Four Funerals, One Society: State Funeral Ceremonies and the Rebirth of International Society

Abstract

This article focuses on a rather neglected aspect of diplomacy, located at the intersection of practices, rituals and performances: state funeral ceremonies. Shifting the emphasis onto the dimension of international attendance, considering international representatives and their hierarchical positions at these state funerals, the article aims to present a novel means to analyse states’ international standing, offering a new contextualisation next to the prevailing approaches that have underlined the numbers of embassies, international memberships or bilateral treaties in defining these points. I first discuss the role of state funerals in international politics, pointing to their quasi-absence from the literature. After offering a theoretical framework with relevant recent contributions on practices, rituals and performances, and underlining state funerals’ role for and within the international society, I present four exploratory case studies that pinpoint varying aspects of state funerals: those for Nelson Mandela, Helmut Kohl, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat.