Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/00471178221140093
A. Curanović, Piotr Szymanski
In this paper we analyse a situation wherein the political establishments of Russia and the United Kingdom, in the face of ontological insecurity, use narratives with messianic overtones in their foreign policies. Although these narratives do not feature prominently in the official discourse, they are nevertheless noticeable and provide a valuable insight into dynamics of national identity. We call them ‘mission narratives’ and interpret their (re)appearance in foreign policy as a reaction to a ‘critical situation’ which undermines the stability of the autobiographical narrative of both countries. Although different in scope and nature, the fall of the USSR and the Brexit referendum both resulted in the status and identity of the two states being questioned. Both countries reacted by emphasising their special role in the world. Referring to mission in foreign policy strengthens a coherent autobiographic narrative which soothes ontological uncertainties.
{"title":"Mission saves us all: Great Russia and Global Britain dealing with ontological insecurity","authors":"A. Curanović, Piotr Szymanski","doi":"10.1177/00471178221140093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221140093","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we analyse a situation wherein the political establishments of Russia and the United Kingdom, in the face of ontological insecurity, use narratives with messianic overtones in their foreign policies. Although these narratives do not feature prominently in the official discourse, they are nevertheless noticeable and provide a valuable insight into dynamics of national identity. We call them ‘mission narratives’ and interpret their (re)appearance in foreign policy as a reaction to a ‘critical situation’ which undermines the stability of the autobiographical narrative of both countries. Although different in scope and nature, the fall of the USSR and the Brexit referendum both resulted in the status and identity of the two states being questioned. Both countries reacted by emphasising their special role in the world. Referring to mission in foreign policy strengthens a coherent autobiographic narrative which soothes ontological uncertainties.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73319937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/00471178221140087
Evan W. Sandlin
According to policymakers, US national values shape US foreign aid policy. However, these national values clash with material interests when policymakers are faced with the decision of whether or not to grant US military aid to countries that do not adhere to US national values but do serve US security and economic interests. To what extent are US national values resilient to clashes with these material interests? This paper hypothesizes that national values are resilient to clashes with interests to the extent to which these values are a salient feature of US national identity. The findings indicate that more prominent values (democracy) are almost impervious to countervailing interests while more tangential values (enterprise and human rights) exhibit different effects on US military aid allocation depending on the security and economic importance of the recipient state.
{"title":"The limits of US national identity: interests and values in US military aid","authors":"Evan W. Sandlin","doi":"10.1177/00471178221140087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221140087","url":null,"abstract":"According to policymakers, US national values shape US foreign aid policy. However, these national values clash with material interests when policymakers are faced with the decision of whether or not to grant US military aid to countries that do not adhere to US national values but do serve US security and economic interests. To what extent are US national values resilient to clashes with these material interests? This paper hypothesizes that national values are resilient to clashes with interests to the extent to which these values are a salient feature of US national identity. The findings indicate that more prominent values (democracy) are almost impervious to countervailing interests while more tangential values (enterprise and human rights) exhibit different effects on US military aid allocation depending on the security and economic importance of the recipient state.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85461310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/00471178221139997
M. Sampson, Jue Wang
When a state is dissatisfied with an international institution it has different strategies available to it to secure change. These strategies are increasingly well understood due to research in the areas of regime complexity and institutional selection. But while there is an understanding of how the structure of a regime can influence the chances of success of different change proposals, there is less clarity on how the content of proposed changes impacts their success. In this article we decompose proposed institutional changes into two sub-types: Status-quo challenging and status-quo enhancing. Status-quo enhancing changes promote reforms that advance the objectives of the existing regime and so serve to drive change that would otherwise be limited by the inertia of existing institutions. Conversely, status-quo challenging changes undermine the stated goals of the existing regime. We develop these sub-types by comparing China’s attempts to secure changes in the global finance and trade regimes and find that for China status-quo enhancing changes have met with more success than status-quo challenging approaches because they have created more opportunities for productive coalition building.
