When and how do party politics matter in junior allies’ decisions to engage in multinational military operations? Developing a new role theory model of party politics and multinational military operations, we put forward a two-level argument. First, we argue that the rationale for military action is defined in a contest between political parties with expectations of what constitutes the proper purpose (constitutive roles) and functions (functional roles) of the state. Second, we hold that material and ontological insecurities reduce political space for contestation and debate, but that junior allies tend to focus on role demands for ‘good states’ and ‘good allies’ rather than the nature and aim of the military operation. To unpack our argument, we analyse the debate among political parties in Romania and Denmark leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Concluding our analysis, we outline the implications for the changing security order and current debates in NATO member states on how to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution was a tectonic change that influenced the geopolitics of the Middle East to this day. This article highlights the necessity of re-examining the events of 1979 from a securitisation perspective. Through an investigation of Ayatollah Khomeini's pivotal role, I challenge the methodological nationalism often found in the study of Israel–Iran relations. Despite his unconventional position in security matters, Khomeini played a crucial role in the securitisation of the 1979 revolution. Drawing on Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives, secondary sources, elite interviews, and Khomeini's theological speeches, this article re-examines the intricate stages of securitisation and counter-securitisation spanning 16 years. Khomeini effectively mobilized the political audience (Iranian people) to support the revolution, aiming to overthrow the Shah and remove Israel’s presence from Iran. I argue that a non-linear securitisation process was employed, characterised by Khomeini's ability to establish informal authority among the opposition. This process ultimately led to him gaining legitimacy from the Iranian people and culminated in the successful securitisation act of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Turkish confrontation with the United States (US) in Syria serves as a test case for how junior allies, which often rely on their senior allies for defence and security, can come close to armed conflict with them. Neither the theoretical literature on alliances nor the empirical literature on Turkey–US relations provide sufficient insight into such a case. Addressing existing gaps requires identifying the likely factors that lead junior allies into disputes with their senior allies and examining junior allies’ ability to challenge the policies of their more powerful counterparts. In the case of Turkey, the way it withstood the US by revealing its readiness to use military force over the latter’s cooperation with armed groups Turkey considered a threat proves that, despite their disadvantage in the balance of power, junior allies can militarily stand up to their senior allies. Nonetheless, the fact that Turkey has failed to alter its ally’s behaviour shows the limits of success in this endeavour, the reason for which, in our case, lies in Turkey’s lack of normative attachment to and weak interest-based ties with the US.

This research delves into the identity construction and violence justification within the context of far-right lone-actor terrorism, particularly motivated by white supremacist ideologies. Employing a qualitative analysis of manifestos compiled by five lone-actor terrorists, this study adopts a model to unveil the nuanced processes behind the justification of violence and glorification of collective identities. The model has been formed for the purpose of the study, drawing from social identity and identity fusion approaches, including steps such as group alignment, exclusion, threat, virtue, and celebration. The analysis of these manifestos illuminates a progression through each phase of the violent act, meticulously crafted through textual expression. Central to the terrorists’ objectives is the creation of a rhetorical platform aimed at fomenting violence against non-white, ethnic, and religious groups. Their motivation arises from the perceived threat of the ‘white race’ being supplanted by immigrant communities across various social, political, and economic domains. This justification of violence hinges on the portrayal of themselves as protectors of the majority society, pitted against these minority groups. Strikingly, the terrorists celebrate their actions by commemorating past white supremacists who employed violence against marginalised communities.

Despite being ubiquitously used, the concept of alignment remains inchoate. Existing literature offers more than 30 interpretations of the term and very few attempts to develop an objective indicators-based metric of alignment. This state of the field makes assessments of the degree to which states are aligned problematic. This article systematises the theoretical knowledge about alliances, alignments, strategic partnerships, and other forms of cooperation and draws on some empirical observations to develop a ‘stadial model of alignment formation’ (SMAF). The model conceptualises, operationalises, measures, and explains interstate alignment with greater precision and consistency. It also includes the explanatory factors in the form of the three balances – the balance of power, the balance of threat, and the balance of interest – and connections between them located along the stages of alignment formation. As such, the SMAF framework gauges the relative scale and depth of strategic alignments and can facilitate comparative analysis.

