Description
The theorization of emotions and their use as an analytical category has become much more commonplace in the international relations literature. Through the efforts of scholars working on these topics, we now understand that emotions have been a neglected category within the field and that their inclusion helps us to understand critical moments in the making of foreign policy. The purpose of this paper, however, is to probe the boundaries of what can be considered an emotion through the illustration of two concepts generally conceptualized as emotions that play central roles in War Studies: trust and revenge. We argue that it is difficult to proclaim that these two phenomena are emotions, but they are rather conflated as emotions by their emotional precursors or consequences. As such, we show that it might be misleading to reduce revenge and trust to the properties commonly associated with emotions in the literature. In making this argument, we therefore seek to provide a theoretical clarification over what might be considered an emotion in order to focus and refine this debate, and show why this matters to the study of war and conflict.
