My research explores the intersection of international relations and emotions. I aim to understand sovereignty as a ‘felt relationship’, foregrounding the affective dimensions of the concept. In my article in Millennium, I referred to this developing research agenda as the study of the ‘affective economies of sovereignty.’ Sovereignty is a mode of organizing power in the modern world, and an imagination of how power can and should be organized, what power is, and what it means to feel powerful or powerless. In my research, I analyze the affective economies of sovereignty to make sense of international politics.
International relations scholarship is built on often-implicit ideas about emotions. We constantly make assumptions about affective force of nationalism, religion, ethnicity, ideology, race, and more. Yet, despite the omnipresence of emotions in our theories, we rarely discuss them explicitly and the language of our discipline often brackets the messiness of emotions. My research aims to excavate the emotional engine at the heart of international relations and develop concepts that foreground the constitutive role of emotions in international relations and our theories of it.
Dissertation and Book Project
My dissertation explores how emotions are constitutive of political discourse in the sovereign relationship between Pakistan and the United States. I identify and analyze how two dominant affective genres of political discourse shape this relationship: melodrama and seriousness. As modes of sensemaking and feeling, these genres are specific ways of narrating politics, imagining the self and others, feeling moral, and adjudicating future actions. They rehabilitate the desire for sovereignty and morality in a complicated and messy world in their own ways.
I argue that the discourse of seriousness posits the ‘serious’ state as a rational-hero in a sea of emotional others, while the discourse of melodrama posits the state as a virtuous victim-hero fighting evil villains. Seriousness traffics in a subdued affect, a pathos of rationality and gravitas, and renders sovereignty as a strategic and moral necessity. Melodrama traffics in heightened affects of pain and suffering of the self and promises the redemption of sovereignty for the virtuous nation. Seriousness is about feeling the self as non-feeling and heroic in its rationality. It is a story of hard realities, limited agency, and doing what must be done because structure, facts, and reason demand it. Melodrama transforms intense feelings of powerlessness and victimhood to legitimize violent expressions of state power, feel them as moral, legitimate, and guaranteed to be successful. It is a story of the triumph of sovereign freedom.
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Empirically, I demonstrate how Pakistan and the U.S. draw on both genres to understand their place in the world, what it means to be a sovereign state, and how they should practice international politics. I draw on archival sources—including speeches, press conferences, autobiographies, interviews, television analysis, and military social media productions—to see the genres in practice. I focus on pivotal moments such as Pakistan’s nuclear tests in 1998, the relationship reset after 9/11, the Osama Bin Laden raid, and drone attacks, where these genres’ contrasting affects and effects are most evident. For example, after a period of denying drone attacks in Pakistan, the Obama administration drew on seriousness to legitimize them as strategic and moral necessities. Drawing on official statements and news coverage after Obama’s first public acknowledgement of these drone attacks, I show how serious political discourse situates drone attacks as strategically sound and morally right. In contrast, the drone attacks contribute to a growing melodramatic politics in Pakistan that sees U.S. imperialism as the root of Pakistan’s powerlessness, evidenced in anti-American protests and domestic political discourse. I demonstrate how these genres resonate in both countries and their relationship by closely looking at policy decisions and political discourse.
The project begins with an introductory chapter on the Pakistan-U.S. relationship and its emotions. Chapter 2 introduces my conceptual toolkit, methodological approach, and theoretical intervention. I identify how thinking with affect and genre offers a new understanding of international relations and a model to study political affect. In Chapter 3, I analyze U.S. melodrama and Pakistani seriousness in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, looking at presidential addresses and media coverage. In Chapter 4, I study how President Obama’s seriousness emerged as the anti-thesis to earlier U.S. melodramatic politics, by analyzing the Obama administration’s public addresses and news coverage. In Chapter 5, I analyze how melodramatic politics in Pakistan developed in response to U.S. seriousness during the long War on Terror, looking at how the military regime came under increasing democratic pressure. I analyze a range of materials, including op-eds, autobiographies, political essays, and speeches targeted at domestic and international audiences by Pakistani political leadership. I contextualize this analysis with an emotional history of the relationship during the Cold War, focusing on the role played by China and India, as well the politics of nuclear weapons.
