Liberal theories of international relations suggest that democracies are more likely to support one another in times of crisis. We evaluate this expectation by examining military assistance to Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion. Comparing patterns of support in 2022 and 2025, we show that democratic solidarity is conditional rather than automatic. The initial response was driven primarily by geographic proximity to Russia and executive autonomy, whereas sustained support became increasingly associated with democratic quality and public backing. These findings qualify liberal expectations and underscore the need for a more systematic understanding of the conditions under which democracies come to another’s defence. The article concludes by reflecting on Western support for Ukraine in an era of democratic backsliding and geopolitical change.
This article re-examines sovereignty and international order in the digital age by theorizing a shift from territorial to infrastructural modalities of power. Rather than considering the present order as a break from the Westphalian past, it conceptualizes the Webphalian system as an overlapping layered configuration coexisting with territorial sovereignty, in which effective authority is mediated by digital infrastructures, platforms, standards, and data regimes. The study introduces digital minoritization to describe how small states experience sovereignty through infrastructures they do not control and theorizes digital clientelism and epistemic injustice as mechanisms that reproduce asymmetric dependence and marginalize small states as credible knowers. Through the contrasting cases of Estonia and Tuvalu, the article shows how digitally ambitious and existentially threatened small states negotiate agency under constraint: leveraging institutional embedding or ontological innovation while remaining structurally tethered to external systems. The study argues that small states function as critical diagnostic lenses for the future of global order, revealing how sovereignty, legitimacy, and justice will be contested in the Webphalian era.
This article theorises parallel membership—the simultaneous admission of rival claimants to a universal organisation—as a mechanism for managing, rather than resolving, divided sovereignties. Examining the dual UN accessions of the two German states (1973) and the two Koreas (1991), it shows that admission depended less on legal universality than on contingent great-power bargains and procedural flexibility. In both cases, parallel membership functioned as a geopolitical compromise that neutralised competing representation claims while leaving sovereignty disputes unresolved. Its broader applicability remains limited: in today’s fragmented multipolar order, entrenched vetoes and absolute claims make parallel membership less a transferable model than a diagnostic of when international society can adapt to contested statehood.
This paper introduces an ontological security approach to international war terminations. While International Relations scholarship emphasises physical security and domestic political calculations as influencing factors in when wars end, this paper explores how ‘ontological security processes’ shape war termination decisions. The paper argues that war terminations often constitute ‘critical situations’ that threaten a state’s ontological security, or ‘security of being’. War terminations are a distinct anxiety-generating moment that prompt elites and citizens to confront gaps between expectations and reality and what that means for a state’s character. This is partly why leaders are often wary of war terminations even when not directly ‘culpable’ for the conflict. Applying this framework to the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, the paper illustrates how ontological security processes shaped termination decisions across three presidential administrations alongside battlefield conditions and domestic political fears. Despite low political salience and broad public support for withdrawal, presidents pursued strikingly similar gradual and ‘responsible’ withdrawals. This avoidance strategy managed ‘normal’ anxiety and was associated with gradual troop reductions, culminating in bipartisan embrace of ending ‘forever/endless’ wars. However, the chaotic August 2021 withdrawal made avoidance impossible, escalating into ‘existential’ anxiety and creating a critical situation with widespread identity-questioning and ‘soul-searching’. As such, an ontological security approach can advance our understanding of both termination decisions and their reception.
Narratives, because they are sense-making devices, are both useful and increasingly necessary tools to navigate global uncertainty. Meanwhile, the divergence of powerful states’ strategic narratives points to a global contestation, which in turn uncovers the growing importance of narrative power as a political resource on the international stage. Yet narrative power does not stand on its own; it is located in time and space, and relies not on a singular but multiple inter-connected stories. This paper aims to illuminate how inter-narrativity is playing out in the rise of the “Indo-Pacific” as geopolitical narrative. It will follow an argument situated at the crossroad of International Relations (IR) and narratology, and also inspired by critical geopolitics. The global spreading of the “Indo-Pacific” narrative tends to obscure its Japanese genealogy, and its relation to previous stories of the “Pacific”. Those stories are about Japan’s regional identity and its historical dissociation from a Sino-centred world. The oceanic narrative that derives from them offers however a plasticity that accommodates a diversity of geopolitical story-telling. This has implications that are both conceptual (expanding the possibilities of narratology within IR) and empirical (understanding the political use and value of the “Pacific” narrative).
