Emotions play an increasingly important role in international relations research. This essay briefly surveys the development of the respective debates and then offers a path forward. The key challenge, we argue, is to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political. We further suggest that this is done best by exploring insights from two seemingly incompatible scholarly tendencies: macro theoretical approaches that develop generalizable propositions about political emotions and, in contrast, micro approaches that investigate how specific emotions (...) function in specific circumstances. Applying this framework we then identify four realms that are central to appreciating the political significance of emotions: the importance of definitions; the role of the body; questions of representation; and the intertwining of emotions and power. Taken together, these building blocks reveal how emotions permeate world politics in complex and interwoven ways and also, once taken seriously, challenge many entrenched assumptions of international relations scholarship. (shrink)

Over the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has become omnipresent in migration control and mobility surveillance, with AI systems now deployed across all aspects of migration management. Critics of such trends typically examine questions of ethics and rights from the vantage point of regulatory mechanisms and the limited venues for the redress of grievances. But if legal frameworks are as of yet forthcoming and do not necessarily apply to migrants, are there alternative mechanisms to critique algorithmic decision making? To explore (...) this and related questions, this paper engages one such alternative by taking a ‘visual turn.’ In asking ‘what can AI see’ the paper interrogates the role of images in constructing AI's capacity to both understand migration and make appropriate decisions about migrants. In addition, a visual turn allows for exploration of an emergent age of post-visualization: a phenomenon whereby the values and meanings of what we see will be increasingly imparted to us by AI systems. The paper examines what AI sees with the help of an experiment, prompting an AI generative platform to draw distinctions between migrants, refugees, and people. (shrink)

Many voices and stories have been systematically silenced in interpersonal conversations, political deliberations and historical narratives. Recalcitrant and interrelated patterns of epistemic, political, cultural and economic marginalisation exclude individuals as knowers, citizens, agents. Two questions lie at the centre of this article, which focuses on the epistemically – but also politically, culturally and economically – dominant: How can we sabotage the dominant’s investment in their own ignorance of unjust silencing? How can they be seduced to become acute perceivers of others’ (...) experiences of oppression and reckon with their own participation in it? Situated at the intersection between political theory, aesthetics and epistemology, this article contributes a so-far-unexplored suggestion: that certain literary works create epistemic friction between shared, entrenched prejudices on the one hand, and representations of epistemic exclusion or authority, on the other. Their power to illuminate ideational, moral and experiential limitations makes them valuable tools in problematising, rendering visible and dislocating epistemic injustice, as well as other marginalisations it intersects with. To advance this argument, the article relies on insights from aesthetics, unpacking fiction’s multidimensional epistemic potential. Audre Lorde exemplifies literary works’ ability to seductively sabotage bias and provide audiences with prosthetic visions of unfamiliar experiences of marginalisation. (shrink)

Studies on the mediatisation of war point to attempts of governments to regulate the visual perspective of their involvements in armed conflict – the most notable example being the practice of ‘embedded reporting’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper focuses on a different strategy of visual meaning-making, namely, the publication of images on social media by armed forces themselves. Specifically, we argue that the mediatisation of war literature could profit from an increased engagement with feminist research, both within Critical Security/Critical (...) Military Studies and within Science and Technology Studies that highlight the close connection between masculinity, technology and control. The article examines the German military mission in Afghanistan as represented on the German armed forces’ official Facebook page. Germany constitutes an interesting, and largely neglected, case for the growing literature on the mediatisation of war: its strong antimilitarist political culture makes the representation of war particularly delicate. The paper examines specific representational patterns of Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan and discusses the implications which arise from what is placed inside the frame of visibility and what remains out of its view. (shrink)

Harmony is a generally agreed-upon idea in international and diplomatic discourse. A common theme in multiple traditions of thought, Platonist and Confucian among others, it underlies today’s significant investments in musical activism, cultural diplomacy, conflict resolution and peace building. Yet despite this wide currency and long history, the idea of harmony seldom receives more than liminal attention in political theory. In the context of Western thought, an essay written in the 1830s by the French philosopher Jean Reynaud offers a striking (...) point of departure: Reynaud defines diplomacy as ‘the science of harmony among states’. This article, drawing from Reynaud’s text as well from the wider history of music, art and political thought, maps a series of conceptual fault lines that touch on the concept’s function in international thought; the inscription of difference, dissonance, conflict and even war within the idea of harmony; the hegemonic and imperial temptations harmony encompasses and legitimizes; and the theoretical sources of harmony in nature and artifice. In effect, the concept of harmony offers less a blueprint than a forum for imagining peace. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of realism in relationship to contemporary serial fiction. Drawing on The Bureau, it argues that spy TV series are “realistic” not because they correspond to reality but because of their impact on reality. It begins by giving an overview of the many ways in which “realism,” in the ordinary sense of a resemblance with reality, served as the working framework for The Bureau’s team. It then identifies three distinct types of realisms in the series. The (...) first is a “fictional realism,” namely the ability of The Bureau to conform to the aesthetic and narrative conventions of realistic fictions. The second type of realism, which I qualify as “ordinary,” refers to the possibilities offered by the show’s aesthetics and the enmeshment of The Bureau with viewers’ ordinary experience. The third type of “performative realism” refers to the series’ impact on shared representations and reality. By providing a common language about the secret activities of the state, The Bureau has gone from being a framed version of reality to being one of the defining frameworks through which state secrecy is experienced both individually and collectively, by insiders and the public at large. (shrink)