Emotions, Bodies, and the Un/Making of International Relations

811243 MIL0010.1177/0305829818811243Millennium: Journal of International StudiesHutchison research-article2018 Symposium: Debating Trauma and Emotion in World Politics Emotions, Bodies, and the Un/Making of International Relations Millennium: Journal of International Studies 2019, Vol. 47(2) 284–298 © The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818811243 DOI: 10.1177/0305829818811243 journals.sagepub.com/home/mil Emma Hutchison The University of Queensland, Australia Keywords affect, body, emotions, international relations theory, trauma, representation, suffering Emociones, cuerpos y la de/construcción de las relaciones internacionales Palabras clave afecto, cuerpo, emociones, teoría de las relaciones internacionales, trauma, representación, sufrimiento Émotions, corps et la fabrication/destruction des relations internationales Mots-clés affect, corps, émotion, théorie des relations internationales, traumatisme, représentation, souffrance Introduction Research on emotions in international relations has come a long way in the last 15 to 20 years. My book, Affective Communities in World Politics, first began to take shape through my PhD, which I commenced in 2004.1 Back then, my insistence on 1. Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions After Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Corresponding author: Emma Hutchison, School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia. Email: [email protected] Hutchison 285 investigating the emotional underpinnings of world politics was met with great interest, but also with scepticism and sometimes hostility. Some even said that researching and writing emotions in international relations was simply not something that could be done. Since this time, scholarship on the political lives of emotions has come far, as has the place of emotions in International Relations (IR) as a discipline. Today, few scholars would dispute that emotions research provides significant insight into world politics. With this in mind it is an incredible honour to respond to the generous, insightful and probing engagements with my work from Anna Agathangelou, Jessica Auchter, Benjamin Meiches, Andrew Ross, and current International Studies Association (ISA) Theory Section Chair Asli Calkivik. They write with passion and care about the contribution of my book. They also open up new spaces for debate. I am immensely grateful to them and also to the ISA Theory Section, the book awards committee, and to the Editorial Team at Millennium for making this symposium possible. In the introduction to the symposium, Calkivik and Auchter write that one way to measure a book’s contribution is by the discussion and debate it solicits. They then generously suggest that in this respect my book achieves much: that it ‘reaches beyond exploring the unexplored’ and ‘inspires further questions, provokes further investigations and further engagements’.2 While expanding on my line of inquiry, Meiches, Agathangelou, Ross and Auchter similarly perceive of and engage the book’s contributions and strengths. Agathangelou suggests that theorising emotions, trauma and community constitutes a ‘timely intervention’ that ‘provide[s] insights into the way we theorise and practise IR’.3 For Meiches too, the inquiry ‘reveals how IR theory and practices of world politics both build on emotional dynamics and forces’.4 Ross pushes the theory further to show how boundaries of ‘affective communities’ in world politics are more than ever in constant negotiation.5 Indeed, if there is one basic, overarching point I hope the book makes it is that emotions and politics are inseparable; as Calkivik and Auchter put it: ‘that the emotive is already political and the political is emotive’.6 Emotions are an inherent yet often hidden and neglected element of the perceptions, reasoning and actions through which international relations takes place, at all levels of analysis. The purpose of this response is to draw together and engage the most prominent recurring theme throughout the symposium: the potentials of emotions to bring the typically hidden, ‘messy’7 parts of world politics out of the shadows and into the light, and 2. Asli Calkivik and Jessica Auchter, ‘Symposium Introduction: Debating Trauma and Emotion in World Politics’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47, no. 2 (2019): 233; Jessica Auchter, ‘Narrating Trauma: Individuals, Communities, Storytelling’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47, no. 2 (2019). 3. Anna Agathangelou, ‘A Conversation with Emma Hutchison and Franz Fanon on Questions of Reading and of Global Raciality’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47, no. 2 (2019): 250. 4. Benjamin Meiches, ‘Traumas without Bodies: A Reply to Emma Hutchison’s, Affective Communities’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47, no. 2 (2019): 238. 5. Andrew A.G. Ross, ‘Representation and Mediation in World Politics’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47, no. 2 (2019). 6. Calkivik and Auchter, ‘Introduction’, 235. 7. Agathangelou, ‘A Conversation with Emma Hutchison and Franz Fanon’, 250, 253. 