China’s rise and growing challenge to U.S. power has triggered debates about how the competition between rising and established Great Powers may impinge upon secondary states. According to IR wisdom, most secondary states choose to either ally with the established Great Power to balance the rising one, or to bandwagon with the rising Great Power. However, scholars have recently argued that some secondary states “hedge”, that is, they maintain an equidistant position between the competing Great Powers. By employing hedging, these secondary states try to mitigate the security risks associated with alignment. Given the pivotal role that some hedging states can have in the context of Great Power competition, both Great Powers are incentivised to develop a strategic response towards them, with the aim to leverage or neutralise these players notwithstanding their hedging strategies. Quite surprisingly, however, the question of how concretely rising and established Great Powers respond to secondary state hedging has been largely left unaddressed. Aiming at filling this important gap, this paper will zoom in on two cases: the hedging response strategies of Germany and Great Britain in relation to the Netherlands before WWI, and those of China and the United States in relation to Singapore today.
China’s growing influence in world politics has resurfaced old debates about hegemonic disputes over global order. At the core of these debates is the question of how the rise of China will interplay with the United States’ preponderant position in the international order and whether it may trigger hegemonic competition. Although hegemonic order studies have long focused on how powerful states build the institutions that underpin international order, they have little to say about how concomitant order-building efforts may shape the dynamics of conflict or cooperation among hegemons. Hegemonic interactions are assumed to be intrinsically conflict-prone and left under the states-under-anarchy framework. This paper argues that hierarchical relations among states constitute hegemonies and structure international orders. It proposes a network-relational framework for investigating the interplay among hegemonic efforts in order-building. Networked hierarchies can entangle multiple hegemonies together and constrain the pathways for cooperation and competition among hegemons. To demonstrate this framework’s utility, I apply it to a comparative analysis of the United States and Soviet Union’s competition in the Cold War (1950–1991) and the hegemonic-ordering dynamics ensuing from the rise of China (2006–2014).
The Russo-Ukrainian War provides a unique, somewhat fortuitous, and data-rich opportunity to compare competing proxy war strategies. On one side resides Russian proxy war strategy, and on the other, the American strategy. Each strategy is quite unique from the other. Yet, in the rich, and often sad, irony that accompanies war, each state’s proxy strategy feeds off the other, having transformed the conflict into a grinding war of attrition. In comparing Russian and American proxy strategies in Ukraine, one quickly finds that the traditional conceptual standards of proxy war scholarship, such as plausible deniability and indirectness, are no longer salient considerations for great power proxy war. Things such as pervasive overhead surveillance and reconnaissance tools, social media, globally accessible mass communication, and open-source reporting have all but rendered those ideas obsolete features of a bygone era. In comparing Russian and American proxy strategies, one finds great powers today use proxy strategies because they render significant benefits in temporal advantage and strategic flexibility. Russia’s reliance on the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Armies and the Wagner Group provide it time and flexibility it wouldn’t otherwise have using its own forces. Additionally, the American strategy – providing weapons, intelligence, training, and money to Ukraine – to defeat Moscow on Ukrainian battlefields, likewise provides Washington’s policymakers time and flexibility that they wouldn’t have if utilizing American forces. In the end, comparing great power proxy strategies in Ukraine provides an excellent opportunity for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike to update their understanding of proxy war studies.
Why do great powers intervene in some revolutionary civil wars, but not in others? When they do intervene, how do they choose sides? Why are some great powers more active in such struggles? Finally, how do intervening great powers choose sides — sometimes siding with the embattled government and other times the armed opposition? Although they have long acted as kingmakers in armed revolutions, we still know relatively little about how and why the world’s leading powers intervene where they do. This project aims to answer these questions by developing new theory and providing global systematic empirical evidence to further our collective understanding of this fundamental political phenomenon that has continued to shape the contours of world politics.
Karl Kautsky’s Ultra-Imperialism shaped his understanding of European colonialism and Great Power competition. In the early twentieth century, Kautsky argued that explanations for world disorder stemmed from what liberal and bourgeois politics avoided— harmonizing class relations and making their states more democratic. He characterized that the capitalist bourgeois approach to world order would be via international cartels and monopolies. They were ideologically and economically unable to offer alternatives routes to peace. He predicted that in an ultra-imperialist world order, the great powers would deepen their exploitation of the world’s resources and working class labour. In situating Kautsky in his context, this article connects his socialist republicanism with his aspirations for a Society of Nations, and finds that he imitated form August Ludwig von Rochau’s Realpolitik, in that he delineated a political strategy to build a socialist world order through his political activism. This paper then calls into view that analytical discussions of Great Power competition have to consider the politics within states. Ultra-Imperialism has hitherto been underexplored but it provides a potential route to understand the causes and character of the emerging polycentric world order.
