Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict.

• Author: Marquez, Xavier
• Position: Book review

MIXED EMOTIONS: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict

Author: Andrew Ross

Published by: University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013, 232pp, US$27.50.

In Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict, Andrew Ross claims that emotions have been poorly conceptualised and undervalued as a source of agency in the study of international relations. Due to what he calls 'liberal' assumptions about the value of reason as the proper standard of agency, international relations scholars tend to present the role of emotion in purely negative terms, failing to account for its productivity and 'creativity', or conceptualising it in schematic terms that oversimplify complex 'circulations of affect' by reducing them to simple 'cycles of hatred' or undifferentiated 'fears' tied to over-specific identities. A proper understanding of phenomena ranging from terrorism to ethnic conflict, according to Ross, requires much more nuanced attention to the ways in which emotions are generated and spread through networks of social practices.

Ross's key argument is that emotion is intensely social, ambiguous and capable of creatively disrupting identities and norms, rather than private, clear-cut in its implications and conservative. Emotions are not mere feelings, but 'expressive social displays' that can be transmitted to others via both conscious and unconscious mechanisms. Ross explores the implications of this conceptualisation of emotion in two theoretical chapters and three case studies: the generation and circulation of emotion surrounding the 9/11 attacks in the United States and the Madrid train bombings on 11 March 2004; the complexity of emotion in the mobilisation of nationalism in early 1990s Yugoslavia and the processes leading to genocide in Rwanda; and the ways in which emotions are framed by institutions of transitional justice, such as the international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the Gacaca courts in Rwanda. Throughout these chapters, Ross argues that standard ways of framing the emotions at work in these settings (for example, accounts of 'cycles of hatred' in ethnic conflict) oversimplify their ambiguity and their relationships with existing identities and norms. Terrorism does not automatically lead to fear of the terrorist and the desire for retribution; strong nationalist passions are not always generated by conscious processes of...