Political emotions in violent contexts: do moral shocks influence activism?

ABSTRACT

Feelings of injustice and political engagement are often connected, sometimes unquestioningly; the idea being that one generates the other along a sort of continuum. This article examines the links that surface between moral feelings – as a specific form of political emotional experience – and engagement, starting with a decentring of current Western democratic contexts and a shift towards coercive or authoritarian contexts, using field research from the Middle East. Clearly, the emotional intensification linked to violent political experiences must be taken into account, but this emotional intensification does not alone establish any necessary continuity between the shock of certain experiences, a feeling of injustice, and engagement. Activist articulations of a feeling of injustice are in fact three-layered: expression of a feeling fed by lived or transmitted experiences, a reference to ideological frameworks that both legitimise their forms of engagement and help give meaning to their situation, and inscription within a general moral argument.

KEYWORDS:

• Political emotions
• activism
• feeling of injustice
• political violence
• Middle East

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the anonymous referees for their thoughtful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a detailed presentation of these criticisms, see Contamin (2010, p. 71). In their later theoretical presentations, Benford and Snow are more sensitive than one might think to these aspects, but the empirical application in the analysis remains within a strategic perspective and still leaves little room for plural visions and the differential interpretations of activists (Benford & Snow, 2000).

2 In this first part of the discussion, we use the general notion of ‘political emotions’ as is common within the discipline. However, moving forward, within the affective dimensions and the realm of emotional experiences, we specifically employ the term ‘moral feelings’ and not ‘emotions’ to denote this particular repertoire, associated with stability and sustainability. For further elaboration on this distinction, see Section 3.

3 In The Art of Moral Protest (1997), James Jasper relies for the most part on mobilisations in the United States (in particular, anti-nuclear and animal rights movements), though he broadens it to include the nineteenth century and the example of the Land League in Ireland. The chapter on the Khmer Rouge does not address moral shock as such, but rather the way in which organisations incorporate the injustice frame within totalising and abstract ideologies, essentialising the enemy – and the resulting, destructive consequences. William Gamson relies on analyses of political discussions about four mediatised and controversial issues within ‘working people’s’ groups in the United States.

4 On the variability of the impact of repression on activism, see Cuadros and de Castro Rocha (2013).

5 Alice Verstraeten thus shows, in the case of families of the disappeared in Argentina who have been fighting on their behalf since 1977, the extent to which it is necessary to take into account the traumatising and exceptional nature of their experience and emotions to understand their ‘tactics’ (2006).

6 Caroline Guibet Lafaye shows the variability of relationships between bad experiences and feelings of injustice in an analysis of feelings of injustice in France (2012b, pp. 58–68).

7 Jutta Bakonyi thus observes the routinisation of violence in Somalia, as do Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot in South Asia, in the face of a ‘violence mirroring the state and private armed groups’ (Bakonyi, 2016; Gayer & Jaffrelot, 2008). The same process of routinisation, which does not exclude every day fear, has been extensively studied in Latin America (Green, 1999; Koonings & Krujit, 1999).

8 Frédéric Sawicki and Johanna Siméant make this one of the transversal results in the sociology of political engagement (2009). For her part, Molly Andrews, who studied fifteen long-term activist careers in England, talks about ‘initiators’ (2008). In the Arab world, Mounia Bennani-Chraïbi and Olivier Fillieule observe the same aspects (2003).

9 A use of the notion of engagement within political sociology – see especially the definition by Sawicki and Siméant (2009) – which differs from other uses in sociology: for example, as a way of being generally involved in an action in the phenomenological tradition (Thévenot, 2006); or, in another current, as a process of subjectivation through action (Dubet, 2016b).

10 The Lebanese context, situated in a different kind of political configuration from our theme, will not be central to the analysis.

11 In their initial review of contributions from the social psychology of protest, van Stekelenburg and Klandermans revisit ‘the thorny issue of causality’, also underscoring that the correlations noted between emotions and protest cannot be straightforwardly interpreted as causal relationships, owing to the very conditions under which the data were collected (2013, p. 898).

