Rituals of world politics: on (visual) practices disordering things

Abstract

Rituals are customarily muted into predictable routines aimed to stabilise social orders and limit conflict. As a result, their magic lure recedes into the background, and the unexpected and disruptive elements are downplayed. Our collaborative contribution counters this move by foregrounding rituals of world politics as social practices with notable disordering effects. We engage a series of 'world pictures' to show the worlding and disruptive work enacted in rituals designed to sustain the sovereign exercise of violence and war, here colonial treatymaking, state commemoration, military/service dog training, cyber-security podcasts, algorithmically generated maps, the visit of Prince Harry to a joint NATO exercise and border ceremonies in India, respectively. We do so highlighting rituals' immanent potential for disruption of existing orders, the fissures, failures and unforeseen repercussions. Reappraising the disordering role of ritual practices sheds light on the place of rituals in rearticulating the boundaries of the political. Rituals can generate dissensus and re-divisions of the sensible rather than only impose a consensus by policing the boundaries of the political, as Rancière might phrase it. Our images are essential to the account. They help disinterring the fundamentals and ambiguities of the current worldings of security, capturing the affective atmosphere of rituals.

Up in the air: Ritualized atmospheres and the global Black Lives Matter movement

“…Much of this work examines ritual activities in many of the formal and institutional spaces of global politics, such as the European Union’s (EU) efforts to ritualize its internal processes (Salgo, 2017) as well as the EU’s foreign relations (Charrett, 2018), rituals in parliaments (Rai, 2010), regional organizations (Davies, 2018), declarations of independence (Knotter, 2020), and official apologies (Kampf and Löwenheim, 2012). Other work explores rituals outside of formal spaces in broader socio-political and cultural settings, such as the construction of authority (Kustermans et al, 2022), visual politics (Aalberts et al, 2020), securitization (Oren and Solomon, 2015), protests (Russo, 2018), and everyday militarism (Wegner, 2021). Within IR ritual research there are at least two themes that speak to the questions posed above about BLM and the widespread resonance of rituals.…”

“…Other work looks at specifically rhythmic practices of rituals and how these generate mobilizing possibilities (Solomon, 2019) or reproduce affective attachments to militarism (Wegner, 2021). Other research examines how rituals act as affective vehicles for socialization into new identities (Ross, 2014) or explores how rituals may function as both ordering and disordering occasions (Aalberts et al, 2020; Baele and Balzacq, 2022). While this work extends and challenges the Durkheimian tradition of viewing rituals as creating emotional solidarity, they nevertheless do not exhaust the possibilities for how emotion and affect can reconfigure global social movements.…”

“…International Relations (IR) has recently seen significant rising interest in rituals of global politics (Aalberts et al, 2020; Baele and Balzacq, 2022; Charrett, 2018; Cronin-Furman and Krystalli, 2020; Davies, 2018; Holmes and Wheeler, 2020; Kampf and Löwenheim, 2012; Knotter, 2020; Koschut, 2014; Kustermans et al, 2022; Mälksoo, 2021; Oren and Solomon, 2015; Pacher, 2018; Salgo, 2017; Wegner, 2021; Wong, 2021). The global BLM movement of 2020 vividly displayed many kinds of ritual practices, from the rhythms and reverberations of protest marches to shared and reiterated discourses and symbolic gestures across countries, to the ritual sharing of video and photographs across social media.…”

Mundane technologies of educational policy consultancy: Presentations and interpretive control

“…They "become a pure ritual in which the audience expects a vivid show of slides while sitting passively and listening to what the speaker has to say" (Kernbach et al, 2015, p. 306). The concept of 'ritual' has multiple definitions in policy research (e.g., Aalberts et al, 2020). Here we use the idea of "political ritual" to refer to a high degree of formalization in how participants are expected to act: "there is 'artificiality' in certain types of behavior adopted by the principal protagonists, behavior expressive of respect, meditation, emotion, etc" (Abélès, 1988, p. 393).…”

How diplomacy evolves: the global spread of honorific state awards

“…To overcome this mistrust, diplomacy’s medium of peace stresses togetherness (not sovereignty), trustworthiness (not threat), amity (not enmity) in order to succeed. When diplomacy utilizes vague terms of friendship (Devere et al, 2011), when it activates positive emotions (Kopper, 2021), and when it immerses participants into ostentatious rituals where no one can do ‘wrong’ (Aalberts et al, 2020), then this is where the medium of peace becomes visible – in the form of friendly wordings, positive emotions, and stately rituals. They all serve to foreground ‘peace’ while invisibilising ‘power’ so as to lower the improbability of overlapping sovereignties.…”