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The International Studies Association (ISA) is widely recognized as an American-European-centric professional organization, with Global South scholars traditionally representing a minority of its membership. This pattern largely reflects the development of the International Relations (IR) discipline and its publication trends. In this Forum, we examine the progress made in the representation of Global South scholars within the IR discipline over the past decade, specifically focusing on the ISA as the primary professional body for IR scholars. We tackle some issues the Global South Task Force (GSTF) highlighted to a more assertive representativeness of the Global South within the ISA. Our analysis concentrates on ISA's journals data tracking to capture the current state of affairs and foster dialogue on developing inventive solutions to enhance diversity, intellectual plurality, and scholarly cultures within the IR discipline. Rather than resorting to outright criticism, we adopt a constructive stance, discussing attempted solutions and proposing steps to advance the discipline.

This Forum aims to push existing debates in critical border and migration studies over the featuring of morals, ethics and rights in everyday practices relating to the governance of the mobility of non-citizen populations. Its contributors steer away from the actual evaluation or advocacy of the good/just/ethical, focusing instead on the sociological examination of morals and ethics in practice, i.e. how actors understand morally and ethically the border and migration policies they implement or resist. A proliferating interest in the discursive and non-discursive materialisation of moral and ethical elements in asylum and migration policies has examined the intertwinement of care and control logics underlying the management of refugee camps, borders and borderzones, and hotspots alongside the deployment of search-and-rescue operations. Nevertheless, recent research has shown the need to unpack narratives and actions displaying values and symbols that are not necessarily encompassed within this intertwinement of compassion and repression. We argue that there is a need to pay more attention to the diversity, plurality and the operation of morality, ethics and rights in settings and geographies, and of including a diversity of actors both across and beyond EUrope.

This intervention offers a speculative lexicon to help students and scholars of global politics think critically and creatively about entanglement. It is neither definitive nor complete, but instead offers some possible points of entry into a contested field. It mobilises two particular claims: (1) that entanglement always involves both human and non-human entities; and (2) that entanglement is always emergent and in process. As a whole, this speculative lexicon is intended to help us sense the moment when entanglements intensify in ways that render them stable; attune to these durabilities in order to analyse their constitutive logics of inclusion/exclusion; acknowledge our own irrevocable entanglement in these logics; care for those bodies, lifeworlds, species and habitats that are targeted or abandoned by such logics; and craft mutual projects to disrupt, disaggregate and re-route these logics. Because entanglements are always emerging, dissipating and reconvening, the practice of navigating this open terrain is disorienting and often frustrating. We may desire a final destination where entanglements solidify and horizons magically appear, but giving in to that desire reproduces the violence of enclosure. This lexicon is offered as a way to keep the political terrain of entanglement open so we can collectively ensure that contestation remains a possibility.

Automated borders promise instantaneous, objective and accurate decisions that efficiently filter the growing mass of mobile people and goods into safe and dangerous categories. We critically interrogate that promise by looking closely at how UK and European border agents reconfigure automated borders through their sense-making activities and everyday working practices. We are not interested in rehearsing a pro- vs. anti-automation debate, but instead illustrate how both positions reproduce a powerful anthropocentrism that effaces the entanglements and coordinations between humans and nonhumans in border spaces. Drawing from fieldwork with customs officers, immigration officers and airport managers at a UK and a European airport, we illustrate how border agents navigate a turbulent ‘cycle’ of automation that continually overturns assumed hierarchies between humans and technology. The coordinated practices engendered by institutional culture, material infrastructures, drug loos and sniffer dogs cannot be captured by a reductive account of automated borders as simply confirming or denying a predetermined, data-driven in/out decision.

