Mapping the emotional terrain of foreign policy

Despite growing interest in political emotion, progress toward understanding the role of emotion in international relations is hampered by two related problems: (1) we have a more fully developed lexicon for discussing emotions related to people than to countries, and (2) we have a better understanding of the main dimensions of interpersonal emotion than of the emotional terrain of foreign policy. Theory development thus depends on an improved account of the emotions commonly evoked in international relations and of how they relate to one another. Techniques developed by psychologists and applied to text from United Nations Special Session proceedings and speeches by prominent national leaders can facilitate a network analysis of emotions in international discourse, yielding a general picture of the emotions at play in foreign policy across time and topic. This research provides a foundation to improve our understanding of the way emotion is structured in international relations.