Excavating the Emotional Nongovernmental Organization

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the emotional dynamics of nongovernmental organizations’ (NGOs’) behavior and influence in international politics. Emotions appear frequently in foundational work on the role of civil society non-state actors, especially NGOs, in international relations (IR), yet they operate as implicit and undertheorized background assumptions. By harnessing key concepts and frameworks from within scholarship on emotions in IR, and by using shame as a primary illustration, the chapter identifies pathways for how to center emotions in understanding NGOs’ political influence in IR. It begins by interrogating prevailing conceptions of emotions as “tools” used strategically by NGOs in their advocacy. It then goes beyond that conventional view to make the case for taking NGOs’ fuller emotional lives seriously as well as to examine how hierarchy and power might determine the exercise of an NGO’s emotional politics vis-à-vis a number of actors.