Introduction
‘It is not possible to sit. It is beyond all reason and reality to hear the representative of Putin present their case’, the Icelandic ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) tweets in April 2022, after leaving the meeting of the Permanent Council along with most diplomats.Footnote 1 The attached picture reveals rows of empty chairs and the Russian delegate delivering a statement in a room without interlocutors.
Walkouts – diplomats massively leaving a meeting – appear to run counter to multilateralism’s core practices and our usual understanding of diplomacy. Through them, diplomats refuse interaction in the forum. Walkouts are neither exclusive to the OSCE nor to the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, as shown by the walkout at the 2025 opening of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly during the Israeli Prime Minister’s speech,Footnote 2 or the United States’ delegation departure from a UN Security Council meeting in July 2026 after the French ambassador commented on their vote against the mandate extension of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk.Footnote 3 Yet, despite being a long-standing collective action in international politics, an in-depth account of walkouts has yet to be provided in the literature. Walkouts could readily be classified as ‘behavioural contestation’,Footnote 4 a form of exit or empty chair politics,Footnote 5 and thus analysed as diplomatic signalling.Footnote 6 An in-depth ethnographic account of the emergence, use, and contestation of diplomatic walkouts at the OSCE after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine suggests that they are part of a more extensive social process of disruption management: by leaving the room, diplomats do not walk out from multilateralism but strive to keep it alive.
This article stems from an ethnography of OSCE diplomacy since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, including direct engagement through seven months of participant observation as an intern at the permanent mission of a European participating state between April and December 2022. Its theorisation is constructed abductively from encounters with, and the performance of, walkouts at the OSCE after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine – which challenged available conceptual tools and demanded new explanations.Footnote 7 A product of the Cold War, the OSCE’s identity is constructed around being a consensus-based forum for maintaining dialogue between non-like-minded states ‘from Vancouver to Vladivostok’Footnote 8 and promoting peaceful change.Footnote 9 The organisation is a heuristic case of multilateralism, understood as ‘a global governance practice characterised by an inclusive, institutionalised, and principled form of political dialogue’.Footnote 10 Since 2014, the organisation’s work and raison d’être have been especially tied to that of the Ukrainian conflict, as the organisation contributed to the negotiation of the Minsk Agreements, and its two monitoring missions became its flagships.Footnote 11 The 2022 Russian invasion pushed the OSCE into an existential crisis, calling into question its identity and core practices.Footnote 12 The emergence and recurrence of walkouts at the OSCE raises the question of how diplomats navigate situations in which the very practices sustaining the order are thrown into question, and, corollarily, how multilateral orders endure.
Processes of collective problem management are at the heart of multilateralism. Multilateral diplomats continuously deal with crises:Footnote 13 delegates write a last-minute statement, attend an emergency meeting to discuss worrying security developments in a member state, or listen to reports on the organisation’s work in disaster situations. In recent years, substantive work has been devoted to ‘crisis diplomacy’,Footnote 14 a ‘sporadic’ activity, breaking away from usual diplomatic practices ‘to manage unexpected disruptive circumstances’.Footnote 15 This scholarship focuses mostly on how diplomats and diplomatic institutions manage international crises; it has sparsely explored the effects of crises – or disruption – on diplomatic practices and actions themselves. Everyday unreflective habits make the bedrock of multilateralism and stabilise its social order,Footnote 16 but there is no evidence of ‘meaningful action in reconstruction of diplomatic practice during crisis situations’.Footnote 17 In practice theory, disruption has been overshadowed by a focus on alignment, face-saving,Footnote 18 the production of trust,Footnote 19 or management of dissent.Footnote 20
In this article, I consider how diplomats act and interact with each other when the core practices of their social order are disrupted by actors located inside the order. Contrary to day-to-day multilateral crises, in disrupted situations – that is, situations when an order’s anchoring practicesFootnote 21 are threatened and reconfigured – multilateral diplomats can appraise habits and practices as insufficient or even ethically problematic. In situations of sustained deep contestation, actors may also seek to ‘go on’ without fully reconstructing anchoring practices. This article introduces coping as the process through which diplomats provisionally sustain institutional interaction when reconstruction is politically or practically unattainable. Walkouts act as a coping strategy, a situational and embodied effort to keep the disrupted multilateral order going by engaging the emotional, practical, and ethical frictions of disruption. They allowed diplomats to remain in the OSCE without reproducing ordinary dialogue with Russia, while their later routinisation revealed the unstable ordering effects of coping.
The article is divided into six parts. This first section locates walkouts within the diplomatic repertoire of action and considers how they have been considered in the literature so far. It highlights their situatedness and the value of ethnography in explaining their use beyond signalling. I then specify the conditions under which the ethnography was conducted and its role in the theorisation of walkouts as a strategy of coping. The second section links walkouts and their use at the OSCE after the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the broader issue of diplomacy under disruption. It builds on the literature on diplomatic practices, particularly anchoring practices, as well as pragmatist inquiry, to show the existence of a distinct diplomacy in liminality that requires specific study and theorisation. I outline how walkouts are one strategy in a wider process of coping, acting as a heuristic case to study how coping unfolds processually, through evolving and contested ways of making do with the emotional, normative, and practical frictions of the disruption of multilateral anchoring practices. The next three sections unpack how this framework works empirically through the ethnographic narrative of the emergence, evolution, and contestation of walkouts at the OSCE. To do so, I reconstruct the OSCE’s diplomatic order prior to 2022 and the centrality of dialogue as a multilateral anchoring practice, and how its disruption by the Russian invasion of Ukraine prompted diplomats to walk out of meetings. After outlining their evolving use, I provide an ethnographic retelling of a typical walkout at its peak. The narrative highlights the embodiment and reflexivity of walkouts as well as their unstable embeddedness within the cloth of diplomatic practices. The third empirical section traces the impact of walkouts on the changing boundaries of diplomacy at the OSCE, including through their growing contestation. It argues that walkouts never fully replaced dialogue as a diplomatic anchor but allowed the institution to temporarily continue without reproducing the existing order. The conclusion of the article first brings together the findings on diplomatic walkouts, before extending them to broader issues pertaining to contemporary diplomacy.