The rise of revisionist powers is deemed to be a haunting recurring pattern of international politics. When the power transition is ripe — the logic goes — they usually challenge the international order and strive to change it with a more beneficial one. The article aims to provide a preliminary test of the concepts and notions produced so far by the International Relations (IR) literature on revisionism. As it will be seen, IR theory displays persistent fallacies regarding many aspects, both substantive and methodological. As for the former, revisionism as a concept features problem of fuzziness and scalability. As for the latter, data and measurement are still troubling the research on the topic. These hamper a useful theory-driven contribution on contemporary great power competition as well as an empirical contribution to a more general theorization on revisionism. Finally, the article aims to sketch unexplored avenues of research that could advance the scholarship on the topic.
Narratives of international decline are common in great powers, from Margaret Thatcher’s promise to reverse Britain’s decline to John F. Kennedy’s handwringing about the decline of the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. What are the consequences of narratives of international decline? I argue that declinists, more often than not, choose policies that can be characterized as expansionist and pugilistic—policies of “punching back” against decline—rather than policies of retrenchment (or “pulling back”). Declinist narratives often sustain policies of global expansion to save face, regain lost glory, and reverse decline. First, it is typical of declinists to envision and draw upon a time of past glory. Second, there are psychological reasons, particularly with respect to prospect theory, for why we would expect declinists to pursue expansion rather than retrenchment. Finally, from a political coalitional perspective, there are more incentives to expand than retrench. I examine this argument by comparing narratives of international decline and foreign policy consequences in three cases: the declinism of Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and Donald Trump. This paper has implications for contemporary debates about US decline and the policy consequences of narratives more generally.
As challenges to the values and norms of the international order keep emerging, this paper analyses the tools that the United States has at its disposal to avoid further marginalizing challenging voices of the liberal international order. Despite recognizing the transitional stage in which the global order is, and the creation and strengthening of ideational margins within it, few studies have looked at the impact of adapting American grand strategy on international social processes, particularly to reduce these margins. The paper thus aims at answering the following question: how can the United States influence international social processes by adjusting its grand strategy at a time when its role is increasingly contested?
The study hypothesizes that the United States needs to adapt its policies in order to impact current processes of socialization in order to continue to lead regionally and systemically. Only a US grand strategy characterized by maintaining a world order structured around the United States which gives more autonomy and responsibilities to others can be successful. Building upon the English school (in particular pluralism and solidarism) and leadership theory the paper argues in favor of a mutual accommodation process with allies and (potential) challengers and deviant members of the international system. In fine, the analysis assesses the need for Washington to focus on an integrative multilevel type of leadership in its grand strategy. This form of American leadership, characterized by co-ordinating leadership of varying types and varying degrees, although less dominant would be more pragmatic and acceptable to others and far more subtle.
Among the quips of Winston Churchill, his lapidary sentence “[i]f Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least one favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons” surely deserves a high rank. It reminds us of the importance of juridical discourses and practices of alliance —often motivated by animosity towards a third party rather than inherent friendship between polities— in the global history of international law. Yet, in the contemporary literature of this field, one finds little reference to the theory and history of alliance-making —or breaking, for that matter. One can contrast this with an older tradition of literature (for instance, what we now understand as the 18th century “Law of Nations”, or 19th “classical international law”) which was critically concerned with the law and practice of inter-polity alliance. In this project, I interrogate how the categories of alliance were exorcised from international legal scholarship precisely during the same period in which coalitions, confederations, and military associations increasingly gained a salient role in the creation and maintenance of international order. By rewriting the law of alliances back into the history of the discipline, I trace some of the (dis)continuities that have haunted the quest for international organization.
