The performance of ritual and the ritualisation of performance are the two main theoretical repertoires of ritual study in international politics and beyond. However, they also escalate tensions between those who insist on ritual's ability to operate by virtue of participants’ presence and those who believe that global networks of media call for a representational turn, which must tie participants and audiences across borders. Should we fail to understand how these distinct theoretical repertoires interact, it would be difficult to study international ritual, identify its functions, and trace its effects. Anchored in the sociology of ‘social occasions’, this article weaves ritual's patterns, properties, and resources into a coherent analytical framework. The framework enables us to better to grasp how actors move between/within different worlds (ritual and performance) and to what effects. The comparative study of two post-terrorism ritual occasions (the 2011 Rose March in Oslo and the 2015 Republican Marches in France) illustrates the usefulness of this theoretical proposition and its related framework.

Both relationality and separateness are aspects of our everyday lives. How we engage these phenomena hinges on the particular existential assumptions that we take for granted. Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), both relationality and separateness have informed how global politics is studied and practiced. How states and their relations are conceived has, for instance, varied by the distinct degrees of privilege given to separation and interconnection: from notions of completely autonomous units like billiard balls to always emergent phenomena co-constituted through relations. The plurality of trajectories that inform this Special Issue illustrate how much broader the spectrum of relational engagement can be when we are cognisant of the impact of these existential assumptions on forms of life, knowing, and knowledge production in International Relations. By highlighting a spectrum of relational engagement, we raise important questions about the way the various knowledge frames in IR are acknowledged, legitimised, limited, and reproduced.

This article offers insights into the character and composition of world order. It does so by focusing on how world order is made and revealed through seemingly disorderly events. We examine how societies struggle to interpret and respond to disorderly events through three modes of treatment: tragedy, crisis, and scandal. These, we argue, are the dominant modes of treatment in world politics, through which an account of disorder is articulated and particular political responses are mobilised. Specifically, we argue that each mode provides a particular way of problematising disorder, locating responsibility, and generating political responses. As we will demonstrate, these modes instigate the ordering of disorder, but they also agitate and reveal the contours of order itself. We argue, therefore, that an attentiveness to how we make sense of and respond to disorder offers the discipline new opportunities for interrogating the underlying forces, dynamics, and structures that define contemporary world politics.

From statistical calculations to psychological knowledge, from profiling to scenario planning, and from biometric data to predictive algorithms, International Relations scholars have shed light on the multiple forms of knowledge deployed in the governing of populations and their political effects. Recent scholarship in critical border and security studies has drawn attention to ‘the other side of knowledge’ and has developed a vibrant conversation with the emergent interdisciplinary field of ignorance studies. This article proposes to advance these conversations on governing through non-knowledge by nuancing the analysis of power/(non-)knowledge/subjectivity relations. Firstly, we expand the analysis of non-knowledge by attending to the problematisation of errors and fakes in controversies at Europe's borders. Errors have emerged in relation to border actors’ practices and technologies, while migrant practices, documentation, and narratives are deemed to be potentially ‘fake’, ‘fraudulent’, or ‘false’. Secondly, we explore how different subjectivities are produced through regimes of error/truth and fake/authenticity. We argue that there are important epistemic differences between ‘fake’ and ‘error’, that they are entangled with different techniques of power and produce highly differentiated subjectivities. Finally, we attend to how these subjectivities are enacted within racialised hierarchies and ask whether non-knowledge can be mobilised to challenge these hierarchies.

This article examines how affective narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media reinforce and challenge established scripts of national identity, political legitimacy, and international geopolitical imaginary. Taking theoretical insights from the scholarship on trauma, disaster nationalism, and politics of emotions, I structure the analysis of social media posts from state media and private accounts around three emotional registers: grief as a crucial site of control and contestation during the initial stage of the outbreak; gandong (being moved in a positive way) associated with stories of heroic sacrifices, national unity, and mundane ‘heart-warming’ moments; and enmity in narratives of power struggles and ideological competition between China and ‘the West’, especially the United States. While state media has sought to transform the crisis into resources for strengthening national belonging and regime legitimacy through a digital reworking of the long-standing repertoire of disaster nationalism, alternative articulations of grief, rage, and vernacular memory that refuse to be incorporated into the ‘correct collective memory’ of a nationalised tragedy have persisted in digital space. Furthermore, the article explicates the ways in which popular narratives affectively reinscribe dominant ideas about the (inter)national community: such as the historical imagination of a continuous nationhood rising from disasters and humiliation, positive energy, and a dichotomous view of the international order characterised by Western hegemony and Chinese victimhood. The geopolitical narratives of the pandemic build on and exacerbate binary oppositions between China and ‘the West’ in the global imaginary, which are co-constructed through discursive practices on both sides in mutually reinforcing ways. The lens of emotion allows us to attend to the resonances and dissonances between official and popular narrativisations of the disaster without assuming a one-way determinate relationship between the two.

