Author ORCID Identifier

Emily Kidd White: 0000-0002-0131-797X

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

Talk of the emotional or affective turn in international law is relatively recent though it tracks and echoes several other critical methods movements, including the turn to history, in the study of international law and, so too, a two-decade long wave of law and emotions research in several domestic legal systems. The affective turn in international law in several instances aims to critique a post-Cold War optimism that held out the promise that a rules and reason-based international order would work to abate war, and secure peace, prosperity and efficient capital flows. As outlined by the editors of this volume of the Cambridge History of International Law, ‘the period beyond or after the Cold War held out enormous hope precisely because it offered the possibility of change and great change at that’. With others similarly casting it as ‘a moment widely thought to be full of new ‘global’, if not cosmopolitan, possibilities’, involving ‘a high-minded desire and universalist objective to build a stable global legal order [that] was projected back to 1945, and then described as having been sacrificed by, and during, the Cold War’. Against this backdrop promise, the focus on emotions and affect in the study of international law stands to offer, via different manners and modes of analysis, critical appraisals of the convincing-or-not performances of this cosmopolitan liberal, legal formalism that rooted (and continues to root) the teaching and practice of international law as a ‘disembodied, disarticulated discipline’ in this so declared post-Cold War era.

The turn to the study of emotions in the history of international law stands to put pressure on the promise of this hopeful mode sketched above, often by illustrating the ways that legal theory offers formal rationalisations of hideously unequal status quo distributions of political and economic power. Indeed, one can map a burgeoning set of projects in the study of international law that foreground, examine, or use emotions (or affect) to better understand the history and politics of international law vis-à-vis this post-Cold War promise of good order.

This chapter takes up the broad challenge of thinking about emotions in the history of international law in the post-Cold War era by addressing the subject, sideways, through an essay by Bernard Williams. Drawing from Williams’s discussion of a tragedy by Sophocles, The Women of Trachis, this chapter speaks to the ways that philosophical conceptions of time set the backdrop for certain emotions appearing apt within a particular political era, and so too, how moralised philosophies of mind and action come to pervade historical thinking, including, as this chapter will argue, historical thinking about international law. Emotions can reveal deep political commitments, and they often serve to reinforce at the cultural level a material base or set of structured power relations. This leads to some emotions presenting as obscure, hard-to-place, or somehow out of bounds, where certain dominant frames and ways of seeing work to exclude them (consider here, for example, how some public acts of mourning have wrought political backlash, vilification, and persistent misconstrual). Attention paid to the work of emotions settled in the bedrocks of certain dominant theories about international law in the post-Cold War period, elucidate the ways in which they support an indomitable, impervious, and challenge-resistant form of liberal hopefulness (one apt to exclude history and horror), that is characteristic of the post-Cold War optimistic mode outlined above, and which later, when confronted with overwhelming political violence, transmutes for some actors into an incredible nostalgia for a past now construed as sufficiently orderly for that same liberal hopefulness to flourish.

Comments

"Chapter 37 from The Cambridge History of International Law, Vol. XII. Forthcoming in late 2023."

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