This paper examines whether the recent (re)prioritisation of great power competition (GPC) as the focus of Washington’s strategic planning has impacted its practices of designing and developing loitering munitions. Despite the increasing prominence these systems have been given in recent Pentagon defence planning, IR scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to the history of loitering munitions and what their study can tell us about the dynamics involved with great power competition. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies scholarship, the first section of this paper conceptualises loitering munitions as a ‘social-technical system’ which can reflect the geopolitical priorities of their manufacturers. International practice theories are then applied to the processes of loitering munition development in four different periods: (1) the Cold War; (2) the ‘unipolar moment’ which followed the Soviet Union’s collapse; (3) the Global War on Terror; and (4) the period of renewed GPC which has crystallized since 2014. The final section of this paper connects these empirical findings to the larger debates on the interactions between technological change and world politics. It reaffirms the role which international politics can play in shaping technological innovation and forecasts Washington’s continuing investment in loitering munitions as a major tool of GPC.
This paper argues that an overlooked pathway via which major powers are drawn into conflict with each other is via competition over small states and territories. When a major power seeks to monopolize a subordinate, preventing others from pursuing their interests in its territory, norms of open subordinate governance are challenged. To address this violation, threats and force may be used. Moreover, the monopolizer is perceived as having revisionist preferences for international order, meaning future interactions are understood in this context. Three pathways to war open up, firstly, monopolization itself may involve the significant use of force, secondly, major powers may immediately respond with force, and thirdly, future interactions will involve greater suspicion and threat-making, increasing the probability of war. This argument is evaluated through quantitative examination of rising power disputes between 1816 and 2010, and comparative case study analysis of the Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese wars. Contestation of the norms of subordinate governance play an important role in shaping the probability of major power conflict, and provide insight into the behaviour of the major powers in the contemporary international order.
Georg Schwarzenberger’s oeuvre has remained significantly underexplored in the literature despite his as one of the most important thinkers in international relations and international law of the twentieth century. Ahead of their time, his works reveal a picture of law that transcends academic boundaries, challenging conventional portrayals of both realism and international law. Through a detailed examination of the works of this theorist, this paper offers an analysis of the fundamental aspects of his theory of international relations and international law. It explores the elements at the heart of Schwarzenberger’s theory of international relations, which, though examined infrequently, retain their relevance in today’s international society. Through this exploration of Schwarzenberger’s works, this paper argues that his theory of international relations provides a powerful commentary on the fundamental structure, nature, and problems of international law. It points to and reveals issues that have remained at the heart of international law until today, offering a sophisticated and self-conscious interrogation of the relationship between law, power, and politics.
Starting from the everyday life concept as the context of symbolic and behavioral interaction, people use symbolic resources and also behaviors that have particular meanings elated with the context characteristics. routines are part of the everyday world, and the start question is: How these routines are influenced by data?
We function in certain spaces and use various objects. Many people have everyday access to many technological devices that improve their possibilities to exchange information. In our contemporary world of life, the digital resources are omnipresent. In this sense, a multiplicity of connections are established. Sociability is dependent on “interconnectivity”, which changes the prevailing modes of social production of meaning. It will be a very important to know how the self and identity construction receive the influence of the digital environment.
There is a domestication of technology in the family context. Technology is processed, interpreted and used within the framework of home paradigms. There is a discussion beetween specialists about the age in which could be used the digital technologies. But in general terms, many families many families allow their iittle children the use of mobile devices
One feature of the contemporary postmodern world is the algorithmizing of everyday family in which data are part of the environment. life. The presence in the home of technological resources such as Alexa changes the standards of access to knowledge. Of course, it is worth analyzing the impact of the use of artificial intelligence at an early age, Lately, the impact of the GPT 3 chat has been discussed in specialized circles.
Unpaid household labour is a major social and economic activity that underpins families and households and is essential for social functioning. At the individual level, household labour is critical to health and well-being, but it is also very time consuming and shared unequally within households. The rising demand for robots to assist with domestic work, such as robotic vacuum cleaners, indicates that some people are turning to digital technologies to solve the work-family crunch.
Despite the increasing digitalisation of domestic work, we know little about individual attitudes to domestic smart technologies and how these vary by personal and family characteristics. This issue is important because differential acceptance of domestic technology could potentially deepen existing workload inequalities across genders and classes, could expose some segments of the population to privacy risks, and transform family interactions.
This paper provides the first picture of acceptability of domestic technologies to UK adults. It is based on a vignette survey we are conducting, which was sent to 12,000 UK respondents selected to match a nationally representative sample on several core demographic characteristics. Our vignettes describe a fictitious family situation where respondents have access to smart technologies that can do housework and care work and are asked to decide whether they would like to use the smart technology. We expect a complex picture to emerge where respondents vary in how acceptable they believe domestic automation to be depending on their family situation, the task at hand and their own characteristics. Preliminary results indicate diverse patterns of acceptability. To give one example, partnered respondents are more open to automating housework, compared to care work. Single respondents are equally open to automating housework and care but are keen to do pet care themselves.
