Reflections on IPS in Translation

We are honored to be stepping in as the new editorial team for International Political Sociology (IPS). We take seriously the vital task before us of continuing to expand a creative and agonistic space for transdisciplinary scholars around the world to shape and intervene in questions and issues of global importance and in ways that matter to them. In a time of profound political challenges, we remain committed to IPS as a project that emphasizes multiple ways of engaging and responding to the world as well as seeking different visions of a more emancipatory politics to come together. As a brief and insufficient introduction to our editorial tenure, we want to reflect on some of the foundational interventions that have shaped the journal's critical ethos as well as emerging areas of conceptual, methodological, theoretical, and empirical inquiry that we hope to foster. It was the ambition of RBJ Walker and Didier Bigo, as the inaugural editorial team for International Political Sociology, to create a venue for generous dialogue between international relations, and methodologies and analyses informed by sociopolitical theory, where different disciplinary communities could have transformative and commensurate impacts on the way that problems of the political and the social were derived (Bigo and Walker 2007, 2). Beyond simply a form of practice, these interventions engaged the things that people, spaces, discourses, concepts, technologies, legal regimes, and institutions do to create and contest conditions of possibility, enmity, and amity in worlds defined by ambiguity and ambivalence. Under the editorial guidance of Jef Huysmans and João Nogueira, the question of what constitutes the international continued to be taken up in transdisciplinary investigations and adaptions of critical scrutiny, with further emphasis placed on an attention to the importance of identifying the fluid entanglements of lines that divide, crosscut, and fracture (Huysmans and Nogueira 2021). Whether physically, metaphysically, or metaphorically, theirs was a call to investigate the effects of fracture not only as markers of difference but also as “constant forms of contestation, acquiescence, [and] reconfiguration within the zones encompassed by the lines themselves” (Huysmans and Nogueira 2012, 2). This focus on fragmentation was offered as an affirmation of the heterogeneous intellectual terrain of IPS as well as a reflection of a broader and long-standing investment in vacating the “horizons of totalization” in critical inquiry (Huysmans and Nogueira 2021). While not entirely comprehensive of the larger ambit of the journal, certain thematic contours for IPS began to take shape around these earlier mediations, including interventions in political theory, sociologies of migration, and policing as a structuring practice in society, in order to think about how social insecurities become political. Here, IPS has been a productive venue for disentangling and mapping the effects of policing and various security apparatuses operative in transversal ways and in everyday life as well as thinking about how power, sense, and habits are formulated through formal and informal social structures articulated through the combination of theory and thick description. Under the editorial leadership of Debbie Lisle, a capacious intellectual encounter with IPS has continued to thrive around interrogating the constitutive role of colonial histories in shaping formations of violence and exclusion in international politics as well as proliferating the sites and modalities from which to examine and intervene in contemporary configurations of power and global asymmetry. Lisle's navigation of the journal, along with Vicki Squire, Roxanne Doty and Alex Hall, centered an energetic focus not only on expanding IPS's transdisciplinary horizons and “unearthing the plurality of global life-worlds” but also in developing concrete practices that might unsettle structural impediments to these engagements in academic publishing as well as expanding the representation of marginalized scholars and knowledges in ISA journals (Lisle et al. 2017, 1). In later reflections on these efforts, Lisle remarked that changing these professional structures “often felt like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” and that their impact was always insufficient. For Lisle, the vital question not only for IPS but for academic publishing in general continues to be how to “collectively and creatively inhabit the broken system we find ourselves in” without succumbing to the inertia that such failure may effectuate? As incoming Editors-in-Chief (EICs), we are committed to how the pluralist commitments of IPS can continue to support creative research emerging through reflexive and grounded work. This means finding ways to better cultivate our own critical responsiveness as we continue to support the journal as a gathering place for different voices and perspectives. A crucial intervention of IPS, and what has defined it in relation to other journals associated with international studies, is its persistent commitment to being reflective about its own position within the field, to consistently evaluating its own investments and disinvestments, as