Emotions in-and-out of Equilibrium
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The first paper attempts to show the epistemological continuities between rational-choice and projective identification. For example, by applying arrow's impossibility theorem at the sub-individual/emotional level of analysis.
The book chapter brings the philosophy of science to shed light on a methodology and method of styding emotions in IR. Drawing from equilibrium analysis as used by theoretical physicists and microeconomists, and borrowing from object-relations theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, I propose conceptualizing emotions as the empirical traces of an underlying affective dynamic of trauma and its defences in-and-out of equilibrium. This allows us to trace the emotions causing different identities to stick with different actors by asking: what are these identities defensive of? |
Critique of Neuro-Politics
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The second paper project evaluates the import of neuroscience into IR. I argue that this turn is misguided for five reasons. First, it cannot make the jump from material neuron to social meaning; second, it conceals the fact that neuroimages are themselves socially interpreted by neuroscientists (and those interpretations are often contested); third, the appeal of a neuroscientific legitimacy often prematurely ends debate on what would be otherwise worthwhile theorizing on how social emotions shapes IR; fourth, the turn to the body as an attempt to find emotions or human nature below the conscious mind neglects the possibility of finding emotions in the unconscious mind; fifth, it runs the normative risk of reducing empathy to accurate guesses and human subjectivity to bare life. In short, scholars of IR ought not to merely import the “findings” from the natural sciences without paying attention to the research design, and indeed the philosophy of science behind those findings themselves.
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