Christine Andrä’s research while affiliated with University of Groningen and other places

This forum urges international relations (IR) practitioners to rethink the nature of both failure and success, and their own responsibility in building an academy that enables scholars of all backgrounds to thrive. Reflecting on their own experiences, the contributors detail factors that commonly stymie promising work in IR. These range from the quotidian-rejections during peer review and frustrations around network-building-to more serious impediments, including the growing neoliberalization of the academy, employment precarity, illness and disability, and limits on academic freedom. The forum offers four central insights: First, we must recognize the difference between constructive and non-constructive research failure and create greater space for the former. Second, we must work harder to identify and address those contributors to research failure that should not be tolerated. This includes a recognition of privilege and positionality and an understanding of failure as fundamentally situational. Concurrently, third, we must also resist narratives that fetishize meritocracy and individual resilience, and render invisible structural barriers to success. Finally, we must better distinguish researcher failure from research failure. The barriers that slow or foreclose promising research harm not only our intellectual community but also our discipline, limiting its potential to address the most significant challenges of the present moment.

This article argues that textiling—a particular kind of making that simultaneously constitutes a concept, a metaphor, and a practice—can facilitate a radical rethinking and redoing of the study of world politics. Specifically, we suggest three ways in which textiling, and the relationality it enables, facilitates this innovation: as a different way of theorizing in the discipline of international relations (IR), as a creative method and methodology for the empirical study of world politics, and as ontological world-making through cosmopraxis. These three ways open up possibilities of engaging the world and its politics differently by enabling an extended epistemology that accounts not only for propositional (abstract and textual) knowledge, but also for experiential, presentational, and practical ways of knowing. Thereby, textiling is not only an innovative practical instrument by means of which different research traditions within IR can cultivate non-propositional ways of knowing; it can also entangle these new insights with the propositional knowledge traditionally privileged by IR and interweave theory and practice in IR scholarship.

This article redirects extant critiques of the modern problem of war at this problem's underlying logic of deviance. According to this logic, war constitutes a kind of international conduct that contravenes behavioural norms and that can be corrected through diagnostic and didactic means. Thereby, war is rendered into a problem falling within the scope of human agency. However, this agency rests on and reproduces this logic's constitutive blind spots. Therefore, it seems imperative to develop ways of problematising war otherwise. The article provides two starting points for (critical) IR scholarship seeking to undertake such a project. Firstly, it combines two Foucaultian tools, the concept of problematisation and the method of genealogy, to direct critique at the logics underlying our evaluative – analytical, ethical, and political – judgements. Secondly, it uses these tools to trace the contingent emergence of the logic of deviance in a crucial example within the wider genealogy of the problem of war: the Carnegie Endowment's commission of inquiry into the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Based on original archival research, I highlight different elements of this inquiry's problematisation of war – its frames, assumptions, ways of knowing, and subjects of knowledge – to make them available for reconstruction.

This article examines the analytical and political potentials of creative methods for peace research. Specifically, the article argues that creative methods can textile, i.e. render material and irregularly textured, (research on) post-conflict politics. Grounded in a collaborative research project with former combatants in Colombia, the article takes this project’s methods – narrative practice, textile-making, and a travelling exhibition – as examples to demonstrate how creative methods’ element of making contributes to the development of post-conflict subjectivities and relationships. Casting the data generated by creative methods as crafted stories, the article also shows how in these stories, semantic meaning becomes entangled with material traces of emotional, affective, and embodied experiences of violence and its aftermath, effecting a shift in the post-conflict distribution of the sensible. By exploring creative methods’ capacity for textiling peace (research), the article contributes to research on creativity, the arts, and peace and on the post-conflict trajectories of former combatants.

This article discusses narrative practice and textile-making as two techniques of researcher reflexivity in diverse teams conducting qualitative-interpretive research. Specifically, it suggests definitional ceremonies—a collective structured method of storytelling and group resonances—as a useful tool to interweave diverse researchers as a team, while maintaining the plurivocity that enables deeper reflexivity. Additionally, textile-making is introduced as a material and embodied way of expression, which complements narrative practice where words fail or need a non-linguistic form of elicitation. We illustrate the two techniques with examples from our international, collaborative qualitative-interpretive research project with demobilized guerrilla fighters in Colombia.

Drawing on our experience of commissioning and co-curating an exhibition of international conflict textiles – appliquéd wall-hangings (arpilleras), quilts, embroidered handkerchiefs, banners, ribbons, and mixed-media art addressing topics such as forced disappearances, military dictatorship, and drone warfare – this article introduces these textiles as bearers of knowledge for the study of war and militarized violence, and curating as a methodology to care for the unsettling, difficult knowledge they carry. Firstly, we explain how conflict textiles as object witnesses voice difficult knowledge in documentary, visual and sensory registers, some of which are specific to their textile material quality. Secondly, we explore curating conflict textiles as a methodology of ‘caring for’ this knowledge. We suggest that the conflict textiles in our exhibition brought about an affective force in many of its visitors, resulting in some cases in a transformation of thought.