The so-called “refugee crisis” of 2015, as well as the ensuring refugee movements due to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022, have evoked both significant solidarity and deep divisions within European societies, leading to emotionally charged debates on European migration policy at various levels.

The associated emotional discourses and practices of affective contestation in European migration policy by activist groups from the left and right spectrum are at the core of this political science sub-project, which seeks to answer the following questions: What institutionally embedded repertoires of emotions in migration policy are evident at the level of the European Union (EU) and to what extent do activist discourses and practices challenge these repertoires of emotions?

Subject of investigation:

The project examines the dynamic interplay between the repertoires of emotions communicated and mobilized by EU governmental bodies and articulations of emotions by activist networks (“affects from below”) that question the emotional politics of state authorities. Whenever state-communicated emotions are contested by “affects from below”, international institutions like the EU, which represent transnational projects, are also called into question, thus potentially altering the relationship between local and European actors.

The project understands emotional politics as political discourses and practices that address, cultivate, manipulate, or mimic certain emotions and expressions for political purposes. The project sheds light on situations in which the meanings and forms of expressions of individual emotional repertoires are disputed or what the project refers to as affective sites of contestation: situations and events in which rules and norms regarding the appropriateness and expression of emotions are questioned, rejected, and possibly redefined.

Theoretical, methodological, and empirical work:

The project theoretically develops an analytical framework for the analysis of affective contestation between the ideal types of established repertoires of emotions of governmental entities and alternative activist communities of feelings as prisms for reconstructing the sites of political contestation over emotion repertoires within the EU. Methodologically, it develops an emotions-based discourse analysis to capture contested verbal and visual forms of emotional expression. Using two example groups in Germany, the project empirically examines how emotional communities that locate themselves on the fringes of the left or right political spectrum, construct European migration policy as an affectively contested political field.