Methodology and Emotion in International Relations

Parsing the Passions

Eric Van Rythoven, Mira Sucharov, Eric Van Rythoven, Mira Sucharov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429813566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume offers a state-of-the-art study of the diverse methodological approaches and issues in the study of emotions in international relations research.

While interest in emotion and affect in IR has grown in recent years, there remains an absence of sustained engagement with questions of methodology and method. Although much of the field holds the 'emotions turn' as laudable, it is commonly seen as facing serious, even prohibitive, methodological challenges.

Using a common framework for making discussions of methodology and emotion mutually intelligible, this work seeks to address this lacuna and will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, research methods and IR theory.

1 Introduction

Parsing the passions

Eric Van Rythoven and Mira Sucharov

How can we study the passions of world politics? Long skeptical of studying affective phenomena, the field of International Relations (IR) is witnessing renewed interest in emotion. The significance of emotions in world politics is pervasive: anger and revulsion seethes at terrorist violence, frustration and anxiety grips observers of the global economy, and the circulation of compassion works to sustain humanitarian projects. Familiar explanations rooted in the logics of consequence and appropriateness stress and strain in explaining how political interactions come to be saturated with emotional intensity. Today, ignoring the embodied dimensions of world politics is increasingly seen as an impoverishment of the discipline—an untenable estrangement of scholarship from how international life is experienced and practiced by real human beings.

Yet as scholars probe the dense network of connections between emotion and world politics, there remains a conspicuous absence of engagement with methodology.¹ Emotions are often presented as nebulous and unconscious phenomena that present distinct methodological challenges. Difficult to define, observe, measure, and operationalize into scientific variables, emotions inquiry is a challenging endeavor. In the stronger version of this claim emotions research is effectively impossible because, in the words of Robert Jervis, “the challenge is simply too great” (Balzaqc and Jervis, 2004:565). For a discipline bound to an often narrow empiricist epistemology, emotions appear “too ephemeral to be evaluated analytically” (Hutchison, 2016:31). The result is a “ring-fence” placed around discussions of emotion as they become devalued as mere metaphysical speculation (Gammon, 2008:262; Wight, 2007:380). This has left IR’s nascent emotions turn in a fundamental state of tension: it may be one of the next “great frontiers” of research (Reus-Smit, 2014:568), but it is a frontier beyond which we appear sadly unprepared to tread.

This book offers a more optimistic rejoinder. Far from being hamstrung by methodological pitfalls, we view the study of emotion in world politics as a field vibrant with possibility and potential. For scholars already engaged in emotions research, we argue methodological reflection is valuable because it promotes greater transparency, attracts those interested in emulation, and opens new paths for dialogue and critique. For those situated in established subfields such as security studies, foreign policy analysis, or political communication, we argue that by placing emotions at the center of inquiry we can prompt a reflection on the discipline’s methodological canon and open scholars to experiment with novel techniques and strategies. Together, the benefits of greater methodological reflection not only to ensure emotions scholarship has a more enduring impact within the field of IR, it also promises greater analytical purchase and understanding of the problems scholars of world politics care about: conflict, cooperation, power, gender, order, and beyond.

To achieve this goal the chapters in this volume are organized around a single question: what are the methodological approaches and issues in studying emotions in world politics? In pursuing this question we move beyond what Simon Koschut calls the “emotions matters” approach of first generation research (2017:481). Too often emotions scholarship in IR defensively retreads familiar themes of past research: that emotions are significant to world politics, that the dichotomy between emotion and reason is artificial, that emotions are collective, social phenomena and not purely private and internal. Dwelling on these themes sucks up oxygen for the conversation we are really pursuing: a state-of-the-art survey of the diverse methodological issues and approaches in studying emotions and world politics.

This introduction lays the foundations for this project by undertaking two important tasks. First, we want to unpack what we mean by the “emotion turn” and “methodology.” Emotion is a notoriously difficult category to define (McDermott, 2004:692) and, as our review of the literature indicates, a similar definitional debate characterizes IR. While we don’t pretend to offer a settled definition here, we rely on the increasingly conventional distinction between affect, emotion, and feeling, captured in Table 1.1.

