Kolloquium: Emotional Communities in International Relations: The Significance of Emotion Norms in NATO's Interallied Conflict Management

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2019 colloquium:

Simon Koschut, Freie Universität Berlin

Emotional Communities in International Relations: The Significance of Emotion Norms in NATO's Interallied Conflict Management

Emotional communities are all around us, whether we take a church congregation or supporters of a particular sports team. What links these communities conceptually is a collective understanding of its basic emotional appraisals and their appropriate expression. Emotional communities are groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – similar or related emotions. This research project investigates a particular type of emotional community in world politics: a security community. It is argued that emotion norms – the expression of appropriate emotions in a given situation – stabilize a security community, such as NATO, during inter-allied conflict. This argument will be empirically illustrated by comparative case studies of transatlantic conflict management.

Simon Koschut is a Heisenberg Fellow at the Otto Suhr Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Previously, he was a Fritz Thyssen Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, Assistant Professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Interim Assistant Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. His most recent book Undoing Peace: Normative Change and the Disintegration of Security Communities (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) received the Ernst Otto Czempiel Award for the best postdoctoral monograph published in the field of peace research. Simon Koschut received his PhD from the University of Potsdam in 2009. He studied Political Science and North American Studies in Berlin, Potsdam, Chapel Hill, and Bonn.