ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that political communities in world politics are composes of emotion norms or feeling rules that set the frame for appropriate interpretations and meanings of emotional performance among members of a particular group, and thus incorporate sociocultural standards into the emotional lives of agents. The emotions political, and relevant for International Relations (IR), is the communitarian nature: the affective connections between individuals and the respective communities. Emotions can be culturally constructs and culturally shared in the sense that culture provides a “structure of feeling”—a set of emotions that show a regular pattern—that constrains and compels affective experience in order to facilitate group cohesion, thereby reproducing power relationships. Theories of emotions across disciplines have not always acknowledges the mutual relevance. The particular conception of constructing emotional worlds shares many affinities and is compatible with various other research agendas in IR.
