Speaker
Description
Terrorism research has increasingly recognised the importance of narratives in facilitating violence. Yet while narratives are often said to be persuasive because they engage affect, how they do so remains underexplored. This conceptual paper addresses that question by examining how narratives contribute to the emotional conditions under which extremist violence comes to feel both permissible and necessary. By integrating insights from criminology, narrative studies, terrorism studies, and Barrett's theory of constructed emotion, we argue that narratives do not simply trigger emotions - they help construct them.
We conceptualise extremist narratives as stories that structure which emotions are available or felt to be legitimate in a given context. In doing so, they also shape which (re)actions are deemed appropriate. We develop this argument through two mechanisms central to understanding violent extremism: neutralisation and de-pluralisation. Neutralisation helps explain how narratives can reorganise emotional responses in ways that make violence feel morally permissible. De-pluralisation shows how narratives progressively narrow alternative interpretations and emotional responses, making violence appear necessary. By reconceptualising extremist narratives as mechanisms of emotion construction rather than emotional triggering, this paper contributes to debates on terrorism and emotions and offers a new framework for understanding how narratives facilitate extremist violence.
| Institutional Affiliation | Vrije Universiteit Brussel |
|---|