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

Emma sadly passed passed away in November 2024. You can find my Tribute to Emma here. It tries to honour both her pathbreaking scholarship and the amazing person she was.

I will make it my mission over the next few years go compete a range of project we have been working on but were unable to advance as a result of all the time we spent in hospitals over the past decade.

In our previous 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, I will now work on completing a number of projects, including several essays and a book on emotions and power.  Emma’s intellectual presence will also remain our collaborative project on Visualising Humanitarian Crises, of which she was the deputy lead chief investigator.