Can the bereaved speak? Emotional governance and the contested meanings of grief after the Berlin terror attack
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088218824349 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088218824349
Journal of International Political Theory
2019, Vol. 15(2) 148 –166
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088218824349
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Can the bereaved speak?
Emotional governance and the
contested meanings of grief
after the Berlin terror attack
Simon Koschut
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Abstract
Emotions that run through relations of power are complex and ambivalent, inviting
resistance and opposition as much as compliance. While the literature in International
Relations broadly accepts emotions as an intrinsic element of power and governance,
relatively little attention has been given to situations when the emotional meanings of
“the state” are openly contested. This essay highlights a situation in which emotional
meanings are contested, or what I refer to as affective sites of contestation: situations and
events where rules and norms about the proper expression of emotions are challenged,
resisted, and potentially redefined. It is the ambivalence and alternation of particular
emotional meanings, which, I will suggest, makes emotions an object of contestation in
world politics. Whenever “official” emotions are contested from “below,” “the state”
itself, representing a national project, is called into question, potentially transforming
the relationship between citizens and the state. Building on the works of sociologist
Mabel Berezin and others, this essay develops the ideal types of “the secure state” and
“communities of feeling” as analytical prisms to reconstruct the political contestation of
emotional meanings, pertaining to how collective grief is expressed after a terror attack.
Keywords
Communities of feeling, contestation, emotions, governance, national grief, power
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it
break.”
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Corresponding author:
Simon Koschut, Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Ihnestraße 22, Berlin
14195, Germany.
Email: simon.koschut@fu-berlin.de
824349IPT0010.1177/1755088218824349Journal of International Political TheoryKoschut
research-article2019
Article
Koschut 149
Introduction
That emotions matter for world politics is a widely shared observation and has been
systematically examined. How emotions matter, however, is highly debated among
scholars of International Relations (IR). Recent studies have centered on the notion of
emotional governance, pointing to the need to understand the concept of the state not
only as a political regime but also as an emotional regime that sets the norms of appro-
priate emotional expressions through feeling rules, enacted via official rituals and dis-
cursive practices (Bell, 2006; Bleiker and Hutchison 2014; Connolly, 2005; Edkins,
2003; Holland and Solomon, 2014; Hutchison, 2016; Huysmans, 2006; Solomon,
2012; Weldes, 1999; Williams, 2011). A related strand has been concerned with the
micropolitical foundations that constitute larger IR categories, such as the state,
unpacking “how macropolitics gets enacted, embodied, and embedded” in the affec-
tive dynamics that generate broader collective configurations (Solomon and Steele,
2016: 4). Some of these scholars explicitly recognize how emotional contexts assist in
shaping the construction of crisis and discourses as “sites of affective investment”
(Solomon, 2012). Fear and anger, for example, have been used by Western govern-
ments, especially in Britain and the United States, to manage the response to terrorist
atrocities by projecting the image of the “secure state” as a route to return to normality
as quickly as possible, raising false hopes that state action alone in the “war on terror”
will remove the threat (Burkitt 2005; Edkins, 2002; Gammon, 2008; Hobson and
Seabrooke, 2007; Sucharov, 2005). Such a perspective makes emotions an intrinsic
element of power and governance in world politics.
However, these techniques of governance, and the state tools of emotional manipula-
tion that accompany it, do not always work in practice. Indeed, they sometimes backfire
and are met with strong resistance. This essay essentially picks up where others have left
off: rather than asking how people affectively invest in the discourse and identity produc-
tion of the state, I seek to explore how people affectively contest the mechanisms of
emotion governance by the state. As I will suggest here, it is through the affective prac-
tices of everyday politics that the emotional meanings projected by the government
become contested. Emotions have a complex pattern, embedded as they are in the multi-
ple networks of social relations. It is the ambivalence and alternation of emotional mean-
ings, which, I will suggest, makes emotions an object of contestation. To illustrate this
point, this essay highlights a situation in which emotions become contested, or what I
refer to as affective sites of contestation: situations and events where rules and norms
about the proper expression of emotions and their meanings are challenged, resisted, and
potentially redefined. Whenever “official” emotions are contested, “the state” itself, rep-
resenting a national project, is called into question, potentially transforming the relation-
ship between citizens and the state.
Cases in which “official” emotional meanings are openly contested have, so far,
received relatively little attention in IR, despite entailing key insights about the substance
and dynamics of affective structures in world politics.1 The image and narrative of the
state is constituted and governed by such an affective structure, that is, a set of feeling
rules and emotional meanings that structure the emotional experience and collective
identities of citizens. In times of severe loss, such as in the aftermath of a terror attack,
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