The concepts of hedging and strategic hedging have gained increasing prominence in IR, yet their relationship remains conceptually ambiguous. Because both concepts often refer to similar mixtures of cooperative and competitive behaviour, they are frequently treated as variants of a single framework. This article clarifies the analytical boundary between them by reconstructing the distinct causal mechanisms through which each concept operates. It argues that the distinction between hedging and strategic hedging is grounded in two analytical categories: level of analysis and strategic purpose. Strategic hedging is reconstructed as a strategy operating at the systemic level of analysis and aimed at averting threats arising from shifts within a declining unipolar system. Hedging, by contrast, is located at the national level and is directed at minimising risks associated with elite perceptions of strategic uncertainty surrounding great-power rivalry. This distinction clarifies their conceptual boundaries and also enhances the analytical utility of both concepts in IR.
The emergence and election of new parties challenging mainstream status quo in democratic countries is one of the most critical features affecting the definition of national security priorities today. While we know that these parties contest mainstream security policies, it is less clear how they do so and with which effects. This paper addresses these questions by exploring challenger parties’ effects on security discussions in a democratic multi-party system. I argue that challengers can prompt the reorganisation of the security agenda by introducing new issues and diminishing the political relevance of previous national priorities. In competition with mainstream parties to dominate the political agenda, challengers will act as political entrepreneurs who mobilise public discontent on neglected security concerns. This suggests that the conglomeration of issues at the centre of the security agenda changes following on broader political struggles between mainstream parties competing to maintain the status-quo and challengers pursuing innovation. I illustrate this argument through two instances of political entrepreneurs in Bulgaria, a context offering important precedents to explore these parties’ effects amid frequent domestic and regional transformations. The paper contributes to discussions about the sources, pathways, and implications of domestic sources of transformations for security affairs.
This article examines the emerging patterns of right-wing international populism through a comparative regional analysis of populist alliances in Central Eastern Europe and Latin America. It argues that the fight against ‘globalists’ constitutes a central organizing principle of right-wing populist cooperation beyond the nation-state. The article addresses two research questions: How is right-wing international populism implemented at the regional level? and How do right-wing populists use ‘globalists’ as an empty signifier to construct ‘international elites’? To answer the research questions, this study applies a comparative case study analysis. Emerging right-wing international populism in Central Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Czechia) and in Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, and El Salvador) are examined to explore the rhetorical tools, the substance of right-wing international populism in both regions and the constraints on deeper cooperation. The findings show that sustained populist rhetoric and polarizing identity constructions facilitate convergence around anti-globalist positions across regions. At the same time, variation in tone, style, and issue emphasis–ranging from relatively moderate to overtly confrontational–broadens the scope of cooperation while simultaneously constraining its institutional depth and durability.
This article examines Mexico's Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) through the lens of strategic narratives, focusing on how the policy has been constructed and mobilized within broader international, national and individual storytelling practices. Building on recent applications of strategic narratives to feminist foreign policies, the article conceptualizes FFP as operating at two interconnected levels. At the macro level, it argues that the adoption of FFP represents a continuation and adaptation of Mexico's longstanding national narrative in the ‘effective multilateral’ system as a regional leader committed to gender equality and human rights. At the micro level, it shows how key political actors involved in the promotion and adoption of FFP have deployed it as an individual strategic narrative, contributing to personal legitimacy, visibility, and political positioning. It draws on a thematic analysis of official press releases and public speeches by the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, alongside a systematic analysis of social media communications, specifically on X, by political elites central to the policy's adoption. Situating these narratives against persistent domestic gender-based violence and political tensions surrounding feminist movements, the article highlights a dissonance between internal realities and international commitments. It argues that Mexico's FFP functions more as a narrative to reinforce the country's international image and politicians' personal branding rather than as a substantive change from past foreign policy practices.
This article focuses on how the Saami Council productively engages with the EU through its narratives in order to bring about change in EU policies and to navigate uncertainties threatening their future existence. Based on an emotion discourse analysis and narrative analysis of Saami Council’s documents that focus on the European Union, the article finds that narratives have worked in two different aspects to enable the Saami Council to motivate the Sámi communities from the emotional states of fear, anger, resentment and disappointment to productively engage with the European Union. Working internally, their narrative has instilled hope in communities that a better future is possible. Facing outward, their narrative has demonstrated that the negative consequences of the green transition on their lands is a new form of colonialism, demanded respect for their internationally recognized rights in EU policies and underlined the significance of their inclusion in EU policy-making structures.
