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Societal transformations for addressing climate change are intensely contested and at risk of resistance and backlash to ambitious policy action. But they are frequently modeled through heuristics such as S‐curves which abstract from such conflicts, assuming increasing returns to scale as a driver of transformations. This is the case even while scholars accept the presence of political conflict in transformation processes. Within political science and allied disciplines, the notions of policy feedback and policy coalitions have been deployed to understand how such political conflicts may be understood. But these approaches risk gravitating toward an instrumental design impulse that inadvertently downplays conflict. We argue that policy action for societal transformations should be re‐conceptualized as an unfolding series of battle‐settlement events whereby heated episodic political struggles over a certain policy object or issue play out and eventually settle in ways that structure future debates while nonetheless remaining indeterminate and open to challenge or reversal. Such an approach reflects the varied empirical experiences of climate policy action to date which include both accumulation and reversal. It also helps explain trajectories of change that are discontinuous and lurching in contrast to common images of transformation as progressive and cumulative. We illustrate this approach through two cases of unfolding societal transformation on climate change: coal phaseout in the United Kingdom and renewable energy uptake in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a backlash against the net zero greenhouse gas emissions target within the UK. It introduces the term "anti-net zero populism" to analyse ideological and opportunistic counter-movements working to undermine climate policy. It builds a conceptual framework based on the literatures on "policy dismantling" and "discursive opportunity structures" to analyse how right-wing populists seek to undermine the net zero goal and dismantle policies. The article compares these efforts across six specific policy areas involved in pursuing net zero. Overall, it contributes to understanding the roles of discourse for policy dismantling, and the comparative strategies pursued to undermine net zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue celebrates the 50th anniversary of Review of International Studies. Since 1975, the Review has published over 200 issues and over 1300 articles. The journal has played a key role in shaping the discipline of International Relations (IR), leading, or critically intervening in, key debates. To celebrate 50 years of Review of International Studies , we have curated a Special Issue examining the challenges facing global politics for the next 50 years. IR has regularly turned its attention backwards towards its historical origins. Instead, we look to the future. In this Introduction, we start by outlining four traditions of future-oriented thinking: positivist, realist prediction; planning, forecasting, and scenario-building; utopian dreams of an ideal political future; and prefigurative thinking in activist politics. From these traditions, we learn that thinking about the future is always thinking about the present. We then outline four themes in the Special Issue articles: How do we think about the future at all? How do we think about imperial pasts and the ongoing questions of colonization and racialization in the present? How will technological change mediate and generates geopolitical change? How are socioecological crises, and in particular climate change, increasingly shaping how we think about the future of global politics? Overall, these provide us with a diverse, stimulating, and thought-provoking set of essays about the future of global politics, as both discipline and set of empirical problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on transnational city networks on climate change focuses on how they form part of a reorganization of the character of global politics away from state-centric forms of governance towards either multilevel, transnational and/or 'polycentric' governance. Consistent with these broad approaches to global (climate) governance, work specifically on city networks focuses on their abilities to generate coordination, learning and experimentation across and within cities regarding climate change. This article argues that analyzing these networks within political economy frameworks generates different but important additional insights. Drawing on the analysis of two cities in Latin America—Mexico City and Lima—within the C40 network, the article argues that C40 promotes particular forms of investment in its member cities, pursuing the interests of transnational capital and assembling combinations of actors to generate this effect. While such a dynamic within C40 may promote decarbonization, it nevertheless skews the process of responding to climate change in those cities. It does so by coercing those cities to prioritize climate mitigation rather than adaptation, over-riding local preferences, and, ignoring local expertise. As a result, C40 undermines the capacity for such cities to generate their own solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with ever-growing climate-related financial risks, the role of central banks in climate governance has intensified debates surrounding central bank independence (CBI). Informed by elite interviews with UK monetary policy experts and a discourse analysis of Bank of England reports, this article reveals the internal views on repoliticisation of the Bank and CBI catalysed by the mandate to ‘facilitate the transition to net zero’. We find different interpretations of CBI that are shaped by perceptions of the Bank’s existing political status, with some claiming that the Bank is intrinsically apolitical and immune to repoliticisation and others viewing CBI as fragile or a strategically-deployed discourse. Across three distinct views of politics, and by extensions CBI, we identify dual dynamics of depoliticisation and re-politicisation that serve to legitimate and depoliticise prior mission creep whilst simultaneously licencing politicising debates on the bank’s institutional evolution. We demonstrate that the Bank of England is an indispensable case study in the green central banking literature for understanding the political economy of CBI within the context of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editorial team of the Review of International Studies (RIS) has completed their four-year term, during which they received over 1,100 submissions and published more than 160 articles. They organized workshops, conference panels, and mentoring programs, aiming to push the boundaries of research on international politics. The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on their work, forcing them to adapt to remote collaboration and rethink their plans for conferences and outreach. They also noticed a decrease in submissions by women, possibly due to the disproportionate impact of caregiving responsibilities. The team made efforts to increase inclusivity and representation in the journal, publishing authors from historically underrepresented regions. They are leaving RIS on the verge of its 50th volume and are planning a special issue to explore the challenges and future of international politics. The team expresses gratitude to their colleagues and supporters who contributed to the success of RIS. [Extracted from the article]