Global Order and Diplomacy

The symbolic structure of the international system, organised around sovereignty, is sustained by an institutional infrastructure that shapes how states seek sovereign agency. We investigate how the modern legal category of the state is an institutional expression of the idea of the state as a liberal person, dependent on a one-off recognition in establishing the sovereign state. We then discuss how this institutional rule coexists with the ongoing frustrated search for recognition in terms of sociopolitical registers. While the first set of rules establishes a protective shield against others, regardless of behaviour, the second set of rules specify rules for behaviour of statehood, which produces a distinct form of misrecognition. States are, at one level, already recognised as sovereign and are granted rights akin to individuals in liberal thought, and yet they are continually misrecognised in their quest to actualise the sovereign agency they associate with statehood. We draw on examples from two contemporary phenomena – fragile states, and assertions of non-interference and sovereignty from the populist right and non-Western great powers, to discuss the misrecognition processes embedded in the bifurcated symbolic structure of sovereignty, and its implications for debates about hierarchy and sovereignty in world affairs. Introduction If the social space of world politics is best understood as organised around a desire for sovereign agency – as the editors of this Special Issue argue – we should be able to capture important aspects of state behaviour that stem from how the institutional infrastructure of sovereignty structures such a quest for sovereign agency. This is so because any symbolic structure depends on institutional arrangements that sustain it, and through which actors can constitute themselves and act in ways that are meaningful for others. We focus on the more specific set of institutions through which recognition of the state as a subject is sought in the modern, post-1945 international system. We identify two layers of recognition, one reified, legalistic and one socio-political. The reified, legal regime entails a one-off recognition, which establishes the state as a permanent 'person' with equal, sovereign rights akin to individuals in liberal thought, and where statehood is near-independent of the behaviour of the government that acts in its name. The sociopolitical regime, by contrast, is ongoing, in flux, vested in relations of inequality and power, and specifies a register for state subjectivity that is marked by misrecognition. The ideal of sovereign agency is negated by the presence of others who seek the same, and also through the systemic hierarchy that emerge from how evaluative criteria for state subjectivity render some states subordinate. While the legalistic regime produces a mythical and non-social vision of 'like units' without an overarching governing authority, the latter negates the ideal of sovereignty

This paper discusses obstacles to civil-military cooperation
in the context of multinational and interagency operations, with a special focus on assessment
functions and processes. As such, the paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing process of developing
a framework for assessment of operations within the context of MNE5. The rationale behind
this study is to strengthen the basis for and the effectiveness of Effects-Based Assessment
(EBA) of performances, effects, and end-states in multinational and interagency operations.
The first section starts by identifying a set of key overall challenges to such cooperation, namely
civilian and military actors’ often lack of knowledge of one another’s organizational identities,
security concerns, and working procedures. The paper then discusses one of these categories,
namely working procedures, in more detail, identifying in the second section the challenge of
divergent operational terminologies, and in the third section the challenge of overcoming the
information sharing gap when in the presence of similar assessment practices. The main suggestion
of this paper is that knowledge about civilian and military operational terminologies and
assessment practices is an imperative for successful civil-military cooperation in multinational
and interagency operations. Such knowledge, we argue, is best obtained if both military and
civilian actors respectively open their communication channels with the purpose of sharing information
and operational experiences. Furthermore, based on the discussion, the paper raises
a number of points which the authors believe would be valuable topics for further developing
civil-military cooperation within the context of multinational and interagency operations.

This article assesses the EU’s performance as a security actor in the context of NATO, both at the institutional level and when acting as a bloc of member states within NATO. Informed by a definition of ‘performance’ as the ability to achieve preset objectives (effectiveness) in an efficient, relevant and viable manner, we observe that the EU’s performance in the context of NATO remains limited. This could be seen as a reflection of underlying political divergences between the two organisations, hampering systematic and formalised intra-institutional cooperation as well as effective cooperation between the EU member states in NATO. More importantly, it has resulted in the emergence of more informal and ad hoc EU practices in the context of NATO as well as parallel EU and NATO practices.