Description
Trauma sits at the heart of IR theory (Edkins 2003). Yet, as has recently been argued, our understanding of trauma in IR has often been limited to a particular (Freudian) psychoanalytic understanding of trauma and its consequences (Furtado & Auchter 2025). This has both effected how trauma is seen as emerging, its consequences for world politics as well as the appropriate solutions for responding to trauma. Against this constrained vision, other disciplines and practices, such as postcolonial theory and embodied and arts-based therapeutic practices, have developed new, and more holistic, accounts of trauma, its affects and modalities of transformation and recovery. Turning to these theories the paper first builds a bio-psycho-social model of trauma which it argues better encapsulates the full affects of trauma on. The paper then examines the mobilisation of new creative responses to trauma in Ukraine that have centred aesthetic modes of practice as the principal tool for understanding, and responding to, trauma, to empirically test these ideas. Doing so also opens space to think through how trauma can be responded to in more emancipatory ways.
