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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  intellectual deliberation over politics. We associate emotional conduct with people 
different from ourselves and, perhaps, places far away from our own. Resisting 
This book is about the emotions connecting ordinary people to the world of poli- 
these assumptions, the theories and cases discussed in this book depict emotions 
tics. It dispenses with the still-commonplace notion that emotions affect only a 
as by-products of everyday social interaction and constitutive elements of political 
marginal population of especially zealous political actors. In the post- 
action. As people receive messages through mass media and participate in other 
Enlightenment West, we generally treat emotions as among the least reliable and 
rituals of public life, they accumulate repertoires of emotional expression. These 
most expendable human capabilities—merely private states with no proper place in 
circulations of affect are contagious, but not in the negative sense of that word: 
expectations, hopes, fears, and other socially transmitted responses are integral to 
the way people—both elites and ordinary citizens—inhabit cultural and political 
communities. Far from a corrupting force, emotions lie at the heart of political 
practice in the modern world. 
This effort to redignify emotion stems from a long-standing curiosity about the 
emotional lives of ordinary people and the impact they have on political contes- 
tation. There is more than a small dose of personal soul-searching embedded in 

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the project—a fact that took me an embarrassing number of years to recognize. 
The project is undeniably a product of some deep, inarticulate need to understand 
why, in a world of emotional intensity, I often felt left out in the cold, as it were. I 
am happy that my work on the book has provided some insight on this intro- 
spective level, even as a proclivity for doing theory insulated me from intimate con- 
tact with actual, emoting people (the irony is not lost on me). The book also grew 
out of critical engagement with various scholarly literatures invested in intellec- 
tualist conceptions of human agency. As a one-time student of political theory, I 
felt tremendous disappointment in neo-Kantian philosophies privileging reflective 
forms of reason and celebrating the promise of deliberative democracy. I then re- 
belled, somewhat haphazardly, against a broad spectrum of rationalist and state- 
centric approaches to international relations, all of which seemed overly detached 
and artificially cleansed of the complex motivations and commitments that make 
human actors behave the way they do. The book is an attempt to capitalize on 
these hesitations by developing an alternative framework better suited to the affec- 
tive intensity of global politics—and to the profound complexity of affect itself. 
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