A Show of Force: The Ritualization of Russian Strategic Posturing in the Baltic Sea
Vladymyrova, Mariia. A Show of Force: The Ritualization of Russian Strategic Posturing in the Baltic Sea, Global Studies Quarterly 6(1) (Special Forum: Ritual Action in World Politics, guest editor: Maria Mälksoo), pp. 1-14. © The Author (2026) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksag012
This article studies military exercises as tools of strategic posturing, understood here as physically embodied, spatially configured, and visually defined coercive signaling action which commonly entails symbolic attributes. By identifying the modalities of ritualization involved in the conduct of military exercises, the article unfolds how these modalities render military activity a politically meaningful action and contribute to the construction of the displayed capabilities as credible deterrent. I argue that the spatial emplacement of strategic posturing is a key element for credibility in general deterrence. This proposition is empirically grounded in the examination of Russian naval exercises in the Baltic Sea in the years 2022–2025. The analysis accentuates how Russian strategic posturing engaged spatiality to project and sustain credibility vis-à-vis NATO as the security tensions between two actors increasingly manifest in the maritime domain.
Mariia Vladymyrova • 13 March 2026
Rituals in Nuclear Statecraft: Conjuring Conformity, Cohesion, and Cooperation
Egeland, Kjølv. Rituals in Nuclear Statecraft: Conjuring Conformity, Cohesion, and Cooperation, Global Studies Quarterly 6(1) (Special Forum: Ritual Action in World Politics, guest editor: Maria Mälksoo), pp. 1-11. © The Author (2026) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksag017
Nuclear statecraft is often seen as a field of policy characterized by hyper-rationality and icy reserve. Yet the practices that make it up are shot through with symbolic imagery and ritualistic behavior. Seeking to advance the nascent literature on ritual in world politics, this article offers an investigation into the origins and functions of central rites in nuclear policy practice. Arguing that rituals can help conjure conformity, cohesion, and cooperation in contexts where credibility is scarce and preferences are at loggerheads, I explore how rituals are deployed to overcome key problems in nuclear statecraft, including the challenge of maintaining obedience throughout the nuclear chain of command, the imperative of securing international buy-in for controversial policies, and the difficulties associated with facilitating structured communication between adversarial states. To do so, I examine three empirical cases: Russian nuclear deterrence practice, NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group, and multilateral nuclear disarmament diplomacy at the UN.
Kjølv Egeland • 13 March 2026
Ritualized Coordination in the PLA Rocket Force: Nuclear Deterrence, Control, and Sacrifice
Hunter, Cameron. Ritualized Coordination in the PLA Rocket Force: Nuclear Deterrence, Control, and Sacrifice, Global Studies Quarterly 6(1) (Special Forum: Ritual Action in World Politics, guest editor: Maria Mälksoo), pp. 1-12. © The Author (2026) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksag018
This article analyzes how China’s People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) uses ritual-like practices to convey specific political messages, around Party control of nuclear weapons and soldiers’ willingness to die for the state. The PLARF has a politically challenging mission, not only to meet the expectations of credible deterrence of its political masters in the Communist Party, but also in the eyes of its adversaries abroad. Consequently, it is insufficient for the PLARF to simply state their willingness to use nuclear weapons. Drawing on the work of Religious Studies scholar Catherine Bell, this article argues that ritualization builds staid policy statements into something reassuring to Chinese elites. Official doctrine calls for the choreographed display of weapons and troops, emphasizing their abilities but crucially also their loyalty to the Party and willingness to sacrifice themselves. To theorize how ritualized practices become politically successful, I turn to the sociologist Randall Collins. Using his interaction ritual chain framework, I argue that rituals produce the shared emotional energy required to agitate troops. PLARF leaders attempt to create symbols and meanings that overspill the immediate scene of the ritual and encounter the domestic and international audiences they target for messaging. Considering ritualizations relating to solidarity, symbolic repair, and sacrifice, this article demonstrates the PLARF addresses multiple goals and audiences with different kinds of ritual-like practices.
Cameron Hunter • 12 March 2026
The Magicians of Nuclear Strategy: Ritualized Knowledge Production and the Origins of Strategic Nuclear Thought
Fraise, Thomas. The Magicians of Nuclear Strategy: Ritualized Knowledge Production and the Origins of Strategic Nuclear Thought, Global Studies Quarterly 6(1) (Special Forum: Ritual Action in World Politics, guest editor: Maria Mälksoo), pp. 1-11. © The Author (2026) DOI: 10.1177/001083672412543
In the 1950s, a new intellectual figure emerged in American strategic debates: the nuclear strategist. Drawn largely from the RAND Corporation, these thinkers—such as Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, and Thomas Schelling—constructed a new field of knowledge: nuclear strategy. While their direct influence on U.S. war planning remains debated, this article argues that the nuclear strategists’ primary impact lay in their ability to create a structured discourse that rendered nuclear deterrence intelligible and actionable. Building on works in epistemic and ontological security, this article conceptualizes deterrence theory as a “script,” an action-oriented construct that transforms unverifiable effects into perceived certainty and provides actors with a sense of control over events. Through ritualized knowledge production, nuclear strategists addressed the radical uncertainty of nuclear policy, acting as “magicians” who linked cause and effect by reference to the deterrence script. This article takes the oft-made comparison between these strategists and “wizards” seriously and shows how their epistemic authority was indeed grounded in relation to magic. Those actors possessed the magicians’ features—liminality, esoteric craft, and secrecy—and were engaged in a practice similar as the one of magicians: sealing over the uncertainties of high-risk activities. The combination of these features granted them with unique epistemic authority over a consequential field of knowledge. In doing so, those “magicians” made the practice of nuclear deterrence sensible, and thus possible.
