Emotional Cultures and the Politics of Peace

Journal of Social Issues, 2007

Societies seem to have emotional climates that affect how people feel and act in public situations. Unlike the emotions experienced in an individual's personal life, these modal feelings reflect a collective response to the socioeconomic political situation of the society and influence how most people behave toward one another and their government. A government may foster a climate of fear to ensure social control, or it may encourage the formation of heterogeneous social groups to facilitate a climate of trust between people from different groups. On one hand, emotional climates may be viewed as reflecting the relative peacefulness or violence of a society. Thus, an assessment of emotional climate may provide a subjective index of human security to complement objective measures of democracy, human rights, equality, and other factors that we presume are beneficial to human welfare. On the other hand, we may view emotional climates as influences that act to further or to impede the development of the culture of peace advocated by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Thus, their assessment may have predictive power, and measuring a society's emotional climate may help us to create desirable policy. In this article we show that it is possible to measure some important aspects of the emotional climates of three nations that have different degrees of a culture of peace: Norway, the United States, and India. We show that estimates of the collective emotions that constitute climate can be distinguished from reports of personal emotions in that the former are more influenced by nation and the latter by social class. It is the subjective experience of national emotional climate, rather than personal emotional experience, that appears most related to objective indices for the culture of peace in the different nations. By an emotional climate, we mean a collective emotional field that is objective in the sense that it is experienced as "out there," in the same way that another person's anger or love is experienced as out there rather than in one's self. This

The objective of this issue is to review the work that has been published on emotional climate and the issues it raises, to present new work that addresses these issues, and to begin the work of relating emotional climate to research on human security and cultures of peace. The issue has three sections. The first focuses on articles that discuss the measurement of emotional climate, how it may be related to a society's peacefulness, and the psychosocial processes involved in its generation. The second involves work on human security and ways it may be restored after societal trauma. The third presents articles that relate emotional climate to cultures of peace.

Why do individuals sacrifice themselves to defend a nation-state? This article emphasizes the link between emotion and culture by investigating the affective reproduction of culture in world politics. Building on the tradition of Émile Durkheim, it introduces the concept of emotion culture to IR. Emotion cultures are understood as the culture-specific complex of emotion vocabularies, feeling rules, and beliefs about emotions and their appropriate expression that facilitates the cultural construction of political communities, such as the nation-state. It is argued that emotions provide a socio-psychological mechanism by which culture moves individuals to defend a nation-state, especially in times of war. By emotionally investing in the cultural structure of a nation-state, the individual aligns itself with a powerful cultural script, which then dominates over other available scripts. The argument is empirically illustrated by the case of the so-called Japanese kamikaze pilots.

Routledge, 2020

This book argues that the link between emotions and discourse provides a new and promising framework to theorize and empirically analyse power relationships in world politics. Examining the ways in which discourse evokes, reveals, and engages emotions, the expert contributors argue that emotions are not irrational forces but have a pattern to them that underpins social relations. However, these are also power relations and their articulation as socially constructed ways of feeling and expressing emotions represent a key force in either sustaining or challenging the social order. This volume goes beyond the “emotions matter” approach to offer specific ways to integrate the consideration of emotion into existing research. It offers a novel integration of emotion, discourse, and power and shows how emotion discourses establish, assert, challenge, or reinforce power and status difference. It will be particularly useful to university researchers, doctoral candidates, and advanced students engaged in scholarship on emotions and discourse analysis in International Relations. Table of Contents PART I: Introduction and Analytical Framework 1. Emotion, Discourse, and Power in World Politics Simon Koschut PART II: Empirical Cases of Emotion Discourse in World Politics 2. "An Extremely Obnoxious and Illegal Case": Three Approaches to Affect, Emotion and Discourse in the Aftermath of the Zhuhai Incident Todd H. Hall 3. Victimhood as Power in International Conflict Brent E. Sasley 4. "On Monday, Our National Humiliation Will Be Over. We Will Finish with Orders from Abroad": Status, Emotions, and the SYRIZA Government’s Rhetoric in the Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis Reinhard Wolf 5. Emotions and Reconciliation Rhetoric: Banishing the Dark Emotions in Timor-Leste Renée Jeffery 6. Hierarchies, Emotions and Memory in International Relations Jelena Subotić & Ayşe Zarakol 7. Contesting Emotional Governance: Empathy Under Fire in the Israeli Public Sphere During Operation Protective Edge Naomi Head 8. Status, Emotions, and in US-Iran Nuclear Politics Ty Solomon 9. Emotional Intentions: Self-Immolation and Ontological Choice in Tibet K. M. Fierke 10. The Power of Viral Expression in World Politics Andrew A.G. Ross PART III: Conclusion 11. Emotion, Agency, and Power in World Politics Emma Hutchison & Roland Bleiker

