Politics Of Emotion Research Articles

Challenging Democracy: Understanding How the Ideas of Populists and Disenchanted Citizens Align

This thematic issue proceeds from the idea that, despite extensive research, we do not know enough about the alternatives to representative party democracy that people disenchanted with democracy and populists envision apart from greater citizen involvement. Citizens’ potential preferences seem to range from stealth democracy and decision-making by apolitical experts to deliberative mechanisms and referenda. The picture is equally blurred when it comes to the views of populist actors themselves. Research suggests that their calls for referendums diminish over time and that they reject deliberative bodies outright. This thematic issue reassesses our understanding of the extent to which populists’ and citizens’ ideas and the alternatives they propose coincide and argues for a wider dissemination of relevant research that explores these shortcomings. The articles presented explore these points by featuring conceptually and/or methodologically innovative contributions that address issues such as the mismatch between populists and citizens in terms of democratic alternatives, (dis)satisfaction with populist parties in public office, the preferences of distinct subgroups as well as the role of political emotions among populist party supporters.

“No punishment is enough for monsters”: vindictiveness as an important political emotion in dealing with Belgian (potential) returnee men

ABSTRACT Building on the call to further integrate emotions in critical security and terrorism studies, we explore the ways emotions figure in media discourses and shape responses and policies on the returnee question. Through critical discourse analysis and thick description, we show how Belgian (potential) returnee men were subject to varying securitising discourses and emotional portrayals in media coverage over the past decade. Our argument contends that media discourse(s) on the returnee question exhibit a complex emotional landscape. We discern dominant, alternative and rising emotions that undergird the media coverage. We will illustrate how the “dominant” emotion of fear oscillated with an “alternative” emotion of vulnerability and, over the course of a decade, was accompanied by a “rising” emotion of vindictiveness. We argue that the cultivation of vindictiveness contributes to securitising narratives that portray Belgian (potential) returnee men as irredeemable monsters deserving of extreme punishments. This rising discourse undermines democratic principles and the rule of law. We speak of political emotions because emotions are deeply intertwined with power dynamics, societal structures, and political processes, which shape collective attitudes, behaviours, and policies towards (potential) returnees.

‘The end of the ‘revolution’ (al-thawra) but not revolutionaries (thuwwār)’*: insights from Syrian fighters

ABSTRACT What drives individuals to join and remain loyal to armed groups amidst the chaos of the Syrian war? This article investigates this question by focusing on the Sham Front, offering a multi-level analysis that integrates external influences, group dynamics, and personal experiences. Based on extensive fieldwork in northern Syria and southern Turkey, including narratives from fighters, commanders, and local leaders, this study reveals how perceived emotional hardships and political uncertainties create distinct revolutionary subjectivities. By considering the macro-level influence of external actors, the meso-level group dynamics, and the micro-level motivations of individual fighters, this article provides a comprehensive understanding of the factors shaping fighters’ behaviour. Incorporating theories of uncertainty-identity and the politics of emotions, the article challenges simplistic narratives, revealing how shared emotional bonds and collective memories sustain loyalty and combat engagement. Unlike many existing studies, this research prioritises the firsthand accounts of fighters, offering a deeper exploration of their motivations. This study bridges significant gaps in existing literature, showcasing how deep-seated emotional and social factors drive the resilience and persistence of fighters in the ongoing conflict.

Political polarization, legitimacy and democratic education

ABSTRACT Political polarization is often argued to be a major threat to democracy. This article examines whether the two different forms of polarization, ideological and affective, may risk some of the core assumptions of democratic legitimacy. The paper argues that ideological polarization is linked with increasingly radical ideological positions being accepted as legitimate contributions to democratic processes, which may lead to the erosion of the democratic culture of society. Affective polarization, in turn, presents a risk to the type of political collaboration that characterizes legitimate democratic processes. The article presents some remarks on how these forms of polarization could be pre-emptively addressed in education: first, by demonstrating to students the practical consequences of neglecting the core democratic principles of toleration (Forst) and reciprocity (Rawls) in society; and second, through forms of political action that engage students’ political emotions in support of democratic principles and way of life in a nonpartisan way.

