In the past two decades, an interdisciplinary body of scholarship has drawn attention to the emotional dimensions of internationalism. These affective approaches have revealed the range of more-than-political forces that move diplomats, animate public campaigns, and structure institutional memory.
This conference takes up a related, yet different starting point, drawing in part on Judith Butler’s framework in The Psychic Life of Power, wherein various actors develop “passionate attachments” to subject positions, institutions, or ways of governing. Moving from a strictly emotional to a more psychological frame, the conference asks participants to think with concepts such as projection and transference. Once understood politically, we can attend to the processes by which people cast inner conflicts, desires, or anxieties onto a symbolic screen—others, institutions, or nations—so that what is inward and uncertain appears outward, visible, and actionable. Thus, the conference asks: how do institutions designed to manage trade, war, health, or aid become sites of displaced desire, grievance, or fantasy—asked to carry demands they were never built to fulfill? And above all, how might thinking in those terms lead us to rethink the historical birth and transformation of these bodies, as well as their perceived successes and failures, past and present?
Programme to be published soon
With the support of the Global Governance Centre and the Department of International History and Politics