Much scholarship has already attended to the ways that social media influencers engage in affective labor to hail audiences and establish familial relationships with their audiences (Garcia-Rapp 2017; Duffy and Hund 2015) We seek to expand on these conversations to address the tensions between influencer culture, fitness culture, and digital culture to explore how fitness influencers on TikTok integrate wearable and health monitoring technology (e.g. Apple watches, fitbits, and health tracking apps) into their content. Building upon Soto-Vásquez’s (2021) notion of “fit subjectivities,” we argue that fitness influencers are engaging in self-disciplinary practices that model working towards achieving the ultimate “fit”/normative body. Further, this labor is highly gendered, aligning with post-feminist ethos of self-discipline and individual choice through consumption (McRobbie 2008). Furthermore, the social components of wearable tech, fitness tracking apps, and affective labor perpetuate the ideal “fit” body through self-discipline, simultaneously encouraging “friendly” competition through gamified fitness challenges (like closing rings on the Apple Watch or the viral “12/3/20” treadmill exercises), body metric tracking, and public leaderboards, further rendering the body subject to public scrutiny on both fitness and social media platforms. These tools are presented as the pathway to achieving a “fit” body, through a community of fitness influencers who use affect to intentionally situate themselves as the leaders of supportive families/communities in which the reward for participating in fitness facilitated by wearable tech is the idealized “fit” body. Through a thematic analysis of fitness influencers who use wearable tech on TikTok, we aim to illuminate how fitness influencers use emotion and familial bonds to maintain followers while also promoting the ideal “fit” body through self-discipline via wearable tech.
In this paper, I draw from two work in progress chapters from my doctoral thesis currently titled ‘making a meal’ and ‘making a routine.’ I demonstrate how food delivery platforms cook for the world by mimicking paid-unpaid, public-private informal food practices and industries. Yet in cooking up the world, platforms have to engage with people and industries’ actually existing use practices of cooking, eating and making a routine. This argument is part of my doctoral work on what digital platforms Swiggy, Zomato, Instagram and Twitter) do to the labours and cultures of food or foodwork. In this project, I examine how food delivery platforms built relationships with their users through a digital ethnography of their push notifications and use of social media platforms (2020- 21). My in-person ethnographic fieldwork (2022-23) investigated how users (individual/household and restaurant/industry) engaged with food delivery apps through immersions in households, a co-working space and with the restaurant industry From this, I investigated actually existing use practices of cooking, eating and making a routine of meals. I asked how do people absorb algorithmic flows from food delivery apps or match work and life routines to ordering in? Especially since habits and use seem to be central to platforms’ success, was there a platform habit? What happened to platforms if people were not habituated to using them? By paying attention to data about flows between the home and market through commercial and private cooking and the making of routines, I widen the question of platformization out from the workplace into the household. I engage with and contribute to platform scholarship on infrastructure and social reproduction by going beyond platform-worker relationship.
From baby monitors to fall sensors, from location trackers to gas detectors, the market is awash with devices connected to the internet that purport to assist relatives and carers in providing safety and care for children and elderly people. These IoT or smart devices allow at-a-distance or even automatic monitoring and even intervention in case of danger, freeing parents (or sons and daughters) for other tasks and commitments. But at the same time, these devices raise issues of privacy and autonomy and even risks of hacking, illegal surveillance or interference.
Conversely, children and the elderly may be not just passive recipients of IoT care, but also active and knowledgeable users of devices (“digital natives” and “silver surfers”), enacting new intergenerational family dynamics and engendering empowerment.
In a southern European country (Portugal), often characterized as an “early adopter” of technology but also with still a very traditional outlook on family roles (where “welfare society” still compensates much of the deficiencies of the welfare state, particularly in the care of the young and the elderly and infirm), what is the place of these IoT devices? Which families adopt them? How do they appropriate and use them?
This presentation aims to explore some of these issues, by drawing on a multi-method research approach, combining document analysis (for instance, of advertisement of IoT products, media articles), expert interviews (with regulators, consumer associations and IoT companies) and interviews with families. It is based on the ongoing research project Engage_IoT Social Engagements with the Internet of Things (funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology).
