Emotional choices

In political history, emotions are booming. Two recent biographies, Susanne Schattenberg's Leonid Breschnew: Staatsmann und Schauspieler im Schatten Stalins (Berlin: Boehlau Verlag, 2017) and Friederike Schotters's Frankreich und das Ende des Kalten Krieges: Gefühlsstrategien der équipe Mitterrand 1981–1990 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), illustrate this trend. While many of these publications are less concerned with the theoretical problems of measuring emotions and their impact ex post facto and from afar, Robin Markwica aims to expand the limits of the discipline. Markwica analyses the impact of emotions in shaping the reaction of two famous targets of coercive diplomacy in two specific crises: Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and Saddam Hussein in the Gulf conflict of 1990–91. The book is well grounded in English-language literature in International Relations theory, psychology, sociology, political sciences and, of course, history. But the author uses neither unpublished, nor Russian-language nor Arabic-language sources. The

Affect (linguistics · De facto · Diplomacy · Humanities · International relations · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · History of Emotions Research · Law · Military History and Strategy · Philosophy