Why They Don’t Hate Us: Emotion, Agency and the Politics of ‘Anti-Americanism’

Abstract

This article reconceptualises the emotions associated with 'anti-Americanism' and sketches an alternative account of impassioned protest in the Middle East and South Asia. I identify two overlapping discursive images that mistake what emotions are and how they fuel political resistance: 'Islamic anger', which delegitimises emotional expression as a form of political agency, and 'anti-American hatred', which assumes that popular emotions in these regions are tied to a clear and distinct object -America. Drawing on two recent cases widely discussed in the American media, I show how the emotional quality of political resistance is used to undermine its legitimacy. Using ethnographic sources, I then offer a preliminary sketch of the normative, historical and interactive contexts of those protests. The article encourages international relations scholars to view grassroots actors as neither impulsive insurgents nor aggregations of survey data but instead complex moral agents embedded in local struggles.

Rethinking Affective Experience and Popular Emotion: World War I and the Construction of Group Emotion in International Relations

“…Representations of mass emotion can serve to delegitimize the political claims and agency of certain actors, as indicated by the long history of efforts to describe revolutionary movements and crowds as emotionally driven disruptions to social stability (Ginneken, ; Van Rythoven, ). In some cases, mass emotions may be regarded as authentic emotional expressions of some culturally divergent community—as in the essentializing notion of “Islamic rage” (Ross, ). Here, mass emotions are attributed to communities on the opposite side of a politically salient marker of difference, whether national, religious, class‐based, gender, or racial, in ways that further work to generate dangerous, irrational, or untrustworthy others (Bilgic, Hoogensen Gjørv, & Wilcock, ).…”

Buying US products and services: religiosity, animosity, and ethnocentrism of young consumers

“…The progression in hostility toward the US increased the chances of supporting terror and extremism in Muslim countries (Van Ginneken, 2007). According to Ross (2010), anti-US sentiments worldwide are significantly causative to the US recession. According to Berger (2014), a study conducted by Pew Foundation in Muslim majority countries indicated that the majority of the people in those countries were intended to refuse US products and services.…”

Realism, emotion, and dynamic allegiances in global politics

“…2 Sterling-Folker rightly argues that realists need to reclaim their controversial concern for human biology but with attention to the variability of its effects in the social world (2002,. I argue that elements of this orientation already exist in the work of Morgenthau and Niebuhr. theory -in order to make sense of what emotions are and how they affect political behavior (Ross 2006(Ross , 2014Bially Mattern, 2011;Bleiker and Hutchison 2008;Crawford 2009;Mercer 2010;Hall 2011;Sasley 2011). In the meantime, under our noses lies a theoretical tradition -political realism -whose long-standing concern for evil, fear, and tragedy indicates a potentially bountiful source for thinking about human emotion and its role in international politics.…”

“…7 Recent work in cultural theory builds on the account of French social theorist Gilles Deleuze. See, for example,Connolly (2002),Ross (2006), and the essays inGregg (2010). 280 A N D R E W A . G .…”

“… 17 On the use of emotionality to delegitimize the political agency of terrorist organizations, see Ross (2010). …”