Towards an emotional geography of diplomacy: Insights from the United Nations Security Council

Abstract

In this paper I progress an emotional geography of diplomacy by considering emotions as part of calculative action on the part of diplomats. I seek to move the spotlight away from what emotion is to what emotion, as an embodied sociality, seeks to do to the alteration or reproduction of geopolitical relations. This unique focus on the calculative dimensions of emotional usage in diplomacy is a central though unexplored dimension of emotional geopolitics and one that I consider supports a perspective in which emotions are not depoliticised or trivialised, but situated, historicised, and relational, and which may be mobilised for political purposes. Focusing on the socio-spatiality of calculative emotions, and building on recent scholarly interest in the mobilisation and manipulation of emotions, I explore their use in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), a poignant and powerful context for the study of emotional diplomacies. Using empirically rich materials derived from interviews with Security Council delegations, the paper's aims are threefold. First, I explore the different ways in which emotions are perceived, performed, interpreted, and acted on by diplomats in this international, inter-cultural geopolitical body. Second, from a geographical perspective I investigate the ways in which embodied emotions are distinctively connected to specific sites and spaces, and demonstrate the complexities of their usage in the UNSC. Finally, using a case study of Russian–UK emotional exchanges in the UNSC over the civil war and humanitarian crisis in Syria, I show that research on emotional diplomacies must be sensitive to the specific social and cultural assumptions over what particular emotions mean and do in altering and reproducing geopolitical relations.