Introduction

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Politics

Symposium: Emotions, Ideologies, and Violent Political Mobilization

The advent of radical Islamist groups, the birth of ISIS, and several violent events in the last 15 years shows that ideologies and emotions are strictly associated with political violence. However, do these intangible factors have concrete roles in the process of armed mobilization and in the management of armed groups? Or are they simply epiphenomena?

Although classical studies on revolutions often acknowledged the ideological implications of those phenomena and research on armed groups performed during the Cold War was mainly focused on Marxist insurgencies, most contemporary social science literature on armed mobilization, civil wars, and terrorism neglects the role of emotions and ideologies, developing behavioral models that mostly focus on material factors. Journalists and policy makers tend to assume that emotions, ideologies, and political violence are somehow intertwined, but rigorous scholarly work on this very topic is still underdeveloped. This symposium aims to go beyond structural and material explanations of conflict and mobilization. The following contributions focus on agency and provide diverse angles on the relations between emotions, ideologies, and political violence. We argue that including emotions and ideologies in our theoretical frameworks will allow us to unpack the decision-making process that leads individuals from accepting the status quo to mobilizing and opting for political violence. It will also help us understand the behavior of armed actors once individuals have been mobilized. Moreover, we suggest that ideologies and emotions should be studied together and researchers should further theorize their possible feedback and interactions. The experience of specific emotions can facilitate certain ideologies being ingrained (see Petersen in this symposium) and, vice-versa, the presence of ideological frameworks may amplify or limit the experience of certain emotions (see Nussio in this symposium). This could possibly lead to theoretical circularity and empirical endogeneity, but the above issues are too relevant to avoid tackling these challenges.

EMOTIONS, IDEOLOGIES AND VIOLENCE: WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR

Emotion can be defined as the by-product of an event that occurred or could occur that influences a person's individual status, especially in terms of feeling or perception. Emotions are the residues of experience (Petersen 2011). Ideology, instead, is "a set of political beliefs that...