Memory Wars and Emotional Politics: “Feel Good” Holocaust Appropriation in Central Europe

Abstract This article analyzes the patriotic turn in Holocaust memory politics, exploring the processes through which the narrative of a morally upright national majority has been pitted against transnational entities such as the European Union. The EU is considered to foster multiculturalism, leading to interpretations of what some perceive as national guilt. The article investigates invocations of shame and pride in Czechia and Slovakia, two countries that are often overlooked in works on Holocaust memory politics yet are symptomatic of larger changes in the region and history appropriation in general. Building on research into emotional communities, it traces how and why political actors across the ideological spectrum have adopted notions of pride to mobilize domestic audiences against “accusations” of local guilt and complicity in the Nazi genocides of Jews and Roma. By doing so, our article demonstrates how Holocaust memory has become entangled with Europeanization and highlights the role of emotions in shaping national identity and belonging.

Collateral damage: the emotional and material costs of political commitment for the followers of Mazzini and Garibaldi

ABSTRACT This article aims to cast light on the backstage of total militancy in the case of the followers of Mazzini and Garibaldi during the Risorgimento and post-Risorgimento. Political engagement is an existential commitment to a cause either in undercover conspiracy networks or in openly volunteering to fight all the way through to parliamentary activity that carries emotional and material costs. These costs can best be approached through the now rich scholarly literature on political emotions and exile, and the still under-investigated collateral effects of nineteenth-century patriotism that can be recovered from the study of the correspondence of families and friends and ego-documents. From Mazzini’s most intimate confessions to the choices made by Giovine Italia’s local leaders or by Garibaldi’s officers on the battlefield or even in the parliamentary arena, the impact of politics on the private horizon reveals the multiple layers of gain and loss, of expectation and disappointment, playing an unavoidable role in the lives of so many Italian men and women. The selected cases illustrate how disruptive political engagement proved to be when it entered the private sphere in the shape of risk, absence or punishment, and yet how fulfilling it was when it offered the ultimate reason for people leaving behind their loved ones and their professional status.

The Politics of Emotions, Bio-Political Border Practices and the Question of (In)security on the Turkish Political Territorial Borders

ABSTRACT This paper conceptually and analytically delineates the operation and employment of discourses and the political emotions of fear and anxiety in the making, conception, and cartographic imagination of the contours of modern Turkey’s political territorial boundaries. This study posits that the emergence and formation of the Turkish political territorial borders after the traumatic and violent experience of the cataclysmic shrinking, collapse and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire continue to influence discourses, emotions, practices and policies of border security and policing. Borders and borderlands are not only sites where the state performs, exercises and displays its sovereign will and power in protecting national security, dignity, pride and honor, but also sources and harbingers of fears, anxieties and ontological (in)securities. In the context of the highly publicized immigration influx of Syrians, Iraqis, Afghanis and others into Turkey, this paper argues that discourses and emotions of fear, anxiety and hate regained new currency and have become consequential in the state’s eliciting of consent from the masses in instituting border walls, fences and harsh border policing practices and policies on the borderlands and in cities across the country.

The Politics of Pandemic Emotions: How Trust in the Trump Administration and Distrust of the Media Affected the Psychological Toll of COVID-19

Initial studies of the COVID-19 pandemic’s emotional toll indicated different outcomes based on partisanship and media consumption. This study builds on prior research by utilizing a broad set of measures to test how (1) political party affiliation, (2) trust in President Trump, (3) news media sources, and (4) distrust in the media’s portrayal of the pandemic impacted self-ascribed increases in negative emotions during the later stages of the pandemic. Using original data from a national survey conducted in the early months of 2021, we confirm that news media and partisanship played a key role in Americans’ perceived increases in psychological distress. Specifically, we find that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to report increased worry and loneliness due to the pandemic. Viewers of CNN were also more likely to disclose increased worry, loneliness, and sadness than Fox News viewers. But both of these findings were related to and mitigated by issues of trust and distrust. In particular, trust that the Trump administration effectively responded to the pandemic was strongly associated with emotional stability above and beyond partisan differences. In addition, distrust of “mainstream media” coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic was linked with lower odds of increased negative emotions due to the pandemic.