Thomas Fraise • 26 February 2026
The Logic of Ritual Action in International Relations
Mälksoo, Maria. The Logic of Ritual Action in International Relations, Global Studies Quarterly 6(1) (Special Forum: Ritual Action in World Politics, guest editor: Maria Mälksoo), pp. 1-13. © The Author (2026) DOI: 10.1177/00108367241254307
International politics abounds with rituals, but the rationale for ritual action has not been systematically expounded in international theory. This introduction to the special forum on Ritual Action in World Politics invites the scholars and students of International Relations (IR) to take ritual seriously. Flagging ritual action as an underappreciated, yet politically consequential genre of action in international relations, I make two main contributions. First, the paper conceptualizes ritual action in relation to the existing rational and constructivist theories of social action. I probe the rationality, functionality, and performativity of ritual(ized) conduct vis-à-vis the logics of consequences, appropriateness, practice/practicality, and habit in international relations. I argue that ritual action seeks to navigate uncertainty and mediate ambiguity in international relations by its promise to create enchantment effects. Second, the paper relates ritual to the already sedimented IR conceptual universe of practices, rules, norms, and performances, and provides a modular framework for the forum contributions to engage with. The forum’s collective aim is to: (1) consolidate the conceptualization of international rituals, (2) deepen the evolving conversation on the features, forms and logic of ritual action in different empirical realms of world politics, and (3) outline a novel research agenda in the well-trodden subfields of deterrence, diplomacy and knowledge production in IR.
Maria Mälksoo • 24 February 2026
NATO Pirates in the Baltic Sea? Lawfare in Russian Deterrence Strategy
Mariia Vladymyrova • 20 February 2026
The chapter “NATO Pirates in the Baltic Sea? Lawfare in Russian Deterrence Strategy” explores how lawfare has become integral to Russia’s coercive signaling strategies.
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Resilience is the New Black: NATO in and Beyond the Grey Zone
14 October 2025
The trope of resilience has emerged as a staple in NATO’s grappling with the many hybrid challenges it is currently facing both in the so-called grey zone of coercion, below the threshold of traditionally conceived violent attacks, and beyond. NATO’s coming to terms with the hybrid challenges through the past decade has been persistent, if somewhat piecemeal. There was a notable delay in recognising the nature and scope of the threat posed by Russia up until its brazen full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 on behalf of the North Atlantic allies.
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Risk, Resilience, and Resistance
26 February 2025
This chapter investigates the development of ‘resilience thinking’ in NATO’s post-Cold War discourse and practice and raises questions about the compatibility between the logics of security and resilience. The increasing emphasis on resilience performatively enacts NATO’s self-projection as a comprehensive security organization, much beyond its standard military alliance repertoire. What deterrence and defence are to NATO’s original identity, now resurrected after Russia’s 2022 full-on aggression against Ukraine, resilience has been to the Alliance’s positive post-Cold War sense of self.
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Nuclearization and de-democratization: security, secrecy, and the French pursuit of nuclear weapons (1945–1974)
Thomas Fraise, Nuclearization and de-democratization: security, secrecy, and the French pursuit of nuclear weapons (1945–1974), European Journal of International Relations (online first). Open access at: https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661241301648
Abstract
Do states change when they acquire nuclear weapons? This article looks at the consequences of nuclear acquisition on democratic states. It argues that nuclear acquisition is best understood as a process of political change through which state actors adapt existing institutions to the new, and unprecedented, challenges created by nuclear weapons. One form of this process of “nuclearization” is the development of nuclear secrecy regimes, which results from actors’ desire to maintain control over information they perceive as potentially having major security implications. Actors may not know what, exactly, must be concealed. The ultimate stakes of nuclear policy, however, are so high that they have incentives not to take their chances. Secrecy has implications for democratic governance: it can exclude actors from decision-making, distort information made available to the public, and be abused by actors in search of autonomy from democratic control. As a result, nuclear secrecy affects the overall level of public consultation inside a state, causing a democratic recoil. To borrow Charles Tilly’s concept, during this process of nuclearization, states also de-democratize. To make this case, the article examines the French nuclear secrecy regime from 1945 to 1974. Drawing on primary sources, it traces the origins of nuclear secrecy in France back to security concerns and shows how this development ultimately reduced the level of public consultation in France and caused a form of de-democratization.
Deterrence Icons as Status Symbols: American Forces in NATO’s Eastern Flank
Mälksoo, Maria. Deterrence Icons as Status Symbols: American Forces in NATO’s Eastern Flank, Cooperation and Conflict (Special Issue: Status Symbols in World Politics, guest editors: Paul Beaumont and Pål Røren), pp. 1-22. © The Author (2024) DOI: 10.1177/00108367241254307
How can a signal of extended deterrence, such as prepositioning of foreign military forces, signify status for the beneficiaries of the allied deterrence/reassurance chain? This article explores how the manifestation and communication of allied deterrence can concurrently constitute an affectively charged status symbol for the protégé states of this international security practice. It does so on the example of the Baltic states and Poland, probing the presence and functionality of the American forces as a status marker in NATO’s eastern flank states post-2014. Engaging discourse analysis and expert interviews, the article shows (i) how the intersubjectively determined success of deterrence is dependent on historically potent symbols which have become emblematic of extended deterrence, and (ii) how deterrence icons can simultaneously serve as multifarious status symbols in intra-alliance politics. The self-identification of protégé states as worthy stakes to deter over emerges as an ambivalent status position defined by the shortage of attributes, rather than a function of their tally. The article contributes to the understanding of the symbolic form of (allied) deterrence and the multivocal status value ascribed to the American ‘boots on the ground’.
Accepted author manuscript available here.
Maria Mälksoo • 25 May 2024