In Public: Collectivities and Polities

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.

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

Review of International Studies, 2008

Although emotions play a significant role in world politics they have so far received surprisingly little attention by International Relations scholars. Numerous authors have emphasised this shortcoming for several years now, but strangely there are still only very few systematic inquiries into emotions and even fewer related discussions on method. The article explains this gap by the fact that much of International Relations scholarship is conducted in the social sciences. Such inquiries can assess emotions up to a certain point, as illustrated by empirical studies on psychology and foreign policy and constructivist engagements with identity and community. But conventional social science methods cannot understand all aspects of phenomena as ephemeral as those of emotions. Doing so would involve conceptualising the influence of emotions even when and where it is not immediately apparent. The ensuing challenges are daunting, but at least some of them could be met by supplementing social scientific methods with modes of inquiry emanating from the humanities. By drawing on feminist and other interpretive approaches we advance three propositions that would facilitate such cross-disciplinary inquiries. (1) The need to accept that research can be insightful and valid even if it engages unobservable phenomena, and even if the results of such inquiries can neither be measured nor validated empirically; (2) The importance of examining processes of representation, such as visual depictions of emotions and the manner in which they shape political perceptions and dynamics; (3) A willingness to consider alternative forms of insight, most notably those stemming from aesthetics sources, which, we argue, are particularly suited to capturing emotions. Taken together, these propositions highlight the need for a sustained global communication across different fields of knowledge. Introduction

Politics and Governance, 2018

The ‘emotional turn’ within the social sciences and humanities attracts increasing scholarly attention. Political Science, traditionally emphasising the ‘rational’ public sphere rather than the ‘emotional’ private sphere, has increasingly questioned this dichotomisation, identifying broader political concepts and practices. The international political process—frequently characterised by widespread distrust, populist campaigns and extreme rhetoric—necessitates addressing and examining its underlying emotions. Informal, affective manifestations of politics are enormously influential, profoundly shaping inter- and intra-national democracy; they accordingly require interdisciplinary study. This thematic issue of <em>Politics and Governance</em> includes disciplines as diverse as education, history, international relations, political theory, psychology, and sociology. In doing so, we illustrate that emotions are cross-disciplinary concerns, relevant beyond the study of politics.

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

Over the past thirty years, emotions and globalization have both become fashionable topics in sociology. But they have not been brought together, as one seems to be an extremely microlevel concern, the other is a macro issue. This essay recaps what we have learned from sociological research and theory on emotions in order to see how we might connect the two sets of issues. The sociology of emotions has focused on face-to-face interactions in which feelings are generated and managed. It places these interactions in the context of broader structures, such as power and status hierarchies, cultural norms and expectations, and employer-employee relations. These encounters remain relevant in a globalizing world, so that the emphasis on face-to-face interactions proves more useful than we might intuitively expect.

Researching Emotions in International Relations: Methodological Perspectives on the Emotional Turn , edited by Maéva Clément and Eric Sangar , 2018

This chapter outlines a multidisciplinary and pluralist framework for the study of emotions in world politics. Needed is not a systematic theory of emotions, but a more open-ended sensibility that could conceptualize the influence of emotions even where and when it is not immediately apparent. It then becomes possible to combine seemingly incompatible methods, from ethnographies to surveys and from interviews to discourse and content analyses. The logic through which these methods operate do not necessarily have to be the same, nor do they have to add up to one coherent whole, for it is precisely through such creative openness that we can hope to capture the complex yet pervasive role emotions play in world politics.

The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions, 2020

We elaborate the conceptual preconditions that must be fulfilled so that the qualifier ‘political’ can be applied to emotions. We then sketch a multi-dimensional approach to political emotions and employ the concept of ‘collective affective intentionality’ as an explicative framework. We argue that political emotions in the robust sense constitute a subclass of collective emotions—collective emotions that disclose a shared concern of political import, claim public recognition and affectively and normatively modulate the emotional life of the members of a polity. Finally, we demonstrate how political emotions essentially contain an orientation towards—often contested or ‘agonistic’—forms of communalization.

Methodology and Emotion in International Relations: Parsing the Passions , 2019

International Theory, 2014