Uses and Abuses of Emotions: Role of Emotions in Provoking War on Terror

Abstract

This study aims to problematize the assumptions of post-positivist and post-structuralist theories regarding the productive power of language. It seeks to address certain critical deficiencies in the conceptualization of power within these theoretical paradigms. The existing models of productive power do not account for how some discourses become efficacious while other do not as well as these theories are unable to recognize the intimate interplay of emotions and language in terrorism discourse. This research aims at unfolding how emotions are infused with language to construe the events in specific manner and then contribute to shape emotional responses to the events. This study also endeavors to demonstrate how emotions generated by United States’ officials, leaders and policy makers provoked and contributed to war on terror. This by extension explicate the role of emotions in international relations and peace and conflict studies. The discourse-emotion nexus is unfolded with the help of the strategy “interpreting emotions” which extracts emotion terms from the discourse for thematic analysis. The speeches, interviews, statements, remarks and official documents of US leaders, policy makers and officials from September 2001 to December 2004 were selected and date was divided into five main themes such as fear, anger, hate, grief and hostility for an exhaustive investigation. The findings of the study indicate that in the context of war on terror emotions were interpreted in a particular way through discourse to galvanize certain actions. The emotional campaign was orchestrated to validate and promote a range of both international and domestic political initiatives. These include actions such as altering regimes in nations like Iraq, extending military presence to new areas like Afghanistan, bolstering military power and influence, establishing domestic and global surveillance systems, exerting influence over international institutions, and more broadly, upholding and expanding a Western-centric liberal global order.