Emma Hutchison

Emotions underpin how political communities are formed and function.  Nowhere is this more pronounced than in times of trauma.  The emotions associated with suffering caused by war, terrorism, natural disasters, famine and poverty can play a pivotal role in shaping communities and orientating their politics.  But until recently the political roles of emotions have received only scant attention. 

This book contributes to burgeoning literatures on emotions and international relations by investigating how ‘affective communities’ emerge after trauma.  Drawing on several case studies and an unusually broad set of interdisciplinary sources, the book examines the role played by representations – from media images to historical narratives and political speeches.  Representations of traumatic events are crucial, the book argues, because they generate socially embedded emotional meanings which, in turn, enable direct victims and distant witnesses to share the injury – as well as the associated loss – in a manner that affirms a particular notion of collective identity.  While ensuing political orders often re-establish old patterns, traumatic events can also generate new ‘emotional cultures’ that genuinely transform national and transnational communities.

It is widely recognised that the study of emotions provides significant and still emerging potentials for the scholarship and practice of world politics.  But having shown that emotions matter, international relations research is turning to more carefully appreciate exactly how emotions matter and possess important political capacities.  Identifying this broad debate as a recurring thread through the symposium as well as in emerging research, this essay focuses on the productive nature and transformative potentials of emotion.  Specifically, the essay reflects on the extent to which emotions can bring the ‘messy’ parts of world politics to light and, in turn, enable us to rethink, perceive of, and feel for them anew.  Key here 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.  The essay forwards a two-part argument.  First, I argue that the links between emotions and bodies are crucial to apprehending the political roles and capacities of emotions.  Second, and somewhat contrary to the current call to focus specifically on bodies, I stress the need to go beyond the body.  Specifically, I argue that before bodies can be situated at the forefront of politics we need to appreciate the emotional politics of bodies themselves.  Equally important, therefore, are the processes of materialisation – of representation and discourse – that condition emotions and shape ways of perceiving and feeling for suffering.  To conclude, I discuss the implications of this paradox and point to how the political mediation of emotion – and how we analyse and write of this mediation – can both complement and contest core concepts and practices through which international relations is conducted, such as sovereignty, statehood, hierarchy and power.  Appreciating the potentials of emotions and affective energies of bodies and mediating bodies in this way makes but can also unmake and remake world politics.

This is the introductory essay to the forum section on Jens Bartelson's War in International Thought (CUP, 2017).  In the essay we outline and critically reflect on the key contributions of the book, which was awarded the ISA International Theory Best Book Prize.  We also introduce the essays that follow and Bartelson's reply.

The study of emotion has become a steadily growing field in international relations and international political sociology. This essay adds to the field through a further empirical examination of the political roles emotions can play. Specifically, the essay questions how emotions were implicated in the construction of transnational solidarity—and the associated humanitarian actions—following an event of pivotal global importance: the Asian tsunami disaster of December 2004. To this end, I focus on the emotional dimensions of dominant media tsunami imagery and examine how emotions helped to produce the humanitarian meanings and ideologies on which the subsequent solidarity and humanitarian actions were based. Analyzing photographs in the New York Times, the essay demonstrates that the dominant tsunami imagery helped to evoke solidarity and garner aid. It did so, at least in part, through mobilizing stereotypical and deeply colonial representations of developing world disaster that are suggestive of a “politics of pity.” In this way, the essay contributes both an empirical study of emotions in world politics and an examination of the linkages between emotions and contemporary humanitarianism.

In this intervention, I argue that conceptualizing the politically constitutive nature of emotions is crucial for a more holistic and reflective understanding of security. Emotions are a mechanism through which political identities and communities are shaped and sustained. They are part of the social fabric that binds communities together. In certain circumstances and particularly after political conflict and crises, emotions can be mobilized in ways that focus communities on trauma and generate antagonistic perceptions and mindsets. Security becomes defined narrowly; resources are spent keeping perceived dangers at bay. Highlighting the links between emotions, community and security, I underline the need to examine how the emotional meanings that underpin these kinds of ‘affective communities’ can constitute threat perceptions and create violent security patterns. Doing so is critical as it provides a pathway through which scholars and policy analysts can rethink security through the type of social emotional dispositions that traditional security approaches are both predicted on and in turn perpetuate.

This essay examines how traumatic events can influence the constitution of community in international relations. Trauma is often perceived as isolating individuals and fragmenting communities. This essay argues, in contrast, that practices of representation can make traumatic events meaningful in ways that give them a collective and often international dimension. Central to this process is the role played by emotions. Often neglected in scholarly analysis of international relations, emotions play a crucial political role during times of crisis and can become pivotal sites for the renewal of political stability and social control. The essay illustrates the ensuing dynamics by examining media portrayals of the Bali bombing of 12 October 2002. Focusing on photographs and the stories that accompany them, the essay shows how representations of trauma can provide a sense of collective feeling that is capable of underpinning political community. It concludes by suggesting that international relations scholars can learn much about the politics of community and security by examining prominent representations of trauma and the emotional discourses they mobilise.

This article examines Jeanette Winterson's novels to show how storytelling can hold transformative political potential. Storytelling is fundamental to human existence. Stories help to provide structure and meaning in what often seems a random, haphazard world. Yet stories can help to not only construct political realities but also transform them. Key here, I argue, is the ability of stories to inspire the imagination needed to render entrenched political patterns and practices contingent. To analyse the potentials and limits of storytelling to do this, the present article examines the fiction of Jeanette Winterson. Her novels adventure into a wondrous world where reality and fantasy combine and established patterns of knowledge are juxtaposed with what is conventionally deemed myth. Winterson's preoccupation with storytelling challenges dominant representations of history and identity and in effect foregrounds different ways to perceive of political realities. Exploring the relationship between storytelling, contingency and politics, the article illustrates how fictional accounts can help scholars reclaim contingency as a critical component of political understanding: it can help to illuminate vanquished identities and perspectives and in so doing bring to the fore alternative, unforeseen social and political possibilities.

