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.

A systematic examination of emotions and world politics, showing how emotions underpin political agency and collective action after trauma.

This book investigates collective emotions in international politics, with examples from 9/11 and World War II to the Rwandan genocide.

Emotions work to define who we are as well as shape what we do and this is no more powerfully at play than in the world of politics. Ahmed considers how emotions keep us invested in relationships of power, and also shows how this use of emotion could be crucial to areas such as feminist and queer politics. Debates on international terrorism, asylum and migration, as well as reconciliation and reparation, are explored through topical case studies. In this book the difficult issues are confronted head on. The Cultural Politics of Emotion is in dialogue with recent literature on emotions within gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, psychology and philosophy. Throughout the book, Ahmed develops a theory of how emotions work, and the effects they have on our day-to-day lives. New for this editionA substantial 15,000-word Afterword on 'Emotions and Their Objects' which provides an original contribution to the burgeoning field of affect studiesA revised BibliographyUpdated throughout.

This edited volume is the first to discuss the methodological implications of the ‘emotional turn’ in International Relations. While emotions have become of increasing interest to IR theory, methodological challenges have yet to receive proper attention. Acknowledging the pluralityof ontological positions, concepts and theories about the role of emotions in world politics, this volume presents and discusses various ways to research emotions empirically. Based on concrete research projects, the chapters demonstrate how social-scientific and humanitiesoriented methodological approaches can be successfully adapted to the study of emotions in IR. The volume covers a diverse set of both well-established and innovative methods, including discourse analysis, ethnography, narrative, and visual analysis. Through a hands-on approach, each chapter sheds light on practical challenges and opportunities, as well as lessons learnt for future research. The volume is an invaluable resource for advanced graduate and postgraduate students as well as scholars interested in developing their own empirical research on the role of emotions.

This volume offers a state-of-the-art study of the diverse methodological approaches and issues in the study of emotions in international relations research. While interest in emotion and affect in IR has grown in recent years, there remains an absence of sustained engagement with questions of methodology and method. Although much of the field holds the ‘emotions turn’ as laudable, it is commonly seen as facing serious, even prohibitive, methodological challenges. Using a common framework for making discussions of methodology and emotion mutually intelligible, this work seeks to address this lacuna and will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, research methods and IR theory.

In recent years, it’s become increasingly clear that emotion plays a central role in global politics. For example, people readily care about acts of terrorism and humanitarian crises because they appeal to our compassion for human suffering. These struggles also command attention where social interactions have the power to produce or intensify the emotional responses of those who participate in them. From passionate protests to poignant speeches, Andrew A. G. Ross analyzes high-emotion events with an eye to how they shape public sentiment and finds that there is no single answer. The politically powerful play to the public’s emotions to advance their political aims, and such appeals to emotion also often serve to sustain existing values and institutions. But the affective dimension can produce profound change, particularly when a struggle in the present can be shown to line up with emotionally resonant events from the past. Extending his findings to well-studied conflicts, including the War on Terror and the violence in Rwanda and the Balkans, Ross identifies important sites of emotional impact missed by earlier research focused on identities and interests.