The spirit of US President Obama’s speech announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden (OBL) was captured in one phrase: ‘Justice has been done.’Footnote 1 Despite the President’s typically impassive demeanor, this was not the cool, legal-rational justice of trial, deliberation, judgment, and sentencing; this was, a decade after 11 September 2001 (9/11), the hot, summary justice of visceral retribution. Aggrieved American moral sensibilities had demanded, and finally received, a head on a pike. It was ‘the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children’ on 11 September 2001, the President intoned, which provided the principal justification. The political class agreed. When former President George W. Bush commented that the killing had sent an ‘unmistakable message’ to terrorists that ‘no matter how long it takes, justice will be done’,Footnote 2 he was stating in polite terms what the New York Post exclaimed forthrightly: ‘Got Him! Vengeance At Last! US Nails The Bastard’.Footnote 3
The President, the former President, and most of the US media, channelled and reinforced the emotions of a majority of Americans. The jubilant crowds in Washington and New York on the night of OBL’s death were microcosms of a phenomenon replicated across the country. Opinion polling showed that 93 per cent of respondents approved of the killing. Eighty per cent reported being ‘thrilled’ or ‘happy’.Footnote 4 A deep emotional resonance linked the present with the past. In a polity as divided as the United States, the death of OBL, like the 9/11 tragedy itself, united the country in a way that few events can. This was the unity of a ‘wounded, vengeful nationalism’.Footnote 5 Through an act of redemptive violence a national trauma was purged, casting from the world of the living he who had ended the lives of thousands of innocent civilians.
Most US politicians, and scholars with rational actor assumptions, would reject the idea that the ‘justice’ invoked after the killing of OBL can be equated with revenge – acts intended to harm a person or group for the harms that they have inflicted on oneself or one’s group. The reasons are not difficult to identify. Revenge is driven by emotions that subvert the rational decision-making many assume is the basis for state-led action.Footnote 6 Revenge is associated with passionate acts, motivated by rage and hatred, which bring no credit to their perpetrators. Such acts are described pejoratively as ‘taking the law into their own hands’, denying the object of vengeful behaviour due legal process.Footnote 7 Rather, the avenger becomes the judge, jury and, quite literally in this case, the executioner.
If the killing of OBL was an act of state revenge, it has serious normative and political implications for the US. For a liberal-democracy ostensibly committed to the rule of law, and one whose leaders repeatedly invoke the idea of it being an exemplar to other states and nations, revenge would in this case be doubly problematic. It would be an act that, prima facie, violated international law by infringing Pakistan’s sovereignty. It would also provide a legitimising example for other states pursuing extra-territorial, revenge killings. Therefore it should come as no surprise that US leaders, the President included, would want to distinguish between justice and revenge, and define the extra-judicial killing of OBL as instantiating the former but not the latter. In this case, it is a distinction without a difference. As we demonstrate, for President Obama himself, and for ranks of lesser political figures, the US media, and the broader polity, the content of ‘justice’ was the killing of a man who bore responsibility for the killing of thousands of Americans. It was an emotionally driven act of negative reciprocity to which the term revenge is appropriately applied.Footnote 8
If this conclusion is accepted, important questions are raised about revenge, emotions, rationality, and state action more generally. What emotions underpinned this act of state vengeance? Are such emotions reducible to individuals or can we meaningfully speak of non-reducible, collective emotions that actuate state behaviour? If we can speak of collective emotions, including those of states, what are the processes through which apparently individual emotions are collectivised and become public and political?Footnote 9 We offer some answers by first expanding on the earlier brief definition of revenge and examining the emotions that animate vengeful acts. We continue by developing a theoretical framework whose core features have been sketched by Jonathon Mercer. This enables an understanding of how emotions and vengeance are collectivised and realised in state actions.Footnote 10 The article then returns to the case of OBL, viewed through this lens. We argue that OBL’s killing was indeed an act of state revenge, premised on emotions collectivised by culture and identity, contagion and interests, and channelled through political leadership.Footnote 11
Revenge, emotions, and political action
As a motive for human action, and as an accelerant of interpersonal and intergroup conflict, revenge is as old as the species itself, or perhaps even older.Footnote 12 Elias Canetti argued that collective revenge was traceable to that most primordial of social groups, the hunting pack.Footnote 13 Anthropological research suggests that revenge behaviour is universal, even if its specific forms are variegated and socially constructed.Footnote 14 From this diversity we can distill some essential features that define vengeful behaviour.
Revenge is, in the first instance, constituted by acts aimed at inflicting harm on those who have, or are perceived to have, inflicted harm on ‘us’ – those with whom we identify as part of our in-group. The infliction of vengeful harm is not pursued primarily as a means to rationally calculated ends – deterrence, modifying behaviour, avoiding future harms – even though such ends may result and/or the avenger may invoke these ends to justify their actions. Rather, it is the infliction of harm itself, in return for previous harm, which is the essence of revenge.Footnote 15 Historically, such harms have involved murder, genocide, torture, assassination, and lesser acts of pecuniary or chiefly symbolic harms. What these share is that in addition to any physical suffering entailed, they take an emotional toll on the object of revenge while communicating a message of righteous redress: to those against whom revenge is taken, to third parties, and most importantly to the revenger themselves. Oded Löwenheim and Gadi Heimann observe:
The revenger, however, wants more than communication with the target or with others. Through ‘teaching’ the target, the revenger actually communicates with itself, thus reaffirming its own psychological world. The injured actor wants to regain the certainty of its violated primary rights, as well as the self-esteem and unique identity that accompany those rights, by putting the wrong-doer in the place of the victim … As the perpetrator is derogated, the world is again seen as an orderly place in which an actor gets what he deserves … .Footnote 16
This passage spells out an ontology and praxis of revenge. By inflicting harm on the object of vengeance, the avenger consoles an individual or collective self that had suffered harms perpetrated by the person or group against whom vengeance is sought. In so doing, they derive emotional solace. Anthropologist Harry Turney-High noted that revenge ‘loosens the taut feeling’ caused by harms to one’s self or one’s group, ‘help[ing] the humiliated human to bear up’. He continued, ‘Revenge, or the hope of revenge, restores the deflated ego, and is a conflict motive with which mankind must reckon with universally.’Footnote 17 Modern neuroscience and psychology affirms the basic thrust of Turney-High’s observation, suggesting that inflicting harm, and even the promise – Vorfreude – of doing so, arouses feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.Footnote 18 These are the emotional drivers that impel vengeance, connecting (selectively) remembered past wrongs with present and future vengeful acts. As such, revenge is always Janus faced, looking backward to the offending act(s) that propel the requisite emotional energies, while simultaneously looking forward to the cleansing, restorative moment when past wrongs will be made right: revenge as catharsis.
