Up in the air: Ritualized atmospheres and the global Black Lives Matter movement
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231181989 |
| Author | Ty Solomon |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
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JR
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231181989
European Journal of
International Relations
2023, Vol. 29(3) 576 –601
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661231181989
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Up in the air: Ritualized
atmospheres and the global
Black Lives Matter movement
Ty Solomon
University of Glasgow, UK
Abstract
How did the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement of 2020 resonate at a global level?
And how did the ritual practices of the movement spread internationally? International
Relations (IR) has seen increasing interest in the role of rituals in global politics, and the
wider literature on rituals often explores their stabilizing effects while noting how rituals
function by working on the collective emotions of participants. Yet what particular kinds
of emotional processes lend rituals their power? And how do these ritual emotions
disrupt prevailing power structures? This article proposes that conceptualizing these
experiences as ritualized atmospheres opens up at least two new avenues for research
on rituals, emotions, and global social movements in IR. First, ritualized atmospheres
are characterized by their viscerally felt yet also intangible and diffuse features. These
tensions offer an affective account of rituals’ often-noted constitutive dual pull between
the materialization of political communities while also constructing them as emotionally
charged abstractions. Second, the tensions and ambiguities of ritualized atmospheres
can generate new horizons for thoughts and actions. Ambient shifts in collective mood
can change what may be thought, said, and practiced within ritual contexts, allowing for
new discourses and new forms of political action. The article pursues the question of
BLM’s global resonance by way of developing these conceptual and empirical arguments.
Keywords
Discourse, resistance, racism, emotions, affect, social movement
Corresponding author:
Ty Solomon, Politics & International Relations, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of
Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8RT, UK.
Email: ty.solomon@glasgow.ac.uk
1181989EJT0010.1177/13540661231181989European Journal of International RelationsSolomon
research-article2023
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Introduction
Beginning in 2014 with the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson yet spreading
internationally in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Black
Lives Matter (BLM) has become one of the most significant social movements in recent
history. The movement has been at the forefront of forcing widespread attention to issues
of police violence and systemic racism in Western societies, contending that racism is
both a domestic and transnational issue (Shilliam, 2020). Although primarily based in the
United States, the movement spread internationally to the United Kingdom, Europe, and
Asia.1 One of the most noted aspects of BLM in its renewed appearance in 2020 was
precisely how widespread the movement became (New York Times, 2020). Through
domestic and transnational organizing across rural towns in the American Midwest to
small villages across the United Kingdom to European urban centers to embassies and
streets in South Africa and Indonesia, the graphic nature of the video of George Floyd’s
killing and the primary claims of BLM have spread globally.2
International Relations (IR) has recently seen significant rising interest in rituals of
global politics (Aalberts et al., 2020; Baele and Balzacq, 2022; Charrett, 2018; Cronin-
Furman and Krystalli, 2020; Davies, 2018; Holmes and Wheeler, 2020; Kampf and
Löwenheim, 2012; Knotter, 2020; Koschut, 2014; Kustermans et al., 2022; Mälksoo,
2021; Oren and Solomon, 2015; Pacher, 2018; Salgo, 2017; Wegner, 2021; Wong, 2021).
The global BLM movement of 2020 vividly displayed many kinds of ritual practices,
from the rhythms and reverberations of protest marches to shared and reiterated dis-
courses and symbolic gestures across countries, to the ritual sharing of video and photo-
graphs across social media. Yet how did BLM resonate globally? How did these ritualized
protests spread internationally across a wide range of audiences and geographical sites?
In recent decades, rituals research has largely moved beyond the notion of rituals as
overly formalized and “irrational,” instead focusing on how rituals help to symbolically
constitute the social world (Bell, 2009). Yet to inquire about the symbolic world that the
BLM movement helped to constitute and spread suggests examining aspects of rituals
that IR scholarship has largely neglected.
This article suggests that the concept of ritualized atmospheres can help address these
questions about the global resonance of BLM and about some of the crucial but over-
looked affective dynamics of rituals more broadly.3 A concept that attempts to capture
the diffuse and ambient yet energetic aspects of collective ritual events, ritualized atmos-
pheres shape behavior in non-determinate ways and can define the character of an expe-
rience. Ritualized atmospheres can be understood as the ambient and tonal affective
qualities and experiences generated by collectively shared embodied ritual practices.
Often looser than discrete emotions, atmospheres (and the related concept of moods)
frequently constitute the affective milieu out of which more definable emotions emerge.
It is these qualities of ritualized atmospheres—their tensions “between presence and
absence, between subject and object and between the definite and indefinite—that enable
us to reflect” on how affective experiences which are diffuse can nevertheless have sig-
nificant effects (Anderson, 2009: 77). The enveloping qualities of ritualized atmospheres
were some of the most striking yet underexamined aspects of BLM participants’ own
articulations of their experiences. Rituals, or following Bell (2009), ritualizations, often
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