This article examines how subnational political entities can gain and exercise power over defense and security policy. Although some scholars still claim that subnational political entities play no role in defense and security policy, several studies have argued otherwise. However, these studies have typically focused on one type of power used by subnational political entities. I argue for a broader approach to the power of subnational political entities within the defense and security policy domain. I create an analytical framework that highlights three types of power—legal claims, compellence, and normative appeals—that subnational political entities exercise within this policy domain. I demonstrate the value of this framework by showing that Greenland has used all three types of power in different settings to obtain at least three types of ends (power over defense and security policy, power over other issues, and economic benefits). I argue that this analytical framework provides a language for studying the multitude of types of power, ends, and settings at play and that it can serve as a starting point for further research about the power of subnational political entities in the defense and security policy domain.
This article introduces Conspiratorial Memory (ConMem) as a new paradigm of memory politics in contemporary International Relations. Building on the research on nationally oriented heroic memory regimes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Nationalist Memory (NatMem)) and the victim-centered, Cosmopolitanized Memory (CosMem) culture that emerged after the Cold War, we argue that the 2020s have witnessed the rise of a hybrid formation that fuses global repertoires of trauma and rights with nationalist triumphalism. ConMem reframes cosmopolitan norms as selectively applied, externally manipulated, or hostile to national sovereignty, even as it hijacks the cosmopolitanized human-rights-based memory regime and its infrastructures by reappropriating core moral vocabularies-victimhood, rights, and historical justice-for exclusionary or illiberal agendas. Its defining feature is a conspiratorial interpretive logic that reads past atrocities and present geopolitical conflicts through narratives of hidden intent, external orchestration, and enemy action, enabling a strategic toggling between victimhood and heroic agency. Conceptually, we develop a tripartite ideal-typology-NatMem, CosMem, and ConMem-to historicize shifts in memory politics across geopolitical epochs. Empirically, we demonstrate ConMem's explanatory power through analysis of Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs discourse (2020-2025), showing how genocide claims, World War II narratives, and conspiratorial reasoning are combined to legitimize foreign policy. While amplified in authoritarian settings, ConMem's central logics are increasingly visible in democracies that are still considered free (e.g. United States, Israel, Italy), but noted for their increasingly illiberal tendencies and backsliding.
How do states shaped by historical trauma seek recognition from the international community when confronted with renewed collective suffering? And to what extent does such recognition facilitate healing? This article examines the foreign policy discourse of retraumatized states, focusing on how they pursue and respond to international recognition following new traumatic events. Bridging trauma and recognition studies in International Relations (IR), we conceptualize trauma recognition as a component of 'thick recognition', requiring symbolic validation of suffering by others. While existing literature suggests that such recognition is essential for healing, our findings reveal a more nuanced story: recognition may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. Rather than promoting reconciliation or emotional repair, recognition can be mobilized to reinforce trauma, sustain grievance, and legitimize assertive or aggressive responses. We illustrate this argument through a qualitative analysis of Israel's foreign policy discourse following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. Our analysis identifies a set of foreign policy roles that retraumatized states may adopt in relation to international recognition - roles that express gratitude, demand solidarity, or react to the perceived absence of recognition.
The article theorizes how neutrality, hedging, and sheltering benefit small states and help them to navigate great power rivalries within buffer complexes. We analyze Georgia's foreign policy, showing how it evolved from balancing against Russia through Euro-Atlantic alignment to adopting a more flexible combination of the three non-alignment strategies. Contrary to realist expectations and recent small state theorization, Georgia's case reveals that small states do not always follow fixed grand strategies or simply bandwagon or balance. Driven by a combination of domestic and external factors, they can adopt adaptive, overlapping approaches to remain unaligned amid intensifying geopolitical competition. Utilizing a game theoretical approach the study contributes both theoretically and empirically to the understanding of small state agency in buffer zones and challenges assumptions in International Relations about their limited strategic options in great power rivalries.