286 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(2) to, in turn, enable us to see, perceive, and feel for them anew. Of particular significance to contributors are bodies – foremost, suffering bodies – and the hierarchical, exclusionary structures and histories that underpin, yet also confound, the appearance of certain bodies in international relations. To this end, I explore the politically productive nature and to an extent transformative capacities of emotions,8 particularly in relation to how we encounter suffering. As such, I hope to clarify my approach to emotions – as contributors push and encourage me to do – and forward a more careful appreciation of the links between, and immanent potentials of, emotions and the body. Doing so is important as it enables a more complete yet also more nuanced understanding of not only the political dynamics of emotions and emotional agency after trauma, but also, consequently, how established, often exclusionary and hierarchical forms of community in world politics pivot on yet can also be unsettled through the emotional politics of bodies. The essay forwards a two-part argument. First, I argue – agreeing with both the symposium and recent scholarship9 – that the links between emotions, affect, and bodies enable a more holistic engagement with how emotions matter in world politics. Taking affective embodiments, energies and circulations seriously shines a light not only on how political communities are emotionally constituted and connected (after trauma or indeed around any political issue or event), but also how those connections are inherently open-ended and can, as such, shift and change and transform. Second, I suggest, at the same time, that understanding the political potentials of emotions cannot be reduced to the body. This suggestion runs somewhat contrary to current scholarly trends that focus foremost on bodies as a source of inherent dynamism and capacity for social change. But there are reasons why I think we need to look beyond how bodies alone matter: Yes, bodies – bruised, maimed, traumatised bodies, and also hopeful bodies – can tell us much about politics and ethics, about trauma and violence, exclusions, power and hierarchies.10 More, perhaps, than any theory or ethics. To situate bodies and the affective insights of and within bodies front-and-centre in IR thus seems like a perfect 8. In writing of ‘the politics of emotion’, I include a range of work that also uses other terms, including affect, feelings, mood, sensibilities and sensation. In doing so, I seek to theorise the connections between emotions and affect, rather than abide with a firm distinction between the two phenomena. This approach follows Sara Ahmed and in international relations Linda Åhäll, who stress ‘that we can separate them does not mean they are separate’. See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014 [2004]), 210; Linda Åhäll, ‘Affect as Methodology: Feminism and the Politics of Emotion’, International Political Sociology 12, no. 1 (2018): 36–52, at 40. 9. For instance, Åhäll, ‘Affect as Methodology’; Andrew A.G. Ross, Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014); Ty Solomon and Brent Steele, ‘Micro-Moves in International Relations Theory’, European Journal of International Relations 23, no. 2 (2017): 267–91, at 275–84. 10. See Himadeep Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. 3–7, 11–21; Lauren B. Wilcox, Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. 59–65. Hutchison 287 solution – to a range of age-old political puzzles.11 But how do we do this in reality? Prioritising bodies, even suffering bodies, is far harder than it may seem. I thus argue that before bodies can be genuinely seen and felt for – before bodies can be what matters most in IR scholarship and practice – we must first appreciate why bodies are seen and felt for so selectively. What is equally important, therefore, is an understanding of the processes of materialisation – the representational and discursive practices – through which emotions are constituted and engendered. Doing so is critical because it reveals how and why bodies are perceived differently in world politics, and particularly why for the most part bodies are rarely perceived of or felt for at all. To conclude I briefly explore the scholarly implications of this disjuncture, reflecting on what it means for theorising emotions in IR. I discuss how the political mediation of emotion – as well as how we comprehend, analyse, and write of this mediation – can both complement and contest core concepts upon which international relations are typically founded, such as sovereignty, statehood, hierarchy and power. Appreciating the potentials of emotions and affective energies and flows through bodies – and of the potentials of mediating bodies – in this way makes, but can also unmake and in turn remake world politics. Approaching Emotion in International Relations The times when IR scholars had to fight to assert a case for studying emotions in world politics have certainly long passed. So promising is the study of emotions that prominent international theorists have referred to it as one of the field’s ‘great frontiers’.12 But even though research on emotions in IR has been transformed, emotions-focused inquiries face significant challenges.13 In some respects, the field may have even reached somewhat of a crossroads. Having convincingly shown that emotions do matter, politics and international relations research is increasingly turning to more carefully theorise exactly how emotions matter. Participants in this symposium praise my inquiry and its contribution in this regard. They generously suggest that it is my focus on ‘the how’ of emotions that distinguishes my work within the expanding international relations emotions field. ‘[W]hat makes Hutchison’s book different and significant’, Calkivik and Auchter comment, quoting Meiches, ‘is that it attends to “the mechanisms that make emotion, particularly trauma, significant in world politics”’.14 Key here is my turn to representations – to photographs, film, text and other mediums of expression – to analyse the social meanings and collective, political significance and resonance of emotions. Meiches and Agathangelou both 11. Such as, for instance, how to stop seemingly intractable conflict, promote more cosmopolitan approaches to humanitarianism and international aid, address gender-based violence, and so on. 12. Christian Reus-Smit, ‘Emotions and the Social’, International Theory 6, no. 3 (2014): 568– 74, at 568. 13. Together with my book, collaborative work with Roland Bleiker has started to summarise some of these, see Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker, ‘Theorizing Emotions in World Politics’, International Theory 6, no. 3 (2014): 491–514. 14. Calkivik and Auchter, ‘Symposium Introduction’, 233. 