Description
Practice scholars have so far largely overlooked the role that emotion and affect play in both the emergence and change of order in international politics. To address this oversight and link research on practices with the turn to emotion, this paper advances two related claims. First, taking orders to be multiple and overlapping instead of singular and static, it is argued that every social order is underpinned by a particular ‘feeling regime’ that constitutes a certain type of ‘background knowledge’ and disposes agents to act in specific ways. Changes in ‘feeling regimes,’ it is proposed, therefore affect social orders and their stability. Second, it is asserted that change to an order is not brought about solely by actions resulting from conscious deliberation, but primarily arises from the affective transactions between agents and their social as well as material environment that transpire during praxis—that is, during the spatio–temporally situated involvement in practices. These affective transactions thereby trigger a transformation of agents’ ‘feeling regimes’ and hence of the dispositions and behavioural patterns that (re)produce a particular social order. It is therefore claimed that change to an order always entails a change in its ‘feeling regime’ which takes place in praxis.
