Emotions and the everyday: Ambivalence, power and resistance
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088219829858 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Kate Schick |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219829858
Journal of International Political Theory
2019, Vol. 15(2) 261 –268
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088219829858
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Emotions and the everyday:
Ambivalence, power and
resistance
Kate Schick
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Abstract
This special issue on emotions and the everyday represents a provocative intervention in
the literature on emotions in International Relations. A strong theme that emerges is the
ambivalence of emotions in global politics, which I explore in two parts. First, I explore
emotions’ ‘ambivalent potentiality’ in international politics, highlighting two dimensions:
the ways emotions are generated and captured by relations of power and the state to
create ‘willing geopolitical subjects’, and the ways emotions resist power by creating and
sustaining ‘sites of contestation’ that challenge hegemonic emotional regimes. Second,
I trace the contributors’ claims regarding the promise and danger of empathy in global
politics, maintaining that the special issue highlights the deep ambivalence that attends
empathy as well as emotions more generally. I then trouble the notion of empathy as
resistance and argue that a more radical and reflexive empathetic engagement could be
captured by a greater emphasis on listening and vulnerable interrogation of the self as
well as the other.
Keywords
Emotions, empathy, everyday, listening, micropolitics, resistance
This special issue moves forward the burgeoning literature on emotions and International
Relations (IR) by emphasizing the complexity that emerges when we focus on the every-
day in global politics. The contributions to this special issue are firmly located in the
micropolitical, drawing our attention to ‘those features of social life that often slip
through our normal schematic or binary framework’ (Solomon and Steele, 2017: 270).
They build on feminist work on emotion, which emphasizes the politics of emotions and
Corresponding author:
Kate Schick, Political Science and International Relations, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600,
Wellington 6140, New Zealand.
Email: kate.schick@vuw.ac.nz
829858IPT0010.1177/1755088219829858Journal of International Political TheorySchick
research-article2019
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