Concepts are the building blocks of language and essential to the academic vocation, yet how conceptual work shapes scholars, research processes, and the production of knowledge remains unclear. Critical International Relations has long examined the interplay between researchers and their research objects and has emphasized how researcher positionality raises important theoretical, methodological, and ethical questions. Yet, it has largely overlooked how concepts mediate these dynamics. Similarly, the emerging field of Critical Concept Studies has focused on the politics of concepts but paid limited attention to the implications for researchers themselves. This article addresses these shortcomings by introducing the notion of “conceptual entrapment,” which captures the complex and often constraining relationship between researchers and the concepts they engage. By introducing autoethnography as a method to critically study concepts and foreground scholars’ reflexivity, the article engages my experience with the soft power concept as an example. In so doing, the article reveals how the concept’s contested performances required me to navigate my commitment to critical distance with the realities of academic work. The analysis demonstrates how researchers can inadvertently become “concept entrepreneurs” and enmeshed in the conceptual politics they seek to critique. These findings challenge (idealized) notions of scholarly autonomy, raising important questions about the ethical and practical implications of engaging with concepts in academic and public discourse. They underscore the importance of reflexivity in studying the researcher-concept relationship and contribute to broader debates about the ethics and possibilities of critical scholarship and the politics of knowledge production in International Relations.

Even though the term ‘New Cold War’ has become ubiquitous in political and media discourse since the mid-2010s, this popularity was not paralleled by an equal level of academic engagement. The New Cold War has remained under-conceptualised and siloed in different research traditions. This forum argues that understanding the New Cold War as a historical analogy, a general concept, or a historical process yields distinct insights into current geopolitics, and makes the case that distinguishing between these usages is critical for making sense of both the term’s political force and its analytical value. Regardless of which framing is adopted, the forum collectively reveals that Cold War discourses do not merely label pre-existing tensions but actively make geopolitical space, re-territorialising international politics, re-centring the state, and rendering complex rivalries legible through familiar binaries. The starting point for the forum is a critical dialogue with Barry Buzan’s article from 2024 that makes the, to date, most comprehensive case for making the ‘cold war’ into a general concept in international relations. The forum’s contributors assess the concept’s explanatory value and limits alongside its political effects from different disciplinary and regional perspectives. They hence examine the New Cold War as being both concept and historical analogy, without it being impossible to disentangle the two; as a discursive repertoire used by US presidents; as a historical process continuing the US–Russia opposition beyond 1989; as a model to define new US–China opposition; and as a lens to make sense of US–China–Russia relations in Latin America. The forum concludes with Buzan reflecting on these interpretations and defending his proposal considering contemporary geopolitical developments.

Recently, a ‘tech war’ between the United States and China has emerged, as the United States aims to maintain its technological supremacy while restricting China’s access to critical technologies. However, the drivers and implications of the tech war are poorly understood, as great power scholars typically adopt an instrumental view of technology as a tool of state power. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies and Critical Security Studies, this article challenges the conception of the tech war as merely one area of competition among others. It asks how sociotechnical imaginaries—distinct sets of values, institutions, conventions, and symbols through which members of a political community imagine their past, present, and future-shape U.S. elite discourse on technology in its great power relations, particularly in the contexts of the Cold War and the U.S.-China tech war. Based on a frame analysis of U.S. elite tech discourse on the Soviet Union during the Cold War and China in the present, the article finds that policy elites rely on sociotechnical imaginaries to associate technology’s possible negative effects in society with a geopolitical rival to construct and justify a geopolitical agenda. This allows domestic sociotechnical life to be ordered according to the overriding needs of a narrow, security-oriented national interest. The analysis draws attention to the cultural, social, and political dynamics underpinning technology's role in great power politics and thus calls for a more multifaceted understanding of contemporary great power rivalry and the tech war.

Despite much attention on “strategic competition” between the USA and China following the declaration of China as America’s “strategic competitor,” the concept’s meanings, origins, as well as different analytical and political functions remain poorly understood. The present article fills this lacuna by conducting a conceptual study of “strategic competition” that traces the concept and its evolution over time. The article finds that there was never a singular or universally applicable meaning of “strategic competition”. When the concept first appeared during the détente era, politicians and scholars referred to the reality of needing to curtail “strategic competition” between the USA and the Soviet Union, and seek cooperative relations, such as through arms reduction treaties. In the late 1990s, the label “strategic competitor” became central to political efforts by the Bush administration to justify their pursuit of military power, deterrence, and American hegemony. Since the Trump administration in the late 2010s, “strategic competition” became a goal to pursue in US-China relations rather than something to be managed. Not recognizing the historical evolution of the term and its many different variations is analytically poor and politically dangerous, and impedes the development of a modus vivendi between the two great powers.