Although Critical Security Studies (CSS) has done much to advance security debates, some shortcomings remain. Its excessive focus on the individual – which we term ‘me’ – reduces CSS' capacity to propose solutions to current global security problems such as pandemics and climate change. This paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on the potential of relational ontologies in Security Studies by introducing Buen Vivir Indigenous cosmopraxes into the debate. Indigenous cosmopraxes such as Sumak Kawsay, Suma Qamaña, and Teko Kavi, we argue, can inform CSS by providing alternative considerations to the pluriverse of ideas that address security crises. These cosmopraxes, which make up the broad notion of Buen Vivir, provide a way to think and enact security from a collective perspective, one that emphasises ‘we’ instead of the liberal self. In that sense, these cosmopraxes allow us to conceive security differently and face insecurities together.

The role of performance in ontological security seeking is underdeveloped, despite the fact that many elements of such behaviour – narratives, rituals, routinised meetings – carry a distinctive performative quality. Drawing on Butlerian performance theory, this article makes the case that performances are essential to re-establishing coherence and a sense of self following ontologically critical situations. The reproduction of the self, especially while directly addressing fundamental existential questions, is an important way to overcome critical situations. At the state level, this reproduction of self also includes a reproduction of the international system, a task which is best enacted in everyday diplomatic practice. To explore this theory, I use Brexit as an illustrative case study. Brexit was a moment of profound crisis for the United Kingdom (UK) and an ontologically critical situation. It forced the UK to reposition itself on the world stage and confront significant challenges to its self-understanding. In Westminster, these efforts centred on ‘Global Britain’ – a narrative shift that bridged the identity gap and provided a thin framework for foreign policy. At the same time, British diplomats were tasked with international realignment post-Brexit. In this way, everyday diplomatic practice became Brexit performances.

In the last two decades, the European Union (EU) has forged an international role as a ‘force for good’ and a champion for democracy, human rights, multilateralism, free trade, climate change action, and sustainable development. However, as the international context has grown more competitive and turbulent, it has become more challenging for the EU to uphold this global role. Subsequently, the EU has pursued more proactive policies to confront urgent challenges to the rules-based international system and global governance norms. This paper explores what the EU’s evolving geopolitical foreign policy role actually entails and how it is compatible with the Union’s understanding of itself as a global leader as expressed as a Normative Power, Market Power, and Security Power. Utilising the Indo-Pacific Strategy of 2021 and subsequent communications as illustrative examples, it examines how the EU is upscaling its plans and partnerships into a broader, sustainable connectivity strategy that fits into the context of a reoriented EU foreign policy and its leadership goals. In conclusion, it finds that the credibility of the three powers that the EU proclaims to play will be dependent on the coherence of the role set and the extent to which the EU can achieve these roles.

This article makes the case that gender and racial analyses of the constitutive interplay between nation branding and diplomacy advance understandings of how liberal states use feminist agendas in response to political crises. Adopting a feminist post-colonial approach and drawing on a discourse analysis of French diplomatic speeches made in the UN Security Council between July 2011 and December 2019, the article examines how male and female diplomats address France’s accountability failures when French peacekeepers sexually abused children in Central African Republic in 2014–15, widely known as the Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, or SEA crisis. Operating as embodied brand ambassadors, diplomats use affective and performative strategies to progress through the political crisis life cycle quickly and re-establish France’s ontological security. It is contended that while feminist foreign policy and feminist diplomacy serve as short-term solutions to reputational damage, France’s longer-term nation-branding project, which follows a masculine, white-supremacist neoliberal logic, stabilises the grand narrative of the middle power and its projected image as a legitimate strategic leader in global governance. Yet in attempting to control the narrative on the SEA crisis, French diplomats downplay the global crisis of accountability surrounding sexual exploitation and abuse and silence the personal crises of SEA survivors.

