Maéva Clément - Böcker

Recognition is often considered a means to de-escalate conflicts and promote peaceful social interactions. This volume explores the forms that social recognition and its withholding may take in asymmetric armed conflicts, examining the risks and opportunities that arise when local, state, and transnational actors recognise, misrecognise, or deny recognition of armed non-state actors.By studying key asymmetric conflicts through the prism of recognition, it offers an innovative perspective on the interactions between armed non-state actors and state actors. In what contexts does granting recognition to armed non-state actors foster conflict transformation? What happens when governments withhold recognition or label armed non-state actors in ways they perceive as misrecognition? The authors examine the ambivalence of recognition processes in violent conflicts and their sometimes-unintended consequences. The volume shows that, while non-recognition prevents conflict transformation, the recognition of armed non-state actors may produce counterproductive precedents and new modes of exclusion in intra-state and transnational politics.

How do collective actors move from moderate politics to (violent) extremism? Faced with high risks of repression and implosion, they need to legitimate such radical change to keep members and followers committed to collective action. Drawing on the texts, audios, and videos of five Islamist organisations in the UK and Germany in the 2000s and 2010s, the book develops a transdisciplinary theoretical framework and innovative methodological approach to explore how radical changes in activism are mediated. Clément argues that political violence has to feel right, as a collective, for an organisation and its followers to move from moderate activism to (violent) extremism. She shows that organisations mediate this change by performing collective emotions in and through narrative. The book offers a provocative and nuanced account which departs from conventional interpretations of radicalisation and reminds us of the power of emotions.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

This edited volume is the first to discuss the methodological implications of the ‘emotional turn’ in International Relations. Acknowledging the pluralityof ontological positions, concepts and theories about the role of emotions in world politics, this volume presents and discusses various ways to research emotions empirically.