Making sense of walkouts
This section reviews the sparse literature on diplomatic walkouts and shows how ethnography makes it possible to explain their situated use and specifying the conditions under which they were studied within the OSCE community after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Walkouts in diplomatic practice
Diplomacy is organised around sustained engagement. Multilateral diplomacy in particular is reproduced by continued presence in the room and the maintenance of interaction among delegates.Footnote 22 Walkouts present an apparent paradox: by physically withdrawing from a meeting, diplomats suspend the interaction that constitutes multilateral diplomacy without abandoning either the institution or the diplomatic order.
Walkouts have long been used episodically by diplomats and other institutional actors, but they have received little sustained scholarly attention. References often remain anecdotal or are conflated with broader forms of disengagement such as boycotts or exits. Unlike exiting an international organisationFootnote 23 or boycotting negotiations, a walkout does not terminate participation. It is closer to what studies of social movements would describe as temporary forms of disengagement or even a ‘diplomatic strike’.Footnote 24
Existing scholarship mentions walkouts primarily in relation to their strategic and communicative functions. In negotiation studies, they are understood as pressure tactics or as the ‘ultimate protest’Footnote 25 designed to alter bargaining dynamics or compel concessions.Footnote 26 During the 2013 Warsaw Climate Conference, civil society organisations and members of the G77 collectively walked out of negotiations to express frustration with perceived asymmetries in the process.Footnote 27 Hall likewise links walkouts to a ‘diplomacy of anger’, as ‘gestures meant to convey displeasure’.Footnote 28 At the level of state leaders, Wong sees individual walkouts as an extreme form of diplomatic ‘withdrawal rituals’, in which actors abruptly interrupt face-to-face interaction to mark the limits of acceptable engagement.Footnote 29 A parallel with research on Indian parliamentary politics, where walkouts are a recurring practice, similarly shows how leaving the room disrupts the institutional orderFootnote 30 while becoming ‘a more acceptable method of protest in parliament, despite, or perhaps because of, its solemn status’.Footnote 31
Across these perspectives, walkouts are considered communicative performances directed towards external audiences or negotiating counterparts, a form of signalling or behavioural dissent. The question of how walkouts relate to the maintenance or challenge of institutional engagement itself remains underexplored, even more so when considering the repetition of walkouts. When actors repeatedly leave meetings while continuing to attend subsequent sessions and remain invested in the institutional setting, walkouts no longer appear as acts of withdrawal in any straightforward sense. Understanding them therefore requires looking at how walkouts are coordinated, performed, embodied, and reintegrated into ongoing diplomatic interaction. Their repetition also raises the broader analytical problem of making sense of the relation between walkouts and the diplomatic order. The limited existing scholarship has focused on what walkouts produce. This article, in turn, asks what walkouts allow diplomats to do.
An ethnographic outlook on walkouts at the OSCE
Ethnography is a method of choice to explain how and why they are situationally performed. The added value of the ethnographic method in International Relations has been demonstrated by several influential studies, including of the diplomatic bureaucracy,Footnote 32 the UN Security Council,Footnote 33 or the use of technology at the European Union.Footnote 34 Following Wedeen, I understand ethnography as an ‘immersion in the place and lives of people under study’ with a sensibility ‘to chronicle aspects of lived experience and to place that experience in conversation with prevailing scholarly themes, problems, and concepts’.Footnote 35
Ethnography has played a pivotal role in the conceptualisation of walkouts and their theorisation as part of a coping process. Theorising from (or through) ethnography is a matter of debate, in particular when one wishes to go beyond categorisation to explain processes or phenomena.Footnote 36 Sociologist Jack Katz sketches seven ways to use ‘luminous descriptions’ to develop explanations;Footnote 37 this paper uses two of them. First, an enigma or paradox, that is, ‘a tension dramatized in the subjects’ interaction’ which brings the researcher to ask themselves ‘why would they do that?’Footnote 38 fuels the move to explanation. I arrived in ViennaFootnote 39 two weeks after the start of full-scale invasion of Ukraine and was an ‘observant participant’Footnote 40 from April to December 2022 through an internship with the delegation of a small EU member State.Footnote 41 I attended the weekly Permanent Council and Forum for Security Co-operation meetings,Footnote 42 smaller working groups, ad hoc briefings, and EU coordination processes. Beyond the formal structures, I routinely observed the informal sociability that structures diplomatic life. Walkouts became a significant object of inquiry through the abductive confrontation between the literature on diplomatic practices and ethnographic notes on the OSCE social order following the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The omnipresence of walkouts, reflected in their frequency and place in the diplomatic discourse, was inconsistent with the OSCE’s usual diplomatic practice. The lack of an in-depth study of the performance of walkouts in diplomacy also limited the analytical framework available a priori.
Second, an ethnographer can ‘describe not only how a given phenomenon emerges in social life but also how it erodes’.Footnote 43 Between 2022 and 2026, I conducted six field trips to Vienna, amounting to almost one year of ethnographic immersion. Over time, I traced the rise and decline of walkouts as an acceptable gesture in the OSCE social order, through their frequency, how and when they were used, and the general discourse around them. The organisation of the data follows the social process as it unfolds by ‘[giving] a temporal structure to data collection that may put them as close to inherently elusive causal contingencies as any research can’.Footnote 44 For that purpose, ethnographic notes capture variations in action as they occur, rather than relying solely on diplomats’ ex-ante reconstructions. This is particularly important in the case at hand as the acceptability of walkouts decreased over time. The article also draws on 29 semi-structured interviews conducted between December 2022 and July 2026 with OSCE diplomats and staff, as well as diplomatic documents,Footnote 45 to identify meaning attached to walkouts and reconstruct their evolution between field trips. My embeddedness within one national delegation risked over-identification and limited access to others, especially delegations aligned with Russia. I mitigated this by conducting the interviews after the end of my internship to reduce positional concerns, triangulating data across interviews, observations, and documents, and paying close attention to Russian and Belarusian during formal and informal interactions.
