This section explores the place of rituals in performing world politics. If rituals traditionally functioned to strengthen the bond between believers and their god(s), as Durkheim suggested, what role do they play in the enactment of contemporary World Political (dis-)orders? What indeed can we learn from engaging and developing recent IR scholarship focusing on rituals and revisiting classical and contemporary theoretical perspectives on rituals as developed e.g. by Alexander, Bell, Mauss, or Turner? Can a focus on rituals pave the way for better locating embodied, affective, sense-making in world politics? Can it reintroduce the place of the magical by moving theorizations of World Politics beyond “the rigid formal rationalization of human agency and social order” of classical modern cultural theory, on the one hand, and the “hyperintellectualization” of “high modern theories of culture” (as Reckwitz suggests)? And can a focus on rituals provide ways dealing with the unstable, messy patchwork that make up contemporary world politics (as Strathern, Mol, or Law might phrase it)? Can a focus on rituals help us understand the ways in which we are indeed staying with the trouble (to use Haraway’s formulation)? To address these questions we invite contributions reflecting on the performing of World Politics through rituals. The rituals may range from the mundane to the grandiose, from the religious to the theoretical and from the memorial to the racial. We envisage contributions focused on the widest possible variety of issues including diplomacy, international law, security, migration, digital communication, humanitarianism, peacekeeping, torture, or marketing.
Section chairs: Tanja Aalberts (VU Amsterdam) and Anna Leander (Graduate Institute, Geneva)
