The imagination is at the heart of what it means to be human. For this reason it has been the subject of close examination across time and locale. Yet, while International Relations (IR) researchers often mobilise the term rhetorically, its character and operations remain under-conceptualised in the discipline and disconnected from the rich literatures that explore this vital faculty. This article identifies a common-sense account of the imagination in IR’s most pervasive discourse on order and anarchy. Taking its cues from the Hobbesian tradition, here the imagination is fearful and pessimistic, rooted in the overriding dread of a sudden and violent death. We draw out its underlying assumptions by foregrounding the deliberate, systematic and sustained construction of the imagination in Hobbes’ Leviathan, where it acts as a crucial and animating impetus for the Hobbesian subject, including in the oft-analogised ‘state of nature’ scenario. We argue that this Hobbesian imagination has been superseded by a multi-disciplinary contemporary scholarship that presents a markedly different account. Whereas Hobbes’ approach is rooted in a monological subject’s fear of unknowable others, now the imagination is understood to be intersubjective, allowing us to stand in another’s shoes and appreciate their motives, preferences, fears, and aspirations. Anyone thinking seriously about the imagination today should disagree with the Hobbesian account, reconsider theories of international relations predicated on it, and explore the political possibilities entailed in other approaches.

View full text

World politics generates a long list of anxiety inspiring scenarios that threaten to unravel everyday life with sudden and violent destruction. From total war and the concentration camps, through nuclear firestorms, global pandemics, and climate disaster, the diabolical violence of the recent past and conceivable future is the stuff of nightmares. The challenge for both policy practitioners and researchers is to engage world politics in a way that foregrounds human consequences. In this article, we explore these difficult experiences through popular culture representations of the apocalypse, a subject of intense interest for researchers in a discipline where global destruction is a distinct possibility. However, we take a different route by exploring the apocalypse through the horror genre, the one place that human suffering is explicitly accentuated. We argue that the horror genre is at once an access point for ethical engagement with the human consequences of extreme violence and a complex terrain where dark imaginings can be politically loaded, culturally specific and ethically ambiguous.

View full text

Popular culture is widely understood to intersect with and shape our understanding of world politics. Numerous studies have highlighted the way language and imagery from literature, drama, film, television, and other sites of cultural production make their way into political discourses on geopolitics, terrorism, immigration, globalisation, and arms control, to name a few. Conversely, world events, especially international crises, provide rich materials for popular culture across mediums and genres. This interchange has often been understood by International Relations (IR) scholars through the theory of intertextuality, which highlights the way the meaning and authority of any text is established by drawing on, or positioning against, other texts from the surrounding culture. This article develops an account of intertextuality that takes seriously the embodied dimensions of popular culture and political discourse. Revisiting the work of work of Julia Kristeva, I argue that a framework that binds together bodies, discourses, and social practices, offers a promising avenue for IR scholars grappling with the embodied aspects of intertextuality. The article explores the implications and potential of this conceptualisation through a case analysis of the sport/war intertext and spectacular war. In doing so, it demonstrates that the legitimising effects ordinarily understood to accompany intertextuality are intensified when bodily drives, impulses, and affect taken into account.

View full text.

Conspiracies play a significant role in world politics. States often engage in covert operations. They plot in secret, with and against each other. At the same time, conspiracies are often associated with irrational thinking and delusion. We address this puzzle and highlight the need to see conspiracies as more than just empirical phenomena. We argue that claims about conspiracies should be seen as narratives that are intrinsically linked to power relations and the production of foreign policy knowledge. We illustrate the links between conspiracies, legitimacy and power by examining multiple conspiracies associated with 9/11 and the War on Terror. Two trends are visible. On the one hand, US officials identified a range of conspiracies and presented them as legitimate and rational, even though some, such as the alleged covert development of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, are now widely considered false. On the other hand, conspiracies circulating in the Arab-Muslim world were dismissed as irrational and pathological, even though some, like those concerned with the covert operation of US power in the Middle East, were based on credible concerns.

