhian ideas which are quite inimical to pacifism. Besides reconciling contradictory characterisations of the same man and his philosophy, as well as contributing to a dialogic, pluriversal approach, I argue that this work also seeks to extend the scholarship on the interrelated themes of agency and cosmology.

The security-migration nexus is ubiquitous throughout Europe and beyond. An avalanche of scholarship has explored the construction of migration as a security threat in general and, in the UK, the creation of the ‘hostile environment’ in particular – the problematic nature of each being well documented. Yet, far less attention has been paid to activities that contest this process. Deploying Balzacq's four modalities of contestation – desecuritisation, resistance, emancipation, and resilience – this article addresses the imbalance, exploring how asylum and refugee sector NGOs engage in and contest security-migration politics. Using Scotland (2018–19) as an illustrative case and analysing discursive and predominantly non-discursive activities, findings demonstrate that NGOs are successfully contesting the security-migration nexus in Scotland across four principal categories, supporting the ‘surviving’ and ‘thriving’ of asylum seeker and refugee communities, problematising previous conceptualisations of ‘UK’ asylum and refugee politics, with implications extending globally. The article helps refine the theorisation of contestation, demonstrating first, the need to move beyond studies of ‘desecuritisation’, with consequences for understandings of ‘success’ in securitisation, and second, the potential blindness of single-modality studies to vital, meaningful contestation, resulting in the production of less comprehensive visions of the security world.

While studies on the role of knowledge and expertise have seen a resurgence of interest in International Relations and in literature on peacebuilding and security governance, little is known how knowledge enters the governance routines after the initial establishment of peacebuilding operations. Taking the mandate decision-making process of MINUSMA and EUTM operations in Mali in the German parliament as case for our explorative study, we ask how knowledge has entered the parliamentary process and how various epistemic practices and epistemic agency shape this peacebuilding governance since 2013. Informed by an object-centred knowledge framework, we argue that the practices and types of agency involved mostly ‘lock-in’ the governing of robust peacebuilding in Mali in much broader foreign- and security policies routines. Epistemic practices are not primarily concerned with new impulses or critical analysis, but with rendering Mali governable as interventionary object. The epistemic authority of the government is dominant and we do not find much evidence that hegemonic knowledge is challenged. Intervening agents do extract certain knowledge via transnational channels from Mali, however, broader knowledge debates or the involvement of Malian agents are missing.

In 2014, eight years prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian-backed separatists seized parts of the Ukrainian regions Luhansk and Donetsk. Shortly thereafter, thousands of Ukrainians voluntarily enrolled to various paramilitary battalions. Unlike the Right Sector's Volunteer Ukrainian Corps (RS VUC), almost all battalions were incorporated into Ukrainian official defence structures. Applying uncertainty-identity theory and based on interviews, observations, and documents, this study investigates the attractiveness of RS VUC prior to the 2022 war, motivating the fighters to join this organisation and to remain in it. The study found that fighters of RS VUC distrusted society, the wider population, and state authorities. RS VUC, with its high fighting morale, discipline, family-like relationships between fighters, as well as its clear ideology and boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, were attractive to the fighters since its unambiguous group prototypes and high entitativity, reduced the fighters’ self-uncertainty regarding their social identity in an uncertain environment. The findings also revealed that the fighters’ choice to join RS VUC can be understood as a rational decision, since RS VUC's group entitativity provided the fighters with moral and emotional benefits, as well as maximised their chances of survival.

In this article, I attempt to theorise the nature of the African multilateral security system. In doing so, I interrogate the question: how does the emancipatory logic of critical security relate to the post-colonial ideal of self-determination within the context of the African multilateral security system? The question is worthy of an attempt, for it brings the post-colonial concerns of African security into the discussion of critical security. For the empirical exposition, I draw on the idea of African solutions to African problems (Afsol to Afprob) as the hallmark of Africa’s collective security system to argue that at the ideational level, the emancipatory logic converges with self-determination. However, I observe that, at the level of operationalisation, the emancipatory logic of critical security diverges from the post-colonial ideal of self-determination. This is owing to the privileges of power reflected in the representational and financial capacity of the actors involved. This facilitates the reproduction of the Eurocentric dependency which Afsol to Afprob sought to supplant. The outcome is a paradox of critical security in post-colonial contexts exemplified in the disaggregation of emancipation into three emancipatory logics: the urgent, preferred, and desired.

