Introduction
The international system is rife with norms, practices, and institutions reaffirming the centrality of state sovereignty. Almost all politics is couched in the language of sovereignty, and much of diplomacy is about negotiating the limits and precise application of sovereignty, including deciding on the appropriate response to other states’ aggression and violence. As such, the United States called the intrusion of a Chinese spy balloon into its airspace in 2023 a ‘clear violation of US sovereignty’,Footnote 1 while Canada referred to the murder of Canadian Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijar in the same way, linking it to Indian agents and calling ‘the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil…an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty’.Footnote 2 Similarly, the Philippines has repeatedly ‘lambasted’ China for its refusal to recognise the country’s sovereign rights over parts of the South China Sea.Footnote 3 Interestingly, states whose sovereignty has been violated do not content themselves with bilateral engagement with the perpetrator state, but frequently make public appeals to the feelings of other members of the international community, seeking sympathy, shared anger, and condemnation. Thus, the United States raised the issue of the Chinese spy balloon with forty other countries, while Canada sought support for its position vis-à-vis India within the context of the 2023 G20 summit and from fellow Five Eyes partners. The Philippines, for its part, engaged in sustained multilateral diplomacy over the years, voicing its anger and frustration at the UN General Assembly and in other multilateral fora, like the ASEAN–US summit. This is curious because, while the multilateralisation of a bilateral sovereignty dispute can undoubtedly help coordinate punitive action, it also entails the risk of escalating tensions by inviting retaliation or inviting third parties to exploit the dispute for their own interests. The question that emerges is thus: how do we make sense of victim states multilateralising ostensibly bilateral sovereignty issues in this particular feeling-driven way? Or, more precisely, what makes them think that sharing their diplomatic grievances with other states will not only be helpful for their cause, but that other states will be receptive to such multilateralisation efforts in the first place?
To answer this question, we theorise the role of performative emotionality in maintaining the institution of sovereignty. Departing from a fundamentally social understanding of sovereignty as ‘shared practices and speech acts, which together provide a common frame of references within which […] sovereignty related practices can be understood’,Footnote 4 we introduce the concept of ‘feeling rules’Footnote 5 to describe distinct emotional performances that are constitutive of the state and the international system as a whole. Concretely, we advance two interrelated arguments. First, we show that sovereignty practices not only codify territorial integrity, formal equality, and non-interference as the sine qua non of statehoodFootnote 6 but also construct and reproduce states as persons with the capacity for intentionality, emotionality, and moral reasoning. This creates the intersubjectively shared expectation to be treated as an autonomous person of equal moral worth – an expectation captured by the notion of dignity. Consequently, sovereignty transgressions are interpreted by the victimised states as a violation of state dignity, leading to particular emotional reactions that reveal some of the fundamental feeling rules that structure the contemporary international order. This we term ‘the emotional politics of sovereignty’. Second, we show that these feeling rules work on victims, perpetrators, and bystanders alike, revealing the emotional and performative demands placed on all states, not just those directly involved in a sovereignty dispute. Since maintaining sovereignty is a collective process that requires the participation of other states, every state person has to exhibit the appropriate emotional responses in the face of a violation. Accordingly, our theoretical intervention reveals emotional and seemingly irrational (re)actions by states to be a structural feature of a sovereignty-based international system, with the multilateralisation of ostensibly bilateral issues being a way for victimised states to reassert their sovereignty and thus themselves. In the process of advancing these arguments, we also uncover that sovereignty practices intersect with the continuous reproduction of a social hierarchy through the invocation of civilisation-based arguments.
To illustrate our theoretical framework, we recount the responses to two peacetime cases of state-led international kidnappings in the form of the so-called Eichmann affair and the North Korean abduction issue.Footnote 7 State-led international kidnappings, that is, the abduction of individuals by foreign state actors, are paradigmatic cases of sovereignty violations, at least when they take place without the consent or participation of the state hosting the abductees.Footnote 8 As such, they require a firm and salient response, one that is most easily visible during peacetimes when there is no noise about other transgressions that would, for example, accompany a war situation. In May 1960, Israeli agents secretly kidnapped Holocaust-architect Adolf Eichmann from Argentine territory, where he had lived in hiding under an assumed name, while between 1973 and 1983 North Korean agents covertly abducted at least seventeen Japanese citizens, most of them also from Japanese territory. When the abductions became publicly known, both Argentina and Japan voiced their diplomatic grievances in the strongest terms, displaying not only anger and outrage at the kidnappings but also the desire to be compensated for a humiliation suffered. Both demanded not only the return of the abductees from the kidnappers but also moral recompense in the form of an apology and the public acknowledgement that the perpetrated acts were wrong. Specifically, they did so by raising the issue in international fora, where they appealed to feelings of sympathy from other states, which were thus drawn into the matter. In outlining these two cases, this article further adds to this special issue’s insights about politicised kidnappings engendering manifold and enduring emotionsFootnote 9 – among not only the victims of abductions, their families,Footnote 10 human rights groups,Footnote 11 and the general publicFootnote 12 but also states – and reaffirms their enormous political consequences.
This article is structured as follows. First, we introduce the international system of states as performatively constituted and describe how states come to be constructed as state persons. We then link the notion of personhood to the concept of dignity as it is found in the emotions literature, conceptualise sovereignty violations as a denial of dignity, and elaborate on the feeling rules that we expect to be involved in the reaffirmation of one’s dignity and sovereignty. The fourth section illustrates the utility of this framework for understanding states’ emotional grievances and the multilateralisation of bilateral disputes by turning to the aforementioned two cases: Argentina’s and Japan’s respective responses to state-led international kidnappings of individuals under their protection. This is followed by an analysis section that focuses on similarities in diplomatic performance and rhetoric to specify the feeling rules that make up the emotional politics of sovereignty, thereby shedding light on multilateralisation attempts and apparent overreactions by states. The conclusion reflects on our findings and posits some avenues for further research.
