Collective emotions and political violence. Narratives of Islamist organisations in Western Europe

• Applicant: Dr. Maeva Clement
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2022 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 507194873

How do collective actors move from moderate politics to violent forms of activism? When turning to political violence, organisations face high risks of repression and implosion. To maintain a high level of activism over time, keep members and followers committed, and incentivise (violent) collective action, groups need to legitimate radical change. Non-state actors justifying and engaging in political violence talk about themselves and others in complex ways that cannot be reduced to ideological precepts nor strategic discourses. Building on a transdisciplinary approach, the author explores how radical changes in activism are mediated narratively and emotionally to members and followers. The empirical analysis focuses on five Islamist organisations in the UK and Germany in the 2000s and 2010s and draws on numerous primary data consisting of textual, audio, and video material.Addressing debates around radicalisation and political violence, the book presents a timely analysis of the politics of emotions by non-state actors. The author makes a theoretical, methodological and empirically grounded contribution. To account for changes in organisations’ political goals and practices, she operationalises discourse-based and action-based forms of moderation and radicalisation, thereby reconstructing phases of activism. In a next step, the author explores how groups’ narrative practices evolved across phases of activism. The analysis centres on how organisations legitimise and create incentives for political violence narratively. Specifically, the author delves into the collective emotions performed in and through narrative and interrogates their effects on the possibilities of (violent) collective action. The book’s central argument is that organisations couch radical changes in activism in a strikingly similar romantic narrative, in and through which group-appropriate emotions are performed and gradually institutionalised. In short, collectives and individuals alike need to feel moved to take decisive (violent) action.By exploring how non-state actors shape collective emotions and their effects on collective action, this book extends beyond the ideology-centric and overly rationalist approaches to radicalisation and political violence. The author offers an innovative and nuanced account which departs from conventional interpretations and reminds us of the power of emotions. As socio-political discourses and practices of all kinds draw on the politics of emotions, the argument presented in this book goes far beyond mobilisation by Islamist actors. It calls for a radical, epistemic shift in the way scholars approach (world) politics and opens research avenues to do so.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants