Emotions, Politics and War

Linda Åhäll, Thomas Gregory, Linda Åhäll, Thomas Gregory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138789050
• eBook ISBN: 9781317656166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A growing number of scholars have sought to re-centre emotions in our study of international politics, however an overarching book on how emotions matter to the study of politics and war is yet to be published. This volume is aimed at filling that gap, proceeding from the assumption that a nuanced understanding of emotions can only enhance our engagement with contemporary conflict and war.

Providing a range of perspectives from a diversity of methodological approaches on the conditions, maintenance and interpretation of emotions, the contributors interrogate the multiple ways in which emotions function and matter to the study of global politics. Accordingly, the innovative contribution of this volume is its specific engagement with the role of emotions and constitution of emotional subjects in a range of different contexts of politics and war, including the gendered nature of war and security; war traumas; post-conflict reconstruction; and counterinsurgency operations.

Looking at how we analyse emotions in war, why it matters, and what emotions do in global politics, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of critical security studies and international relations alike.

1 Introduction

Mapping emotions, politics and war

Thomas Gregory and Linda Åhäll

The commemorations marking the centenary of the First World War have brought the lived experiences of those most affected by war back into view. In contrast to previous years, there has been a much greater emphasis on lived experiences of those touched by war. To mark the anniversary, The Guardian has opened up its website to readers, encouraging them to submit mementos of the war. Since its initial launch, there has been a steady stream of faded photographs, tattered postcards and old letters submitted to the site – memorabilia that provide a very different perspective from how stories of war are usually told. One entry, for example, describes in quite disconcerting detail the mood in the trenches following the execution of a soldier for desertion. The details, recorded in the diary of an army chaplain, recount the moment that the soldier – ‘only a boy’ – was led out to be shot. In a last-gasp effort to escape, the chaplain describes how he ‘ran wildly across the broken ground, stumbling, panting, straining’ before being caught and lined up against a sandbag, ‘a pathetic figure of exhaustion and helpless appeal’ (The Guardian 2014). A few hours later, clearly still uncertain about the rights and wrongs of the execution, the chaplain recorded his feelings again, ‘the strain of this morning’s tragedy has been rather much’ (The Guardian 2014).

Along with the letters describing the misery of life in the trenches, the pain of being far from home, and the horrors of the conflict, there are numerous items that hint at the more enjoyable aspects of people’s wartime experiences. Although these may represent nothing more than a brief respite in an otherwise terrifying experience, they point to experiences of war that are often overlooked.¹ One photograph shows three men sitting in a dugout in Egypt, grinning toward the camera from underneath their pith helmets as they drink tea from a cup and saucer. Other photographs show groups of soldiers standing around watching unsanctioned boxing matches, cheering on one side or the other as they try to find ways to pass the time. Still others tell of the boredom and monotony of trench life; variations of the phrase ‘nothing exciting to report’ are common. Of course, these items were not necessarily meant to be seen by anyone other than the intended recipient. They are not the memoirs of a great military leader or an important political figure, but the intimate reflections, thoughts and memories of ordinary people, perhaps hidden away at the back of an old drawer or left to collect dust in a loft. Still, these historical artefacts reveal aspects of their authors’ experiences that are often forgotten, overlooked or simply pushed to the margins of political and academic debates on war.

In her influential essay ‘The passion of world politics’, Neta C. Crawford (2000) argues that emotions have been neglected in the study of global politics, despite that they actively shape the world around us. Her intervention was particularly thought-provoking as emotions, in the realm and study of ‘high politics’, security and war, tend to be seen as contrary to reason and rationality, and to be relegated to the private, feminine sphere, or seen as some kind of bodily aberration that needs to be subdued or overcome. Yet key ideas in the study of war, such as deterrence, cooperation and security, Crawford argues, simply do not make sense unless we take emotions into consideration. The security dilemma, for example, cannot be understood without some awareness of the fear, anxiety or apprehension that underpins the calculations of state leaders as they look at what their rivals are doing. The problem with the academic discipline of International Relations (IR), Crawford notes, is not that the emotions are absent, but that they are treated as undisputable and entirely unproblematic (2000: 118–121). In other words, it is because rationalist prejudices have traditionally dominated the discipline of IR that the role of emotions in global politics has been downplayed, ignored or denigrated, despite that emotions are essential to the way in which conflicts are both thought and fought.²

Although some contributions to IR acknowledged that psychological issues are important to perception and therefore, for example, key to understanding why state leaders go to war (see Jervis 1976), it is only more recently that a growing number of scholars have sought to re-centre emotions in our study of international politics.

