International relations in the age of ‘post-truth’ politics

In 2016, the victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election, alongside the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union, led to the term ‘posttruth’ being chosen the word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary. These events also led to the publication of a spate of books that address how contemporary politics has shifted from an age of reason and facts to an age of emotion and lies. In reviewing several works on ‘post-truth’, this book review essay explores what this might mean for the discipline of International Relations (IR). As such, I argue that claims about an epochal shift to ‘post-truth’ politics are based on problematic distinctions between rationality and emotion, fail to reflect on the importance of emotion in politics and society prior to 2016, while also obscuring who is actually to blame for the events that are seen as archetypes of ‘post-truth’ politics. I suggest that the issues raised in these books require scholars of IR to move beyond claims about ‘post-truth’ politics, and instead to pay more attention to emotions, racism, sexism, everyday experiences and the role of mediatization in contemporary global politics.