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Electoral violence is perpetrated by anti-systemic actors opposed to the democratic system, as well as by those vying for power through the electoral process. Even though the motivations for violent tactics are distinct, we do not know whether intra- and anti-systemic violence differ in their effects. Focusing on state-level elections in India – a country that combines nationwide elections with persistent political violence – we demonstrate that the distinction is crucial for understanding spatial patterns of electoral violence and effects on election outcomes. Based on an original dataset of violence in legislative assembly elections between 1985 and 2008, we show that both tactics depress turnout overall but that the effect is larger for anti-systemic violence. Intra-systemic violence not only appears to be more selectively targeted, as it is more likely to occur in constituencies where the incumbent belongs to the state-level opposition, but also generates electoral benefits for the party in control of state government.

In the past decades we have seen increased policy discourse around public engagement with research and innovation. Despite this attention, the institutionalization of public engagement practices still appears rather limited, leading to a recent systemic turn in public engagement with science studies. Still missing in this systemic turn is a pragmatist and new institutionalist framework that can support research into how public engagement practices may enact or transform the research and innovation system. This article presents such a framework to help untangle how existing (in)formal institutions and materialities influence public engagement with research and innovation. To illustrate its utility, the framework is tentatively applied to engagement in the British research funding context. This application informs further development of the framework, including recommendations for (action) research into the construction of collectives of institutional entrepreneurs (institutional entrepreneurial collectives) that may support further institutionalization of public engagement in the research and innovation system.

This paper explores the foundational role of race in humanitarianism, its historical geographies, genealogy, and contemporary practice. I pay particular attention to the work of Sylvia Wynter on the overrepresentation of (white bourgeois) Man in modernist understandings of the human that form the basis of humanitarianism in the present. Building on Wynter's work, I offer an alter-historical geography of humanitarianism – locating its genus in the voyages of 1441 and 1492 – that unsettles other critical work on the colonial origins of humanitarianism as both a normative and instrumental form of governance and their geographies. In following what Wynter terms a “human view”, I explore the racist orderings of Rational Man and his irrational, racialised “others” that work to structure humanitarianism's subjects. Alongside this, I consider the parasitic relations of humanitarianism to the negation of life enacted through the genocide of Black and Indigenous peoples, arguing humanitarianism's claims to save lives and relieve suffering cannot be divorced from conquistador violence. I argue that grappling with what Wynter calls “category problems” is necessary as humanitarianism – or huManitarianism – faces the contemporary challenges raised by Black Lives Matter that undermine and question its universalist legitimacy.

This article investigates refugee categorisations in humanitarian admission programmes. Official selection categories and the way they are enacted at the frontline have significant implications for refugees’ unequal (im)mobility and (in)security as they determine who can safely and legally travel to Europe. Based on original ethnographic data, the analysis examines how different political actors mobilise humanitarian and security ‘orders of worth’ to justify how selection categories prioritise some refugees’ security and mobility over others’ in times of perceived crisis. Contrasting Germany’s admission programmes from Lebanon (2013-2015) to those from Turkey (2016-) demonstrates a shift from an overall humanitarian, to a combination of humanitarian and state security orders of worth. The focus on categorisation and justification practices advances a grounded understanding of how inequalities in refugees’ (in)security and (im)mobility emerge and shift in the course of changing crisis definitions.

This chapter grows out of an engagement between scholars and practitioners interested and invested in questions about humanitarian futures, that is, questions around the future of humanitarianism as both a normative, ethical commitment to life and a practice concerned with saving lives, relieving suffering, and upholding human dignity. These urgent questions are increasingly being considered by scholars and practitioners. While there is an ever-growing body of work concerned with the politics of humanitarianism, both as a normative ideal and as a practice of intervention, recent interventions related to decolonizing humanitarianism have been keen to stress the importance of understanding the differences between them. Recent exposes made by those who have worked in the humanitarian industry have shone a light on the racist and white supremacist practices rooted in humanitarianism’s liberal universalizing claims. Shining a light on racism and white supremacy in the humanitarian industry requires an interrogation of the human subject at the heart of humanitarianism.

In the wake of the wars on drugs and terror, countries around the globe have established Financial Intelligence Units – often abbreviated simply FIUs – that analyze financial transactions for security purposes. FIUs are relatively new public organizations that provide intelligence in the context of combatting money laundering and terrorist financing. Because financial transactions flow irrespective of national borders, FIUs are bound to join forces, coordinate their operations, and exchange their expertise and intelligence. However, FIUs are diverse organizations, that operate in varied political, cultural, and economic environments, with different legal regulations concerning privacy, data handling, and human rights. This dissertation examines how this collective of diverse security organizations overcomes geographical distance and works across operational difference, in order to follow illicit finance across borders. How do FIUs coordinate their operations transnationally and exchange financial intelligence across geographical distance and organizational difference? Drawing on literatures at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and International Relations (IR), the dissertation adopts four ‘vantage points’ to analyze the coordination of transitional processes in practice, where political negotiation and the reconfiguration of power relations take place. The vantage points are the FIU-the Netherlands, where the financial intelligence that is exchanged is produced; the EU-FIU Platform, an EU Commission expert group that discusses how cross-border tracking practices are organized; the numbering practices of FIUs, through which FIUs coordinate cross-border operations; and circuits of trust, that is, informal relationships that make the sharing of financial intelligence possible. The dissertation concludes that it is the relatively informal nature of international agreements in combination with FIU operational autonomy that enables FIUs to overcome distance and difference and share privacy-sensitive intelligence. This conclusion raises questions of accountability, oversight, and proportionality of FIU operations. These will be of interest not only to academics, but to politicians, policymakers, and practitioners as well.