The ethnographic approach taken in this article also influences its writing style, which aims to strike a fine balance between sensitive narrative that brings the reader into the meeting room, and analytical clarity. The paper contains ‘luminous descriptions’Footnote 46 of situations, atmospheres, and bodily movements. While not an autoethnography per se,Footnote 47 I have not erased my presence from the final text. Beyond specifying the conditions of data production, the self-references convey the first-hand experience of participating in walkouts and observing their unfolding.Footnote 48
Coping with the disruption of multilateral practices
Going on with multilateral diplomacy under disruption
The use of walkouts at the OSCE after 2022 should be placed in the wider context of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine’s effects on multilateral diplomacy. It has brought a ‘reframing of […] the feasibility of multilateralism under war conditions’,Footnote 49 raising the problems of Russia’s continued institutional participation alongside pressures for its isolation and efforts by chairs to preserve collective agendas. The war has also deepened the challenges against the principled underpinnings of multilateralism.Footnote 50 The evolution of multilateral diplomacy since the Russian war against Ukraine is a paradigmatic configuration to consider multilateral diplomacy in disruption, that is, situations in which existing ‘anchoring practices’Footnote 51 – which enact and produce the principles of ordering relations among states that organise and define multilateralismFootnote 52 – are called into question, suspended, displaced, or reconfigured.Footnote 53
Anchoring practices enable and constrain diplomatic actions. They carry a diplomatic order’s normativity via standards of action and produce its boundariesFootnote 54 by defining the appropriate ‘set of strategies for action’.Footnote 55 Multilateral dialogue is particularly salient to consider in the case of walkouts, forming the practical arrangement as much as a normative ideal, produced through presence around the same table, turn-taking for talking, respect for the meeting procedures, which lead to a recognition of others as interlocutors.Footnote 56 Repeated walkouts at the OSCE go against this practice, breaking with the arrangement of presence and exchange that normally sustains multilateral diplomacy without necessarily implying a total breakdown of diplomacy and diplomatic practices.
Contrary to shocks, which can be endogenous or exogenous,Footnote 57 disruption unfolds within the order itself, even more so when an actor associated with disruption remains a recognised participant in the order, as Russia at the OSCE. It unsettles the shared meanings and expectations that underpin anchoring practices. Disruption carries an ethical dimension: habits may break ‘if one is convinced that they are normatively unacceptable’.Footnote 58 In this sense, disruption challenges the boundaries of social order, opening a space for, and potentially demanding, agency and judgment.Footnote 59 The questioning of existing diplomatic rules of engagement reshapes affiliations and affective ties among participantsFootnote 60 and generates tensions in diplomatic practice that are at once emotional,Footnote 61 normative, and practical.
As shown by Cornut in the case of frontline diplomats during the Arab Springs, changes in diplomatic practices generally happen incrementally, to adapt to new situations.Footnote 62 Under disruption, however, the existing schemes of actions are suspended as their normative and ethical underpinnings are questioned. In contrast, pragmatism considers what happens when practices or habits do not bounce back. For pragmatists such as Dewey, disruption is at the source of thinking and inquiry.Footnote 63 The suspension of ‘the belief and the routines of actions based upon it’,Footnote 64 i.e. anchoring practices, leads to a ‘moral fissure’ of the social ties forming the order.Footnote 65 Through deliberative and experimental inquiry, actors creatively reconstruct practices based on their renewed situational expectations.Footnote 66 However, diplomacy under disruption involves situations in which shared reconstruction is not available as the disruptor remains inside the order.
Explaining the use of walkouts after the Russian invasion thereby brings me to complement existing theorisations of diplomatic practices to consider the specificities of diplomacy under disruption as a fluid and informal process of reconfiguration that takes place in the absence of the ordinary reproduction of the order’s structures and processes. The space between the suspension of anchoring practices such as dialogue and their possible reconstruction brings diplomats to ‘make do’ with what can no longer be reproduced.Footnote 67 The process is instead oriented towards sustaining interaction despite unresolved indeterminacy. As noted by Constantinou, when crises become ‘turning points that transform relationships’, diplomats may have an interest in ‘initiating or sustaining the disruption of a system’,Footnote 68 challenging the prevailing assumption that crisis diplomacy aims to restore normalcy and ‘[reinstate] the habitual inertia of international processes’.Footnote 69 Then, going on neither means returning to routine nor resolving the crisis, but sustaining enough interaction for diplomacy to remain possible under unresolved disruption. The next subsection conceptualises this liminal process,Footnote 70 nested in the tension between a need for action and the impossible reconstruction of anchoring practices as coping, and walkouts as one of its strategies.
Walkouts as diplomatic coping
I borrow the concept of coping from the psychology of stress management, where it refers to ‘constantly changing cognitive and behavioural efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person’.Footnote 71 Transposed to diplomacy, I consider diplomatic coping as a collective process that materialises diplomats’ ability to go on in disruption. More precisely, it is a liminal process through which diplomatic actors strive to manage the emotional, practical, and normative tensions from the disruption of diplomacy’s anchoring practices. It comprises various and changing coping strategies: situational and embodied efforts to sustain the disrupted diplomatic order. Walkouts are one of them, provisionally displacing ordinary engagement when it cannot be reproduced.
To specify how coping works, I unpack its three key characteristics: coping is a liminal process (1), comprised of diplomatic actions that act as coping strategies (2), which provide ways for the diplomatic order to continue in disruption (3).
(1) Coping is a liminal process, influenced by the unfolding of disruption within the order and the related practical, emotional, and normative frictions experienced by diplomatic actors. Each stage affects how actors (re)interpret and engage with their environment.Footnote 72 The anticipation stage is characterised by the continued hold of existing anchors, as actors build on existing problem-solving practices – in the case of the OSCE, efforts to mitigate tensions in the run-up to the invasion in 2021–2022. The impact stage marks the height of the suspension of normality – the day of the invasion or its immediate aftermath. It is pivotal in the emergence of coping strategies that break away from diplomatic standards, such as walkouts. Finally, the post-impact period is defined by the unstable adjustment between the unsettled action and the need to maintain the diplomatic environment. Strategies that emerged in the impact stage can be questioned as their meaning and ends-in-view evolve. This process is not fully linear, and renewed disruption – in this article’s case, for example, intensified Russian attacks against civilians or the discovery of a massacre – can lead to the reinterpretation of existing strategies.
(2) Coping strategies are the concrete ways diplomats act through disruption. They are more reflexive and less rule-bound than traditional diplomatic practices. As Turner notes, liminal entities ‘are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’.Footnote 73 Performed in lieu of suspended anchoring practices, they are less constrained by them. They can therefore involve greater reflexivity and challenge the boundaries of acceptable diplomatic actions, such as civility, sociability, face-saving,Footnote 74 or emotional and bodily composure. The disruptive dimension of walkouts does not preclude their repeated use in a multilateral forum, despite their departure from existing diplomatic standards. Since coping strategies such as walkouts are less internalised than practices, background knowledge plays a more limited role. Yet not all actions under disruption are coping strategies. Notably, practices remain central, and coping strategies partly rest on established practices.Footnote 75 Coping strategies do not necessarily form a coherent whole and are constantly changing. One analytical strength of this theorisation is to help make sense of the contradictory actions in moments of disruption and their constant evolution.