{"title":"Status-quo enhancing versus status-quo challenging change in global economic governance: the case of China in finance and trade","authors":"M. Sampson, Jue Wang","doi":"10.1177/00471178221139997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221139997","url":null,"abstract":"When a state is dissatisfied with an international institution it has different strategies available to it to secure change. These strategies are increasingly well understood due to research in the areas of regime complexity and institutional selection. But while there is an understanding of how the structure of a regime can influence the chances of success of different change proposals, there is less clarity on how the content of proposed changes impacts their success. In this article we decompose proposed institutional changes into two sub-types: Status-quo challenging and status-quo enhancing. Status-quo enhancing changes promote reforms that advance the objectives of the existing regime and so serve to drive change that would otherwise be limited by the inertia of existing institutions. Conversely, status-quo challenging changes undermine the stated goals of the existing regime. We develop these sub-types by comparing China’s attempts to secure changes in the global finance and trade regimes and find that for China status-quo enhancing changes have met with more success than status-quo challenging approaches because they have created more opportunities for productive coalition building.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77388400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-26DOI: 10.1177/00471178221140086
Zhichao Tong
This paper examines one often overlooked aspect of Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics: the analogy he makes between firms and states. Specifically, I contrast this ‘states as firms’ analogy adopted by Waltz with the state of nature analogy that has often been attributed to him. I make three separate but interrelated claims: (1) the state of nature analogy is not only different from the states as firms analogy, but may also be an inappropriate one for structural realism in the sense that it fails to account for some of the theory’s key theses; (2) the states as firms analogy helps us to better understand, if not to fully embrace, how Waltz arrives at certain central premises of his theory; and (3) the states as firms analogy provides a more comprehensive account of dynamic effects of the international system, including the transformation of state attributes that would have been neglected by those who subscribe to the state of nature analogy.
{"title":"State of nature versus states as firms: reassessing the Waltzian analogy of structural realism","authors":"Zhichao Tong","doi":"10.1177/00471178221140086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221140086","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines one often overlooked aspect of Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics: the analogy he makes between firms and states. Specifically, I contrast this ‘states as firms’ analogy adopted by Waltz with the state of nature analogy that has often been attributed to him. I make three separate but interrelated claims: (1) the state of nature analogy is not only different from the states as firms analogy, but may also be an inappropriate one for structural realism in the sense that it fails to account for some of the theory’s key theses; (2) the states as firms analogy helps us to better understand, if not to fully embrace, how Waltz arrives at certain central premises of his theory; and (3) the states as firms analogy provides a more comprehensive account of dynamic effects of the international system, including the transformation of state attributes that would have been neglected by those who subscribe to the state of nature analogy.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81141151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-05DOI: 10.1177/00471178221136015
Martin Welz
This article uses the Chagos Archipelago that is administered by the United Kingdom, used as a military base by the US, and claimed by Mauritius, as a case study to explore competing international orders and move the theorization of international orders forward. Considering international orders as functionally and geographically limited sets of rules, I focus on those three sets of orders that functionally relate to human rights, the rule of law, and foreign rule. I show that those orders that promote human rights and the rule of law more consistently and reject foreign rule have extended their geographic scope. The Chagos Islands dispute is an intriguing case study to probe shifts of and attempts to protect these orders as a vote in 2019 at the United National General Assembly forced states to take sides. At the same time, my analysis highlights that realpolitik prevents the full overturn of the challenged orders.
