Description
This paper aims to unpack the complex affective politics behind challenges to the liberal international order. IR scholars have made significant strides in understanding the role of emotions, memories, and other affective investments in world politics. While some of this work has moved beyond nations and states to consider affective investments on wider scales—regional organizations, global civil society, and transnational protest movements—IR theory has yet to come to terms with what it means to investigate the affective underpinnings of “international order.” We first trace the complex history of post-WWII institutions—and global resistance to them—to show that the affective investments involved in an order are inherently multi-dimensional, aggregative, and deeply contested. Revisiting this multiplicity then allows us to theorize the micropolitics behind anti-liberal pressures in contemporary global politics. Rather than approach contemporary challenges as an ideologically unified movement of the new right, we regard them as a constellation of intersecting and sometimes resonating affective investments—including performances of masculinity, the enjoyment of co-production in online spaces, and defiance in the face of pandemics and planetary crises. By uncovering these micropolitical underpinnings, our account complements existing work on both neoconservative ideas and authoritarian populist strategies.
