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5 Jun 2023 • Journal Article • Cooperation and Conflict
How do states reminisce? Building relations through bonding narratives
AbstractReminiscing during foreign state visits serves as a discursive means for building interstate relationships. When political leaders strategically narrate their states’ historical legacies, they construct a collective memory that serves as a resource for creating and sustaining amicable relations between states. Studying evocations of past events in 455 speeches delivered
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Sep 2022 • Journal Article • Journal of Language and Politics
“These are not just slogans”: Assertions of friendship between states
AbstractThe goal of this study is to capture the meaning of interstate friendship from the perspective of international actors and to underline the benefits of analyzing speech acts as a tool for revealing the relational scripts that guide interstate relations. Analysis of the discourse surrounding 215 assertions of friendship made by statespersons in a variety of diplomatic
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Sep 2022 • Journal Article • International Studies Quarterly
The Servant of Many Masters: The Multiple Commitments of State- Agents
AbstractPersonal commitments are a ubiquitous but undertheorized phenomenon in the everyday wheels of world politics. While resonating with multiple threads in international relations theory, the role of individuals’ commitments in statecraft, diplomacy, and foreign policy has hardly been addressed in and of itself. Drawing on insights from symbolic interactionism and organizational
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Apr 2022 • Journal Article • Foreign Policy Analysis
The Benefits of Friendliness: The Consequences of Positive Interpersonal Relations for Interstate Politics
AbstractWhile most international relations (IR) scholars tend to minimize the effect of relations between statespersons on foreign policy, this article argues that interpersonal relationships have more weight than the literature suggests. On the basis of twenty-one interviews conducted with senior Israeli statespersons, we propose a two-level model-linking positive interaction
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Sep 2021 • Journal Article • Cooperation and Conflict
What makes them tick: Challenging the impersonal ethos in International Relations
AbstractInternational Relations scholars and practitioners commonly agree that relationships in world politics are managed impersonally. Personal connections between agents of states are perceived as having only little impact on foreign policy of states. The current article challenges this impersonal ethos, suggesting that personal relationships play an important role in
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Jul 2021 • Journal Article • Language & Communication
“Flattery helps”: Relational practices in statecraft
AbstractThis paper provides an explanation for how coworkers manage to cultivate close relationships in an extremely competitive workplace. Our case study is the workplace of statespersons, considered an impersonal, rule-governed, and interest-motivated social environment, and as such, provides indications for how counterparts overcome alienation and suspicion in developing
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