{"title":"The Chagos Islands and international orders: human rights, rule of law, and foreign rule","authors":"Martin Welz","doi":"10.1177/00471178221136015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221136015","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses the Chagos Archipelago that is administered by the United Kingdom, used as a military base by the US, and claimed by Mauritius, as a case study to explore competing international orders and move the theorization of international orders forward. Considering international orders as functionally and geographically limited sets of rules, I focus on those three sets of orders that functionally relate to human rights, the rule of law, and foreign rule. I show that those orders that promote human rights and the rule of law more consistently and reject foreign rule have extended their geographic scope. The Chagos Islands dispute is an intriguing case study to probe shifts of and attempts to protect these orders as a vote in 2019 at the United National General Assembly forced states to take sides. At the same time, my analysis highlights that realpolitik prevents the full overturn of the challenged orders.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84536791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-25DOI: 10.1177/00471178221134341
Andrew R. Hom, Luke B. Campbell
Wartime dominates the 21st century. The term is ubiquitous in contemporary politics, providing an intuitive trope for narrating foreign relations, grappling with intractable policy problems, and responding to shocking events. Such pervasion makes it easy to forget that wartime is a relatively recent political invention. It began as an instrumental and somewhat stylized concept that authorized exceptional violence by promising to contain it within strict temporal boundaries. Yet in the same era that wartime achieved international prominence, war itself became an increasingly ordinary and extended dimension of politics. Today, ‘wartime’ refers to a number of unconstrained and often self-perpetuating violent practices that have changed global politics and national security policies in deep and enduring ways – nowhere more so than in the United States. To introduce the special issue, this article presents wartime as a neglected and paradoxical topic at the heart of International Relations. It sketches the concept’s historical emergence, from innovative Presidential discourse through expansion in World War II and the Cold War, to 21st century entrenchment in daily life and habits of foreign relations. We also make the case for why US wartime marks an especially apt example of a global phenomenon, and one worthy of increased scrutiny within International Relations (IR). Finally, we provide synoptic summaries of the articles that comprise the special issue, showing how they work together to interrogate key aspects of 21st century wartime. We conclude with reflections on how the study of wartime may be extended to better understand its impact on historical and contemporary global politics.
{"title":"Wartime in the 21st century","authors":"Andrew R. Hom, Luke B. Campbell","doi":"10.1177/00471178221134341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221134341","url":null,"abstract":"Wartime dominates the 21st century. The term is ubiquitous in contemporary politics, providing an intuitive trope for narrating foreign relations, grappling with intractable policy problems, and responding to shocking events. Such pervasion makes it easy to forget that wartime is a relatively recent political invention. It began as an instrumental and somewhat stylized concept that authorized exceptional violence by promising to contain it within strict temporal boundaries. Yet in the same era that wartime achieved international prominence, war itself became an increasingly ordinary and extended dimension of politics. Today, ‘wartime’ refers to a number of unconstrained and often self-perpetuating violent practices that have changed global politics and national security policies in deep and enduring ways – nowhere more so than in the United States. To introduce the special issue, this article presents wartime as a neglected and paradoxical topic at the heart of International Relations. It sketches the concept’s historical emergence, from innovative Presidential discourse through expansion in World War II and the Cold War, to 21st century entrenchment in daily life and habits of foreign relations. We also make the case for why US wartime marks an especially apt example of a global phenomenon, and one worthy of increased scrutiny within International Relations (IR). Finally, we provide synoptic summaries of the articles that comprise the special issue, showing how they work together to interrogate key aspects of 21st century wartime. We conclude with reflections on how the study of wartime may be extended to better understand its impact on historical and contemporary global politics.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78791131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-25DOI: 10.1177/00471178221132945
D. Armitage
The Finnish lawyer-historian Martti Koskenniemi’s new book, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power, 1300–1870 (2021), is the culmination of a 30-year-long project to deconstruct and historicise the reigning assumptions of the profession of international law. This article evaluates To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth in the context of Koskenniemi’s larger critical project as well as within the historiography of international law from the late 19th century to the present. It argues that Koskenniemi’s genealogical method is revealing and frustrating in equal measure: frustrating in its diffuseness and lack of overarching argument but revealing in its scope, in its erudition and in its ambitions to disrupt traditional teleologies, to reveal the constraining force of legal language and to expose European dialogues between ‘domestic’ and international law over more than 500 years.