Whether the subject is security, civil society, or global governance, the study of world politics is a messy affair. This leads us to view the distinction between emotion and affect as crucial because empirical studies of world politics rarely encounter the neatly defined emotions that appear in our theoretical narratives (Sylvester, 2012:109–110). This means the concept of affect plays a key role in emotion research because it allows us to capture and probe those situations where embodied experiences are ambivalent.² But at the same time years of research in IR has revealed that there are a multitude of empirical processes—including institutionalization (Crawford, 2014), representation (Hutchison, 2016), and diplomatic interactions (Hall, 2016)—which discipline and narrow affect into more recognizable categories of emotional experience. In this volume these definitions serve as a baseline from which the contributors position themselves.

Table 1.1 Common emotion terms in International Relations³

Affect	A range of diffuse and often unconscious embodied experience and processes, including moods, sentiments, and attachments
Emotion	Structured and socially recognized embodied experiences such as joy, fear, or anger
Feeling	A conscious experience of an emotion

The meaning of methodology in IR is similarly uncertain. One effect of the discipline’s ongoing pluralization is that the term’s increasingly broad scope has made it more ambiguous. In this volume we distinguish between the practical techniques and recipes comprising methods and define methodology as a reflection on the core wagers—the choices made prior to the conduct of empirical research that subsequently structure research design. We see different methodological approaches as comprised of—at minimum—explicit assumptions over ontology, epistemology, and research puzzle.

Alongside these distinctions we see one further term in need of defining: methodological dialogue. How can we talk about methodology in a way that fosters meaningful debate and critique? In this project we argue there are least two types of methodological dialogue that can and should characterize emotions research. The first type occurs when researchers elaborate on how the central wagers underpinning their methodology come together to create a distinctive realm of research—what we define as an “emotion world.” The second type occurs when researchers highlight the affinities and contentions characterizing their approach in relation to other works. In this volume we see both kinds of dialogue at play. These definitions are summarized in Table 1.2.

The final task of this introduction is to lay out the structure organizing the book and to summarize the chapters. The volume is thematically structured around four themes: concepts, macro approaches, micro approaches, and ethics. Concepts are crucial in any empirical study of emotion in world politics because they establish the “ontology of the ‘international’” (Guzzini, 2013:537). Long before we ever gather our first scraps of data, the concepts we employ have already shaped the world we study in powerful ways. While the distinction between macro and micro approaches has been made previously (Hutchison and Bleiker, 2014), our use of this distinction is rooted in questions of scale.⁴ Macro approaches center on large-scale social collectivities and their interactions; micro approaches cluster around more intimate social contexts. Yet as the subsequent chapters demonstrate, there can still be a considerable level of variation within these approaches. In the final section we turn to the question of ethics. From dilemmas over how to write about the pain and humiliation of distant communities, to our very own emotional relationship with the subject matter, the chapters in this section are a forceful reminder that ethical quandaries abound in the study of emotions and world politics.

Table 1.2 Making sense of “methodology talk”

Methods	Practical techniques and recipes of research
Methodology	A reflection on the core wagers—the choices made prior to the conduct of empirical research and subsequently structure research design
Methodological Approach	At minimum, the set of core wagers surrounding ontology, epistemology, and research puzzle in a given inquiry
Methodological Dialogue	Type 1: how do different methodological wagers come together to form a distinct sphere of research? Type 2: what are the affinities and contentions characterizing this approach in relation to other works?

The “emotion turn” and world politics

In less than two decades emotions in IR have transformed from a ghettoized subject into a burgeoning subfield. While the history of this shift is beyond our scope, we want to take a moment to clarify that the “emotion turn” (Hutchison and Bleiker, 2014:492) emerges from a diverse collection of research. One could equally claim a “turn” toward affect or embodiment. To help emphasize this diversity we often use the phrase “passionate politics” to denote research which includes not only emotions, but also affect, embodiment, moods, feeling rules, trauma, emotional communities, as well as a host of other phenomena. In this section we aim to convey that, while the emotion turn is marked by a shared dissatisfaction over the absence of embodied experience in IR, what this “turn” precisely entails is far from clear.

