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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

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. 1 We have all grown accustomed to familiar representations of the international and its conflicts. Wars, famines and diplomatic summits are shown to us in their usual guise: as short-lived media events that blend information and entertainment. The numbing regularity with which these images and sound-bites are communicated soon erases their highly arbitrary nature. We gradually forget that we have become so accustomed to these politically charged and distorting metaphors that we take them for real and begin to 'lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all'. 2 Those who make the analysis of these political events their professional purview-the students of international relations (ir)-adhere to representational habits that have become equally objectified and problematic. Many of them are social scientists for whom knowledge about the 'facts' of the 'real world' emerges from the search for 'valid inferences by the systematic use of well-established procedures of inquiry'. 3 But relatively little practical knowledge has emerged from these efforts, even after successive generations of social scientists have refined their models and methods. Our insights into the international have not grown This essay has been in the making for a while, and I am thus indebted to various people who have helped me ruminate along the way. Thanks to