Rituals in International Relations

International politics is not short of the ceremonial and the performative. Yet the field dedicated to its study has only recently begun to pay focused attention to ritual processes, actors and elements in world politics. Over the years, the Review of International Studies (RIS) has hosted the analytical unfolding of a number of such rituals on its pages.

This Special Collection brings together some of the key texts in IR that have sought to conceptualise, apply and/or rethink ritual dynamics and phenomena in the context of international relations. It is a testament to RIS’s long engagement with social theory and anthropology that these now essential readings on international rituals have been published here.

The articles compiled in this virtual collection show the sheer abundance of ritual practices in our field of study. Collectively, they demonstrate the productivity of insights and conceptual tools from ritual theory for examining the bread and butter-subjects of IR, ranging from war and crises to the formation of subjectivity, community and the bordering thereof (e.g., Zaiotti 2011).

Bahar Rumelili’s article builds on Victor Turner’s ritual theory to conceptualise liminal identities in international politics as part of the 2012 Forum on Liminality. Engaging the classical works by Durkheim and Goffman, Simon Koschut’s article untangles the role of rituals in the formation and maintaining of stable emotional communities in world politics. Tom Bentley turns the ritual lens to memory politics, conceptualising colonial apologies as performative and ritualistic legitimation strategy whereby liberalism reproduces itself in the international system by states concurrently taking and delimiting their responsibility. Oren and Solomon’s article re-thinks securitisation as a ritual process through a study of ritualised chanting of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ during the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Samman’s shows how the management of contemporary financial crises has been reliant on the ritual work of summoning past crises to govern the present ones. Knotter’s paper explores declarations of independence as a specific ritual in international relations. Last but not least, Baele and Balzacq offer a compelling analytical framework to capture rituals’ twofold logic of integration and fragmentation via a comparative study of post-terrorism ritual occasions in Norway and France.

What might the future hold for the ritual-focused inquiry in IR? Aside from the continuing fascination with the evidently ritualised fabric of various international practices and institutions, such as diplomacy and international criminal justice, we can expect scholarship to draw on the analytical power of ritual in relation to the evolving research agendas on international order, security, political spectacles and dramas, emotions, and corporeality. We trust that the future contributors to ‘Ritual IR’ will find this virtual collection an inspiring springboard to draw on and debate with.

The articles in this collection are free to read until the end of September 2024.

For the latest updates from this important journal, follow the Review of International Studies on Twitter (X).