The performance of sovereignty and the (re)production of states as persons
The international system ‘is a symbolic structure that is ordained by an unrealisable ideal’ of sovereign agency and equality.Footnote 13 Its constitutive parts are states who are themselves legal and social constructions whose existence is entirely the result of sovereignty practices and beliefs.Footnote 14 In other words, states do not exist as natural or material facts in the world, but only as social facts that need to constantly be performed to reaffirm their existence and legitimacy.Footnote 15 This performance takes place publicly on the international stage and its success depends on the audience’s reception.Footnote 16 In this context, states’ behaviour is characterised by the search for recognition of their legitimacy from two different audiences: internally from their own citizens, and externally from other states.Footnote 17 While all violations of sovereignty challenge states’ internal legitimacy, given that they undermine the state’s promise of protection and control and thus represent ‘a failure by the state to perform as a state’,Footnote 18 what is most pertinent for the present purpose is that they compromise states’ legitimacy externally vis-à-vis other states.
To be a state is to be recognised as a fundamental ontological equal to other states,Footnote 19 and to have been conferred a special status that makes one subject to ‘the rules of conduct between formally independent states’.Footnote 20 Yet, the recognition of this status is neither a one-time event nor automatic, but needs to be constantly performed and reaffirmed by other actors. In practice, states do this via day-to-day diplomatic practices, especially representation and public communication in the form of everyday discourse, performance, and bureaucratic work.Footnote 21 Put differently, ‘practices, artifacts, and language, which stand in for an entity as a whole’, like a seat at the UN, an ambassador, or a territory demarcated on a map, are ‘representants’ that make visible not only the international order but also international actors.Footnote 22 At the most basic level, then, reaffirming another state’s sovereign equality means respecting its sovereign rights, like its territorial integrity and right to non-interference. Therefore, a deliberate violation of sovereignty denotes a lack of such respect, putting the state’s legitimacy on the international stage in question.
These practices not only make up states’ constitutive performances but also describe how the institution of sovereignty constructs states in a particular way, namely as state persons. In legal terms, states can claim the rights associated with sovereignty by virtue of being endowed with international personality, that is, by being designated a unitary subject under international law.Footnote 23 This understanding finds its social expression in the international system that imbues states with rights, responsibilities, and the obligation to act in accordance with normative standards.Footnote 24 Ascribing this kind of moral equality to states is only possible because the international system and the institution of sovereignty reproduce states as persons. Yet, to say that states are persons in this social sense, and that we can therefore attribute to them intentions, emotions, and the capacity for moral reasoning, is not without controversy in international relations (IR).Footnote 25 Even where scholars agree that states are persons in some sense, they still disagree on the basis of that claim, with some grounding state personhood in a physicalist ontology, like the identification processes of biological individualsFootnote 26 or wave functions,Footnote 27 while others take an ideational-constructionist view, identifying state personhood on the basis of discourse,Footnote 28 metaphors,Footnote 29 or, as we do in this article, as a result of ‘ongoing constitutive practices’.Footnote 30 While the question whether and, if so, how states are persons is thus a matter of ontology that precedes scientific inquiry,Footnote 31 there is evidence that states are indeed commonly thought of and treated as personsFootnote 32 – a fact that we take to be constitutive of social reality. Importantly, the stance that states come to be persons as a result of being treated as suchFootnote 33 implies that they are singular rather than collective actors, unitary actors whose personification not only makes them the subjects of international thought but also politically, morally, and legally real.Footnote 34
While the idea of states as persons is rooted in history and goes back to the seventeenth century,Footnote 35 the status of being a state person was for the longest time the prerogative of a handful of predominantly European states on the grounds of assumed civilisational superiority.Footnote 36 These states recognised each other as capable of free and reasoned action, exemplified by diplomatic practices designed to reaffirm their mutual equality that endure to this day, for example the hosting of ambassadors. Even though the status of state personhood has been granted to a significantly greater number of communities than ever before, we can see the continuation of an implicit standard of civilisation in the liberal underpinnings of the international system, which tends to extend equal treatment only to those members who live up to some unspecified ideal of ‘human rights, market economy and some form of democracy’.Footnote 37 Those who do not conform to this standard risk being cast as ‘the enemies of civilisation’.Footnote 38 This informal hierarchy between formally equal states finds expression in the practice of international relations, for example in the designation of states as ‘rogue’ or ‘failed’, or the continued justification of interventions on humanitarian groundsFootnote 39 – all of which make sovereignty a ‘conditional’ virtue for non-Western states.Footnote 40
Sovereignty’s colonial legacy means that the performance of state personhood is influenced by racialised and gendered stereotypes,Footnote 41 which, in turn, add to a distinct ‘emotional legacy of colonialism’.Footnote 42 Where European states were strong, independent, and hyper-rational, non-Western political entities were seen as weak, dependent, and emotional – a hierarchical ordering that served to justify colonial practices. For colonial entities to overcome their subjugation meant to live up to the Eurocentric ideal of what it means to be a person, and to ‘assert that they, too, are men’.Footnote 43 This entails a distinct display of ‘manly’ emotions, like anger, and the refusal to let perceived slights and humiliations go unanswered, in order to demonstrate one’s belonging to the community of civilised state persons. This suggests that sovereignty goes hand in hand with a distinct emotional performance, especially where violations are concerned, and that this works to reproduce a culturally biased informal hierarchy.
