Maria Mälksoo
2022 - 2027 • Consolidator Grant
How has receiving an ERC grant influenced you as a scientist?
It has given me the creative freedom, generous time, and resources to explore in depth the questions I could otherwise only study in a piecemeal fashion. The new scholarly contacts and incredibly enriching conversations with past and future grantees have underlined the collective nature of academic work, and the many villages behind any scholar’s personal growth.
Ritual Action: Making Deterrence Matter in International Security and Memory Politics (RITUAL DETERRENCE)
How is deterrence made to matter in international politics? Since Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine, deterrence has become a buzzword in the debates about European and global security. The jury is still out on what makes deterrence credible. This project turns to anthropology, religious studies, and social theory to probe the role of ritual in the creation and maintenance of deterrence.
The broader aim is to advance understanding of how ritual action fosters political identity and community building in world politics more generally. Mälksoo aims to examine how political identities and communities are enacted and legitimised by comparing deterrence as a ritual-like social practice in international security and memory politics. The investigation of concrete interactions, such as military exercises, force posture movements and high-level summits, reveals how credible deterrence is sought to be accomplished in practice.
Result
Mälksoo hopes to develop a deeper understanding of the logic of ritual action in international relations. Furthermore, the project will offer systematic sociologically informed research on deterrence as a social practice across different dimensions, domains, and types of deterrence. The empirical contributions shed light on the many meanings attributed to deterrence in international relations, along with unintended side-effects of practicing deterrence. Looking at deterrence as a ritual-like practice offers novel theoretical and methodological tools to recognise the politically productive power of deterrence beyond its standard strategic functions, such as the production of solidarity in military alliances and the generation of national identity through memory laws which entail punishments for politically undesirable narratives of the past. A better understanding of the logics and mechanisms of “working” deterrence is crucial for both physical and politically meaningful survival.
Impact
The project shows that for deterrence to be effective, it needs to be performed, symbolically charged and made visible to appear and, crucially, to be recognised as credible. Ritual conventions and dramatisation help to enhance the sought credibility effects of deterrence. Understanding context-specific deterrence rituals helps address key problems in international security politics, such as how to convey credible commitment and resolve, which in turn determines whether particular threats and promises succeed or fail. RITUAL DETERRENCE highlights the vital importance of taking seriously the culture-specific conventions and patterns of performing deterrence and signals of assurance, and underscores the practical costs of methodological nationalism. The high stakes of nuclear deterrence politics are also consequential for the quality of democracy in the societies that practice it.