Almost ten years ago, Bleiker and Hutchison observed in a widely cited article that it seemed “surprising” there were “hardly any sustained discussions about how to go about studying emotions in world politics” (2008, p. 124). Few researchers in international relations (IR) interested in emotions would have then disagreed with this diagnosis.1 The nascent research on emotions focused on explaining why emotions matter conceptually, thereby having methodological debates take a backseat at the same time as these gained importance in the larger IR discipline. Even though emotion research in IR has started to address methodological issues more systematically, it is lacking consolidated insights discussing methodology in relation to the ontological, epistemological and theoretical debates on emotions in international politics.
This collective volume is the first of its kind to specifically address methodological considerations in doing empirical research on emotions in IR. It discusses the link between theoretical argument(s) and methodology by presenting research-practical insights from contemporary cases in international politics. In so doing, this volume encourages researchers interested in emotions in international politics to discuss methodological choices more explicitly as well as the opportunities and limits associated with these choices. The book is committed to a ‘hands-on approach’. It emphasizes research-practical problems and solutions, thus providing an accessible and useful guide to students and scholars alike.
We define methodology as the way research is done, that is, how the researcher aims to gain knowledge with regard to his/her research question. It is a roadmap including—among others—selection principles, data collection procedures, decisions about the use of a specific research method or a combination of methods and, decisively, the justification for these specific choices. Methods are defined, for the purpose of this book, as tools, techniques and processes of data collection (interviews, surveys , archival work, etc.) and analysis (narrative method, content analysis, process -tracing, etc.). Their use is shaped by and codified in the researcher’s methodology.
Against this backdrop, the volume pursues three specific objectives:
- It provides valuable insights into how emotions and affects can be operationalized. It thereby problematizes methodological path dependency , that is, the extent to which ontological positions and theoretical arguments imply specific ways of collecting and analyzing empirical material in concrete research projects. Since methodological choices vary from research project to research project, the authors of this volume write about methodology and methods within the context of their own research project. By reconstructing and making accessible how researchers translated complex theoretical frameworks into concrete empirical analysis, readers can draw practical inspiration for producing both empirically creative and methodologically founded research;
- The volume takes stock of several of the main methods currently used to produce empirical evidence on the role of emotions in IR. The volume does not claim to be exhaustive but focuses rather on the call for integrating tools from ‘classical’ social science with approaches from the humanities in the study of emotions in IR (Bleiker & Hutchison, 2008, p. 131);
- Each individual chapter deals with key challenges identified in the introduction and discusses limits and advantages with regard to the specific method(s) presented. In this regard, the contributing authors remind us that no method is perfect and offer insights and suggestions on how researchers might overcome some of the limits that they identified in their own methodological approach.
In the following, we briefly discuss the current state of the art of research on emotions in international politics. While not aiming at providing an exhaustive review of this vibrant field, we pinpoint two major theoretical debates, discuss general methodological trends in the current scholarship, and present six key methodological issues that we deem particularly important for studying emotions empirically. In the second part, we explain the rationale of the volume and the didactic structure followed by each chapter. As the volume is designed both for research and teaching purposes, we highlight the two key aspects presiding over the volume: plurality and practicality. Finally, we present the volume’s structure, followed by an overview table of the contributions, and introduce each individual chapter.
Overview of the State of the Art in Emotion Research
Until the late 1990s, among the central analytical categories of IR, emotions had occupied the role of a strange uncle who is invited to all family reunions but often sits isolated at the coffee table. ‘Fear’ in realist accounts of the international system (Freyberg-Inan, 2006), mutual sympathy in neoliberal conceptualizations of social capital (D’Aoust, 2014), ‘pride ’ in constructivist accounts of recognition (Lindemann, 2014) and the influence of emotions on individual perceptions of rationality in actor-centric foreign policy analysis (Mercer, 2005) are just some examples of how implicit assumptions about emotions underline some of the most influential IR paradigms. This neglect is even more surprising given that both during and after the Cold War , emotions have played a central role in representations of conflict , with examples ranging from the transformation of ‘enmity ’ into ‘friendship ’ during the Franco-German reconciliation in the 1960s to the fear of a ‘nuclear ho...