Description
How do emotions help shape the formation of a nation-state? Nationalist movements tend to draw on a broad conceptual corpus of belonging, articulating who belongs and who does not belong in the nationalist movement. Belonging is an attachment—a feeling of being at home. Since articulations of belonging draw on attachments and feelings, this article suggests that belonging is deeply emotional. To examine how belonging is articulated in nationalist movements, I examine what emotions do the articulation of belonging. Building on and advancing the existing scholarly interventions in social sciences, I analyse how emotions are understood as cognitive, embodied, or social processes. I draw on Bourdieusean logic of practice to conceptualise how emotions could be understood as practices in international politics. That is, emotions exist in the ‘in-between’ as cognitive, embodied, and social practices. Building on this logic, I argue that belonging is an emotional practice that seeks to percolate, perform, and practice nationalism in the making of a nation-state.
