Description
This paper argues that the legitimacy of a state in world politics is not solely the subject of rationality and institutional phenomena. Instead, aesthetic reasoning is a crucial factor in how politics are felt, seen and imagined. Drawing on Roland Bleiker’s call to place a strong emphasis on emotions and aesthetics as forms of political insight, the paper conceptualises aesthetic legitimacy as a mode of political understanding that both complements and challenges traditional rationalist explanations of power.
Moving beyond the individual-level analysis, this paper will examine Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit foreign policy discourse in a performative manner, in which the United Kingdom claims that its global power status remains legitimate and sustained, despite not being part of the EU. A discourse analysis will be used to analyse Johnson’s speeches between 2019 and 2022, tracing how humour, spectacle, optimism, and elements from British literature function as an affective grammar of credibility, reinforcing the perception of the UK as a self-assured global participant despite material and reputational decline. Even though the majority of existing scholarship focuses on Johnson’s rhetoric as evidence of the UK’s decline or imperial nostalgia, this research presents an alternative reading: these aesthetic performances do not necessarily mask a decline but instead actively reconstruct the UK2s sense of power and relevance.
This research is positioning its case within the broader debates on the epistemological futures of International Studies. The study suggests that aesthetic reasoning is not peripheral but fundamental to global politics. The aim will be to highlight the need for an IR that is capable of how power and legitimacy are performed, felt and seen. By doing this, the research will bridge foreign policy analysis with aesthetic turns.