{"title":"Home and the world: the legal imagination of Martti Koskenniemi","authors":"D. Armitage","doi":"10.1177/00471178221132945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221132945","url":null,"abstract":"The Finnish lawyer-historian Martti Koskenniemi’s new book, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power, 1300–1870 (2021), is the culmination of a 30-year-long project to deconstruct and historicise the reigning assumptions of the profession of international law. This article evaluates To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth in the context of Koskenniemi’s larger critical project as well as within the historiography of international law from the late 19th century to the present. It argues that Koskenniemi’s genealogical method is revealing and frustrating in equal measure: frustrating in its diffuseness and lack of overarching argument but revealing in its scope, in its erudition and in its ambitions to disrupt traditional teleologies, to reveal the constraining force of legal language and to expose European dialogues between ‘domestic’ and international law over more than 500 years.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86155362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-25DOI: 10.1177/00471178221134340
L. Silvestri
How should we think about war today? This afterword assesses the impact of using a temporal lens to understand contemporary conflict. Reflecting upon my own work on media and war alongside wider societal relationships to violence, I consider the ways in which new technologies and styles of warfighting change both our view of time and our understanding of war itself. In particular, I show how a shift from space to time helps focus attention on the personal and lived experience of US war, on the importance of routines both in constituting and obscuring wartime, on how many issues of contemporary war have become a matter of digitized perspective, and finally how emergent technologies have unsettled familiar temporal patterns of conflict. War today is media-drenched but struggles to occupy our attention over sustained periods. It remains an epochal political force that we tend to approach through deeply individualized, microcosmic stories. It proceeds at breakneck pace but rarely gets anywhere. These questions and tensions underline the importance of focusing not only on the resolutely temporal aspects of wartime, but also on the way in which shifts in time are changing the very nature and politics of war in the 21st century.
{"title":"Afterword: war:time","authors":"L. Silvestri","doi":"10.1177/00471178221134340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221134340","url":null,"abstract":"How should we think about war today? This afterword assesses the impact of using a temporal lens to understand contemporary conflict. Reflecting upon my own work on media and war alongside wider societal relationships to violence, I consider the ways in which new technologies and styles of warfighting change both our view of time and our understanding of war itself. In particular, I show how a shift from space to time helps focus attention on the personal and lived experience of US war, on the importance of routines both in constituting and obscuring wartime, on how many issues of contemporary war have become a matter of digitized perspective, and finally how emergent technologies have unsettled familiar temporal patterns of conflict. War today is media-drenched but struggles to occupy our attention over sustained periods. It remains an epochal political force that we tend to approach through deeply individualized, microcosmic stories. It proceeds at breakneck pace but rarely gets anywhere. These questions and tensions underline the importance of focusing not only on the resolutely temporal aspects of wartime, but also on the way in which shifts in time are changing the very nature and politics of war in the 21st century.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91290926","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-25DOI: 10.1177/00471178221135036
Terilyn Johnston Huntington, Amy E. Eckert
Scholars of war and combat posit that soldiers are more willing to execute strikes on adversaries when they perceive lower risk to themselves or less connection with their targets. Accordingly, technologies like the drone, which drastically expands the distance between adversaries, should make it easier to strike decisively and without remorse. The empirical record tells a different story. Despite operating very far away from the battle theater, drone operators suffer PTSD at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft. We argue that this unanticipated consequence of drone warfare stems from the unique way in which drone tactics marry spatial distance and temporal duration. Drone operators surveil their targets via detailed video footage for extended periods of time, both before and after firing, in order to identify or locate potential targets, to measure collateral risks, and afterward to assess a strike’s effectiveness. We argue that the clarity and duration of this surveillance tempers any advantage derived from ‘distance’. Spatial distance protects drone operators from enemy fire but temporal proximity exposes them to greater emotional costs of killing than previously thought. Indeed, prolonged observation temporally extends ‘contact’ and mitigates the dehumanizing effects imputed to distance. This unexpected effect highlights a shifting ethical dilemma. In the formulation of the ‘naked soldier’, combatants in a just war deserve respect due to shared vulnerability. Yet while spatial distance physically protects the drone operator, it also requires that they identify vulnerable and legitimate targets through contemporary timing practices that establish intimate knowledge of that target and may thus denude and even heighten the operator’s emotional vulnerability. While others have argued that contemporary wartime features technologies and tactics that undercut conventions about legitimate combat, we uncover an emerging ethical problem in moral and psychological harms associated with the way that drone warfare trades space for time.