This article presents the study of ambiguity as the essence of hybrid warfare to reconcile it with the international political context. It addresses the gaps in the literature in an effort to elucidate the essence of hybrid warfare not as a separate concept, but rather as the symptom of a changing political environment. The analysis of the literature is reinforced by two case studies: the war in eastern Ukraine of 2014 and the South China Sea dispute. Both these case studies express ambiguity in the combination of kinetic and non-kinetic means used to achieve political objectives. The article rests on three pillars that constitute the architecture of the central argument. The first pillar will address the gap in the current literature on hybrid warfare and how the current debate is too concerned with conflict dynamics rather than its political nature. The second pillar will delineate the essence, characteristics, and value of ambiguity in hybrid warfare. The third pillar will address the practice of hybrid warfare as the conduct of war by great powers.

This article contributes to an ‘historical turn’ in security scholarship. It addresses imbalance in security studies’ attention to historical empirics, and argues against notions of temporal disjunct prevalent within the discipline. I employ a genealogical framework to clarify the interpellation of past and present; and I introduce the ‘conceptual archive’ as a lens for pursuing that interpellation in research. My thesis on the ‘conceptual archive’ represents a twofold contribution. Firstly, a conceptual contribution: I advance the ‘conceptual archive’ as a way of thinking about past-present interpellation (specifically, existing conceptual logics’ remodelling in arguments justifying new practice). Secondly, an analytical contribution: I propose the ‘conceptual archive’ as a tool for doing genealogy (a research programme with historicising promise, but one suffering nebulous operationalisation at present). I use the field of terrorism studies as an entry-point to these contributions: adopting a mixed-methods research design to trace British counterterrorism practices’ roots within an ‘archive’ of logics on Northern Ireland. I find 1970s British governments remodelled long-standing ‘archival’ vocabularies in their arguments for new security provisions: framing exceptional practices according to an accepted fabric of concepts.

The shift of responsibility from the state and public authorities to the individual and the local level is one of the most common critiques of resilience policies. Individuals are portrayed as self-responsible entrepreneurs of their own protection. This article proposes a more nuanced reading of this process by arguing that resilience also entails an emancipatory potential. Drawing on an analysis of the German disaster management system and its structural marginalisation of care-dependent people, the article discusses the potential of resilience to make so far neglected needs visible. This visibilisation is the precondition for the recognition and, subsequently, the societal negotiation of the various needs and resources. Recognition and material redistribution may then be the yardstick for assessing the legitimacy of a shift of responsibilities that rests on the appropriate consideration of power, privileges, and abilities of the respective referent object of responsibility. Taking up the Frankfurt School's tradition of immanent critique, security scholars should not restrict themselves to exercise the necessary critique of problematic resilience policies, but engage in carving out how resilience can contribute to freeing rather than burdening the (precarious) individual.

This article examines the conditions under which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) gain access to defence administrations when campaigning for transparency around the use of military force. We theorise that gaining access in this traditionally secluded domain is a matter of supply and demand. NGOs can gain access through technical and political information, yet not without demand for these resources, dependent on the politicisation of concerns about the use of force. We focus on the activities of Airwars, an international NGO, and its campaign in the Netherlands (2015–20) to foster transparency about civilian casualties caused by Dutch airstrikes. Our analysis shows that their credible information about air strikes led to access to the defence administration and allowed them to effectively advocate for transparency, mediated by the politicisation of the issue through parliamentary and media attention. Our findings contribute both to the literature on NGO advocacy and to the field of civil-military relations.

The European Union's cooperation with Middle Eastern regimes to counter terrorism and prevent violent extremism has received increased scholarly attention following several terrorist attacks in Europe the last decade. Despite the EU's emphasis on good governance, democracy, and human rights to prevent violent extremism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), I argue that the Union is in fact declining as a ‘normative power’ as it has prioritised a ‘security first’ centred approach. This article demonstrates how the EU's normative projects have, first, appropriated a logic of securitisation; and second, how the Union downplays democracy and good governance in fear of alienating authoritarian key partners in the region. There are consequently inherent limitations to, and contradictions in, the EU's Counter-Terrorism (CT) and Preventing Violent Extremism (PvE) efforts. These conclusions are based on interviews with EU representatives and implementing partners on the ground. The interviews are complemented by an analysis of the scope and focus of the EU's CT and PvE projects. The findings have implications for our understanding of normative powers’ priorities when facing a perceived dilemma of choosing between its security, on the one hand, and its identity and value aspirations, on the other.

