Political Memory, Emotions, and the Politics of Exclusion in IR
Abstract
A growing body of literature has emphasized that emotions, memory and exclusion constitute a fundamental element of world politics. Nevertheless, these themes have continued to receive relatively limited attention within mainstream International Relations (IR) scholarship (Crawford, 2000; Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008; Mercer, 2010; Hutchison and Bleiker, 2014; Pace and Bilgic, 2018). The dominance of rational-institutional and empiricist–positivist approaches in IR has constrained analytical engagement with emotional and affective dimensions, which are often framed as subjective, irrational, and methodologically elusive. Yet over at least the past two decades, scholarships on emotions, affect, and political memory have expanded significantly. This body of literature demonstrates that emotions operate as social and political practices that play a central role in the formation of collective identities and historically constituted global power relations (Ahmed, 2014; Berenskoetter, 2014; Hutchison, 2016). Emotions function as mechanisms that bind political subjects to particular memories, draw boundaries between “us” and “them,” and shape what is deemed morally and politically meaningful in world politics. At the same time, memories of colonialism, structural violence, and the emotions of affected communities such as grief, political anger, existential anxiety, and past trauma are frequently excluded from mainstream IR discourse and international policymaking. This limited engagement with emotional dimensions has direct implications for how political memory is understood to operate through mechanisms of selection and exclusion in International Relations, shaping affective orientations toward particular political subjects. Certain historical experiences are activated, legitimized, and granted international recognition, while others are silenced, depoliticized, or marginalized (Olick, 2007; Subotic, 2019). These processes generate moral hierarchies, understood as normative structures that determine which forms of suffering are recognized as worthy of concern, which victims are considered legitimate, and which historical experiences