Abstract. Benchmarking practices have rapidly diffused throughout the globe in recent years. This can be traced to their popularity amongst non-state actors, such as civil society organisations and corporate actors, as well as states and international organisations (IOs). Benchmarks serve to both 'neutralise' and 'universalise' a range of overlapping normative values and agendas, including freedom of speech, democracy, human development, environmental protection, poverty alleviation, 'modern' statehood, and 'free' markets. The proliferation of global benchmarks in these key areas amounts to a comprehensive normative vision regarding what various types of transnational actors should look like, what they should value, and how they should behave. While individual benchmarks routinely differ in terms of scope and application, they all share a common foundation, with normative values and agendas being translated into numerical representations through simplification and extrapolation, commensuration, reification, and symbolic judgements. We argue that the power of benchmarks chiefly stems from their capacity to create the appearance of authoritative expertise on the basis of forms of quantification and numerical representation. This politics of numbers paves the way for the exercise of various forms of indirect power, or 'governance at a distance', for the purposes of either status quo legitimation or political reform.

This article explores the relationship between the historical events surrounding the legal abolition of slavery, and the widespread and often longstanding practices that fall under the rubric of "contemporary forms of slavery." Slavery is routinely dismissed as an historical artifact, but this complacent viewpoint obscures a range of complex and enduring problems. In this article, I suggest that one of the main limitations of an emerging literature on contemporary slavery is a recurrent tendency to downplay or disregard the historical dimensions of current problems, in favor of a problematic bifurcation between "new" and "old." Employing a macro-historical perspective, I take up the complex relationship between the historical and contemporary, introducing the concept of an "Anti-Slavery Project," which builds upon the notion that the present status quo can be traced to both the remarkable achievements, and substantive limitations, of legal abolition.

Abstract. Global benchmarks have grown exponentially over the last two decades, having been both applied to and developed by states, international organisations, corporations, and nongovernmental organisations. As a consequence, global benchmarking is now firmly established as a distinct mode of transnational governance. Benchmarking chiefly involves the development of comparative metrics of performance, which typically take the form of highly stylised comparisons which are generated by translating complex phenomena into numerical values via simplification and extrapolation, commensuration, reification, and symbolic judgements. This process of translation takes what might otherwise be highly contentious normative agendas and converts them into formats that gain credibility through rhetorical claims to neutral and technocratic assessment. This politics of numbers has far-reaching ramifications for transnational governance, including the dimensions and effects of indirect power, expertise and agenda-setting, coordination, regulation and certification, and norm contestation and activism. This Special Issue draws upon an emerging literature to explore how and why benchmarks both align with and expand upon established models of International Relations theory and scholarship. It does so by critically examining the role of global benchmarks in key areas such as state 'failure', global supply chains, disaster management, economic governance, corporate social responsibility, and human development.

Over the last decade, critical historiographers have established that the story of a First Debate, which tells of a struggle between idealism/utopianism and realism between the 1920s and 1940s, is a misleading characterisation of the history of academic international thought. This article adds to this critical literature by exploring how the story of a First Debate became a part of disciplinary orthodoxy between the 1950s and 1990s. Our analysis reveals that scholars produced the myth of a First Debate by detaching the concept of a struggle between idealism and realism from the unique historical milieu in which it was conceived, and employing this dichotomy for a new set of rhetorical purposes. We use these findings to suggest refinements for the historiographical methods employed to understand past international thought, and to illuminate the historical contingency of contemporary notions of scholarly purpose in international relations.

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In this article, we explore the relationship between past and present international relations (IR) scholarship, paying particular attention to the way in which various representations, interpretations and classifications of past works can collectively influence how modern scholars ask and answer questions. This serves two main purposes. On the one hand, we seek to contribute to a growing literature interrogating misleading and simplistic depictions of past authors and eras. On the other, we explore how the history of ideas can be utilized as a critical resource, which offers a compelling platform from which to refine and re-evaluate prevailing notions of the purposes of intellectual inquiry.

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