To summarise, the contemporary international order manifests in the institution of sovereignty, which constructs and reproduces states as persons. Sovereignty violations can be read as a challenge to the victimised state’s external legitimacy, requiring a performative response to reaffirm its sovereign personhood. Since this performance is shaped by historically grounded social expectations implicating the display of emotions, it stands to reason that it is a particular understanding of personhood that informs states’ responses to sovereignty violations. To explore these further and arrive at a better understanding of how states might deal with feelings of embarrassment, humiliation, or anger, the next section introduces the notion of dignity to develop a sense of what it means to be a person and explores associated emotional expectations and ‘feeling rules’.
Dignity and the ‘feeling rules’ of sovereignty
What, then, does it mean to be a person, and what are the rules for behaviour that follow from that? As mentioned, the international system constructs states as persons, that is, as autonomously acting individuals of moral equality. Given that the construction of what one is necessarily proceeds by differentiation from what one is not, to be a state person is to be treated differently from other international actors, including those that enjoy some limited degree of legal personhood, like international organisations.Footnote 44 It is to be a member of a rather exclusive ‘club’,Footnote 45 and to have that status acknowledged and respected. Respect is not an emotion itself but a social attribution related to social structures, like status hierarchies. As such, it is generative of behavioural expectations, and potentially strong emotional responses if those expectations are not met, which is why Reinhard Wolf defines respect as ‘adequate consideration shown for an actor’s status’Footnote 46 or ‘an attitude we expect others to show by the way they treat us’.Footnote 47 Because status and corresponding recognition depend on others, and are thus to some extent beyond each individual’s control, tensions arise when one perceives having been denied due recognition and respect. This is felt as disrespectful, an insult and sometimes even a threat to one’s sense of self.Footnote 48 In fact, the scholarship has shown that the (perceived) denial of status recognition and respect generates powerful emotional responses, like feelings of anger or humiliation,Footnote 49 because it attacks a person’s ‘dearly-held perceptions about the self which act as the basis of its self-respect and dignity’.Footnote 50 These, in turn, can motivate retributive and vengeful behaviour aimed at re-establishing one’s self-esteem.Footnote 51 In this way, respect is linked to emotional forces that drive behaviour.
Yet, respect does not fully capture what is at stake in the recognition of state personhood. Respect tends to indicate an acknowledgement of specific traits, such as someone’s distinctive identity or position in the social hierarchy. Personhood, however, is about being in a fundamental way the same as, and equal to, other persons, that is, other members in the same category. This kind of more fundamental recognition of one’s existence as an equal and autonomous being is best captured by the notion of dignity, which refers to one’s ‘status as an autonomous actor’Footnote 52 and ‘the abstract core of human worth’ that ‘is not really part of a specific identity but rather the foundation for acquiring one’.Footnote 53 It is this bestowment of dignity that makes persons moral actors to whom rights and responsibilities can be attributed.Footnote 54 Consequently, to be treated like a person is to be treated differently from non-person categories of being, like animals, plants, or objects, by having one’s capacity for moral action acknowledged. This makes recognition of one’s personhood the fundamental dignifying act. In the case of individuals, we recognise this most easily in cases where recognition of personhood is being denied, for example in the case of slavery, which treats people as tools and objects, or in the case of discrimination against women, who are often still denied equal rights and equal moral worth. In the case of states, the denial of dignity manifests in the violation of the equal rights associated with sovereignty or the treatment as somehow less than other sovereign states. The denial of dignity is humiliating and causes pain at not having been treated like someone of equal moral worth.
This returns us to the question of the role of emotions in generating socially meaningful behaviour – a line of inquiry that is the purview of a significant field of scholarship in IR.Footnote 55 A core insight of this scholarship is that emotions are not merely individually experienced affective responses but rather deeply social phenomena, emerging out of social interactions, interlinked with social structures, and productive of their own independent effects.Footnote 56 Political emotions are shaped by the social and political norms of a given society and intertwined with power relations and institutions.Footnote 57 At the state level, states have been shown to experience and express anger, sympathy, pride, or guilt towards other states in diplomatic interactions.Footnote 58 In this way, it has been shown that emotions can be applied to states as unitary actorsFootnote 59 without, however, making any claims about the interior lives of states. While we cannot be sure about what states really feel, what we can see is that emotions appear through representations, that is, performative behaviour, which can be analysed and theorised.Footnote 60 Gustafsson and Hall,Footnote 61 drawing from HochschildFootnote 62 and Koschut,Footnote 63 speak in this context of ‘feeling rules’, that is, moral expectations about what emotions, and corresponding behaviour, are appropriate in a given context. They identify three different ways in which such feeling rules could manifest: first, through a politics of emotional obligations whereby actors seek to compel other actors to feel a specific emotion and to act accordingly; second, through a politics of emotional entitlement whereby actors press home their right to feel a certain way; and third, through a politics of emotional deference involving claims about whose feelings deserve pre-eminent consideration.Footnote 64 Together, these feeling rules ‘reflect how the socially shared understanding of a situation – with all its power relations, hierarchies, and value judgments – is expected to interact with an actor’s innermost beliefs’.Footnote 65
Given that the recognition of sovereignty is the fundamental dignifying act, it stands to reason that any blatant violation by another state would, in the first instance, be interpreted as a denial of dignity and the equal treatment due to fellow states. Such treatment is bound to elicit feelings of indignation on the part of the violated state since, to paraphrase Reinhard Wolf, we all do not only want to be recognised as a particular someone, but as being someone in the first place.Footnote 66 From this we can infer how Gustafsson and Hall’s three feeling rules might pertain to the institution of sovereignty. First, we can expect the violated state to have a right to feel hurt, disrespected, and outraged, and to seek recognition of the validity of these feelings from both the perpetrator state and fellow state persons through what Gustafsson and Hall call the politics of emotional entitlement.Footnote 67 In other words, the violated state seeks to reaffirm its dignity through acknowledgement of the wrongfulness of the infringement of its sovereign rights. Second, due to the intersubjectively shared understanding of sovereignty, we can presuppose a feeling rule related to the emotional obligation imposed on other states to share in the feelings of outrage towards the violator, and to display an appropriate amount of sympathy with the victim state. Such an emotional politics of obligationFootnote 68 would not only reaffirm the institution of sovereignty as a whole but potentially also contribute to shaming and discrediting the perpetrator. Additionally, we might expect the victimised state to impose on the aggressor an obligation to feel shame and to display genuine remorse for its actions. Lastly, with regard to what Gustafsson and Hall term the politics of emotional deference,Footnote 69 we might expect emotions related to the constitutive performance of sovereignty and state personhood, such as anger, to be given priority over other feelings on the international stage, due to the overriding importance of sovereignty, which tends to outweigh almost all other concerns.