This book challenges the assumption that authoritarianism is necessarily a phenomenon located at the level of the state, and that states as a whole are therefore either democratic or authoritarian. Its central aim is to shed light on manifestations of authoritarianism that are not confined to the 'territorial trap' of the modern state, and are not captured by the concept of an authoritarian regime. Redefining authoritarianism from a practice perspective allows us to understand how authoritarian practices unfold and evolve within democracies and in transnational settings, in what circumstances they thrive, and how they are best countered. Authoritarian Practices in a Global Age provides a parsimonious framework for recognizing and analysing contemporary manifestations of authoritarianism beyond the state, alongside a number of empirical case studies.The empirical chapters cast a wide net. They comprise a study of transnational repression by authoritarian states; two chapters on informal and formal multilateral collaboration in anti-terrorist policies; a chapter on corporate and public-private authoritarian practices in the mining sector; and a chapter on cover-ups of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The concluding chapter draws out commonalities and unique features from the case studies, thereby setting out a research agenda for future work. Authoritarian practices, once operationalized as demonstrated in this book, can and must be classified and compared, and causal connections established with other phenomena such as violence, corruption, and inequality, if we are to suggest ways of responding to them.

This article highlights the relevance, the potential, and the limitations of environ-mental restorative justice in addressing the harms exper ienced by asbestos vic-tims. Starting from case studies related to three dierent subsidiaries of Eternit in Belgium, Italy, and Brazil, the article identies some of the main challenges to understand the harms caused by asbestos from the perspective of the victims, the problem with their identication, and to identify whom the perpetrators are. The last section is dedicated to pondering how the demands for justice by the people aected to asbestos-related diseases meets strong diculties, but they also oer some perspective of restorative responses. Resumen Este artículo destaca la relevancia, el potencial y las limitaciones de la justicia res-taurativa ambiental para abordar los daños experimentados por las víctimas del amianto. Partiendo de estudios de casos relacionados con tres liales diferentes de Eternit en Bélgica, Italia y Brasil, el artículo aborda algunos de los principales retos para entender los daños causados por el amianto desde la perspectiva de las víctimas, el problema de su identicación y la individualización de quiénes son los culpables. La última parte está dedicada a reexionar sobre cómo las demandas de justicia por parte de las personas afectadas por las enfermedades relacionadas con el amianto encuentran fuertes dicultades, pero también ofrecen algunas perspectivas de respuestas reparadoras.

This dissertation studies the role of trust in the transformation of European agriculture towards increased diversification and sustainability. The central interest is how trust is constructed in situations where radical and structural changes are required that highly impact stakeholders, whilst also requiring the involvement of those same stakeholders to succeed. This was studied through fieldwork with three co-innovation projects in Belgium, Germany and Sweden that each brought together groups of stakeholders involved in the food system, to work on diversification of agriculture. Based on insights from this fieldwork, it is suggested that trust dynamics are highly intertwined with learning in such co-innovation processes and that it is necessary to understand the ‘underlying’ factors that trust is based on: namely in which ways actors experience uncertainty and vulnerability in relation to the subject of change. Finally it became apparent that developments on a system or society level strongly influenced inter-personal trust dynamics and vice versa.

The “pink tide” or turn to the left that altered the Latin American political landscape brought promises to promote equality, social justice, and new forms of democratic participation on the one hand, and stronger and more centralized states, with greater capacity to intervene and regulate the economy and society on the other hand. This paper examines if and how these promises affected women’s policy machinery in four countries in the region. Now that the pink tide era is fading and the region is facing an increase in conservative and anti-gender movements, it is important to know if state-society architectures changed in any substantial way to provide some level of protection or resilience against backsliding.

Meanwhile a recalibration of the human challenges the ways in which life is universalized and rendered equal in biopolitical understandings of humanitarianism, and discussions of race confront humanitarianism with distinctly political relations that unsettle both universal norms and the claims of (professional) humanitarianism to be impartial and apolitical (see [27]). The rest of the intervention examines humanitarianism's role in producing and securing whiteness and white supremacy, drawing on the work of both Du Bois and Wynter, before discussing decolonizing humanitarianism in any move beyond its white supremacy. Even while racism has animated and structured humanitarian practice, the figure of the universal human underpinning humanitarianism's commitment to saving lives, relieving suffering and upholding human dignity provides humanitarianism with its normative power. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Security Dialogue is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Research on armed conflict's gender dynamics has expanded significantly in the past decade. However, research in this field pays little attention to sexual orientation and gender identity. Moreover, where scholarship focused on violence against sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals during war exists, it is largely divorced from work on gender-based violence (GBV) in conflict-related environments and from sexuality studies. In this article, we integrate these bodies of work and argue for the theoretical expansion of GBV as a conceptual, empirical, and analytic category to study and explain targeted attacks against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise queer individuals. We suggest two theoretical interventions to better equip existing GBV frameworks to explain violence perpetrated against SGM people. We argue, first, that violence targeting SGM communities is GBV, as sexuality and gender identity are integral components of gender, and second, that analyzing gender dynamics adds to our understanding of when, how, and why targeting SGM individuals composes part of an organization's regulatory “repertoire of violence.” We examine violence in Colombia's civil war as an illustrative application of our approach and we identify future, fruitful research avenues with important policy implications for studying and responding to GBV during war.