In the Ulster Museum’s new gallery The Troubles and Beyond, the central display showcases a Wheelbarrow bomb disposal robot. This machine was invented by the British Army in Northern Ireland in 1972 and used by officers of the 321 Explosive Ordinance Disposal Squadron (321EOD) to defuse car bombs planted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). This article offers an alternative history of that machine – a dirtier history – that critically assesses its role during the Troubles. Centrally, the article contests the British Army’s preferred account of this machine as a ‘game-changing’ technological innovation in counterinsurgency, and their understanding of themselves as benign peacekeepers. Rather than figure the Wheelbarrow robot as an unreadable ‘black box’ used instrumentally by the superior human operators of 321EOD, this article seeks to foreground the unruly transfers of agency between the machine and its operators as they tested and experimented in the exceptional colonial laboratory of Northern Ireland. The article further explores the machine’s failures during bomb disposal episodes, the collateral damage that resulted, and the multiple and often unruly reactions of local populations who watched the Wheelbarrow robot at work. Providing a ‘dirty history’ of the Wheelbarrow robot is an effort to demonstrate that war can never be fully cleaned up, either through militarized mythologies of technological innovation or hopeful museum displays.

What happens when violence disappears? What is left in the backwash of crisis? Who attends to the emotional, material and ideational detritus of closing borders? Like many, we are working in the aftermath of the recent and deadly intensification of EU migration. We contest the widespread account that the ‘crisis’ is now over – that policymakers have effectively ‘solved’ the problem of migration by gathering undocumented subjects into infrastructures of containment. We focus instead on the painful traces of EU migration that continue to be produced by global structures of citizen/alien, legal/illegal, friend/enemy. We do not produce a comprehensive diagnosis, normative argument or critical framework. Instead, we rest awhile in the aftermath of the crisis – specifically on the Greek island of Kos – to think about questions of abandonment, erasure and displacement. This is a visual essay representing a conversation between two researchers as they interact with the aftermath of the refugee crisis on Kos. Reflecting on select images from September 2016, we present a dialogue that directly speaks to a core theme each image raises. In doing so, we question some of the basic assumptions about how to do critical analysis on migration, security and borders, and therefore seek to disrupt dominant modes of academic writing as well as the practice of research itself.

Understanding how US imperial strategy is sustained by tourism and militarism requires an account of how American soldiers learn to understand themselves in relation to a variety of marginalized others. This paper explores how the US Army’s ‘Ready and Resilient’ (R2) campaign constructs soldier / other relations by mobilizing off-duty time through the ‘Better Opportunities for Single Soldiers’ (BOSS) program. BOSS’s first two platforms of ‘Well-Being’ and ‘Community Service’ feed into the R2 agenda by producing highly-skilled leaders (who govern a disengaged rank and file) and benevolent humanitarians (who provide charity for abject civilians). When these dispositions are transposed into BOSS’s third platform of ‘Recreation and Leisure’, soldiers turn away from the goals of leadership and humanitarianism to reveal the privileged narcissism underscoring the R2 agenda. This self-focus is intensified by familiar power relations in the tourism industry as soldiers pursue self-improvement by commodifying, distancing and effacing local tourist workers. Using the BOSS program as a case study, this paper critically interrogates how the US Army is assimilating off-duty practices of tourism, leisure and recreation into the wider program of resilience training.

This is a reply to:Moller, Frank. 2017. “Witnessing violence through photography.” Global Discourse. 7 (2–3): 264–281. https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2017.1339979

This paper uses the work of Samuel Beckett to reflect on the in-between positionality of International Political Sociology (IPS) and offers a field guide to help scholars, students, and thinkers embrace this disposition more energetically. It makes the case for a more balanced transdisciplinarity that keeps the field of inquiry open while attending to the international, the political, and the social at the same time and in equal measure. The power of this in-between approach is that it forces thinkers in IPS to constantly look at the horrors of our contemporary world without turning away. Through the ambivalent position of the “happy wreck,” this paper explores the need to do something about these horrors (e.g., diagnose, act, intervene) while fully acknowledging that such actions always produce new forms of violence and exclusion. To help thinkers in IPS inhabit this challenging space of inquiry more confidently, the paper makes four suggestions: (i) broadening our emotional responses to the horrors of the world; (ii) resisting resolution through non-cathartic dispositions; (iii) pursuing slow research to contest dominant rhetorics of crisis and emergency; and (iv) re-imagining shared conditions of vulnerability.

