Emotions that permeate power relations are complex and ambivalent, inviting resistance and opposition as much as consent. While emotions are widely accepted as an inherent element of power and governance in the literature on international relations, relatively little attention has been paid to situations where the emotional meanings of the 'state' are openly contested. This paper highlights a situation where emotional meanings are contested, or what I call affective sites of contestation: Situations and events in which rules and norms about the appropriate expression of emotions are challenged, resisted and potentially redefined. It is the ambivalence and change of certain emotional meanings that make emotions an object of contestation in world politics, I argue. Whenever "official" emotions are contested from "below", "the state" itself, representing a national project, is challenged, potentially changing the relationship between citizens and the state.