Digital and networked media are extending parents’ ability to care for their children across distances, creating forms of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) that manifest as spectral presences (Derrida 1994; Peeren 2014). Commercial products help parents to track their child’s locations, to use a phone’s microphone to listen in to conversations around the child in real-time, and to review the child’s online activity. With apps, it is also possible to control the temperature, check the contents of a fridge, and monitor the media consumption of a home remotely. Researchers explore the phenomenon of mediated family surveillance in terms of how it affects trust between children and parents and poses ethical challenges to privacy. At the same time, the effectiveness of these technologies in keeping children safe is put into question (refs). In this paper, we contribute conceptually to the thinking of mediated family surveillance by relating these practices to ongoing debates about the “spectrality” of media and telepresence, as developed in media and cultural studies (Blackman 2019; Kemper 2022). We propose that current mediated family surveillance is giving way to a new style of intimate spectral media, where both comfortable and uncomfortable (perhaps even haunting) caring and loving presences are sustained by networks and data. What needs do such intimate spectral media fulfill for parent and child, and what impositions are involved in being enabled to provide care at a distance (and sometimes also across time zones)? What forms of care at a distance are deemed nourishing, and what forms are horrifying and alienating, and what negotiations take place around the fine line intimate spectral media draw between care and control? By addressing these questions, this paper shows that the debate about how care at a distance manifests and is experienced is also a conversation about the affordances of media, and how care and media shape each other.
For many young adults, going away to university is the time they will have maintained their own household. The skills required to run a household include decision-making around data and device use which can have longstanding repercussions. Examples include decisions around borrowing and spending (generating credit scores), data sharing (e.g., using free services premised on the sale of data ‘fumes’) and data monitoring (e.g., monitoring of health and fitness metrics). Young adults do not come to these data and device practices cold: as children this generation featured in the digital literacy debates, often cast in the role of the “digital native.” Yet in childhood, their devices and data are monitored and in part controlled by responsibilised adults, regulated through parental controls and age-restriction functions at app-level, and managed by strictures about permitted daily screen-time, for example, at the parental-level. Reaching the age of majority and moving out of home signals the shift of the legal and social responsibility of avoidance of online harms from the shoulders of parents and onto the shoulders of young adults. The practices and worries around harm avoidance, however, must be transformed and transferred within families within wider practices of intimacies and care work.
To explore how this happens, this paper analyses discourses of adulthood, responsibility and ‘predictive time’ (Barassi, 2020) in connection to householding practices of young adults living apart from their parents or guardians for the first time. Within this, how young adults ‘separate’ from their parents or guardians in terms of removal of parental controls, deleting (or altering) of tracker apps, and discussions about online safety and data management within the family are focussed on. A focus on university students is theoretically rich from this perspective because of the ‘extended adolescence’ that university students sometimes feel, still protected from some responsibilities of adulthood.
Digital media targeting young children (0-5) is increasingly subject to the sociotechnical process of “platformization” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018). Research on this subject has been primarily focused on the role YouTube Kids’ recommendation systems play in the production of video content – often of dubious algorithmic provenance (Bridle, 2017; Burroughs, 2017). Yet there is scant research on the role similar algorithmic systems play in the production of the ever-growing digital market of apps for children. As such, this paper studies how apps for young children are affected by “platformization” and offers a critical analysis of the emerging “algorithmic cultures” (Striphas, 2015) of apps for children.
To understand the relationship between distribution and the production of children’s apps, this paper focuses its attention on a particular app genre that education researchers have critiqued as an unruly “Wild West”: early literacy apps (Guernsey et al., 2012) . From a software studies perspective, I critically scrutinise the platform’s distribution conditions and the “ranking cultures” (Rieder et al., 2018) influencing young children’s educational apps through the empirical analysis of 343 scraped app store search results.
By arguing how the “Wild West” of educational apps is a manifestation of algorithmic cultures, this paper problematizes the role that recommendation systems play in the distribution, access, and production of children’s apps. The discussion reveals several characteristics of the algorithmic cultures of apps for young children, including the perceptible bloating of the genre by generic free-for-download and formulaic app families. Additionally, considering the cultural logic behind this group of apps for children highlights tensions of this double-step mediation process on app stores. First, the centralized role of recommendations as gatekeepers of content for children as a vulnerable population. Second, the challenges platforms pose to digital parenting (Mascheroni et al., 2018) by operationalizing their economic priorities through algorithms.