Suchergebnisse

Circulations of affect in global politics -- Contagion and the creativity of affect -- The affective politics of terror -- Emotions and ethnic conflict -- Justice beyond hatred -- Conclusion

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that emotion plays a central role in global politics. For example, people readily care about acts of terrorism and humanitarian crises because they appeal to our compassion for human suffering. These struggles also command attention where social interactions have the power to produce or intensify the emotional responses of those who participate in them. From passionate protests to poignant speeches, the author analyzes high-emotion events with an eye to how they shape public perception and finds that there is no single answer.

This contribution reflects on the cultural pol- itics of affective media in the field of global humanitarianism. Liberal advocates of internet connectivity continue to celebrate mobile and other digital networking technologies as vehicles for global dialogue and transnational justice. A key conceit of this tradition is an ontological linkage between the scale of mediated communication, the sensorial range of human experience, and the capaciousness of moral attention. In reference to recent developments in digital humanitarian advocacy, this chapter disrupts these linkages and tells a more complex story about the politics of mediated humanitarian affect. Digital humanitarian campaigns enhance moral sensitivities but also engender new forms of digital labor, data gathering, and political control. Crisis mapping technologies expand opportunities for liberal institutions to manage distant populations according to specific rationalities of governance. And the algorithms that circulate video advocacy campaigns are translating distant conflicts into new sites for enjoyment and moral urgency. The case of mediated humanitarian affect reveals the extent to which human affective energies are being captured by the technologies and regimes of power characteristic of neoliberal societies.

This article appeals to classical realism for new insights into the role emotions play in shifting the terrain of political allegiance in global politics. Although undetected in readings emphasizing rational statecraft, realists such as Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr were centrally concerned with human emotions and their political impact. While following the intellectual currents of their time in regarding emotions as fixed impulses, these realists' deep appreciation for the contingencies of history also led them to cast emotions as socially conditioned mechanisms of adaptation. By revisiting the texts of classical realism, this paper develops a fresh account of how emotion responds to and engenders change in the social world – in particular, change in the location of political allegiances. I then show how Morgenthau and Niebuhr applied these ideas not only to the nation-state but also to the most vexingtransnational phenomena of their time – communism and liberal internationalism. In conclusion, the paper speculates that these reflections on dynamic allegiances at the transnational level offer realists and other international relation theorists insight into the emotional appeal, adaptability, and organizational complexity of contemporary non-state movements and actors.

This article reconceptualises the emotions associated with 'anti-Americanism' and sketches an alternative account of impassioned protest in the Middle East and South Asia. I identify two overlapping discursive images that mistake what emotions are and how they fuel political resistance: 'Islamic anger', which delegitimises emotional expression as a form of political agency, and 'anti-American hatred', which assumes that popular emotions in these regions are tied to a clear and distinct object — America. Drawing on two recent cases widely discussed in the American media, I show how the emotional quality of political resistance is used to undermine its legitimacy. Using ethnographic sources, I then offer a preliminary sketch of the normative, historical and interactive contexts of those protests. The article encourages international relations scholars to view grassroots actors as neither impulsive insurgents nor aggregations of survey data but instead complex moral agents embedded in local struggles.