I am developing the dissertation into a book project titled Melodramatic Nations and Serious States. In the book, I will expand Chapter 5 to focus only on the long War on Terror. An additional chapter will focus on the politics of nuclear weapons during the Cold War and before-9/11 as I have uncovered significant archival material on nuclear weapons and the Pakistan-U.S. relationship. I am currently editing Chapter 4 into a manuscript for a journal submission this fall.
Publications:
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In my Millennium article, I study how the affective economies of sovereignty is a developing literature that explores questions of sovereignty, agency, power, and politics in a cultural-affective register. I argued that these studies depend on assumptions about the desire for sovereignty and identification with the state form. I consider how these studies posit sovereignty as an unattainable fantasy and caution against this assumption. I am concerned that the literature often misses out on the idea that ‘the fantasy is not that some of us can be sovereign but rather that all of us can be sovereign.’
Working Papers
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“No-Drama Obama: Empire of Seriousness”
After the emotional excess of the Bush presidency and the War on Terror, President Obama campaigned on a promise of sobering realism, tough choices, and a strategy based on facts on the ground. Obama’s ‘fundamental seriousness’ was the anti-thesis to ideological and emotional arm-chair weekends warriors who led the U.S. to a disastrous war in Iraq and away from the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet even as seriousness presents itself as the solution to the problems of ideology and emotion, its successful performance increases the proclivity to violence. I explore seriousness as a way of making sense of the nation- state and its place in the world order. The serious state traffics in what can be described as subdued affect, a pathos of rationality and gravitas, and morally necessary sovereignty. I analyze seriousness’ political work as affect by analyzing it as a genre of political discourse by looking at how it casts the self and others, its affective moral economy, style, narrative, and narrative trajectory. The paper explores how seriousness operates in Obama’s foreign policy speeches, especially as a making sense of and legitimizing U.S. imperial sovereignty.
"Being Intentional About Intentions"
International relations explanations depend on an assumptions about intentions, and Intentions are central to moral and political questions everyday. The intention behind an action is as important as the action it self, and as intentions are inherently within us, this is a process of consistent interpretation. The politics of intention, of attributing intentions to the self and others, is central to politics. In international relations, realism fundamentally depends on the simultaneous unknowability of intentions and assuming the worst. Ikenberry's famous consent-based order is hierarchical but not coercive because it is built on different intentions. This paper situates the politics of intention as central to international relations theory and practice, demonstrating its poltiical effects and illustrating a method to study 'the politics of intentions.'
“The Regime of Regime Change”
The world of global politics is replete with stories of regime change, whether through overt interventions such as war and coercive diplomacy, or the hidden machinations of intelligence agencies. Stories of regime change abound and there are significant disagreements about what counts as regime change. Do intelligence agencies have the skills to completely administer a regime change from nothing or is their best case supporting an actor already on the way? How much effect does a diplomatic statement of support or opposition have? I argue that answers to these questions and the politics of regime change is dependent on implicit theories of the relational nature of the international system. By analyzing three cases of regime change claims (Iran, Pakistan, and Nicaragua), I show what kind of assumptions are required to believe that each is or is not a case of regime change.
"The Tragedy of Realism"
The notion of tragedy is a central rheotroical device in realist theories. The realists often locate the tragedy of power politics in the structure of the international politics and the nature of the actors involved (the self-interested state pursing power or security both lead to a similar tragic conclusion). The inherent flaw is both in the structure and the actors. The realist is able to identify this flaw but in tragic fashion, the protagonist states are helpless against these inherent flaws. In this paper, I wonder if turning the tragic lens back towards the realists helps us consider whether the realists are the true tragic heroes of their own stories. Their focus on the tragic flaws of others blinds them to their own. This paper is rooted in an exploration of the different uses of the concept of tragedy in political science and theory applied to realism.
"Sovereignty Costs"
Sovereignty structures the international order in ways that makes it possible for certain states to be sovereign at the expense of other states and peoples. The fantasy of sovereignty as a promise of self-determination, autonomy, and supreme authority within a territory for the nation-state is a misrecognition of the basic conditions of international politics. Certain states pay sovereignty costs and bear a disproportionate burden of the system so that other states can enjoy the sovereignty they desire. I argue that ‘sovereignty costs’ are not externalities or deviations from a system of sovereign states but are an intrinsic feature of sovereignty. The sovereign self must be sovereign over others to feel a sense of agency. The desire for the fantasy of sovereignty is sustained by sovereignty costs, whether for states that pay them or those that reap the benefits.