Varieties of international reconciliation: the configuration of interest and reflection after conflict

After conflict, states occasionally succeed in reconciling with former adversaries. When they do, they do so in different ways. Some grudgingly sign a treaty to signal the end of a conflict. Others provide for not only reparations and compensations but also economic assistance as material evidence of reconciliation. Yet others offer apologies, official and unofficial, and engage their former adversaries in reflective dialog that transforms their relationship from enmity to amity. Is there a way to systemically organize different ways in which states reconcile? Can different types of reconciliation be identified? If so, what explains the types? We address these questions in this article. Based on our survey of war terminations in the post-World War II period, we identify four different types of reconciliation that former injurious states have made with their victim states – procedural, material, ideational, and substantial. We hypothesize that their choice of a reconciliation type can be explained in terms of a configuration of national interest and national reflection. In this article, we engage in a structured comparative analysis of the cases of reconciliation between France-Algeria, Japan-Korea, Germany-Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, and Germany-Poland – that we argue closely resemble the four ideal types – and demonstrate that our hypotheses are confirmed. We conclude with a consideration of how likely it is for ideational and material reconciliation to develop into substantial reconciliation

Resilience to crisis and resistance to change: a comparative analysis of the determinants of crisis outcomes in Latin American regional organisations

Latin American regionalism displays a long history of crises, which have affected almost all regional organisations (ROs) across different waves of regionalism. The article conducts the first comparative analysis of the outcomes of crises in Latin American ROs across time, tackling the following questions: What have been the outcomes of the crises faced by Latin American ROs? Under what conditions does a crisis result in the survival or breakdown of the affected RO in Latin America? We adopt a multi-method approach that combines QCA with process tracing to identify the causal pathways to the survival or breakdown of ROs across a universe of eight crises. The findings show that Latin American ROs have been resilient to crises, which resulted in RO survival in seven cases out of eight. The QCA reveals how the distributive nature of interstate conflicts and the availability of majority voting are both sufficient conditions for Latin American ROs to survive a crisis. Analysis of the outlier case of UNASUR shows that normative conflicts that take place in the absence of majority voting constitute a ‘perfect storm’ configuration that can lead to RO breakdown. The findings also show that Latin America ROs’ tendency to survive crises is associated with the preservation of the status quo in terms of institutional design, which in some cases is achieved through the temporary flexibilisation of existing rules. Differently from the case of the EU, then, the crises of Latin American ROs have not led to the deepening of regional integration, but rather to institutional inertia.

Hegemonic stability in the Indo-Pacific: US-India relations and induced balancing

The United States has improved relations with no other country during the Trump administration as much as it advanced its relationship with India. US-India relations have arguably marked their historical high points since Trump entered office and India seems to be overcoming its suspicion of closer cooperation with the US. Given these developments, this article aims to theorize the relationship through the hegemonic stability theory and explain US strategy toward India. We first demonstrate why India is accepting the hegemonic standing of the US in the Indo-Pacific and then – since balance of power politics are still a staple of policymakers’ approach to stability in the Indo-Pacific – we introduce the notion of induced balancing to show what approach the United States has adopted to empower India to expand its balancing capacity vis-à-vis China. The last section of the article empirically maps the various incentives that Washington offers to New Delhi in order to situate it in the desired position of a proxy China-balancer.

Interventionist or internationalist? Coercion, self-determination, and humanitarianism in Third World practice

This article argues that contemporary debates around intervention, and especially humanitarian intervention, have misunderstood the meaning of these concepts in Cold War international society. By comparing a specific kind of humanitarian interventionism with a specific kind of internationalism, that of a revolutionist strain of Third World practice, it shows that existing studies have paid too little attention to discursive entanglements of coercion, self-determination, and humanitarianism. The Angola case provides a significant illustration: in 1975 the problem of intervention comes to be tied not just to dictatorial interference, but to a logic of self-determination, which is itself tied to causes of anticolonialism and anti-racism. It is too easy to say that the period’s rules of non-intervention precluded the legitimate coercive prevention of atrocities and related international crimes. Particular practices of internationalism, linked to the promotion of self-determination, provided a basis for enforcing international human rights treaties, including the Genocide Convention. All this seems very different from what we usually know of the legitimacy of saving strangers and the character of Third World organising in the mid-20th century.

International crisis in the midst of civil war

This article examines the nexus between international crises and civil wars. Based on the premise that not all simultaneous civil and international conflicts are related, the study aims to explore the circumstances in which civil wars affect violent escalation in international crises. The study identifies ‘composite’ crises – where the civil war is the core issue of the international dispute – as a unique subset of international crises. These crises are distinguished from ‘unrelated-civil war’ situations, in which the issues in the internal and international conflicts are separate. Using data from the ICB, COW, and UCDP/PRIO datasets, the article tests a dual-conflict argument, positing that interconnected issues and interactions between actors in composite situations inhibit moderate crisis management and aggravate interstate behavior. The findings show that while civil war in composite situations has a negative impact on crisis escalation, unrelated-civil war has an inverse impact on interstate relations in crisis.

