Abstract
This article critically examines the interrelationship of values and emotions in international relations. It focuses on the different meaning of affects and emotions, and theorizes about the affective qualities of values in world politics. It defines affective values as values that arise from the ceaseless, unconscious striving(s) to contest the outside control over one’s life. In doing so, it distinguishes between negative affective values, which represent the evocation of fear, shame, and distrust to shape and project the creative energies of resistance, and positive affective values that signify the material and practical strategies that convert these energies into an awareness of one’s insecurity in the world. The article argues that the tension between positive and negative affective values allows us to understand the transformative link between emotions and values. By focusing on the norm of humanitarian intervention, it contextualizes positive affective values in terms of the new resilience initiative of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).
Introduction
Moral values form an important part of inquiry in international relations (IR). By giving meaning and purpose to one’s actions, they also help to determine one’s conduct. Values in this sense affect how we think and act in the world; they explain why we become emotionally attached to a cause. In studying this emotional connection, social scientists have studied how certain emotions, that is, shame and anger, shape our experiences and actions (Demertzis, 2013; Scheff, 2000; Thoits, 1989). Much of their work draws on a range of studies conducted by empirical psychologists and neuroscientists who have focused on the integration and intersection of emotion and cognition (where emotions are no longer conceived as irrational or lying prior to cognitive processes) (Damasio, 2003; Ekman, 1992). In recent years, philosophers have theorized that emotions constitute integral components of moral decision-making (Miller, 1993; Mulligan, 1998; Nussbaum, 2001, 2013: 360–361; Scheler, 1954; Solomon, 1993, 2007). Drawing on this area of philosophical research as well as neuroscience, some IR scholars have analyzed the contradictory effects of institutionalizing certain emotions in world politics, including how fear can lead to either a reduction or increase in violence (Crawford, 2014: 526; Payne, 2014; Scheff, 2000: 80). Others have adopted equally, if not more critical approaches that theorize how affects and memories shape state or collective behavior (see Crawford, 2000; Edkins, 2003; Fierke, 2014; Jeffery, 2013; Mercer, 2005; Ross, 2006).
The appeal of studying emotions in IR is that they allow us to understand the underlying motivations of actors in world politics (see Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008; Demertzis, 2013). In this way, they help to expose the persistent dynamics of conflict and the possibilities of overcoming the effects of violence. For example, instituting shame can be understood as an attempt to target the motives of leaders to commit human rights atrocities, or rather, to pressure political leaders to recognize the public/reputational costs of perpetrating such atrocities, for example, the naming and shaming campaign of Amnesty International. 1 While there may be cases in which leaders fail to apologize or reveal any shame and guilt, public apologies can involve underlying motivations to address the root causes of violence (Lazare, 2004). In the context of well-equipped truth commissions, this can take the form of national healing/unity, that is, the institutionalization of practices and mechanisms designed to facilitate reconciliation and forgiveness. Within IR theorizing, this healing process reflects, in part, an ongoing challenge of explaining how individual and collective emotions become political (Hutchison and Bleiker, 2014: 492). I shall understand this challenge in terms of how social values help to set into motion creative energies that project and shape the conflictual affects and emotional ties to one’s environment.
My aim in this article, then, is to analyze this affective dimension of values, by showing how it reflects a contingent process of linking certain values and affects/emotions in world politics. I adopt a modified version of Neta Crawford’s (2000: 125) definition of emotion (as meaning ‘subjective experiences that also have physiological, intersubjective, and cultural components’) to interpret affective values as those that arise from the ceaseless, unconscious striving to contest outside control over one’s life. In doing so, I distinguish between negative affective values, which represent the evocation of fear, shame, and distrust (among other emotions) to shape and maintain these creative energies of resistance (or the imagined ways of resisting), and positive affective values that signify the emotionally driven strategies that convert these energies into an awareness of one’s insecurity in the world. I argue that the open-ended tension between positive and negative affective values allows us to understand the transformative role of marginalizing effects in institutionalizing certain emotions and values in world politics. Norms as standards of behavior play an important role in explaining this overall effect or trend. One of the norms I shall focus on in this article is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which has, in the context of a new policy agenda, resulted in novel, albeit problematic, opportunities for enhancing control over one’s affairs (see International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), 2001).