Differently from Gustafsson and Hall, such a conceptualisation of feeling rules emphasises their structural and intersubjectively shared nature over their conception as tools to be wielded by states for a specific purpose. In their work, Gustafsson and Hall focus on a bilateral relationship where both partners utilise feeling rules in a game of action and reaction to advance their position.Footnote 70 By contrast, our proposition of an emotional politics of sovereignty proceeds from an understanding of sovereignty as a primary institution into which all states are socialised and which is upheld through constitutive performances of state personhood, including the display of appropriate emotions. While individual states can attempt to mobilise these intersubjectively shared feeling rules strategically, we suggest that these rules put behavioural expectations on everyone, whether they like it or not, and require a state to do something in the face of a transgression of sovereignty.Footnote 71 Consequently, these feeling rules are a baked-in feature of the international system. This suggests that the reason why states multilateralise ostensibly bilateral sovereignty disputes, and why they have reasonable expectations about the success of such a move, has to do with the collective effort it takes to uphold the institution of sovereignty. To further gauge the utility of our interpretation, the next section introduces two instances of state-led international kidnappings as paradigmatic cases of the violation of state sovereignty and dignity.
Case illustrations: International kidnappings as sovereignty violations
Cases of international kidnappings are of course most common in times of active conflict where they are often part of a concerted strategy.Footnote 72 Yet, because interstate conflict tends to involve other kinds of sovereignty violations and security issues, too, the effects associated with a violation of state dignity become difficult to isolate. We therefore focus here on state-orchestrated kidnappings during peacetimes. Amongst those, we can distinguish between different kinds. A rather common occurrence is for some states, like Russia or China, to simply detain foreign nationals when they enter their territory in order to use them as diplomatic leverage.Footnote 73 The Russian detention of Brittney Griner is one of the most high-profile cases of this in recent history. Another strategy is for states to go after their political enemies abroad, such as when Saudi Arabia murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in their consulate in Turkey, or to take them to third countries, such as when the US unlawfully imprisoned and tortured suspected terrorists in CIA compounds in Poland.Footnote 74 However, the most daring and blatantly violating abductions are arguably those where state actors enter another state’s territory with the express purpose of kidnapping nationals of that state or individuals under that state’s protection. Not only do such kidnappings represent a double violation of sovereignty, but, after becoming public, they expose the state’s failure to perform as a state on the international stage. They implicate a state’s dignity by revealing that the state’s status as an autonomous and morally equal person was not respected. Hence, it is in such cases that we would expect to see the feeling rules of sovereignty play out most clearly. This is not to say that domestic politics does not play a role in how states respond to particular kidnapping incidents;Footnote 75 only that for the purpose of understanding the multilateralisation of such incidents, it is more useful to focus on the structural dynamics of interstate relations.
To explore this phenomenon further and illustrate our theorisation of the emotional politics of sovereignty we look at two situations: Argentina’s reaction to the Israeli abduction of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, and Japan’s ongoing response to the revelation of the abduction of at least seventeen nationals by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s. The two cases are apart in time and different in the moral outrage they could be expected to trigger – with one concerning the abduction of a notorious war criminal while the other concerns the abduction of quintessentially innocent citizens, including children – yet, the responses are surprisingly similar. Both Argentina and Japan employ a diplomatic strategy that could otherwise be seen as emotional and overblown, and in both cases the international community feels compelled to side with them.
Argentina and ‘the Eichmann affair’
On 23 May 1960, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced in the Knesset that Israel’s secret service had apprehended Adolf Eichmann, the chief planner of the Holocaust, and that Eichmann was currently being held in Israel, where he would stand trial for the killing of millions of Jews during the Nazi regime.Footnote 76 The capture of Eichmann was further confirmed the next day during a press conference called by Israel’s secret service, detailing its efforts in tracking down Eichmann.Footnote 77 While these announcements were presented without information regarding where Eichmann had been captured, week-long speculations in the international press eventually led to reports that Eichmann had in fact been found in and taken from Argentina. These rumours prompted the Argentine foreign minister to seek clarification from the Israeli ambassador Aryeh Levavi on 1 June 1960, noting that Argentina would be ‘compelled’ to register more serious protests should the reports prove to be true.Footnote 78 Mindful of the issue of Argentine sovereignty, the Israeli government responded by denying having had advance knowledge of the events, claiming that Eichmann had been apprehended by Holocaust-surviving volunteers and that he had gone with them of his own free will to stand trial.Footnote 79 This obvious contradiction of Ben-Gurion’s earlier statement in the Knesset marked the beginning of a months-long diplomatic dispute between the two countries. To quote a contemporary newspaper commentary, ‘At first, Argentina protested just as a matter of form’, but when the Israeli government admitted to the kidnapping while denying any responsibility for it, ‘Argentines got the feeling that not only had their sovereignty been flouted in the eyes of the world, but that Israel was treating them like gullible fools’.Footnote 80
While Ben-Gurion sent a personal letter to Argentine president Arturo Frondizi on 7 June, pleading for understanding given the moral justifications of the act and apologising for ‘all the violations of the laws of the Argentine Republic that may have occurred’, Argentina still responded the next day by conveying the ‘most formal protest for the illicit act committed in violation of one of the most fundamental rights of the Argentine state’ and informed the UN Security Council on 10 June 1960 of its intention to raise the issue there, should Israel fail to return Eichmann to Argentina.Footnote 81 Specifically, Argentina demanded ‘material and moral reparations’Footnote 82 in the form of an apology, the return of Eichmann so that he could be made subject to an official extradition request, and the extradition of the Israeli individuals who had carried out the abduction.Footnote 83 Since a return of Eichmann was out of the question for Israel, meaning that it refused to meet Argentina’s demands for adequate ‘reparations’, Argentina felt that it had ‘no choice but to go to [the] SC [UN Security Council]’.Footnote 84 It is possible that this decision was partially motivated by domestic discontent, where the violation of Argentine sovereignty had hurt the ‘pride’ of both the military and the people, allowing right-wingers to frame it as an issue of ‘Argentina’s dignity and honor’, leading to anti-Jewish attacks that mounted pressure on the government.Footnote 85
At the request of Argentina, the UN Security Council convened an emergency session on 22 June 1960, one month after the first rumours, to discuss the infringement of its sovereignty and its right to reparations.Footnote 86 In his opening statement, the Argentine ambassador declared that Israel’s actions constituted a threat to the international order, which arose out of the principle that had been compromised: ‘This principle is the absolute respect which states owe to each other and which excludes the exercise of jurisdictional acts in foreign territory.’Footnote 87 He further argued that ‘no civilized life will survive upon the face of the earth’ if the international community tolerated one exception to the juridical order,Footnote 88 and that acts ‘which affect the sovereignty of a member state…might endanger international peace and security’.Footnote 89 Partially in response to Israeli allusions that Argentina was effectively a haven for Nazis,Footnote 90 the ambassador further claimed that Israel’s actions undermine the international right to political asylum, and that Argentina is therefore also ‘defending the security of millions of men and women who seek protection outside their native land’.Footnote 91 However, it was the gravity of the sovereignty violation that formed the basis for the Argentine complaint and to which the members of the Security Council were clearly receptive. By putting the complaint on the agenda, they not only rejected Israel’s claim that the Council did not have jurisdiction over the matter but also gave credence to Argentina’s claim of this being a matter of sovereignty and thus a concern for all members of the international community.Footnote 92
The Council’s general agreement with Argentina’s view is further confirmed by the passing of the Argentine resolution the next day, even though some member states, like Britain, felt that Argentina was demanding too much.Footnote 93 The carefully worded resolution declares the matter to be one concerning a violation of sovereignty and the principles of international order, and requests Israel to make appropriate reparations in the form of an apology in the face of the Security Council’s strong disapproval.Footnote 94 Notably, the resolution’s demand for ‘adequate reparations’ did not include the repatriation of Eichmann to Argentina. While this session in the Security Council was followed by another spat between Argentina and Israel over the adequacy of the apology as a form of reparations, resulting in the expulsion of Israeli ambassador Levavi from Argentina, both countries soon came to an agreement and issued a joint communiqué in early August 1960, declaring their decision ‘to regard as closed the incident that arose out of action taken by Israeli nationals which infringed fundamental rights of the State of Argentina’.Footnote 95
Japan and ‘the North Korean abduction issue’
After the end of World War II, North Korea initiated and maintained a decades-long state-sponsored abduction programme, which oversaw the kidnapping of thousands of South Koreans and hundreds of other foreign nationals.Footnote 96 Among the latter are confirmed to be at least seventeen Japanese citizens abducted between the 1970s and early 1980s, most of them directly from Japanese territory.Footnote 97 The Japanese government was slow to take the possibility of North Korea’s involvement in the disappearance of some of its citizens seriously, but eventually raised its suspicions directly with North Korea in the early 1990s during negotiations over the normalisation of relations between the two countries – a move that angered North Korea, which accused Japan of slander.Footnote 98 It was only in 2002 that then-North Korean leader Kim Jung-Il admitted to the abductions during a high-profile summit with Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro, blaming them on ‘rogue’ agents and issuing a formal apology.Footnote 99 Ironically, it was this high-profile apology aimed at paving the way towards finally establishing formal relations between the two countries that caused a storm in Japan, making most members of the public for the first time aware of both North Korea’s brazen and outrageous actions and their own government’s decades-long ineptitude in dealing with the matter.
