Martin Coward

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has foregrounded its distinctively antiurban way of war. Historically, Russian warfighting has been intertwined with antiurban violence and the use of artillery and aerial bombardment to destroy the civilian fabric of the city has been an operational strategy. The targeting of homes, offices, roads, power grids – the infrastructure of everyday civilian life – is deliberate and widespread. In this article I examine this antiurban way of war and argue that these attacks on civilian urban fabric can be understood as both a clearing of space and an undoing of interconnection as both punishment and manipulation of morale. As such they are strategies of domination: antiurban war seeks to erode the capacity to resist. The article introduces 3 conceptual innovations for international politics. First, the concept of strategies of domination provides tools for thinking about the politics of violence. Second, I show that that urban destruction is always already targeted towards civilians and thus challenges the basis of International Humanitarian Law. I show how the concepts of reverberating effects and entanglement help international politics scholars to think about the legacies of violence. Finally, I show that the slow violence urban destruction causes challenges the temporal registers in which international politics scholars traditionally understand war and violence. Instead, I argue that it is necessary to think about the way in which the legacies of destruction lead to long-term effects.

Our present is marked by multiple failures: of governance; of care; of hope. Amidst the wreckage, we see numerous attempts – real and imagined – to keep hope alive by dreaming of a better future. Such utopian exhortations are fuelled by the idea that it is not too late – we still have time to correct our failures. This secures a particular futurity for failure: we speculate on a utopian tomorrow to counteract the pressing failures of today, and we implement lessons today to course correct for a better future. We argue that it is already too late for such social dreaming. We turn instead to the uneven potentialities of the current ‘failure-scene’ through accounts of non-redemptive failure that refuse the normative coordinates of hope; flatten the elongated present of the ruins; endure the event-oriented temporality of crisis thinking; and improvise with whatever tools and energies are available to us.

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

The 2020 murder of George Floyd put the question of racialised violence at the forefront of thinking about contemporary politics. In recent years, international politics has begun the task of acknowledging the colonial legacies that underpin global politics as well as the urgent work of decolonising its own thinking, knowledge production, and research agendas. 1 Decolonial research has delineated the exploitation, inequality, and discrimination that are the legacy of colonialism. It has traced the way oppression is not simply political or economic, but also epistemological. 2 Despite this important work, decoloniality has often been pitched in a cultural, economic, or epistemological register. This has left the question of the racialisation of political violence-killing, torture, and other acts of cruelty-under-represented. It is clear however that killing and cruelty are a constitutive aspect of the racial dynamics of genocide, war, policing, and (counter-)insurgency. 3 Recognising the importance of such violence goes hand in hand with work that recognises the constitutive-as opposed to merely epiphenomenal-role of violence. 4 We cannot understand police killing as simply the product of racism; rather-as has been demonstrated in relation to the racial dynamics of genocide-it is constitutive of racial hierarchies and their brutal consequences. 5

