§ II · Publications
§ I — Book
Monograph
Forthcoming · 2027
Edinburgh University Press
Arms, News, and Lobbying: The Remaking of the Middle East Regional (Dis)Order
Arms, News, and Lobbying examines the struggle over the Middle East regional order after the Arab Uprisings through arms deals, news coverage, and political lobbying. Foregrounding two scenes that reshaped Middle Eastern politics in the 2010s—Egypt after the 2013 coup and Qatar during the 2017–21 crisis—the book tells a broader story of rivalries and alignments, extending from the domestic through the regional to the global, that reshaped regional order. Arms, News, and Lobbying argues that the struggle over the Middle East was a struggle for recognition. Regional players strived to be recognised, to have their self-identities as legitimate regimes and benevolent regional powers acknowledged by relevant others. Centring Egypt’s and Qatar’s recognition concerns, the book moves the focus away from dominant powers’ role in regional politics and departs from the assumption that states consistently act out of motivations to increase their material power.
§ II — Peer-reviewed articles
Ignorance is power: the antiepistemology of international order
International orders need shared knowledge and understandings: constructivist scholarship has established this much. Yet orders depend equally on what remains systematically unknown. This article argues that ignorance-production practices — what Peter Galison calls ‘antiepistemology’ — are vital for making order. Building on the sociology of ignorance, I approach ignorance not as an aberration but as a productive social force constitutive of international order. Ignorance functions through two key pathways: it enables the intelligibility of ordering norms, and it manages the dissonance between proclaimed norms and actual behaviour. All international orders require an antiepistemology, yet they deploy distinct combinations of ignorance-production practices: positive (e.g., the fabrication of falsehoods), negative (e.g., the dismissal of uncomfortable knowledge), and subtle, grey-area practices (e.g., strategic ambiguity). Examining how the liberal international order, the China order and the ‘Make America Great Again’ order sustain their respective claims about human rights, sovereignty and ethnonationalist civilizationism reveals how proponents of each vision employ different ignorance regimes to preserve coherence in domains central to their legitimacy. The stakes of this analysis extend beyond theoretical reframing: artificial intelligence threatens to disrupt existing antiepistemologies by collapsing the distinction between knowledge and ignorance altogether. Recognizing ignorance as constitutive of order reframes our understanding of the current moment and the future possibilities for world politics.
It is widely acknowledged that Chinese authoritarianism and Trumpian populism rely on ignorance production. But the liberal international order does, too. While orders deploy different practices, they all rest on antiepistemological foundations.
What distinguishes competing visions of international order is not knowledge versus ignorance or truth versus falsehood, but rather the distinctive practices of ignorance production that each employs to maintain its coherence.
The fall and rise of sovereignty
The aftermath of the Cold War signalled a decline of the international norm of sovereignty. The ‘triumph’ of the Liberal International Order during a brief unipolar moment challenged traditional principles of sovereignty, notably non-intervention. However, recent years have seen a resurgence of affirmations of sovereignty in political discourse, coinciding with a broader narrative on the Liberal International Order’s erosion. This article attempts to make sense of this fall and rise of sovereignty. Motivated by genealogical concerns, it historicises political and scholarly conversations on the concept. First, it examines the perceived decline of sovereignty following the Cold War. Second, it traces the proliferation of sovereignty discourses in the European 2000s and 2010s back to debates surrounding the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Third, it explores the concept of sovereigntism, charting its move from political discourse into academic debates. Finally, the article concludes with a reflection on the trajectory of sovereignty in a post-Liberal International Order world.
Gone, it seems, is the heyday of the Liberal International Order (LIO) and, with it, what perhaps looked in the aftermath of the Cold War like an irreversible triumph of internationalism, collective problem solving, and shared sovereignty. The contestation of the LIO’s tenets is today increasingly appealing as is the return to some fantasised golden age of sovereignty, not only in the order’s periphery but also in its very core.
The usage of the term [‘sovereigntism’] in public discourse, informed by various political cultures and contexts, points to different branches of a diverse genealogy […], despite a common appreciation of the state as the legitimate proprietor of sovereignty, in keeping with the terms of international political modernity.
Sanctions and stigma: regional and global ordering in the Gulf crisis
The Gulf Crisis (2017–21) witnessed Qatar facing sanctions by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain, self-proclaimed as the ‘Anti-Terror Quartet.’ Accusing Qatar of sponsoring Islamist terrorism, the Quartet broke diplomatic relations with Doha and imposed an embargo. In reaction, Qatar affirmed its sovereignty yet sought in parallel to expand and make permanent the US al-Udeid airbase — a marker of US imperialism in the region. To understand such a paradox, this article argues that we must study sanctions in tandem with the stigmatization narratives that legitimate them. Sanctions and stigma work together as performances of norms, which themselves serve to bound an order. This article conceptualizes the Gulf Crisis as an episode of regional order-making reproducing the hegemonic repertoire of the US-led global order. The Quartet employed US-inspired practices of sanctioning ‘rogue’ actors and hegemonic narratives on the fight against terrorism, while Qatar sought to counter this stigma by scaling up the al-Udeid airbase to showcase its pro-US, anti-terror credentials. By attending to the deployment of hegemonic norms — through sanctions and stigma — as tools of regional ordering, this article underlines that the Gulf Crisis ultimately contributed to bolstering the normative architecture sustaining the US-led global order.
The Quartet’s order-making designs transpired through practices of sanctioning and ostracizing ‘rogue’ actors and narratives on the fight against terrorism, both central to the hegemonic repertoire of global order. Likewise, Qatar’s response sought not only to overcome the immense material challenge represented by the Quartet’s sanctions, but also to clear the emirate from the hegemonic stigma tarnishing its status and reputation.
Both the Quartet and Qatar appealed to practices and narratives from the US-led global order’s repertoire, not simply as one option among others, but from a place of structural propensity stemming from those dependencies.
Subordinates’ quest for recognition in hierarchy
The scholarship on hierarchy held the promise of exposing conditions of systemic inequality in world politics. However, a significant strand of it approached the international order from above, privileging the perspective of dominant actors. I make the case for a from-below approach to hierarchical orders, recognising and accounting for understudied experiences in world politics, but also developing a more accurate understanding of hierarchy. Through a relational-sociological approach, I conceptualise hierarchy as a socially differentiated system predicated on recognition. The experience of misrecognition by way of normative and material constraints constitutes actors as subordinates. I propose a framework for subordinate actors’ navigation of hierarchy in quest of social recognition. I identify three strategies that subordinates employ, depending on the misrecognising constraints they counter (normative/material) and the recognition they seek (internal/external). Subordinates may engage in norm appropriation, alternative leveraging, and salvation from victimhood. I demonstrate the applicability of the framework by examining Egypt’s quest for recognition in the aftermath of the 2013 military coup.
Concentrating on subordinate actors in international hierarchies is not merely about adding ‘diversity’ to the scholarship on hierarchy and, beyond, to IR. It is about recognising, accounting for, and understanding different experiences in a stratified world order.
Hierarchy is about more than only constraints; it provides actors, including subordinate ones, with resources to navigate the stratified order. Subordinates indeed may instrumentalise and weaponise the very constraints underpinning their social misrecognition.