One key meeting point for the emotion turn is in a series of sweeping broadsides against IR theory. These challenges point to the under-theorization of emotions such as fear and trust despite their importance to theories of realism and liberalism (Crawford, 2000), they highlight the tension between a field that fetishizes rationality yet ignores how emotions are integral to rational judgment (Mercer, 2005, 2006), and they reveal the limits of the Cartesian foundations of constructivism where social structures must be reduced to either the material or ideational (Ross, 2006). In other instances, these critiques have accrued around more specific disciplinary concepts. This scholarship invites us to interrogate the emotional and affective underpinnings of security communities (Hutchison, 2013; Koschut, 2014), soft power (Solomon, 2014), social identity (Mercer, 2014; Sasley, 2011), institutionalization (Crawford, 2014), and exceptionalism (Norman, 2017).

Critique is not the only currency of the subfield. Much of this work is focused on exploring new empirical territory, including discrete categories of emotional experience in world politics. These include works on humiliation (Callahan, 2004; Fattah and Fierke, 2009; Saurette, 2006), anger (Eznack, 2013; Hall, 2011), trust (Holmes, 2013; Michel, 2012; Wong, 2015), empathy (Crawford, 2014; Head, 2015; Hutchison and Bleiker, 2008), fear (Booth and Wheeler, 2008; Crawford, 2014; Van Rythoven, 2015), joy (Penttinen, 2013), anxiety (Gentry, 2015), shame (Steele, 2007b), nostalgia (Sucharov, 2013), guilt and sympathy (Hall, 2016), love (D’Aoust, 2014a; Solomon, 2012a), revenge (Löwenheim and Heimann, 2008), as well as friendship (Koschut and Oelsner, 2014). These studies cut across different levels and units of analysis—from the macro to the micro—and explore puzzles ranging from the orthodox (e.g., interstate diplomacy, war, alliances) to the heterodox (e.g., securitization, orientalism, the politics of memory). In doing so they offer a confounding variety of views on emotion from sources spanning from political theory, neuroscience, literary studies, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, postcolonial studies, and beyond.

It is impossible to discuss the emotion turn and not address the closely related—and occasionally competing—conceptions of “affect.” Inspired by the work of cultural theorists (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Massumi, 2002), the idea of affect has had a powerful and far-reaching influence on constructivist and poststructuralist IR. Like the term emotion, definitions of affect abound: it can mean “nonconscious and embodied emotional states” (Ross, 2006:197), it can be used “to signify an inner disposition or feeling, or a mental state, mood or emotion” (Gregory and Åhäll, 2015:4), and it can also refer to “the capacity of the body to effectuate change” (Kaufmann, 2016:103). One way of cutting through this confusion is by understanding how interest in affect revives William James’s nineteenth century critique of emotions psychology (Deigh, 2014; James, 1890; Ross, 2014:17–21). Not only was James critical of the way in which discussions of emotion ignored their unconscious and embodied dimensions, he contended that what we call “emotions” are at best labels we retroactively paste on much richer sensory experiences. These neo-Jamesian approaches are further complemented by psychoanalytical accounts of affect.⁵ In his Lacanian reading Solomon parses affect as an “amorphous potential that remains outside of discourse” yet can become “translated into recognisable emotional signifiers within discourse” (Solomon, 2012b:2; see also Gammon, 2008). While studies of affect are uniformly skeptical of a cognitively mediated, conscious, and intentionalist readings of emotion, there is little beyond this to suggest a unified approach.

As cultural theory’s affective turn was diffusing into IR...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: parsing the passions
• PART I: Concepts
• PART II: Macro approaches
• PART III: Micro approaches
• PART IV: Ethics
• PART V: Conclusion
• Index