De-democratization and hostility to gender equality alter relations between states and feminists. State feminism, which focuses on cooperation between feminists and states, needs amendments for applicability in such contexts. We propose the integration of anti-gender actors into the analysis. We also suggest moving away from the assumption that transactional activism targeting states is the most effective strategy for feminists to respond to such hostile contexts and discuss the potential of more diversified forms of engagement. To illustrate our conceptual framework, we look at changing political dynamics in three recent democracies: Croatia, Hungary, and Poland.

This paper examines through qualitative study the effect of government regulatory restriction and repression on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engaging in transnational advocacy. The focus is on NGO’s advocacy activities, in the realm of human rights, environment, labor and development in particular, using illustrations from Bangladesh and Zambia. It finds that next to some NGOs disbanding and moving towards service activities, many NGOs shift in terms of substantive advocacy and form of organizational collaboration. To continue cross-border interactions with their foreign partners, many NGOs adjust to circumvent or compensate for restrictions and repression. Because of this, transnational advocacy can be said to continue, but repression and restrictions have significant substantive and organizational effects for the collaborations studied, and cross-border NGO collaborations in our sample are increasingly fragile and their advocacy more tempered.

Invisible and seemingly technical financial infrastructures have become the site of high geopolitics. Crucially, security sanctions are being leveraged through the global financial messaging network SWIFT. This article offers the term “infrastructural geopolitics” to draw attention to the ways in which hegemonic contestation and fracturing play out in and through payment infrastructures. Infrastructures are not passive sites to be used in the service of preexisting hegemonic power but can themselves route, block, challenge, or rework power in particular ways.We focus on the new trade mechanism INSTEX as a lens on the global battle over financial payment infrastructures. How and why has hegemonic contestation taken the shape of, and is in turn shaped by, struggles over payment infrastructure? As a heuristic device to analyze the hegemonic politics of financial infrastructure, we propose three terms that capture the processual nature of infrastructural politics: sedimentation, resurfacing, and fracturing. We apply these to the emergence of the payment infrastructure INSTEX. We explain how hegemonic politics become hardwired in the technical and largely invisible SWIFT infrastructure, which supported postwar financial order and sedimented its uneven power relations. The process of political resurfacing captures the ways in which infrastructural dispositions come to the surface of political discussion again, after 9/11 and through the JCPOA process. In conclusion, the introduction of INSTEX has advanced the possibility of fracturing international payment routes, with multiple alternative infrastructures emerging.

The European Union (EU) seeks to play a leading role in steering the private work of online content moderation, as demonstrated by numerous policy and legislative initiatives in the domain. Two initiatives, in particular, are shaping terrorist content moderation: the creation of a EU Internet Referral Unit and the adoption of a Regulation on preventing the online dissemination of terrorist content (TERREG). This article analyses these initiatives and their practical effects. In particular, it unpacks the legal and technological mechanisms at the core of EU regulation in the realm of online terrorist content moderation, and how they co-produce security decisions across public and private spheres. Based on interviews, fieldwork observations and document analysis, we show how processes of referral and removal, and processes of flagging and filtering are key to EU-directed content moderation. In conclusion, we reflect on content moderation as a novel form of European security integration.

Increasing multi-polarity within global politics is understood to be a key contributor to the current legitimacy crisis facing global governance organisations. International relations scholars studying this crisis recognise that a prominent strategy to confront “Northern” dominance within this arena is through the construction of alternative governance institutions. Yet while the de-legitimation of long-established international organisations is widely discussed, there is less focused attention on how alternative institutions seek to gain legitimacy, particularly when they advance in fields where both “Northern” and “Southern” interests matter and beliefs about what constitutes proper governance may differ. This article analyses the field of transnational economic governance where the de-legitimation of pre-existing Northern-oriented governance takes the shape of new initiatives backed by Southern actors. Specifically, we focus on transnational sustainability standards governing trade and production in the global economy. This global governance arena has been transformed by the increasingly polycentric nature of global trade, in which producers governed by sustainability standards cater to rapidly expanding markets in the Global South as well as markets in the Global North. As markets have expanded in emerging economies, transnational sustainability standards must increasingly navigate and respond to actors and interests within different geographies in order to gain and establish legitimacy. The recent development of Southern-oriented sustainability standards (as opposed to established Northern-led standards) reflects the existence of diverging perspectives on the appropriateness of established rules and procedures when it comes to the regulation of trade and production. These standards are seen as partially challenging established standards but may likely seek to establish legitimacy within the wider transnational field of sustainability governance. This article examines the case of a recently established India-based sustainability standard known as Trustea to illustrate how various actors managed design and policy dilemmas to reconcile the preferences and beliefs of various audiences. The case illustrates the significance of both “Northern” and “Southern” audiences to Trustea’s legitimacy-seeking strategies in the context of broader political contestations regarding how production should be governed in relation to sustainable practices.