Affective values, it should be stressed, evoke a range of feelings and motivations that help to shape social relations and the desire for asserting control over one’s affairs. As these motivations change in relation to changes in the environment, they can reveal the marginalizing effects of both gaining and losing control over one’s surroundings, that is, alienation, underrepresentation, and injuries. For this reason, I treat autonomy or political control as neither an end in-itself nor self-justifying means to overcome such insecurity, but rather, as part of contingent process of resisting one’s changing circumstances (or politically autonomous life), whether this means provisionally securing one’s beliefs or transferring new knowledge to the policy world.
In short, the unconscious striving to be free of restraint can never be rationally conquered nor controlled. Its ceaselessness ensures that any rational value that enables one to assert control over a new set of social and political circumstances will also involve an awareness of one’s insecurity to oneself and the attendant proneness to being undermined. Thus, for instance, the plight of indigenous groups has long reflected the unconscious striving to be free of outside interference. In recent years, increasing awareness and sensitivity toward these deprived needs (and social oppression) have materialized into legal strategies and agreements that not only embody the conscious emotional attachments to their land and their ancestors, but also seek to preserve their traditional values via management over their natural resources. But the changing circumstances of the environment, namely, the effects of climate change, threaten to undermine their political and social control over natural resources and their way of life. Resilience may be one valued strategy of coping with these effects. However, it also becomes problematic, as we shall see, when it is understood as replacing these people’s ongoing resistance to the outside authorities, or permanently and positively overcoming the effects of subordination.
The article is organized as follows. In the first part, I will assess the problem of values by discussing the meaning of values and affects. I shall then critically examine in the second and third parts how theories of affect turn on the distinction between emotions and affects. Here, I claim that affective values constitute an important component of understanding the transformative link between emotions and values. Finally, I move on to address the affective dynamics of the value of resilience in human security or R2P.
Values and intentionality
Value is a wooly concept, difficult to define precisely because its meaning can vary from group to group. Generally speaking, though, it refers to a process of judging the worth of certain qualities of an object or another person (Oprisko, 2012: 29). The process of judging or evaluating is how we learn to define our self-worth in relation to others. But because some people may value some goods at the expense of others, values can and often do presuppose incompatible ways of seeing and experiencing the world. This may not make one a relativist, or, rather, an opponent of an overarching value by which to measure other goods. Yet, it does suggest that the conflict of values is a permanent feature of our understanding of human affairs.
Indeed, liberal pluralists argue that values remain incommensurable and that attempts to achieve commensurability can lead to the most extreme outcomes of conflict. History, in other words, proves that the struggle or pursuit of utopian visions of society can only end in large-scale (absolute means of) violence, that to justify violence in the name of social harmony, for example, can only come at the expense of other values, that is, freedom (Berlin, 1959: 54). As such, incommensurability characterizes the tragic fate of values: for it forces us to make compromises and to tolerate others’ differences. Such tragic fate can be thought of as the normative cost we pay for overcoming the effects of value incommensurability.
In IR the tragedy of values forces us to make rational choices between peace and war (Lebow, 2003). States, in other words, learn to value competitive power for the strategic advantages it provides. In this scenario, power and fear of another’s intentions presupposes structural constraints on state behavior (see Mearsheimer, 2001: 18–19; Waltz, 1979). Yet valuing power is not the same as rationalizing value in terms of social action, or what Max Weber (1978) referred to as value rationality, which, as he puts it, ‘is determined by conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious or other form of behavior’ (p. 25). Here, Weber distinguished value rationality from affectual action, which he equated with the physical emotions and the feelings of the agent. For him, ethical values justify the goals, intentions, and beliefs of individuals, while affective or emotional behavior revealed the feelings and desires of an agent in relation to one’s attachment or commitment to goals. In this way, Weber dichotomized between emotions and cognition by treating affective behavior and emotions as forces operating independently of rational judgment.
