Taking Love and Care Seriously: An Emergent Research Agenda for Remaking Worlds in the Wake of Violence

Abstract

While research on armed conflict focuses primarily on violence and suffering, this article explores the practices of love and care that sit alongside these experiences of harm. Motivated by our omissions to pay sufficient attention to love and care in our research to date, we ask: How can centering practices of love and care illuminate different pathways for understanding the remaking of worlds in the wake of violence? Building on interdisciplinary literature, we conceptualize love and care as practices and potential sites of politics that shape how people survive and make sense of violence as well as imagine and enact lives in its wake. Drawing from our respective research in Colombia and Uganda, we argue that paying attention to love and care expands scholarly understandings of the sites associated with remaking a world, draws attention to the simultaneity of harms and care, sheds light on the textured meanings of politics and political work, and highlights ethical and narrative dilemmas regarding how to capture these political meanings without reducing their intricacies. For each of the pillars of our argument, we propose a set of questions and avenues that can shape emergent research agendas on taking love and care seriously in contexts of armed conflict.

How love orders: an engagement with disciplinary International Relations

“…Taken together, their diverse accounts of love lend credence to three claims. First, along with the first wave of literature on love (Hartnett, 2022; Krystalli and Schulz, 2022; Pin-Fat, 2019) and political emotions (Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008; Crawford, 2000; Mercer, 2006), they unequivocally affirm that love and emotions matter to IR. 1 Second, they gesture towards intellectual history, in general, and disciplinary IR, in particular, as important and largely untapped resources for theorising love.…”

“…Third, and to this end, this article reveals how love has served as an ideological mask for power. Complicating important accounts of love’s significance as a ‘practice of peace’ (Hartnett, 2020), a soteriological space amid violence (Krystalli and Schulz, 2022) and a decolonial emotion (Poopuu, 2022), this article illuminates how love has also been evoked to advance violent worldmaking projects of empire, war and domination. Revealing the latent ideological content of disciplinary IR (Persaud, 2022), this engagement with what love is used to evoke and govern equips us with a better understanding of how the ideas we inherit, the emotions we evoke and the imaginaries we inhabit can be as racialised, gendered and classed as the canons that bequeath them.…”

Organizing leadership education and learning for liberation

“…Mutual aid, as an idea and practice, has gained significant traction amidst concerning global trends that have withered social safety nets, privatized responsibility, and prioritized profits over people (Beito, 2000; Krystalli & Schulz, 2022; Littman et al., 2022; Spade, 2020a). Spade (2020b), who has written extensively on mutual aid movements, offered a definition of mutual aid that is particularly helpful within the larger framework of liberation and liberation's desire to dismantle capitalist and colonial forms of oppression (e.g., domination and exploitation).…”

Rethinking the political in the pluriverse: The ethico-political significance of care

“…Care is varied, sometimes takes surprising forms and appears in unexpected spaces (e.g. Krystalli and Schulz, 2022), and different collectives have different practices of care that sometimes exist alongside each other unnoticed, while at other times, they are deeply antagonistic (e.g. Blaser, 2018).…”