Description
This panel explores emotional hierarchies within International Relations (IR) and addresses how they influence and affect different actors, states, institutions, as well as practices of governance in times of crisis and beyond. We seek to understand how political, social, legal, and strategic processes take advantage of or produce specific affect and/or emotions, as well as emotional subject positions which are embedded in history, culture, society, politics, and/or geography. In other words, how do emotions which are embedded in a social (and political) order lead to tensions between values, ideologies, traditions and/or relationships? Moreover, the papers in the panel investigate the dynamics between affect and/or emotions and power – whose emotions matter, how do structures of power trigger, repress, or support certain affects and/or emotions, and how are emotional hierarchies established, reinforced, mediated, or fought against.
In so doing, we ask the following questions:
1) How are affects and/or emotions shaped, experienced, performed, regulated, or spread in contexts of IR, and specifically in situations where power hierarchies become visible.
2) How do these hierarchies reflect in what way emotions are gendered, classed, or racialised in social and/or political contexts.
3) How are emotions mediated and/or contested and what are the strategies used in doing so.
4) How are certain ways of feeling dis- or encouraged and what are the consequences of that.
The papers included in this panel consider emotions within discourse, performances, as well as affective encounters of individuals or groups with governmental structures and law, identifying the consequences of these encounters on the right to certain feelings, on how emotions are expressed and embodied.
