Conference Program

This paper critically discusses the positionality and controversies in and around the concept of New Medievalism (NM) as coined by Hedley Bull (1977) in IR literature. Namely, NM is a metaphor based on the historical analogy of the postmodern world with the European Middle Ages and provides a future scenario in which the state system is replaced by "the system of overlapping authorities and multiple loyalties" as proposed by Bull in the context of the consequences of globalization and neoliberalism in governance. Taking into account this conceptual complexity, there is a question: how to define NM in IR? This paper argues that NM is a liminal concept in the context of how it projects world order as well as due to NM's positionality in IR academic discourse. Namely, as the paper demonstrates, NM transgresses the modern imaginaries of world politics as well as the modern underpinnings of knowledge production. That manifests in two issues: 1) the conceptualization of the international; and 2) the framing of IR subject matter and epistemic anxieties associated with it.

Pairing necropolitical theory and secondary literature on the Latino Threat Narrative, this work conducts a discourse analysis of a selection of photographs from El Sueño Americano [the American Dream], a 600-photo series depicting belongings confiscated at the Mexico-U.S. border, to demonstrates how efforts to secure the United States against (perceived) penetrative and reproductive threats exert gendered and sexual necropolitical regulation of migrating people. It points to how borderization to exclude racialized, classed bodies south of the border enmasse is not just implemented by state-brokered policy and subsequent administrative cultures that permit subjecting migrants to physical pain and dehumanizing treatment. Rather, broader participation in sexual and gendered subjugation of migrating people reflect how genderedness, and especially reproductive capabilities, of bodies serve as an accessible technology through which securitization is taken up wittingly or unwittingly by nonstate actors on either side of the border.

This work argues that objects seized along the U.S.–Mexico border for their perceived superfluous or threatening nature reveal how the discourse surrounding a “Latino Threat” against American civilization manifests via attempts to regulate sexual pleasure, promote (white) American reproduction, and sexually subjugate (especially female) migrants. This research thus broadens necropolitical theory beyond the state/society binary, arguing that bodies themselves may wield the power of death and discomfort to securitize against migrants deemed unbelonging.

It is not difficult to argue that since the inception of the label of neoclassical realism (Rose 1998), the category of state's extraction capability has been central to the conversation within this strand of realist theorising. And since the beginning, it has been an object of controversy (Legro, Moravcsik 1999). Contemporary literature often points out to the problems of poor definition, explatative overload, lack of hierarchy of variables (Kozub-Karkut 2020; Filary-Szczepanik, Kozub-Karkut 2022 and bibliography therein).

This contribution aims at providing the conceptual analysis of the term state's extraction capability as used not only by neoclassical realists, but also by their classical and structural predesesors. On this basis the proposition will be made to split the category into three different aspects - mobilization, shaping and indominability. The author will focus on two aspects to the matter - the difference between power [attribute of the state] and governance [structural power] (Guzzini 1997) and the distinction between state's extraction capability as an aspect of power and as agency of the state. Finally, a brief attention will be given to the possible empirical consequences of the proposed unpacking fo the category.

The state is a historical phenomenon, an emanation of, in author's view, more basic, political community. By theorising the extraction capability in the mentioned three aspects, an attempt will be made to dereify the concept of state/political community and bringing back the historism of classical realism to the fore of the contemporary discourse in Realist IR theory.

The paper seeks to advance the objective of "creolizing the theory" (Lionett & Shih 2011), drawing inspiration from critical International Relations (IR) and postcolonial studies. The aim is to integrate non-state actors and minor agencies as co-defining the architectonic of power in a world of flux. Grounded in Joseph S. Nye's analogy of international relations as a 3D chessboard, wherein power is fluidly distributed among heterogeneous agencies (cf. Cerny 2023), our study critically engages with the prevailing paradigm of hard and soft power (Nye 2005). This conventional framework often mirrors the global hierarchy of great and rising powers in relation to “small states”. In light of the increasing challenges to Western hegemony and the ongoing renegotiation of power dynamics, actions spearheaded by Russia and China are frequently characterized as instances of "dark" (Galeotti 2018; Shekhovtsov 2020) and "sharp power" (Walker, Kalathil, & Ludwig 2020). We argue that these disruptions can be effectively countered by the emergence of "bright power," exemplified by the resistance of Ukraine and the broader Western community to Russian aggression (Korablyova 2023). Our proposed framework redirects attention from the institutional dimension and instrumental rationality to the realm of performative politics and value rationality.