Existing theoretical frameworks and data collection tools relating to religious freedom suffer from various blind spots, leaving many forms of vulnerability of religiously motivated individuals and communities unobserved. We develop a new approach to observing violations of freedom of religion, informed by human security and with attention to active religious behavior. In a case study of the interactions of actively religious Christians with crime syndicates in Northeast Mexico, we show that threats at the subnational level may have nothing to do with the quality of national legislation, and that religious freedom may be threatened by non-state actors who need not be religiously motivated. Most importantly, by focusing on religious behavior rather than religious identity, we bring to light the risks people may run because they translate their religiosity into behavior that involuntarily or intentionally challenges local power-holders.

Scholars have often oscillated between celebrating the transformative potential of solidarity and recognising the ambivalent nature of cooperation for disadvantaged and marginalised groups. How can we make sense of these differences? This article addresses this question by unpacking intersectional solidarity along two dimensions: the ways issues are framed; and the extent to which organisations adopt a transformative praxis to redress disparities in resources and representation. By focusing on the interplay between discursive and material dimensions of power, we identify four types of intersectional solidarity, with different transformative potential. The usefulness of this typology is illustrated by means of secondary analysis of coalition work developed around reproductive justice and domestic workers’ rights. It shows that only an ideal form of transformative solidarity reflects feminist normative theorising of an alliance across differences.

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 article starts from the premise that International Political Economy (IPE) literature – with some notable exceptions – has a blind spot for the colonial and contested histories of financial infrastructures. Often considered to be the mere ‘plumbing’ of international finance, financial infrastructures instead are profoundly political and rooted in long-term colonial histories. To start addressing these blind spots, the article draws on literatures in critical infrastructure studies, that offer understandings of infrastructure as lively, contested and profoundly political. The argument is that attending to infrastructure inevitably brings into view the postcolonial nature of contemporary capitalism and finance. The article draws a parallel between the ways in which inequities and dis/connectivities became hard-wired into early modern financial infrastructures, and the ways in which new inequities and disconnections are hard-wired into present-day financial infrastructures through security sanctions. It uses the case of the contemporary payment infrastructure wars, whereby the SWIFT infrastructure is used to enforce sanctions policies, as example to develop the arguments.

Regional and Federal Studies' 30th anniversary offers an opportunity to take stock of the state of the discipline and of the journal. We make four claims. First, the multi-level nature of the political world has intensified in the last 30 years. Second, the approaches to studying this changing world have evolved through a quantitative and comparative turn. Regional and Federal Studies has embraced these developments whilst remaining faithful to its tradition of rich conceptual and case-study work. Third, the journal has contributed to the ?territorialization? of mainstream political science as many fields of study have gradually recognized the limitations of national- or single-level analyses. Finally, the journal itself has diversified in terms of approaches, methods, geographical coverage, and gender balance of author profiles, although we recognize there is more to do. We view further comparative research on the Global South as a particularly important research avenue. acceptedVersion

International migrants are subject to many types of violence, such as trafficking, detention, and forced labour. We need an improved understanding of what protects migrants from such violence. The concept of ‘migrant protection regimes’ draws our attention away from formal rights advocacy and to both the informal dimensions of protection and the way migrants help determine the quality of protection they receive. ‘Migrant protection regimes’ are sets of rules and practices regarding who ought to protect whom. These regimes include formal rights to protection in the law and informal relationships that protect migrants from lawful violence by the state. They may be changed by ‘power grabs’, when sovereign actors seek to monopolise protection relationships, but also by ‘exits’, when migrants refuse to accept the protection on offer. The study demonstrates the value of these concepts by using them to explain an unlikely case: a change in laws concerning migrant protection in an authoritarian state: Thailand. Drawing on rich qualitative sources, the article reveals how, after a human rights advocacy campaign had placed migrants’ protection in jeopardy, a mass migrant exodus compelled the country's junta to offer migrants protection on better terms.

The migration process raises a set of migration-related risks and vulnerabilities that governments first need to recognize as collective problems before formulating public policy responses. The South Indian state of Kerala is among the first subnational states globally to institutionalise various social protection policies towards emigrants and returned migrants, specifically through the department of Non-Resident Keralites' Affairs (NORKA) and its implementation agency, NORKA ROOTS. This article focuses on Kerala to investigate why migrant-origin states assume collective social responsibility for emigrants and include them in social protection policies. By drawing on original data, the analysis shows that (returned) emigrants' access to social protection schemes is built on the state government's understandings of deservingness. Kerala bases deservingness on a combination of instrumentalist and ideational rationales that are rooted in the state's specific developmental and identity discourse. These findings contribute to debates on the social policy-migration nexus, and particularly transnational social protection, in two ways. First, Kerala's approach highlights migration's role in welfare-state expansion and shows that positive discourses on migration can facilitate policy change, especially compared to negative discourses and welfare retrenchment in European destination countries in recent years. Second, the Kerala example underlines the importance of studying subnational governments to understand how transnational labour migration and social policies are made and how these subnational governments shape emigrants' access to social protection.

The seamy underside of humanitarianism What does it mean when humanitarianism is the response to death, injury and suffering at the border? This book interrogates the politics of humanitarian responses to border violence and unequal mobility, arguing that such responses mask underlying injustices, depoliticise violent borders and bolster liberal and paternalist approaches to suffering. Focusing on the diversity of actors involved in humanitarian assistance alongside the times and spaces of action, the book draws a direct line between privileges of movement and global inequalities of race, class, gender and disability rooted in colonial histories and white supremacy, and humanitarian efforts that save lives while entrenching such inequalities.

