The question of political change – how the nature and the distinguishing features of orders persist or change – is an enduring puzzle in international theory. We engage ensuing debates through the burgeoning literature on the politics of rituals. We proceed in two steps. First, we introduce and build on existing scholarship that presents emotions as central to how rituals create a sense of collective unity. Second and primarily, we then show that emotions are also key to understanding how rituals can disrupt and transform order. To think so appears counterintuitive at first, for it is natural to think of rituals as being associated with tradition, with time-honoured processes and patterns. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, we show how the very power of rituals to enact and entrench political orders also provides disenfranchised individuals and groups with opportunities to challenge existing power relations. We argue that discomfort – being unsettled – is important for understanding how ritual and political change take place. We do so by linking rituals with shifts in collective feelings. The ensuing affective agency can explain how rituals – and the political orders they manage and sustain – are enacted and change over time.

A central concept in Global International Relations (IR) is ‘global’ or ‘globality,’ which has been commonly understood as the sum total of all geo-cultural parts of the world. This understanding underpins Global IR’s efforts to make IR more geo-epistemologically representative and inclusive, but it has been criticized for its essentialism trap and geo-epistemology. While many critics problematize Global IR’s conception of globality, few pay attention to an alternative form of existence of globality, namely, its embodiment within each of the ‘geo-cultural’ parts. This article aims to engage with this form of globality by drawing on the conceptual framework of quantum holography, which sees the whole as not just comprising its parts but also being encoded within them. The implications are that if global-local relationality is holographic in nature, globalizing IR should entail not only externally expanding IR’s geo-epistemological horizon but also discovering and appreciating the globality that always already exists within each locale. Thus, this approach may help us tackle the stubborn binary of global vs. local/national in the Global IR debate and mitigate its essentialism trap and geo-epistemology. To illustrate, we apply this framework to problematize ‘Chineseness’ in the Chinese School of IR theory.

In 2021, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), an umbrella organization mobilizing a network of sectoral initiatives for climate action, was launched to ‘transform the global financial system.’ In part due to its efforts, hundreds of global financial companies joined and collectively committed to net-zero emissions reduction targets. But the momentum was short-lived: in the ensuing years, internal and external challenges led to defections, the reconfiguration of GFANZ, and the collapse of affiliate alliances. Such a pattern rests uneasily with theories of change like the norm cascade, which asserts that exponential uptake is a prelude to resilience, not fragility. In this paper, I argue that cases such as GFANZ may be better described as a ‘hype cycle’ rather than a norm cascade, where ambiguity and uncertainty limit normative and calculative reasoning; actors refer to each other’s behavior as an indication of what to do; and time limits incentivize participation to avoid being left behind. I demonstrate the validity of this account through an analysis of three GFANZ-affiliated alliances (the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, and the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative), and their episodes of membership growth and decline.

International relations scholarship typically assumes that states achieve their objectives through deliberate, strategic action. This article develops an alternative account: many state objectives are self-effacing – they cannot be attained directly, but only as byproducts of other pursuits. I argue that this dynamic is especially likely under interdependence, where networks emerge through the voluntary participation of new entrants. Under such conditions, overt bids for future leverage provoke resistance, hedging, and duplication. Where durable structural advantage does materialize, it tends to arise indirectly, as the unintended result of principled state commitments, or of nonstate actors pursuing goals unrelated to geopolitics. I illustrate the argument through cases in global finance and global supply chains, showing how leverage repeatedly emerges from processes no state intended. Finally, I turn to foreign influence campaigns to demonstrate how states can nonetheless design conditions conducive to ‘welcome byproducts.’ Yet doing so requires relinquishing some control. The result is a reframing of strategy in international relations: dominance proves most likely when it is not openly pursued.

Scholars of Kant have long been critical of International Relations’ appropriation of his Toward Perpetual Peace, in particular as it informed democratic peace theory. Now, with democratic backsliding occurring even at the core of the ‘separate peace’ the theory claims developed between democracies, that critique gains newfound salience. This essay demonstrates how the theory is unable to understand democratic backsliding, especially as it is occurring in the United States, but would have been able to if not for misinterpretations of certain substantive elements of Kant’s schema, and, more crucially, a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and proper use of it. Grounding a reading of Toward Perpetual Peace more thoroughly in Kant’s philosophical system, I develop the idea of conceiving of and utilizing the essay’s schema in terms of what I call a critical cosmology of peace – a holistic and evolving vision of interrelated practices, conditions, and mechanisms encompassing all of humanity through time and space, and meant mainly to act as a tool of perpetual critique of whatever existing form and degree of democratic peace is currently in existence.

A growing number of governments are seeking to return control from supranational authorities to the state. Many of them wish to do so without sacrificing the benefits of deep international cooperation. But this desire to increase national control while maintaining cooperation – which we term ‘sovereigntist internationalism’ – is often frustrated in practice. We argue that this is due to a ‘trust paradox’ these governments face when their ideological commitments push them towards trust-based institutional arrangements while simultaneously rendering them less trusting and less trustworthy. We illustrate our argument with a case study of the Brexit negotiations during Theresa May’s premiership from 2016 to 2019. Drawing on elite interviews, we show how the UK government sought to transpose existing forms of economic cooperation into looser institutional arrangements but failed to convince the European Commission that enough trust could be generated to make the continuation of deep cooperation viable without strong control mechanisms. Our argument advances debates in International Relations (IR) by, first, explaining governments’ sometimes contradictory preferences for institutional designs; second, showing that different actors need different levels of trust to achieve similar levels of cooperation; and, third, improving our understanding of how populist actors view international institutions.