Against the background of the intensified U. S.-Chinese strategic competition in recent years, this paper examines the implications of the Ukraine war for security in the Asia- Pacific. Based on a qualitative analysis of hundreds of governmental documents, speeches and news articles, the study finds that both the United States and China have exploited the Ukraine war to double down on their strategic rivalry in the Asia- Pacific. The Biden administration has cast China and Russia as similar threats to the international order; intertwined Europe's problems with those of the Asia-Pacific; and pursued a global anti-authoritarian alliance directed against both Russia and China. China has become an increasingly uninhibited security- seeker as it has recognized its own rapidly deteriorating security situation; America's resolve to maintain its China policy; and a unique strategic moment in which to present itself globally as an anti-hegemonic, responsible great power. Given these developments, the security situation in the Asia- Pacific is becoming ever more volatile.

Since 2018, US foreign policy elites have portrayed China as the gravest threat to their country. Why was China predominantly cast as an ideological threat, even though other discursive formulations, such as a geopolitical threat, were plausible and available? Existing major IR theories on threat perpcetions struggle to address these questions. In this article, we draw from rhetoric and public legitimation scholarship to argue that the mobilization of adjacent policy debates was key to mainstream the representation of China as an ideological threat. By mobilizing debates on Russia and the soft power and sharp power concepts, a minority view in US foreign policy with a longstanding ambition to get tough on China established a seemingly natural link between liberal internationalism and an ideologically threatening China. Liberal foreign policy elites who originally opposed a realpolitik view of China could now subsume a geopolitical threat into an ideological one reminiscent of US-Soviet Cold War rivalry. This constituted a necessary catalyst to align most foreign policy elites to understand China as the gravest threat to the United States, at a time when China's capabilities and behaviour, coupled with a deep sense of insecurity regarding America's place in the world, provided the necessary backdrop.

Concepts are a key feature of academic research and international politics. Despite the fact that interpreting, classifying and communicating the world through concepts has far-reaching social and political consequences, their various roles and complex dynamics remain poorly understood in International Relations (IR). Instead of disregarding concepts, conflating them with other cognitive terms such as norms, or obsessing about their ability to scientifically capture reality, this dissertation builds on the emerging field of critical concept studies (CSS), which understands concepts as open and contestable interpretive devices that observers use to make sense of the world, often to steer political thought and action. In line with CSS, this dissertation refers to these political struggles as “conceptual politics”—the ways in which actors coin, use, promote, revisit and fight over concepts in anticipation of performative effects—and argues that it constitutes a key facet of politics.

The field of CSS is mainly theoretically oriented, and few empirical studies address conceptual politics in practice. The purpose of this study is to further the field of CSS by expanding the notion of conceptual politics. It does so first by developing three issues that previous research presumes are important but does not investigate empirically: the dynamics of feedback loops, or interaction effects between interpretations of the world and the world; reification, the treatment of concepts as if they were real rather than human-made interpretive devices; and travel, the movement of concepts across time, levels and space. Next, the dissertation develops an analytical framework capable of tracing conceptual politics empirically. The dissertation seeks to answer the following key questions: How can we study conceptual politics? How do feedback loops, reification and travel shape conceptual politics? What are the consequences of conceptual politics for world politics?

Taking an abductive approach, an analytical framework is developed as a “thinking tool” to trace conceptual politics in practice. Based on a case study design and interpretivist process-tracing, the soft power concept—the ability to affect others through attraction—is subjected to a critical concept analysis of its travel from the US to Japan and China and back to the US again. Although soft power has emerged as a key concern in IR and international politics, the concept and its consequences remain poorly understood. This dissertation finds that the soft power concept has become part and parcel of various political struggles over the “correct” interpretation of reality and the way to act on it. The findings reveal the importance of: continuous efforts to ensure soft power’s position in IR; the concept’s common treatment as if it was real; the interaction effects between its various roles (e.g. social fact and interpretive, foreign policy and socialising tool), which have shaped how “power” and “power shifts” are understood and acted on in international politics; and the emergence of new translations and discrete sites of conceptual politics that rely on, exploit, challenge or even ignore the original concept.

From the analysis, a more complete picture of conceptual politics emerges that underscores many dynamics and effects that would otherwise be missed, and advances our understanding of the role of concepts and the consequences of conceptual politics in IR.

The purpose of this article is to analyse how the seemingly natural fit between Japan and the soft power concept has been possible despite the notorious vagueness of the concept and what the consequences of soft power's reification are. By building on recent scholarship on concepts, expert knowledge and narratives, the article suggests that reification processes are best conceptualized as driven by concept coalitions. The article finds that soft power was narrated and nurtured into Japan's cultural diplomacy, Japan's relationship with the United States (US) and its security policy. The article, moreover, shows that the more soft power was understood, framed and accepted as benign and necessary, the more persuasive arguments about what Japan should do or be in order to wield soft power became. This has legitimized narratives that suggest that Japan's 'proactive contribution to peace' as a responsible ally of the US constitutes an inevitable source of soft power.