This article investigates the fragmented knowledges that migrants need to deal with in order to get access to asylum, and the related effects of disorientation it generates on them. The piece argues that disorientation is as a constitutive political technology of refugee governance and develops this argument by focusing on the Greek asylum system. It starts by drawing attention to the multiple technological steps and forced digital intermediations that asylum seekers in Greece need to navigate, focusing in particular on the Cash Assistance Programme, and it shows how asylum seekers need to deal with dispersed knowledges. The article moves on by analysing how the governing through disorientation underpin the asylum legal system in Greece and how this ends up in debilitating asylum seekers and hampering them from accessing rights and humanitarian support. The final section explores how asylum seekers are racialised and treated as deceitful subjects, and argues that not only their speech but also their conduct and behaviour are assumed to be deceptive, and therefore their knowledge turns out to be pointless. It concludes by challenging claims for more transparency and more knowledge as a response to the governing through disorientation.

A pluriversal encounter that includes interlocutors from other ways of knowing and being requires recrafting how we commonly approach ontology in IR. Our shared ontological register only acknowledges separation as the fundamental existential assumption, and not all lifeways depart from this assumption. The article prods us to move beyond considering ontology as the study of being, a more substantialist reading, to include other fundamental existential commitments so that we can address how distinct presuppositions shape and are shaped by how we perceive and engage existence. With this reorientation, the article first establishes how even relational approaches in the discipline, including variations of constructivism, poststructuralism, and new materialism privilege separation as the primordial condition of existence to the exclusion of any other option. A conceptual toolset is then elaborated to examine how a singular commitment to separation constitutes an ontological parochialism that enforces reductionism, exclusion, and domination towards lifeways that embrace the interconnection as fundamental existential commitment. Even though more effective engagement across pluriversal worlds would be crucial for developing more complex tools for confronting the current planetary crisis, the discipline's reductionist concept of ontology itself keeps us quite far from effectively being able to engage in such an exchange.

On 26 March 2020, the leaders of the Group of twenty major economies (G20) convened in an emergency virtual meeting to discuss the extraordinary situation facing the world. Virtual summitry provided a stark visual contrast to the traditional staging of modern multilateral diplomacy – leaders were suddenly responsible for their own staging, leaving them with new opportunities to create a favourable impression of how they, and their respective state, would be seen. Taking the disruption of virtual summitry as a starting point, we focus on the resulting new opportunities for visual diplomacy. We draw on the symbolic interactionism of Erving Goffman and we argue that status signalling in this context was based on a shared understanding of the symbols and resources that have social value in the interaction order of summit diplomacy. Based on a visual analysis of 51 photographs from the G20 video conference, we find that the visual performances during the extraordinary meeting reflected evident, but not necessarily intentional, attempts at status seeking. The article thus contributes to an increased understanding of how visual performances contribute to uphold status distinctions in multilateral diplomacy.

This article argues that communities of practice (CoPs) provide IR with a unique way to understand how a small group of committed people can make a difference to international politics. The point is addressed in three steps. First, the article advances our understanding of how CoPs work. While at its core a CoP is a group of people brought together by a practice they enjoy, a CoP also shares a sense of timing, placing, and humour. These aspects help the group anchor, refine, and innovate their practice in the face of challenges and uncertainty. Second, the article contrasts the analysis of CoPs with other IR approaches, especially institutional analysis, network analysis, and epistemic communities, to show how CoPs supplement them. Third, the article illustrates the argument with the example of the EU foreign policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It concludes by suggesting that a CoP's perspective not only helps IR better understand informal politics, but also opens up conversations across disciplines.

International organisations (IOs) are said to command growing levels of authority. But in studying this phenomenon, scholars predominantly focus on the formal capacities member states assign to IOs. Much less attention is paid to the effects of IO authority, that is, how authority is exerted in practice and what it does within the affected societies. Based on a case study of the African Union's (AU) anti-coup regime, I make the case for a ‘bottom-up’ approach to IO authority, focusing on its localised enactment and effects. Analysing the AU's authority through a governmentality lens and drawing on several months of field research, I show that the AU's authority to govern coups is indeed effective: in commanding the re-establishment of constitutional order, the AU prescribes a particular imaginary of political order to resolve conflict and shapes the conduct of political actors in affected states by inscribing them into this order. But rather than operating in a top-down, direct way, the AU's authority is enacted in a distant, diffuse manner. Although based on formal powers assigned to the AU, neither the way this authority is exercised nor its effects can be inferred merely from these formal powers.

