Emotions and World Politics
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.
Seeing and Sensing World Politics
When Emma was still alive, in October 2024, I was invited to give the keynote address at the 50th Anniversary Annual Conference of the British International Studies Association. We knew that by the time the conference would be held, in June 2025 in Belfast, Emma would not longer be alive. We decided that I should still accept the invitation, travel to Belfast and give the keynote on behalf of both of us.
Emma and I then worked together on this right until the end, spending much of our time in the palliative care ward discussing ideas and making plans.
The keynote maps out the collaborative work with Emma that I will complete over the next few years. It is entitled Seeing and Sensing World Politics and you can find the video here. It was recoded on 19 June 2025 at the Assembly Hall in Belfast.
My Tribute to Emma Hutchison
Here is a Link to my Tribute to Emma Hutchison
Project Publications
Hutchison, Emma, Roland Bleiker, Josephine Bourne and Youngju Hoang. 2024. “Decolonising Affect? Emotions and the Politics of Peace,” Cooperation and Conflict, 59(2): 149-70.
Hutchison, Emma and Roland Bleiker. 2024. “Emotions, Reconciliation and Peacebuilding,” in Roger Mac Ginty (ed), Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding. London: Routledge.
Bleiker, Roland, David Campbell and Emma Hutchison. 2022. “Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Emotions,” in Jenny M. Lewis and Anne Tiernan (eds), Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics, pp 222-36. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hutchison, Emma and Roland Bleiker. 2022. “Performing Political Empathy,” in Shirin Ray, Miija Gluhovic, Silvija Jestrovic and Michael Saward (eds), Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance, pp. 595-608.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hutchison, Emma and Roland Bleiker. 2020. “Emotions, Discourse and Power in World Politics,” in Simon Koschut (ed), The Power of Emotions in World Politics, pp. 185-196. London: Routledge.