Is individual support for internationally agreed military humanitarian interventions (MHIs) subject to a religious bias? Conducting a vignette-based survey experiment, the paper provides micro-level evidence for such a bias within a highly unlikely sample: German university students. Participants in our survey experiment were more compassionate and indeed more supportive of an MHI when the victims of war-related violence were Christians rather than Muslims. The paper thus contributes to the literature on support for MHIs in two important ways: first, whereas the existing literature has a strong focus on the United States, this paper studies individuals’ support in another Western country that regularly contributes to MHIs, namely Germany. Second, while the existing literature has mainly examined how other social factors, such as the race or gender of the victims, affect individuals’ support for MHIs, drawing on social identity theory, this paper claims that religious identification also has an impact. Moreover, by showing that the religion of the victims of war-related violence shapes individuals’ attitudes towards MHIs through compassion, the paper also speaks to more recent literature that demonstrates that individuals’ attitudes towards refugees depend on – among other things – their religion. Against the background of a general rise of identitarian politics in many Western societies, our findings seem to be of particular relevance.

Peace operations are often deployed to countries where conflicts are effectively ongoing, with mandates to protect civilians and provide security. With the authorisation to use force beyond self-defence, peacekeepers are expected to exert military pressure on armed groups to induce them to abandon violence and join peace processes. Such an approach falls in the domain of compellence. Given that peace operations struggle to adapt to this new expectation, it is imperative to find effective ways of compelling armed groups. While studies on compellence agree on the effectiveness of denial-type pressure, its specific forms are highly context-dependent. What is the most effective way to achieve denial against armed groups in the context of peace operations? There are four such approaches: attrition, stronghold neutralisation, decapitation, and counter-coercion negation. A case study of peacekeeping by the United Nation in Ituri reveals that stronghold neutralisation and counter-coercion negation were especially important for compelling rebels to disarm. As existing studies have not examined the effectiveness of specific forms of denial in peace operations, the finding contributes significantly to the literature on compellence and peace operations.

Many are now discussing the possible demise of the so called ‘liberal international order’, but how can we know whether any international order is changing? This article argues for understanding order as maintained by institutions of international society and further theorises the role those institutions play in the stability or transformation of international order. To usefully put institutional analysis to work, this article, first, models the stylised evolution of a primary institution. Second, it illustrates this evolution with a discussion of the historical institution of trusteeship in order to historicise adaptation and transformation in international order. Finally, this leads to a generalised idea of how institutional analysis can be employed to study stability and transformation in international order. Beyond making a contribution to the wider debates about the possible demise of the current international order, this piece also fills a gap in English School theory, which is quite silent on the question of when international society furthers transformation, and when it furthers stability. Accepting the view of history that the future is contingent on today’s events, this study suggests possible points where push comes to shove for change and continuity in international order more generally.

After all-male universal conscription had been deactivated in many European countries in the post-Cold War era, the past decade has seen a surprising reversal of this trend, with several countries reactivating, voting to retain, or even extending military conscription to women. Due to the strong historical link between conscription and the formation of hierarchical gender orders, this paper conducts a feminist analysis of debates on conscription in Sweden and Austria and asks how gender served to legitimise the ‘return’ of mandatory military service. We find that a neoliberal, individualistic discourse legitimised Sweden’s gender-neutral conscription as an efficient and progressive model that presents as competitive, while the Austrian all-male model was justified on the basis of conservative, communitarian sentiments of fostering responsible male citizens and preserving a solidaric national community. Moreover, while conscription was envisioned as strengthening Swedish defence and war preparedness, conscription in Austria was rather associated with containing militarism and preventing involvement in armed conflict. Despite these differences, we suggest that hierarchical notions of masculinity and femininity, intersecting with classed and racialised dichotomies, served to render conscription acceptable and even appealing in both cases.