Objectives To conduct a formative evaluation of applying the VALIDATE approach in practice by (i) assessing how students appreciated the e-learning course, (ii) exploring how, for what purposes and with what outcomes the acquired VALIDATE competences subsequently were used in internships in different institutional contexts, and how this was shaped by these contexts, and (iii) what this shows on real-world use of VALIDATE. Methods Comparative discussion of experiences of applying the VALIDATE approach via a semistructured survey and oral feedback from e-course students; final reports on internships in health technology assessment (HTA) practice, followed by semistructured interviews with interns and supervisors to complement and interpret results. Results All students considered the VALIDATE approach an enlightening and important addition to current HTA knowledge, especially regarding understanding the relation between empirical analysis and normative inquiry, identifying policy relevant questions and using the method of reconstructing interpretive frames for scoping. The latter appeared intellectually challenging and requiring some prior HTA knowledge. The use the VALIDATE approach in practice shows that interns productively redefined the HTA problem, based on appreciation of different stakeholders’ definition of the issue; they experienced constraints from retrieving all relevant perspectives from existing literature as well as from institutional rules and routines. Conclusions Some challenges in applying the VALIDATE approach deserve attention for its future use: currently used research approaches often assume a problem as “given”; and the data needed on different perspectives is often not reported in scientific literature. Finally, data gathering on and evaluation of value dimensions was experienced as challenging.

This article focuses on the Schengen Information System (SIS II) – the largest data infrastructure supporting police cooperation and border controls in the European Union. Through the SIS II, national authorities exchange information about individuals and objects, and this across national and institutional boundaries. Yet, the SIS II does not always perform as anticipated in its design scripts. Following common threads about infrastructural politics across Science and Technology Studies, political geography and critical security studies, we explore fragility and maintenance as being intrinsic to the functioning of data infrastructures and crucial sites of governance. We show how the SIS II is kept under continuous control to operate as a controlling data infrastructure. This article contributes to a critical inquiry into the datafication of border controls by interrogating how data acquire the status of allegedly credible and accurate information. Ultimately, this approach pinpoints the inherent fragility of seemingly mighty data infrastructures and casts a light on those actors and processes that sustain, through maintenance, contemporary digital borders.

This article explores the many more-than-human actors involved in crafting migrant (im)mobility across the Alps and the racialised (re)production of the borderscape as what I call a whitescape. Using cycling and hiking as embodied and mobile methodologies of encounter it examines the entanglement of landscapes, terrains, gradients, weather, water, and forests, alongside transport and tourist infrastructures: roads, railways, tunnels, bus routes, ski slopes, golf courses, hiking trails and cycling tracks in shaping how illegalised migrants encounter the Alpine Susa Valley/Hautes-Alpes border routes and how these ecologies are made political. Drawing on the work of Juanita Sundberg the article makes the case for posthumanism and political ecology in the study of borderscapes and illegalised migrant (im)mobility, while being sensitive to the racist dynamics of the nature/culture divide present in much posthumanist and political ecology scholarship. Therefore, while the article makes space for the role of more-than-human actors in borderscapes it also highlights the racialising work of these more-than-human entanglements in the following ways: through perpetuating dualist ontologies of nature/culture or nature/human from which illegalised migrants are linked to the natural, read pre-modern, world; and through producing illegalised migrants as ‘bodies-out-of-place’ in a political ecology that is concomitantly (re)produced as a whitescape.

Policy conflict is gaining attention in policy studies. In this paper, we explore the relation between emotional storylines and policy conflict escalation in the case of the Dutch gasquakes in the north of the country. Based on a longitudinal analysis of emotional storylines in 1308 newspaper articles and additional empirical data we find that Dutch subnational governmental actors as well as citizen action groups discursively express emotional storylines about anxiety/fear, anger, and contempt in relation to discursive expressions of trustworthiness/distrust. Over time, specific combinations of these emotional storylines shape the interpretation of the problem and point toward responsible actors. Also the way in which specific sequences of emotional storylines develop (particularly from fear to anger) suggests a discursive escalation. In addition, discursive escalation can be found in the increased intensity of specific emotional storylines. We conclude that the combinations, sequencing and increasing intensity of the emotional storylines suggest a process of emotionally expressed escalation, which we have only just begun to explore.

EU–Middle East relations are multifaceted, varied and complex, shaped by historical, political, economic, migratory, social and cultural dynamics. Covering these relations from a broad perspective that captures continuities, ruptures and entanglements, this handbook provides a clearer understanding of trends, thus contributing to a range of different turns in international relations.The interdisciplinary and diverse assessments through which readers may grasp a more nuanced comprehension of the intricate entanglements in EU–Middle East relations are carefully provided in these pages by leading experts in the various (sub)fields, including academics, think-tankers, as well as policymakers. The volume offers original reflections on historical constructions; theoretical approaches; multilateralism and geopolitical perspectives; contemporary issues; peace, security and conflict; and development, economics, trade and society.This handbook provides an entry point for an informed exploration of the multiple themes, actors, structures, policies and processes that mould EU–Middle East relations. It is designed for policymakers, academics and students of all levels interested in politics, international and global studies, contemporary history, regionalism and area studies.

