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"Bleiker, Roland"
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Theorizing emotions in world politics
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.
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Autoethnographic International Relations: exploring the self as a source of knowledge
Research is all about a person's engagement with an issue. But most approaches to International Relations actively discourage personal involvement by the researcher. We question the adequacy of this norm and the related scholarly conventions. Instead, we explore how the personal experience of the researcher can be used as a legitimate and potentially important source of insight into politics. But we also note that simply telling the story of the researcher is inadequate. We engage the ensuing dilemmas by discussing how to both appreciate and evaluate autoethnographic insights. Rather than relying on pre-determined criteria, we argue that methodological uses of the self should be judged within knowledge communities and according to their ability to open up new perspectives on political dilemmas. We then advance two related suggestions: one advocates conceptualising research around puzzles; the other explores the methodological implications of recognising that producing knowledge is an inherently relational activity.
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Visual autoethnography and international security: Insights from the Korean DMZ
The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore the political potential of visual autoethnography. I do so through my experience of working as a Swiss Army officer in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Drawing on my own photographs I examine how an appreciation of everyday aesthetic sensibilities can open up new ways of thinking about security dilemmas. I argue that visual autoethnography can be insightful not because it offers better or even authentic views – it cannot – but because it has the potential to reveal how prevailing political discourses are so widely rehearsed and accepted that we no longer see their partial, political, and often problematic nature. I illustrate this potential in two ways: (1) how a self-reflective engagement with my own photographs of the DMZ reveals the deeply entrenched role of militarised masculinities; (2) how my positionality and my photographs of everyday life in North Korea show that prevailing security discourses are highly particular and biased, even though they are used to justify seemingly objective policy decisions.
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Fear no more: emotions and world politics
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.
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Conspiracy and foreign policy
Conspiracies play a significant role in world politics. States often engage in covert operations. They plot in secret, with and against each other. At the same time, conspiracies are often associated with irrational thinking and delusion. We address this puzzle and highlight the need to see conspiracies as more than just empirical phenomena. We argue that claims about conspiracies should be seen as narratives that are intrinsically linked to power relations and the production of foreign policy knowledge. We illustrate the links between conspiracies, legitimacy and power by examining multiple conspiracies associated with 9/11 and the War on Terror. Two trends are visible. On the one hand, US officials identified a range of conspiracies and presented them as legitimate and rational, even though some, such as the alleged covert development of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, are now widely considered false. On the other hand, conspiracies circulating in the Arab-Muslim world were dismissed as irrational and pathological, even though some, like those concerned with the covert operation of US power in the Middle East, were based on credible concerns.
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Writing Visual Global Politics
I am delighted and honoured to respond to Gabi Schlag’s generous and insightful review of Visual Global Politics. She endorses our open-ended Bsearch for thinking space^ and finds that one of the book’s Bprimary strength^ lies in our effort to embrace Bpluralism and diversity^ in the study of visual global politics. At the same time, Schlag believes that this very attempt to eschew disciplinary boundaries leads to Bmissed opportunities^. The first and most important one has to do with the need for Ba genealogy of visual IR^. Schlag highlights the benefits of historicising the Bvisual turn^ in international relations (IR) research. Doing so, she stresses, would reveal the Bconditions of possibility of research practices^ and show how visuality has emerged and become a major topic of disciplinary inquiry. Schlag’s second key point follows this disciplinary self-reflection. She flags the importance of advancing Ba critical engagement with methods^ as a way of addressing the ambiguity and fluidity of the visual. This methodological move is seen as essential to demonstrate that ensuing research is legitimate and can produce Binter-subjective^ knowledge.
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Visuality and creativity in global politics. In memory of Alex Danchev
Artical about academic achievements and personality of Alex Danchev, professor of international relations
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DISCOURSE AND EMOTIONS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The field of International Relations (IR) has recently witnessed the emergence of a wide variety of different approaches to make sense of the many ways emotions work in and through discourse. This forum takes stock of and investigates this link based on two interrelated questions: Why study emotions through discourse? How can we study emotions through discourse? Concerning the first question, we argue that textual and verbal utterances provide us with a promising way to make emotions empirically accessible for researchers. Regarding the second question, we argue that it is essential to develop specific criteria for the study of emotions via speech acts. We propose three criteria that the study of emotion discourse must answer to, which revolve around theory (what is an emotion?), expression (how are emotions communicated?), and effects (what do emotions do?). In a step toward fostering engagement and dialogue on these questions, the contributors of this forum propose a variety of approaches to study emotion discourse in world politics. The idea is to explore the ways in which discourse evokes, reveals, and engages emotions and how these effects can speak to larger questions in IR. Precisely, the goal with this forum is to go beyond the “emotions matter” approach of the first wave of emotions scholarship in IR to offer more specific ways to integrate the consideration of emotion into existing research, particularly that of a constructivist vein.
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