The Politics of Emotions in International Relations: Who Gets to Feel What, Whose Emotions Matter, and the “History Problem” in Sino-Japanese Relations

Abstract

A large literature within the field of international relations has now explored both how emotions can shape political perceptions and behavior and how international actors may seek to manipulate, harness, or deploy emotions and emotional displays for political ends. Less attention, however, has been paid to how political struggles can also center upon issues of who can or should feel what emotion and whose feelings matter. Precisely, we theorize a distributive politics of emotion that can manifest in three general forms, all of which have their own properties and logics of contestation. The first centers on emotional obligations, understood as an actor's duties to feel and express specific emotions. The second concerns emotional entitlements, or the rights an actor enjoys to either feel or not feel certain emotions. And the third involves hierarchies of emotional deference, that is, the varying degrees of priority accorded to different actors’ feelings. We illustrate how the politics of emotions can unfold on the international stage by looking at developments in the so-called history problem within Sino-Japanese relations.

Emotions in Politics: A Review of Contemporary Perspectives and Trends

“…This cultural discontent, as an overarching sentiment, bolsters the ascent and support of populist ideologies and movements. Gustafsson and Hall (2021) shift attention from the affective construction of emotions to the "distributive politics of emotion" (973), which assumes three forms: emotional obligations or duties to feel a type of emotion, emotional entitlements as a right to feel specific emotions, and "hierarchies of emotional deference" concerning whose felt emotions deserve consideration (973). The authors present a unique perspective on how emotions permeate politics using the case of the Sino-Japanese history dispute.…”

Erasing trauma – Erasing indigeneity: How the settler colonial state erased Warlpiri trauma in the wake of the police shooting Kumunjayi Walker

“…The specificity of the sympathetic gesture, that is, grief counsellors as opposed to other kinds of counsellors, serves to erase the traumatic circumstances of the shooting by directing the discourse about how Warlpiri people were expected to and allowed to feel about the killing and how it could, or rather could not, be politically contextualised. Drawing on Gustafsson's articulation of emotional politics , that is, ‘political discourse and behaviour that work by appealing to, cultivating, manipulating, or emulating emotions and emotional expression for political ends’ (Gustafsson, 2021, p. 2), the use of grief as an adjective in this context subtly dictates the narrative that the Warlpiri experience was one of bereavement, that they were simply grieving a loss, reinforced when Gunner stated that ‘someone has died in the Northern Territory’ (7News, 2019). People die every day in the Northern Territory, but Warlpiri people do not get shot in their homes by police every day; this was obviously more than someone dying .…”

The multimodal construction of political personae through the strategic management of semiotic resources of emotion expression

“…A variety of approaches covers the emotion-politics nexus, whether we are talking about the role of emotions in political campaigns and political marketing (Schweiger and Adami 1999;Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000;Engelken-Jorge, Güell, and del Río 2011;Scammell 2014;Grüning and Schubert 2022), the political sociology of emotion (Demertzis 2020), the convergence between political cognition and emotion (Westen 2007;Lakoff 2008;Castells 2009;Lakoff [1996] 2016), the emotional and moral basis of politics (Haidt 2012), how emotions sustain certain ideologies (Breeze 2019;D'Arcens and Waldek 2021;Verbalyte, Bonansinga, and Exadaktylos 2022), or the politics of emotions in international relations (Gustafsson and Hall 2021). Therefore, political cognition is "emotionally shaped" (Castells 2009, 146).…”