Banks have become private security actors. As “gatekeepers” of the financial system, they are legally obliged to conduct customer research and monitor bank accounts for unusual or suspicious transactions. If they identify transactions with potential links to money laundering or terrorist financing, they must report these to their national Financial Intelligence Unit. Because of the sheer volume of financial transactions that banks process daily, detection of financial crime relies on digital security technologies that help analysts categorise and identify risky customers and financial transactions. This thesis analyses how banks practice counter-terrorist financing and how they experiment with technologies to make authoritative security decisions. Contributing to theories at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and International Relations, the thesis develops a dynamic and processual understanding of risk detection and of processes of financial inclusion and exclusion. The research is based on fieldwork observations in the financial crime sector in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It includes three months’ observation at a major Dutch bank, alongside interviews with public and private actors and document analysis. This dissertation analyses security at the human-technology interface, specifically during the production of customer risk profiles, in the design and use of transaction monitoring systems and in the emergence of public-private partnerships to counter terrorist financing. The research concludes that there is a misalignment between regulation and practice: the implementation of counter-terrorist financing rules does not lead to the effective prevention of terrorist financing in practice.

Our society currently confronts complex public problems around food, water, mobility, health, energy and climate. Many policymakers hope that research and innovation will provide answers to these grand challenges. In recent decades, some researchers have noted that research and innovation can deliver responsible solutions only if they engage democratically with the values, needs and expectations of diverse emergent groups of affected citizens (publics). Some scholars have also started to experiment with public participation in research and innovation, but many experiments remain of a temporary nature. Until now, it is unclear how such add-on and ad hoc experimentation can inform structural changes that contribute to a deeper democratization of the research and innovation system. This thesis addresses this puzzle from a conceptual and action-oriented perspective. Building on insights from pragmatism and new institutionalism it develops a framework and agenda for (action) research into the organization of collectives of institutional entrepreneurs (‘institutional entrepreneurial collectives’). The framework is used to analyze experiences with organizing a series of social labs that promoted Responsible Research and Innovation in the European science funding system. Analysis of these experiments with help of the framework helped to uncover how institutions of research and innovation can block and potentially enable participation. Furthermore, the thesis shows that public experimentation can support engaged participants to operate as collectives of institutional entrepreneurs. With enough attention to the structural context of the experiment and with support from methods that enhance a sense of agency, participants can thus create diverse pathways toward structural change. The thesis concludes with policy recommendations and practical pointers for future public experimentation that may help to further promote structural participation in the European research and innovation system.

Health technology assessment (HTA) aims, through empirical analysis, to shed light on the value of health technologies (O’Rourke et al. [2020, International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care 36, 187–90]). HTA is, then, where facts and values meet. But how, where, and when do facts and values meet in HTA? Currently, HTA is usually portrayed as a sequential process, starting with empirical analysis (assessment), followed by a deliberation on the implications of the findings for a judgment of a health technology’s value (appraisal). In this paper, we will argue that in HTA, empirical analysis and normative inquiry are much more closely entwined. In fact, as we hope to show, normative commitments act as an indispensable guide for the collection and interpretation of empirical evidence. Drawing on policy sciences, we will suggest a concrete methodology that can help HTA practitioners to integrate empirical analysis and normative inquiry in a transparent way. The proposed methodology can be conceived as a concrete means for conducting a scoping exercise in HTA. Moreover, it offers a distinct way of giving stakeholders a structural and constructive role in HTA. This paper outlines the approach developed by the values in doing assessments of health technologies project, a project funded by the Erasmus+ program (contract number 2018-1-NL01-KA203-038960), which is the European Union’s program to support education, training, youth, and sport in Europe. The project has resulted in an E-learning course, an accompanying handbook, and a consensus statement, all freely available from the project’s website www.validatehta.eu.

Have relations between the European Union (EU) and the Middle East really changed substantially or is there actually more continuity than usually assumed? The aim of this introductory chapter is to take stock of the continuities, ruptures and entanglements in EU–Middle East relations. Since the end of the Second World War, the decolonisation process in the Middle East, the challenges of pan-Arabism, the US hegemony over the Middle East, the Venice Declaration, the aftermath of the Cold War, the intensification of US–European military presence in the Middle East and the Arab uprisings have all contributed to key moments of rupture in these relations. All these events represent flashpoints which expose vulnerabilities, weaknesses, fallacies and incoherencies in these relations. This introduction frames and presents the 41 chapters of this handbook which are organised in six parts – Historical Constructions/Perspectives; Theoretical Approaches/Perspectives; Multilateralism and Geopolitical Perspectives; MENA–EU Relations in the Contemporary World; Peace, Security and Conflict; and Development, Economics, Trade and Society. Each chapter and collectively these contributions highlight how EU–Middle East relations are multifaceted, varied and complex. This handbook provides a useful entry point for an informed exploration and nuanced understanding of the multiple themes, actors, structures and processes that mould these relations.

