Description
This paper discusses how IR’s emotional turn could benefit from Global IR debates, especially by considering the multiple ways in which tempo-spatial differences, epistemological and ontological divergences across the globe can be taken into account when engaging with emotions in world politics. The study elaborates how Global IRʼs novel insights could provide significant tools for a broader understanding of emotions, calling for these to be more comprehensively studied and understood by considering the important role of past and extant forms of inter- as well as intra-societal difference. It argues that most of emotions-focused work in IR originates from a Eurocentric framework that is not necessarily just a problem deriving from the disciplineʼs own settings. In this regard, it explains how IR explores emotions in ways that tend to overlook emotionsʼ historicity as well as their spatial and global divergences. The paper develops its main claims by turning to the recent historiographical debates, and problematizes the frequent tendency to perceive, and impose, popular neuroscientific and other cognitive scientific paradigms as the ultimate means for studying emotions in IR. It also considers IR sociological dynamics that shape the prevailing approaches to emotions by analyzing some 150 articles published on emotions in IR journals in the 2000-2019 period.
