Kyle Grayson

As the journal International Political Sociology marks its twentieth anniversary, we explore what it now means to do international political sociology as a way of introducing the IPS@20 Special Issue. Drawing on our experience as an editorial team, we highlight how we have engaged with debates about what constitutes international political sociology in our editorial practice. In doing so, we offer a set of reflections on IPS and international political sociology, as conceptual terrains but also as intellectual functionaries. Second, we explore the potential futures of international political sociology. Third, we reflect on the role of critique and transformation in the field. We note the decline of immanent critique and what that might mean for work in international political sociology. Finally, in the concluding (or commencing) section, we return to the question of the international, its futures, and its functions in a time of poly-crisis. By engaging with these questions, we offer a significant contribution to the ongoing conversations about international political sociology that have productively shaped the field.

This chapter outlines the nine different questions we can ask in relation to security: who can ‘speak’ security; security for whom; security where; security when; security from what; security how; security why; security for what purpose; and security at whose expense? Asking some of these questions help to determine the context within which security is being mobilized, while others enable us to precisely identify what security does within a given socio-political order. The chapter uses the global drug war as an illustrative case study. By asking the nine security questions about the global drug war, the chapter shows how illicit drugs have been used as a pretext to reproduce racism, violence, and structural inequalities. As such, the chapter concludes by restating the importance of not taking security thinking at face value.

This chapter discusses what it means to adopt a critical perspective to analyse security. It highlights the fact that critical perspectives share a common concern with identifying and transforming forms of domination and oppression. To identify how security may be connected to domination and oppression requires uncovering the logics of the socio-political order in which a security mobilization takes place. The chapter then looks at the different ways that we can conceptualize power and how power can (re)produce hierarchies through identities, ideas, interests, institutions, and infrastructures. It also illustrates how forms of domination and oppression made possible by security mobilizations can be contested and resisted.

This chapter addresses the question of ‘what security is’. It begins by exploring the history of security as a concept and practice emerging out of the long nineteenth century. The chapter shows security's inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism. It then suggests that security can be seen as an achievable threshold/goal whose progress can be measured, or as an ongoing process that is never complete. Either way, security is a form of political mobilization that acts upon our worlds through the prism of threats and risks, creating conditions of possibility and impossibility. The chapter concludes that the ubiquity of security demands that we ask how it defines our relations with others and with ourselves in shaping socio-political orders. To ask ‘what is security?’ is ultimately to answer the question, ‘what does security do?’.

This chapter introduces the notion of critique. At its simplest, to apply ‘critique’ means to question and ask questions about our world(s). This is because how we perceive our world(s) shapes what we identify as problems and why. This is what is also termed, problem framings. The chapter begins by outlining the main elements of critique: contingency, historicity, sociology, and a concern with transformation. It then presents the benefits of adopting a perspective that is critical of security. To understand the impacts of security within worlds and across them, it is important to look at security in relation to class, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ideology and culture, religion, political belonging, and disability and/or their intersections. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the decision to mobilize security is always a political choice.

This chapter presents a conceptual framework that identifies different forms of violence, their relation to security, and their political dimensions. It focuses on four types of violence: physical, psychological, material, and symbolic. To determine the potential political dimensions of violence, the chapter explores actors, intentions, structures, and its presence within socio-political orders. Security seeks to address something that an authority has determined to be a threat or under threat. In this context, violence can be deemed political when it is legitimized and authorized from a security claim, as well as when it is an effect of a security mobilization that has emerged from a security claim. Two key questions then arise. Firstly, when is violence legitimate? Secondly, who has the authority to exercise violence legitimately within a given socio-political order? The chapter concludes that understanding how violence emerges from security mobilizations is important to understanding security.

Sound matters for international political sociology. Drawing upon literature from cultural geography and sound studies, we argue that sound contributes to political dynamics that are constitutive of world politics. To capture these dynamics, we offer a set of conceptual frameworks to analyze sound. First, we differentiate the concept of sound from noise and show the importance of doing so. Second, we introduce “sonic formations” as a means of capturing how sound contributes to world politics. Third, we make the case for analyzing sound's historicity, adaptability, relationality, and performativity (SHARP) in any given context. Fourth, using sonic formations and the SHARP framework, we examine an illustrative case study: the nuclear deterrence and non-proliferation regimes. By focusing on the role of sound in these regimes, our preliminary findings demonstrate the utility for the field of undertaking additional work to capture the wider significance of sound. This includes its contributions to shaping relations of power.

In this article, we argue that the lack of attention paid to the scopic regimes of modernity in the ‘visual turn’ literature misses a key aspect of how visuality produces and shapes the international as both a site — and sight — of politics. In making the case that systemised ways of seeing are central to world politics, we contend that the scopic regimes of modernity help us to understand how it becomes possible for particular representational practices and outputs to resonate within broader discourses as authoritative, truthful, and/or emotively powerful. To do so, we draw from ongoing controversies over targeted killing via drones. We argue that disagreements over the legality and governance of drone warfare are more than disputes over legal statutes and legitimate techniques for the application of kinetic force; they also encompass disagreements over how we see, who we see, what we see, and what counts as being seen. Thus, by demonstrating the importance of scopic regimes, we provide evidence of the value of engaging with how the visual produces the political in International Relations. Moreover, we argue for International Relations to engage with scopic regimes from beyond Western traditions in order to decolonise the ‘visual turn’.