Contemporary commemoration of war shows us what war meant and means to us. Such meanings are emotional, but such emotional meanings are also political. With this book we would like to make the simple point that we cannot make sense of war if we are unable or unwilling to pay attention to the sensual experiences of those affected. The contributors to this volume, therefore, proceed from the assumption that a nuanced understanding of emotions, affect and the somatic experience of the human body can only enhance our engagement with contemporary conflict and war (Sylvester 2011; McSorley 2012; Holmqvist 2013). Our overall aim is to provide a range of perspectives on the conditions, maintenance and interpretation of emotions that will both enhance scholarly understandings of war and interrogate the multiple ways in which emotions function and matter to the study of global politics. In this way, we hope to turn conventional approaches to conflict, IR and security on their head, not only by thinking about the embodied experiences of those affected by war and other forms of violence, but also by exploring the ways in which emotions function to re-inscribe the boundaries between the human and the non-human and differentiate between those who can be loved and those who cannot, those who should be feared and those who should not, those whose deaths can be grieved and those whose deaths cannot. In multiple ways, we hope this book will contribute to conversations about the practice, study and experiences of war that are frequently marginalised, silenced, forgotten or ignored despite their obvious importance.

Our final aim is to facilitate some conversations about how to study a topic that, at first glance, might appear rather difficult to grasp. The methods used and perspectives taken by the contributors to this book are by no means the only ways to engage with the topic methodologically; nevertheless, we hope these interventions can start a wider conversation on how to think seriously about the [political] role of emotions, feelings and affects in contemporary practices, experiences and representations of war. This is because, as Jon Elster argues, if we do not account for emotions, the things that happen in the world – from the mundane decisions we make in our everyday lives to acts of genocide on a much larger scale – would simply be unintelligible (Elster 1999: 403–4). This book is about, on multiple levels, making the politics of war intelligible.

What are emotions?

It may seem like a relatively straightforward task to explain what counts as an emotion. After all, we are all familiar with the spectrum of emotional states, from the more negative feelings associated with anger, sadness and fear to the more positive experiences of joy, optimism, hope. However, our familiarity with these emotions can be quite deceiving; there is simply no agreed definition of what counts as an emotion. With this book, we do not attempt to offer a fixed definition of emotions. Instead, we echo Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison’s call for ‘a type of scholarly and political sensibility that could conceptualise the influence of emotions even where and when it is not immediately apparent’ (2008: 128). With this caveat in mind, we now discuss the most important ways in which emotions have been theorised.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes an emotion as an ‘agitation of the mind’ or an ‘excited mental state’ that is commonly used to signify feelings such as ‘pleasure, grief, hope, fear, etc.’, derived from our relationships with others. According to so-called basic emotions research, there are six (or maybe five or seven) universal primary human emotions and a more tenuous set of secondary emotions (Wetherell 2012: 18). However, within this range, affective reactions do not seem to fit. To make matters worse, it is not always possible to distinguish between an emotion and a mood, or an emotion and a physical condition or bodily state. Going by the dictionary definition, one would be hard pressed to differentiate between an emotional state and a mood or temperament, which makes classifying states such as boredom, optimism, excitement or apathy incredibly difficult. Likewise, there appears to be a great deal of overlap between our emotional state and our physical condition. Let’s think about how one can be a ‘happy person’ without being happy in that particular moment, or angry about structures of poverty without necessarily experiencing the physical conditions that we would normally associate with anger. Rather than being an emotional experience as such, these examples seem to be more of a value judgement about what is right and what is just – how emotions experienced are closely related to our normative beliefs as individuals. The idea that emotions simply signify feelings, in other words, seems insufficient.

Scholars arguing that emotions should be viewed as a cultural construct, which we follow here, take issue with approaches that focus on the cognitive dimension of our emotional experiences, and with studies on emotions that place more emphasis on physiological, neurological and biological dimensions of emotional experience.³ Catherine A. Lutz, for example, argues that we need to ‘deconstruct an overly naturalised and rigidly bounded concept of emotion, to treat emotion as an ideological practice rather than as a thing to be discovered or an essence to be distilled’ (1988: 4). Such a focus, which has been used to great effect by postcolonial, feminist and queer theorists, means a focus on not just what emotions are, but also what they do. For example, Lauren Berlant has focused her attention on the effects of compassion in producing and maintaining exclusionary practices. The emphasis of compassion, she argues, is not on the experiences of those who are suffering, but on the experiences of those watching from afar (2004: 1–2; see also Spelman 1997; Sedgwick 2003; Welland, Chapter 9 in this volume).

