국제정치학(IR)의 감정연구 : 비판적 검토와 이론적 제언

초록

Due to ‘logocentrism’ in Western philosophy since Plato, the binary thinking of ‘emotion-versus-reason’ has long served as a basis of theorization about our social and political worlds. In this thinking, emotion is believed to deter rational choice, and it thus needs to be controlled or even suppressed by reason. However, beginning in the mid-1980s, scholars of sociology, philosophy, and neuroscience took issue with such a dichotomous view of ‘reason-vs-emotion’ and had a reflexive look at the roles of emotion in social interactions. This is often called a ‘emotional turn’ in sociology. Building on this achievement, the field of International Relations (IR) has recently started to pay attention to emotion. This article intends to carry out a critical review of the recent IR literature on emotion from (meta-)theoretical perspectives and discuss theoretical implications emotion studies have for IR. To this end, the article first ponders the issues associated with the conceptual and ontological foundation of emotion. Although extant studies tend to conceptualize emotions in a binary manner (i.e. the micro vs. the macro or the individual vs. the group), we argue that emotion has ontological nature across individual and group (micro and macro) levels in which neither of them is given an ontological and thus conceptual and analytical priority. Based on this discussion, the article identifies how individual emotions lead to a collective and political emotion. In doing so, we pay particular attention to so-called ‘affective politics.’ As Hutchison and Bleiker point out, there is a serious gap in the existing literature about how certain emotions are triggered and/or sidelined in a nation’s certain social and political context or in certain power relationships between nations. A related question of how political elites maintain the status quo or create new power relations by using collective emotions has also received scant attention. Given such a paucity of work on ‘affective politics,’ we lay out a set of research agendas and related concepts that can help us have a better understanding of the relationship between emotion and power politics. This article concludes with critical implications of the developments in the recent studies on emotion for theorizing international relations. We suggest that IR take the study of emotion and its normative appeal seriously. Through reflectivism, emotion studies can offer significant practical values in terms of generating empathy, a necessary foundation for reconciliation and peace building among states and ethnicities.

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