The production of transnational knowledge that is widely recognized as legitimate is a major source of influence for international organizations. To reinforce their expert status, international organizations increasingly produce global benchmarks that measure national performance across a range of issue areas. This article illustrates how international organization benchmarking is a significant source of indirect power in world politics by examining two prominent cases in which international organizations seek to shape the world through comparative metrics: (1) the World Bank–International Finance Corporation Ease of Doing Business ranking; and (2) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index. We argue that the legitimacy attached to these benchmarks because of the expertise of the international organizations that produce them is highly problematic for two reasons. First, both benchmarks oversimplify the evaluation of relative national performance, misrepresenting contested political values drawn from a specific transnational paradigm as empirical facts. Second, they entrench an arbitrary division in the international arena between ‘ideal’ and ‘pathological’ types of national performance, which (re)produces social hierarchies among states. We argue that the ways in which international organizations use benchmarking to orient how political actors understand best practices, advocate policy changes and attribute political responsibility thus constitutes ‘bad science’. Extending research on processes of paradigm maintenance and the influence of international organizations as teachers of norms or judges of norm compliance, we show how the indirect power that international organizations exercise as evaluators of relative national performance through benchmarking can be highly consequential for the definition of states’ policy priorities.

For most observers, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States (US) came as a shock. This has been widely recast as the culmination of the American public's long-standing dissatisfaction with the political elite and deep-seated frustrations with broader socioeconomic conditions. We argue that the Trump campaign's success also stemmed from its effective use of an emotionally charged, anti-establishment crisis narrative. With insights from political psychology, we examine the socio-linguistic mechanisms that underlie the effectiveness of 'Trump-speak' through both quantitative and qualitative content analysis of Trump's communications toolkit during the 2016 US presidential election campaign. We show that his leadership legitimation claims rest significantly upon 'crisis talk' that puts his audience in a loss frame with nothing to lose and explain why 'crisis talk' impacts on political behaviour. As we demonstrate, the crisis stories that political agents tell simultaneously instil ontological insecurity among the American public and serve to transform their anxiety into confidence that the narrator's policy agendas are the route back to 'normality'. Through these rhetorical mechanisms, the Trump campaign manipulated individuals' ontological (in)security as a tool in the politics of reassurance at the broader, societal level. 'There is an eager political market for that which pleases and reassures.' (Galbraith 1992: 2) 'For those suffering and hurting, I say: give Donald J. Trump a chance. I will fix it. What do you have to lose?'

The loss of faith in mainstream political parties and moderate electoral candidates seems characteristic of the zeitgeist in much of the Western world and beyond. Whether in the form of the United Kingdom's vote to exit the European Union (EU), the 2016 United States (US) presidential election of the Republican nominee Donald Trump, the prior strength of Senator Bernie Sandecrs within the Democratic party primaries, or the rise of the anti-neoliberal left alongside resurgent rightist anti-migration groups in Europe, varieties of populism have gravitated from the fringes of politics into the center. They have gained traction in tandem with widespread perceptions of crises, insecurity and alienation as markers of a 'runaway world' whose forces lie beyond the control of the many (Giddens 1999). The urgency of populist politics calls attention to the everyday anxieties and concerns of 'ordinary' individuals in a variety of everyday settings. Although it is often invoked as a self-evident term or concept, the meaning of 'populism' depends upon the contexts within which it operates. A broad understanding of populism therefore acknowledges that it is an approach, ideology or discourse that easily escapes definitional straightjackets but which centrally features the driving of a wedge between two antagonistic sides-the bad, corrupt elite and the good, pure people-to appeal to the 'common' person (Mudde 2004, 543). 1 While much remains undefined here both in terms of who (or what) is a populist, 2 as well as whom such politics is aimed towards-both for and against-the politics of populism centralizes the power struggles and emotional contexts that involve who (or what) gets to be considered as part of the 'true' people, and who does not. Boundary-making practices, especially those relating to emotionally charged processes of exclusion