12 Field research in the West Bank, Ramallah, 2009.

13 In another context, Loukia Kotronaki and Seraphim Seferiades show how a ‘non-normalised event of repressive violence’ can induce shock; by this, they mean ‘a type of repressive event which is not assimilated and inscribed in the collective imaginary as a conventional and/or agreed expression of the “repressive repertoire” and which throws into question patterns of tolerated injustice as well as “protest routines”’ (2010).

14 Checkpoints in particular mark the entry into these zones of uncertainty authorised by domination (Larzillière, 2004; Pommerolle & Vairel, 2009, p. 3).

15 In his categorisation of authoritarian regimes, Juan Linz included ‘limited pluralism’ (2000, see the new introduction and p. 159 and after). Since then, a large literature has examined forms of hybrid and liberal authoritarian regimes (see especially Diamond, 2002; Hermet, 2004; O’Donnell & Schmitter, 1986). A notable evolution in this literature since the 2000s has been the retreat from the idea of democratic transition. What analyses of these regimes and again the Jordanian regime show is the compatibility between the establishment of certain democratic institutions and authoritarianism. Contrary to the expectations of classic theories of democratic transition, democratic opening can simply mean the integration of these institutions into an authoritarian system. And political evolutions depend rather on a complex play among different political arenas of which democratic institutions form only one part (Albrecht, 2009, p. 2; Camau, 2005; Dabène et al., 2008, p. 21).

16 On the issue of these traumatic transmissions by activists in Tunisia see Béchir Ayari (2009).

17 Analysing political mobilisations specifically through the relationship between individuals and parties, Birgitta Nedelmann shows the importance of the affective dimension and how parties ‘motivate individuals to commit themselves emotionally for abstract ideas and impersonal relationships’ (1987, p. 187).

18 Sommier uses ‘affectual’ and not ‘affective’ to avoid a psychological reception of the term.

19 In these contexts, the ‘charge of emotional irrationality’ can also be seen as ‘an attempt at social control’ and an ‘invocation of the status quo’ (Carman, 2022; Srinivasan, 2018, pp. 134 and 141).

20 Field study in the West Bank, Ramallah, 2009.

21 In her analysis of Istanbul garbage collectors’ reference to a feeling of injustice and their attempts to mobilise, Bénédicte Florin identifies a double register: the indignity of the situation in which they are placed and more generally an ecological social vision allowing them to validate and lend their work new legitimacy (2016).

22 Notably, Wood analyses the impact of moral outrage. On the relationship between normative orders, particularly those concerning definitions of economic justice, and armed violence in Colombia, see Grajales (2016).

23 Coëffic also highlights this aspect in an analysis of Hezbollah’s awareness-raising mechanisms (2018).

24 Field study in Jordan, Amman, 2007.

25 Field study in Jordan, Amman, 2009 and 2010.

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Pénélope Larzillière

Pénélope Larzillière (PhD, habil.) is a political and social scientist, Research Professor at the IRD, and affiliated to the Ceped at the Université Paris Cité. Her research focuses thematically on moral and political sociology, and in particular activism and political protest. Her recent work analyses the relationship between moral feelings and political commitment. She also works on protest art and has recently edited The global politics of artistic engagement (Brill, 2022). She has carried out extensive field research in the Middle East (Palestinian Territories, Jordan, and Lebanon). Her books include Activism in Jordan (Zed Books, 2016) and To be young in Palestine (Balland, 2004). She has also co-edited several journal issues, among them ‘Revolutions, protests, indignation’ (Socio, 2013), and ‘Political emotions between war and peace’ (Critique internationale, 2021). Her work has been published in French, English, Arabic, and German, and appeared in the International Review of Sociology, International Journal of Conflict and Violence, Development Policy Review, and Science, Technology & Society, among others. She sits on the scientific committee of the Institut d’études de l’Islam et des sociétés du monde musulman (IISMM-EHESS-Paris), the editorial board of the review Socio, and the editorial council of Monde commun.