In an attempt to quieten the public outrage in Japan and prevent it from becoming an obstacle to reconciliation, Japan and North Korea negotiated the return of five of the abductees in 2002. When Koizumi requested further information about the remaining abductees, North Korea claimed that all of them had died of natural causes, either illness or accidents, and that all but one of their graves had been washed away in massive floods, so that there were no remains to return.Footnote 100 These explanations were met with suspicion in Japan, even more so because the same hospital had seemingly issued death certificates for all of the deceased despite them supposedly having died under very different circumstances.Footnote 101 As a result, Japanese public opinion turned overwhelmingly against North Korea and any prospect of normalising relations, causing a flurry of political activity in Japan.Footnote 102 Not only was the clarification of the fate of the abductees and the return of any survivors made the immediate condition for economic aid and any progress in the normalisation talks, but the ‘North Korean abduction issue’, as it came to be known, has come to occupy a prominent place on every prime minister’s agenda since. Domestically, the government passed the North Korean Abductions and Human Rights Act – a law that requires the government to report to the Diet annually about how it has exerted ‘maximal effort’ to resolve the issue – and, crucially, established the Cabinet Headquarters for the Abduction Issue, a separate body dedicated to the gathering and spreading of information about North Korea’s kidnappings, formally led by the prime minster himself.Footnote 103 As a result of this obligation to raise awareness, the abduction issue was added to school curricula in 2011Footnote 104 and is the primary reason behind the annual government-sponsored ‘North Korean Human Rights Abuses Awareness Week’.Footnote 105 Rather than human rights, however, formal political statements tend to emphasise the kidnappings’ relation to sovereignty, commonly describing the abduction of Japanese citizens as ‘a serious issue related to our national sovereignty and the lives and safety of citizens’.Footnote 106 Notably, former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo is on record saying that ‘the reason why I pursued the solution of the abduction issue is first and foremost because Japan’s sovereignty was violated’.Footnote 107
Internationally, all prime ministers since 2002 have made it a priority to foster awareness and gather support from other states. Former Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru had the issue on the agenda for his first meeting with Donald Trump in February 2025,Footnote 108 while Abe claimed in 2017 to have raised the issue with foreign leaders more than 500 times.Footnote 109 Since 2003, Japan has discussed the issue using a human rights framing at all G7/G8 meetings and frequently succeeded in having references to North Korea’s human rights violations, or even the abductions specifically, included in the summits’ final communiqué.Footnote 110 Also since 2003, the abductions feature annually in the United Nation’s Human Rights Council and General Assembly resolutions condemning North Korea’s human rights record, with Japan co-sponsoring the latter resolutions since 2004.Footnote 111 The prominence of the human rights framing in these contexts stands in contrast to the domestic discourse, where newspapers rarely discuss the abductions as a general issue of human rights and where politicians tend to engage in ‘human rights nationalism’, privileging the rights of Japanese nationals over all else.Footnote 112
Most curious, perhaps, in terms of multilateralisation efforts, is that Japan raised the issue of the abductions during the Six-Party Talks – a forum of six states that convened between 2003 and 2007 with the sole purpose of dissuading North Korea from pursuing its nuclear weapons programme. While the other participants, including China, South Korea, and Russia, were annoyed with Japan and worried that the abduction issue might jeopardise the talks,Footnote 113 they still eventually added the issue to the agenda. China and the United States even expanded significant diplomatic efforts on the sidelines to persuade North Korea to meet Japan’s demands.Footnote 114 While bilateral talks to resolve the issue were eventually restarted, no significant progress was made, causing Japan to withhold its share of economic aid that had been promised as part of a collective agreement reached during the talks.Footnote 115 When North Korea ultimately abandoned the talks in 2007, the abduction issue was likely not the primary reason, but it allowed North Korea to blame Japan for their failure, as it had insisted on bringing up ‘“irrelevant” issues’.Footnote 116 Even after the end of the Six-Party Talks, Japan continued to interfere in negotiations over denuclearisation, for example by lobbying the United States in 2008 not to remove North Korea from the list of terrorist states, arguing that the abductions ‘amount to terrorist acts’.Footnote 117 This echoes a domestic discourse that frequently describes the abductions as ‘criminal acts’Footnote 118 or ‘a national crime’.Footnote 119 The United States, for its part, proceeded with delisting North Korea, but not before assuring Japan that they ‘will never forget’ about the abductions.Footnote 120
The emotional politics of sovereignty
While different in many respects, including their historical circumstances and eventual (ir)resolution, the two cases are similar in significant ways. In both cases, once the abductions, and thus the fact of their sovereignty violation, became public, Argentina and Japan felt the need to act and respond publicly. We can see this in the Argentine foreign minister’s statement that Argentina would be ‘compelled’ to protest more seriously should the reports about Israel’s actions prove to be true, its sense that it had ‘no choice’ other than taking the matter to the Security Council, and in the fact that Japan began its barrage of public and diplomatic activities only after Kim Jong-Il’s apology publicised the issue, not when Japanese officials first became aware of the abductions a decade, or possibly more, earlier. As the New York Times noted in May 1960, ‘It would be embarrassing to the country in which Eichmann was captured to have it known that its people can be smuggled out by Israeli agents with or without its consent or cooperation’,Footnote 121 and the same is arguably even more true for Japan where foreign abductions had gone first undetected and then unacknowledged for years. Clearly, the public nature of the dignity violation necessitated an equally public performance on the international stage to reaffirm their sovereignty and restore their dignity in front of the relevant audience.Footnote 122
Consequently, both countries subsequently engaged in a multifaceted emotional politics of sovereignty, drawing from and evoking feeling rules related to rights, duties, and deference. In the first instance, both Argentina and Japan engaged in a politics of emotional obligations, seeking to impose on the perpetrators of the kidnappings a duty to feel genuine remorse. While both Israel and North Korea did issue multiple apologies, these were seemingly perceived as insufficient and insincere, given that they were not accompanied by the desired reparative actions. In the case of the Eichmann affair, Israel refused to return Eichmann and to apply to Argentina with an official extradition request, while in the case of the North Korean abduction issue, North Korea’s implausible stories about the fate of the unreturned abductees undermined its apology. Unsurprisingly, this perceived failure by the perpetrators to display sincere feelings of remorse added to Argentina’s and Japan’s sense of undignified treatment and humiliation. Simultaneously, both Argentina and Japan pressed home their right to feel outraged and sought recognition of their right to feel this way, and thereby recognition of the wrongfulness of the violation, from others. Argentina did so by taking the issue to the UN Security Council, while Japan’s leaders pursued a similar goal in raising the issue with other state leaders and in the context of international summits (recall Abe Shinzo’s claim to have mentioned the issue to foreign leaders more than 500 times). It is significant that Argentina and Japan mostly engaged state actors, indicating that it was the recognition of other state persons that mattered and underlining both countries’ concern with reaffirming their status as a formally equal member of that exclusive ‘club’. In the process, they also sought to impose on other states a duty to share in their outrage at these blatant violations of sovereignty and to compel them to display an appropriate amount of sympathy. This is most clearly visible in the way the Argentine ambassador sought to implicate all states at the UN Security Council by framing Israel’s actions as an attack on the sovereignty of all and the principle of the ‘respect which states owe to each other’, but it is also evident in Japan’s efforts to include the North Korean abduction issue in G7/G8 summit communiqués and during the Six-Party Talks.
