This volume takes concepts familiar to foreign policy scholars and reimagines their usefulness in a global era. The essays in this collection feature unique methodological and theoretical contributions to rhetorical scholarship. The field of rhetorical studies often assumes a US-centric approach that elevates American chief executives as the sole doers and makers of foreign policy discourse. This work points to a more comprehensive, global perspective of foreign policy discourse and offers key concepts, case studies, and approaches. It also examines who enacts discourse, where it happens, and how it influences relationships in/between local, national, transnational, and global spheres.
Among the cases researched in this collection are foreign policy rhetoric from Cold War foreign policy in Latin America, the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine war messages, and the development challenges of the Ford Foundation and the Kenya Women Finance Trust, among many others.

International politics is often conducted in two languages or more, and since no two languages are exactly the same, what is possible to say in one language may be impossible to say in another. Translation is at the heart of global politics, and interlingual relations traverse time, space, culture, and state borders. Interlingual Relations builds on emergent literature on translation in International Relations (IR) to propose a unique research agenda for scholars of global politics, offering multiple directions and sets of principles for sustained study.

The contributors use various methodologies to explore these interfaces and encounters in different sites, bringing together multiple subfields, approaches, and disciplinary paradigms across IR’s history. Together they offer a more truly global perspective on international affairs, going beyond the hegemony of English to demonstrate the interconnectedness between “high” politics and everyday life. They show the role of translation in global politics as one of world-making, whereby social roles, rules, and responsibilities establish the semblance of order despite not sounding or meaning the same to all actors. In establishing Interlingual Relations as a foundational part of IR, the book offers another key to studying global interactions and the high political stakes in the theories, methods, and ethics of translation.