International Relations

This book critically engages with NATO’s two main referent objects of security: civilisation and individuals. By rethinking the seemingly natural assumption of these two referent objects, it suggests the epistemological importance of an unconscious dimension to understand meaning formation and behaviour change in international security.
The book provides a historicised and genealogical approach of the idea of civilisation that is at the core of the Alliance, in which human needs, narratives, and security arrangements are interconnected. It suggests that there is a Civilised Subject of Security at the core of modern Western security that has constantly produced civilised and secure subjects around the world, which explains NATO’s emergence around a civilisational referent. The book then proceeds by considering the Individualisation of Security after the Cold War as another stage of the civilising process, based on NATO’s military operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Afghanistan.
https://www.palgrave.com/cn/book/9783319744087#aboutBook

Although space exploration has been evolving increasingly rapidly, at the material, technological and economic levels, IR has been generally dismissive of the topic, and almost exclusively focused on geopolitical approaches. As traditional paradigms of IR have encapsulated outer space affairs in an epistemic parallax – a locus of epistemic irreconcilability – time urges to rethink the fundamental purpose of doing (social) science. It is thereby suggested that, although it would be much more useful and progressive for humanity as a whole that they both address the same problems in the same epistemic vein, the state of the world and IR Theory have rather moved at a different speed. While outer space affairs reveal the depth of that epistemological and phenomenological displacement, it is argued that they constitute a critical object of study with the potential to enable IR to move forward along with the state of the world.

This article analyses how the European Union (EU) and Russia perceive each other as regional players, by assessing their security-oriented policies towards the shared neighbourhood in Eastern Europe and South Caucasus, and delves into the impact those perceptions have on EU–Russia relations. It argues that both EU and Russian policies towards the region are built upon the belief that internal security starts outside their borders and, thus, the countries in the shared neighbourhood emerge as lynchpins in their internal and regional security strategies. In a mostly competing and mutually exclusive logic, the EU and Russia attempt to keep those countries in their own sphere of influence. Accordingly, commitments to European integration are generally seen by Moscow as a political loss, in the same way that a rapprochement towards Russia is usually perceived to constrain the EU's leverage in the region. This research is framed by a critical constructivist approach focusing on practices and discourses, thereby enabling a broader mapping of the dynamics resulting from the EU's and Russia's competing interests, perceptions and policies in the shared neighbourhood, and a deeper understanding of their impact on EU–Russia bilateral relations, particularly under the so-called strategic partnership.