Foreign policy change as rhetorical politics: domestic-regional constellation of Global South states

Although the recent advancements in critical constructivist IR on political rhetoric has greatly improved our understanding of linguistic mechanisms of political action, we need a sharp understanding of how rhetoric explains foreign policy change. Here we conceptualize a link between rhetoric and foreign policy change by foregrounding distinct dynamics at the regional and domestic institutional environments. Analytically, at the regional level, we suggest examining whether norms of foreign policy engagement are explicitly coded in treaties and agreements or implicit in conventions and practices of actors. And at the domestic level, we suggest examining whether a particular foreign policy issue area is concurrent or contested among interlocutors. In this constellation, we clarify how four different rhetorical strategies underwrites foreign policy change – persuasion, mediation, explication and reconstruction – how it operates, and the processes through which it unfolds in relation to multiple audiences. Our principal argument is that grand foreign policy change requires continuous rhetorical deployments with varieties of politics to preserve and stabilize the boundaries in the ongoing fluid relations of states. We illustrate our argument with an analysis of Brazil’s South-South grand strategy under the Lula administration and contrast it against the rhetoric of subsequent administrations. Our study has implications for advancing critical foreign policy analysis on foreign policy change and generally for exploring new ways of studying foreign policies of nonwestern postcolonial states in international relations.

Trusted intermediaries: Macmillan, Kennedy and their ambassadors

Studying trust at the international level is one of the greatest challenges for trust studies. In this article I seek to expand on work which has sought to study trust between states in a way which avoids anthropomorphising the state, and retains the salience of interpersonal trust. To do this, I consider trust between states as existing in a web of relationships, from relationships between government figures, to military personnel, to members of society. In this article I demonstrate the value of incorporating actors beyond leaders in the most minimal sense: through including boundary spanners, those whose relationships and interactions span across boundaries, whether those boundaries be state borders or segments of government and society. Furthermore, I seek to begin a process of categorising the types of roles that boundary spanners can play in the development of trust between states. To illustrate their impact, I deploy a multidimensional approach to trust which is used to assess the relationship between leaders, and the impact of intermediary figures on both trust between the leaders, and in the relationships developed between the intermediary and their respective leader. One case study is used to exemplify the utility of this approach: the relationship between Harold Macmillan and John F. Kennedy and their respective official ambassadors David Ormsby-Gore and David Bruce.

Regulatory networks and regional human rights governance: a study of the European Network of National Human Rights Institutions

Transnational regional networks of regulatory bodies play a prominent role in complex systems of human rights governance. Despite their growing importance, we still have much to learn about the roles regional networks play as regulatory stewards in the field of human rights. I draw on the literature about regulatory stewardship to analyse a recently formalised regulatory network operating in Europe – the European Network of National Human Rights Institutions. The analysis proposes a model of global governance for human rights that includes networks of national human rights institutions as intermediaries. Moreover, it draws on some of the main concepts of network analysis to assesses the European network’s development into a ‘network administrative organisation’ and applies the model of regulatory stewardship to analyse the institutional network’s use of hierarchical and managerial stewardship to: support its member institutions; stimulate intra-network communication and learning; gain access to international networks; and to shape the regional human rights agenda.

Separatists, state subjectivity, and fundamental ontological (in)security in international relations

Ontological security studies (OSS) in International Relations (IR) emphasize the role of identity, anxiety, and a sense of self in world politics. Yet suggesting that states act in certain ways because of ‘who they are’ also assumes that they are in fact states. In this article, I problematize the presupposition of state subjects in the context of separatist conflicts in which claims to statehood compete and overlap. Where unrecognized de facto states are pitted against their unyielding parent states, the two threaten each other’s very state personhood, thereby presenting a more radical challenge to their existence than traditional ‘physical’ and ‘ontological’ security threats. Separatist conflicts thus reveal a widely overlooked dimension of fundamental ontological security, provided by the constitution and recognition of states as such. Moreover, because of the exclusiveness of state subjects in the modern international order, any third parties attempting to resolve such conflicts inevitably face a meta-security dilemma whereby reassuring one side by confirming its claim to statehood simultaneously renders the other side radically insecure. Thus, rather than regarding particular state subjects as merely the starting point of quests for ontological security in international relations, they should also be understood as already their result.

Shrinking planet, expanding imaginary: the imperial press system and the idea of Greater Britain

This article explores the relationship between the 19th century ‘global transformation’ and the contemporary intensification of communication media through the lens of Greater Britain, a late-Victorian ordering imaginary centred on the integration of Britain and its white settler colonies. Contrary to existing conceptions of globe-spanning media as either components of ‘interaction capacity’ or boundary conditions that set broad outer limits for political thought, I advance an understanding of media as socio-technical and political structures in their own right and explore how they surface meanings and representations upon which imaginaries such as Greater Britain depended. The argument thereby contributes to IR debates on global modernity, communication media and the dynamics of historical change.