Analyzing the role of affects and emotions
Reductive (scientific) approaches
Over the years, empirical psychologists have studied the difficulties and prospects of measuring the cognitive role of emotions. Determining this role has meant distinguishing between the material/physical nature of affects and the cognitive function of emotions in order to understand the independent basis of one’s emotions (see Massumi, 2002). This difference, it should be stressed, is not simply semantic in nature. Rather, it reflects the distinctive properties of affects, that is, how affects represent purely physical responses to threats, forming part of what one scholar states is a ‘non-conscious experience of intensity … with an unstructured potential that lies prior to consciousness and that is the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance’ (Quoted in Leys, 2011: 442). Here affects constitute physical stimuli with no discernable source or cause, that is, sobbing, shrieking, and disgust. In short, they can be said to exist in the pre-consciousness and therefore independent of one’s intentions, beliefs, and decisions (Griffiths, 1997: 243).
By contrast, emotions constitute an integral and conscious part of one’s thoughts and beliefs. They are, in other words, inner states of feelings that drive one’s conscious awareness of the world. As perceptions of judgment, they represent basic-level categories, or what some refer to as ‘basic emotions’, that is, anger, fear, disgust, and happiness (Ekman, 1992: 12). By ‘basic’ is meant emotions that all people experience when they think and act in the world. 2 This reflects an important scientific priority of measuring the cause and effect of emotions. Neuroscientists, for example, use magnetic resonance images (MRIs) to draw correlations between activities of certain parts of the brain and emotions such as happiness and compassion (see Damasio, 2003; Harris, 2010: 23). While this allows them to assess the cognitive properties of emotions, it fails to capture fully the immaterial or immeasurable properties of emotions: namely, the unconscious desires that determine and shape emotions. For as Nicolas Demertzis (2013: 5) explains, emotions invariably reflect the deeply rooted ties to one’s cultural values, or how one naturally internalizes their social values and norms to understand and act in the world.
From this standpoint, the intersection of macro-level analysis of social relations and the micro-level analysis of an individual’s psyche allows social scientists to analyze the social properties of emotions; more specifically, one’s social motivations and intentions to participate in and structure societal affairs. Again the idea is that emotions can involve the observable effects of action, such as the fear and distrust that drives one to oppose outside authorities. Emotions, in this sense, embody the feelings and thoughts that motivate one to act or adapt to one’s circumstances; while values, as we have seen, help to explain and justify these motivations to pursue a larger cause or open-ended task.
Normative and critical approaches
Philosophers have made considerable strides in framing this difference by theorizing about the social and moral structure of emotions and values (mostly at the personal level) (see Elster, 1999; Goldie, 2002; Mulligan, 1998; Nussbaum, 2013: 6–8; Solomon, 2007; Thoits, 1989). But, as mentioned earlier, the structures of emotions also presuppose a certain tension between one’s unconscious desire (affect) and conscious thoughts. An affect such as sobbing represents an unconscious and uncontrollable desire to express sadness. It is not simply a primal urge, but rather can be thought of as part of an evolving moral instinct linking our emotions with what we know to be right. The trolley and bridge scenario, for example, helps to illustrate this idea of an evolving moral structure of emotions. In this case, a person is confronted with having to throw a large man over the side of a bridge in order to save five workers (working on the trolley tracks below) from an oncoming train that they do not hear nor see (and the only way to save them is to throw the large man onto the tracks). That most would likely not throw the man onto the tracks indicates not simply the unconscious expectation of one’s shrieking, but also the unconscious and conscious internalization of civil and humanitarian norms (see Cathcart, 2014; Pinker, 2008).
