Emma Hutchison

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.

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.

Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma

This article examines the public significance of emotions, most specifically their role in constituting identity and community in the wake of political violence and trauma. It offers a conceptual engagement with processes of healing and reconciliation, showing that emotions are central to how societies experience and work through the legacy of catastrophe. In many instances, political actors deal with the legacy of trauma in restorative ways, by re-imposing the order that has been violated. Emotions can in this way be directed by elites who are concerned with reinstating political stability and social control. Healing often becomes more about retribution and revenge, rather than a long-term project begetting peace, collaboration and emotional catharsis. The emotions triggered by trauma thus tend to perpetuate existing antagonisms, further entrenching the disingenuous perceptions of identity that may have created violence in the first place. Surveying this process, this article suggests that scholars of politics and reconciliation need to be more attentive to the role emotion plays in shaping particular forms of community. Doing so requires a systematic understanding not only of the feelings associated with first-hand experiences of trauma, but also of the manner in which these affective reactions can spread and generate collective emotions, thus producing new forms of antagonism. Addressing this challenge, the authors explore how a more conscious and active appreciation of the whole spectrum of emotions — not only anger and fear, for instance, but also empathy, compassion and wonder — may facilitate more lasting and ingenuous forms of social healing and reconciliation.

The visual dehumanisation of refugees

Dealing with refugees is one of the most contested political issues in Australia. We examine how media images of asylum seekers have framed ensuing debates during two crucial periods over the past decade. By conducting a content analysis of newspaper front pages we demonstrate that asylum seekers have primarily been represented as medium or large groups and through a focus on boats. We argue that this visual framing, and in particular the relative absence of images that depict individual asylum seekers with recognisable facial features, associates refugees not with a humanitarian challenge, but with threats to sovereignty and security. These dehumanising visual patterns reinforce a politics of fear that explains why refugees are publicly framed as people whose plight, dire as it is, nevertheless does not generate a compassionate political response. 如何对待难民是澳大利亚一个最具争议的政治话题。我们考察了在过去十年中的两个关键时期中媒体的避难者形象是如何影响接下来辩论的。根据笔者对报纸的头版所做的内容分析，避难者主要被再现为中、大型群体，多集中在船上。我们认为，这样的视觉形象、尤其是缺少描画个体避难者脸部特征的形象，不会将避难者同人道主义问题联系起来，而只会同威胁主权及安全相链接。这类非人性化的视觉模式强化了恐惧的政治，这也解释了为什么公众认为难民境遇凄惨，却不给他们政治上的同情。

Trauma and the Politics of Emotions: Constituting Identity, Security and Community after the Bali Bombing

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.

Affective communities as security communities

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.

Unsettling Stories: Jeanette Winterson and the Cultivation of Political Contingency

This article examines Jeanette Wintersons 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. Wintersons 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.

Visual Cultures of Inhospitality

The concept of hospitality has long been central to how philosophers conceptualize the obligation of states to accommodate strangers in need of help. Rendered prominent, in particular, through Immanuel Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace, hospitality offers a way to conceptualize the difficult tension between the rights of strangers to the protection and the rights of hosts to preserve their autonomy. In today’s world, this fragile balance is often lost. Fear of strangers outweighs the moral obligation to help them. Migrants who are forced to cross national boundaries often encounter hostile worlds characterized by legal obstacles, political antagonism, and cultural prejudice. Numerous factors shape prevailing cultures of inhospitality. Chief among them are deeply entrenched notions of state sovereignty and national identity. But there are other, more subtle but equally influential factors. In this essay, the focus is on one of them: the role of images. The purpose of this essay is to highlight how visual representations of refugees influence cultures of hospitality. Images are important because they contribute to establishing the kind of collective sensibilities that either prevent or promote genuine cultures of hospitality. We present materials from an Australian case study that examines how asylum seekers were visually portrayed on the front pages of two prominent newspapers: The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. For more than a decade now, public perceptions and political debates about refugees have been shaped, at least in part, by dramatic images of asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia’s shores. Since 1998, more than 600 boats carrying over 35,000 individuals arrived. More than a thousand people have died during their attempts to reach Australia.

Methods and methodologies for the study of emotions in world politics

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.

Book Review: Elizabeth Dauphinée, The Ethics of Researching War: Looking for Bosnia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, 160 pp., £14.99 pbk.)

208 antagonistic language between the non-EU Mediterranean states persists not least because the EU policies or policies of individual EU member states towards ‘us’ and ‘them’ are perceived as driven by the interests of individual EU Mediterranean states and/or formulated along ideological and cultural lines. It is in the intersection between the EU’s legitimacy in these countries and the legitimacy of domestic elites that the research could have been developed further. Although the author maps those domestic forces which have the will, if not the potential, to construct state representations which are in line with the aspired-for identity of the EU itself and of its democratization aspirations in the region, their strategies for intervening in the dominant state representations/discourses are not fully explored. Considering that the prospect of EU membership is remote for these three Mediterranean partners and domestic rifts over national and societal identities have widened as the prospects for peace in the Middle East have receded, as the author suggests, one is led to conclude that there is little that the EMP can do to make good its failures in forging a regional identity and inducing domestic reform. As the normative regionbuilding approach of the EMP seeks to indirectly cure precisely those problems that make possible domestic contestations of state identities in these case studies, restating the problems does not take us much further with the remedy, which is the EMP itself. The quest for a solution may then take us back to the tailoring of the EMP so that it can respond to the countryspecific cultural and political settings that the book effectively reveals.