Volume 101, Issue 3, May 2025

How does ‘boundary work’ shape global cooperation? This introduction offers a framework to investigate the role of actors in the production and placement of boundaries in transnational settings. An examination of disputes across sites of global governance shows that cooperation relies on competitive and collaborative forms of boundary work.

Taking international agreements as an example of boundary work, this article investigates how existing power inequities play out in the context of food safety standard-setting. Boundary work can lead to cooperation and to the inclusion or exclusion of historically marginalized actors.

While the African Union's boundary practices may have prevented major border wars in the continent, a decolonial perspective shows that they have paradoxically enhanced the visibility of borders created by colonial powers. This has detrimental implications for African societies and for meaningful regional cooperation.

When members of regional international organizations (RIOs) engage in conflict, macropolitical boundaries are redrawn. Case-studies focusing on conflicts in Cyprus and the South China Sea show how this boundary work may enable—or inhibit—RIOs' role in conflict resolution.

When the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank work together, they face strong pressures to prove their distinctiveness. To cope with identity stress, officials engage in boundary work that accentuates differences in their mandates, and these efforts contribute to identity cohesion and facilitate cooperation.

In boundary work, emotional labour can indicate actors' intentions to construct, maintain or tear down boundaries. This ethnographic study of Filipino transnational workers in Indian cities underscores the role of emotions and their consequences for cooperation amid cultural change and within social hierarchies.

The process of defining ecologically or biologically significant marine areas (EBSAs) that need protection offers a rich case-study for boundary work. This article analyses collaboration and competition practices at regional workshops tasked with designating EBSAs and hosted by the Convention on Biological Diversity.

When a democratic state decides to deploy its military in domestic law enforcement, transnational security logics and cooperation arrangements are influential. A close examination of the case of Mexico since 1983 reveals the boundary practices involved in the militarization of policing.

Through the lens of boundary work theory, this article examines how the web of institutions engaged in Arctic governance can best adapt to navigate the fallout from recent geopolitical developments and ultimately determine who holds ‘the responsibility to freeze’.

The crisis of the liberal international order (LIO) is also a crisis of the conservative international order, which has come to oppose the LIO after supporting its rise in the postwar period. Is it time for a rethinking of the conventional IR view of liberalism?

This article adds to current knowledge on disinformation deterrence by proposing a new concept for understanding how deterrence strategies can be mediated through political contexts. Three contemporary case-studies illustrate how governments have employed diverse strategies of attribution, non-attribution and diffused attribution.

Challenging the conventional view that status translates to power through voluntary deference, this article presents a new framework for the relationship between social status and power and then probes it by way of a case-study of the US' relationships with small and major powers.

Drawing on recent theories of world order, this article argues that the case of the Russia–Ukraine war exemplifies how the responses of democracies—whether in the global North or South—to issues of world order are likely to converge and/or diverge in ways that defy generalization.

What challenges and opportunities are presented when efforts are made to regulate or prohibit morally problematic battlefield weapons or practices ex ante—i.e., before they have been used in warfare—and how are those outcomes influenced by the timing of these regulatory efforts?

The capacity of citizens to self-protect against armed conflict has been transformed by the development of information and communications technologies. Case-studies of two non-violent civilian movements—Colombia's Indigenous Guards and Syria's White Helmets—show how communities adapt these technologies to reduce the risk of harm.

To what extent are discourses of states that expressly commit to feminist or LGBTQ+ advocacy in foreign and diplomatic policy reflected in diplomatic practice? This article draws on western diplomats' personal experiences of engagement with local LGBTQ+ Pride events around the world.

By drawing a fresh analogy with US policy and regulations in the oil sector, this policy paper offers pointers for a strategic blueprint for securing access to semiconductor chips and ensuring the responsible use of AI across its myriad applications.

Five years after the US first blocked appointments to the WTO's Appellate Body—the standing body involved in dispute settlement—the multilateral trading system is in crisis, despite efforts to provide a new mechanism for handling disputes. Can the rules-based trading order prevail?

Progress on peace in Yemen is constrained by an outdated international vision and framework, allowing hard-liners in power to strengthen their control. An international approach which acknowledges the realities of existing governance could provide space for a Yemeni-led peace process to emerge.