Affective states: Rethinking passion in global politics

This dissertation recasts passion as a vital topic for international relations, a creative dimension of global life, and a potential resource for international law and ethics. It develops an account of how affect connects people to nation-states, as well as political movements above and below the nation. It then considers the implications of this account for the study of international conflict and international criminal justice. The dissertation begins with a genealogy of passion in international relations theory, arguing that existing perspectives are only partly equipped to theorize the micropolitics of affect: Realists understand the importance of passions but cast them as unchanging aspects of human nature, and constructivists---focusing on identity as the primary channel of social construction---miss the affective depth of political agency. From this genealogy, the dissertation develops a theoretical account of the global micropolitics of affect. This work explains how memories and habits from a variety of historical moments and a range of social, economic, and cultural fields become folded into contemporary political events and encounters. Drawing especially from the work of Gilles Deleuze, it underlines the nonsubjective dimension of affect and traces its significance for understanding collective agency. In this view, affect consists not of subjective feelings but of habits and other inarticulate states that tie individuals to multiple constituencies; it forges political identities before these are recognized as such. The dissertation explores the significance of these contentions for the study of international conflict and international justice and reconciliation. It takes two so-called ethnic conflicts from the 1990s---in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda---and identifies the specific practices and events that induced affective energy and escalated violence in each case. Tracing the micropolitics of affect shows how wider ranges of memory and more plural and dynamic sites of agency are involved in these conflicts than is commonly supposed. The dissertation considers the implications of theses ideas for both the international criminal justice regime and non-legalist alternatives to criminal justice. It argues that rethinking passion opens new possibilities for juridical and quasi juridical institutions to intervene productively in the micropolitics of affect.