(3) Coping makes possible the provisional continuation of ordering when anchoring practices are no longer reproduced. As an action-centred process, it is not defined by the outcomes of particular strategies, but by the efforts to sustain order, regardless of whether they succeed. Moreover, there is no need for an explicit intent to replace anchoring practices, only for a general ‘end-in-view’ to go on through disruption. The coping process – that is, the body of coping strategies, their interaction, and their evolution over time – still shapes social order even when it does not stabilise it. In the short term, coping strategies allow for an incomplete reproduction of the social order. For example, walking out helps diplomats manage the emotional and political burden of disruption, allowing them to continue attending multilateral meetings and engaging with the institution. In the medium term, some strategies may enter the diplomatic repertoire of action within a social order and reshape background knowledge. As liminal experiences, coping strategies can have a long-standing influence on diplomatic know-how.Footnote 76 Over time, they can produce boundary effects by making the standards of competent diplomacy themselves available for dispute. In that case, a group of coping strategies might come to replace an existing anchoring practice. Finally, clashing coping strategies could contribute to the collapse of the social order. Beyond walkouts, this collective and dynamic process plays a critical role in reshaping disrupted orders, potentially leading to the evolution of new diplomatic norms and practices.
Taken together, this theorisation explains how walkouts can recur without becoming ordinary diplomatic practices. Treating them as coping strategies directs attention to how they are practically accomplished – coordinated, embodied, and integrated into meetings – and to what their repetition does to diplomatic order. As such, walkouts – and generally coping strategies – are not isolated acts of behavioural protest or signalling, but part of a broader process of going on through disruption, whose effects on diplomatic ordering remain provisional, contested, and unstable.
More broadly, diplomatic coping is a more fluid, less constrained form of diplomacy, resting on actors’ liminal experience of transitional moments that call into question how they should act. In contrast to improvisation, which is an inherent dimension of practice through which diplomats choose the right form of action or adapt it on the fly based on their background knowledge and feel of the game,Footnote 77 coping involves innovation or stepping away from existing practices because they are deemed unsuitable.Footnote 78 Being liminal, coping also resists the binary between breaking and continuing diplomatic engagement.
Three scope conditions of coping can be outlined: the disruption of practices that ordinarily anchor interaction, actors’ continued investment in the relevant institutional setting, and the practical or political unavailability of a shared reconstruction. They distinguish coping from adjacent concepts. Coping happens when the disruption is ongoing within the social order, thereby preventing the use of problem-solving strategies. The challenging of core practices of the order also differentiates it from crisis management. Finally, the continuing investment within that order and its sustainment separates coping from contestation or exit.
From sitting together to walking out
This section reconstructs the OSCE diplomatic order in which sitting together functioned as an anchoring practice, and the disruption that made leaving the room possible after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Before walkouts: OSCE dialogue and the anticipation of disruption
Since its inception, the OSCE – initially named the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) – has been defined as a forum for the management of East–West confrontation, meant to gather non-like-minded states around the shared assumption that ‘one does not want war, that one has to prevent it under all circumstances’.Footnote 79 The CSCE negotiations led to the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, considered the normative foundation of the OSCE and its practices. The ‘Helsinki spirit’, meant as the ‘willingness to engage in genuine dialogue, even with adversaries and competitors’,Footnote 80 is frequently invoked at the OSCE to inspire good-faith engagement with practices of dialogue. This ‘willingness of adversaries to come together for dialogue’ lies at the heart of the OSCE’s raison d’être and anchoring practices.Footnote 81
The practice of ‘permanent, institutionalised, and open dialogue’Footnote 82 is both a mean and an end of the OSCE. As the crisis of multilateralism and relations between Russia and the West deepened, and Russian contestation at the OSCE intensified,Footnote 83 the value of a dialogue-based organisation was both questioned and reinforced: the worse the situation gets, the greater the need for dialogue. The 2014 ‘Ukraine crisis’ (as it was termed at the OSCE at the time) and Russia’s annexation of Crimea were a case in point. They provided the OSCE with a new lease on life,Footnote 84 particularly through the consensus decision that year to set up in Ukraine the biggest mission in the organisation’s history, tasked with supporting the implementation of the Minsk agreements.Footnote 85 More importantly for this article, the centrality of dialogue and engagement between non-like-minded states was reinforced in meeting rooms.Footnote 86 While the annexation of Crimea increased tensions and sowed doubts about Russia’s good-faith engagement, it did not make OSCE dialogue untenable. The crisis was still managed through the organisation’s usual repertoire of confidence-building, monitoring, and dialogue. Sitting together remained difficult, but it nonetheless appeared necessary and diplomatically meaningful.
This continued hold of dialogue was also visible in the anticipation stage before the full-scale invasion. In 2021 and early 2022, OSCE diplomats continued to engage with habitual problem-solving diplomatic practices, drawing on multilateral dialogue sedimented by previous experience. As Russia amassed troops and equipment at the Ukrainian border in May and October 2021, OSCE diplomats engaged in practices of dialogue and mobilised Confidence- and Security-Building Measures. Diplomats acted in line with ideas of dialogue, reciprocity, and good-faith engagement as normative standards for diplomatic practice at the OSCE, and the Secretariat acted through typical ‘OSCE diplomacy’ to maintain a minimal level of trust and security.Footnote 87 In early February 2022, Ukraine activated provisions of the Vienna Document (2011) that allow for a meeting with a participating State in cases of unusual military activity.Footnote 88 The Russian delegation refused to attend the meeting, arguing that Russia had not been conducting any unusual military activity that would require holding such a meeting.Footnote 89
The same logic shaped the 2022 Polish Chairmanship’s effort to improve the atmosphere of debates at the OSCE and return to the Helsinki spirit of cooperation.Footnote 90 A ‘last attempt’Footnote 91 was the ‘Renewed European Security Dialogue’, a political process intended to foster open dialogue around core European security issues,Footnote 92 aligned with the OSCE practice of informal initiatives to revive security among participating States, such as the 2009 Corfu Process. While present at the initiative’s official launch on 8 February 2022,Footnote 93 the Russian delegation denied it any value, claiming to prefer talks with NATO and the United States.Footnote 94 Less than two weeks after the launch of the ‘Renewed European Security Dialogue’, Russia invaded Ukraine.
