{"title":"Who Owns a Deadly Virus? Viral Sovereignty, Global Health Emergencies, and the Matrix of the International","authors":"Stefan Elbe","doi":"10.1093/ips/olab037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olab037","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article investigates the global inequities imbricated in the international response to lethal viruses. It does so by developing a virographic approach to the study of international relations that builds upon the matrix methods pioneered within black feminist thought for unraveling particularly complex forms of interlocking oppression. Performing such a virography of international relations exposes the multifaceted economic, racial, and epistemological disparities embedded in the international management of emergent viruses. It further demonstrates how those multiple axes of international inequality intersect during viral outbreaks to form a deadly matrix of global subjugation—vital abandonment—that repeatedly deprives the world's majority population from equitable access to life-saving biomedical interventions. It finally also reveals how diplomatic assertions of viral sovereignty, that is, claiming legal ownership of pathogens, are directly enrolling lethal viruses now in the political strategies of countries seeking to resist their vital abandonment. Overall, a virography thus contributes to the broader study of international relations by foregrounding the global salience of epidemiological injustices and positionalities, by capturing the actant power of lethal viruses in contemporary world politics, and by intimating that the “international” can itself be studied as a continually reconfiguring matrix of interlocking and historically conditioned global inequities.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43856084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Machine Learning and the Platformization of the Military: A Study of Google's Machine Learning Platform TensorFlow","authors":"Marijn Hoijtink, Anneroos Planqué-van Hardeveld","doi":"10.1093/ips/olab036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olab036","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Against the background of the growing use of machine learning (ML) based technologies by the military, our article calls for an analytical perspective on ML platforms to understand how ML proliferates across the military and to what effects. Adopting a material–technical perspective on platforms as developed within new media studies, and bringing this literature to critical security studies, we suggest that a focus on platforms and the technical work they do is needed to understand how digital technologies are emerging and shaping security practices. Through a detailed study of Google's open-source ML platform TensorFlow and a discussion of the US Department of Defense Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, or Project Maven, we make two broader contributions. First, we identify a broader “platformization” of the military, with which we refer to the growing involvement and permeation of the (technomaterial) ML platform as the infrastructure that enables new practices of decentralized and experimental algorithm development across the military. Second, we draw out how this platformization is accompanied by new entanglements between the military and actors in the corporate domain, especially Big Tech, which play a key role in this context, as well as the open-source community that is organized around these platforms.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42757358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unmastering Research: Positionality and Intercorporeal Vulnerability in International Studies","authors":"Enrike van Wingerden","doi":"10.1093/ips/olac008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olac008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues that in order to understand how bodily impressions shape ways of knowing and being, researchers need to enhance claims of positionality through a language of intercorporeality. The notion of positionality is used to indicate the inherent situatedness and partiality of knowledge, but positionality statements also risk affirming a hierarchical narrative structure, leaving out how knowledge is indelibly and dynamically impressed by bodily others, thereby reinscribing researcher authority. Strengthening attempts to resist mastery in doing research, this article theorizes the intercorporeality of research practice on the basis of the bodily experiences of being there, being moved, and being vulnerable. These insights into the intercorporeality of research practice emerge from fieldwork across the West Bank, the Naqab desert, and alongside the Gaza fence. This article argues that intercorporeal vulnerability is at the core of cultivating knowledge, which emerges not only through willful action, but also through nonintentional rapport with objects and (non)human others. Understanding this vulnerability restores a sense of openness and uncertainty by appreciating research practice as always “in excess” of established categories and always just beyond the researcher's positional mastery.