{"title":"‘We watched his whole life unfold. . .Then you watch the death’: drone tactics, operator trauma, and hidden human costs of contemporary wartime","authors":"Terilyn Johnston Huntington, Amy E. Eckert","doi":"10.1177/00471178221135036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221135036","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars of war and combat posit that soldiers are more willing to execute strikes on adversaries when they perceive lower risk to themselves or less connection with their targets. Accordingly, technologies like the drone, which drastically expands the distance between adversaries, should make it easier to strike decisively and without remorse. The empirical record tells a different story. Despite operating very far away from the battle theater, drone operators suffer PTSD at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft. We argue that this unanticipated consequence of drone warfare stems from the unique way in which drone tactics marry spatial distance and temporal duration. Drone operators surveil their targets via detailed video footage for extended periods of time, both before and after firing, in order to identify or locate potential targets, to measure collateral risks, and afterward to assess a strike’s effectiveness. We argue that the clarity and duration of this surveillance tempers any advantage derived from ‘distance’. Spatial distance protects drone operators from enemy fire but temporal proximity exposes them to greater emotional costs of killing than previously thought. Indeed, prolonged observation temporally extends ‘contact’ and mitigates the dehumanizing effects imputed to distance. This unexpected effect highlights a shifting ethical dilemma. In the formulation of the ‘naked soldier’, combatants in a just war deserve respect due to shared vulnerability. Yet while spatial distance physically protects the drone operator, it also requires that they identify vulnerable and legitimate targets through contemporary timing practices that establish intimate knowledge of that target and may thus denude and even heighten the operator’s emotional vulnerability. While others have argued that contemporary wartime features technologies and tactics that undercut conventions about legitimate combat, we uncover an emerging ethical problem in moral and psychological harms associated with the way that drone warfare trades space for time.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83878496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-25DOI: 10.1177/00471178221135097
Andrew R. Hom, Luke B. Campbell
Wartime is fundamentally important to the study of international politics but not especially well understood. In this paper, we use timing theory and the concept of liturgy to unpack the contemporary dynamics of US wartime. A theory of political timing posits that all temporalities derive from and symbolize underlying social processes, and that these timing efforts unfold according to a master organizing standard. Liturgy highlights the way that ritualized acts help participants commune with the sacred – whether this be God or the nation-state. Scrutinizing contemporary US culture practices, we combine these ideas to argue that the notion of victory, as enacted through a widespread set of performative routines, acts as an organizing standard that embeds and reifies wartime in US security policy and daily life. Prevalent ideals of winning wars gather together a stylized past, explicate present problems, and generate expectations about future problems and conflicts. We tabulate several highly influential examples of this liturgy of triumph from national calendars, commemorative sites and events, and cultural practices like spectator sports. In addition to normalizing a view of wartime as having clear beginnings and uniquely successful endings, the US liturgy of triumph highlights a growing gap in the country’s relationship to the use of force. Most of what performative war liturgies commemorate is ‘finished’; it has been seen, known, and ostensibly won. Yet, much of what defines 21st century conflict is anything but certain or victorious. Moreover, US victory culture has only grown more acute the longer the concrete victories fail to materialize, suggesting a tragic code at the heart of US security politics.
{"title":"The liturgy of triumph: victory culture, popular rituals, and the US way of wartiming","authors":"Andrew R. Hom, Luke B. Campbell","doi":"10.1177/00471178221135097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221135097","url":null,"abstract":"Wartime is fundamentally important to the study of international politics but not especially well understood. In this paper, we use timing theory and the concept of liturgy to unpack the contemporary dynamics of US wartime. A theory of political timing posits that all temporalities derive from and symbolize underlying social processes, and that these timing efforts unfold according to a master organizing standard. Liturgy highlights the way that ritualized acts help participants commune with the sacred – whether this be God or the nation-state. Scrutinizing contemporary US culture practices, we combine these ideas to argue that the notion of victory, as enacted through a widespread set of performative routines, acts as an organizing standard that embeds and reifies wartime in US security policy and daily life. Prevalent ideals of winning wars gather together a stylized past, explicate present problems, and generate expectations about future problems and conflicts. We tabulate several highly influential examples of this liturgy of triumph from national calendars, commemorative sites and events, and cultural practices like spectator sports. In addition to normalizing a view of wartime as having clear beginnings and uniquely successful endings, the US liturgy of triumph highlights a growing gap in the country’s relationship to the use of force. Most of what performative war liturgies commemorate is ‘finished’; it has been seen, known, and ostensibly won. Yet, much of what defines 21st century conflict is anything but certain or victorious. Moreover, US victory culture has only grown more acute the longer the concrete victories fail to materialize, suggesting a tragic code at the heart of US security politics.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83602584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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