Political events can evoke strong emotions. Rising tides of nationalism, protest movements, and political polarization have provoked a new awareness of emotion in domestic politics, but emotion is also an important feature of international relations as well. Although we might think first of emotions associated with tragic events, particularly in the international domain, positive emotions such as hope and compassion also play a role in shaping foreign policies.

Scholars who study foreign policy tend to underestimate the importance of both positive and negative emotions because microeconomic models of policy making resting on rational choice assumptions have given us so many important insights into the strategic dynamics of foreign policy. In contrast, efforts to study the role of emotion lack the conceptual rigor and the organizing intellectual framework that formal rational models provide.

In several ongoing research projects, I am exploring the “emotional terrain” of foreign policy in an effort to develop better models of emotion in foreign policy. Stephen McAvene and I have catalogued a wide range of emotion words in various United Nations documents in order to identify emotion “clusters” that might shed light on the most prominent dimensions of emotional responses to international events. Our recent paper in International Politics, “Mapping the Emotional Terrain of Foreign Policy,” develops a “time-control-valence” (TCV) model of emotion in foreign policy.