well as the kinds of theories, politics, and forms of receptivity it invites. That said, as EICs we do not always adhere to a unified vision for what a response to inhabiting this broken system of academic publishing should be. We think this is a virtue and a benefit to the overall project of IPS. Instead of aiming for consensus, we strive for a continuity of productive dialogue on how IPS can support its academic community through the everyday workings of the journal. For Grayson, this productive dialogue coalesces around how contemporary relations of power are historically situated, contingent, relational, and multicausal. However, such coalescence is only transitory. International political sociology as a field is often strongest when it provides the space for our examinations of relations of power to be refracted through ontologies, epistemologies, theories, concepts, and methods that reveal how inequalities conditioned by class, gender, sexuality, race, and disability are embedded within myriad practices that traverse diverse sites. Perhaps the most important, at its most effective and probing, work within international political sociology can reveal that “the problem” is the problem. Thus, international political sociology brings together concerns with how multiscalar relations of power, the international, and social practices are mutually constitutive, the stakes and consequences as these play out within specific contexts, how these can then tell us something about the insufficiency of wider problematiques to capture problems with precision, and how these misdiagnoses are disproportionately experienced and felt. In doing so, we can begin to see and confront “the contradictions and aporias inherent in processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or in dreamworlds conjured by cosmopolitanism, but also of the darker world produced by exceptions” (Pasha 2010, 215) IPS thus invites us to encounter ourselves and our world(s) anew. As someone whose scholarship is sometimes informed by fieldwork, but always by sensorial and experiential modes of engagement with different forms of intransigence and articulations of politics, Grove is conscious of how a particular spatialization of empirics reifies the idea of a research space “out there,” where the realities of violence and marginalization are thought to be located, and where the plundering of the resources of the field can be gathered, brought back to the mind, and transferred to the page. This version of empirics supports a racial ordering confluent with cartographies of danger that presumes a particular kind of rigor but has nothing to do with the rigor to which one attends to the empirical. If all thinking is empirical and if we encounter everything sensually, how might IPS intervene in an understanding of empiricism that names the rigorous attempt to understand sense and encounter and where no observations are made outside of the world nor the body that inhabits it? Grove also comes to the journal after working for several years at an indigenous-serving institution on a militarily occupied island as well as “teaching” critical security studies in Beirut alongside faculty and students whose lives have been deeply affected by state oppression and war. From these locations, there is no exemplary model nor a genuine form of engagement that one can work backward from and be assured they are doing the “good” kind of IR. One is always already on unstable ground. Insofar as these reflections touch upon IPS as a mode of inquiry, they suggest the impossibility of establishing the boundaries of IPS in advance—that the field must always be given the space to continue to morph and change so that it reflects the scholarship that pushes at its own disciplinary boundaries. As we consider the way our different reflections move into conversation with one another, the issue of translation is foregrounded. If IPS is to continue to expand its engagements with different paradigms and figurations of power in relation to the social, to gender and sexuality, race and racism, geography, security, mobility, development, and other key areas of questioning for the field (however strictly or loosely defined), then what kinds of active processes of translation could we engage in to make those connections more salient, more invitational, and more collaborative rather than extractive? Some of the more practical ways the journal has tried to intervene here is to unsettle the linguistic predominance of English in academic publishing by producing abstracts in French and Spanish and furthering the conditions for reviewing submissions in other languages. In collaboration with an intellectually and linguistically diverse editorial team, we will continue to explore ways of expanding the languages through which theories and relations are constructed via outreach, professionalization, and publication. We also want to continue to think more deeply about how the translation of concepts and experiences that shape IPS as an academic project travel in different communities and locations as well as in relation to different professional commitments and cultural codes. This means moving away from a notion of exporting modes of research and ideas drawn from IPS to other places