How did South Korean discourses on nuclear technology politicise and depoliticise collective memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings against ethnic Koreans? While studies on traumas and collective memories of nuclear violence have shown various ways of (de)politicising memories of nuclear violence, they often overlook the broader role of nuclear technology in it. This article addresses that gap by reframing nuclearity as material, symbolic and affective configurations of what is considered nuclear. I argue that collective memories of nuclear violence in South Korea were politicised and depoliticised by material, symbolic and affective nuclearity through four evolving modes - moral justification, technocratic silence, justice claim and foreign policy use - across three periods: 1945-1953, 1954-1963 and 1964-1975. While the first two periods were dominated by depoliticisation through moral justification and technocratic silence, the final period saw emergent politicisation of justice claim and foreign policy use, albeit constrained by depoliticising forces. This argument is demonstrated through discourse tracing a total of 488 archival documents, including South Korean legislative and administrative records, media reports and the survivor group's publications. The article contributes to collective memory and trauma studies by highlighting the role of weapons and technology in constituting and silencing memories of mass violence.
International practice theory (IPT) is now firmly established as a key theoretical and methodological framework for International Relations (IR), offering novel ways to address the oversight around the ‘everyday’ in global politics. Yet, the presumed novelty of such an approach is surprising to feminist, race, and postcolonial IR scholars who have thought deeply about the problem of the everyday. Surprisingly, these approaches have been footnotes (at best) in practice-oriented research. Despite the growth of IPT and its increasing influence within the discipline, it has remained perplexingly silent on issues related to gender, race, or colonialism. This Forum brings together an international range of scholars to address these silences. First, we are interested in exploring whether gender, race, and postcolonial scholarship offer relevant concepts, methodologies, theoretical contributions, or case studies that can inform IPT scholars. Second, we are interested in providing a space for scholars of gender and race to ‘speak back’ to IPT. Finally, what does the silencing of gender and race within IPT tell us about knowledge production within our discipline?
This article develops the concept of compounded historical trauma to analytically distinguish a single traumatic incident from a succession of interrelated traumatic events that took place over an extended period. Focusing on the compounded trauma of World War II and communist repression in Central and Eastern Europe, specifically Russia, Poland, and Serbia, I illustrate the enduring legacy of this complex trauma on the region’s contemporary foreign policy by examining a specific diplomatic issue: the restitution of Nazi-looted art still displayed across the region’s public museums. The issue of cultural restitution became newly salient in the 2000s, when international norms about looted art return developed and institutionalized. New claims for restitution of Nazi-looted art arrived at these museums’ doors, rekindling memories of the compounded historical trauma of WWII, the Holocaust, and communist repression. While the response to these demands was uneven across the region, in this article, I focus on one particular response rooted in post-traumatic victimhood resentment, to demonstrate the effects of compounded historical trauma on contemporary foreign policy and diplomatic practice. I illustrate the argument with short examples of contemporary cultural restitution policies in the three states.
How does inter-institutional competition emerging from the creation of new multilateral development banks (MDBs) affect the performance of existing institutions? Since newly established MDBs can deprive incumbents of vital resources, existing banks have strong incentives to respond. Using a large dataset of 30 MDBs across 144 countries from 1946 to 2013, we first demonstrate that existing MDBs respond to the establishment of a new competitor by increasing assistance to countries eligible for lending from both the incumbent and the new MDB. Using project performance evaluation data from up to 12,116 projects between 1961 and 2017, we then show for the World Bank that competitive entry increases the performance of new projects, but not ongoing ones. We explain these results as follows: when faced with a new competitor, the World Bank prioritizes the development of high-quality projects that better match borrower demand. In contrast, ongoing projects are “locked in” and receive less staff attention, limiting opportunities for performance improvement. Importantly, these dynamics do not extend to other legacy MDBs. This underscores the World Bank’s unique position as a major institution capable of expanding its operations without compromising project quality in response to new competition.