Visuality shapes all aspects of peace and conflict. Images influence how we view, understand, and respond to violence and how we find solutions to entrenched problems. This chapter examines the issues at stake by highlighting the need to take into account the historical dimension of images. It focuses, in particular, on how humanitarian ideals and norms have emerged in response to depictions of violence and suffering. It then explores how understandings of peace are inherently linked to ensuing humanitarian imagery. Images, in this sense, have been and continue to be critical to enabling local and global audiences to see, perceive of, and feel for communities that endure conflict and are working toward peaceful solutions. It is in this sense that visuality—in its various manifestations—plays an important part of reconciliation, statebuilding, and peace formation.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the role of performance in the relationship be tween emotions and politics. To do so it focuses on the role that empathy plays in process es of reconciliation after conflict and trauma. Emotions triggered by conflict often perpet uate existing antagonisms. They tend to reproduce the hostile attitudes that have created violence in the first place. A performative approach illuminates not only how emotions perpetuate conflict but also how they can help divided societies adopt more reflective cul tures of reconciliation. The performative dimensions of emotions are crucial because they link individual emotions with collective ones. Drawing on a range of conceptual sources the chapter shows how actively drawing on empathy can promote alternative ways of dealing with conflict. A short case study examines the roles that art, and theater in partic ular, play in peacebuilding in Sri Lanka. An active appreciation of the whole spectrum of emotions-not o...

The issue of asylum seekers and refugees is one of the most contested political issues in Australia. This chapter examines ensuing debates, focusing closely on how refugees and asylum seekers are perceived and responded to in relation to the spatial and emotional dynamics that prevail in Australian society and politics. Specifically, the chapter examines how the issue of asylum is intimately connected to and influenced by highly emotional im ages circulating in the national media. To do this, the authors first discuss the history of refugees at Australia's borders. In doing so, the authors underline the key role that politi cal and media representations play in shaping refugee debates and policy. The chapter then undertakes an empirical investigation of two crucial recent periods when refugee debates proliferated in both the media and in politics: August to December 2001 and Oc tober 2009 to September 2011. By conducting a content analysis of front-page coverage in The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, the authors focus on the particular vi sual framing that has been used to depict asylum seekers and its emotional and political consequences, highlighting how recurring frames have been used to dehumanize and fur ther displace asylum seekers and refugees in the Australian context. The authors then ar gue that these visual media depictions associate refugees not with humanitarian chal lenges and responsibilities, but instead with threats to sovereignty and security.

The emotional dimensions of witnessing human hardship and suffering through images are key to ensuing humanitarianism.  Yet while images of suffering have historically evoked a range of ‘humanitarian emotions’, contemporary commentators lament that a ‘politics of pity’ now commonly fuels western humanitarian practices.  While this is often highlighted as a more recent phenomenon, emotions evoked in response to suffering have deeply historical origins.  Scholars speak, for instance, of the guilt, sympathy, ‘irresistible compassion’ and again pity, which so moved people in the 17-18th century to act and alleviate other’s pain.  This chapter therefore seeks to explore these historical linkages.  It examines the historical emergence of humanitarian emotions and sensibilities through tracing how early humanitarian representations bear out in those in the present day.  Analyzing early modern and contemporary media images of suffering, the chapter focuses on how the history of representing distant suffering has contributed the proliferation of a ‘politics of pity’ through which humanitarian actions are performed and practiced.  Exposing the historical and cultural contingency of such emotions, the chapter concludes by emphasizing how bodily feelings and affects hold immanent possibilities for political - and humanitarian - transformations.

Questions of gender permeate all aspect of media coverage of violence.  Wars and the militarized practices that sustain them are deeply gendered and so is press coverage of them.  Rape and other forms sexual violence make the news on a regular basis.  But the links between gender and violence go beyond the obvious: they range from dramatic to seemingly mundane, invisible in social structures and institutions that shape everyday society and politics.  The purpose of this chapter is to focus on the links between gender and violence in photographic representations of humanitarian crises. We examine their deeply gendered nature.  Whether they relate to war, famines or natural disasters, images of suffering often replicate gender stereotypes in highly problematic ways.  But the chapter also shows how these visual narratives, which are a form of structural violence, can be challenged through alternative visual representations.  The resulting feminist aesthetic encourages us, quite literally, to view the world differently.  Seeing, in this sense, is a form of agency, an active engagement with politics, for established – and highly gendered - models of international relations can ultimately only change when we and our aesthetic sensibilities do.

This blog explores the links between emotion, conflict and conciliation.  It focuses on the need to more closely examine how emotional practices can both abet and help to reconcile communities divided by histories of violence and injustice.  In the conclusion I discuss the potentials of grief as a possibility for communities to consciously work through emotions and affects that may be perpetuating, rather than ameliorating, conflict.

This paper examines how traumatic events can influence the constitution of identity and community in international relations. It demonstrates that emotions are central to how individuals and societies experience and work through the legacy of catastrophe. Often neglected in scholarly analysis of international relations, emotions can become pivotal sites for the renewal of political stability and social control. Key to this process are practices of representation. They provide individual experiences of trauma with a collective and often international dimension. They often smooth over feelings of shock and terror and unite individuals in a spirit of shared experience and mutual understanding. The paper illustrates the ensuing dynamics by examining the media’s portrayal of the Bali bombing of 12 October 2002. Focusing on photographs and the stories that accompany them, the paper shows how representations of trauma may provide a sense of collective solace that can, in turn, underwrite t...