288 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(2) stress that my focus on representations is ‘analytically rigorous’ and ‘comprehensive’. It tells us much, Meiches continues, about ‘the constitutive capacities of trauma and emotion’ and consequently how political communities can be ‘sutured’ together.15 Agathangelou contends that it is in this way that my inquiry is ‘not afraid to confront the messy stuff of politics’, and crucially in doing so it shows not merely that emotions matter but specifically how international relations are constituted by emotional histories and the political possibilities that affective legacies both limit and enable.16 However, contributors also explore what a focus on representations might miss. The implication here is that even though my inquiry confronts the messiness of world politics, it is perhaps not ‘messy’ enough. One central concern lies at the heart of the contributors’ engagements: that the path my inquiry takes to examine the roles of emotions in world politics may end up excluding as many issues as it exposes and opens up. This apprehension comes through in different ways and in relation to each contributor’s distinct focus. Meiches and Agathangelou, and less explicitly Auchter, worry about the place (and perceived absence) of the body and all of its attendant affects in my approach to traumatic emotions. Agathangelou too writes more specifically of bodies traumatised by colonial struggle and the affective insights they reveal. Agathangelou, Meiches and Ross discuss the methodological complexities of emotions and the extent to which a focus on representations can capture the subtleties and full political potentials of everyday lived emotional experiences. Auchter turns to and encourages still greater reflection, nuance and care in the types of trauma stories we tell and the emotions such stories give voice to. Finally, the symposium as a whole is cautious about the conceptual boundaries I draw around ‘affective communities’ in world politics and how these boundaries play out in practice. The questions and critique put to me are thoughtful and thorough – and they are well taken. I am immensely grateful for such considered engagements. This is particularly so because they prompt me to pause and consider my approach more closely. What is at stake in studying emotions in the way that I do and how, then, might we more carefully gauge the roles of emotions in world politics? How exactly do emotions matter in society and politics, and through what tools can we appreciate the complex ways emotions are politically productive? How do the methodological choices scholars face matter, and what, then, is ultimately at stake for international relations in approaching emotions? Affect, the Body and the Political Potentials of Emotion I now respond by reflecting on what contributors urge me to do most: consider the significance of the body and bodies in international relations. I examine the extent to which the linkages between emotion and the body may provide a more careful theorisation of the politically productive nature and capacities of emotions. 15. Meiches, ‘Traumas Without Bodies’, 238. 16. Agathangelou, ‘A Conversation with Emma Hutchison and Franz Fanon’, 250. Hutchison 289 The body – that is, one’s physical body – is generally perceived as pivotal to understanding emotions and how emotions ‘work’. This is especially the case for somatic or body-focused approaches to emotions, which stress that emotions are emergent in physical bodies first and foremost.17 For proponents of this view, the body is where all emotions begin. Emotions are the product of changed bodily states; emotions are, above all, about bodily feelings. What we call ‘emotion’ – that is, the conscious ‘feeling of a feeling’ – ensues only after. In this way, what our mind recognises as emotion is the conscious – and inevitably incomplete – cognitive manifestation or interpretation of a prior physical state or sensation. Somatic approaches consequently focus on the body as an emotional starting-point. Some of the respective scholars even perceive of feelings as physical predispositions within individual bodies.18 They maintain this position even in the face of critique that problematises the resulting non-social, a-historical understandings of both the body and its attendant feelings.19 While debate on the nature of the body and the questions of its social constitution will invariably continue, there is nonetheless considerable merit in looking to inner states of bodies (whichever way they are conceived) for political insights. Recent research on the body in IR contributes significantly in this regard.20 Failing to consider bodies in world politics is to neglect the most fundamental and ‘everyday’ way that international relations and ‘the political’ play out, this research tells us. Our bodies are the very site of politics; they are the place where political subjectivities, allegiances, attachments and also political resistance and transgressions are enacted and performed.21 A combined focus on the body as political, and on emotions as bodily, is helpful when considering how bodies are an important aspect of emotional politics. Indeed, reflecting 17. See Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (London: Vintage, 1999). 18. For an articulation of this approach to the body and emotion in international relations, see Rose McDermott, ‘The Body Doesn’t Lie: A Somatic Approach to the Study of Emotions in World Politics’, International Theory 6, no. 3 (2014): 557–62. 19. Michel Foucault told us long ago that power shapes and disciplines the body and how bodies are perceived and made to fit (and not fit) in societies. See Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995 [1977]). 