IR scholarship has recently seen a burgeoning interest in the right-wing populist politics of security, showing that it tends to align with the international ultraconservative mobilisation against ‘gender ideology’. In contrast, this article investigates how local feminist actors can resist right-wing populist constructions of (in)security by introducing counter-populist discourses and aesthetics of security. I analyse the case of Poland, which presents two competing populist performances of (in)security: the Independence March organised by right-wing groups on Poland's Independence Day and the Women's Strike protests against the near-total ban on abortion. The article draws on Judith Butler's theory of the performative politics of public assembly, which elucidates how the political subject of ‘the people’ can emerge as bodies come together to make security demands through both verbal and non-verbal acts. I argue that the feminist movement used the vehicle of populist performance to subvert the exclusionary constructions of (in)security by right-wing populists. In the process, it introduced a different conception of security in the struggle for a ‘livable life’. The study expands the understanding of the relationship between populism, security and feminism in IR by exploring how the populist politics of security is differently enacted by everyday agents in local contexts.

Conflict across African states has often been linked to ethnic-based biases in government, and exclusive policies. However, the domestic politics of developing states, and the elites who contest for power therein, have often been overlooked when explaining the patterns and risk of disorder and violence. We consider how African leaders practice politics in whom to represent, and at what level. These choices have consequences as how regimes accommodate political elites creates different competitive conditions which, in turn, create incentives and opportunities for political violence. Using a dataset on cabinet appointments over twenty years, we find that high levels of elite political inclusion and mal-apportionment in positions is consistently associated with increases in non-state violence. Power distribution levels among those groups included in senior positions account for more political violence than that which stems from exclusive politics.

International organisations reflect global power configurations and as such, are deemed to reproduce global inequalities. Nevertheless, they also represent opportunities for the Global South to challenge the global stratification of power, for instance by providing personnel to international agencies and bureaucracies. This article examines the role of leadership personnel from the Global South in implementing robust peacekeeping mandates.

Given that states from the Global South have often been hesitant to support the use of force internationally, can leadership positions in peace operations help these states to influence norms at the implementation level? We develop a conceptual understanding of individuals’ role in implementing norms and apply the framework to military force commanders from Brazil, India, and Rwanda. The analysis demonstrates that appointments provide an opportunity for norm contestation, but do not necessarily guarantee such influence. Under certain circumstances, we find that military force commanders can actually undermine their governments’ preferences. However, the relation between force commanders’ practices and their country of origin's policy stance is complex and influenced by a variety of different factors that merit further investigation.

Boat pushbacks and pullbacks by Italy and the European Union (EU) have returned migrants and refugees to Libya where they have been subjected to brutal human rights violations, such as torture and ill-treatment. This article argues that these pushbacks and pullbacks not only undermine key human rights principles, but they are also an act of cruelty. As Italy and the EU have used the law to evade their international human rights and refugee obligations, the law has had distributive effects that have shaped migration pathways and exacerbated the vulnerability of migrants and refugees to torture. Not only have legal manoeuvres stripped migrants and refugees of their rights, enabling Italy and the EU to return people to inhumane detention centres in Libya, but they have also had the sinister side effect of excluding migrants and refugees from moral concern. As Italy and the EU have sought to evade legal responsibility, it has created indifference to the suffering of people on the move in Libya. This article sheds important light on the factors that lead to the torture of migrants and refugees on their migration journeys and offers new insights into the relationship between cruelty, migration policies, and indifference to human suffering.

There is a multifaceted relational revolution afoot in International Relations (IR) and in the social sciences more widely. This article suggests, via engagement with varied forms of relational thought and practice in IR, but in particular via engagement with ‘relational cosmology’ associated with the ‘natural’ as well as the ‘social’ sciences, that there are important reasons for relational thought and practice in IR and around it to be more attentive to dialogues on relationality across natural and social sciences. If relational thought in IR has challenged the colonial and bifurcated ontologies of the field, relational cosmology too assists in shifting ‘modern’ understandings of science and the cosmos by facilitating engagement with situated knowledges and deep-going relationalities across ‘nature’ and ‘society’, ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ communities. Relational cosmology may be productive in joining, and perhaps even in facilitating, conversations across multiple relationalities emerging from different parts of the world and in different fields of inquiry, and yet – reflecting its relational and pluriversal orientations – it is not proposed here as a new ‘meta-‘ or ‘grand-’ narrative for relational theorising or IR.