This article examines affective responses to terror and the emergence of communities of sense in the commemoration of such attacks. We challenge the predominant framing of responses to terror which emphasize security and identity. We focus on the singular response by the city of Manchester in the aftermath of the 2017 Arena bombing, drawing on fieldwork conducted at the 1-year anniversary commemorative events. Our discussion focuses on the ways improvised, transient communities crystallized around the cultural significance of music during these events. The article explores these communities of sense through two case studies: those drawn together around the figure of Ariane Grande; and those assembled through a mass sing-along. In contrast to national or municipal responses to terror which orchestrate affect to establish narratives about security, borders and identity, we argue for the importance of paying attention to the improvised, affective ways in which people respond to terror. These plural, affective responses suggest another form of collective subjectivity. They also demonstrate the transient, plural, and everyday ways in which politics is practiced, assembled, and negotiated by different publics in response to terror.Cet article examine les réactions affectives au terrorisme et l’émergence de communautés de sens dans la commémoration de tels attentats. Nous remettons en question le cadre prédominant des réactions au terrorisme qui met l'accent sur la sécurité et sur l'identité. Nous nous concentrons sur la réaction singulière de la ville de Manchester au lendemain de l'attentat à la bombe de l'Arena de 2017 en nous appuyant sur le travail de terrain qui a été mené lors des événements commémoratifs de son premier anniversaire. Notre discussion s'axe sur les manières dont des communautés transitoires improvisées se sont cristallisées autour de la signification culturelle de la musique durant ces événements. L'article explore ces communautés de sens par le biais de deux études de cas: celles qui se sont rassemblées autour d'Ariane Grande, et celles qui se sont réunies dans le cadre d'un chant de masse. Contrairement aux réactions nationales ou municipales au terrorisme qui orchestrent les affects en élaborant des discours sur la sécurité, les frontières et l'identité, nous soutenons qu'il est important de prêter attention aux manières improvisées et affectives dont la population réagit au terrorisme. Cette pluralité de réactions affectives suggère une autre forme de subjectivité collective. Elle démontre également la pluralité des façons transitoires quotidiennes dont la politique est pratiquée, composée et négociée par les différents publics en réaction au terrorisme.En este artículo se examinan las respuestas afectivas al terrorismo y la aparición de comunidades de sentido en el marco de la conmemoración de dichos ataques. Cuestionamos el marco predominante de respuestas al terrorismo que hacen hincapié en la seguridad y la identidad. Nos centramos en la singular respuesta de la ciudad de Manchester tras el bombardeo del Arena en 2017 a partir del trabajo de campo realizado en los actos conmemorativos del primer aniversario. Nuestro análisis se centra en las formas en las que las comunidades improvisadas y transitorias se cristalizaron en torno a la importancia cultural de la música en estos eventos. En el artículo se exploran estas comunidades de sentido mediante dos estudios de caso: las que se unen en torno a la figura de Ariane Grande y las que unen sus voces con un canto masivo. A diferencia de las respuestas al terrorismo a nivel nacional y municipal que orquestan el afecto para establecer narrativas sobre seguridad, fronteras e identidad, defendemos la importancia de prestar atención a las formas improvisadas y afectivas en las que las personas responden al terrorismo. Estas diversas respuestas afectivas sugieren otra forma de subjetividad colectiva. También demuestran las formas transitorias, múltiples y cotidianas en que diferentes públicos ponen en práctica, instauran y negocian políticas en respuesta al terrorismo.

This article examines the forms and feelings of togetherness evident in both Manchester city centre and on social media during the first anniversary of the 22 May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. To do this, we introduce a conceptual framework that conceives commemorative public atmospheres as composed of a combination of ‘more or less digital’ elements. We also present a methodological approach that combines the computational collection and analysis of Twitter content with short-term team autoethnography. First, the article addresses the concept of public atmospheres before introducing the case study and outlining our methodology. We then analyse the shifting moods of togetherness created by the official programme of commemorative events known as Manchester Together and their digital mediatisation through Twitter. We then explore a grassroots initiative, #LoveMCRBees, and how it relied on the materialisation of social media logics to connect people. Overall, we demonstrate how public atmospheres, as constituted in more and less digital ways, provide a framework for conceptualising commemorative events, and how togetherness is reworked by social media, especially in the context of responses to terrorism.

This article advances a critique of network thinking and the pathological sovereignty that it gives rise to. The network is ubiquitous as a metaphor for understanding the social, economic and political dynamics of the contemporary era. Implicitly drawing on an analogy with communications infrastructures such as the telegraph or internet, the network metaphor represents global politics in terms of nodes related to one another through conduit-like links. I begin by demonstrating the widespread nature of network thinking and outline the way in which conventional metaphors structure both thinking and action. I then recreate an episodic history of network thinking in order to demonstrate the key entailments of the network metaphor. I argue that there are four entailments of network thinking: the prioritisation of connectivity; the identification of novel actors; de-territorialisation; and a lack of concern for contiguity and context. The article then outlines the corresponding political and ethical consequences that follow from these entailments, specifically: fantasies of precision; new threat imaginaries; unboundedness; and a failure to attend to culture and community. I contend that network thinking gives rise to a pathological sovereignty whose dual faces can be seen in drone strikes and invasive surveillance. Finally, I argue that thinking beyond the network requires us to foreground the importance of contiguity and context in understanding global politics. This article contributes both a novel theoretical framework for challenging the hegemony of network thinking and an ethical call for greater recognition of the harm caused by pathological sovereignty.