After the attacks of 9/11 Americans asked, `Why do they hate us so much?' The answer has been framed in terms of a range of `clashes', none of which has addressed emotion, which is at the centre of the question. Emotion, and particularly humiliation, has begun to be addressed within the literature of IR. Numerous scholars have highlighted the pervasiveness of a discourse of humiliation in the Middle East and its relationship to the swelling ranks of recruits who are willing to act as human bombs. The purpose of this article is to examine the emotional dynamics of this relationship. The first section undertakes a conceptual analysis of humiliation and betrayal. The second section explores how these emotions have been given coherent meaning in the narrative of Islamists from the region. This is followed by an historical analysis of how this narrative has provided a framework for giving meaning to a range of national, regional and international interactions, particularly since 1967, and has contributed to the emergence of Islam as the basis for transnational identity in what had become a highly secular region. Section three examines flaws in the logic of both militant Islamists and the US-led `War on Terrorism', arguing that both have exacerbated feelings of humiliation in the region rather than contributing to a restoration of dignity. The conclusion builds on the principle of human dignity to rethink the international approach to political violence.

Constructivists have distanced themselves from questions of language in order to engage the "positivist" mainstream in dialogue. Yet language has played a central role in one important strand of positivism. Current debates in international relations assume a question about whether language is important. This article asks how or why language is important to the study of IR by exploring two distinct phases of the linguistic turn. The first phase, associated with logical positivism, approaches language as a picture of the logic of reality; the second, at the roots of a range of alternative approaches, approaches language use as analogous to making moves in a game. In constructing a link between two phases of the linguistic turn, the abyss separating "positivists," who aren't concerned with language, and "poststructuralists," who are, is replaced with a spectrum of different approaches to language and logic in international relations. The significance of these differences is illustrated in a variety of theoretical and empirical examples.

In cases such as World War I grief or trauma were nearly universal in the European context and a direct consequence of a political experience of war. This article asks whether widespread social suffering may have a social and political expression that is larger than the sum of traumatised or bereaved individuals. Section 1 explores Martha Nussbaum's theory of emotion, particularly as it relates to grief and compassion and uses this to build two contrasting typologies of grief and trauma. Central to this contrast is the idea that grief, as an emotion, is embedded in a community, while trauma and emotional numbing correspond with a breakdown of community and an isolation, which may give rise to solipsism. The latter would appear to make any notion of social trauma a contradiction in terms. Section 2 draws on the philosopher Wittgenstein's critique in the Philosophical Investigations of his early work in the Tractatus, to argue that even the solipsist exists in a particular kind of social world. This provides a foundation for arguing, in Section 3, that social trauma can find expression in a political solipsism, which has dangerous consequences. Section 4 theorises the relationship between trauma, identity and agency at the international level.

While the strategic objectives of those who organize suicide terrorism may be explained in rationalist terms, the choice of those who volunteer to be candidates for death is far more problematic, given the high premium, at least within international relations theory, on survival as the ultimate rational end. The rational choice model also makes it difficult to take language or emotion into account as factors in constituting the meaning of the act. This article begins with an observation: In Western discourse the acts of human bombs tend to be referred to as ‘suicide terrorism’ or ‘suicide bombings’; by contrast the terminology of ‘martyrdom operations’ is more prevalent in the Arab and Muslim Middle East, or among Islamists in the West. The first section of the paper examines the importance of context for understanding the rationality of an action. The second explores ‘martyrdom’ and ‘suicide’ as two distinct frameworks for giving meaning to an act of voluntary death in the post-9/11 world, and the emotional dynamics that link these two ‘games’ to a larger structural logic. The third section further develops the structural logic that emerges from the interaction of the two. The conclusions analyse the significance of this argument for rethinking both the structural dynamics of this international context, as well as the theoretical model of games.

Many of the violent conflicts of the post‐Cold War period have involved peoples who have historically been victims of interstate politics. Compromise is highly problematic in contexts of this kind, given that sovereign powers tend to attach the label ‘terrorism’ to acts of resistance and the resistance tends to claim an experience of injustice. Given a situation where compromise is seen by actors on both sides to be impossible, how would anything other than a ‘rotten compromise’ be possible? The article develops a framework called the Warden's Dilemma which is then put to use in the empirical exploration of two historical cases: the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland in 1980–81 and the martyrdom of Polish Solidarity's priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, a few years later.