Feelings of (eco-) grief and sorrow: climate activists as emotion entrepreneurs
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221136772 |
| Author | Leonie Holthaus |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221136772
European Journal of
International Relations
2023, Vol. 29(2) 352 –373
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661221136772
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Feelings of (eco-) grief and
sorrow: climate activists as
emotion entrepreneurs
Leonie Holthaus
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Abstract
This article conceives of climate activists as emotion entrepreneurs to explain
the emergence of particular emotional responses to climate change. Among these
emotional responses is eco-grief or grief felt because of experienced or anticipated
ecological losses. I elaborate on the concept of the emotion entrepreneur and theorize
the emergence of eco-grief on the basis of a practice theoretical and Bourdieusian
approach. I suggest that activists possessing cultural capital are well positioned to
introduce new feelings and identify three mechanisms that contribute to explanations
of the emergence and growing importance of eco-grief. Objectivation is about the most
often reflexive practice of giving names to emotions to turn them into ontological
entities. Cultivation is about the creation of social spaces for the experience and
regulation of eco-grief among activists. Diffusion is about emotional contagion, the
creation of emotional vocabularies, and the spread of activist feeling rules. Research on
emotion entrepreneurs moves beyond conceptions of feelings as causes of activism and
suggests there is a need for further research on emotional dynamics in heterogenous
transnational advocacy coalitions, influences of language on emotions, and feelings rules
in late-modern Western societies.
Keywords
Climate change, activism, emotions, constructivism, practice theory, governance
Introduction
How can we theorize the emergence of feelings and the processes that render them politi-
cal (Hutchinson and Bleiker, 2014: 499; Flam, 2005: 271; Koschut, 2020; Solomon and
Corresponding author:
Leonie Holthaus, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Dolivostrasse 15, Darmstadt, 64293, Germany.
Email: holthaus@pg.tu-darmstadt.de
1136772EJT0010.1177/13540661221136772European Journal of International RelationsHolthaus
research-article2022
Article
Holthaus 353
Steele, 2017)?1 In this article, I address this question in view of the new emotional
dimension of climate activism and the emergence of eco-grief in particular. This is not to
say that environmentalist and climate activism has not had an emotional dimension
before. Recent literature has shown (climate) politics and activism are all about emotions
(Bleiker and Hutchinson, 2008; Crawford, 2000; Wapner, 2014). What is new, however,
is the staging of new climate emotions and feelings, such as eco-grief, by movements
such as Extinction Rebellion (XR; Andrews and Smirnov, 2020; Kelz and Knappe, 2021;
Neckel and Hasenfratz, 2021). XR originated in 2018 in the United Kingdom, is now
present in more than 45 states, and calls for civil disobedience to compel national and
international policy makers for climate emergence policies in the face of the sixth mass
extinction unleashed by climate change (Green, 2019; Westwell and Bunting, 2020). At
demonstrations, XR uses posters with slogans such as “Give yourself time to feel—grief
opens pathways of love and melts the parts of you that are frozen,” and grief-associated
symbols, such as mock coffins (Green, 2019). The use of grief-associated symbols and
vocabularies is also evident in activists’ public mourning of a glacier (Read, 2019). Such
actions reuse cultural symbols and language and show climate change as a new cause of
grief.
Eco-grief can be broadly defined as the “the grief felt in relation to experienced or
anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems and meaningful
landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change” (Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018:
275). Eco-grief, like many other emotions and feelings, is not a primary emotion, such as
fear. It is a combination of different emotions and framed by climate activists as a feeling
that arises along with recognition of climate change. The incredible dimension of climate
change and the force that climate activism has gained since 2019 suggest that the feeling
will gain importance (Comtesse et al., 2021; Craps, 2020). Activists acknowledge feel-
ings such as eco-grief and eco-anxiety and bundle them in emotional responses to cli-
mate change that increase pressure on policy makers and present climate emergency
policies as the only legitimate policy option (Adler-Nissen et al., 2020: 94). In Germany
(2021), climate activists protested, pointed to their eco-anxiety and fear, and went on a
hunger strike (Schmidt-Mattern, 2021). Climate activists also create emotional language
to further imagine eco-grief in German and other societies. Sympathizers of climate
activism, for example, journalists, support the creation and spread of this new, meaning-
making language.
In view of these developments, I complement scholarship on emotions and construc-
tivist perspectives in particular and adopt a Bourdieusian approach to theorize the emer-
gence of eco-grief. Constructivism advanced scholarship on emotions, but constructivists
still grapple with the question of how emotions and norms emerge (Price and Sikkink,
2021). In their seminal article on norm entrepreneurs, Finnemore and Sikkink (1998)
recognized emotions as a motivation for activism. Constructivists following Finnemore
and Sikkink hence assume “activists form transnational advocacy networks because they
have been emotionally moved by human stories of suffering and distress and, in turn, use
the same logic to move other people and governments to action” (Koschut, 2020: 8);2
however, there is a growing tension between a traditional constructivist focus on how
established emotions have causal effects and recognition of emotions as entities that
steadily emerge in micro-contexts, characterized by uneven power relations (Koschut,
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