Critical studies of the social and moral context of emotions stress this inexpressible yet constitutive link between the affects and humanity. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1991: 164) argue that affects can be imagined as ‘nonhuman becoming’, zones of indetermination or even beings whose validity lies in themselves. They are formless, non-reflective elements of behavior that resonate what is unspeakable of past and present experience. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 256) write that the many relations ‘composing, decomposing, and making the individual, correspond to intensities that affect the person’. Affects, in this sense, symbolize the many ways that different species come into being through their relations to one another. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 262), this reflects how memories and habits fold (pli) into single and multiple planes of one’s existence, or rather how our memories serve as resonances of past experiences that continue to shape the identity of persons. 3 In short, Deleuze and Guattari treat affects as something lying deep in the (creative) soul, something that helps to resonate one’s feelings and ineffable, unconscious desire.
In recent years, their critical interpretation of affects has helped inspire critical IR scholars to theorize about the global context of affects, especially in relation to human suffering, violence, and militant ideologies (see Roach, 2008). Jenny Edkins, for example, analyzes how affects or severe trauma interrupt our habitual ‘day to day to life’, forcing us to relive our past suffering (Edkins, 2003). Trauma in this respect is not simply a painful feeling or strained perception of past suffering; rather, it expresses the intensity of affect that exceeds (and limits) our capacity to express our thoughts and feelings of past suffering. Put differently, the intensity of this affect is something that becomes inexpressible, that can trigger painful episodes of remembering the past. Still, it is important to stress that confronting the past is not simply a metaphysical event: it is also a process involving practical and moral considerations in the context of legal or political practical measures in IR, most notably, truth commissions that investigate past wrongs.
For example, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC) used its mandate of investigating the violence perpetrated during the Apartheid era to help heal the moral and psychological wounds caused by such violence. Unlike other truth commissions, the SATRC relied on forgiveness to forge novel measures of reconciliation, including immunity for the confessions given by the key perpetrators of human rights atrocities (see Hayner, 2011; Verdeja, 2009). Whether or not these measures have proved successful in promoting national healing, they do amount to an unprecedented attempt to link accountability with the transformative qualities of compassion and forgiveness (in terms of the transition from a racist society to a multiracial democracy)(see Roach, 2010). 4 But note that compassion does not necessarily constitute a universal emotion or affect, or an emotion that all people, regardless of nationality and ethnicity, possess and practice in the same manner. There may be cases where a culture and its language does not formally recognize the meaning and importance of certain basic emotions. Anna Wiersbicka (1994: 137), who has researched the Micronesian group, the Ifaluks, writes how anger remains absent in the Ifaluk language. This of course does not mean that the Ifaluks do not experience this emotion, but rather that they interpret and resonate the elements of this emotion in a culturally specific manner. Emotions, in other words, tend to acquire their meaning in relation to the structure of social and cultural relations, or how social ties are formed through language (White, 1994: 220–221).
This is what underscores the need for what Wiersbicka (1994: 139–140) points out are ‘lexical universals’. By this term, she means conveying what is the gist of one’s feelings about right and wrong, which suggests that all people will invariably learn to share and construct their emotions in ways that resonate their past and present feelings about events. Andrew Ross, who draws on affect theory to reconstruct the United States’ response to the crisis, argues that affects expose the layers of experienced emotion in the United States. For him, affects necessarily assume a synthetic quality, in which memories can be folded or layered within current decisions to act out or seek vengeance (see Ross, 2006: 212; Saurette, 2005). Here, the unconscious striving to defeat the terrorists/jihadists helps expose the conscious enactment of preventive strategies of legalized torture: the institutionalization of harsh interrogation tactics.
