Emma Hutchison

The question of political change – how the nature and the distinguishing features of orders persist or change – is an enduring puzzle in international theory. We engage ensuing debates through the burgeoning literature on the politics of rituals. We proceed in two steps. First, we introduce and build on existing scholarship that presents emotions as central to how rituals create a sense of collective unity. Second and primarily, we then show that emotions are also key to understanding how rituals can disrupt and transform order. To think so appears counterintuitive at first, for it is natural to think of rituals as being associated with tradition, with time-honoured processes and patterns. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, we show how the very power of rituals to enact and entrench political orders also provides disenfranchised individuals and groups with opportunities to challenge existing power relations. We argue that discomfort – being unsettled – is important for understanding how ritual and political change take place. We do so by linking rituals with shifts in collective feelings. The ensuing affective agency can explain how rituals – and the political orders they manage and sustain – are enacted and change over time.

Nonprofit humanitarian imagery has long sparked ethical concerns, yet these critiques often overlook how such images are received by potential donors—even though donor support is essential to nonprofit success. Most work seeking to understand ethical imagery has been largely conceptual or focused on single image attributes. To understand holistically how potential donors perceive humanitarian imagery, we surveyed a large sample of U.S. residents ( N = 1990) and asked them to evaluate 186 real images used by an international humanitarian aid nonprofit. The findings revealed clear patterns in what Western audiences consider ethical. Positive portrayals of children (such as smiling) led to higher ethical ratings, while images showing malnutrition diminished them. Photos featuring smiling aid workers (regardless of ethnicity) also boosted ethical perceptions. Some of these patterns echo existing scholarly critiques, such as concerns about depicting suffering, while others diverge from prior arguments, including positive portrayals of aid workers. Together, results suggest that donor perceptions of ethical imagery may not fully align with theoretical critiques, highlighting the need to integrate audience perspectives into ongoing ethical debates. To resonate ethically with potential donors, international nonprofits should consider moving away from negative stereotypes and instead highlighting the positive impact of their work. International nonprofits can use these findings to refine their image selection processes and inform their ethical guidelines.

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Peace processes require societies to break with animosity and violence. Scholars and practitioners have traditionally focused on institutional and structural mechanisms. Recent contributions have stressed the need to address the emotional legacies of destructive conflicts and how they influence peace processes. We build on these contributions by engaging current debates on decolonisation. We advance a three-part argument that places decolonising emotion at the core of peace and conflict studies. First, prevailing concepts and practices of peace rely on collective emotions that are western and colonial in origin. Emotions are central to the power dynamics that sustain colonial legacies and the practices of exclusion and injustice that ensue from them. Second, decolonising emotion requires an openness to different feelings which, in turn, can open up possibilities for creative ways of thinking about and practising peace. Third, these realms – colonial legacies and resistant ways of being and feeling – do not exist in isolation. Potentials for peace-making emerge from complex ‘interfaces’ between them, which we examine through two cases: the emotion of Han (한/恨) in Korean traditions of conflict resolution; and links between mourning and conflict management in the Maluilgal First Nation of the Torres Strait in far northern Australia.

The realm of art and of aesthetics may seem a world away from that of global politics. The study of aesthetics is the study of taste and beauty and how together they awaken in us a certain affective sensibility. Global politics, by contrast, is dominated by hard power and military might. Or is it really so? In the past three decades, there have been conscious efforts to challenge these assumptions and approach the study of global politics with an aesthetic sensibility. How can insights derived from art help us rethink the realities of global politics? And what do such engagements tell us about the gendered dimensions of the international and its various political manifestations?

The issue of asylum seekers and refugees is one of the most contested political issues in Australia. This chapter examines ensuing debates, focusing closely on how refugees and asylum seekers are perceived and responded to in relation to the spatial and emotional dynamics that prevail in Australian society and politics. Specifically, the chapter examines how the issue of asylum is intimately connected to and influenced by highly emotional images circulating in the national media. To do this, the authors first discuss the history of refugees at Australia’s borders. In doing so, the authors underline the key role that political and media representations play in shaping refugee debates and policy. The chapter then undertakes an empirical investigation of two crucial recent periods when refugee debates proliferated in both the media and in politics: August to December 2001 and October 2009 to September 2011. By conducting a content analysis of front-page coverage in The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, the authors focus on the particular visual framing that has been used to depict asylum seekers and its emotional and political consequences, highlighting how recurring frames have been used to dehumanize and further displace asylum seekers and refugees in the Australian context. The authors then argue that these visual media depictions associate refugees not with humanitarian challenges and responsibilities, but instead with threats to sovereignty and security.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the role of performance in the relationship between emotions and politics. To do so it focuses on the role that empathy plays in processes of reconciliation after conflict and trauma. Emotions triggered by conflict often perpetuate existing antagonisms. They tend to reproduce the hostile attitudes that have created violence in the first place. A performative approach illuminates not only how emotions perpetuate conflict but also how they can help divided societies adopt more reflective cultures of reconciliation. The performative dimensions of emotions are crucial because they link individual emotions with collective ones. Drawing on a range of conceptual sources the chapter shows how actively drawing on empathy can promote alternative ways of dealing with conflict. A short case study examines the roles that art, and theater in particular, play in peacebuilding in Sri Lanka. An active appreciation of the whole spectrum of emotions—not only fear, anger, and resentment, for instance, but also compassion—may facilitate forms of social healing and reconciliation.