Some of the most exciting work being done on such performative power of emotions is by Sara Ahmed. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed uses ‘emotions’ rather broadly, as the idea of ‘impression’, precisely to avoid making analytical distinctions between bodily sensation, emotion and thought, as if, she says, they could be ‘experienced’ as distinct realms of human ‘experience’ (Ahmed 2004: 6). Ahmed argues that emotions are not simply feelings that an individual undergoes, but are cultural constructs that help to ‘shape the “surfaces” of individuals and collective bodies’ (2004: 1). When we are scared, for example, we are responding not simply to some existential danger that this person or object poses, but to the cultural memories and shared social norms that have marked them as dangerous in our minds. Likewise, the hate we might feel towards certain groups of people cannot be understood as the manifestation of some innate dislike for them that is buried deep within us. Rather, it is the product of past encounters that have resulted in these groups being demarcated as a threat to our way of life (2004: 42). Moreover, this experience of hatred or fear is not a passive occurrence, but works to reaffirm the boundaries between us and them and to strengthen the notion that they are a group that should be approached with caution (2004: 63). As Ahmed explains, ‘emotions work to differentiate between others precisely by identifying those that can be loved those that can be grieved, that is, by constituting some other as legitimate objects of emotion [whilst denying others the same privilege]’ (2004: 191, emphasis in original).

Affect, by contrast, has traditionally been used as a noun to signify an inner disposition or feeling, or a mental state, mood or emotion. Affect can also be used as a transitive verb to indicate the ways in which something or someone may cause a particular effect, material or otherwise. In this sense, affect can be used to explain effects on the mind or feelings of a person, the ways in which someone can be impressed upon, moved and touched. It also signifies the material effects that can be made, the physical imprints that might be left after a particular encounter between two objects or the physiological impressions left upon the body.

Within the academic literature, affect has been used in a variety of different ways. Although there is no agreed definition of what affect is, studies of affect generally tend to move beyond a focus on single emotions to explore our ability to affect and be affected in more depth. To some, it is important to separate affect from emotion in the sense that, where emotions might be used to denote a more amplified, developed and coherent form of experience, affect is seen as something that is before emotion:

Affect gives you away: the tell-tale heart; my clammy hands; the note of anger in your voice; the sparkle of glee in their eyes… Affect is the cuckoo in the nest; the fifth columnist out to undermine you; your personal polygraph machine.

(Highmore 2010: 118)

Although there is disagreement to what extent affect is mainly biological and instinctive or social, an interest in affect necessarily involves a focus on bodies (human and non-human), and affect theorists thus often focus on embodiment – on the very fabric of the body and those forms of embodied experience that often remain unseen, unnoticed and unrecognised. In contrast to personal, and conscious, emotional experiences identified as ‘feelings’, affect resembles a flow of resonances, a form of emotional communication between body and mind that influences us, and is therefore often described as non-conscious, non-subjective or pre-personal. In other words, whereas emotion might capture the conscious thoughts, subjective experiences and normative judgements belonging to the individual, affect refers to a completely different order of activity where, as Nigel Thrift suggests, affect can be understood as a ‘set of embodied practices’ or as a form of ‘indirect and non-reflective’ thinking that never quite rises to the level of an emotion (2008: 175).

Others are careful not to overstate a distinction between emotion and affect. Margaret Wetherell uses affect as ‘embodied meaning-making that is mostly understood as human emotion’ (Wetherell 2012: 4, emphasis in original); and while Brian Massumi would agree with Thrift that affect has another ‘logic’ than emotion, he argues that these two registers can be situated on the same continuum, viewing the former as a more qualified and coherent expression of the latter. Emotion, Massumi argues, can be viewed as a ‘qualified intensity’ or ‘sociolinguistic fixing’ of affect that has been imbrued with subjective content; emotion is ‘intensity owned and recognised’ (Massumi 2002: 28). Affect, to Massumi, is that feeling of dread that seems to creep up on you when walking home late at night: the goose-bumps that cover the skin, the tension in the shoulders, the hairs that stand up on the back of your neck that seem to appear when you catch a glimpse of a strange shadow or hear an ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction Mapping emotions, politics and war
• Part I Researching Emotions
• Part II Emotionality and War
• Index