This article examines how meaning is produced from war trauma at both the collective and individual levels, and how these processes interact during an ongoing conflict. The interdisciplinary scholarship theorizes “collective” and “cultural” trauma as ruptures in social meaning while also recognizing trauma’s reconstructive dimension. Moreover, trauma operates at both individual and collective levels, with diverse individual experiences persisting even under strong state-led narratives. Focusing on Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the article qualitatively analyses President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s wartime speeches and 50 in-depth interviews with Ukrainians inside the country and abroad. The discourse analysis shows how Zelenskyy’s addresses construct an official narrative that transforms the invasion into a morally ordered story of national unity, righteous resistance, and future victory, offering a coherent identity for the collective. The interview data, however, reveal three distinct pathways of individual meaning-making: strong alignment with the official narrative; ambivalent or pragmatic meaning-making grounded in personal continuity and practical concerns; and distance or resistance, marked by moral ambiguity, disillusionment, or exhaustion. Together, these findings demonstrate that pathways to meaning in the face of social trauma vary across individual and collective levels, reflecting multiple ways in which people and their communities re-establish continuity and significance amid traumatic rupture.
The Putin regime's foreign policy communication has absorbed anticolonial discourse. By analysing Russian foreign policy discourse since Putin's anti-Western turn from 2005 onwards, this article shows how anticolonial meanings are attached to key concepts in Russian foreign policy discourse, including traditional values, sovereign democracy, and unipolarity/multipolarity. The article argues that these concepts are developed and articulated with logics similar to the works of anticolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, Aime C & eacute;saire, and Walter Mignolo - particularly in their critiques of colonial domination, their emphasis on Indigenous culture and tradition, and their visions of emancipation. The Putin regime's absorption of anticolonial discourse has three interrelated strategic functions: first, it obscures power politics and authoritarian practices for domestic (and foreign) audiences; second, it plugs into central political debates and provokes diverse political reactions in liberal societies, deepening ideological and political divisions; and third, it exacerbates global ideological fault lines, thereby undermining liberal internationalism while promoting reactionary alternatives. Building on emerging research on reactionary internationalism, this article suggests that the absorption of anticolonial discourse should be understood as a strategic tool that helps divide the enemies of the Reactionary Internationale.
This forum critically examines humour’s rising significance in International Relations (IR). It blends interdisciplinary insights to explore how humour shapes political realities, mediates conflict and engages audiences in a mediatised era. Four key themes emerge: humour’s impact on political identities and ontological security, evident, for instance, in the Danish Cartoon Crisis and far-right memes; its strategic deployment in digital diplomacy during conflicts like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, where it can both escalate and tranquilise tensions; audience reception, where humour often reinforces beliefs and can feed the kinds of divisive logics associated with populism; as well as critiques of Eurocentrism and the de-colonial potentials of African humourists and the geopolitical work of political cartoonists. Highlighting humour’s interplay with power, identity and (technological) agency, the forum reveals its dual role in both intensifying and ‘distracting from’ global conflicts and questions of justice. It challenges conventional IR frameworks by positioning humour as a vital, yet understudied, force in political life. These analyses underscore humour’s ability to empower or disempower across contexts, deepening our grasp of its transformative potential; advancing critical IR scholarship by unpacking humour’s complex, affective and paradoxical dynamics in contemporary global politics.
This article explores how hidden contestation of norms can become visible through unauthorized disclosures. Existing constructivist scholarship recognizes contestation as an integral part of the norm life cycle yet focuses on its observable forms such as public statements, explicit non-compliance or formal treaty derogations. As a result, situations where states affirm norms while secretly engaging in practices that depart from their declared commitments are often excluded from scholarly attention and not recognized as contestation. To address this gap, the article conceptualizes these secret practices as covert norm contestation and argues that revelations through espionage and whistleblowing can function as mechanisms making them visible. They provide access to actors who had previously been deliberately excluded from that information. The argument is illustrated through two cases. The first concerns the Stig Wennerstrom's espionage affair, which revealed contradictions between Sweden's long-standing neutrality policy and its secret military cooperation with Western powers during the Cold War. The second is Daniel Ellsberg's disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed how US conduct in Vietnam conflicted with its international commitments, including non-intervention, sovereign equality of states, non-use of force, and the peaceful conflict settlement. In both cases, disclosure exposed a gap between declared commitments and actual behavior, unsettling states' normative self-presentation and altering the terms on which legitimacy and contestation were assessed.
