Shock. Guilt. Hysteria. Fear. Shame. Envy. These are emotions evoked in our bodies every day. Our societies are filled with emotions. They are felt personally but are also passed down from generations, triggered by structures and have repercussions for the collective. We want change because we feel strongly about something—it stirs something deep within us. It’s angst drives you to protest: the anger that erupts in the face of injustice, the sorrow that compels you to stand with those who suffer, and the hope that pushes you to a better world. You feel grief over genocides and honor killings and loathe the systemic oppression and deliberate suppression of minorities by structures of power and acts of religious and racial persecution. All because they make you feel helpless, overwhelmed by the weight of human cruelty. Emotions—raw, unfiltered, and urgent— define our lives, society and the political landscape to a larger extent.

 

Politics, in turn, also manipulates and channels emotions—through rhetoric, policies, and media narratives—to sustain power, influence behaviour, or mobilize support. Despite their centrality, emotions remain an underrepresented aspect of political discourse, often dismissed as irrational or secondary to logic yet are forces that determine individual and larger social and institutional structures’ behaviour. By conflation of emotions with political process we also run the risk of diluting the validity of the discipline. We lose the fight against the positivists by not being ‘calculated’ ‘formalised’ and ‘scientific’ anymore. It is this meditation of the discipline (in both theory and praxis) with emotions that we wish to understand.