This project – conducted with my long-term collaborator and wife Emma Hutchison – deals with emotions and world politics. 

In our past work Emma and I explored how emotions are not just private and irrational phenomena, as commonly assumed, but central to the conduct of politics. In an essay in the Review of International Studies (“Fear No More: Emotions and World Politics) we advanced an interdisciplinary methodological framework for the study of emotions.  We then lead a collaborative project that addresses one of the biggest challenges: understanding how individual emotions become collective and thus political. The result was a Forum on “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics,” in International Theory, involving Neta Crawford, Jon Mercer, Rose McDermott, Karin Fierke, Christian Reus Smit, Andrew Linklater, Lily Ling, Renée Jeffery and Janice Bially-Mattern.

Building on this work and on Emma’s CUP Book Affective Communities: Collective Emotions After Trauma, we are working on a number of projects, including a book on emotions and power.  Emotions also play a central role in our project on Visualising Humanitarian Crises.