Roland Bleiker

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that although emotions play a significant role in world politics they have so far received surprisingly little attention by International Relations scholars and draw on feminist and other interpretive approaches to facilitate cross-disciplinary inquiries.

TL;DR: We have all grown accustomed to familiar representations of the international and its conflicts, and we gradually forget that we have become so accustomed to these politically charged and distorting metaphors that we accept them as real as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors survey the development of the respective debates and then offer a path forward, arguing that the key challenge is to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political, and 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 micro approaches that investigate how specific emotions function in specific circumstances.

TL;DR: The authors examine how media images of asylum seekers have framed ensuing debates during two crucial periods over the past decade and demonstrate that refugees have primarily been represented as medium or large groups and through a focus on boats, which reinforces a politics of fear that explains why refugees are publicly framed as people whose plight, dire as it is, nevertheless does not generate a compassionate political response.

TL;DR: The authors argue that aesthetic sources can offer alternative insight: a type of reflective understanding that emerges not from applying the analytical skills that are central to the social sciences, but from cultivating a more open-ended level of creativity and sensibility about the political.