The anticipation period was characterised by the use of habitual problem-solving practices. Diplomats resorted to a known repertoire built on assumptions about how OSCE diplomacy is done, what was still possible, and how tensions should be managed. These attempts to address the crisis beforehand, through accepted practices, shaped the construction of disruption and the emergence of particular coping strategies.
The invasion as shock and the construction of disruption
Despite mounting intelligence reports, at the OSCE ‘everybody had a tiny hope’Footnote 95 that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine could be avoided. The announcement of the war came as a shock to the OSCE diplomatic community. Ambassadors learned of the start of the war through a 4:30 a.m. message from the Ukrainian ambassador in a WhatsApp group for all OSCE heads of mission. ‘We used the group mostly for congratulations on national days or things like that. This was the last message ever sent in that group’, said an ambassador.Footnote 96 The invasion brought an instant severing of social ties as well as a suspension of existing sensemaking frames – ‘that perspective “I think it’s possible” got pushed into the space of “it happened”’.Footnote 97 This shock became the crucible through which diplomats challenged prior beliefs and constructed the Russian full-scale invasion as a disruption of the OSCE’s order.
On a macro level, the Russian invasion itself was considered a breach of all the principles of the Helsinki Final Act and of its aim of preventing interstate conflict in Europe. On an interactional level, the fruitless attempts to engage with Russia through the OSCE in the weeks preceding the invasion, and the double game of Russian diplomats – reassuring their colleagues in Vienna while the invasion was organised in Moscow – exposed the inconsistencies in the practices of diplomacy and dialogue in this environment. The OSCE community saw itself as particularly affected by the war because of the organisation’s long-standing work in Ukraine. Years of continuous discussions across forums gave diplomats the sense that the ‘OSCE perspective is the most intimate of this conflict’.Footnote 98 This led to a rupture with existing OSCE anchoring practices, whose continuation was deemed both impossible and undesirable, as ‘the Russians have killed diplomacy as we knew it’.Footnote 99 At the special reinforced meeting of the Permanent Council organised on the day of the invasion, the OSCE Chairman, Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau,Footnote 100 verbalised the suspension of dialogue as an OSCE anchoring practice, noting that ‘there [was] no way of going back to the spirit of trust and cooperation, which was the cornerstone of the Organization’.Footnote 101 The invasion was interpreted and experienced as an uprooting of the OSCE’s anchoring practice of dialogue, which was considered ‘no longer desirable’.Footnote 102 Disruption was built through the emotional, normative, and practical frictions around OSCE engagement after 24 February 2022, and crystallised around the meeting table.
At the meeting table
Diplomats shared a strong sense that there could be no return to meaningful dialogue with Russia and Belarus. At the same time, for most, Russia and Belarus could not and should not be suspended from the organisation, resulting in a situation in which representatives were still formally required to share a room and follow the existing procedures, even though the basic assumptions underpinning those practices were considered shattered. Yet any attempt to renegotiate existing practices was rendered impossible by Russian diplomats’ continuous reproduction of disruption through meetings used to justify the war and contest facts, and by the continuation of the war itself.
Multilateralism is a structured form of dialogue that rests on physicality and sociality, with sitting around a table with representatives of other states being one of its material foundations.Footnote 103 The breakdown of the OSCE’s multilateral order thus became tangible at the very site where it had previously been enacted. Meetings in the months that followed the invasion were emotionally charged: faces were serious, and chitchat almost non-existent.Footnote 104 All of them started with an agenda point on the war.Footnote 105 The Ukrainian delegate would take the floor first and describe – sometimes fighting back tears – the suffering of civilians fleeing bombings, the targeting of children, and accounts of sexual assaults and torture, ‘really graphic and unpleasant things’.Footnote 106 In an entirely silent room, many diplomats would lose their composure. ‘I couldn’t help myself; tears were running from my eyes. I was just so helpless’, later confided a European diplomat.Footnote 107 At an individual level, some found it too hard to stay in the room. ‘There have been a couple of times I‘ve had to relieve colleagues because they have messaged to say, “I can’t listen to any more of this, I’m sorry”’, the same diplomat told me.Footnote 108
As both a low-level delegate and a researcher, I did not allow myself to show emotion or leave the room unless instructed to do so. Sitting across from the Russian delegates, I observed their reactions to Ukrainian statements: scrolling through their phones, rolling their eyes, and smiling faintly. They sometimes took the floor in a ‘right of reply’ after Western statements of support for Ukraine, and other times waited until their own agenda item to speak. Practically speaking, there was no way to prevent Russian diplomats from delivering statements others deemed insulting, filled with disinformation, and that went well beyond the customary five-minute limit,Footnote 109 which was viewed as a misuse of the practice of dialogue. Western diplomats did not try to curtail their Russian counterparts’ right to speak. Yet, the ‘outrage of having to listen to Russian statements justifying the invasion’Footnote 110 was experienced as untenable by many. OSCE diplomats simultaneously constructed disruption and the need to go on. They tried to ‘figure out what is possible and what is not possible’Footnote 111 for diplomatic engagement in the post-invasion OSCE.
At the meeting table, diplomats faced a shifting dilemma: how to remain in the OSCE without allowing Russian interventions to count as dialogue. Walkouts emerged as a way to sustain OSCE diplomacy despite the emotional, normative, and practical impossibility of ordinary engagement with Russian diplomats.
Walking out to go on
Walkouts came to be a way to keep OSCE diplomacy going while refusing to reproduce its anchoring practice of dialogue – they acted as a coping strategy. In this section, I first trace the evolving use of walkouts as a coping strategy over time and then provide an ethnographic reconstruction of the performance of walkouts in situation.
Should I stay or should I go?
The first walkout occurred during a reinforced Permanent Council meeting on the day of the invasion. Described as ‘spontaneous’ by several diplomats, it was not the subject of a conscious deliberative process inside the ‘Western camp’.Footnote 112 Nonetheless, it echoed pre-existing practices: an ambassador – or more rarely a full delegation – leaving the room to show discontent was a common occurrence at the OSCE well before the invasion of Ukraine.Footnote 113 However, earlier practices of room exit, or empty-chair politics,Footnote 114 are not categorised as walkouts by diplomats but as common signalling practices. OSCE diplomats restricted the term ‘walkout’ to the collective performance that emerged after the invasion, as a bounded gesture differentiated from regular practices performed in diplomatic meetings. The surprise and disconcertion among delegations that did not take part in the walkout,Footnote 115 as well as among OSCE Secretariat staff members,Footnote 116 reflected the break with the existing diplomatic modes of action, and with the anchoring practice of dialogue.
