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Central to the goal of 'hearts and minds' counterinsurgency is the need for knowledge, understanding and influence in relation to local populations. Building on feminist scholarship on counterinsurgency, the article focuses on the 'female engagement' work undertaken by four programmes developed by the US military between 2003 and 2014. The article offers three key arguments. First, it maintains that the gendered subjectivities of Iraqi and Afghan women and US female counterinsurgents are constructed as strategic assets and as vulnerable subjects. Second, these programmes reveal the extent to which gendered counterinsurgency is constituted and regulated by emotional and embodied norms and rules for both female soldiers and civilians. Third, it suggests that the discursive construction of 'winning hearts and minds' works to render less visible the violence of gendered counterinsurgency practices. Although gendered counterinsurgency mobilizes a relational ontology predicated on the emotional labour required for developing knowledge of the Iraqi and Afghan 'other', female engagement activities cannot escape the logic of instrumental reasoning within which they are located. Ultimately, recognizing the policy of female engagement as central to forms of knowledge production reveals the extent to which the violences of war rely on a complex set of gendered and affective relations.

Stories and representations of suffering are frequently central to attempts to arouse our emotions and initiate political action. Yet, the evocation of emotion and, in particular, empathy, remains politically ambivalent. It does not necessarily lead to the acknowledgement of political responsibility or to actions to address the historically-constituted roots of contemporary structural injustices. Moving beyond the legal, moral, and institutional boundaries of political responsibility, this article argues for greater recognition of its affective dimensions. In particular, it differentiates between a sentimental politics and testimonial empathy to better understand the affective dynamics of political responsibility. While the former finds close company with pity and a lack of acknowledged political responsibility, the latter offers an ethical–political orientation towards radical reflexivity and social transformation, situating experiences of injustice within wider networks of power, privilege, and agency. Drawing on the work of feminist, cultural, and social theorists, the article offers a critical conceptualisation of testimonial empathy and its limits. The article illustrates the insights offered by re-thinking political responsibility in terms of testimonial empathy through a close reading of a historical account of structural injustice – slavery in the United States – as written in Harriet A. Jacobs' 1861 slave narrative.

Stories and representations of suffering are frequently central to attempts to arouse our emotions and initiate political action. Yet, the evocation of emotion and, in particular, empathy, remains politically ambivalent. It does not necessarily lead to the acknowledgement of political responsibility or to actions to address the historically-constituted roots of contemporary structural injustices. Moving beyond the legal, moral, and institutional boundaries of political responsibility, this article argues for greater recognition of its affective dimensions. In particular, it differentiates between a sentimental politics and testimonial empathy to better understand the affective dynamics of political responsibility. While the former finds close company with pity and a lack of acknowledged political responsibility, the latter offers an ethical–political orientation towards radical reflexivity and social transformation, situating experiences of injustice within wider networks of power, privilege, and agency. Drawing on the work of feminist, cultural, and social theorists, the article offers a critical conceptualisation of testimonial empathy and its limits. The article illustrates the insights offered by re-thinking political responsibility in terms of testimonial empathy through a close reading of a historical account of structural injustice – slavery in the United States – as written in Harriet A. Jacobs' 1861 slave narrative.

AbstractA "pedagogy of discomfort" (Boler 1999) recognizes the degree to which epistemology, emotions, and ethics are closely entwined both within and beyond our classrooms shaping who, what, where, why, and when we can see. It recognizes not only the intellectual and cognitive focus of education but also its embodied and affective dimensions. A pedagogy of discomfort which engages with the historically, politically, and ideologically contested and the emotionally invested subject of Israel/Palestine offers one way to engage in the teaching and learning of conflict analysis, and to support the development of active and critical student-citizens. This article suggests that experiential learning can support the development of pedagogical discomfort and explores this in the context of the Olive Tree Initiative, a narrative-based and experiential learning program for undergraduate politics and international relations students that focuses on Israel/Palestine. Drawing on student testimony, this article explores the ways in which the program plays a role in challenging dominant social, political, and emotional beliefs in order to create possibilities for individual and social transformation. It also reflects on some of the challenges and limitations posed by this approach, and engages with questions of emotions, vulnerability, and ambiguity in and beyond the classroom.

While considerable attention is being accorded to emotions in International Relations, this article seeks to integrate empathy into these interdisciplinary debates. It counters the dominant assumption that empathy tends to be largely benign and beneficial by conceptualizing a typology of the costs of empathy. The dimensions of costs addressed are epistemological, cognitive, emotional, material, and embodied. I argue that these costs are frequently tangible for those who make the ethical-political choice to engage in empathy in situations of conflict and political violence. Drawing on social psychology approaches, empathy is located within a framework of collective narratives, emotions, and social structures shaped by both micro- and macro-political processes. A model of empathy, which acknowledges social influences and the psychological mechanisms through which these influences may be mediated, contributes to a deeper understanding of how politics, psychology, and culture shape empathy and, crucially, helps understand the conditions which may affect the successes, limitations, and failures of empathy in the (international) political sphere. The article offers empirical illustrations of the costs of empathy drawing on examples from Israel and Palestine.

AbstractThis article starts from the premise that empathy is an inherent part of social and political life but that this is not sufficiently theorised in International Relations (IR). Building on the burgeoning debates on emotions in world politics, it argues that the study of empathy should be developed more rigorously by establishing an interdisciplinary and critical framework for understanding the experiences and processes of empathy in IR. The central contribution of the article is twofold: firstly, it highlights limitations of the dominant perspective on empathy in IR, and secondly, it argues that a range of meanings may be attributed to empathy when examined within the sociopolitical conditions of particular contexts. Drawing on research on the conflict in Israel and Palestine, the article identifies and articulates two such alternative interpretations: empathy as non-violent resistance and as a strategy of normalisation.

While it is true that the US has, for once, signed up to a UN Security Council statement which calls for an "immediate and unconditional humanitarian cease-fire", this might still be considered a tactical step to prevent more strongly worded resolutions against Israel being proposed in the Security Council.

There remains within International Relations a general presumption towards mistrust which characterises interactions at the global level and which has been identified as a relevant factor in conflict transformation. How we conceptualise trust and mistrust matters because it can make the difference between war and peace. This article considers trust, empathy, and dialogue as central concepts for an understanding of conflict and its transformation. Arguing for a relational and dynamic understanding of trust, empathy, and dialogue, the article identifies limitations within IR and contributes to an emergent interdisciplinary research agenda. The contested and unresolved negotiations between Iran and the West over Iran's nuclear program which is framed by the parties as a dilemma of trust, serves to illustrate some of the obstacles to exercising empathy and, at the same time, the need to engage in reflexive dialogue in order to build trust and transform adversarial relationships. Adapted from the source document.

Developing the 'applied turn' in critical theory and Habermasian discourse ethics, this article explores whether a communicative ethics approach enables us to examine the justifications for and legitimacy of actions taken by states during NATO's intervention in Kosovo. By focusing on the deliberations which took place in the UN Security Council over Kosovo from March 1998 to June 1999 and the negotiations at Rambouillet in 1999, it will be shown that there are patterns of exclusion, coercion and illegitimacy which not only challenge the claims to legitimacy of the intervention and of the interveners, but indicate the critical power of a communicative framework.