and issues and instead allowing the field itself to change through different modes of engagement the speak to issues of translation and the creation of agonistic spaces for thinking and dialogue by expanding the journal's readership, its authors, reviewers, and its theoretical groundings. We are also interested in how the critical agenda of IPS may not translate in certain contexts when trying to capture particular experiences and relations as well as the “uneven ascriptions of value and validity” that such failures of translation might reveal (see Abboud et al. 2018, 278). These are just some initial lines of thinking offered here. We understand as part of our remit that IPS continues to remain a hospitable place for different epistemic traditions and investments. This is particularly vital at a time when the number of outlets open to publishing heterodox approaches within the broader fields of international relations and sociology is diminishing and where the arts, humanities, and social sciences are under attack from reactionary forces within and outside the academy. We remain committed to fostering conditions and dialogues that adhere to the highest possible scholarly standards and remain respectful even in cases of profound disagreement. During a tenure that will likely continue to be defined by the pandemic and its wake, we want to support colleagues re-establishing research momentum, both by publishing work that inspires and by providing formats conducive to reinvigorating research that has been disrupted. We are enthusiastic about working alongside our editorial team to design multiple professional development opportunities—which are often unevenly distributed—in support of these efforts, in particular for colleagues who face systemic social, institutional and geographic marginalization, job insecurity, and increased duties of care. Here, we wish to build not only codified and tacit knowledge about publishing, peer review, and effective writing but also a broader experience of community and support for which the journal can play a role as we proactively seek to address knowledge gaps, unequal access to publishing and professional opportunities, and hopefully improving the peer-review experience for all involved in the process. We are pleased to continue the Collective Discussion format as part of the journal's offerings, which will now be a regular feature of every issue of IPS during our tenure. Collective Discussion manuscripts can now be submitted at any time. We feel that this is a format particularly suited to the current conditions under which scholarly production is taking place, and we hope will continue to encourage the international political sociology community to work collectively to vivify the kinds of creative engagements we seek. Thus, over the course of our editorial tenure, we will continue to foster a vibrant space for transdisciplinary investigations of practices, lines, and global life-worlds while collaboratively intervening in the challenges of a “broken system” in which only some (and often the same) voices are able to cut through the chatter. We also understand that an open door is of little use if colleagues are not interested in what lies on the other side of the threshold. We are committed to the longer term project of transforming IPS into a venue where the conversations, debates, dialogues, and themes we feature reflect more than the boutique interests of a pre-constituted community. In these efforts, we look forward to continuing to build upon the previous team's commitment to democratic decision-making in journal workings. We are excited to be joined by an incredibly thoughtful and dynamic editorial team and thank Jessica Auchter, Yolande Bouka, Nora El Qadim, Xavier Guillaume, Aida A. Hozic, Beste İşleyen, Madhan Mohan Jaganathan, Julien Jeandesboz, Victor Coutinho Lage, and Samson Okoth Opondo for joining us on this journey as well as our Editorial Assistant Colin Shaw, and our graduate intern Sara Saastamoinen, who has helped us to better incorporate accessibility practices in our communications. We look forward to what comes next.

Biology · Epistemology · Sociology · Translation (biology) · Genetics · Global Security and Public Health · Philosophy

• Introducing IPS@20

  Open Access•J Auchter, Kyle Grayson et al.•International Political Sociology•2026

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• Towards a Beirut School of critical security studies

  Samer Abboud, Omar S Dahi et al.•Critical Studies on Security•2018

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• International Political Sociology

  Open Access•J Huysmans, João P Nogueira•International Political Sociology•2012

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• Disciplining Foucault

  Open Access•Mustapha Kamal Pasha•International Political Sociology•2010

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• International, Political, Sociology

  Open Access•D Bigo, R B J Walker•International Political Sociology•2007

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• International Political Sociology as a Mode of Critique

  Open Access•J Huysmans, João P Nogueira•International Political Sociology•2021

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