20. My line of questioning here owes a lot to this literature, and in particular to my reading of: Charlotte Epstein, ‘Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies: Crossing Biometric Borders’, International Political Sociology 1, no. 1 (2007): 149–64; Thomas Gregory, ‘Dismembering the Dead: Violence and Vulnerability and the Body in War’, European Journal of International Relations 22, no. 4 (2016): 944–65; Renée Marlin-Bennet, ‘Embodied Information, Knowing Bodies, and Power’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41, no. 3 (2013): 601–22; Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations; Swati Parashar, ‘What Wars and War Bodies Know About International Relations’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26, no. 4 (2013): 615–30; Rosemary E. Shinko, ‘Ethics After Liberalism: Why (Autonomous) Bodies Matter’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38, no. 3 (2010): 723–45; Wilcox, Bodies of Violence; Lauren B. Wilcox, ‘Making Bodies Matter in IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43, no. 1 (2014): 359–64. 21. Cynthia Weber, ‘Performative States’, Millennium: Journal of International Relations 27, no. 1 (1998): 77–95. 290 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(2) on emotions and the body adds a crucial component to conceptualising how exactly emotions matter. Three aspects are particularly key to the links between bodies, emotions and world politics. First is that bodies, like emotions, are inseparable from society and culture. Human embodiment tends to be taken for granted, yet our bodily states – bodily feelings – are the product of a complex range of material social and political processes.22 Fundamentally, the body lies at the centre of the various ways one’s sense of being – one’s identities and associated meanings and values – is politically constituted. In this way, as Renée MarlinBennett argues, bodies are more than just physical bodies. Bodies are ‘knowing bodies’: the body is intrinsically connected with what we perceive we ‘know’ and is ‘the means through which information becomes sensible.23 In Meiches’ contribution, he draws implicitly on this approach and argues that the body is key to appreciating the politics of traumatic emotions. To study emotions more carefully we need to look to ‘the genesis of emotion in and through the body’s interaction with social relations’, he contends.24 Doing so, Meiches continues, is critical to ‘a closer investigation of the role that bodies and embodiment play in the formation of the politics of trauma’25 – and crucially how bodies can possess insights and agencies that belie material representations.26 Focusing on what bodies and embodiment can tell us can consequently highlight affective insights and forms of emotional knowledge that a focus on representations of trauma alone cannot. Second, even though bodies are imbued with social meanings and are a product of prevailing social and political relations, bodies can also ‘create and transform meaning by acting within and upon their environment’.27 Key here is that even while bodies are disciplined by social norms, and thus by power, bodies also possess ‘agential capacities’ that can resist power and transform it – in turn, re-shaping social and political perspectives, priorities, values and norms.28 Feminist philosopher Judith Butler has summarised this paradox. She stresses that no matter how entrenched social norms may seem to be, or how potently such norms are physically embodied and enacted, ‘bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialism is compelled’.29 Because the body 22. Lisa Blackman, The Body (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 15–36; Joanna Latimer, ‘Introduction: Body, Knowledge, Worlds’, in Un/Knowing Bodies, eds. Joanna Latimer and Michael Schillmeier (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 4–9; Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (London: SAGE Publications, 2008 [1984]), 4–13. 23. Marlin-Bennett, ‘Embodied Information, Knowing Bodies, and Power’, 602. 24. Meiches, ‘Traumas without Bodies’, 244. 25. Meiches, ‘Traumas without Bodies’, 239. 26. Wilcox, ‘Making Bodies Matter in IR’, 360. 27. K.M. Fierke, Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 22. 28. Diana Coole, ‘Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities’, Political Studies 53, no. 1 (2005): 124–42, esp. 129–32; see also Wilcox, ‘Making Bodies Matter in IR’, 362–3. 29. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). Hutchison 291 and its emotions are socially constituted, both the body and its emotions are in constant negotiation. The social meanings, identities, norms and codes that are embodied and experienced in bodies are inherently contingent and thus possess potential to shift and change through space and time. Nevertheless, how exactly bodies possess agency that is free of or can resist prevailing social codes and power is a challenging question. But it is one where I suggest work on the politics of emotion – and specifically a turn towards affect – may come in.30 Through an emphasis on bodily feelings and sensations, a shift towards affect refocuses the politics of emotion around the more micro-political level of everyday lived, embodied experiences. Rather than concentrating on the ‘grander’, macro social and cultural structures through which emotions are discursively constituted,31 the politics of emotion becomes orientated around the physical location where emotions manifest: the affective energies and capacities of bodies. This is not, however, to promote an idea of affect as something non-social or even before or to an extent outside of discourse.32 Affect, as I see it, is not something prepersonal in a generic, universalistic sense. Affects are instead embodied apprehensions, experiences of, and feelings about the world. Such bodily feelings are moreover conditioned by historical emotional encounters – by the emotional ‘baggage’, as Linda Åhäll puts it, that we have each acquired through our (social) lives.33 Conceiving of affect as bodily feeling is therefore important as it enables an understanding of how affects are embodied capacities that help and enable us to make sense of the social world. Affect, in this sense, provides a link between the body and particular emotions that are subsequently cultivated and can be politically mobilised – within individuals and collectives. The linkages sketched here are central to understanding and realising the transformative capacities of bodies. Key here is the role corporeality can play in questioning and breaking socialised emotional ‘habits’ as well as the political roles such habits play.34 Through the capacity to be affected and to also affect – that is, to be touched and influenced by the feelings, moods, temperaments and sensations that are being circulated 30. I follow and acknowledge the work of Nick Fox, Ty Solomon and Brent Steele in suggesting such a shift. See Nick Fox, ‘Emotions, Affects and the Production of Social Life’, The British Journal of Sociology 66, no. 2 (2015): 301–18; and Solomon and Steele, ‘Micro-Moves in International Relations Theory’, 275–84. 