Abstract
Emotional influence on academic knowledge production is a pervasive but overlooked phenomenon. Like all academics, strategic studies scholars generate knowledge through thinking. Contemporary psychological and neuroscientific research indicates that all thinking is, for better or worse, influenced by emotions. Recent research from across different fields indicates that scholarly thinking is not an exception in this regard. Emotions as diverse as fear, anxiety, wonder, awe, and anger accompany scholars in their everyday investigations and shape how and what academics think about their subjects of inquiry. Building upon this previous research, this paper investigates how the emotion of interest matters to the development of strategic studies scholarship. In our field, we usually treat interest in a rationalistic manner; almost as a manifestation of a cost/benefit calculation. The infamous trinity of “fear, honour, and interest”, unfairly ascribed to Thucydides, is perhaps the most popular example of this tendency. However, there are other ways to think about interest. Specifically, contemporary psychological literature shows that interest can also be understood as an emotion. This literature allows us to understand how interest emerges, how it influences our thinking, how it motivates behavior, and how it can be regulated. Accordingly, this paper combines this emotional perspective with abductive logic and selected examples of contemporary strategic studies scholarship to illustrate how interest shapes knowledge production in our field. The paper further discusses some notable implications of interest’s influence on strategic studies scholarship. In particular, it highlights certain positive and negative aspects of interest’s influence and elaborates on the possibility of regulating interest for the purpose of improving the quality of thinking in strategic studies.
Panel: Knowledge Production on War