This article examines how communicative practices, emotion, and everyday experiences of insecurity interlink in processes of populist political mobilization. Combining insights from international security studies, political psychology, and populism research, it demonstrates how populist political agents from the right of the political spectrum have constructed a powerful security imaginary around the loss of past national greatness that creates affinities with the experiences of those who feel disempowered and ties existential anxieties to concerns with immigration, globalization, and integration. As we show, within the populist security imaginary, humiliation is the key discursive mechanism that helps turn abstract notions of enmity into politically consequential affective narratives of loss, betrayal, and oppression. Humiliation binds together an ostensibly conflicting sense of national greatness and victimhood to achieve an emotive response that enables a radical departure from established domestic and international policy norms and problematizes policy choices centered on collaboration, dialogue, and peaceful conflict resolution. Cet article examine la mesure dans laquelle les pratiques de communication, l’émotion et les expériences quotidiennes d'insécurité sont liées aux processus de mobilisation politique des populistes. Il allie des renseignements issus d’études internationales sur la sécurité, de la psychologie politique et de recherches sur le populisme pour montrer la manière dont les agents politiques populistes de droite ont construit un puissant imaginaire de la sécurité autour de la perte de la grandeur nationale passée. Cet imaginaire crée des affinités avec les expériences des personnes qui se sentent mises à l’écart et associe les anxiétés existentielles à des préoccupations liées à l'immigration, à la mondialisation et à l'intégration. Comme nous le montrons, dans l'imaginaire populiste de la sécurité, l'humiliation est le mécanisme discursif clé qui permet de transformer des notions abstraites d'inimitié en récits de perte, de trahison et d'oppression qui font appel à l'affectif et ont des conséquences politiques. Cette humiliation associe deux sentiments ostensiblement contradictoires, celui de grandeur nationale et celui d’être victime, qui amènent à une réaction émotive conduisant à s’éloigner radicalement des normes politiques nationales et internationales établies tout en trouvant problématiques les choix politiques centrés sur la collaboration, le dialogue et la résolution pacifique des conflits. Este artículo investiga de qué manera las prácticas comunicativas, las emociones y las experiencias cotidianas de inseguridad se conectan con los procesos de movilizaciones políticas populistas. Combinando los conocimientos de los estudios de seguridad internacional, la psicología política y la investigación del populismo, demuestra cómo los agentes políticos populistas de la derecha del espectro político han construido un imaginario de seguridad poderoso en torno a la pérdida de la grandeza nacional pasada, el cual crea afinidad con las experiencias de aquellas personas que sienten que carecen de poder y relaciona las ansiedades existenciales con las preocupaciones por la inmigración, la globalización y la integración. Tal como lo presentamos, dentro del imaginario de seguridad populista, la humillación es el mecanismo discursivo clave que ayuda a convertir las nociones abstractas de la enemistad en discursos afectivos de derrotas, traiciones y opresiones que son relevantes en términos políticos. La humillación une un sentido ostensiblemente opuesto de grandeza nacional y victimismo para lograr una respuesta emotiva que permita la divergencia radical de las normas políticas nacionales e internacionales establecidas y problematiza las elecciones políticas centradas en la colaboración, el diálogo y la resolución pacífica de conflictos.

This article examines how the foundations of the ‘rogue states’ security narrative in the United States developed prior to the declaration of the George W. Bush administration’s ‘Global War on Terror’ and President Bush’s representation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’. The article argues that the puzzle of how US post-Cold War foreign and defence policy came to be focused on ‘irrational’ — but militarily inferior — adversaries can be understood through analysing how actors within the US defence community discursively constructed discrete international crises as the trigger for a major shift in US threat scenarios. This is developed through an examination of two crucial episodes in the construction of post-Cold War US national security interests: the crisis in the Persian Gulf in 1990–1 and the North Korean nuclear crisis in 1993–4. The article suggests the importance of historicizing contests over the interpretation of international crises in order to both better understand the process through which a country’s national security interests are defined and to gain greater analytical purchase on how security narratives are reconstructed during processes of systemic change.

The rhetoric leaders use to speak to domestic audiences about security is not simply bluster. Political agents rely upon stories of enmity and threat to represent what is happening in the international arena, to whom and why, in order to push national and international security policy agendas. They do so for the simple reason that a good story is a powerful political device. This article examines historical ‘calls to arms’ in the United States, based on insights from archival research at US presidential libraries and the United States National Archives. Drawing on narrative theory and political psychology, the article develops a new analytic framework to explain the political currency and staying power of hero–villain security narratives, which divide the world into opposing spheres of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Shifting the conceptual focus away from speakers and settings towards audience and affect, it argues that the resonance of hero–villain security narratives lies in the way their plot structure keeps the audience in suspense. Because they are consequential rhetorical tools that shape security policy practices, the stories political agents tell about security demand greater attention in the broader field of international security studies.

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This paper explores the discursive processes of legitimizing leadership claims in the context of the nuclear proliferation crisis. Three complementary analyses of texts are carried out: discourse analyses of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and relevant speeches by members of the US administration, as well as a corpus analysis of news media accounts of nuclear proliferation published in prominent US and UK broadsheets. Findings suggest that leadership claims are legitimized through a range of discursive strategies, which are echoed across the different text types. However, a combination and comparison of the different datasets puts these findings into perspective and reveals that the various contexts and text types in which these leadership claims are made differ remarkably in terms of their use of relevant terms relating to leadership and crisis. We argue that this dynamic is best captured by the notion of an (inter)discursive chain of legitimization.