31. For example, see J.M. Barbalet, Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 32. Debates on the nature of affect and the distinction between affect and emotions are incredibly complex and contested. It is impossible to cover the issues at stake in my brief response. I instead briefly sketch my own understanding of the potentials of a focus on affect and in particular the affective energies and capacities of the body. For insightful accounts of the issues at stake, see Clare Hemmings, ‘Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn’, Cultural Studies 19, no. 5 (2005): 548–67; Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 434–72; and Margaret Wetherell, ‘Trends in the Turn to Affect’, Body and Society 21, no. 2 (2014): 139–66. 33. Åhäll, ‘Affect as Methodology’, 40. 34. Chris Shilling, Changing Bodies: Habit, Crisis and Creativity (London: SAGE Publications, 2008), 12–25. 292 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(2) – bodies possess the capacity to cultivate and shape emotions, which can in turn either reinstate or question and potentially transgress preponderant political perceptions, standpoints and attachments. In this view, emotions are derivative of and in part the product of more ephemeral affective resonances.35 Agathangelou’s contribution reveals the significance of these linkages. Engaging the work of Frantz Fanon and the emotions – from humiliation and shame to anger and rage – experienced by enslaved peoples throughout history, she tells us of how in colonial times, ‘affective energies accumulating in the enslaved and colonised subject await[ed] their inevitable, violent, and explosive release’.36 In this way, she perceives of the links between bodies and their inherent affectivity energies as crucial to post-imperial political knowledge and change.37 Affects and affective energies, flows and circulations within and between bodies produce capacities to feel and ‘do things’,38 which are politically productive. Third, and cumulatively, is the idea that turning to the body and its affects enables a more careful appreciation of the politically productive nature and capacities of emotions. More specifically, attentiveness to the affective energies of and circulations between bodies offers a conceptualisation of how emotions matter precisely through the immanent political possibilities that bodies and their affects possess. This is particularly important because ensuing collective ‘circulations of affect’39 – affective flows through bodies – can be powerful. Such was arguably the case in a range of defining social movements, from the Arab Spring in late 2010 and Occupy Wall Street a year later, to more incremental forms of social and emotional change such as the global rise of humanitarianism.40 What is key here is that affects can function (within and between bodies) to either reinscribe political realities or conversely begin to transform the very political realities that the same affects and emotions seem to emerge and attain meaning from. Conceived of in this way, it is not a big leap to consider the links between bodies, affects and emotions as a crucial part of an enduring puzzle in world politics: understanding political agency and global change. Here too, the above line of inquiry aligns with 35. Fox, ‘Emotions, Affects and the Production of Social Life’, 307–8. 36. Agathangelou, ‘A Conversation with Emma Hutchison and Frantz Fanon’, 262; see also Anna A. Agathangelou, ‘Bodies to the Slaughter: Global Racial Reconstructions, Fanon’s Combat Breath, and Wrestling for Life’, Somatechnics 1, no. 1 (2011): 209–48. 37. It is important to note that Agathangelou sees this type of post-imperial, de-colonial project as very much ongoing. I completely agree, particularly with respect to the challenge of decolonising the types of hierarchical emotional regimes – and ‘affective economies’ – that prevail in world politics. 38. Jo Labanyi, ‘Doing Things: Emotion, Affect, and Materiality’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 11, no. 3–4 (2010): 223–33. 39. Fierke, Political Self-Sacrifice, 90–103. 40. Andrew Ross explores the links between affective transformation and the rise of humanitarianism in his symposium contribution. I have also begun to do so in new work. See Emma Hutchison, ‘Humanitarian Emotions through History: Imaging Suffering and Performing Aid’, in Emotional Bodies Studies in the Historical Performativity of Emotions, eds. Dolores Martín-Moruno and Beatriz Pichel (Illinois: Illinois University Press, forthcoming 2019). 