Following its exceptional response to the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) gained new powers to securitise infectious disease outbreaks via the revised 2005 International Health Regulations (IHRs) and the ability to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). This article investigates the declaration of a PHEIC in relation to the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that the securitisation of these outbreaks was dependent upon global surveillance networks that utilised genetic technologies to visualise the molecular characteristics and spread of the pathogen in question. Genetic evidence in these cases facilitated the creation of a securitised object by revealing the unique and ‘untypable’ nature of the H1N1 and SARS-CoV-2 viruses and made visible the widespread prevalence of Ebola across the population of West Africa. The power of this evidence draws from a societal perception of science as producing objective ‘facts’ about the world that objectivise their objects of concern and empower political actors in the implementation of their security agendas. As a result, scientific evidence provided by genetic technologies now plays a necessary and indispensable role in the securitisation of infectious disease outbreaks.

IR’s visual turn has emphasised visual analysis over visual method, centring images of war and crisis. Meanwhile security studies centres great power politics and moments of rupture. Together, they reinforce a dominant image of security as spectacular. This article unites two ethnographic projects focused on everyday security: one examining everyday security landscapes in China, and one examining health security at the UK border. Both found a gap between the dominant image of security and what we saw, and explored this gap through photography. Building on the everyday and visual turns, the article introduces interpretive photography as method to make two contributions. The first is methodological: it introduces interpretive photography as a distinct critical qualitative method that operates on five modes: enabling the seeing-capturing-making-sharing of visual artefacts, it also disrupts dominant visions and contributes to the construction of international relations. The second contribution is empirical: a deeper, richer account of what security looks like. While the discipline associates security with emergency politics or a state of exception, Nyman’s photographs show the exception-made-everyday, while Ferhani’s photos reject the exception by showing banal routines. In this way, photography engages the visuality of security, and can change how we see security.

A growing amount of literature is being devoted to interrogating gendered dynamics in both violent extremism and terrorism, contributing to the integration of international and feminist security. This includes how such dynamics can shape differences in the motivations and participation of women and men. By critically analysing ideological gender constructs in two women-only extremist forums – the Women's Forum on Stormfront.org and Women Dawah, a Turkish-language pro-Islamic State group chat on Telegram – and employing feminist methodology, this article demonstrates how gendered online spaces influence women's ‘everyday practices’ within extremist movements. We argue that women-only online spaces not only facilitate gendered practices by allowing women to share everyday experiences, hold ideological discussions, and engage in debate, but also provide an important means to navigate these issues within the movement itself. In fact, women-only forums are actively used by women within extremist movements to exert greater agency in the face of otherwise constraining gendered ideological constructs. In turn, gendered everyday practices are reinforced by virtual communities that strengthen a sense of meaning – and purpose – in the movement, albeit being ideologically confined to the private sphere in many ways. This study sheds light not only on the differences in participation between women and men, but also on how such virtual communities can serve as spaces to frame and reinforce gendered practices in extremist movements. This has key implications for deradicalisation and disengagement strategies, which are at present overwhelmingly gender neutral. We provide evidence of how women navigate agency in these spaces, while challenging the stereotype that women in extremist movements are typically passive actors confined to traditional roles.

Evolving official Russian identifications of Georgia amount to a dangerous securitisation of this small neighbour – achieved through a focus not on Georgia itself but on Western engagement in the region. With the long absence of face-to-face diplomatic encounters and contact, the Russian idea of Georgia as a ‘Western proxy’ has become entrenched. This article advances a social explanation of Russian foreign policy that speaks to geopolitical explanations in foregrounding great power interaction and security by drawing on insights from a discourse-theoretical reading of securitisation theory. It adds value to social explanations by showing how the identification of another political entity can be changed into that of a ‘proxy’ through its integration into a larger ‘radically different other’, and how this expansion occurs in interplay with interpretations of physical manifestations of the larger ‘radically different other’ in the ‘proxy’. Finally, it draws attention to the impact of physical encounters on foreign policy in these times of COVID-19, war, and growing isolationism in world affairs.