This article argues that in asymmetric international relationships, gratitude functions as a technology of disciplinary power through which material assistance is converted into moral indebtedness. Unlike material conditionality, which constrains what subordinate actors can do, gratitude constrains what they can say, claim, and be within the relationship, delegitimizing resistance by recoding it as emotional deviance. Integrating Maussian gift theory, emotional-regime analysis, and speech-act approaches to emotion, the article theorizes a specific causal sequence: material assistance is framed as a morally valorized gift, which generates a debt of gratitude, which prescribes an emotional performance of acknowledgment and deference, which in turn constrains the subordinate actor’s capacity to contest donor authority. Empirically, the argument is developed through a comparative emotional-discursive analysis of two structurally asymmetric alliances: the Soviet-Cuban relationship during the 1962 Missile Crisis and the U.S.-Ukraine relationship (2022–2025). Across both cases, great powers mobilized gratitude as a reactive disciplinary instrument, deployed to reassert authority at moments when influence risked erosion. The article contributes to the emotional turn in IR theory by demonstrating that hierarchy is mostly sustained through emotional regimes that prescribe what subordinate actors must feel, display, and acknowledge.

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.

What is the relationship between political ideology and realism in international relations? This article reconceptualizes the realist relationship with ideology in terms of a recurring experience of ideological exile. Exile was a crucial part of the biographical experience of early realists like Hans Morgenthau and John Herz. I argue that the idea of exile also marked an aspect of their relationship to ideology. Realists often allied themselves with ideological camps, through which they aimed to shape political practice. Yet realists mistrusted ideological utopianisms, and these liaisons often ended badly – in effect driving realists into ideological exile. The resulting exile persona has marked realism durably, recurring among later realists who do not have a biographical experience of exile in the conventional sense. Exile has thus become a persistent, constitutive feature of the intellectual project of realism itself. My argument has ongoing implications for how we understand realism as a political project.

This paper analyzes two ideal-type signaling interactions that are fundamental to international relations: reassurance and coercive bargaining. In reassurance, states attempt to signal that their goals are compatible in order to avoid conflict, whereas in coercive bargaining, they attempt to inflate the incompatibility of their goals in order to increase their negotiating leverage over a disputed asset. This article conceptualizes these two types of signaling interaction and delineates semi-overlapping conditions under which each obtains. It then identifies three ways in which credible signaling occurs differently in reassurance versus coercive bargaining. First, the directional effects of power shifts are reversed in each interaction, generating incentives for rising states to misrepresent in reassurance but not in bargaining. Second, whereas signals that are costless to honest, high-resolve senders are widely available in bargaining, the most prominent reassurance signals are typically costly even to honest senders with benign intentions. Third, it is often difficult to infer which issue area motivates senders’ behaviors in reassurance, whereas in bargaining senders have incentives to reveal which issues they prioritize. In combination, these distinctions suggest that reassurance is systematically more difficult than signaling high resolve.

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.

The ethics of the international monetary system (IMS) can be framed either as a case of background injustice or of structural injustice. Both ideas suggest that due to the background conditions, the interaction of agents, in a context of no rules, can lead to domination and unfairness. Moreover, both ideas emphasise the need to create regulation, or a structure, that prevents domination and unfairness. This article asks how (if at all) do monetary regimes, or each of the three scenarios that stem from the Mundell-Fleming trilemma, raise domination and unfairness. This article identifies domination and unfairness in both regimes with open capital markets: the one with floating exchange rates and the one with fixed exchange rates. Moreover, it offers a principle of non-domination, according to which institutions of the IMS ought to guarantee effective sovereignty of participant states or offer an equal distribution of this value when securing full effective sovereignty for all is not possible. For the last regime, of closed capital markets, this article identifies unfairness but no domination. By identifying domination and unfairness in each regime, this article proposes policies and regulation, or a structure, to prevent and mitigate these issues.

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.

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.