How do states remain credible participants in global environmental governance despite persistent gaps between environmental commitments and their implementation? Existing scholarship often treats such inconsistencies as failures of credibility or compliance. This article advances an alternative explanation. It argues that states manage enduring contradictions not by resolving them at the level of policy outcomes, but by narratively sequencing them through storylines that render contradiction intelligible and politically productive. Building on narrative studies in International Relations, we introduce the concept of symbolic temporality to capture how political actors deploy symbolic acts within storylines that link past grievances, present constraints, and future aspirations. Through this sequencing, contradiction is reframed as a temporally staged process of deferral. The argument is developed through a comparative analysis of Brazil and Indonesia; two Global South states that face expectations to lead on environmental governance while navigating significant developmental constraints. The analysis draws on a large corpus of elite foreign policy discourse in both countries, spanning multiple decades. This article forms part of the debate on Narratives in Times of Uncertainty and contributes to debates on narrative productivity by theorizing symbolic temporality and showing how symbolic commitments sustain agency and legitimacy without immediate policy implementation.
Life stories help ground states in the chaos of social life by allowing them to experience themselves, their behaviours, and their relationships as coherent, predictable, and tractable. Continuity in these stories is important for maintaining a sense of ontological security, but they can also constrain agency when crises challenge understandings of self, others, and the world ‘out there’. Against approaches in ontological security scholarship (OSS) that treat uncertainty and anxiety primarily as paralysing, this article shows how encounters with expanded possibility can generate productive forms of agency instead. While change may carry emancipatory potential, the article finds that actors may ultimately act to restabilise existing versions of the self rather than transforming it. An examination of South Africa’s responses to the crises in Gaza and Ukraine shows that although these destabilising moments created opportunities for the state to rewrite its life story, it chose to pursue a system-level rescripting of the moral grammar of international politics to maintain a semblance of continuity. By reordering the interpretive framework of global governance around the evolving narrative arcs of its own life story, the state is able to avoid deeper self-transformation.
This article contributes to IR scholarship on the domestic politicisation of international affairs, focusing on transnational actors and mechanisms through which international issues can become politicised domestically. It conceptualises transnational politicisation as cross-boundary processes that draw international issues into the realm of domestic political choice and contestation. The analysis zooms in on diaspora groups as an exemplary case of such transnational politicisation, given their unique position in the transnational space. We argue that diasporas play a powerful role in the transnational politicisation of bilateral issues between homeland and hostland within host country domestic politics, either as politicising agents or conduits of politicisation attempts by home or host country political actors. Transnational processes of politicisation can generate intergovernmental friction, reducing the scope for bilateral cooperation, if they lead to widespread domestic politicisation in the host countries, raising identity-related and sovereignty concerns. The article presents two heuristic case studies on the Turkish diaspora in Germany, focusing on the 2016 ‘Armenia resolution’ of the German Bundestag and the 2017/2018 cycle of German and Turkish elections. The case studies detail the diaspora actors involved, explicate the transnational mechanisms through which bilateral issues become politicised in German domestic politics, and discuss consequences for German-Turkish relations.
Authoritarian states are increasingly shaping global normative orders by promoting state-centric and communitarian alternatives to liberal norms in global governance institutions. This article studies the interplay between normative and material strategies autocracies use to reshape global norms. While existing research on norm entrepreneurship focuses on liberal actors, non-state advocacy networks, and right-wing norm spoilers, this paper broadens the concept of norm entrepreneurship to include authoritarian-led norm promotion. It argues that like-minded coalitions of authoritarian regimes strategically cooperate to integrate normative and material power to reshape international norms in favor of state control and societal development. Through case studies of China’s “win-win” development agenda in the UN Human Rights Council and Russia’s digital sovereignty push in global internet governance, the paper demonstrates how authoritarian coalitions amplify their influence through persuasion and incentivation. These findings have important implications for the future of multilateralism and the liberal international order.
Rural development has a long history in international development practice, yet the conception of ‘rurality’ and its implications for what rural development does are rarely discussed in their own right. Based on a double-paired comparison of two North African (Morocco, Tunisia) and two Southern African (Botswana, Zambia) cases, this article investigates varying, context-specific meanings of ‘rural’ and their interaction with internationalised development policies. We show that while the focus on agriculture and social protection in international development cooperation represents a strong structuring force in the policy field, the targets of rural development – ‘rural areas’ or ‘rural populations’ – take on various meanings in national politics and people’s daily lives. These observations challenge the common expectation of comparability on which global development paradigms hinge. They further call for reconsidering the value of ‘rural’ areas in their own right, building on the meanings and visions that people attribute to them beyond their insertion into global capitalism.