This Forum discusses how different international actors learn different lessons from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and how the logics discernible behind these lessons may define the future shapes of a new international order to substitute the post-1991 system of international relations. In this Forum, a group of scholars discuss the lessons learned from the perspective of Europe's normative credentials, demonstrating tensions between idea(l)s of liberal normativity and practices of security governance. Together, these contributions suggest that contemporary security challenges require not merely new applications of existing theories, but fundamental reconsideration of how protection, threat identification, and institutional adaptation operate under war conditions. They point towards a research agenda focused on understanding when and why security governance produces its own contradictions, and what this means for both theoretical development and policy practice. With all the different interpretations in mind, what unites all the contributions to this Forum is the connection between lesson learning and agency that is built on this cognitive basis and defines where international actors stand regarding issues of normativity and security.
What happens when the hegemon misrecognises the status of its allies or partners? This article argues that hegemonic recognition plays a critical role in stabilising allies' social standing within the established international hierarchy. When such recognition is withdrawn-particularly in contravention of the ally's sovereignty and shared basic norms of the status group-misrecognised states not only confront a potential legalistic erosion of their sovereignty but also experience status anxiety that unfolds relationally: uncertainty over how they are now positioned vis-& agrave;-vis the hegemon, their status peers, and other states beyond the status group. In response to this multidimensional threat, allies mobilise a range of status-preserving strategies aimed at reaffirming their rightful place and standing within the existing order. Building on works regarding status, this article identifies four core status-preserving strategies: status performance and signalling, normative reassertion, international insertion, and selective accommodation. Through qualitative analysis on two selected cases, it demonstrates how Canada and Denmark seek to preserve their sovereign status without capitulating to hegemonic coercion. In this way, this research contributes to existing status scholarship by shifting focus from status-seeking to status-preserving behaviours, and by exploring the implications of misrecognition from a norm-breaking hegemonic ally rather than a strategic adversary.
This article examines the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) efforts to restore its ontological security under a weakening global nuclear regime. Combining insights from critical regime theory and the Lacanian ontological security perspective, the article conceptualizes nuclear regime as a symbolic order that NATO relies on to mask its structural "lack" stemming from its contradictory commitment to both deterrence and disarmament. Through a structural narrative analysis of the Alliance's official texts from 1949 to 2025, the article reveals three narrative emplotments (romance, tragedy, and comedy) that NATO has invoked to reaffirm and stabilize its elusive nuclear identity. By acting as stabilizing "fantasies," these narrative emplotments have helped NATO justify its self-image as a moral and responsible nuclear alliance. By showing how collective actors retain identity through symbolic discursive performance by activating and deactivating a series of plots, this article has contributed to both ontological security and critical regime perspectives.
The UN has been traditionally a prime component of small states' foreign policy, but also a conspicuous space where norms are interpreted, bargained, and contested. Gauging the dynamics of remembrance and norms at international organizations, this article explores the purchase of norm legitimization through memory discourses. We argue that the transposition of memory at international level claims a new subjective order of legitimization, which actors then use to interpret or contest international legal norms in response to contemporary challenges. Linking our analysis to work on the centrality of interpretation for meaning-making in international law and the political processes that underpin these processes, we conceptualize the nexus between memory and international law. We articulate three mechanisms that link mnemonic invocations and norm legitimation: mnemonic co-presencing, mnemonic accountability claims, and countermemory and mnemonic critique. We also emphasize the entanglements between them on the one side, and between national and international memory discourses, on the other side. Empirically, this article examines discourses in the UN Security Council and the General Assembly in the context of Russia's aggression in Ukraine. We conclude that by epitomizing both normative and memory spaces, international organizations reveal how mnemonic practices constitute the meaning and legitimacy of international law.