Space matters for global politics but the treatment thereof in International Relations (IR) has been uneven. There is broad interest in spatial aspects across many research communities but only a nascent theoretical discussion and little cross-field communication. This article argues for a fuller engagement of IR scholars with sociospatial concepts and proposes a spatial approach to global politics based on four essential dimensions: a spatial ontology, the constructedness of space, a scalar perspective, and the interaction of materiality and ideas. As one possible way of integrating these aspects into a more specific concept, the article elaborates a framework of spatial practices and uses the example of Arctic Security research to illustrate the upsides of such a spatial approach for IR research.

State and non-state actors interact in both formal and informal ways during migration governance. Yet, we know little about such interactions, especially in the field of transit migration, a largely regional phenomenon. Here the categories of migrants are fluid between refugees, regular and irregular migrants, including those from conflict regions. Governance takes place also informally. Building on relational theories in International Relations, this article introduces a novel relational approach to polycentric governance. I argue that at the centre of such governance are not simply institutions or migration regimes, but power-laden relations among governmental, non-governmental, supranational, and non-state actors, as well as sending and destination states. These form architectures of partially official, partially informal dynamics that govern transit migration in a particular world region. Such architectures are based on mechanisms of cooperation, conditionality, containment, contestation, and others, combined in regionally specific ways. The mechanisms manifest themselves differently depending on how actors are embedded in places with different political regimes and statehood capacities. The article illustrates this relational perspective to polycentric governance with comparative evidence from the Balkans and the Middle East.

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and women's participation in peace processes are strongly supported by states. Yet financing to support the implementation of WPS has lagged behind overt international commitments to the agenda. WPS scholars and practitioners have highlighted the funding shortfalls for enabling WPS implementation and continued under-investment in gender-inclusive peace. In this article, we ask how much are donor states financially backing the implementation of gender-inclusive peace agreements which they promote? We use a high ambiguity-conflict model of policy implementation to explore the mechanisms of bilateral and multilateral financing for gender-inclusive peace. We trace to what extent international investments are supporting specific gender provisions in two progressive gender-inclusive peace processes, the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement and 2015 Comprehensive Peace Agreement in the Philippines. In both case studies, we reveal a drastic gap between the international donor rhetoric and the funding. Patterns of financial investment do not follow nor support the life cycle of inclusive peace processes. We suggest key strategies for further research to address this policy and recommend that all gender provisions of peace agreements be monitored in-country and all gender-responsive investments be tracked and evaluated.

Ex-combatant youth originated the commercial motorcycling sector in Liberia and have played a dominant role in its development. This article collates key insights narrated by one of Liberia's young ex-combatants-turned-commercial motorcyclists, Edwin Nyankoon, to build narrative accounts of peacebuilding around conceptualisation of youth livelihood, identity, and politics after war. The article contributes to diverse literatures on youth agency by emphasising the need for narrative and subject-led methodologies that anchor research questions and data analysis to research participants’ own language and narrated experiences of post war. It applies insights about everyday peace to interpret hustling as bottom-up peacebuilding, in opposition to dominant top-down peacebuilding accounts of ex-combatants. These latter accounts largely fail to see youth actors as peacebuilding agents, constructing them instead as troublemakers and interpreting their livelihood activities in terms of criminality and threat. Additionally, it argues that hustling also constitutes a peacebuilding style. More than a coping strategy or an indicator of peace, hustling-as-peacebuilding-style is performative: relational, embodied, contradictory, and recognisable to its adherents as peace-promoting even if (and arguably because) outsiders construct it as peace-negating. This analysis problematises agency, social relations, gendered identity, and collective security as they relate to ex-combatant and conflict-affected youth during peace processes.

This article will attempt to ‘provincialise’ (Chakrabarty, 2000) the ‘secular cosmology’ of International Relations (IR) through an examination of the relational cosmology of dharma. We argue that IR is grounded in ‘secularised’ Judaeo-Christian assumptions concerning time, relations between self and other, order, and the sovereign state that set the epistemic limits of the discipline. These assumptions will be ‘provincialised’ through an engagement with dharma based on a reading of The Mahābharāta, one of the oldest recorded texts in the world. We argue that the concept of dharma offers a mode of understanding the multidimensionality of human existence without negating any of its varied, contradictory expressions. By deconstructing notions of self and other, dharma illustrates how all beings are related to one another in a moral, social, and cosmic order premised on human agency, which flows from ‘inside-out’ rather than ‘outside-in’ and that is governed by a heterogenous understanding of time. This order places limits on the state's exercise of power in a given territory by making the state responsible for creating social conditions that would enable all beings to realise their potential, thus qualifying the principle of state sovereignty that remains the foundation of the ‘secular cosmology of IR’.