After several walkouts, a reflexive inquiry took place among Western delegates about the modalities, frequency, and potential implications of walkouts. Time-consuming discussionsFootnote 117 served as a key site through which diplomats negotiated their understanding of the disruption of the geopolitical and diplomatic order and unearthed the normative, emotional, and practical frictions of going on, as summarised by a European diplomat:
At the beginning, there was a big discussion inside the so-called ‘Western camp’. Some said, ‘This is outrageous what the Russians present, and this is not up to us to listen to that or to give them a platform to present it.’ Others said, ‘Yes, but as long as we are an organisation and they are in, we have to confront that, and it is better that we counter it than we walk away.’ Because walkouts … if they are happening too often, undermine the Organization. And then there’s a risk that it might cease to exist one day if everybody is walking out all the time.Footnote 118
The debate went beyond the condemnation of Russia, to the way of refusing interaction without damaging the institution diplomats were trying to sustain. The OSCE’s specificity as an inclusive forum of dialogue was in tension with the refusal to listen to Russian justifications for the war. In effect, walkouts at the OSCE occurred in relation to peaks of violence on the ground in Ukraine (Bucha, the attacks on Kramatorsk railway station), or decisions in Moscow (official annexation of territories in Eastern Ukraine). The debate was not settled and reemerged regularly throughout my participant observation in 2022. The relevance of walkouts was constantly re-evaluated and weighed against other actions. Starting in May 2022, the frequency of massive walkouts at the Permanent Council decreased following a change of strategy by delegates of EU member states, who pointed out the impossibility of walking out every day. Their shift towards a majority of ‘rights of reply’ instead of walkouts was ‘intentional’ to ‘fight back’.Footnote 119
Through this performance and adjustment, walkouts provisionally entered the OSCE’s diplomatic repertoire of action, and they became an item on the menu of possible meeting interactions between Russians and Western diplomats. For example, an impromptu walkout at the Forum for Security and Co-operation in June 2023 took place during a Russian statement, as the representative brandished a fragment that he identified as a part of High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) while commenting that he did not see diplomats in the room but ‘people needing a psychiatrist’.Footnote 120 Diplomats reacted to the statement by the Russian Ambassador, which they considered a violation of the basic etiquette of diplomatic interactions. At the same time, the decrease in the frequency of walkouts came with their ‘ritualisation’Footnote 121 – through symbolic staging on the anniversary of the Russian invasion, and for some delegations at the annual meetings of the Ministerial Council.Footnote 122 This rise and waning of walkouts at the OSCE points towards coping as an unstable process in which strategies such as walkouts are repeatedly tested and adjusted against the institution that diplomats seek to sustain.
The choreography of walking out
This subsection zooms in ethnographically on the concrete unfolding of walkouts at the OSCE in 2022 and shows how they are performed as part of coping. The following pages reconstruct a typical walkout in April 2022, drawing on the observation of several walkouts to highlight their distinctive elements while bringing the reader inside the room.Footnote 123
April is marked by violence and the uncovering of atrocities in Ukraine: the Bucha massacre, the Russian attack on civilians at the Kramatorsk railway station, and the siege of Mariupol – including the long ordeal of Ukrainian fighters resisting in the Azovstal steel plant. At the OSCE, diplomats enter the traditional spring recess. Outside of our compulsive checking of news feeds, the delegation’s office feels eerily quiet; we are waiting. The Permanent Council Chair has warned delegates to stay alert, as special meetings could be convened at the last minute due to the rapidly changing situation on the ground. Footnote 124 The email arrives in the morning: a special Permanent Council meeting is scheduled for the afternoon to discuss new developments in Ukraine. Things start to move. Colleagues get on their phones – intense chatting on the messaging apps fills the room. ‘There will be a walkout’, I am told matter-of-factly. The word has been floating around in many informal conversations. They do not explain what it means or what its logistics are. Walkouts are now an integral part of their vocabulary.
Walkouts require coordination through all stages of the process. Today’s decision has been prepared during an EU coordination meeting, after consultations with the Ukrainians and in contact with other like-minded countries (United States, Canada, Norway, Iceland, EU accession candidates) through ‘political dialogue’. Footnote 125 It is confirmed before the meeting through group chats. Communication extends beyond the Western camp. The EU delegation informs diplomats from Central Asia and the Caucasus so they can make an informed decision about their participation in the meeting, ‘so they didn’t have to walk with us, but they also didn’t have to sit in the hall only with Russia and Belarus’. Footnote 126 Through informal coordination, diplomats allow for the coexistence of different, and sometimes contradictory, coping strategies. It continues in the Neuer Saal. ‘How do we know if a walkout will happen, and when it starts?’ I overhear an intern ask before a meeting. ‘Look for a signal’, his supervisor explains. Footnote 127 The ambassadors from ‘big countries’ will start to move; there will also be a cue on WhatsApp.
The timing of walkouts is facilitated by OSCE rules of procedure: Western and Russian diplomats do not speak under the same agenda item. The agenda, set by the Chairmanship, includes a standing item on the ‘Russian aggression against Ukraine’, under which the Russian delegation refuses to speak. Russia instead uses the ‘current issues’ item, where any participating State can raise an issue pertaining to security in the OSCE area. That way, Western diplomats can speak first, leave during Russia’s current issue, and not have to re-enter the room.
Eleven delegates – starting with the Ukrainian – take the floor under the item ‘The Russian Federation’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine’, all strongly condemning Russia’s invasion. The room’s confrontational atmosphere is palpable. Diplomats speak in an unyielding tone, denouncing the deliberate Russian attack on civilians. They address Russian diplomats directly, denouncing the atrocity and horror of the attack, and appeal to the emotions of the audience in the room and online. The Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a significant intensification of diplomats’ emotional labourFootnote 128 during meetings. The Polish Chair announces, ‘We will now move to the current issues. The Chair has been notified of one item, raised by the delegation of the Russian Federation.’ The Ukrainian ambassador stands up; this is the cue. While walkouts are the product of reflexive efforts to cope with the Russian invasion, knowing when to leave the room and how to behave physically as you walk out also rests on an implicit ‘feel for the game’,Footnote 129 with diplomats performing more or less competently. Existing diplomatic know-how remains essential.
