Czech Journal of International Relations

Stefan Auer: European Disunion: Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency.

Jana Vargovčíková — 2025-02-25

Jana Vargovčíková reviews Stefan Auer's new book. According to Vargovčíková, Auer brings a timely, elegantly written, and engaging critique of the many deficits and overstretches of the EU´s technocratic integration and its impact on democracy in Europe. He also provides a refreshing appreciation of the contradictory relationship between CEE experience and EU membership to point out these overstretches. However, Auer's polemical and provocative style risks falling into interpretative traps, including creating a caricature of the EU as a monolithic bloc and relativizing the CEE radical conservative autocrats at the expense of truly democratic and plural politics in the region. First, his critique rests on a reductionist caricature of the EU as a homogeneous project on its way to becoming a superstate and moving away from a Europe of nation states. Second, his rightful critique of the EU asymmetries makes him underestimate Central European radical conservatives' antidemocratic tendencies that are manifested through their own extraordinary politics in the manner of culture wars. Finally, Auer's admiration for political sovereignists makes him mistakenly view popular sovereignty as the only expression of national democracy rather than seeing the other EU-friendly democratic claims and actors of democratic politics in the region.

Grappling with the Climate Crisis in IR: Existentially, Psychologically, Interdisciplinarily

Nina C. Krickel-Choi — 2025-03-13

The introduction to this special issue argues that International Relations (IR) needs to give greater consideration to the existential and psychological implications of the accelerating climate crisis. Starting from debates about the disciplinary suitability of IR to meaningfully tackle an issue as all-encompassing as climate change, this introduction gives a short overview of how the problem of climate change has conventionally been conceived, and finds that IR has so far not sufficiently appreciated the psychological implications of the climate crisis. Yet, such a perspective is sorely needed, as climate change is not only an environmental problem but also a problem of existentialist sense-making, and because IR’s actors are themselves deeply affected by changes to the physical world that they are a part of. Consequently, this introduction provides a sketch of what an existential-psychological inquiry into the implications of climate change could look like and concludes that, regardless of the current state of the discipline, IR has a duty to become a discipline that can meaningfully contribute towards mitigating the climate crisis.

Theorising Bad Faith in International Relations: Climate Change, Deception and the Negotiation of International Order

Pauline Sophie Heinrichs — 2024-12-11

This study examines how climate-vulnerable states charge major carbon emitters with bad faith behaviors, how those emitters respond in ways that often confirm the bad faith charges, and what vulnerable states propose as policy alternatives. Using an existentialist conceptualization of bad faith and Bassan-Nygate and Heimann’s four response mechanisms – projection, distortion, displacement, and rationalization – we identify how major emitters try to negate bad faith claims in ways that are deceptive of the self and the other. Major emitters require self-ref lection to identify how they are not meeting international climate policy agreements and begin to address what they must change (about themselves), but vulnerable states note that this ref lection is absent. This study of 399 speeches by national leaders at three climate summits opens directions for scholars, activists and policymakers to understand how interactions around bad faith illuminate the politics of bad faith and the potential for change this contains.

From Disparity to Sustainability: Social Identity, Perceived Fairness, and Climate Cooperation

Emily Hanson — 2024-12-11

In the International Relations (IR) literature, inequality has been identified as a major inf luence on climate policy cooperation and implementation. Identities formed by the multiple inequalities in the global order have become key organizing principles for climate negotiation and significantly affect whether policies are seen as fair. We focus on these inequality related identities (IRIs) and present an analytical framework that translates concepts from Social Identity Theory for use in IR to systematically examine how IRIs affect perceptions of policy fairness and implementation. We contend that this framework is cross-scalar in character; that is, given the social basis of climate politics, the dynamics can be understood as social processes regardless of whether they are undertaken by states, international organizations, or individuals. We offer this framework as a tool for mobilizing insights from social psychology into IR research and understanding the ways social identities affect collective climate action.

“For Generations, Farmers Have Preserved the Environment, Now You Are Endangering It”: Affective-Discursive Practices in European Farmers’ Reaction to Climate Policy

Dora Matejak — 2025-02-04

The farming sector is one of the sectors most affected by climate change while simultaneously contributing to around 20% of global greenhouse emissions. To alleviate the pressures of agricultural production on nature and climate, the European Union (EU) established a new set of agri-environmental regulations positioning farmers as crucial actors in providing sustainable food and safeguarding the environment. However, farmers are increasingly contesting these regulations and mobilizing through EU-wide protests. Despite the obvious potency of the farmers’ actions, scholarly studies problematizing their manifestation in the context of climate governance are scarce. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing the 2023–2024 farmers’ protests in Slovenia to examine the interplay of affects and discourse in meaning-making among the farmers, which shows a mobilization driven by anger and fear as well as self-importance. The paper thus contributes to the knowledge on agrarian populism and farmers’ mobilizations in the European context, uncovering complexities and nuances of the articulated affective-discursive canon.

Crafting Utopias through Environmental Denial: The Far-Right Populism of Bolsonaro and Milei

Diego S. Crescentino — 2025-02-20

Existing studies of radical right-wing populism have primarily analysed populist leaders like Milei and Bolsonaro through their retrotopian appeals to past authoritarianism, often overlooking their forward-looking utopian projections. This gap in the literature obscures how their rejection of the status quo frames the climate crisis as a manufactured dystopia — one they counter by dismissing its very existence. Drawing on insights from utopian studies, this research seeks to fill this gap by providing tools for deconstructing the covert utopias envisioned by these leaders. Specifically, it examines how Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) and Javier Milei (2024-present) craft their utopian imaginaries and the role that environmental denial plays within them.

Rethinking the Climate Crisis Here and Now: Mahāyāna Buddhism, Engi Relationality, and the Familiar Pitfalls in Japanese and Taiwanese pro-Nuclear Energy Narratives

Naofumi Yamada — 2025-03-13

Climate inaction occurs partly because the ‘problem’ is often perceived as spatially and temporally distant. Contemporary Japanese and Taiwanese pro-nuclear energy narratives stress the necessity of nuclear energy for solving carbon emissions and energy security issues (here) and the urgency to retain and/or modernize nuclear power generation capabilities (now), despite its known vulnerability. This article deconstructs nuclear energy as a here-and-now solution to the climate crisis, and it proposes Mahāyāna Buddhism as a means to go beyond the modernist beliefs that gave rise to both the climate crisis and the nuclear energy solution. Drawing on Mahāyāna Buddhist thought where subjects are seen as being generated through relations with others (engi) and all beings are inseparable from and intradependent with nature (eshō-funi), we argue that the aforementioned narratives offer a false promise to solve the climate crisis. This is because they ignore the relations between current and future generations, and their techno-national, modernist assumptions reproduce human/nature dichotomies.