Israel and North Korea, for their part, refused to acquiesce to the claimants’ attempts at casting them as outsiders of the international community and, in turn, sought to undermine Argentina’s and Japan’s efforts at multilateralising the dispute by condemning the raising of the issue in international fora. As evident from the kidnappings ending up on the agenda of multiple international summits, however, other states largely sided with the victim states, indicating not only their sympathy for Argentina and Japan but also that they, too, felt an obligation to publicly reaffirm the principle of sovereignty. To quote an analysis of Argentina’s diplomatic moves at the time, it was Argentina’s reference to its ‘sovereignty’ interest that ‘evoked a great deal of emotional response among the Council members’.Footnote 123 In this way, the successful multilateralisation of these ostensibly bilateral issues is also suggestive of a politics of emotional deference, with Argentina and Japan successfully claiming the priority of their feelings of outrage over other states’ feelings of annoyance and impatience, and even over hard security concerns like denuclearisation. This is most readily visible in the way both China and the United States made serious efforts to solve the dispute between Japan and North Korea during the Six-Party Talks, despite internally agreeing that it was an obstacle to the goal of the talks.
In the process of making these claims, which largely appealed to the rights of autonomy and formal equality codified within the institution of sovereignty, Argentina and Japan also sought to establish a moral hierarchy between themselves and the perpetrators of the kidnappings by painting Israel and North Korea as less civilised than them and the enlightened international audience. The Argentine ambassador is explicit in this when he describes Israel’s actions as a threat to ‘civilised life’ on earth, but Japan’s efforts to consistently brand North Korea as a human rights violator and even a terrorist state can be understood in the same light. As Aalberts and Hobson have pointed out, the deeply Eurocentric and racialised standard of civilisation lives on in the current international system as an unspecified ideal of human rights, democracy, and other Western liberal values.Footnote 124 The language of civilisation and human rights is thus not incidental but indicative of an enduring and widely shared social hierarchy, something that both Argentina and Japan utilise when they portray Israel and North Korea as falling short of this standard. This is likely also why the Argentine ambassador felt the need to proclaim Israel as a threat to the right to asylum, and Argentina as the heroic defender thereof, seeing as it is one of the most established human rights in international law. This portrayal of the kidnappers as insufficiently civilised to be legitimate and equal members of the international society of states is clearly an attempt to shame them – perhaps in order to compel them into reparative actions, but more likely as a way to repair one’s self-esteem and exert some revenge for the public humiliation suffered.Footnote 125
Thus, what we can glean from this analysis are three things. First, the international society of states is underpinned by an emotional politics of sovereignty aimed at reproducing states as persons, that is, as entitled to dignity in the form of autonomy and formal equality. Part of the constitutive performance of sovereignty is the appropriate public display of emotions in accordance with feeling rules related to emotional rights, duties, and their relative importance. Since these rules are intersubjectively shared and maintained, no state can defend its state personhood by itself and is always reliant on recognition and reaffirmation by others. It is for this reason that Argentina and Japan engaged in a strategy of multilateralisation. Second, while the pursuit of dignity is related to reaffirming one’s status as a sovereign equal, states simultaneously seek to establish a social hierarchy by portraying themselves as model civilised state persons and the violators as not worthy of the respect due to sovereign states. The fact that this logic is both understood and upheld by the international community of states at large shows the enduring influence of a Eurocentric ‘standard of civilisation’ within a post-1945 world, reminding us of the profoundly unequal foundations of the contemporary international order.Footnote 126
Third, due to the emotional politics of sovereignty being a structural feature of the institution of sovereignty, the moral weight of the associated feeling rules works on everyone. This means that victims, perpetrators, and bystander states alike feel the need to do something in the face of a violation of sovereignty. Not only did both Argentina and Japan feel ‘compelled’ to multilateralise the issues, but Israel and North Korea, too, demonstrated mindfulness of Argentina’s and Japan’s sovereignty by publicly apologising when the kidnappings first became known. The international community of states, for its part, understood the violation of sovereignty of one to be an attack on the sovereignty of all, at least to some limited extent, and felt the need to acknowledge the wrongfulness of the sovereignty violation. This can be seen in the support for the victim states and the reluctant willingness to include an apparent bilateral issue on the international agenda. In the end, the multilateralisation of sovereignty disputes is a reflection of the collective efforts it takes to maintain the institution of sovereignty, alerting us to the shared meanings and rules on which it is based.