The Chair continues the meeting as if nothing is happening: ‘Ambassador, the screen is yours’, he says as the Russian ambassador’s face appears on my computer screen. The performance of walkouts relies on diplomats’ corporeal interaction with their environment. Despite deviating from accepted OSCE diplomatic practices, walkouts are carried out through bodily discipline, preserving the dignified stature of the diplomat as an embodiment of the state.Footnote 130 There is no loud packing or chatting, no hurried movements that might breach the decorum of the Permanent Council. Diplomats leave the room in silence, maintaining a steady rhythm and deliberate composure. Any visible hesitation or clumsiness risks undermining the performance and could invite ironic remarks from the Russian representative, who might begin his intervention with a jab such as: ‘Don’t rush – you’ll all have time to leave.’ Western diplomats do their best to ignore the Russian speaker, whether in the room or online. ‘Look straight; do not look at the Russians’, I remind myself. Footnote 131 Walking out became a way to refuse multilateral interaction while sustaining the OSCE’s social order through action. In this choreography of departure, coping materialised in the body: diplomats made do within the constraints of decorum, using posture and silence as tools to hold the order together when dialogue practices could not be reproduced.
Walkouts do not end when the last Western diplomat steps through the door. Inside the Neuer Saal, the meeting continues. The Chair ignores the rupture, but the Russian diplomat does not: ‘I address those recording online’, he begins. Footnote 132 I am often one of them – the only Russian speaker in my delegation, I follow online from the office and take notes. Listening to the statement online but not in the room becomes a way for diplomats to negotiate the practical and normative friction of interaction with Russian representatives. This hybrid presence exposes the paradox of walkouts: diplomats refuse dialogue in physical space while maintaining the informational flow necessary to keep the organisation functioning. Russian delegates seize on this ambiguity, pointing out that Western diplomats are still listening, ‘hiding’ to do so. In response, Western missions recalibrate their coping strategy – by May 2022, they log out of Zoom entirely and rely on circulated statements after the meeting.Footnote 133 Russian diplomats adapt as well, using the hybrid format to frame walkouts as performative and disruptive: ‘We were ready to be in the room today and to take part in the meeting of the Permanent Council’, one says from his mission, ‘but when we see this kind of attitude, what are we supposed to do? Come and watch this circus of diplomats who are leaving the room?’ Through their responses to walkouts, Russian diplomats also negotiate the refusal of interaction with Western diplomats. They adapt to this new form of action, which, in turn, brings about further adaptation of the coping strategy.
Adjacent to the Neuer Saal, Western diplomats gather in the cafeteria, posing for a photo to share on social media alongside another image showing the meeting room almost empty after their departure. Walkouts materialise the geopolitical reconfigurations within the OSCE: Western diplomats cluster in the cafeteria, Russian delegates remain nearly alone in the room, and representatives of non-Western states connect via Zoom – where staying seated is perceived as ‘taking sides’.Footnote 134 Publicising these scenes serves a dual purpose. It signals to external audiences a clear diplomatic stance while opening a traditionally closed space to public view.Footnote 135 Within the OSCE community, this practice fosters an ‘online sociability’ through messages of solidarity and outrage, which in turn generates ‘offline effects’ on the social order.Footnote 136 Walkouts thus displaced diplomacy across the meeting room, messaging apps, Zoom, informal spaces, and social media, transforming it into a fragmented form of diplomatic engagement under disruption. This resonates with the ‘blended’ character of contemporary diplomacy, in which digital and analogue practices are increasingly entangled.Footnote 137
Walkouts and the shifting contours of OSCE diplomacy
Walkouts altered the conditions under which OSCE diplomacy could be performed and imagined without replacing dialogue as an anchoring practice. Anchoring practices are sticky: their disruption did not imply their collapse, as they continued to shape what diplomats recognised as acceptable or excessive conduct. Despite entering diplomats’ repertoire of action, walkouts were still conceived as radical, in tension with the organisation’s spirit. This is apparent in how diplomats situate walkouts within the broader scheme of OSCE diplomacy. Some openly disagreed with the practice of walkouts and the suspension of ‘usual’ diplomacy. At several meetings of the Forum for Security and Co-operation in 2022 and 2023, a Swiss delegate openly criticised this new practice of leaving the room during a statement, arguing that it prevented any dialogue,Footnote 138 creating a stir among Western diplomats. Some informally praised the delegate for his comment, for saying out loud what they thought but could not express due to political constraints. Others opposed their comment and complained vehemently through diplomatic channels.Footnote 139
For OSCE staff, walkouts caused distress and uncertainty. Upon attending a Permanent Council meeting after returning to work at the OSCE Secretariat several months after the start of the invasion, a seasoned OSCE staff member shared their shock at witnessing a walkout, stating they found it ineffective and even ‘silly’, adding that ‘it needs to be done rarely, if at all’.Footnote 140 OSCE staff could not walk out, as it would contradict principles of impartiality. Another staff member noted, ‘when other people were walking out of the Neuer Saal, I remained still and sat where I was. It was just important to be seen to be transparent and fair with all delegations equally’.Footnote 141 Walkouts created a rift between the OSCE’s core organisational practices and the new forms of diplomatic action that emerged after the invasion. They test the boundaries of diplomacy, departing from existing standards and entering a more political dimension:Footnote 142
It’s not diplomacy. One can do it once or twice, but it’s also an expression of a certain frustration that we cannot do anything. We are still diplomats. This is how we should work, rather calm and cool-minded and cool-blooded, which does not mean we do not have emotions. (…) Now we are at the border to activism.Footnote 143
In that way, diplomatic walkouts echo the use of the gesture in social movements. The balance between contradictory normative, practical, and emotional demands shifted over time, as diplomats ‘realised after a while that this is not the organisation for that’ and ‘started rolling back a little bit’ after 2024.Footnote 144 During a brief field stay in November 2025, all my interlocutors saw walkouts as something from the past – even though they remained within the set of possible actions. The case of walkouts highlights the larger tension at play in the coping process at the OSCE after the Russian invasion, between the clashing projectivities of coping strategies – turning the OSCE into a theatre of confrontation and salvaging the organisation – which prevented the stabilisation of the order and the reconstruction of anchoring practices.
