International Relations scholars have recently begun exploring the politics of human-animal relations in global affairs. Building on Jacques Derrida’s work on hospitality and animals, this article theorises possibilities of responsibility to animals in war zones, pushing the limits of what it means to be with and for others regardless of their human or animal otherness. Specifically, I develop a critical account of cosmopolitan belongingness to illustrate how our being on earth is always a ‘being-with’ animal others. In thinking through possibilities of post-human belongingness that could emerge in times of war, cosmopolitanism becomes a futural task, an out-of-time and endless confrontation of past and future opportunities for interspecies togetherness. The theoretical significance of this approach is illustrated with a case study on the killing of stray dogs during the Iraq War. This case reveals a cosmopolitanism calibrated to more fully consider possibilities of human-animal belongingness amidst violence.

This article explores avian experiences with toxic war processes that unfold across space and time. Joining together three evolving areas of interest in global politics – ontologies of war, interspecies relations, and sensory politics – the article develops a view of war that centres ongoing war processes that affect more-than-human life in and outside of international warzones. Advancing a multispecies form of inquiry attentive to local voices, including Upper Cook Inlet Tribes, the article examines how interspecies relations emerge in national security debates about long-lasting ecological costs of war. Specifically, it offers an analysis of US Department of Defense hearings surrounding the controversy over reopening Eagle River Flats – an Alaskan estuary that had been polluted with white phosphorus munitions – for weapons testing and training during the Iraq War. The article also considers the experiences of two migratory avian communities (northern pintails and tundra swans) with toxic white phosphorus pollution, illustrating more-than-human sensory perspectives on the space and time of war processes. These conceptual and empirical moves reposition national security concerns about wartime risk into a much broader post-anthropocentric perspective.

As foreign sources in the news might help the public assess their home country's foreign policies, scholars have recently turned attention to the effects of foreign source cues on domestic public opinion. Using original survey experiments, we explore the effects of domestic (United States) and foreign (Israeli, British, and Palestinian) criticism of Israel's military actions and settlements on US attitudes towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We find that foreign cues by government officials and non-governmental organisations have modest effects, and are generally not more influential than domestic cues. We also show that individuals might discount foreign criticism of Israel in the context of US bipartisan support for Israel. While our experiments reveal some heterogeneous effects related to partisanship, we are sceptical of significant movement in opinion in response to foreign cues. These findings provide insights into foreign source cue effects beyond the context of the use of military force.

IR scholars have recently turned to emotions to understand and explain events in world politics. Although this turn is appealing, most scholars have failed to critically examine the relationships between emotion, language, identity and foreign policy. This article aims to unpack these relationships. Drawing upon Sara Ahmed's notion of the 'emotionality of texts', this article explores how foreign policy may be an affective practice, which can be defined as a ritualized practice of discursively binding emotions to Others' identities and legitimating foreign policy through a discursive logic of feeling. In this way, identities are produced and policies are legitimated affectively. Neglecting the emotional narratives that constitute Self/Other relations leads to an insufficient understanding of emotion in global politics, an incomplete understanding of how identities emerge and matter as they do, and forecloses new alternatives of apprehending transformative ruptures and enduring patterns of Self/Other interaction. Through an analysis of United States policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian, this article highlights the importance of emotion and affective practices in world politics.

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