When international rituals go wrong: How ritual failure undermines peaceful change in NATO

Recent International Relations scholarship has emphasized the significance of ritual and emotion in international politics. Much less attention has been paid to instances of ritual failure. Ritual failure refers to the occurrence of deliberate mistakes, errors or sabotage to contest the sociocultural boundaries, hierarchies and structures underlying international rituals. In this article, I argue that ritual is an emotion transformer that generates a sense of community among North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members. Successful ritual makes community members experience ‘we-feeling’, which underpins peaceful change in a security community. NATO members carry the group-aroused emotions for a time and come out of the ritual encounter feeling strong and confident. Conversely, a failed ritual lowers the confidence of community members because they do not experience ‘we-feeling’. I suggest that this explains the internal divisions and anxieties when rituals go wrong, such as during Trump’s infamous speech in front of the new NATO headquarters in 2017.