ABSTRACT
This chapter presents one of the central divides in emotions research in International Relations (IR): the distinction between affect and emotion. Affect is commonly understood as diffuse embodied experiences that are pre-conscious, automatic, and rooted in the sensory and neurological systems of the body. When IR scholars talk about the empirical effects of emotions, they’re often referring to distinct categories of embodied experience. Emotions categories such as fear, joy, and anger reflect discrete ranges of socially recognizable embodied experience and are often linked to distinct patterns of behavior. The affect/emotion divide in IR is rooted in broader debates over the terms across the social sciences and humanities. For all the insights that IR’s emotion turn has generated, there remain some key issues surrounding the conceptualizations of emotion and affect, respectively, as well as their asserted non-relationship. The ordering effects of encounters stem from how they discipline, govern, and cultivate affect into narrower emotional experiences.
