'Waging word wars': The 'emotionscape' of the United Nations Security Council and the Russian war in Ukraine

This paper seeks to make three intersected contributions: to the growing body of work on emotions in geopolitics, to important scholarship on geographies of diplomacy, and to the further engagement of geopolitics with language writing, delivery, and reception, that is its performative and affective dimensions. A unique and central focus of the paper is emotive language and its use in diplomacy at a time of heightened international tension. Language making is intrinsic to and constitutive of engagements with power and the [geo] political. Building upon the concept of the UN Security Council as an 'emotionscape' - a setting which emphasises in relational ways the inter-language, inter-cultural, and inter-individual contexts of emotive language use - the paper shows how language writing and its performance in diplomacy not only binds language with practice but must also be sensitive to the contingencies of place, people, and context; it has a geographical sensibility. In effect, the reception of language in claim making requires an explicit connection to be made between emotions, space, and geopolitical process. The paper seeks to ground emotions spatially by focusing on the diplomatic body/bodies as loci at which geopolitical power is produced and contested through language practice and, crucially, is coconstituted with the international. This embodied geopolitics presents diplomatic bodies as sites of performance of language practice rather than merely surfaces for its inscription. Using first hand interviews with senior diplomats working in the Security Council, and in the specific context of the Russian war in Ukraine, this paper examines how emotive language is deployed in diplomatic calculation and the limits to and consequences of its use in the 'emotionscape'.