Hydro-Rugging as Reparative Caring Encounter: Re-Membering Southern Oceanic Hauntologies

ABSTRACT Expanding beach clean-ups to more than just removing plastic from the shoreline, citizens are invited to dwell with the ecological crisis and its intersectional entanglements of historical injustices related to the ocean, through a tactile mending practice using collected rubbish. Public story-doing (Rodricks, 2024) [Towards a (strategic) sensibility of unbelonging: Full participation revisited. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 1–15] is initiated by generative dialogue enabled through the material call of the collected plastic which is re-membered and mended into the Mother Hydro-rug. This making-with thinking/theorising (Haraway, 2016 [Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press]; Manning, 2016 [The minor gesture. Duke University Press]) involves re-membering erased narratives that entangle people with the ocean. Hydro-rugging fosters reparative care practices within vulnerable communities through convivial organised events that bring together people, particularly Black and Brown bodies, together to share their memories of and with the ocean. Hydro-rugging embodies the importance of active listening and acknowledging emotions (Ahmed, 2004) [The cultural politics of emotion. University Press], engaging in a call and response with the very fabric of beach surroundings, be it the plastic or other more-than-human elements.

Political emotions in a literature classroom

ABSTRACT The democratic potential of literature education has often been accentuated. In this article, we draw on Gert Biesta’s subjectification conception of democratic education, and view democracy as a concept open for (re)negotiation in the classroom. We are informed by Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic democratic theory, and its view of dissent as a foundational aspect of democracy, in that the struggle itself constitutes the identities of the opponents. Agonistic proposals for democratic education also pay attention to political emotions in the classroom. We pair agonism with Sara Ahmed’s view of emotion as performative to explore how power, identity and emotions are entangled in a student group and how this entanglement is integrated in the students’ conceptions of democracy. The students were in their last year of upper secondary school in Sweden. We analysed audio recordings from three group interviews with a total of eleven students. The interviews followed a literary discussion about the short story ‘Farangs’ by Rattawut Lapcharoensap, which was video recorded. The analysis shows that students referred to emotion when constructing the collective identities of themselves and their opponents, and that the power relations between these collective identities influenced what literary interpretations were centred in the discussion.

Feeling queer, feeling real: affective economies of truth in queer asylum politics

ABSTRACT This article discusses the role of affect in the credibility assessment process in queer asylum claims. Through 27 semistructured interviews with caseworkers, it explores how sexual truth, in the Greek asylum apparatus, is affectively produced and analyses how access to asylum is intermediated by affective control of who is considered the “good” sexual citizen. According to the research material, the process focuses on applicants' emotions, while caseworkers tend to assess the “authenticity” of applicants' feelings through their senses and intuition. Additionally, apart from the exclusionary politics of emotions in homonationalist border regimes, it discusses affect's transformative possibilities in legal decision-making. Reflecting on queerness as an affect, through those failed, unspeakable queer performances that have been rendered non-credible by the affective rules of spoken sexual truth, it aims to challenge white-centred definitions of “genuine” queerness and the binaries of compliance and resistance in slow-death apparatuses.

Emotions in EU foreign policy – when and how do they matter?

ABSTRACT Despite the increasing importance of emotions in explaining political behaviour, the study of emotions in EU policies and politics remains still very limited. The core objective of this special issue is to fill this gap by shedding light on the role of ‘emotions’ in EU foreign policy and to launch a call to EU foreign policy scholars for taking emotions seriously. By analysing multiple foreign policy cases across different geographies and by elucidating the plurality of emotions expressed by the EU, the contributions to this special issue show how and when emotions bear an impact on the EU’s foreign policy decisions and actions in the cases of international norm violations by external actors. The introduction sets the framework for analysing different roles that emotions might play in EU foreign policy by introducing enabling and constraining mechanisms, whereby the EU’s emotional expressions lead to action/inaction through its institutionalised appraisal process.