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46466077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deprivation of Citizenship as Colonial Violence: Deracination and Dispossession in Assam","authors":"Rudabeh Shahid, Joseph Turner","doi":"10.1093/ips/olac009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olac009","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues that deprivation of citizenship is an ongoing force of colonial violence. By exploring the case of citizenship stripping in India's northeastern state of Assam, the article proposes that the removal of citizenship rights is not merely an aberration of the “normal” rules of citizenship but bound up with ongoing forms of colonial dispossession informed by racial hierarchies, the regulation of belonging and mobility. Interdisciplinary scholarship on deprivation of citizenship remains largely Euro/Western-centric and fails to consider how deprivation works as part of broader patterns of colonial-modern dispossession. By drawing on Gurminder K. Bhambra's (2015) work on the colonial constitution of citizenship and Aurora Vergara-Figueroa's (2018) work on deracination, we treat deprivation of citizenship as a legacy of the colonial and racialized structure of citizenship itself. By using Assam as a case study, the article examines how practices of deprivations are tied to the histories of dispossession, extraction, and control, which underpinned the historical emergence of citizenship in (post)colonial India and beyond.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41528082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Visual Appropriation: A Self-reflexive Qualitative Method for Visual Analysis of the International","authors":"Frank Möller, Rasmus Bellmer, Rune Saugmann","doi":"10.1093/ips/olab029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olab029","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"76 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138527225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cold War Psychiatry, Extremism, and Expertise: The “Special Committee on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry”","authors":"Charlotte Heath-Kelly","doi":"10.1093/ips/olab034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olab034","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43831647","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Digital Surveillance Unacceptable? Security, Democracy, and the Political Sociology of Disputes","authors":"Claudia Aradau, Emma Mc Cluskey","doi":"10.1093/ips/olab024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olab024","url":null,"abstract":"Despite extensive criticisms of mass surveillance and mobilization by civil liberties and digital rights activists, surveillance has paradoxically been extended and legalized in the name of security. How do some democratic claims against surveillance appear to be normal and common-sense, whereas others are deemed unacceptable, even outlandish? Instead of starting from particular “logics” of either security or democracy, this paper proposes to develop a political sociology of disputes to trace how the relation between security and democracy is shaped by critique in practice. Disputes entail critique and demands for justification. They allow us to account for the constraints which govern whether an argument is deemed acceptable or improper; common-sensical or peculiar. We mobilize disputes in conjunction with Arjun Appadurai's reflections on “small numbers” in democracies in order to understand how justifications of surveillance for security enact a “rise in generality,” whereas critiques of digital surveillance that mobilize democratic claims enact a “descent into singularity.” To this purpose, we analyze public mobilizations against mass surveillance and challenges brought before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). We draw on interviews with a range of actors involved in the disputes, the parties’ submissions, oral hearings, judgments, and public reports.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138527215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Periods, Pregnancy, and Peeing: Leaky Feminine Bodies in Swedish Military Marketing","authors":"M. Stern, Sanna Strand","doi":"10.1093/ips/olab025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olab025","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The notion of “leaky” female bodies has long rationalized the exclusion of women from military service. Yet, in an attempt to bolster enlistments by appealing to women, the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) embarked on a marketing strategy that aims to break with gender stereotypes in order to fill its ranks. Most notably, in a 2018 recruitment campaign, an SAF billboard posed the question “Can I have my period in the field?” This article probes how the leaky female body is mobilized in SAF marketing campaigns and outreach activities. While remarkable for their commitment to gender parity, we aver that there is more going on in these campaigns that seemingly render women's bodies normal and unproblematic as military bodies than a move toward gender equality. The representations of female soldiering bodies that emerge reproduce a familiar form of militarism that promotes the necessity of a battle-ready military corps that is predictable, and poised for warring. Moreover, these explicitly feminist SAF campaigns also beckon with the possibility of becoming that transcends the bodily limitations of sex/gender in civilian as well as military life, in war as well as in peace—to become perhaps something/someone/somewhere else that only military service can offer.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44990040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
C. Constantinou, J. Dittmer, Merje Kuus, Fiona McConnell, S. O. Opondo, Vincent Pouliot
{"title":"Thinking with Diplomacy: Within and Beyond Practice Theory","authors":"C. Constantinou, J. Dittmer, Merje Kuus, Fiona McConnell, S. O. Opondo, Vincent Pouliot","doi":"10.1093/ips/olab028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olab028","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61433540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“We Closed the Ports to Protect Refugees.” Hygienic Borders and Deterrence Humanitarianism during Covid-19","authors":"M. Tazzioli, M. Stierl","doi":"10.1093/ips/olab023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olab023","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47204757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}