Can the bereaved speak? Emotional governance and the contested meanings of grief after the Berlin terror attack

Abstract

Emotions that run through relations of power are complex and ambivalent, inviting resistance and opposition as much as compliance. While the literature in International Relations broadly accepts emotions as an intrinsic element of power and governance, relatively little attention has been given to situations when the emotional meanings of “the state” are openly contested. This essay highlights a situation in which emotional meanings are contested, or what I refer to as affective sites of contestation: situations and events where rules and norms about the proper expression of emotions are challenged, resisted, and potentially redefined. It is the ambivalence and alternation of particular emotional meanings, which, I will suggest, makes emotions an object of contestation in world politics. Whenever “official” emotions are contested from “below,” “the state” itself, representing a national project, is called into question, potentially transforming the relationship between citizens and the state. Building on the works of sociologist Mabel Berezin and others, this essay develops the ideal types of “the secure state” and “communities of feeling” as analytical prisms to reconstruct the political contestation of emotional meanings, pertaining to how collective grief is expressed after a terror attack.