A growing number of scholars have sought to re-centre emotions in our study of international politics, however an overarching book on how emotions matter to the study of politics and war is yet to be published. This volume is aimed at filling that gap, proceeding from the assumption that a nuanced understanding of emotions can only enhance our engagement with contemporary conflict and war. Providing a range of perspectives from a diversity of methodological approaches on the conditions, maintenance and interpretation of emotions, the contributors interrogate the multiple ways in which emotions function and matter to the study of global politics. Accordingly, the innovative contribution of this volume is its specific engagement with the role of emotions and constitution of emotional subjects in a range of different contexts of politics and war, including the gendered nature of war and security; war traumas; post-conflict reconstruction; and counterinsurgency operations. Looking at how we analyse emotions in war, why it matters, and what emotions do in global politics, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of critical security studies and international relations alike.

2020

This chapter discusses emotions in the discipline of international relations (IR) from a critical perspective, meaning that emotions are theorized as contextual, relational, and shifting. Despite the strong forces of the rational actor paradigm in the academic climate, the last decade has seen an explosion of research on emotions that is moving beyond what may be conceptualized as the first wave of emotion scholarship in IR. Whereas the first wave of IR emotion research was primarily concerned with bringing to light and critiquing the omission and neglect of emotions in IR theories and the practices of international politics, a second wave has recently moved beyond this preliminary and ground-clearing research by extending the boundaries of the discipline. This new wave of emotion scholarship has been developing its own research programs, using emotions as a category of analysis in studying real-world events, and incorporating conceptual critique into their analysis of particular emotions in concrete historical and sociocultural contexts (Van Rythoven et al. 2019, Clément/ Sangar 2018; Arrifin et al. 2016). The result is the development of a field that may be called critical emotion research. While critical emotion research encompasses a broad and complex range of approaches and topics of inquiry, it shares three core assumptions: that emotions and reason are not distinct, but are intertwined in all decision-making processes; that emotions, rather than being limited to individual and private experiences, are socially constructed and experienced, particularly through language; and that every culture inculcates rules and structures of feeling that serve to produce and reproduce dominant cultural values and norms. These issues are connected to understanding emotions as socially constructed and deeply enmeshed in power relations in world politics. Critical emotion research is rooted in a social constructivist ontology and a feminist methodology, which means that researchers are mainly interested in how emotions are linked to power and marginalization, boundary-making, and the politics of difference. Consider, for example, the emotional governing of the gendered dualism of the rational male/emotional female that serves to maintain existing hierarchies and hegemonic narratives in world politics (Kinnvall 2016). Also, socially established groups, such as the "great powers", develop a positive self-image that reflects global power structures vis-à-vis socially non-established or marginalized groups, such as the "global periphery" or the "developing world" (Ling 2014). Conversely, social movements such as the World Social Forum or the lesbian, gay bisexual and trans-gender (LGBT) community are built on strong sentiments of resistance and empow-erment. This, in turn, opens up the possibility for various avenues of emotional

Journal of Social Issues, 2007

2014

Emotions play an increasingly important role in international relations research. This essay briefly surveys the development of the respective debates and then offers a path forward. The key challenge, we argue, is to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political. We further suggest that this is done best by exploring insights from two seemingly incompatible scholarly tendencies: macro theoretical approaches that develop generalizable propositions about political emotions and, in contrast, micro approaches that investigate how specific emotions function in specific circumstances. Applying this framework we then identify four realms that are central to appreciating the political significance of emotions: 1) the importance of definitions; 2) the role of the body; 3) questions of representation; and 4) the intertwining of emotions and power. Taken together, these building blocks reveal how emotions permeate world politics in complex and interwoven ways and also, once taken seriously, challenge many entrenched assumptions of international relations scholarship.

International Theory, 2014