steve on Nostr: “Emotional Choices: How the Logic of Affect Shapes Coercive Diplomacy” by Robin ...
“Emotional Choices: How the Logic of Affect Shapes Coercive Diplomacy” by Robin Markwica
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Not many books can be deemed “transformative” but damn… this one earned that distinction. Markwica challenges prevailing scholars from international relations, psychology, AND coercion theory to present a novel framework for how emotions affect coercive diplomacy. The author begins this ambitious task with a thorough, multi-disciplinary literature review that reconciles traditional realist and liberal IR views thru a constructivist lens. Our identities, cultures, and norms shape the emotions we feel when exposed to outside stimuli. Those emotions, consequently, affect both our appraisals of emerging situations as well as our actions in response to them. Markwica tests his framework by applying it to two cases: the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1991 Gulf War. Across both cases, the author shows that 50% of the key decisions made by Nikita Khrushchev and Saddam Hussein during each crisis were heavily influenced by their felt emotions and the cognitive constructs that informed them. This was a very structured book that reads more like a dissertation than a novel—a fact which only aids the reader in absorbing the multi-disciplinary points made by the author. Ultimately, the conclusion is clear: your feelings DO matter. ☺️😥😱😡
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Not many books can be deemed “transformative” but damn… this one earned that distinction. Markwica challenges prevailing scholars from international relations, psychology, AND coercion theory to present a novel framework for how emotions affect coercive diplomacy. The author begins this ambitious task with a thorough, multi-disciplinary literature review that reconciles traditional realist and liberal IR views thru a constructivist lens. Our identities, cultures, and norms shape the emotions we feel when exposed to outside stimuli. Those emotions, consequently, affect both our appraisals of emerging situations as well as our actions in response to them. Markwica tests his framework by applying it to two cases: the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1991 Gulf War. Across both cases, the author shows that 50% of the key decisions made by Nikita Khrushchev and Saddam Hussein during each crisis were heavily influenced by their felt emotions and the cognitive constructs that informed them. This was a very structured book that reads more like a dissertation than a novel—a fact which only aids the reader in absorbing the multi-disciplinary points made by the author. Ultimately, the conclusion is clear: your feelings DO matter. ☺️😥😱😡