Love, Hate, and the Fate of International Organizations: The Psychological Life of Global Governance (1900–Present)
May 6-7, 2026
The Annual Pierre du Bois Conference ‘Love, Hate, and the Fate of International Organizations: The Psychological Life of Global Governance (1900–Present)’ is organised by the Graduate Institute in partnership with the Pierre du Bois Foundation and will take place at Maison de la Paix in Geneva, from May 6-7, 2026. Professor Amalia Ribi Forclaz and Professor Carolyn Biltoft organize the conference. This conference is also part of the ‘Global Governance, Trust and Democratic Engagement in Past and Present’ (GLO) Project.
Please find below a description of the conference:
In the past two decades, an interdisciplinary body of scholarship has drawn attention to the emotional dimensions of internationalism.[1] These affective approaches have revealed the range of more-than-political forces that move diplomats, animate public campaigns, and structure institutional memory.
This conference takes up a related, yet different starting point, drawing in part on Judith Butler’s framework in The Psychic Life of Power, wherein various actors develop “passionate attachments” to subject positions, institutions, or ways of governing.[2] Moving from a strictly emotional to a more psychological frame, the conference asks participants to think with concepts such as projection and transference. Once understood politically, we can attend to the processes by which people cast inner conflicts, desires, or anxieties onto a symbolic screen—others, institutions, or nations—so that what is inward and uncertain appears outward, visible, and actionable.[3] Thus, the conference asks: how do institutions designed to manage trade, war, health, or aid become sites of displaced desire, grievance, or fantasy—asked to carry demands they were never built to fulfill? And above all, how might thinking in those terms lead us to rethink the historical birth and transformation of these bodies, as well as their perceived successes and failures, past and present?
The conference will bring together researchers who think historically about how international institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, and their many specialized agencies have not only governed the international but have also absorbed the tensions of modern political psychology and subjectivity. Across media campaigns, petitions, and protests, IOs have been positioned as redeemers, betrayers, caretakers, and criminals. They have received letters from the wanton, the grief- and love-stricken, and from the earth’s most entitled as well as its most dispossessed. They have been objects of religious devotion or placed at the center of dark conspiracy theories. In short, they have become containers for forms of excess—objects of love, affection, disdain or fear.
By making this psychic life of IOs the central object of historical analysis, the conference breaks new ground. It offers an original conceptual framework for understanding how IOs carry, distort, and reflect back the impossible demands placed upon them by social reformers, activists, international civil servants, artists, and ordinary people. To ground this inquiry, the conference will draw on a wide range of concrete case studies.
This conference thus offers a different way of seeing and thinking about international organizations—not as what they were designed to be, but as what they have been and how they continue to operate in the modern psyche: objects onto which we project our beliefs, disappointments, hopes, and fears. Understanding these dynamics does not solve the institutional crises of legitimacy that IOs face, but it does clarify the nature of those crises. It teaches us that global governance is not only a rational problem of coordination; it is also a symbolic site charged with emotional and psychological assumptions. Until we fully understand those dynamics, we will continue to misread both the limits and the possibilities of international cooperation.
Contact: intlovehate.conference@gmail.com
[1] Ilaria Scaglia, The Emotions of Internationalism: Feeling International Cooperation in the Alps in the Interwar Period (Oxford University Press, 2020); Brenda Lynn Edgar et al., eds., Making Humanitarian Crises: Emotions and Images in History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); Anne-Marie Houde, “Emotions, International Relations, and the Everyday: Individuals’ Emotional Attachments to International Organisations,” Review of International Studies 51, no. 3 (2025): 504–22; Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford University Press, 2015); Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What Is the History of Emotions? (Polity Press, 2018); Ute Frevert, Feeling Political: Emotions and Institutions since 1789 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); Maéva Clément and Eric Sangar, eds. Researching Emotions in International Relations (Springer International Publishing, 2018); Todd Hall, Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage (Cornell University Press, 2015).
[2] Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997).
[3] C.N Biltoft, “Projection, Transference: Recasting the History of IOs in Psychoanalytic Terms” article, forthcoming. See also Joan W. Scott, “The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History,” History and Theory 51, no. 1 (2012): 63–83.; Geoffrey Cocks and Travis L Crosby, Psycho/History: Readings in the Method of Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and History (Yale University Press, 1987); Joy Damousi et al., The Transnational Unconscious: Essays in the History of Psychoanalysis and Transnationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).