Multi‐polarity as resistance to liberal norms::Russia’s position on Responsibility to Protect

In Western analysis, Russia's insistence on the supremacy of international law serves as little more than a strategy to sustain parity with the West. The Kremlin's justification of its use of responsibility to protect is seen as an abuse of humanitarian language and a smokescreen in the pursuit of geopolitical interests. Formulated from within the liberal paradigm, such interpretations underestimate the normative saturation of strategic action. This article examines Russia's discourse of multipolarity not as being purely strategic - as is widely held - but rather as a form of resistance to the perceived liberal hegemony of the West. The effects of such resistance resemble the outcomes of strategic manoeuvring but they should not be reduced to such. Bolstered by a sense of betrayal by the West, Russia's evolving discourse of multipolarity provides an alternative vision of the world order that contests the imposition of liberal values and bestows upon the authorities an actual responsibility to contain the West's dominance. Both Russia's interpretation of responsibility to protect and its position in the debate arise from this agenda

Cybersecurity and the politics of knowledge production: towards a reflexive practice

How does a reflexive scholarly practice matter for producing useful cybersecurity knowledge and policy? We argue that staking relevance without engaging in reflexivity diminishes the usefulness of knowledge produced both in academia and in policy. To advance a reflexive research agenda in cybersecurity, this forum offers a collective interrogation of the liminal positionality of the cybersecurity scholar. We examine the politics of ‘the making of’ cybersecurity expertise as knowledge practitioners who are located across and in between the diverse and overlapping fields of academia, diplomacy and policy. Cybersecurity expertise, and the practices of the cybersecurity epistemic community more broadly, rely heavily on the perceived applicability and actionability of knowledge outputs, on the practical dependency on policy practitioners regarding access, and thus on the continuous negotiation of hierarchies of knowledge. Participants in this forum reflect on their research practice of negotiating such dilemmas. Collectively, we draw on these contributions to identify obstacles and opportunities towards realising a reflexive research practice in cybersecurity