Emotional politics of norm hierarchy in EU’s external relations: the case of climate crisis and the EU’s arctic policy

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the role emotions play as a heuristic tool in determining the hierarchy of norms in EU’s Arctic policy. In the Arctic, appropriate behaviour prescribed by the norms regarding climate change mitigation (the European Green Deal and the Paris Agreement), environmental protection according to EU environmental law and UN-recognised Indigenous Peoples’ rights contradict each other. When multiple norms are to be applied in a situation and they conflict with each other, a prioritisation needs to be made among these norms. This paper investigates how emotions contribute in a heuristic way to determining this priority. It finds out that fear of climate change enables climate change mitigation and regulations of the European Green Deal to gain primacy over environmental protection norms and Indigenous Peoples’ rights. Self-confidence of the EU and its trust in Nordic member states in these two areas constrain the EU from taking further protective measures.

Populist Ressentiment in a Mediated Context

The aim of this article is to review the role that emotions play in populism, specifically ressentiment, and how it is strategically used on social media platforms to create polarization. Firstly, I define the two of the main characteristics that populism has had over time: the agonistic struggle between a people and an elite, and charismatic leadership. Secondly, I examine the significance of resentment as a political emotion and how it operates in extreme right-wing populism. Thirdly, I review how resentment has been applied in the context of social media and how these platforms offer the most effective means to generate social mobilization based on emotions through storytelling, which can anticipate the reactions of the public or users. Keywords: populism, social media, emotions, ressentiment, mobilization

The politics of resentment: what is it and how is it mobilized by populist radical right-wing parties in different contexts?

The role of emotions in politics is drawing increasing scholarly attention. Yet, despite this heightened interest, the ways in which politicians concretely appeal to emotions of their target audience are still blurry. Let aside how they do so in different contexts. This article focuses on an affect that is frequently mentioned as the key driver explaining the electoral appeal of populist radical right-wing parties (PRRPs): resentment. In that respect, several authors have used the term “the politics of resentment,” even though the exact definition of resentment often remains unclear. In this article, we theorize what resentment precisely is and how it is used politically, and hypothesize how it is mobilized in different ways by PRR parties in different contexts. Empirically, then, we employ content analysis to study a corpus of party documents of PRRPs in three West and two East European countries from 2004 onwards and identify three types of resentment mobilized by the radical right: (1) redistributive resentment; (2) recognitory resentment; and (3) retributive resentment. Despite being expressed in a more heterogeneous way than we theoretically expected, these forms of resentment share important commonalities that, we argue, can help to better understand the electoral appeal of radical right-wing parties.

Demands, displays, and dreams of “Black joy” during times of crisis

ABSTRACT Based on collaborative research and reflections on media depictions, marketplace experiences, and Black life in Belgium and Britain, this article embraces Black joy, while critiquing societal demands and (re)presentations of it. Informed by scholarship on racialised emotions, Black interiority, and Black emotional epistemologies, we analyse how the idea of “Black joy” has been (re)presented in media in ways connected to racialised, classed, and national discourses of “we-ness” during the coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis. By analysing public (re)presentations of Black people, we critically consider how “Black joy” becomes “Black JoyTM” – a defanged expression, enabling brand advertising by tapping into the racial and capitalist politics of marketable and mediated Black emotions and intimacy. We ask, “when, how, and why are the everyday emotions and experiences of Black people (re)presented by contemporary marketplace institutions as joyful?”. Consequently, we theorise the relationship between Black joy, crises, and forms of Belgian and British advertising and media.

Settler Colonialism and Mortal Dangers: Affective Responses to COVID-19 and the 2021 Israeli Bombings among Young Palestinians in Gaza

Abstract The article examines the affective dynamics of collective survival and resistance under Israeli settler colonialism in the Gaza Strip. Focusing on Gaza as an under-researched enclave of Israeli settler colonialism, it analyzes how young Palestinians renegotiated their affective bonds in response to two coinciding deadly events: the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 Israeli bombings. Theoretically, we extend the politics of emotions and affect to encompass experiences of settler-colonial violence. Drawing on original interviews with Palestinians in Gaza, we trace how affective bonds were impacted among families, friends, and neighbors and, from a transpersonal perspective, across the political community. We show how settler colonialism shaped responses to the pandemic, deepening existing inequalities and causing social frictions. The bombings, by contrast, triggered a unified response of pure terror and universal concern for collective survival. The military targeting of homes was countered by practices of physical and emotional togetherness in the face of death. Overall, our study shows how (i) different kinds of mortal dangers are experienced politically by colonized people, (ii) these experiences are conditioned by collective histories of colonial violence, and that (iii) they constitute expressions of collective affective life, necessary for the preservation of peoplehood amidst colonial oppression.

