Emotions and charged emotional relationships may permeate the international system and long outlast the initial cause for emotions, leaving self-sustaining fearful environments.
Mainstream IR theories must further analyse fear and the mechanics of its invocation in order to better understand international politics and the complexities of fear.
Fear, which is a ‘basic emotion directed at a specified object that prompts an adaptive response: fight or flight’, plays a significant role in the practices of deterrence.
Fieldwork is, among many other things, messy, and deeply frustrating and failure is unavoidable. The feelings this produces are shared by many researchers.
In presenting a story of my own negotiation, I call for careful consideration of ‘I’ as an object, voice, and tool – and how it might entwine with hierarchies.
A practical and collective reflexivity is indispensable to the type of embedded, ethnographic fieldwork so many of us are now undertaking in the field of IR.
No one knows how or to what extent affect and failure will enter your research. So it may be reassuring to know that affect failure is not a failure of research practice.
As Postcolonial Theory becomes accepted in the mainstream, how do we control the means through which academia aims to re-invent its as only seemingly more benign?
The only stories that are possible to be told are the translations of ours or our interlocutors’ experiences located in particular places and in particular times.
Failure is produced structurally but experienced personally, and is always hard to take. All academics, by virtue of being academics, are haunted by it.
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