Die Geopolitik der Emotionen – Zum Verhältnis von Sprache und Emotionen in geopolitischen Krisenzeiten am Beispiel der Bundestagsdebatten über den russischen Expansionskrieg in der Ukraine

Abstract. Analysing the emotionalisation of (geo)political discourses is becoming increasingly urgent in the context of the Russian-Ukranian war and the subsequent intensification of political debates. While the debate on emotional geopolitics has mainly concentrated on dimensions of materiality and the body, this article focuses on emotions in political debates on conflict and war. It therefore proposes a theoretical-conceptual perspective that explores the inner-discursive relationship between emotions and geopolitical imaginations. To this end, feminist and political-geographical debates on emotions and affects are adapted to the dynamics of geopolitical discourses, establishing a methodologically viable approach for a qualitative-interpretive analysis, that is capable of capturing both explicit manifestations of inner-discursive emotions and more implicit emotional moods. In order to understand the genealogy and dynamics of discursive-emotional ruptures in times of war, the article draws on Ahmed's (2014) concept of stickiness and connects it with the Foucaultian concept of the archive, here as archives of geopolitics.