View full text.

This article explores the problem of attribution in the context of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) intervention through an analysis of the Syrian chemical weapons attack of 2013. We argue that R2P advocates can be confronted by a crisis dynamic where the political momentum for military intervention runs ahead of independent verification and attribution of mass atrocity crimes. We contrast the political momentum for intervention with the technical process of independent attribution and show that the sort of independent evidence that would ideally legitimize an R2P intervention was unavailable when there was political momentum for action. Conversely, the information that was available (which inevitably informed the political momentum for action) was largely produced by state intelligence organizations - or a potentially briefed media - and shaped by the interests and priorities of its end users. While understandable in the face of the 'extreme', we suggest that the mobilization of political momentum by R2P advocates entails significant dangers: first, it risks undermining the integrity of R2P if evidence is later discredited and second, it risks amplifying the perception that states sometimes exploit humanitarian pretexts in pursuit of other strategic ends.

View full text.

This is a full-length author's response to four reviews of Conspiracy Theory and American Foreign Policy (MUP:2016), part of a symposium published in Global Discourse. Responding to four leading International Relations scholars, it builds on key themes addressed in the book, including the relevance of conspiracy theory during the Trump Presidency.

View full text.

With the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the issue of radicalisation has loomed large in Western policy debates. Recent summits on countering violent extremism have sought to highlight the importance of undermining extremist narratives, mobilising moderate Muslims who oppose ISIS and working to address drivers of radicalisation. This article explores the ideological underpinnings of this approach. It focuses on what I call the â??Muslim paranoia narrativeâ??, a recurring feature of Western radicalisation discourse that helpfully captures its ideological commitments and their contemporary significance. Analysing its manifestation in American political culture, I argue that the Muslim paranoia narrative indicates a powerful process of ideological reproduction that works against approaches to counter-radicalisation centred on engagement and collaboration with Muslim communities. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

View full text.

With the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the issue of domestic radicalisation has taken on renewed significance for Western democracies. In particular, attention has been drawn to the potency of ISIS engagement on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Several governments have emphasised the importance of online programs aimed at undermining ISIS recruitment, including the use of state-run accounts on a variety of social media platforms to respond directly to ISIS messaging. This article assesses the viability of online counter-radicalisation by examining the effectiveness of similar programs at the US State Department over the last decade. The article argues that governments attempting to counter online radicalisation of their domestic populations must take seriously the significant shortcomings of these State Department programs. The most relevant issue in this regard is the recurring problem of credibility, when the authenticity of government information is undercut by the realities of foreign policy practice, and existing perceptions of hypocrisy and duplicity are reinforced in target audiences. © 2015 Australian Institute of International Affairs.

View full text.

Conspiracy theory has come up frequently in media commentary around the Occupy Wall Street movement. For all their good intentions, Occupy is hampered by a paranoid style of populism that sees nefarious elites behind everything – or so the story goes. This paper takes the conspiracy discourse around Occupy as an entry point into the underlying dynamics of power and interpretation that help set the conditions of possibility for dissent in the liberal context. It is certainly tempting to accept that conspiracy narratives have played a role in some forms of populist interpretations, but in a way that revises the common sense understanding of conspiracy theory as irrational pathology, towards a more positive emancipatory account. This is a prominent approach in the literature around conspiracy theory. Following Jameson, we might say that conspiracy theory is just a ‘degraded attempt … to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system’, perhaps the only course available in a late capitalist culture disconnected from its base, where it is no longer possible to understand the economic and political conditions that produce social reality. In this article I focus instead on the context in which conspiracy theory emerges as a subject of concern for commentators and scholars writing about Occupy, and then draw out some implications for a more general account of dissent and political interpretation. My analysis focuses on an article by Naomi Wolf, the prominent author and activist, titled ‘The Shocking Truth about the Crackdown on Occupy’, published by The Guardian in late November 2011.

View full text.