Over the past two decades, International Relations has undergone a significant epistemological turn that has expanded the discipline’s traditional boundaries by incorporating analytical categories previously considered marginal for explaining world politics. Among these, emotions have become central to understanding the behavior of international actors, the construction of global order, and the dynamics of power that shape contemporary politics.
The so-called “emotional turn” has challenged the primacy of rationalist approaches, which for decades regarded emotions as an irrational element foreign to international decision-making. In contrast to this tradition, a prolific body of academic literature has been consolidated (Crawford, 2000; Mercer, 2005, 2010; Moïsi, 2009; Sasley, 2011; Hutchison and Bleiker, 2014; Solomon, 2015, 2018; Clément, Lindemann & Sangar, 2018; Duncombe, 2019; Koschut, 2020; Iranzo Amatriaín, 1999; and Meštrović, 1997), demonstrating that emotions constitute an essential component in the construction of identities, narratives, hierarchies, securitization processes, and forms of legitimacy that permeate the international system.
This symposium seeks to open a space for discussion on the affective, disaffective, and passionate dimension of world politics. From a plural perspective, it invites research that contributes to answering a central question: what role do emotions play in explaining and understanding contemporary international phenomena?
We welcome papers examining the conceptual foundations of the emotional turn, the relationship between emotion and rationality, and the processes through which individual emotions acquire a collective and political character. Likewise, we invite research on the construction of identities, recognition, status, prestige, humiliation, resentment, and other emotions that influence conflict, revisionism, and the transformation of the international order.
Also welcome are contributions analyzing the role of emotions in democracy and electoral behavior; fear, uncertainty, and the resilience of authoritarian regimes; international security, war, peace, the construction of the enemy, transitional justice, reconciliation, and peacebuilding processes. Likewise, the symposium seeks to promote research on nationalism, populism, political polarization, foreign policy, diplomacy, negotiation, geopolitics, terrorism, migration, climate change, artificial intelligence, digital technologies, and other phenomena in which emotions are fundamental to understanding international dynamics.
The symposium also welcomes work from feminist, postcolonial, and Global South perspectives, as well as methodological research using discourse analysis, ethnography, process tracing, experiments, computational methods, network analysis, or mixed approaches for the empirical study of emotions. This symposium proposes to understand emotions as a constitutive dimension of the decisions, practices, and power relations that shape contemporary world politics.
