This article addresses the question of how the EU exercises power in international politics and, in particular, whether or not there is anything distinctive about the ways in which it does so. Taking a relational approach to power, where the focus is on practical knowledge and perceptions of self and other, the paper departs from the assumption that such a question has to be evaluated in specific settings. Extrapolating from the EU's attempt to influence outcomes in Tunisia and Morocco following the Arab Spring, this paper proposes that the power of ambiguity captures some of the distinctiveness of the EU as a global actor. The paper highlights the ambiguity of what the EU is in the eyes of others, which opens up avenues for exercising power that others lack, not necessarily in accordance with a well-defined agenda, but understood as the production of effects in delimited settings.

This article critically examines a poorly understood aspect of the European security landscape: early warning systems (EWSs). EWSs are socio-technical systems designed to detect, analyse, and disseminate knowledge on potential security issues in a wide variety of sectors. We first present an empirical overview of more than 80 EWS in the European Union. We then draw on debates in Critical Security Studies to help us make sense of the role of such systems, tapping into conceptual debates on the construction of security issues as either "threat" or "risk" related. Finally, we study one EWS - the Early Warning and Response System for infectious diseases - to understand how it works and how it reconciles risk versus threat-based security logics. Contrary to assumptions of a clear distinction between risk-and threat-based logics of security, we show that EWSs may serve as a "transmission belt" for the movement of issues from risk into threats.

This article engages genealogy as a form of critique in International Relations. It demonstrates that Foucault's genealogy has had an important, albeit hitherto unexamined, impact on how critique is understood in post-structuralist International Relations. Specifically, the article argues that a genealogical disposition tends to inscribe violence as foundational to the human condition, and genealogically informed empirical applications in International Relations risk reproducing this gesture. In the first part, the article returns to the first generation of post-structuralist International Relations and also examines examples of contemporary scholarship using frameworks of governmentality and biopolitics. The second part of the article traces the problem of ontologically inscribing violence back to Foucault's genealogical phase. Drawing on the work of John Milbank, the article then contrasts a genealogical ontology of violence with one that refuses violence as foundational. The article ends by arguing that empirical scholarship drawing on governmentality and biopolitics should be careful not to read the genealogical ontology of violence into their analyses of global political life.

This article contributes to a theoretical understanding of rights claiming as a specific form of political practice. The article develops and defends a post-foundationalist understanding of rights discourse as a way of making a claim to social change through appealing to a universal and illustrates such an understanding with the contestation over women's rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia. To develop this argument, the article draws on Jacques Ranciere's notion of political subjectification and Ernesto Laclau's engagement with the relation between the universal and the particular. To examine the relevance of such conceptualisation, the article turns to the struggle over women's rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia, where secular and sacred understandings of the universal have been invoked frequently through rights discourse. In this context it is shown that claims to the universal give rhetorical force to rights discourse, and instead of depoliticising social relations, which rights discourse is often charged with, such claims are vital for political efficacy. However, whereas Laclau's position helps us to understand rights as a language of resistance, a more robust defence of the universal is needed to defend rights in terms of emancipatory political change. To pursue this argument, the article turns to Ranciere's defence of axiomatic equality.

This study argues that the practices of European integration reproduce, rather than transcend, the practices of modern statecraft. Therefore, the project of European integration is plagued by similar ethico-political dilemmas as the modern state, and is ultimately animated by a similar desire to either expel or interiorize difference.

This article critiques state failure discourses from a poststructural and postcolonial perspective. We argue that these discourses are wedded to Euro-Western notions of the state and that, therefore, they fail to articulate other modes of political community to which we seek to open world political theory. First, we deconstruct prevalent state failure discourses to unearth the problematic character of their underlying commitments to a Eurocentric state. Second, we engage the way such discourses are deployed in the Failed States Index. Third, we propose an alternative account of why the Western model of the state has failed, explaining how the (neo)colonialist insistence on the propagation on this model enables the proliferation of violence conventionally attributed to state failure. Finally, we seek to open the notion of state failure to alternative forms of community obscured by the reification of the Western model of statecraft as the universal mode of political life.