Power, Emotions, and Violent Conflicts

Hatred, fear, and disdain—these are emotions that drive conflict protagonists to commit acts of violence against their adversaries. Conventional thinking among conflict analysts holds that the private realm of negative emotions exhibited by conflict actors is distinct fundamentally from the public world of objective causal drivers of conflict, such as poverty, structural violence and proliferation of small arms. However, such conventional thinking regarding this inherent duality of emotions and power cannot for the social-psychic force of affect emotions that intersects with the conflict dynamics. In many conflict settings, the release of such a force is a political act, with the potential to induce, motivate, lure, compel or mobilize conflict actors to take up arms against their adversary. Such a force reflects a manifestation of affect power that manifests itself in the public performatives where people gather, debate, deliberate, cheer, jeer, and sometimes fight. In this paper, I examine the entanglement of certain emotions and power relations among actors immersed in protracted violence. Central to my arguments are the recent findings in social psychology regarding the complexity of moral emotions as they are experienced as a contagious force in conflict settings. Section 1 summarizes these findings. In section 2, I develop certain themes regarding the inter-linkages between the conflict actors’ emotional life and their power relations. The notion of affect power is developed. In section 3, I present two case studies of affect power, which center on elements of structurally violent systems. I conclude with a summary regarding the implications of this emotion-power entanglement for conflict analysis. I recommend that conflict analysts abandon the alleged inherent distinction between the subjectivity of social psychological constructions, such as notions of identity and difference, and the objectivity of power dynamics that represent external drivers of conflict