Questions of trust and mistrust have always been at the heart of the conduct of international relations, yet existing scholarship tends to assume a need to move towards an idealised endpoint of ‘deeper trust’ and largely overlooks the dynamism of everyday practices of trusting in Global South contexts characterised by complex reliance. This creates important empirical and conceptual blind spots. We develop a practice-centred account of trusting and introduce the concept of shallow trusting to capture how cooperation is sustained in relations of structural asymmetry. Drawing on 17 key informant interviews with practitioners in Malawi, we identify three co-constitutive practices of trusting: committing, identifying, and sensemaking. We show how these practices are enacted in limited ways and shaped by power relations, making collective action possible even when actors do not share intentions, identities, or understandings. Our conceptualisation challenges prevailing assumptions in climate governance and calls for a rethinking of donor-Global South interactions in addressing urgent global challenges.
Situated within the research on norm complexity, this article studies norm competition during the evolution of norm clusters. It draws on insights from media and communication research to theorize how competition for limited attentional resources—such as advocacy capacity, public awareness, and agenda space—can lead to the blocking or displacement of weaker norms by dominant ones, resulting in partial norm emergence. I apply this framework to the evolution of the humanitarian arms control cluster, focusing on the delayed emergence of the norm against cluster munitions. Through process tracing and content analysis of public and institutional discourses from 1945 to 1997, I demonstrate how this norm lost the competition for attention twice: first to incendiary weapons in the 1960s and 1970s, and then to anti-personnel landmines in the 1980s and 1990s. The analysis reveals that issue attractiveness, sequence, and framing dynamics played critical roles in determining which norms gained traction. By offering a relational perspective on norms, this study advances and complements our understanding of the evolution of norm clusters. The findings have practical implications for advocacy strategies, challenging the dominance of one-issue advocacy approaches.
Traditionally dominated by the executives, parliaments increasingly push for a more active role in multilateral affairs through International Parliamentary Institutions (IPIs). Conceptual research has argued that IPIs improve the democratic legitimacy of IOs by strengthening the accountability of IOs, as they allow parliamentary oversight over executives. Empirically, it remains unclear if IPIs are accomplishing this task. This paper provides further evidence in this regard. I theoretically derive the hypothesis that IPIs help legislators to hold the executives from their own country to account within the context of an IO. This happens by way of improved access to otherwise scarce information. I test this hypothesis on a novel dataset including three IOs (NATO, OSCE, Council of Europe) and their respective IPIs. For the German case, I show that legislators who are part of an IPI delegation ask more questions to the foreign ministries, but that this effect is likely driven by self-selection. Further exploratory qualitative interview evidence suggest that legislators do not attend IPIs to improve their parliamentary oversight capacity, but rather to engage in informal diplomacy. My findings add further nuance to our understanding of IPIs as source of information for MPs active in foreign affairs and their role in extending multilateral diplomacy.
This article explains variation in multilateral development banks’ (MDBs) crisis-response policies during the COVID-19 crisis. Drawing on a focused, structured comparison of 22 MDBs, this study analyzes five crisis-response policies: investment scale-ups and resource repurposing; institutional restructuring; fast-track facilities and procedures; policy and scope expansions; and inter-institutional collaboration and orchestration. It argues that MDBs’ crisis responses were shaped not only by institutional capacity but also by competitive pressures and hierarchical positioning within the development finance regime complex. MDBs occupying higher positions in the hierarchy demonstrated greater flexibility and were more likely to scale up lending, introduce expedited procedures, and expand operational scope, while lower-positioned MDBs adopted more cautious strategies and relied more heavily on cooperation with established MDBs. The analysis shows that some of this variation takes the form of patterned convergence in policy choices within hierarchical tiers and benchmarking practices across them, suggesting that hierarchy conditions both competition and coordination among MDBs during fast-moving crises and helps explain variation in countercyclical responses.
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.
