Practical wisdom is caring understanding of the good in the situations of a human life. Our emotions are rational to the extent that we care about the real good and are truthful about the facts. The two main kinds of virtues – the virtues of caring and the enkratic virtues – embody different aspects of practical wisdom. On the one side, in compassion, generosity, justice, and sense of duty, we care about and understand our good in its varieties and aspects. On the other side, we know about and know our practical way around ourselves, our shortcomings and the ways they may be mitigated and repaired by use of courage, patience, perseverance, and self-control. The virtues of caring form a coherent ensemble and overall picture of the good, a practical wisdom by which we see our situations in the perspective of a whole life.

Chapter 23 stresses that four sets of ideas need to be added to the principles and the topics of focus mentioned in Chapter 22. First, neither international order nor national order can be sustainable if the contradiction that exists today between, on the one hand, the celebration of human rights and, on the other hand, the tendency to treat individuals as disposable, deepens or simply persists. Second, the global justice agenda cannot credibly claim to be feasible if it does not factor in the views of the rest of the world. It is imperative to integrate what the non-West thinks. The ownership of a global agenda cannot be lopsided. Third, a cosmopolitan approach does not have to call for the removal or elimination of the state and sovereignty; rather, it is their reconceptualization and the application of this reconceptualization that are recommended. Fourth, institutional innovation will help implement this agenda.

In this book, I have tried to make sense of legitimacy at the international level, especially in relation to international law. I have paid a lot of attention to international law, in particular aligned with the demands of legitimacy and justice. But international law is only one aspect of the forces and the ecosystem that shape international order. Therefore, alone it cannot engineer the change that the international system requires today. This change has to be part of a more comprehensive approach. Here is not the place to offer a full account of the areas on which research could concentrate in the future to further encourage justice and legitimacy at the international level. However, it is worthwhile to present a general overview of these areas. In particular, three domains offer a possible road map for facilitating a constructive path forward: globalization, emotions and passions in social life, and the geopolitics of tomorrow.

Marcus Aurelius acknowledges his debt to the Stoic tradition of emotions and endorses both the analysis of emotions as value judgements, the ideal of apatheia, i.e. the eradication of ‘passions’, and the promotion of ‘good feelings’. By emotions, he means all kinds of emotional reactions to everything that reaches us from the outside, i.e. pleasure and pain as well as anger, love, fear, etc. Every impression being twofold (what the object is and of what value it is to us), Marcus develops a strategy to eradicate the second judgement. But there is a positive side to the reshaping of desire and aversion, a joy resulting from the gifts of nature and the fulfilment of our human relations. Such emotions are reserved for the Sage in ancient Stoicism, but they become more accessible to Marcus, who does not reject any emotion from human life but values the appropriate ones.

Chapter III delves into the discursive mechanisms through which former Israeli conscripts in this study understood, justified and/or distanced themselves from the violent regime in which they serve(d) – relating this to the broader context of ‘moralised militarism’ so frequently attributed to the Israeli military. Through analysis of the speech acts, moralisations and emotive articulations by former and current soldiers, I argue that traits of emotional expression, reflection and critique – far from being anomalies of militarised masculinity in this context – are central to its legitimation and idealisation, enabling the soldier, and society more broadly, to retain their sense of humanity amidst enduring violence. Rather than performances of stoicism and emotional control with which ‘traditional’ forms of militarised masculinity are normatively associated, a more philosophical, emotive, and cerebral approach to violence appears to be celebrated and encouraged within Israeli militarism – consolidating the supposed relation between militarism, masculinity, and moralism in the settler-colonial state.

Specifically analysing the experiences of Palestinian youth in a West Bank refugee camp, Chapter IV analyses the navigation of emotions inevitably precipitated by the grinding realities of colonisation and military occupation, in a setting in which normative conceptions of masculinity assert that ‘men don’t cry’. Using Palestinian rap music as a case study to explore young refugee men’s navigation and subversion of these dynamics, I argue that emotional expression in this particular musical culture both functions to reconfigure binary gendered norms in a context of invasive settler colonialism, while simultaneously masculinising emotionality through a dialogic performance of emotion, nationalism, resistance, and paternalism. I illustrate, therefore, that in some ways gendered binaries are challenged in and through the performance of Palestinian rap as a form of resistance and release, while in other ways, these are reconfigured so that men’s emotional expression can be subsumed within them.

Chapter 5 reveals the numerous specific challenges experienced by emigrant soldiers and explores the coping mechanisms they employed. Compared to other soldiers, they experienced additional difficulties related to sending and receiving letters from abroad, in finding their preferred brands of foreign cigarettes and, for those without close family in Italy, in using their infrequent periods of leave. In addition to such practicalities, integration into the Italian Army was often challenging. A significant obstacle was their weak grasp of the Italian language and the fact that they were often treated as foreigners by others. There was no widespread recognition of the need to consider the emigrant soldiers as a distinct cohort within the Army and the men often felt forgotten and disregarded. Within a few months of Italy’s entry into the war, intense feelings of regret surfaced for most of the emigrants, even those who had previously been patriotic. While feelings of being Italian may have increased for many non-emigrant soldiers, the opposite was true of large numbers of those who had returned to Italy from abroad and many of them found their feelings of national belonging severely weakened as a result of their military service.

Describe some important features of infant–caregiver relationships; evaluate the role of early life experiences on later development; understand what emotions are for and how they develop.

This chapter explores the foundations of emotions from empirical research in neuroscience, biology, psychology, multiculturalism, and primatology. The phenomenon of emotional experience is depthless and ever complex. The reader learns to appreciate how social and emotional intelligences are necessary if one is to learn the nature of emotions. Cultural meanings, languages, and world paradigms may seek to define emotions. However, this chapter argues that by developing a multicultural humanistic psychology approach to understanding emotions, readers can appreciate their flowing nature that is not known by definition, but through relationship.

This chapter discusses multicultural humanistic psychology, which is a theoretical foundation that seeks to engage the culturally relative self-actualization processes of the individual and community through the diverse spectrum of multicultural facets, so that wellbeing and social and emotional intelligences flourish. This paradigm synthesizes the strengths of both humanistic psychology and multicultural paradigms to support clinicians and educators in engaging with phenomena in the rapidly changing world. Multicultural humanistic psychology is not about validating Western cultural paradigms so that a new theory can be prepackaged and distributed globally. Rather, it is a way to awaken the potential of consilience, to recognize and transcend limitations, and acknowledge that together the fields are more relevant to global challenges. This paradigm guides the further discussions on social and emotional intelligences.