Complex military interventions throughout the 1990s sought to redress the violence of previous R&R experiences by re-orienting soldiers through humanitarian and egalitarian values. Changing post-Cold War geopolitics also led to the rise of ‘Dark Tourism’ as places like South Africa, Israel, Palestine, Cyprus and Northern Ireland tried to increase tourism revenue at the same time as commemorating and exhibiting their difficult pasts.

Tourist practices to the Somme in the immediate aftermath of the Great War are politically significant because they mobilized contradictory experiences of commemoration, grief, reverence, leisure, spectacle and adventure. By the end of WWII, a much more toxic combination racism, patriarchy and dehumanization was at work as Allied forces made their way across the Pacific.

Are there ways in which the combined modes of dominance reproduced by war-tourism entanglements can be disrupted, reoriented and resisted? Aesthetic interventions can prompt us to look differently at war and tourism, and mobilize us to think and act creatively to resist how these twinned practices are currently bolstering Neoliberal dominance.

Holidays in the Danger Zone traces the usually overlooked connections between warfare and tourism. It shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behaviour of soldiers in war – especially the experiences of Western military populations deployed in ‘exotic’ settings. This tourist sensibility certainly includes the familiar military rotations of ‘Rest and Relaxation’ (R&R), but also more mundane episodes when soldiers transition from the battlefield into landscapes of leisure and tourism. The book also explores how a military sensibility shapes the development of tourism in post-war contexts, from the immediate instances of ‘Dark Tourism’ to the more established displays of conflict in museums, galleries and memorial sites. By focusing on the practices of soldiers as they become tourists and the experiences of tourists as they engage in representations of conflict, Holidays in the Danger Zone exposes the mundane and everyday entanglements between these two seemingly opposed worlds. It is primarily concerned with the extent to which war and tourism reinforce prevailing modes of domination within historically constituted global orders. To that end, it critically examines the war-tourism nexus as it developed through 19th Century Imperialism, the ‘total wars’ of WWI and WWII, the Cold War stalemate, Globalization in the 1990s and the recent War on Terror.

Efforts to preserve and transform Auschwitz and Hiroshima into tourist sites in the aftermath of WWII reveal the difficult and often jarring connection between commemoration and tourism spectacle. As these sites slowly developed throughout the Cold War, another war-tourism conjunction was emerging in which Western soldiers on R&R vacations from the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam intensified racist, patriarchal and often violent modes of dominance.

As new media technologies give occupying soldiers more scope to record their overseas adventures and disseminate them through the internet, modes of militarized global encounter have re-ordered familiar understandings of distance and difference. One consequence of the normalization of war after 9/11 has been a securitization of the tourism industry, bringing the serious questions of global violence more directly into leisured spaces like hotels, airports and tourist attractions.

Thomas Cook & Sons’ domination of the tourism industry in 19th Century Egypt enabled them to facilitate the British military’s efforts to rescue General Gordon in Khartoum in 1884-85. This event reveals much about the tourist sensibility that shaped occupying soldiers as they engaged with local populations at the far reaches of Empire, and demonstrates the clear alignment between militarism and tourism within the Imperial mind-set.

This article argues that the terrorist bombings of hotels, pubs and nightclubs in Bali in October 2002, and in Mombasa one month later, were inaugural moments in the post-9/11 securitization of the tourism industry. Although practices of tourism and terrorism seem antithetical – one devoted to travel and leisure, the other to political violence – this article argues that their entanglement is revealed most clearly in the counter-terrorism responses that brought the everyday lives of tourists and tourism workers, as well as the material infrastructure of the tourism industry, within the orbit of a global security apparatus waging a ‘war on terror’. Drawing on critical work in international relations and geography, this article understands the securitization of tourism as part of a much wider logic in which the liberal order enacts pernicious modes of governance by producing a terrorist threat that is exceptional. It explores how this logic is reproduced through a cosmopolitan community symbolized by global travellers, and examines the measures taken by the tourism industry to secure this community (e.g. the physical transformations of hotel infrastructure and the provision of counter-terrorism training).