41. Ted Hopf, ‘The Logic of Habit in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations 16, no. 4 (2010): 539–61, at 540. Hutchison 293 recent thinking across the field. Ted Hopf, for instance, has argued that in international relations ‘[a]ny efforts to change have to first overcome the power of habitual perceptions, emotions, and practices’.41 Slightly further afield and two decades ago, Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink similarly suggested that the micro-foundations of political behaviours are an important part of understanding normative political change. They suggested in particular the need to examine ‘the roles of affect, empathy, conformity and esteem’.42 To follow this line of thinking, I suggest this is precisely where the body and the emotionality of bodies may potentially come in: a shift towards affect helps to understand how individuals and collectives can overcome the emotional ‘habits’ that constitute and confound the status quo (in all of its guises and iterations) in world politics. All of the symposium contributors stress the importance of such bodily knowledge, although some more explicitly than others. Ross reiterates and expands on his pioneering work on affective energies and ‘circulations’ to explore how the constant remediation of the world also provides unceasing opportunities to negotiate and transform communities in world politics.43 Likewise, Auchter’s contribution looks implicitly at the capacities immanent within bodies through the process of being ‘affected’. She highlights links with the types of trauma stories we tell, questioning whether it is in the telling of trauma stories that unique affective insights and political possibilities can be generated. Specifically, by ‘haunting’ individuals, stories of trauma can (affectively) force us to revisit and think anew about suffering and the suffering bodies we see and also do not see or rarely see.44 Turning to both the (suffering) bodies and affective energies of colonialised peoples, Agathangelou forces us to see and engage how imperial, racial discourses permeate the ‘affective economies’45 through which contemporary international relations continue to be constituted. Mediating Suffering Bodies: The Importance and Power of Representation A focus on bodies is convincing and much needed. Imagine what world politics would look like if decision-makers first and foremost saw the individuals – the bodies – that make world politics possible? What would everyday political life – from the ‘high’ politics of foreign policy to the more ordinary micro-politics of our daily encounters – look like if individuals and collectives were moved to feel for and genuinely reflect on bodies and the politics that confine and conceal bodies, especially those that suffer? Would we all be sufficiently ‘haunted’, as Auchter suggests,46 to think about and practise world politics differently? I can only hope. 42. Marta Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change’, International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 887–917, at 916. 43. See also Ross, Mixed Emotions; and Andrew A.G. Ross, ‘The Power of Viral Expression in World Politics’ (unpublished manuscript, Ohio University, 2018). 44. See Jessica Auchter, The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations (London: Routledge, 2014). 45. Sara Ahmed, ‘Affective Economies’, Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–39. 46. Auchter, The Politics of Haunting and Memory. 294 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(2) While acknowledging the centrality of the body, I nonetheless question the extent to which the politics and potentials of emotion can so easily be reduced to the body and what bodies tell us. I do so because often bodies do not speak to us, or at least not loudly enough. Yes, bodies can tell us much: about how political structures and communities marginalise, exclude and forget; about violence and how it feels to suffer, or to be in pain, or to be traumatised and continue to suffer inequalities and injustices from events supposedly long passed. But not if we cannot hear or listen to them. Why do some instances of suffering – some bodies – come to inhabit a collective consciousness, while others fail to incite a sideways glance? How is it that we do not hear or see bodies, especially suffering bodies and communities in world politics? Before bodies can be situated at the forefront of politics, we need to appreciate the emotional politics of how we see and feel for bodies in the first place. Significant here, I argue, are the material processes – of representation, interpretation, and discourse – that shape how bodies are seen and felt for in world politics. This proposition thus returns to the inquiry I forward in my book and elsewhere: that representations of trauma are a promising place to examine the parallel politics of emotions and community.47 There at least three reasons for this. First, representational practices – such as speech, writing, imaging, and even bodily performance through movement and gesture – are, in a sense, all we have in order to understand emotions in the social realm. Even though emotions have social, cultural origins and can resonate collectively,48 emotions – together with the bodily feelings and affects that precede them – are experienced internally. The ways we feel can thus only be known, and only ever incompletely known, through ‘their instrumental display’.49 Second, emotions are social phenomena that are shaped through cultural environments and the practices of representation and discourse that give meaning within those environments. Key here is not simply that practices of representing reality give meaning to the world around us, but crucially that in doing so representations inevitably ‘say something’ emotionally.50 Representations evoke feelings and affects, which shape how one perceives of and is positioned in the world. Yet, this process – the linkages (and slippages) between emotions and their representations – functions like a dialogue: a kind of back-and-forth exchange; or, a two-way street. While representations elicit affects and emotions, the types of feelings and emotions evoked can in turn feed back and reshape practices of representation. Nonetheless, the overall point I make here is that it is through 47. See also Emma Hutchison, ‘A Global Politics of Pity? Disaster Imagery and the Emotional Construction of Solidarity After the 2004 Asian Tsunami’, International Political Sociology 8, no.1 (2014): 1–19, at 3–5; Hutchison and Bleiker, ‘Theorizing Emotions in World Politics’, 505–7. 48. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion; Catherine A. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 49. Neta C. Crawford, ‘The Passion of World Politics: A Proposition on Emotions and Emotional Relationships’, International Security 24, no. 4 (2000): 116–56. 50. Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction’, in Representations: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: SAGE Publications and the Open University, 1997), 1, 5. Hutchison 295 representations that emotions can be embodied, enacted, transmitted and interpreted in ways that elicit (and can change) socio-cultural meanings, values and beliefs.51 Third and finally – and perhaps the central point I use to stress the need to examine representations of trauma and suffering – is that the links between the politics of emotion and representation get to the heart of a central concern in world politics: the issue of power. Emotions – and pertinent for the subject of my inquiry, the emotions felt in response to witnessing trauma – are inevitably shaped by dominant political discourses and the entrenched interests associated with them. Since emotions are socially and culturally embedded, and since power is an inevitable part of the social processes that shape all cultural interactions, power relations – forms of domination and resistance – inform acceptable modes of emotionality.52 Power shapes what can and cannot or should be said when it comes to the nature of individuals’ feelings. Generated over time through one’s prevailing social and cultural environments, dominant discourses and power relations thus structure what individuals feel or indeed what they think they should feel emotionally in everyday social situations, including the witnessing of suffering. The links between emotions and power are a key reason why I turn to representations to conceptualise how affective communities can take shape. The practice of representing trauma – of mediating suffering, in all its guises – has to do with the construction of meaning and as such ‘the production of possibility’53 in the aftermath of trauma. And it is in this construction of meaning and possibility that politics and power lie and are at stake. Thomas Gregory implicitly stresses the power of representations in relation to perceiving of bodies subjected to the traumas of war. He explains that ‘the appearance of a coherent and bounded body is contingent upon an exclusionary violence that prevents certain bodies from appearing’.54 This means that representations as well as ensuing forms of witnessing trauma are inevitably partial: representations are bound by established ways of seeing and feeling that are conditioned through discourse and power. In this way, representations bring only certain bodies and instances of trauma into view. However, this is not to claim, as symposium contributors put it, that trauma only becomes political through representations. It is instead to maintain that it is the gap between the experiences of trauma and how trauma then takes representational shape that power is enacted and our emotions are too, as a consequence, moulded into shape.55 51. On the power of ‘emotional beliefs’ in world politics, see Jonathan Mercer, ‘Emotional Beliefs’, International Organization 64, no. 1 (2010): 1–31. 52. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, 3–13; Jennifer Harding and E. Diedre Pribram, ‘The Power of Feeling: Locating Emotions in Culture’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 5, no. 4 (2002): 407–26, esp. 423–21; Jonathan G. Heaney, ‘Emotions and Power: Reconciling Conceptual Twins’, Journal of Political Power 4, no. 2 (2011): 259–77, esp. 264–72. 53. Laura J. Shepherd, Gender, UN Peacebuilding, and the Politics of Space: Locating Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 23. 54. Gregory, ‘Dismembering the Dead’, 950. 55. A recent insightful essay on the politics of trauma and the role structural inequalities (including those associated with imperialism) play in defining what constitutes and is examined as ‘trauma’ in world politics has been forwarded by Adam Lerner, ‘Theorizing Collective Trauma in International Political Economy’, International Studies Review, OnlineFirst (2018). 296 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(2) Symposium contributors take issue with this argument. They do so by claiming that ‘the problem of violence cannot be reduced to… a question of representations’;56 that a focus on representations is a ‘partial engagement’ that ‘simplifies the task of translating the complexities of embodied experiences of trauma into political terms’.57 They also imply that to focus on representations is to reinscribe exclusions and legitimate ‘hierarchy, exclusion and marginalisation’ onto communities.58 But these critiques only reinforce the underlying point I am trying to make. Yes, representations simplify. Yes, representations exclude and marginalise. Yes, representations of trauma – like representations of every phenomenon in the social world – are only ever a partial and subjective expression of how things are and can really be. This is part of my book’s key argument: that the emotional and collective politics of trauma is situated precisely in the gap between the embodiment of trauma and the strategies available to express such a catastrophic human experience. The politics of emotions and trauma is thus inevitably about the politics of representation. It is about how we speak of the unspeakable. How we write the unwrite-able. And, why we do so in the ways we do – and what it means to do so in the ways we do? What do our words signal, emotionally? How do representations align some bodies and render certain bodies visible/invisible, ‘grievable’/ungrievable,59 some worthy of care and others forgotten? In this sense, the emotional politics of trauma cannot only be about the body. Bodies do not always speak. Auchter and Meiches in particular want me to acknowledge that bodies are the essence of trauma. Auchter moreover wants me to draw on my own traumatic experience to say so. And she is disappointed that I did not put more emotion into my writing. But I ask in response: how can so much be demanded of suffering bodies? Why do those who suffer have to do more than those who do not? Making this issue all the more