Emotional cycles and collective action: Global crises and the World Social Forum

Abstract

As the world suffers the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, global justice activists pursue political solutions to its devastating consequences especially on the weakest sections of the world’s population. I analyse activists’ responses to the 2008 financial crisis to reflect on how collective action is impacted by social crises. The global justice movement and the financial sector face recurring, intertwined, and inversely related cycles of exuberance and crash. I find that, on the one hand, the prevalence and intensity of recurring crises in large transnational collective actors depend on factors including their prevalent emotional dynamics, their dispositions towards their objectives, and their ability to gauge external reality. On the other hand, differential outcomes of crises in groups are accounted for by the capacity to mourn the losses suffered, as opposed to the denial of responsibility and the externalisation of blame. I analyse these emotional dynamics through psychoanalytic lenses to provide a contribution to the literature on the cycles of collective action and, more broadly, to the study of political action and social change.

The mediating role of emotions in offline and online political participation: A post-social outbreak study in Ecuador and Chile

“…Empirical evidence has shown that discontent is necessary, but not sufficient to explain participation in social movements (Cárdenas and Blanco, 2006). Current evidence suggests that emotions play a determining role in action within these contexts (Jasper, 2011;Poma and Gravante, 2017;Van Ness and Summers-Effler, 2018;Curnow and Vea, 2020;Caruso, 2022). These actions are expressed in different forms of political participation, in which emotions can increase participation, fostering anger and fear, which are related to political discontent and increase the probability of involvement (Valentino et al, 2011).…”