Daniel Møller Ølgaard

This chapter grapples theoretically and analytically with the significance of new digital media technologies in relation to the study of emotions and world politics. It begins with a review of existing international relations literature that identifies the need for scholarly engagement with the technological backdrop of emotions and their politics. Drawing on insights from postphenomenology, it then introduces “technological mediation” as a theoretical prism with which to make sense of the role of media technologies in relation to how emotions become collective and shape world politics. It ends by illustrating the value of this approach by exploring how the refugee crisis is mediated in the virtual reality (VR) experience Sense of Home. In doing so, the chapter unveils the politics of emotions inherent to this humanitarian VR experience, which appeals to and manages the emotions of spectators but also reproduces problematic ways of seeing distant suffering.

This chapter investigates digital media as new spaces for the promotion and normalisation of war and violence and marks a shift in analytical focus from the content of digital text, images or videos to the wide range of senses and practices involved in providing meaning to these forms of representation. To this end, the chapter presents an embodied reading of Islamic State’s (IS) propaganda video ‘Flames of War’. This draws out, firstly, how the organisation’s online propaganda addresses the embodied and affective sensibilities of spectators to facilitate a felt sense of intimacy and, secondly, how the affective potentials and intensities generated by such experiences are mobilised through the networked dynamic of digital and social media. These, the chapter argues, are distinctive features of how war is experienced on and through digital media, revealing new possibilities for promoting military action for insurgent groups like IS who do not have the communicative capacities that state militaries do.