Conclusion
We can make sense of the phenomenon of the multilateralisation of sovereignty disputes by recognising that the maintenance of sovereignty is dependent on constitutive and collectively upheld performances of state personhood. Because statehood, like the international system as a whole, requires constant reenactment for its continued existence, recognised and socially shared performances, including emotional ones, are crucial. The feeling rules that make up the emotional politics of sovereignty structure parts of this performance, obliging all states to act in specific ways in the face of a violation of sovereignty. Victims of sovereignty violations express their anger and seek reparations to reassert their dignity, violators of sovereignty display remorse while downplaying their transgressions, and bystanders reaffirm the overall importance of the rules of sovereignty by showing sympathy and support for the victim. These performances reproduce states and the international system ontologically. Accordingly, what matters is not so much whether Argentina and Japan succeed in gaining the asked-for reparations, but that they do something in response to the violation of their sovereignty, that they express outrage and make demands on the international community. In this way, publicly holding perpetrators accountable through multilateralisation efforts not only reaffirms a state’s personhood and entitlement to dignified treatment but also contributes to maintaining the international order.Footnote 127 Our key insight is thus that these emotional performances are not just lip service or window dressing, but that they do something.
That being said, our theorisation of sovereignty’s feeling rules is not without limitations. For one, there are situations when states will not take action in the face of sovereignty transgressions. South Korea, for instance, has chosen to frame the kidnapping of its nationals by North Korea as an exclusively humanitarian or human rights issue,Footnote 128 thereby skirting the question of sovereignty and its transgression. Not only would addressing the kidnappings as a sovereignty issue further complicate inter-Korean relations,Footnote 129 but it could also undermine South Korea’s own sovereignty claim over the entire Korean Peninsula by revealing its inability to keep its citizens safe. In other words, such a move would activate feeling rules, like the performance of public outrage, counter to its other interests. Thus, states may choose to avoid politicising sovereignty issues for political or diplomatic reasons. Second, there are instances when the international community will not show sympathy with the victim of a sovereignty violation. When Canada labelled the 2023 murder of a Sikh-Canadian separatist a ‘violation of Canada’s sovereignty’, on the grounds that the Indian government was behind the assassination, international support for Canada’s position was decidedly muted, despite its strong attempt to multilateralise the issue and secure moral condemnation from other states.Footnote 130 Both instances suggest that the activation of the feeling rules of sovereignty is not automatic but in some way contextual – a context that our current theorisation is not equipped to account for.
Still, our theorisation of the emotional politics of sovereignty contributes to the understanding of states’ seemingly overblown emotional diplomatic performances, such as Argentina calling Israel’s behaviour a threat to all ‘civilised life’ on earth or Japan raising the abduction issue during denuclearisation talks. It shows that, while transgressive actions may be diverse, at the core of a victim state’s reaction is the pursuit of dignity in the face of its perceived denial. More broadly, our investigation points to ideas about dignity and sovereignty, qua their association with reason and autonomy, being not only genderedFootnote 131 but also racialised. This confirms insights of the decolonial and post-Western scholarship, which has frequently highlighted the biases entrenched in the contemporary international system. Future research could investigate the consequences of the interplay between formal equality and social hierarchy within the international community of states – an interplay that our theoretical lens frames as generative of tensions and political destabilisation, despite the well-established rules and practices governing the institution of sovereignty. Future research could also look into whether the social pressure of sovereignty’s feeling rules works on everyone equally, and whether some states are more sensitive to sovereignty violations than others. As Seo-Hyun Park shows, concepts like sovereignty and autonomy vary not only across time but also regions, and in East Asia, for example, sovereignty has been utilised as a status-seeking instrument with enduring ideational power.Footnote 132 Similarly, Ayşe Zarakol has outlined the effects of the uneven expansion of the international system across the globe, highlighting the particular emotionality of states whose incorporation into the current international order was ‘late’.Footnote 133 These accounts suggest that non-Western states not part of the original ‘club’ of ‘civilised’ states might potentially be more sensitive to sovereignty violations than traditionally ‘Western’ states. Given the lasting impact of the colonial standard of civilisation, they also raise the possibility that some states are more easily framed as ‘rogue’ or ‘less civilised’ than others. On the whole, much work remains to be done on the continual use of the language of sovereignty and the endurance of the international system of sovereign states, even as much of it seems outdated in an age of rapid globalisation and transnationalisation.
Acknowledgements
We thank Richard Samuels and Karl Gustafsson for organising this special issue, and all participants at the workshops in Berlin and Chicago for their thoughtful comments. Previous versions of our argument were presented at the 2022 ISA Northeast conference, as well as at a workshop organised at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs. In this context, we thank Columba Achilleos-Sarll, Patrick T. Jackson, Nicola Pratt, Ty Solomon, Saskia Stachowitsch, and Sanna Strand for their constructive engagement. We are also indebted to the EJIS editors and the two anonymous reviewers who greatly helped us in sharpening our argument. Finally, we would like to thank Abdallah Hussein for his valuable research assistance.
Funding statement
Minseon Ku received research support from William & Mary’s Global Research Institute as a postdoctoral fellow in 2024–5.
Nina C. Krickel-Choi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. She works on issues related to international security, state sovereignty, and political psychology and currently leads a research project on climate change and existentialist sense-making. Her work can be found in, inter alia, the European Journal of International Relations, the International Studies Review, and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.
Minseon Ku is Assistant Professor at the Grace School of Applied Diplomacy at DePaul University, United States. Her research interests primarily concern the home dimension across various levels of diplomacy.
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