Twenty years after 9/11, policies to control and disrupt the financial sources of terrorist organizations are considered a key aspect of combatting terrorist organizations. To prevent and deter support for terrorist activities, EU countries are obliged by law to criminalize and prosecute those who engage in financing terrorist organizations and/or individuals. Financing terrorism as defined under international law, however, is a broad offence, criminalizing a range of activities such as fundraising, donating, and transferring. Furthermore, a court conviction is not dependent on the actual use of the money, but on whether the sender accepted the reasonable chance that the money might be used for terrorist activities. This pre-emptive and broad formulation of the law therefore raises the question how courts make the distinction between mundane financial transactions and terrorism financing. This dissertation focusses on how the investigation and prosecution of terrorism financing is done in practice. Adopting this practice-approach, I collected empirical data by observing court cases in four European countries, conducting interviews with legal professionals and document analysis. In my dissertation I show that what counts as terrorism financing, is often not straight-forward but the outcome of fierce debates on new materials that are presented for the court, judges deliberating on admissible security expertise, definitions of terrorism, geopolitical knowledge on complex war zones, and even contestations about the fundamental purpose of the law. My research therefore concludes that prosecuting terrorism financing is a complex and interdisciplinary practice and illustrates the multiplicity of legal definitions and arguments.

Research on women's participation in rebel organizations often focuses on “frontline” fighters. But there is a dearth of scholarship about noncombat roles in rebel groups. This is surprising because scholarship on gender and rebellion suggests that women's involvement in rebel governance, publicity, and mobilization can have positive effects on civilian support for and participation in rebel organizations cross-nationally. Further, women often make up the critical infrastructure that maintains rebellion. A new conceptual typology of participation in rebellion identifies four dimensions along which individuals are involved in noncombat labor: logistics, outreach, governance, and community management. These duties are gendered in ways that make women's experiences and opportunities unique and, often, uniquely advantageous for rebel organizations. Women take on complex roles within rebellion, including myriad tasks and duties that rebels perform in conjunction with or in lieu of combat labor. An in-depth analysis of women's noncombat participation in the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland demonstrates this typology's purpose and promise. Attention to noncombat labor enables a more comprehensive analysis of rebel groups and of civil wars. Studying these activities through this framework expands our understanding of rebellion as a system of actors and behaviors that extends beyond fighting. Future scholarship may use this typology to explain variation in types of women's participation or the outcomes that they produce.

The objective of this chapter is to give an overview of the politics of borders, migration and refugees in EU–Middle East relations. More specifically, the chapter looks at EU cooperation with Lebanon and Turkey, which are two major refugee hosting countries in the EU’s so-called Southern neighbourhood and main recipients of EU funds in the management of borders and displaced populations. The chapter identifies the main drivers, policies, mechanisms and practices of EU–Middle East relations in migration and border governance. Special attention will be paid to the concept of “externalisation”, which is regarded as the main legal and policy framework through which the EU transfers migration and border control to third countries. Here, we discuss “accession” and “association” as the two central ways for the operation of externalisation and relate them to our two cases. In both cases, we emphasise the legal, ethical and normative underpinnings and implications of the politics of borders, migration and refugees in EU relations with the Middle East.

This Introduction contextualises this special anniversary issue of the journal. The Editors of a previous 2013 special issue of the EJIR (The End of International Relations Theory?) asked if the paradigmatic “theoretical cacophony” in IR was deep and irresolvable. We argue that there is still very much a conversation going on across ‘generalist’ and specialised IR journals, and that renewal and broadening is more important than boundaries per se. Meanwhile the field of International Relations has continued to broaden, absorbing much from other social science disciplines in the process. Yet IR has a problematic relationship with interdisciplinarity, often discovering as ‘new’ what other fields have long debated and in turn ‘domesticating’ these insights from other fields by fitting them into existing IR paradigms. This special issue is thus aimed above all at what ‘we’ in IR are not seeing from other disciplines, and we go on to argue how IR scholars might best employ ‘transdisciplinary’ insights to ensure the future dynamism and innovation of the field. We argue that in this context, a special effort of critical and open engagement with work that makes us uncomfortable is required and that the very notion of inter-disciplinarity takes on a new form.

In Latin America and Southern Africa, norms on violence against women have developed with ups and downs, not simply in reaction to global norms, but sometimes even preceding global norm diffusion or surpassing it in terms of scope, framing and binding character. The classic global-to-local account with a single source of norm creation cannot capture these dynamics. Including the regional level in a dynamic model of norm diffusion enables us to understand the changing contents of a norm and to acknowledge transregional agency. We show (1) how norm contestation is an ongoing, multidirectional and polycentric process; (2) how the regional level opens up opportunities for feminists and femocrats; and (3) under which conditions regional norms can be both more progressive than global ones and more adapted to regional needs, and, in turn, are thus able to strengthen the ‘global’ norm.

Urban experiments are no longer exclusively undertaken by alternative networks, dominated by new actors and alliances and located at the fringes of the current system. A second generation of initiatives is emerging, which Is characterized by a leading role for local governments, together with other established players. For experimentation at the fringes of the regime the challenge is to maximally benefit from niche protection while seizing opportunities to influence regime dynamics. Second generation experiments face a different challenge: to benefit from the proximity to the regime while maintaining a protective space for developing ‘deviant’ solutions. I will draw on insights on reflexive governance to develop a framework for understanding this challenge and strategies to meet it. I will use an ongoing project on achieving synergy between energy, water and data infrastructures in Amsterdam as an empirical referent to clarify and sharpen the argument. The framework includes propositions on strategies for this newly emerging types of initiatives, focusing on the processes through which they do or do not work. They may be tested and further developed through case studies. Such work may also contribute to meta-theoretical issue of the relations between institutional, discursive and material factors in driving change.

