Emotions and International Relations

In: Meždunarodnye processy: žurnal teorii meždunarodnych otnošenij i mirovoj politiki = International trends : journal of theory of international relations and world politics, Band 19, Heft 3, S. 43-67

Abstract

This article is the part of the recent emotional turn when the scholars of social science are paying more attention to the study of collective emotions in international affairs. The former dominance of the biological and essentialist paradigms in this field were replaced by a number of culture-centered approaches based on social constructivism, which were elaborated within two pioneering disciplines – anthropology of emotions and history of emotions. The influence of such a scientific revolution included the key axis of the common – unique with an emphasis on the latter. The IR has been also affected by an emotional turn when the field of constructivist emotional studies had been established in the early 2000s. The object of this work is the transnational structural common – collective emotional patterns that have recurrent nature and emerge beyond state borders. This part of reality has not been conceptualized by scholars. Therefore, the aim of the article is to fill an epistemological vacuum and outline the ways for conceptualization of transnational structural common. It is IR that seem to be the most suitable field to do this. The empirical case of the crisis response after terrorist attacks are analyzed as the example of the transnational structural common. This case is explored by the author through the framework of "emotion culture" by S. Koschut in combination with the concept of "emotives" by W. Reddy. Speeches by the leaders of Israel, the United States, Russia, India and France after six terrorist attacks from 1972 to 2015 allow to identify an integrated tripartite emotional structure, which is observed in each of the cases. This structure includes an emotive of pity; compensatory structure with the emotives of fighting fear through reciprocal determination; finally, an emotive of solidarity. This discursive structure functions in a stable way because the emotional code connects the type of event (terrorist attack) with the cultural script (tripartite structure). Finally, some approaches in sociological institutionalism would enrich future studies of emotion culture.