This paper critically examines the intersections of global tourism and fitness in the Marathon des Sables, an annual ultramarathon in the Sahara desert in which over a thousand athletes run the equivalent of five marathons in six days. It demonstrates how the globalization of health and fitness resonates with familiar Western productions of exotic cultures for the purposes of tourist consumption. Of particular interest here is how established colonial asymmetries are recast in a neoliberal context as runners test their resilience, endurance and strength against an ‘extreme’ Saharan landscape. While the paper calls attention to these asymmetries, it is more concerned with troubling reductive colonial encounters in order to reveal their instability, heterogeneity and ambivalence. Indeed, the central conceit of the Marathon des Sables – that superior Western fitness regimes and technologies will dominate the race – is inverted by the overwhelming success of Moroccan runners and disaggregated by the biopolitical regulation of elite running bodies. These unexpected intersections of global tourism and fitness demand further attention because they reconfigure our received notions of who (and what) is capable of exerting agency in postcolonial encounters.

Bulley, Dan and Debbie Lisle. (2012) Welcoming the World: Governing Hospitality in London’s 2012 Olympic Bid. International Political Sociology, doi: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2012.00158.x © 2012 International Studies Association London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games presented a diverse, cosmopolitan city opening its arms and “welcoming the world.” This article explores the apparently benign gesture of hospitality contained in London’s official candidature files submitted in 2004 and asks how such a promise of inclusiveness is managed. We argue that London’s depiction of itself as hospitable to every kind of visitor relies on subtle techniques of governmentality in which the subject positions of “host” and “guest” are imagined and produced in ways that make them more governable. By this, we are not referring to acts of authority, coercion, or discipline that exclude subjects or render them docile bodies within a rigid panoptical city. Rather, we are referring to the delicate ways in which the official bid document imagines and produces the ideal subject positions of host and guest and in so doing enables, encourages, and incentivizes certain behaviors. This analysis of urban welcoming takes us beyond reductive oppositions of hospitality and hostility, inclusion and exclusion, self and other. It focuses instead on how London’s inclusive welcome produces a variety of host and guest positions (for example, the “Olympic Family,” volunteers, guest workers), segregates them within the city, and then “conducts their conduct” in the areas of planning, security, transport, accommodation, education, and training. By analyzing the techniques of governmentality at work in London’s 2004 bid document, this article foregrounds the enabling form of power driving the city’s inclusive welcome and exposes its inherent micropolitics.

This paper explores the Late Photography of War created in the aftermath of conflict, violence, and atrocity and makes two claims. Firstly, it argues that the belatedness, absence, and ruin central to the Late Photography of War have the capacity to trouble the ethical viewing relations underscoring one of the dominant interpretive frameworks of war photography—that of pity. Rather than reproducing a familiar logic in which benevolent viewers are privileged over foreign landscapes and abject victims, these photographs foreground a more ambivalent set of viewing relations which elongates the moment of encounter between the viewer and the picture. Secondly, the paper explores this ambivalence through a common but unexamined motif in Late Photography: the juxtaposition of leisure and war. Focusing on the material detritus of leisure facilities that populate the photographs of Simon Norfolk and Angus Boulton (eg, bullet-marked hotels, wrecked swimming pools), the paper suggests that the tentative formations of solidarity between viewers and the ghosts populating these images constitute a provocative alternative viewing relation.

Aside from the more mundane purpose of telling us where to eat, sleep and sightsee in foreign lands, guidebooks communicate an ethical vision that sees travel as the key to reducing cultural differences and inequalities. This article argues that Lonely Planet guidebooks in particular encourage a form of ‘responsible independent travel’ that both reflects and produces a powerful discourse of humanitarianism. By examining the controversy over Lonely Planet’s publication of guidebooks to Burma, this article uncovers the problematic colonial logic embedded in that ethical vision.