Contentious Emotions: An Introduction

TLDR: A growing number of scholarly works show that emotions, both negative (fear, anger, hatred, disgust, grief, sadness, indignation, shame, guilt, resentment) and positive (trust, compassion, love, pride, pleasure, joy) have explanatory power regarding the shape and trajectory of political mobilisations.

Abstract: Emotions matter a great deal in politics, in South Asia as elsewhere, because they have the power to mobilise. A growing number of scholarly works show that emotions, both negative (fear, anger, hatred, disgust, grief, sadness, indignation, shame, guilt, resentment) and positive (trust, compassion, love, pride, pleasure, joy) have explanatory power regarding the shape and trajectory of political mobilisations. However, this exciting new literature suffers, we argue, from three important weaknesses. First, it deals almost exclusively with Western politics and societies. It thus suffers from an ethnocentric bias in the conceptualisation both of emotions and their political role. Second, the theoretical and methodological difficulties involved in defining, observing and analysing emotions are not adequately addressed. Third, only rarely does this literature build on empirical, inductive and contextual observation of the political role of emotions, to test the validity of dominant generalisations of the causality link between emotion and action. This chapter discusses these three research gaps and introduces the discussion on the specific value of South Asia for cross-cultural comparisons of the relationship between emotions and mobilisation, a relationship here encapsulated in the notion of ‘contentious emotions’.