But norms against torture can also trigger a counteractive emotional and moral response. In this case, the revulsion at images of torture – via the released photos showing US soldiers torturing suspected terrorists at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq – triggered public disgust and anger over the United States’s role in committing such acts (i.e. references back to Nazism and Soviet aggression). These of course were images that many Americans never intended to project to the world. For Peter Goldie (2002: 248), this complex process of layering and projecting intention represents what he calls borrowed intentionality, in which the intentionality of our bodily feeling is actually ‘towards the world beyond the body’ (p. 247). His idea is that we need to examine ‘the unity of emotional life’, by treating emotion as the ‘substantial event’ in our experience, that is, where one’s personal feelings about an event, such as the recent Nepalese earthquake(s), explain the affective link between us and these people’s plight. In this instance, the givers of money will have demonstrated in part the positive effect of internalizing the norm of humanitarian assistance, which is to say that the unconscious striving to actively relieve the suffering of others will have enacted a political emotion culture, or the institutionalization of compassion via the political activities of the UN Children’s Relief Fund and other nongovernmental organizations. What this example suggests is that one’s unconscious striving to assert control over his or her life can also resonate one’s conscious awareness of redressing/protecting lives abroad.
Positive and negative affective values in world politics
This substantive, intersubjective link between affects and emotions brings us to the particular emotions that IR theorists have employed to explain the recurring outcomes in world politics. Earlier, we had discussed how values assumed a strategic importance: how, in the case fear, this emotion could be linked to the value of self-preservation and the self-imposed constraints associated with peace and cooperation. This macro-level approach, however, revealed very little, if anything of how states can be treated as emotional actors, or how institutionalized fear helps to explain unexpected outcomes in world politics (see Hutchison and Bleiker, 2014; Mercer, 2005). 5 As Kenneth Payne (2014) argues, state leaders can act on an array of emotions, which, in turn, help to explain why leaders resolve ‘to fight on disproportionate to the prospective costs and benefits’ (p. 481). In the case of the Vietnam War, the shameful prospects of losing a war was one reason that the American government continued to fight in spite of the heavy human costs and domestic political pressures. Shame in this way can impose significant constraints on political leaders and lawmakers.
Thomas Scheff (2000: 4), for example, claims that shame can be thought of as the master emotion in world politics, that when actors experience such an emotion, it can solidify the very social bonds that reinforce grievances (or anger). Shame in this sense often remains unacknowledged, which might explain why collective actors act on sheer arrogance to fight wars, why nationalist ideologues or political elites elect to manipulate social bonds to serve their coercive ends/power agenda, for example, the rule of Slobodan Milosevic. Unacknowledged shame can also become the tool of those affected by violence to expose the inhumanity of injustices and brutality. The nonviolent resistance of protesters in colonial India, for instance, became a powerful weapon, precisely because it exposed the brutal effects of Britain’s colonial rule. Eventually, such resistance forced the British to recognize their own shame of imposing colonial rule and the need to end such rule. By comparison, Amnesty International’s agenda of ‘naming and shaming’, which, as mentioned earlier, lists and advertises the names of leaders and officials, depends on open publicity to induce the shame of political leaders who are committing human rights abuses.
The campaign is part of a larger practical narrative of ending the culture of impunity and redressing victims’ needs (in the name of transitional justice) (see Roach, 2009). And in the cases where shame has had a positive influence in pressuring political leaders, it has helped evidence what I have been calling the transformative link between emotions and values, or the unconscious striving to save and protect the lives of human beings and raising awareness of victims’ needs. Thus, it can be said that the changing meaning of values presupposes a tension between the negative and positive elements of affective values (see Roach, 2007), one in which the unconscious striving to shape one’s environment materializes into emotional attachments and a felt desire to influence these changing circumstances. In the context of the SATRC’s implementation of new instruments of accountability, that is, immunity through confession and subpoena power, officials sought to mediate the tension between affect (striving to redeem their suffering) and the conscious willingness to forgive (Minow, 1998: 18).
This tension, as I have argued, reflects the important distinction between negative and positive affective values. 6 Again, negative affective values refer to the emotional process of judging the worth of another’s threat to one’s existence, while positive affective values reflect the emotional process of moving beyond these constraints. In terms of the latter, one encounters the existence of new social opportunities and social incentives that help to restructure social relations. Here, the institutionalization of new norms plays an important role in realizing these possibilities. As mentioned earlier, norms stand at the intersection of the micro-reality of individual emotion and the macro-reality of group values, insofar as they regulate and constitute the cultural incentives and social opportunities for taking control of one’s life and surroundings. They show, as Jon Elster (1999: 262) stresses, an ‘emotion culture’, in which ‘culture acts a modifier whether it is as an ameliorative, or as a brake’.
