Abstract
Emotions are often said to be a hard case for empirical analysis because of their ‘intimate’ nature. This chapter argues that this perspective stems from a misleading view of the real nature of emotions. As Butler recently put it, emotions are inseparable from the social ‘frames’ which constitute them. Hence, it is possible to bypass the epistemological problem of the study of emotions by studying these frames. I make this point by elaborating on an inquiry into the ‘frames’ which mediate French airmen’s emotional relation to violence. I analyse their emotional approach to violence in three steps: (1) data collection, (2) an analysis of the language they use when talking about their victims, and (3) an investigation of the routinized procedures which precede their lethal actions.
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Notes
- 1.
The words ‘emotion’ and ‘move’ have the same etymological roots.
- 2.
Some authors who take for granted the aforementioned dualism conceive of emotions as social expressions of personal feelings .
- 3.
House of Commons, Foreign Affairs Committee, Libya : Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK’s future policy options, Third Report of Session 2016–2017.
- 4.
The notion of ‘defence intellectual’ refers to scholars who work for think tanks or university departments sponsored by the industrial–military complex.
- 5.
Interview no 19 with a pilot, March 2013.
- 6.
So-called ‘smart bombs’—that is, bombs equipped with guidance systems—have ambivalent effects on the fate of civilians. On the one hand, they enable targeting of specific sites which are, sometimes, empty of civilians. On the other hand, they rarely miss their target, meaning that they often fall in the middle of a city. In this sense , they differ from the ‘blind’ bombs of the Second World War which often fell in the sea or in no man’s land. The consequence of this is simple: ‘smart bombs’ structurally kill a calculable number of civilians. I elaborate more on this idea in the last section.
- 7.
Interview no 13 with a pilot, March 2013.
- 8.
Interview no 3 with a pilot, December 2012.
- 9.
See the famous Goldstone report published by the UN Human Rights Council, 12th session, agenda item 7, “Human rights in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories? Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict”, 25 September 2009.
- 10.
It is important to highlight, in this respect , that the choice between both security instruments does not stem from technical considerations. As the assassination of Bin Laden illustrates, Western government do not hesitate to put elite troops on the ground when they deem it necessary. The preference for air bombing outside the West simply stems from the fact that they do not want to put their military personnel at risk and prefer ‘transferring risks’ to non-Western civilians (Shaw, 2006).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Maéva Clément and Eric Sangar for their comments on a previous version of this text.
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Delori, M. (2018). A Plea for a Discursive Approach to Emotions: The Example of the French Airmen’s Relation to Violence. In: Clément, M., Sangar, E. (eds) Researching Emotions in International Relations. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65575-8_6
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