Up in the air: Ritualized atmospheres and the global Black Lives Matter movement

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.