A transformational approach to emotions and values in world politics, then, stresses the changes that have led to the positive, political dynamics of this emotion culture (where emotions are part of one’s ‘actively lived experience’) (Caracciolo, 2012; Elster, 1999: 35). It reflects how, in the context of the Arab Spring, the early political protests arose from the unconscious striving to adapt to and seize the opportunity to exercise control over one’s repressed life. By contrast, a non-transformational approach emphasizes the reactions and/or institutionalization of fear, the deep-seated aversion to risking one’s social and political status (or role thereof). As Neta Crawford (2014: 536) suggests, when one studies the outcomes of institutionalizing empathy, one confronts the need to act on the limits of fear or risk aversion. For our purposes, the institutionalization of empathy allows us to understand how treating the suffering as one’s own induces incentives for challenging and overcoming these limits. Whether or not empathy can be thought of as an emotion (Bially Mattern, 2011), it can and should be treated as a positive affective value, one that moves us, in various ways, beyond the effects of fear towards the self-realization of the good and control of one’s life. 7 As we shall see, affective values can also reflect a ceaseless unconscious striving to resist, which, in interacting with the emotions, can produce awareness of one’s persistent insecurity in the world or of the marginalizing effects that represent the possibilities of further resistance.
Resiliency in world politics
In this final section, I shall analyze in greater detail a positive and practical affective value: resilience in the area of human security. In doing so, I want to show how resilience exemplifies three key, contextual features of an affective value: (1) the unconscious striving to contribute (and adapt) positively to the health and sustainability of one’s community through voluntary coordination, (2) the emotions of fear and insecurity that conflict with this affect and project the (negative) unconscious striving to be free from conflict and undue interference, and (3) the marginalizing and destabilizing effect of exercising control over one’s circumstances, which leads one to become increasingly aware of one’s own insecurity, or of the (internalized) threats that can quickly undermine and subvert such control (Beck, 2008). Again, exercising control or autonomy signifies neither an end nor self-justifying means, but rather, a contingent feature of the open-ended dialectical interplay of positive and negative affective values.
Generally speaking, resilience signifies an ability to bounce back and a capacity to adapt effectively to threats. In environmental studies and human security, for example, it reflects a capacity to manage and resolve the long-term threat posed by pollution, including the impacts associated with a rise in the sea level or the scarcity of fresh water. Resilience in the area of human security has long characterized the political tension between developed and developing states regarding the moral and political objectives of the responsibility of protecting the lives of innocent civilians (see Bellamy, 2013). For developing states, R2P remains a source of fear and anger directed at the most powerful states. The constant threat of intervention for political reasons presupposes what I have been referring to as the unconscious striving to be free of such undue interference. It is why developing states may see little difference between the value placed on resilience and the value placed on stability and the norm of military intervention (Evans, 2008). For the most part, it is fair to say that developing countries believe that powerful states have been using the norm of R2P to disguise their interests of intervening in states where they can increase their political influence.
The UN’s recent strategic agenda addresses this concern by emphasizing empowerment and responsibility at the local and state levels. The strategy has been couched in terms of the UN Secretary-General’s initiative to promote prevention, which has led to various resolutions stressing resiliency, capacity-building, empowerment, prevention, democratization, civil society building, and legal accountability (United Nations, 2012). The initiative is designed to address concerns of less developing countries (their fear of intervention), by implementing positive or forward-looking measures that promote trust and cooperation. From this standpoint, it constitutes a shift in priority from the interventionism of R2P to one of local self-reliance and governance, that is, from coercive governance to one of capacity-building at the local level. The politics of resilience, in this sense, involves the empowerment of local groups and the legitimization of their capacity to coordinate their affairs.
