Drawing on a wide range of material, from memoirs of former spy masters to the highly acclaimed TV series Le Bureau des Légendes, this article shows how documentary as well as fictional accounts of double agents cast light on a “dark underside” of the international system. This dark underside is made up of exceptional spaces of secrecy in which intelligence organizations and spies operate. The article's main point of entry when analyzing these spaces is the intimate connection between secrecy and subjectivity. While secrecy as a social practice has received increased attention in sociological accounts of secret intelligence, the constitutive role of secrecy in relation to subjectivity is a much less explored theme. This theme, it is argued, becomes especially valuable for thinking about the conflicting lines that constitute the life and becoming of the double agent. In particular, it can be drawn on to show how this subject both is captured by the transparent norms and limits of the international state system and effectively transgresses those limits. In this way, rather than upholding a dichotomy of secrecy and transparency as two separable sides of the international system, the double agent emerges as a disruptive figure calling for its deconstruction.
Over the last 10 years, economic issues related to currency policy have become the major ongoing dispute between China and the United States. Specifically, the US Congress has demanded a tougher policy to avert the negative consequences of “unfair” Chinese policies—in the form of a “manipulated currency”—for the US economy. Building on an analytical framework of discourse theory (DT)—and proposing a method for applying DT in empirical research—an investigation into congressional debates on the Chinese currency shows that the question is not a purely economic one, but rather that it reflects a dislocation of US identity as the vanguard of liberal-democratic capitalism. This dislocation involves changes to how “liberal” identity in the US Congress is articulated in relation to the role attributed to “illiberal” China, which in turn affects the formulation of US China policy in Congress.
The globalized security situation characterized by transnational threats and international interventionism in ‘‘new wars,’’ connect non traditional local actors and traditional global actors to one another in unprecedented ways. We argue that children in particular need to be highlighted because they are highly pertinent to the globalized security situation, yet they make up one of the few agents that have remained non-politicized in the eyes of the scholarly community. The article suggests a framework of analysis that can generate analyses on security of traditional as well as non-traditional agents. Placing non-traditional groups in the center of attention serves to mirror the complexities of the current security situation better.
Feminist peace research is an emerging field of social sciences that is transdisciplinary, intersectional, and normative—as well as transnational. Although it draws from disciplines such as peace and conflict research (in and outside of international relations [IR]) as well as feminist security studies, it also differs from them in terms of research scope and research design. Consequently, it not only provides insights on what can be termed “spectacular” instances of violence or peace but also sharpens our analysis of the everydayness of reconciliatory measures and the mundaneness of both violence and peace. As a feminist endeavor, feminist peace research necessarily asks questions about unequal gender relations and power structures within any given conflict environment. In this collective discussion piece, a diverse group of scholars, who formed part of the recently convened Feminist Peace Research Network, explores and further develops the parameters of this emergent field through a set of short conversation pieces.