Trump, Zelensky and the Clash of Agent-Centric and Relational Worlds

This article analyses, through the lens of speech act theory, the confrontation between two declarations, each enacting an alternative social reality, made by Presidents Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump in the Oval Office on the 28th of February 2025. This confrontation between alternative framings has continued, with the EU often siding with the security framing while the US defending Trump’s peace framing. The clash is interpreted in this article as Trump’s attempt to redefine the war in Ukraine by means of a declaratory speech act. Instead of situating the war within the domain of security, Trump’s declaration can be seen to have placed it within the realm of peacemaking. He did not desecuritise the issue by denying the existential threat the war poses; rather, he reframed the threat as relational, focusing on the risk of a breakdown in relationships rather than a breakdown of security. In doing so, he can be interpreted to have mobilised the constitutive rules of the institution of peacemaking and challenged the traditional substantialist, agent‑centric perspective. By advancing a peace‑focused rearticulation of the war in Ukraine, Trump performs an act that I call “peacification” – shifting attention from security measures to relational dynamics, wherein dialogue, rather than militarisation, is framed as the means of alleviating existential threats. While clarifying the Trump–Zelensky clash, the case is used for theory-building related to the theory of speech acts in politics. It explicates the act of peacification and by highlighting the complications that arise from partial and conflicting audience uptake when analysing speech acts in international politics.