Diplomats viewed walkouts as a temporary device, not a long-term replacement for anchoring practices. Yet, as a strategy for going on despite the impossibility of reproducing anchoring practices, they affected the OSCE’s multilateral order in at least two ways. First, they became part of renewed background knowledge, which allowed the continued performance of everyday diplomatic practices.Footnote 145 Even after their frequency drastically decreased, walkouts remained on everybody’s lips, testifying to their imprint on the social fabric of the OSCE. On average, diplomats’ postings at the OSCE are relatively short.Footnote 146 With the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion, there is no longer any shared experience and knowledge of how regular OSCE diplomacy was practised.Footnote 147 The baseline from which diplomats can engage in inquiry about which actions are possible and what could count as dialogue at the OSCE is thereby defined by the mediated experience of pandemic diplomacy and, mostly, the coping strategies through which they (or their immediate predecessors) acted as diplomats to the OSCE.
Second, and relatedly, walkouts participated in shifting the boundaries of OSCE diplomacy, thereby paving the way for a possible later adaptation of anchoring practices. The performance of walkouts made visible ‘the unique aspect of the OSCE’ as a forum for interaction with the Russians, in a form of diplomacy without dialogue: ‘at NATO, we speak of Russia, here we talk to the Russians’, a Western diplomat told me. ‘It is an exchange, not dialogue’, they stressed.Footnote 148 In 2025, the Finnish Chairpersonship launched the ‘Helsinki +50 process’Footnote 149 to foster consultations on the ways to salvage and reform the OSCE. In the various concept papers and perception papers that summarise the content of those informal discussions, ‘real dialogue’ is still present as a long-term aim. In the short- to medium-term, the management of tensions and mistrust – which was the initial anchoring practice of the CSCE after 1975 – is reemerging as the way to move beyond coping towards a stabilisation of the order.Footnote 150 Coping does not resolve indeterminacy or restore prior anchoring practices, but it recalibrates interaction under disruption. As a liminal process, coping can support and shape the parameters of a renewed ordering process without itself stabilising the order.
Conclusion
At the OSCE, walkouts suspended the face-to-face interaction through which multilateral diplomacy is ordinarily performed, denying Russian representatives’ recognition as interlocutors. Yet diplomats returned to subsequent meetings, continued to participate in the organisation, and preserved the procedural framework for future interaction. Tracing their emergence, performance, and waning shows that they were more than discrete transgressive actions. What began as a largely spontaneous response to the invasion became a coordinated and increasingly refined choreography, as diplomats learned when and how to leave while preserving diplomatic composure. As emotional, normative, and practical frictions changed, repetition generated concerns about walkouts’ effects on the organisation, leading diplomats to restrict their use, adopt other forms of confrontation, or reserve them for symbolic occasions. Following walkouts over time reveals how their intersubjective meanings depend on previous iterations and how each performance reshapes subsequent possibilities. They entered the OSCE repertoire of action without becoming an ordinary or uncontested diplomatic practice.
The central claim of this article is that walkouts can act as coping strategies through which an order can keep going when its anchoring practices have become untenable. At the OSCE, they allowed diplomats to remain invested in the organisation while temporarily refusing to reproduce ordinary dialogue with Russia. This ordering effect remained unstable. Walkouts intensified confrontation, generated uncertainty among diplomats and OSCE staff, and tested the boundaries of recognisable diplomatic conduct. They also became part of diplomats’ background knowledge and affected subsequent understandings of what interaction with Russia could entail. Walkouts are part of a wider process of coping which sustained the organisation through disruption while leaving its anchoring practices unresolved and its future open.
This article’s focus on diplomacy under disruption brings us to reconsider the stability of core diplomatic principles, such as engagement. At the same time, it shows the strength and plasticity of diplomacy, whose boundaries shift as conduct previously associated with protest or activism becomes temporarily available to diplomats. Diplomacy extends beyond the formal meeting room, unfolding through messaging applications, online platforms, corridors, cafeterias, and public performances. Its endurance rests on the capacity of diplomatic actors to redistribute engagement across these sites while negotiating the practical and normative limits of their role. Coping diplomacy provides a framework to make sense of a diplomacy of the in-betweenness and highlights the specificities of diplomacy in disruption, which is to be distinguished from crisis management. This form of liminal diplomacy sheds light on the importance of disjunctions, ruptures in processes of reproduction of diplomatic practices and ordering. It reveals international order as something actors also sustain through friction, improvisation, and incomplete repair.
Coping can travel beyond the case of the OSCE and beyond traditional interstate diplomacy. The pluralisation of diplomacy across state and non-state actors has expanded diplomatic activity beyond a single profession and its officially recognised representatives.Footnote 151 Coping offers a way of examining how these diverse actors sustain relationships and institutional participation under disruption without presupposing that they share the professional dispositions or formal authority of state diplomats.
Further avenues of research could investigate (1) other forms of coping strategies, (2) how contradictory or competing coping strategies coexist, and (3) historical and contemporary cases of disruption that lead to coping in the global governance system. Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine exemplifies a wider shift towards international politics marked by sustained disruption and deep contestation, where coping could be investigated. Contemporary challenges to multilateralism arise from several sources, including conflict among member states, the withdrawal of support by powerful members, institutional competition, and growing disagreement over the purposes and principles of cooperation. In that regard, another obvious extension is the management of disruptions caused by the second Trump presidency in the international order and the processes of ‘transitional order’Footnote 152 which are taking place. Current challenges show the need to shift our premise from stability to disruption and uncertainty, to problematise order and how we keep going.
Acknowledgements
I thank Jérémie Cornut, Kristin Anabel Eggeling, Stephanie Hoffman, Maren Hofius, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Tana Johnson, Mathilde Leloup, Matias Margulis, Frédéric Mérand, Jean-Philippe Thérien, Jennifer Welsh, Carla Winston, and the participants of the 2023 EWIS Workshop ‘Global crisis governance in times of uncertainty’ in Amsterdam who have read and commented on previous versions of this article. Previous drafts of the paper have been presented at ISA in 2023 in Montreal, in 2024 in San Francisco, APSA in 2025 in Vancouver and at the 2023 Conference of the Swiss Network for International Studies in Saint-Gallen.
Funding statement
This research was supported by a Doctoral training scholarship of the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (#286054).
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