perplexing is that there are inherent limits to both representing trauma and interpreting trauma through witnessing. In my own experience, the politics of trauma hovers in the space between my body and the inherently limited capacity I have to give voice to it and the even more limited capacity of those who listen to ever truly understand. Thus, for me, the ethics and responsibility and search to include and care lies foremost with those who bear witness. Significant in this respect is that we understand and can reflect on the emotional politics of representing – and interpreting – trauma. What is essential is that we deconstruct how emotions make up and can shift and change and re-make the boundaries of ‘affective communities’ in world politics, and in doing so help to shape and reshape the boundaries of for whom we care. In Lieu of Conclusion: Emotions, Hierarchy, and the Making of World Politics The study of emotions in international relations has gained prominence in the last 15 years. At the same time, the genuine inclusion of and deeper reflection on emotions 56. 57. 58. 59. Agathangelou, ‘A Conversation with Emma Hutchison and Frantz Fanon’, 252. Meiches, ‘Traumas without Bodies’, 242. Meiches, ‘Traumas without Bodies’, 240; see also Auchter, ‘Narrating Trauma’. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2016). Hutchison 297 continues to take place in a somewhat contested theoretical and empirical terrain. This is the case within both the emotions field in IR and how the field speaks meaningfully to IR as a discipline and an everyday practice. The present symposium contributions praise and push me on both accounts. On the one hand, they do so regarding the approach my book takes to examining the politics of emotions and reading trauma and community. On the other hand, the conceptual and methodological issues they raise also intersect with the emotions literature and question the field more generally. Contributors highlight a range of concerns, foremost: 1) how can we analyse the politics of emotions in ways that appreciate the complexities and possibilities of bodily feelings and affects; 2) how might emotions possess potential to expose marginalised communities as well as the structures that subjugate and colonise minds and bodies in international relations; and, 3) can such an emotional attunement help to rethink existing emotional regimes and concomitant boundaries of ‘affective communities’ in world politics? Engaging the symposium as well as existing literature in the field, this essay has sought to explore the links between emotions and bodies, and the extent to which bodily feelings and affective energies can hold potentials for perceiving of world politics differently. By ‘unleashing’ cognition from emotion and through its capacity to circulate collectively,60 a turn towards affect orientates the politics of emotion around the micro-politics of the everyday ways we feel. Doing so can be powerful: apprehending and deconstructing how and why we feel has potential to awaken our senses and enable us to see and feel for the social world anew. Nonetheless, I have also suggested that the politics of emotions cannot be so readily reduced to the body. Bodies in world politics, and most pertinently bodies enduring suffering and trauma, can only ever appear and thus be felt for through the practice of representation. As such, representations of trauma make ensuing forms of feeling political. In order to realise the possibilities of emotions and affects, we must therefore first confront and expose the representational strategies through which bodies are seen only selectively in international relations and in so doing condition the affective possibilities (and limits that help shape for whom we care). This is exactly how emotions matter in world politics: emotions either reinscribe the status quo or work to transgress and transform the perceptions, perspectives and policies through which international relations are practised. Emotions can, in this sense, be seen to ‘make’ international relations. Established ways of representing the world tend to reinforce hierarchical emotional regimes and cultures through which politics is constituted. These emotions help to constitute traditional ideas about sovereignty, statehood and borders, and the limited, exclusionary conceptions of responsibility and community that go hand-in-hand with customary inside/ outside visions of the world.61 But emotions can also unmake and remake international relations. Emotions shift and change and can chip away at entrenched forms of power and order and community. 60. Janice Bially Mattern, ‘On Being Convinced: An Emotional Epistemology of International Relations’, International Theory 6, no. 3 (2014): 589–94; see also Ross, Mixed Emotions. 61. R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 298 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(2) Emotions can prompt reflection on and expose structures of exclusion, inequality and injustice and suggest new ways of imagining world politics. In this respect, the links between and potentials of our own corporeality and the possibilities immanent in bodies and affects are crucial. While emotions can themselves be forms of power, bodies and feelings possess capacities to create ‘agency, resistance and political change’.62 But just as important as bodies are the practices of representation that bring forth and empower bodies. Representations enact and define the very frames through which we can see, feel for and reflect on bodies in international relations and beyond. Acknowledgments Thanks to Morgan Brigg, Federica Caso, Andrew Phillips and especially Roland Bleiker for valuable conversations and feedback that assisted in writing this response. Funding This research was supported in the context of a broader project on emotions and the politics of humanitarianism. I have received funding from the Australian Research Council (DE180100029) as well a University of Queensland Foundation Research Excellence Award. 62. Wilcox, ‘Making Bodies Matter in IR’, 361.