Restraint in International Politics

Reputation crisis management and the state: Theorising containment as diplomatic mode

“…Whereas the scholarly interest in how states practice restraint as part of their foreign policy is now on the rise in IR (see esp. Steele, 2019), less attention has been paid to containment as a response mode for various actors speaking and operating on the state's behalf. While government ministers and bureaucratic officials may navigate between rejection, countering and recognition responses, diplomats will in most cases not be what Hay (1999) has termed 'agents capable of making a response'.…”

“…Appearing both alone and in combination with other response types, containment may be used by the entire state apparatus but is a key response mode for diplomats when seeking to keep communication channels open and prevent a crisis from escalating. While many IR scholars will be familiar with discussions of containment as a US foreign policy strategy during the Cold War (Holmes, 2018;Steele, 2019), we add here a psychoanalytical understanding of the concept to capture the activity of managing a crisis through the acknowledgement of difference, expressing empathy with divergent points of views, and the facilitation of dialogue and knowledge exchange (Bion, 1963). Combining insights from the literature on emotions and diplomacy in international politics with insights from social psychology, we observe that a key part of the diplomat's job and skillset is to create a secure space in which the other party can voice concerns and opinions, while simultaneously working to suspend or bracket the urge to articulate one's own intentions, beliefs, opinions and emotions (Holmes, 2018: 87;Wilkinson, 2018).…”

Restraint in International Politics: A Conversation between Brent Steele and Christopher Peys

“…Within the temporal space opened by a successful practice of a 'strategic narrative of restraint', and thus as a consequence of opposing the unleashing of actionism, we might, for instance, begin to think about forms of action devoted to repairing, maintaining and preserving the web of relationships that constitute and condition the political realm. This is not to say that there is either a singular or ideal means of theorising this moment of opening but, rather, that the act of restraint allows us to consider the yet to come -or that which comes next -free from the overwhelming grip of actionism, and subsequently to pursue alternative courses of action that 'enable others to be part of politics', most 'especially those who have been excluded, ignored, [or] erased as unworthy of having a political voice' (Steele, 2019). Restraint is, therefore, an act integral to the initial process of channelling libidinal impulses into the creation of new beginnings, most especially -as Peys suggests in his work on Arendt's notion of 'care for the world' (Arendt, 1958, p. 254;Arendt, 1968, p. 14) -in the sense that it is important to care for the narrative spaces of public action that constitute "the political" (Peys, 2020).…”

The Trump administration’s politics of time: The temporal dynamics that enable Trump’s interests to determine American foreign policy

“…Instead, the claim is that whatever violence already exists as a result of the United States' actions in the world has the potential to get worse, when compared to the initial stages of the Trump administration, the previous administration, and the past few decades. The US government has always violated and circumvented its commitments to international law, human rights, and the use of force, but since their development, it has been loathe to reject these principles entirely and declare them meaningless (Steele, 2019). At a minimum, they have existed as rhetorical tropes actors can use as resources for opposition, and this politics of time calls their existence into question.…”