Walking out from multilateralism? Diplomatic coping at the OSCE after the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Walkouts appear to run against multilateral diplomacy’s core commitment to sustained engagement. Drawing on ethnographic research at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) after Russia’s 2022 full-scale war against Ukraine, this article analyses walkouts as a way of going on when the anchoring practices of diplomatic order become untenable. The invasion unsettled the conditions under which sitting together with Russian diplomats could be reproduced as meaningful dialogue, generating emotional, normative, and practical frictions in everyday interaction. The article introduces coping as a liminal process through which diplomats provisionally sustain institutional interaction when the reconstruction of anchoring practices is politically or practically unavailable. At the OSCE, walkouts acted as one such coping strategy. They allowed diplomats to remain in the organisation while temporarily displacing ordinary dialogue with Russia. The case of walkouts highlights how coping supports the sustainment of order without stabilising it, while reshaping the boundaries through which diplomacy is recognised and practised. By tracing the emergence, performance, and waning of walkouts, the article provides an ethnographic account of an underexplored diplomatic gesture and theorises how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has transformed diplomacy and multilateralism, while opening a way to study unstable orders in transition.