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The paper considers the role of humour in dealing with failure in foreign policy and brings insights together from the studies of policy failure, humour studies, customer service management and crisis communication. It investigates how research in customer service management and crisis communication points to the use of humour as an additional strategy for dealing with foreign policy failure. This research has provided valuable insights into the benefits of humour for dealing with minor service failure, reducing the level of damage done to the standing of the actor responsible for the failure. The paper transfers these insights into IR and investigates the benefits and drawbacks of self-deprecating humour by policy makers responsible for failure. To illustrate this, we consider the humour employed by US President George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2004 when making fun of his administration's inability to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. We argue that humour can be a tool to address policy failure only in front of a sympathetic audience when humour can be a means of addressing the cognitive tension between support for a policy and its empirical failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brexit was potentially a highly divisive issue for the EU27 with states having different relationships with the UK. And yet in the period from the UK's referendum in 2016 until the exit of the UK in 2020, the EU27 maintained a remarkable degree of unity. This article examines relative EU27 unity in the face of the Brexit process. The article is based on interviews and other research on four selected EU member states: Germany, France, Poland and Ireland. The article considers four different factors drawn from the theoretical literature that might account for EU27 unity and then examines how they played out in each of the four states. We then compare across the cases and conclude that they all shaped national responses to Brexit, but that how they mattered and the patterns of effects were differentiated among the cases. This points towards the importance of seeing Brexit as a multifaceted phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biographical narratives generate a continuous sense of political community across the state's past, present and future, and provide the state with ontological security. Building on growing International Relations scholarship that highlights the power of visuals in shaping global politics, our article proposes visual rhetorical analysis as a tool to interrogate how governments employ images to tell their biographical narratives. The rhetorical approach transcends the methodological divide in the current 'visual turn' literature between the cognitive psychological and poststructuralist perspectives. We illustrate the analytical value of the rhetorical approach through an empirical study of how the totalitarian regimes of China and North Korea communicate their biographical narratives – the 'rightful great power' narrative and the 'family state' narrative, respectively – through propaganda imagery of their leaders. To this end, we develop a close semiotic reading of selected photographs of Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un in different narrative settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article takes stock of German foreign policy under the Merkel IV government and adopts an analytical perspective that zooms in on the role of coalition politics. Specifically, it explores the impact of party-political contestation inside the 'grand coalition' both between (inter-party contestation) and within (intra-party contestation) the coalition partners on the foreign policy record of the Merkel IV government. In the empirical analysis, the discussion focuses on selected foreign policy areas that dominated the German foreign policy agenda during the Merkel IV government, namely transatlantic relations, European integration, the UN and multilateralism as well as Germany's relations to autocratic states, in particular Russia and China. While the analysis points to some foreign policy contestation between and within the coalition parties, it finds that the foreign policy of the Merkel IV government remained largely unaffected by party political contestation inside the 'grand coalition'. The article argues that the limited influence of coalition politics points to the key role of the foreign policy executive in German foreign policy and reflects the broad foreign policy consensus at the centre of the German party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article contributes to scholarship on symbolic interactionist role theory in Foreign Policy Analysis, focusing on the concept of altercasting. Altercasting refers to verbal and non-verbal state behaviors in a role relationship to cast another state into roles that are complementary to its own roles. The article suggests putting more attention on the agency of the actor "doing" the altercasting to gain a better understanding of how altercasting works. To this purpose, the article develops a framework to unpack the agency of the altercasting actor. The framework addresses the preconditions for actors to engage in altercasting, the interplay of altercasting with domestic politics, and the available altercasting techniques. The article illustrates this framework in a case study on the efforts of the Biden administration to altercast Germany into a "faithful ally" role vis-à-vis China when the new German government transitioned into office in late 2021. Building on evidence from expert interviews among the U.S. foreign policy community, the case study demonstrates that the Biden administration had clear role expectations of Germany and understood the balance of opinion between the German coalition parties. The Biden administration used the altercasting techniques of self-presentation, signaling approval, and disapproval and making direct behavioral demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research shows that the pariah regime of North Korea—as other countries too—cares about how it is perceived internationally. However, so far, we know very little about how effective North Korea's strategic efforts are in improving its image among foreign audiences. As a first step toward addressing this gap, we employ a rigorous survey experiment among a representative sample of US adults (N = 800) to demonstrate that propaganda photographs of Kim Jong-un—produced and distributed by the regime's official mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)—succeed in improving perceptions of North Korea, albeit only among audiences with limited political knowledge. By providing evidence that news photographs are effective strategic communication instruments, our paper also makes an original and significant contribution to general scholarship on mediated public diplomacy, which has until now paid little attention to visual media as a tool of image management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]