Affective Turn, or Return?

The ‘affective turn’ suggests that we pay attention to how affects create subjectivities, build communities, and shape new forms of politics in the making. It invites us to move beyond established humanities and social science paradigms and toward richer forms of contextual analysis by studying how bodies – human and otherwise – ‘act and are acted upon’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 1). The ‘affective turn’ requires sensitive attention to a host of cognate terms and concepts – sentiment, emotion, reverberation, resonance, atmosphere, and far beyond, including the more specific trans-category of ‘affective politics’ as well as affective reinterpretations of the social. Music has long been recognized as a site where affective politics play out. However, existing scholarship often view Baruch Spinoza, Silvan Tomkins, Gilles Deleuze, and Brian Massumi as the founding fathers of affective thinking at the expense of related work in the broader tradition of music philosophy. We address this lacuna by discussing the relationship between music, affect, and politics in the work of Plato, Aristotle, Al-Farabi, Qian Sima, Johannes Tinctoris, René Descartes, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Theodor Adorno, Antoine Hennion, and Tia DeNora, as we aim to broaden, nuance, sharpen, and situate contemporary understandings of affective politics in music studies. In doing so, we discuss whether the affective turn is, perhaps, better understood as a ‘return’ to cross-disciplinary music research that situates the understandings of affective politics, relational agency, and political emotions within a longer history of music philosophy that, taken together, provide a more robust theoretical argument for the social and political force of musical sounds.

Disruptive Emotions and Affective Injustice Within an African-Inspired Relational Ethics:

Abstract Forms of African relational ethics that prioritise the value of harmony struggle to accommodate arguably valuable disharmony, such as disruptive emotions like anger. A wider literature on political emotions has defended the value of such emotions and even proposed that a particular form of injustice, affective injustice, can arise if we fail to create space for them. While it has recently been proposed that Thaddeus Metz's African-inspired relational moral theory can accommodate disruptive emotions and address affective injustice, in this philosophical article I argue that any success that Metz's account has in this regard is superficial. This critique has important implications: either we need to engage further with disruptive emotions and affective injustice within an African relational ethics, or it may be the case that we instead need to return to how we conceptualise affective injustice to ensure that it does the justice-promoting work that we want it to do.

Who counts? Anti-antisemitism and the racial politics of emotion

This article focuses on the rise of anti-antisemitic discourse in Britain over the past fifteen years. It explores the relationship between the increasingly emotional tone of public discourse in Britain and other western countries and the miring of anti-antisemitism in dynamics of competitive victimhood and ethnic antagonism. The development of this dynamic is traced from the bitter arguments over the representation and reporting of the Palestine/Israel conflict at the time of the Israeli ground assault in the Gaza Strip in early 2009 – with special attention to Caryl Churchill’s short play Seven Jewish Children – through to recent anti-antisemitic interventions such as David Baddiel’s bestselling polemic Jews Don’t Count (2021) and Jonathan Freedland’s verbatim play recently staged at London’s Royal Court Theatre (2022). These interventions, the article shows, call for the ‘normal’ treatment of anti-Jewish prejudice while simultaneously appealing on exceptionalist grounds for public sympathy with Jewish perceptions of antisemitism. The exceptional moral authority widely accorded to anti-antisemitism has made the cause an attractive one for those who resent what they believe to be the unwarranted priority accorded to non-white victimhood. Various forms of anti-antisemitism, such as Baddiel’s, have thus become front-line arguments in shrill culture-war tussles suffused with intellectual confusion and racially tinged rhetorical combat. This racialization, politicization and emotionalization of anti-antisemitism has reached new heights, the article concludes, following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas in October 2023.