Symposium on Emotions and Foreign Policy in Global International Relations: the West and the Rest

Instituto Cultura y Sociedad (ICS)
Public Discourse Research Group
Universidad de Navarra, Spain
7-8 June 2022

Prof. Dr. Simon Koschut
Chair of International Security Policy (DFG Heisenberg-Professorship), Zeppelin University.
 

It has been almost two decades since the emotional turn in the studies of international relations (IR). There is a growing literature in the discipline exploring affect and emotions at different levels of analysis: (a) at the level of individual actors, especially analyzing political leaders’ emotional responses; b) at the level of groups such as social movements, political parties or social identities  by drawing on the sociological theories, especially benefiting from intergroup emotions theory; c) at the level of states, mainly using discourse analysis, social psychological theories and constructivist theories. There are also impressive hybrid works by well-known scholars who attempt to cut across all these levels to explain how the emotions play into the developments in world politics and interstate relations.

This two-day hybrid symposium at the Universidad de Navarra aims to bring together scholars who work on the role of emotions in foreign policy in ‘non-Western’ geopolitical contexts by taking different experiences, histories, and agencies into account and/or focusing on the relations of the Global South countries with the ‘West’ (i.e. Western European Countries and the USA). In regional terms, it is open to studies of political emotions in Balkan, Central and Eastern European, Asian, Latin American, African and Middle Eastern Countries in the context of international politics. Papers that conduct emotion analysis of Western foreign policy with the above-mentioned countries at the level of international organizations or states are more than welcome.

We invite contributions from a plurality of disciplines and methodologies. Papers that explore the relation between emotions and cultural politics and resituate the issue in the current debate on Global IR are especially welcome. In this context, we are also interested in papers that address the emotions at the intersection of foreign policy analysis and post-colonial studies, feminist studies and/or cultural studies.

Regarding the methodological questions, although the conference is open to multi-disciplinary papers and to scholars from all relevant disciplines, at least one session will be devoted to presentations of case-studies in relation to political emotions, using foreign policy discourse analysis with a constructivist/post-structuralist approach. This will be complemented with a discussion panel on discourse analysis as a method for researching emotions in IR.