Rupert Brodersen - Emotional Motives in International Relations: Rage, Rancour and Revenge

First published 2018

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2018 Rupert Brodersen

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ISBN: 978-0-8153-8667-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-17530-2 (ebk)

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The study of emotions in International Relations (IR) has gained considerable traction. An over-dependence on rational actor models and narrowly defined interest-based politics has given way to new modes of analysis that attempt to explain state behaviour through a richer understanding of motivation and goals. Emotions, however, are not new to International Relations scholarship; they feature in classic works by Thucydides or Thomas Hobbes, whose influence on International Relations cannot be denied. These thinkers were pre-occupied with the emotion of fear, an emotion they believed to be the source of much failure and misery in international politics. This assessment was later reiterated by Robert Jervis, as he would lament the distorting impact of fear in his seminal study Perception and Misperception in International Relations . There was the belief that reason and sound judgement could banish fear and, by extension, its political manifestation of warfare and insecurity. And so, while the study of emotions, fear specifically, has always been part of IR scholarship, it was accompanied by an undeniable Enlightenment bias that emotions as a whole are distorting and stand in opposition to reason, progress and peace.

Earliest attempts to introduce a more balanced view of emotions into IR scholarship occurred by way of Neta Crawfords seminal essay The Passion of World Politics , where she argued convincingly that both traditional schools of IR scholarship, Neo-Realism and Neo-Liberalism , were heavily influenced by emotional considerations. Anderson stressed the importance of positive emotions in the origins of national identities. Rather than a source of distortions and failure, these emotions were the glue that held groups together and created the basis of statehood, on which traditional IR scholarship so heavily relies.

However, Crawfords essay was published a year before the Realists worst fears came to be realized. The attacks on the Twin Towers forced the study of emotions in IR out of a comfortable back seat into the front seat. A flood of new papers and books attempted to explain the terrorist attacks, along with the USs response, drawing on different fields in the humanities, like sociology, group psychology and affect theory to explain motivation. New sub fields of study opened up in IR scholarship, focusing on concepts like humiliation, slights, trauma or ontological security to explain the motivation behind violence and terrorism.

However, the initial intellectual enterprise commissioned by Crawford, to re-situate the role of emotions in IR scholarship, was not abandoned. Despite the flood of publications stressing the causal mechanisms between anger and violence, important theoretical questions remained unanswered. A single terrorist can certainly be emotionally motivated, but can a state act emotionally? How does a state feel? Within the growing body of IR literature on emotions, these fundamental questions are referred to as the Macro Approach to emotions in IR, attempting to construct a theoretical foundation for the study of emotions in international politics. Scholars like Mercer and Sasley argue that social identity rests on individuals identifying as a member of a group, in turn allowing the group to exist and feel through its members. Neta Crawford argues that emotions are institutionalized through state practices, such as the espousal of Neo-Realist or Neo-Liberal foreign policy, or on the micro level through social practices that both respond to and entrench emotions, like the heightened security at airports or transit hubs that attempt to respond to a sense of insecurity but end up only reinforcing the emotion. Scholars like Ned Lebow or Todd Hall place the site of emotionality with political leaders and their immediate group of advisors, arguing that a small group of people gathered in the Oval Office can easily be proved to act emotionally in their decision making, while Hall argues that foreign policy elites use emotional displays as deliberate, strategic signals.

Against this more theoretical Macro Approach stands the Micro Approach to emotions in IR. These more empirically focused investigations posit a causal mechanism to explain state behaviour. The experience of humiliation, trauma, slights or ontological displacement is sought to explain emotional reactions, which, in turn, engender a certain, mostly fixed, pattern of behaviour. Within this Micro Approach field, it is worth making a further distinction between scholars concerned purely with action tendencies, that is how an emotion leads to an action, and those also paying close attention to changes in cognition, that is how an emotion affects the brain. The first group establishes clear causal mechanisms; for instance, an experienced act of humiliation must lead to an act of revenge or counter-humiliation or simply lashing out. The neurological turn in IR has successfully decoupled emotions from their objectively perceived actions; in other words, we no longer need to search for a performative manifestation to prove the existence of an emotion, a somewhat crude enterprise, but instead can search for more refined expressions of emotional manifestations by way of changes in group cognition.