We are excited to invite you to attend the Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group’s annual lecture for 2026. This year, we are delighted to welcome Professor Ty Solomon from the University of Glasgow as our speaker, who will explore the gendered and affective dimensions of the decline of the liberal international order.
"The fragmentation of the liberal international order (LIO) is perhaps the predominant debate in contemporary International Relations and yet, the affective underpinnings of that fragmentation remains surprisingly neglected. In this lecture, I argue that the politics of gender, nested within the broader rise of global conservative, right-wing, and reactionary movements, offers a uniquely revealing window into how and why the LIO is unravelling.
While much existing work on contemporary reactionary movements focuses on network analysis or intellectual histories, this lecture approaches the specifically affective orientations and circulations of these movements through everyday performances and practices of masculinity, within the first and second Trump administrations in the United States. I suggest that the ostentatious gendered performances associated with Trump’s foreign policy resonate with a broader landscape of everyday micropolitics: ontological insecurities, perceived cultural onslaughts from globalisation, fear of unaccountable global institutions, and simmering racial resentments.
This has important implications for how we study LIO decline. Current research tends to privilege institutional and structural changes at the macro level, such as national parties and leaders, global balances of power, and the viability of multilateral institutions. Yet these changes are consistently animated by micropolitical affective dynamics that such frameworks struggle to capture. Surveying a range of gendered performances from the Trump administration, I argue that IR cannot fully comprehend the causes and consequences of LIO decline without attending to its shifting gendered-affective landscapes."
Registration will close two hours before the event begins.