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Although emotions play a significant role in world politics they have so far received surprisingly little attention by International Relations scholars. Numerous authors have emphasised this shortcoming for several years now, but strangely there are still only very few systematic inquiries into emotions and even fewer related discussions on method. The article explains this gap by the fact that much of International Relations scholarship is conducted in the social sciences. Such inquiries can assess emotions up to a certain point, as illustrated by empirical studies on psychology and foreign policy and constructivist engagements with identity and community. But conventional social science methods cannot understand all aspects of phenomena as ephemeral as those of emotions. Doing so would involve conceptualising the influence of emotions even when and where it is not immediately apparent. The ensuing challenges are daunting, but at least some of them could be met by supplementing social scientific methods with modes of inquiry emanating from the humanities. By drawing on feminist and other interpretive approaches we advance three propositions that would facilitate such cross-disciplinary inquiries. (1) The need to accept that research can be insightful and valid even if it engages unobservable phenomena, and even if the results of such inquiries can neither be measured nor validated empirically; (2) The importance of examining processes of representation, such as visual depictions of emotions and the manner in which they shape political perceptions and dynamics; (3) A willingness to consider alternative forms of insight, most notably those stemming from aesthetics sources, which, we argue, are particularly suited to capturing emotions. Taken together, these propositions highlight the need for a sustained global communication across different fields of knowledge.

a 3-year collaboration that included a workshop at the University of Queensland, an ISA roundtable, and, mostly, countless rounds of mutual feedback and adjustments.The Forum is structured around a combination of article-length essays and commentaries. The editors first offer a theoretically oriented survey of the state of current research on the topic: a one-stop location for readers who want to know about emotions and world politics. Then follow essays by the two pioneers in this field: Jonathan Mercer and Neta Crawford. Both have made path-breaking early contributions, which have substantially shaped scholarly discussions on the topic. Seven shorter commentaries will then either directly engage the previous texts or take on important additional aspects of emotions and world politics. Contributors have been selected so that they represent a broad spectrum of theoretical and methodological positions. The authors are either specialists on emotions research or experienced scholars who comment on the relevance of the respective insights for the broader theory and practice of international relations.All contributions revolve around one central challenge: to theorize the processes that render individual emotions collective and thus political. This is, however, not to say that the contributors present uniform positions. While agreeing that emotions are political, the contributors divergeat times stronglyon how emotions become so and what consequences are entailed. The Forum is thus primarily a venue for deliberation and critique that aims to encourage further innovative research on this crucial but still largely under-theorized topic.Emotions play an increasingly important role in international relations research. This essay briefly surveys the development of the respective debates and then offers a path forward. The key challenge, we argue, is to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political. We further suggest that this is done best by exploring insights from two seemingly incompatible scholarly tendencies: macro theoretical approaches that develop generalizable propositions about political emotions and, in contrast, micro approaches that investigate how Forum: Emotions and World Politics 491

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Emotions underpin how political communities are formed and function. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in times of trauma. The emotions associated with suffering caused by war, terrorism, natural disasters, famine and poverty can play a pivotal role in shaping communities and orientating their politics. This book investigates how 'affective communities' emerge after trauma. Drawing on several case studies and an unusually broad set of interdisciplinary sources, it examines the role played by representations, from media images to historical narratives and political speeches. Representations of traumatic events are crucial because they generate socially embedded emotional meanings which, in turn, enable direct victims and distant witnesses to share the injury, as well as the associated loss, in a manner that affirms a particular notion of collective identity. While ensuing political orders often re-establish old patterns, traumatic events can also generate new 'emotional cultures' that genuinely transform national and transnational communities.