Still, this does not mean that such an initiative should be treated as a self-justifying means of self-governance/political coordination, nor as simply a positive value that moves communities emotionally beyond the effects of military intervention. Resiliency, as I have been arguing, reflects an unconscious striving for empowerment, which now appears to drive the emotional process of adapting to and working with others to reduce the severe risks to innocent civilians. As a positive affective value, it signifies the people’s entitlement to internalize and manage their own risks, which requires a significant degree of self-discipline to control their own affairs.
This disciplinary power, then, introduces a new form of intervention that remains in itself problematic (Brassett et al., 2013; Chandler, 2013; Duffield, 2012). As David Chandler (2013: 216) puts it, ‘Intervention that focuses on the empowerment and responsibility of agency at the local societal level … evades the 1990s problematic of intervention – contested in the formal international legal and political sphere of law and sovereign rights’. Rather than representing subordinated subjects, ‘resilient subjects’ now possess the positive qualities of management, such as self-discipline, which have seemingly eclipsed the negative qualities or desire to resist (Duffield, 2012; O’Malley, 2010).
In effect, resilience becomes a positive end itself that seems to displace resistance at an unconscious and conscious level. But it is also important to realize that the affirmation of power can trigger emotional effects of marginalization. As Kevin Grove and Pete Adey (2015: 82) claim, the problematic of resiliency can be understood in terms of the diagrammatic effects of affective relations. Such effects register what they call an aesthetic sensibility, which, as they state, ‘directs … the way that resilience addresses itself to insecurity … and why it is contingent and always open to being condemned’ (Grove and Adey, 2015: 82). In other words, the negative affect (or unceasing desire to be free of constraint) conflicts with the positive affect of exercising rational self-control. This, in turn, presupposes not simply a blunted awareness of one’s security, but also a heightened awareness of one’s insecurity. It is this awareness that maintains the instability of social relations and/or affective relations. It is also crucial part of the tension between negative and positive affective values, or how the assertion of the latter can produce the very forces that subvert existing social relations.
Another way of interpreting the problematic of resilience is to return to our discussion of affect in Deleuze and Guattari. Resilience is what reflects a new fold of resistance, in which empowerment via capacity building folds back onto the new layer of resistance to local efforts to manage risks. In this way, the positive structural incentives to manage risk cannot overcome the problem of inclusion or the effect of marginalizing some people from the local management of such risks. Rather, this marginalizing effect produces a new resistance to these efforts. As we saw in the case of restorative justice, forgiveness can also marginalize the people striving for greater accountability, since many of these peoples may still believe that the perpetrators of serious crimes should be held to account in criminal courts.
In sum, by creating new self-imposed duties and even incentives to cooperate, resilience represents a transformative challenge(s) of instituting affect. Through the ceaseless striving for self-governance, resilience exposes new forms of resistance that seem to fold back onto the plane of existing desires and relations.
Conclusion
There has been considerable discussion of the importance of studying emotions in IR. Much of the recent discussion has centered on the interaction of macro-level and micro-level approaches, which, in turn, has helped to link studies of emotion at the individual level to the collective level of states and international organizations. This trend represents an important methodological development in IR, since emotions often play a vital role in helping one to explain the unexpected outcomes of conflicts. Still, one of the challenges facing IR theorists lies in deciphering what I called the transformative, political link of values and emotions in world politics, that is, how certain values of moral healing and resilience can create new possibilities of social and political (local) of resistance to institutionalizing trust, forgiveness, and compassion.
My approach drew on the recent literature on affect and emotions to critically examine the metaphysical and practical sources of this transformative link within the area of humanitarian and transitional justice. By distinguishing between negative and positive affective values, I argued that the institutionalization of positive values such as reconciliation and resilience could be treated as process of overcoming the constraints and status quo limits of the former, that by theorizing the components of affective values, we could also understand the changing social reality and expectations for justice.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the three external reviewers, the journal editors, and especially Robert Oprisko, for their insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the manuscript.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.