The internationalization of intrastate conflicts has become a defining trend in 21st-century organized violence, marked by external actors providing militarily relevant support-such as troops, arms, or intelligence-to domestic warring parties. While research examines various dimensions of this phenomenon, systematic analysis of macro-level trends and their drivers remains limited. This article addresses this gap through three contributions. First, it introduces a network-based framework to conceptualize forms of internationalization and identify potential explanations. Second, it demonstrates empirically that intrastate conflicts have indeed become more internationalized across multiple measures. Third, it synthesizes research to identify and evaluate likely drivers of this trend. The study provides the first systematic framework for understanding internationalization as a network phenomenon and establishes a foundation for future research on external involvement in civil wars. By unifying fragmented research through a coherent analytical lens, the article advances both theoretical and empirical understanding of contemporary conflict dynamics.
The significance of this article lies in its reconceptualisation of disinformation as not only a challenge to truth but an affective force that can be examined through ontological (in)security. While media and communication studies increasingly recognise the affective dimensions of disinformation, Ontological Security Studies (OSS) in International Relations (IR) has yet to theorise its interaction with existential anxiety - the field's foundational concept. Addressing this gap, the article advances the argument that disinformation functions as an affective technology: an apparatus that channels existential anxiety into the symbolic realm through emotional representations. Drawing on affect theory, communication studies, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it demonstrates that emotions are operational mechanisms through which disinformation promises subjects enjoyment (jouissance), thereby sustaining fantasies of complete 'Self'. This conceptual innovation extends OSS beyond cognitive and identity-stability models, offering a dynamic account of how Lacanian fantasy narratives - despite their inaccuracies - produce coherence and agency in times of uncertainty. By revising the psychoanalytical strand of OSS, the article underscores the role of emotions in the politics of (in)security and calls for OSS frameworks that take affective dynamics seriously in an era defined by disinformation. The interdisciplinary novel framework is illustrated through the disinformative 'Great Replacement Theory'.
The study of how rival powers interact when they engage in proxy wars has generated many important insights, but the field remains fragmented. This article integrates these insights by offering a typological framework focused on interaction patterns among rival powers. The framework rests on two key choices rival powers face when conducting proxy interventions in third-party conflicts. The first is whether to support the same or opposing local warring parties; the second is whether to coordinate their in-theater activities. Combining these two dimensions yields four distinct interaction patterns, which we call (1) confrontation, (2) managed rivalry, (3) competitive influence-seeking, and (4) tacit alignment. The article unpacks these categories, specifies the mechanisms through which they emerge, and illustrates the framework's analytical value through a series of empirical vignettes drawn from both the Cold War and the contemporary era. The framework enables structured within-case and between-case comparisons as well as large-n analyses aimed at uncovering recurring conditions associated with distinct forms of interaction between rival powers.
This forum opens up a dialogue between two subfields of International Relations (IR) that have so far talked past, rather than with, each other: international political economy (IPE) and foreign policy analysis (FPA). Many scholars of IPE or FPA would welcome more cross-pollination in principle but remain reluctant to embrace specific concepts, theories or issues from each other. Our forum seeks to address the underlying structural and conceptual barriers by initiating eclectic conversations between different perspectives on individual or collective agency, bottom-up preference formation versus top-down decision-making, or domestic political and international systemic drivers. Six contributions written by IPE or FPA experts address two guiding questions: First, how could tried-and-tested theoretical perspectives and methodologies in both fields interact with each other? Second, what are the key conceptual and empirical next steps in moving the proposed IPE-FPA research agenda forward and leveraging its impact on wider IR scholarship? The contributions tackle both questions by discussing existing or illustrative novel research, and proposing new conjectures and avenues for future integrative studies. Altogether, the forum highlights how transcending compartmentalized boundaries can move IR towards more refined theories and deeper understandings of contemporary issues, ranging from geo-economic crises to the political economy of climate change.
