The Power of Emotions in World Politics

Simon Koschut

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367347222
• eBook ISBN: 9781000025514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book argues that the link between emotions and discourse provides a new and promising framework to theorize and empirically analyse power relationships in world politics.

Examining the ways in which discourse evokes, reveals, and engages emotions, the expert contributors argue that emotions are not irrational forces but have a pattern to them that underpins social relations. However, these are also power relations and their articulation as socially constructed ways of feeling and expressing emotions represent a key force in either sustaining or challenging the social order. This volume goes beyond the "emotions matter" approach to offer specific ways to integrate the consideration of emotion into existing research. It offers a novel integration of emotion, discourse, and power and shows how emotion discourses establish, assert, challenge, or reinforce power and status difference.

It will be particularly useful to university researchers, doctoral candidates, and advanced students engaged in scholarship on emotions and discourse analysis in International Relations.

Part I

Introduction and analytical framework

1 Emotion, discourse, and power in world politics

Simon Koschut

Introduction

Current events underscore the significance of the link between discourse, emotions, and power in world politics. In the United States and parts of Europe, populists playing with fear are shaping political discourse. Meanwhile, the arrival of millions of migrants and refugees is dividing the European Union into those who express sympathy with the exiles by welcoming them in, and those who respond with resentment by drawing their bridges up. This raises an important question for the discipline of International Relations (IR): If the power of language includes an affective dimension then the question is how can researchers theorize and analytically extract the emotion potential and emotionalizing effects built into political discourse?

The field of IR has recently witnessed the emergence of a wide variety of different approaches that theorize the link between discourse and emotion.¹ Whatever divergent claims are made by these and other scholars, they share a broader theoretical concern in how the emotional underpinnings of discourses work, leading to a common research interest in how emotions “seep into everyday discourse … and become part of the taken-for-granted assumptions that underpin the decision of agents” (Fierke 2013: 209). Studies involving the discourse-emotion nexus have in recent years been among the most active and interesting areas contributing to the “emotional turn” in IR as one of the most promising developments in the field. Beyond the proclamation of an emotional turn, however, there has been strikingly little systematic elaboration of appropriate ways for studying emotion discourse, understood as words, phrases, narratives, expressions, and representations that in some way symbolically refer to emotion and anything that is visual such as photographs, artwork and images. More importantly, IR scholars are just beginning to study how the discursive and socially embedded nature of emotions intersects with political power.²

In this volume, we argue that the link between discourse and emotion provides a promising framework to theorize and empirically analyse power relationships in IR. In fact, we suggest that emotions cannot be understood or studied without their sociolinguistic force, or more precisely, their sociolinguistic configurations of power. As Lutz (1988, 6) explains: “Talk about emotions is simultaneously talk … about power and politics.” Emotions are not some irrational force but have a pattern to them that underpins social relations. However, those relations are also power relations, and we cannot, in our view, separate emotional meanings and their articulation in discourse from the power relations in which they are located. We thus claim that emotions, understood as emergent rather than intrinsic properties representing beliefs, values, and moral judgements about the world, coincide with social hierarchies, inequalities, and status differences, resulting in webs of interconnections and relatively stable patterns of multiple, overlapping, and sometimes contradicting emotional meanings. We suggest that this multiplicity of emotional meanings operates in a continual process of discursively reproducing and resisting relations of power. A focus on the link between emotion and discourse thus offers a prolific way to unpack the emotional underpinnings of power in IR and thus to translate a commonsensical position into a more thorough theoretical understanding of what emotions actually “do” at the level of world politics: how emotions, as socially constructed representations of affects and feelings, function to legitimize or delegitimize status rank, accept or challenge authority, and reinforce or transform global hierarchies. Precisely, the idea is to explore how the ways in which discourse evokes, reveals, and engages emotions intersects with political power. Our goal with this volume 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.

Such an undertaking not only speaks to emotion research in IR but makes an important contribution to several other debates. First, there is an ongoing theoretical debate about power and language in IR. Constructivist and poststructuralist accounts both emphasize a logical connection between power and language (Milliken 1999; Hansen 2006; Epstein 2008; Shepherd 2008). Yet, most seem to either take for granted or neglect to give equal attention to its emotional underpinnings (Solomon 2014; Koschut 2018). It is often overlooked that the discursive exercise of power, for example via status differentiation, is rooted in collectively shared emotions that undergird and reproduce power discourses and identities at the international level. It is argued here that the inclusion of emotions as an additional category of analysis for intersubjectivity allows further questions and that the scope of meanings that emerge from the discussion of emotions is too often neglected in discourse analysis. To this end, we present a framework to further understanding of the dynamics and creative “workings” of emotions in the discursive construction of intersubjectivity and power relations.

Second, linking emotion to power draws on and extends another recent debate that deals with hierarchies and status differentiation in IR (Lake 2009; Paul et al. 2014; Pouliot 2016). Here, some scholars convincingly suggest including emotions in their research (Zarakol 2017). Yet, both research strands presently do not speak to each other: Those who appreciate the role of emotion in language do not specifically address status, and those who address the emotionality of status do not specifically examine its manifestation in language. This volume links these two flanks in a novel way. It investigates the socio-emotional underpinnings of power in the construction of hierarchies and status in world politics through language.

Conceptually, we distinguish between emotions (relatively stable representational moral value judgements) and affects (rather short-lived phenomenological excitation states). Emotions differ from affects (and their conceptual relatives such as feelings, moods, sensations, arousals, etc.) based on the notion that the former is not only an elusive physical sensation but a cognitive representation of a concrete object (e.g. the snarling dog as dangerous) (Goldie 2000, 51). Affects and feelings constitute indeterminate and amorphous phenomena that, in our view, cannot be meaningfully captured within discourse (which is not to say that they do not hold significance or implications for discourses) but must be given meaning through socially guided interpretations (Solomon 2012; Crawford 2000). We thus argue that affects as immediately experienced are socially ineffective and largely apolitical until they result in social or collective discursive manifestations. Codifying, managing, and mobilizing emotions as discursive articulations of feelings and affects transforms the latter into culturally accepted intersubjective patterns and social conventions, situates them in time and space, and thus adds a political dimension.

