The terror of emotion

By DEBBIE HATHWAY
… sexual assault … Burmese leader … George Bush … chain to power … will of the people … coup d’etat … uprising … war against Islam … civil unrest … corruption … Somali …
The opening of PARTLY GOD is so intense; I have tears in my eyes within five minutes. That’s a good sign. "The dancers are brave, committed and disciplined ... There's no baggage. No filters," says director Lara Foot Newton.
Transnational trauma is one of the themes of PARTLY GOD. I googled it and found an April 2006 summary of the fourth conference in the Persian Gulf Initiative about transnational violence. It shows that emotion, spread through social networks, is the root cause of this type of uprising. It quoted a study of “weak-against-strong resistance in Eastern Europe throughout the Second World War. One of the best predictors of high-risk and high-sacrifice violence against occupation or political puppets was resentment, an emotion that depended upon inversions of group status. Even if the group that was placed in a higher status wasn’t a threat, it would be attacked...
“… alienation, anger, and shame have been used as descriptions of Europe’s diaspora Muslims, many of which comprise the Sunni extremist network. Emotion exists in the seemingly benign social bonds that gradually radicalise decentralised terror networks, and even today’s self-starters. Emotion galvanises populations in response to a clear change in group status. And emotion fosters the type of risk acceptance and sacrifice necessary for weak groups to take on strong militaries. Importantly, emotion in these cases is not invoked in an irrational/pathological sense, but as a normal response to the political events and social structure of daily life.
“... emotions appear integral to all the processes surrounding terror: networks, motivation, and ideology. They are central to the radicalisation story because changes in structure (e.g. wars in Afghanistan or Palestine, political repression throughout the Arab world, occupation in Iraq, etc.) affect emotion, and emotion affects the formation of one’s beliefs and the salience of one’s preferences.”
(Extracts of summary report by Nichole Argo, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was research assistant to the Persian Gulf Initiative in 2005-2006.)