The Geopolitics of Emotion
How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
In the first book to investigate the far-reaching emotional impact of globalization, Dominique Moïsi shows how the geopolitics of today is characterized by a “clash of emotions.” The West, he argues, is dominated and divided by fear. For Muslims and Arabs, a culture of humiliation is quickly devolving into a culture of hatred. Asia, on the other hand, has been able to concentrate on building a better future, so it is creating a new culture of hope. Moïsi, a leading authority on international affairs, explains that in order to understand our changing world, we need to confront emotion. And as he makes his case, he deciphers the driving emotions behind our cultural differences, delineating a provocative and important new perspective on globalization.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An astonishingly creative response to Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, this groundbreaking analysis examines political trends through the prism of emotion, arguing that fear, humiliation and hope might be as influential as the cultural, social and economic factors that breed political conflict. Shedding keen light on the limitations of the geographic and cultural determinism that currently dominates international relations discourse, Mo si uses these definitions to remap the world's political regions. Dexterously avoiding clich or sentimentality, Mo si studies how emotions interact (e.g., fear is the absence of confidence; hope is the expression of confidence; humiliation is the loss of hope that results from wounded confidence) and plumbs the roots of Asia's culture of hope, the historical humiliation feeding Islamic extremism and the long-dominant emotions in the West: a fear of the "other," confusion about national identity and an anxiety to maintain global relevance. This elegant thesis presents the very real consequences of the "Clash of Emotions" and concludes with well-reasoned if tentative conjecture about how these currents will shift in years to come.
