Given the enduring influence of historical narratives in international relations, how do memory politics and emotions intersect in diplomatic communication? While prior research often treats them separately, this article argues for the importance of the memory-emotion nexus to assess how memory and emotion are inextricably linked and jointly shape multilateral diplomacy. Viewing them as mutually constitutive forces reveals how emotional charges are embedded in collective memories, influencing identity projection, diplomatic behaviour and prospects for international cooperation. This argument is explored through the EU's memory-driven emotional diplomacy in the UN General Assembly during the Ukraine conflict. Examining six Ukraine-related UNGA resolutions (2022-2023), we employ Emotion Discourse Analysis and network analysis to visualize patterns. Findings show that the EU and its member states aligned with dominant memory-emotion nexuses in the UNGA, invoking WWII and the UN's founding to convey anger and shame Russia. It also expressed empathy through national historical references. However, the EU and its MS failed to engage with the colonialism-anger-shame nexus mobilized by several other UNGA members. In a fragmented international order, understanding the emotional dynamics of memory diplomacy is essential for policymakers seeking to navigate global crises and foster meaningful engagement in multilateral settings.
Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine returned enlargement to the centre of European political debate, transforming the political conditions within which established frameworks of enlargement studies were developed. Accession remains formally organised as a merit-based, rule-governed process, yet its outcomes increasingly follow strategic valuation, discretionary recognition, and political bargaining. This article introduces International Patron - Client Relations (PCR) as a bounded, middle-range framework for interpreting contemporary enlargement, advancing the relational approach in enlargement studies. PCR conceptualises accession as a relationship organised around cooperative resource exchange, asymmetric power dependence, diffuse obligation, and durability, operating at the level of the individual EU - candidate dyad. The framework occupies the middle ground between conditionality scholarship, which foregrounds incentive structures and compliance, and stronger relational ontologies, retaining strategically oriented actors while embedding their calculations in a structure of persistent asymmetry. Viewed through the lens of PCR, selective acceleration without institutional closure, strategic tolerance of democratic backsliding, differentiated treatment across candidates, and prolonged liminality arise as patterned outcomes of an accession relationship rather than anomalies of a rule-bound process. Therefore, the condition most frequently diagnosed as the crisis of enlargement emerges as its current equilibrium.
This study examines how disinformation reshapes the semantic meaning of peace, transforming it from a universal normative ideal into a contested, strategically displaced concept. In contemporary information environments saturated with manipulated narratives, semantic instability undermines public deliberation, media discourse, and diplomatic communication. The semantic shift is examined within the context of the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the global disinformation landscape. Utilizing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the research investigates how disinformation reshapes peace from a universal normative ideal into a strategically displaced and transactional tool. The analysis is structured across four interconnected dimensions: the criminalization and erasure of peace-related language in Russian media; the tactical redefinition of peace in pre-war Putin's key addresses, where the term is stripped of its ethical force; the substitution of 'peace' with 'ceasefire' and 'deal-making' in high-level political interactions (Zelensky-Trump meeting and a Lukashenko-Putin meeting). The findings suggest that disinformation not only distorts factual content, but also actively destabilizes shared semantic frameworks through mechanisms of erasure, substitution, and redefinition. By analyzing the shift from peace as a fundamental right to peace as a conditional deal, we identify a process of semantic bleaching, in which linguistic manipulation facilitates asymmetric power relations and constrains diplomatic discourse.