Power is understood here as discursive power. We argue that the notion of discursive power highlights the social and contextual dimension of power, exercised through discourse, in the construction of emotional intersubjectivity. As Bleiker and Hutchison (2014, 501) note, “emotions become intersubjective when they relate to something social that people care about, whether it is power, status, or justice”. The contributions in this volume focus on the most diverse dimensions of discursive power: the power of established meaning structures and ideational constraints in world politics; the power to transform these structures and constraints; and the power of actors to reproduce or challenge the status quo (Milliken 1999).

Discourses are defined in a broad sense as “framings of meaning and lenses of interpretation” (Hansen 2006, 7). Importantly, we do not argue that emotions should replace the concept of discourse but rather complement and enrich the latter by adding an additional, albeit crucial perspective. What makes our approach to discourse distinctive is that our basic units of analysis are not words and symbols but emotional expressions. As pointed out above, discourse scholarship in IR hardly offers systematic approaches for analysing the power potential of emotion. It is essential to develop specific criteria to study the power of emotion discourse. In this chapter, I propose three criteria that emotion research must answer to and which together form the research framework of this volume. These criteria revolve around theory (what is an emotion?), expression (how are emotions expressed?), and effects (what do emotions do?).

• First, we need a theory of emotions by answering the basic question: What is an emotion? Researchers who wish to study emotions come with already pre-defined theoretical expectations about the nature of emotions. When studying emotions in discourse, it is thus indispensable to likewise address the discourse on emotions, which relates to the way emotions are talked about scientifically or in everyday speech (Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990). It defines the way we conceive of emotions as being, for example, rational/irrational, biological/cultural, personal/social, universal/particular or spontaneous/strategic. In other words, to make claims about the emotional underpinnings and implications of discourses, researchers need to first clarify their underlying theoretical and conceptual assumptions. The first part of this introductory chapter outlines the social constructivist perspective on emotions, which forms the theoretical framework of this book. This theory holds that emotions – how they are experienced, expressed, and interpreted – are shaped by the societies and cultures in which they are embedded. This allows us to incorporate many different theoretical perspectives in IR (e.g. critical constructivism, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, or critical theory).

• Second, we need a methodological framework and research tools to trace the expressions of emotions in and through discourse. In this context, we argue that emotions can be studied in two interrelated ways. On the one side, interpretative approaches pay close attention to particular words and linguistic concepts such as metaphors or euphemisms, and interpret their scope of emotional meaning and usage in discourse (Chilton 1996; Straehle et al. 1999). On the other side, contextualizing approaches attempt to uncover larger patterns or structures across discourses that mask systems of emotional meanings (Derrida 1978; Connolly 1983). The second part of this chapter proposes a set of emotionally attuned discursive strategies and tools to trace the emotion potential of texts by combining interpretative and contextualizing approaches.

• Finally, scholars need to address the question of what the emotional expressions within and across discourse essentially help us to explain or understand in terms of the power potential of emotions in world politics. We refer to this as the effects of emotion discourse. This does not necessarily imply a causal relationship in any strict sense but rather the political implications of analysing emotions in discourse, what doing so can reveal or what significance it can carry. We present an organic account of two conceptions of emotional intersubjectivity: once emotional expressions become patterned and socially recognized, they become subject to micro-level feeling rules governing acceptable expressions. When these micro-level rules become embedded in larger institutions and social structures, they comprise elements within a macro-level feeling structure.³

Each of these three criteria will be explored in more detail in the following sections, thus preparing the ground for the subsequent contributions in this volume. The chapter concludes by presenting the methodology and organization of the volume.

What an emotion is: the social nature of emotion

There is a wide range of perspectives and working assumptions that encompass the term emotion, which makes it imperative to identify where one stands on such basic matters such as defining emotions, how to study emotions, and how precisely emotions are circumscribed. At issue in these debates is the basic claim to either a naturalist conception of emotion or a social one. In the former case, evolutionary and phenomenological theories of emotion in the tradition of Charles Darwin and William James focus on emotion as embodied experience and argue in favour of innate universals as opposed to cultural relativism. For these emotion scholars, emotions are “natural kinds”, meaning that they exist in nature and are largely indifferent to social labelling.

This volume, by contrast, takes a social constructivist viewpoint on emotions. A constructivist perspective views emotion as socially constructed in the sense that “what people feel is conditioned by socialization into culture and by participation in social structures” (Turner and Stets 2005, 2). This view builds on cognitivist emotion theories, pioneered by Magda Arnold, Richard Lazarus and Martha Nussbaum. In contrast to the naturalist conception, cognitivists suggest that emotions are moral value judgements that are based on individual appraisals and beliefs. However, cognitivist theories share with biological emotion theories a subjective ontology of emotion. Constructivism, by contrast, shifts the analytical focus on emotions from their internal phenomenological perception and cognitive appraisal by individuals to their intersubjective expression within social spheres. Originating in the works of Emile Durkheim and others, a social constructivist approach to emotion combines a set of generalized assumptions about the social nature and cultural function of emotions that have emerged across various disciplines, ranging from philosophy (Coulter 1979), psychology (Averill 1980; Harré 1986), sociology (Gordon 1988; Hochschild 1979), linguistics (Wilce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Introduction and analytical framework
• PART II: Empirical cases of emotion discourse in world politics
• PART III: Conclusion
• Index