This paper asks about the practices and forms of critique afforded at the intersection between Science-and-Technology Studies and the critical study of security politics, by drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers. Can engagements with practice generate effective forms of critique? How does the attention to materialities and the fine-grained analysis of technical practices, that typically accompany STS-inspired research, feed into ways of practicing critique? How can the analytical attention to ‘little security nothings’ be translated into critical agendas?In addressing these questions, Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers serves as an inspiration, not just for her philosophical writing on the situated nature of critical thinking, but also for her own experimental politics and engagement. A key message of the paper is that critical practice is “engagement all the way down.” The article thinks through the ways in which the work of Stengers and her companions can be put into practice in qualitative critical security research. It builds on Foucault’s rejection of the separation between theoretical, universalist knowledge on the one hand, and practical knowledge on the other. It emphasises the processual, uncertain and practical aspects of critical thinking. It identifies the notions of following, leveraging, joined risks and paying attention as key, concrete pathways of engaged critique.

The paper proposes to use the concept of co-production to account for the mutual coproduction of private as well as public security actors and critical infrastructure. Through an exploration in the field of urban security provision, we aim to contribute to critical security studies by turning to the entanglements of public and private security actors in the process of securitising infrastructure. As the construction and provision of infrastructural security depends neither solely on public nor private actors but on their interaction, we propose the concept of co-production to account for these dynamics. Based on a focused ethnography, the paper mobilises material collected during a security conference in Israel, in which the close connections between private and public security actors were forged and where infrastructure was at the heart of the security concerns.

Financial transactions are part of everyday life, yet banking has largely withstood the digital transformation within most European countries. Recently, there have been initiatives that merge the digital and the financial sphere by integrating the transactions that run through established financial infrastructures into digital platforms. Large data-driven companies hereby seek access to financial transactions and try to embed payments within their platforms. This contribution discusses differing models of how tech-driven companies gain access to financial infrastructures, and how recently introduced policies engender these processes. Within Europe and the United Kingdom, banks that operate through financial infrastructures and hold most transactional data are now required by regulators to provide access to their customers’ accounts. The platformization of financial transactions is thus not purely a technical question, but it also is a remarkable example of how politically enforced changes in the materiality of data lead to reconfigurations with broader economic and social consequences. It results in the transformation of money into a form of (transactional) data and shows how the value of money and data depends on the technological underpinnings that determine the capability of their circulation. In order to understand their valuation, we need to take the material assemblages that enable their distribution into account.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that sexual violence varies significantly across cases of election violence and communal conflicts but systematic research is scarce. Post-election violence is particularly likely if electoral mobilization further polarizes longstanding communal conflicts and political elites do not instruct security forces to intervene decisively. I comparatively analyse two prominent cases of post-election violence in Kenya (2007/8) and Nigeria (2008) that exhibit stark variation in sexual violence. Patrimonial networks and norms of violent masculinity that increase the probability of (gang) rape were present in both cases and do not explain variation. Civil war research has identified three explanations for the variation in sexual violence: situational constraints; ordered sexual violence or restraint; and bottom-up dynamics of sexual violence or restraint. I examine these for the context of post-election violence. I argue that the type of communal conflict triggered by electoral mobilization explains variation in sexual violence. In Kenya, pogroms of a majority group against a minority allowed for the time and space to perpetrate widespread sexual violence while in Nigeria, dyadic clashes between similarly strong groups offered less opportunity but produced a significantly higher death toll. These findings have important implications for preventing election violence. They demonstrate that civilian vulnerability is gendered and that high levels of sexual violence do not necessarily correspond to high levels of lethal violence. Ignoring sexual violence means underestimating the real intensity of conflict and its impact on the political process.

The COVID-19 crisis opened up discussions on using online tools and platforms for academic work, e.g. for research (management) events that were originally designed as face-to-face interactions. As social scientists working in the domain of responsible research and innovation (RRI), we draft this paper to open up a dialogue on Responsible online Research and Innovation (RoRI), and deliberate particular socioethical opportunities and challenges of the onlineification in collaborative theoretical and empirical research. An RRI-inspired ‘going online’ approach would mean, we suggest, trying to make academic events and research activities more inclusive, researchers’ attitude to their work more reflective and suggest processes that are more responsive to societal needs and ethical concerns. For such systematic reflection, we suggest using the RRI-heuristic provided by Owen et al., and applying the dimensions of ‘Anticipation, Inclusion, Reflection and Responsiveness’ (AIRR) in order to identify and reflect on the dilemmas involved in ‘going online’ in one’s research.

This paper engages in ‘flat’ International Relations (IR). Inspired by Actor-Network Theory (ANT), it studies how geographically dispersed security actors produce shared understandings of financial intelligence on the EU-FIU Platform, a European Commission expert group. Studying the Platform enables empirical observation of how ‘the international’ is not a natural given nor a static analytical framework, but instead is actively made to exist in everyday practice, entailing numerous human and non-human actors. Engaging the Platform with a flat ontology allows the significance of materiality to be drawn out and key IR concerns such as power and governance to be readdressed. The paper examines the publicly accessible minutes of the EU-FIU Platform meetings and traces the development of the phrase ‘for intelligence purposes’, demonstrating both its interpretive flexibility, allowing actors to cooperate across heterogeneous understandings, and its flexible scalability, allowing actors to assign and navigate several scales concurrently.