Responding to terrorism with peace, love and solidarity: ‘Je suis Charlie’, ‘Peace’ and ‘I Heart MCR’
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088219829884 |
| Author | Clara Eroukhmanoff |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219829884
Journal of International Political Theory
2019, Vol. 15(2) 167 –187
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088219829884
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Responding to terrorism
with peace, love and
solidarity: ‘Je suis Charlie’,
‘Peace’ and ‘I Heart
MCR’
Clara Eroukhmanoff
London South Bank University, UK
Abstract
This article explores the affective responses to terrorist attacks in Western Europe,
visually manifested through the memes ‘Je suis Charlie’, ‘Peace’, and ‘I heart MCR’ . By
invoking the universal peace and solidarity signs, these responses mobilised an iconic
repertoire that framed the responses as peaceful retaliations to terrorist attacks in
solidarity with the victims and in that respect, helped to visualise and foster positive
emotions in times of crisis. Indeed, the memes were articulated as the antidote (love)
that can defy the brutality and hatred of terrorists. This article challenges this view in
two ways. First, the article argues that the visual interventions constitute technologies
of emotional governance that police subjects about whom to love, to whom solidarity
should be extended and when and where those feelings should be displayed. Second,
drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze on Francis Bacon, this article demonstrates that
by propagating iconic representations of solidarity, peace and love, ‘meming’ attends
to the logic of the sensational and the cliché and thereby falls short of contesting
terrorism through sensing peace, love and solidarity. Finally, the article addresses how
the violence of sensation can release the invisible forces that can be made productive
in celebrating life.
Keywords
Affect, Deleuze, ‘Je suis Charlie’, memes, terrorism, visual approaches
Corresponding author:
Clara Eroukhmanoff, School of Law and Social Sciences, London South Bank University, 103 Borough Road,
London SE1 0AA, UK.
Email: Eroukhmc@lsbu.ac.uk
829884IPT0010.1177/1755088219829884Journal of International Political TheoryEroukhmanoff
research-article2019
Article
168 Journal of International Political Theory 15(2)
Introduction
On 7 January 2015, armed with Kalashnikovs, the Kouachi brothers attacked the Paris
headquarters of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, killing 11 employees.1 The next
day, an eruption of affects emerged following the moral indignation the brutal killings
caused. Various memes quickly spread under the hashtag #JesuisCharlie. In January
2015, ‘Je suis Charlie’ had for a slogan ‘l’amour plus fort que la haine’ (love: stronger
than hate) and after the November Paris attacks, the Eiffel Tower was collated to the
universal peace sign, as the second image above shows. ‘Je suis Charlie’ is at the origin
of a multi-languages trend that replicates and alters the slogan to new victims of terror-
ism in Western Europe. More recently, responses to the Manchester attacks mobilised a
similar response with the slogan ‘I heart MCR’. These visual and affective interventions
draw on a long repertoire of anti-war movements by invoking the universal peace sign
and the solidarity ribbon and in that sense, perform a visualisation of peace and solidar-
ity. This article challenges this view by showing that they create a system of meaning and
order that institutionalises an emotional guideline for how one should feel about terror-
ism and how solidarity should be expressed (and importantly to whom). Memes of soli-
darity to victims of terrorist attacks in the ‘West’2 sensationalise terrorism and represent
a kind of affects that are conditioned as much as condition future emotional responses to
terrorism. In other words, they constitute technologies of emotional governance that
police Western bodies’ responses to terrorism: emotions of peace, solidarity and love
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