Beyond recent examples such as Brexit or the withdrawal of Nicaragua from the Organization of American States, looking at 73 regional international organizations (RIOs) in existence between 1945 and 2022, over 50 withdrawals occurred. While existing research on state withdrawals alluded to (Hirschman (1970) Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to the decline in firms, organizations, and states. Harvard University Press), we add to this literature by systematically translating Hirschman’s seminal (frame)work into empirical analysis. Thus, we test the corresponding hypotheses on the impact of effective voice and loyalty on actors’ decisions to exit an organization through quantitative analysis combined with insights from narrative evidence. The analysis reveals that shaping opportunities (voice) in the form of veto options and relative state power decrease the chances of exits only in tendency. In contrast, greater loyalty due to low substitutability, attributions of importance, as well as socialization and sunk costs significantly reduce the propensity of states to use the exit option by withdrawing from a RIO. The latter also significantly increases the likelihood that states choose the voice option—in the form of exit threats—rather than withdrawing. The paper thereby contributes to our understanding of the conditions under which RIOs face the greatest risk of disintegration due to exits of member states.
Informal intergovernmental organisations (IIGOs) like the G20 and the BRICS are omnipresent in current international affairs and frequently portrayed as global crisis managers or steering committees. While such metaphors help in understanding their role in global governance, they tend to overlook their varying institutional features and potential for informal governance. Not every IIGO acts globally, addresses multiple issues or steers through orchestration. Hence, this paper asks how variations in IIGOs’ institutional design shape their capacity for informal governance. Building on a discussion of their agency and institutional variety, it develops a typology that distinguishes and illustrates key IIGO types according to their issue scope and members’ collective capabilities. It argues that both features shape IIGO’s capacity for informal governance and holds that especially general-purpose IIGOs with comprehensive collective capabilities are likely to draw on the full spectrum of informal governance mechanisms—including self-binding commitments, outreach, and orchestration. Other IIGO types are either restricted in the scope of issues they address or in their collective capabilities, and thus in their overall governance capacity. With that, it raises questions about existing debates on the creation of IIGOs and their contribution to global governance, and indicates directions for future research on their effectiveness, legitimacy, and change.
Ontological security theory has increasingly informed research in international relations, yet its insights remain largely absent from policymaking. This article seeks to bridge that gap by offering a policy-oriented framework grounded in ontological security theory. Given the field’s theoretical diversity, practical indeterminacy, and normative complexity, translating its insights into policy guidance presents significant challenges. To address these, I propose a two-step approach. First, I identify three dilemmas that actors often face: the tension between ontological and physical security; the dissonance between competing internal identities (a dissonance dilemma); and the trade-off between actors’ own security and that of others (a spiral dilemma). These dilemmas underscore key tensions in decision-making and help render ontological concerns more actionable. Second, I outline three mechanisms for addressing these dilemmas: identifying sources of ontological insecurity; assessing the broader implications of security measures; and avoiding actions that needlessly threaten others’ ontological security. Rather than prescribing specific policies, this framework aims to sensitize policymakers to ontological dynamics and provide conceptual tools for navigating them. Recognizing such dilemmas can help prevent destabilizing behavior and foster more reflexive, conscious policy practices.
This paper focuses on how, during his second mandate, far-right leader Donald Trump tells a story of his nation as having been disrespected in the recent past by national elites and global ones, while the leader and their close circle have the mission to repair that status as part of United States foreign policy (i.e. respect for the status of the US). When narrating a better future, Trump travels to a remote national past to show the possibility of reinstating US stature in the international. While constructing that better future, Trump also starts to unfold a foreign policy story of success to cement the brighter future in a retrospective way given this future has purportedly been previously lived in a more remote national past. Relied on here is symbolic interactionist role theory, strategic narrative analysis and the notion of ‘heartland’ from populism scholarship; this paper also contributes to the study of narratives of roles and populism in the field of foreign policy analysis by engaging with the IR notion of ‘status’. Taking an interpretative analysis approach, this case study shows how far-right leaders like Trump can conceive and play the status or master role of their states in foreign policy via strategic narratives.
