ABSTRACT
War is associated with every conceivable human emotion: fear, loathing, pity, compassion, love, despair. This chapter seeks to navigate the growing but disparate body of scholarship concerned with the relationship between violence and affect in the modern era, defined here in the main as encompassing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapter does so, first, by exploring the ways in which emotion has been positioned centre stage in the historiography on war, in part through the importance attached in recent years to the lived experience of conflict, trauma and healing, understandings of gender and the significance of memory. Second, the paper argues that, while the bulk of this work has been concerned with Europe and the West, we can see these issues being framed increasingly in global terms, and within the context of ‘global modernity’. We are still some way off global parity – cultural and racial encounters, and postcolonial wars, are often framed in reductionist or dismissive ways – but there is a growing appreciation of the universality of emotional responses to war in the modern, global age.
