The Affective Forces of Ethnic Politics

A powerful exploration of how emotions like rage, grief, and pride drive ethnic conflict and shape political life. The Affective Forces of Ethnic Politics: But Look What They Did to Us! offers a bold intervention into the study of ethnic conflict, challenging the idea that fear, interests, or elite manipulation are the primary drivers of violence. Instead, it reveals how humiliation, grief, pride, and spite, or the affective forces of ethnic politics, sustain long-term antagonism and block the path to reconciliation. Through emotionally charged case studies from Bosnia, Kosovo, Gaza, and Nagorno-Karabakh, the book shows how wounded identity, symbolic resistance, and accusatory discourse fuel post-conflict polarization. Rather than irrational outbursts, these emotions are deeply structured forces that shape how communities interpret the past, experience the present, and imagine the future. Against approaches that treatemotion as the opposite of reason, the book reframes it as a vital infrastructure of political life that must be understood to address the endurance of ethnic conflict. Written in a clear, conceptually rich style, the book explains complex emotional dynamics without relying on jargon, making it accessible to students, researchers, and general readers with a basic grounding in conflict or political studies. It offers a powerful new lens for understanding identity conflict, and why reckoning with its emotional foundations is essential for any lasting resolution.