How love orders: an engagement with disciplinary International Relations

Abstract

Love plays an important role in the normative production and sustenance of order. Historically implicated in imaginaries of order, it has been evoked to constitute community, legitimate coercion and (dis)empower. Put differently, love provides the affective glue that binds groups, frames feelings to enable and constrain action and is integral to the workings of power. Love can be evoked and governed for various political ends. Complicating accounts of love as a positive emotion, this article uncovers love’s neglected history in disciplinary International Relations (IR) as an ideological mask that conceals its implication in violent worldmaking projects of empire, war and domination. To illustrate this, it identifies three ideal-typical – or Hegelian, Augustinian and Nietzschean – logics that exemplify love’s ordering work and examines how they find expression in the work of three leading figures of disciplinary IR, namely Alfred Zimmern (1859–1957), Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) and Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980).