The language, feeling, and symbolism of righting past wrongs are central to individual and collective revenge. They transmit the moral substratum on which such acts and justifications are premised. That is, revenge and the harms to which revenge is a response are bound with deeply felt – not just thought or intellectualised – notions of justice.Footnote 19 Individuals and communities, including states, seek revenge not only because they have suffered harm, but also because that harm is perceived to have been unjust and ‘morally outrageous’.Footnote 20 The transgression of justice and the desire to restore it – however that protean notion and its non-English cognates are understood in different times, places, and cultures – are the ultimate sources from which individual and collective revenge flows. When President Obama said of OBL’s killing that ‘justice has been done’, this older, deeper connection between justice and revenge was revealed.
While conceptions of justice and their social expression are time-bound and culturally specific, the underlying emotional states associated with their actual or perceived violation seem to be universal.Footnote 21 Studies from a variety of disciplines emphasise the connection between revenge and a cluster of emotional states that motivate the special intensity driving the planning and execution of vengeful acts. These clusters include, most importantly, shame and humiliation leading to resentment on the one hand, and anger and hatred leading to aggression on the other.Footnote 22
Psychology and other social sciences recognise shame and humiliation as powerful motivators of revenge.Footnote 23 Shame refers to the psychic discomfort that attends circumstances in which one’s feelings and conscious evaluation of self-worth, respect, and esteem are eroded. Humiliation is a particularly intense expression of shame, invariably present, even if repressed, when revenge is demanded and/or taken. Specific expressions of shame and humiliation are culturally grounded and connected to socially constructed conceptions and perceptions of ‘honour’ and ‘respect’.Footnote 24 As Paul Saurette has summarised, for particular circumstances to be experienced as shame or humiliation, ‘there needs to be a normative standard of judgment and aspiration that is deeply embedded and accepted … by a given community.’Footnote 25 The breaching of this normative standard triggers humiliation and repressed or overt anger.Footnote 26
For shame and humiliation to manifest as vengeance they have to be energised by the powerful emotive force of anger and, where nothing short of killing will satisfy the desire for revenge, hatred. Although these emotions are often thought to be synonymous, with the latter a more intense variation of the former, there is a critical distinction between the two. Borrowing from Aristotle, Jon Elster has summed up this difference as one where the hostile feelings associated with anger are directed at and elicited by someone’s actions, rather than being determined by a judgment about their essential qualities and worth. In contrast, with hatred ‘my hostility is directed toward another person or a category of individuals who are seen as intrinsically and irremediably bad. For the world to be made whole, they have to disappear.’Footnote 27 One can be angry with a person or group for what they have done, but this does not necessarily imply hatred of them. To hate is to view a person, group, or categorical identity as an absolute negative, unworthy of the moral consideration we afford those whom we do not hate. Anger is here a necessary but not sufficient condition for hatred. Anger can burgeon into hatred and externalised aggression, particularly when humiliation is anger’s source. Hatred intensifies the desire for, and the probability of, revenge being sought.
The foregoing discussion has identified the key features of revenge, and the emotions on which it rests. These include shame, humiliation, anger, and hatred. These emotions are bound up with conceptions of social honour and esteem, whose defilement can supposedly be erased by taking revenge on the violator. Such conceptions are linked to particular social identities and political cultures, which provides the starting point for understanding how emotions are collectivised and made public.
Collectivising emotions
Mercer recently outlined four processes through which emotions are collectivised, including culture, identity, contagion, and perceived interests.Footnote 28 For all of its suggestiveness, however, this approach is in need of elaboration. In reformulating and further developing Mercer’s ideas, we deal with culture and identity together, differentiating their political aspects more explicitly, and introduce an additional element in the collectivising of emotions – group leadership.Footnote 29
The first element is the symbiotic one of culture and identity, which partly regulates the emotions of their bearers. Culture is conventionally understood as the intersubjective, patterned system of beliefs, values, and symbolic representations shared by members of a given group.Footnote 30 Political culture, with which we are centrally concerned, is a subset of these broader patterns, referring to the dominant ideas and behaviours informing institutions and groups involved in the exercise of power. It forms the ideational basis for communication and sociality, and is the mutually constitutive companion to political identity. While culture does not homogenise group thinking or create uniform identities and personality types, as earlier generations of anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists thought, it does structure relatively durable behavioural and ideational ‘dispositions’ in those who are the bearers of particular examples.Footnote 31 These in turn help shape emotional responses, individually and collectively.
Emotions are cultural phenomena that can have resounding political implications.Footnote 32 Culture constitutes the quotidian, normative frame(s) within which emotion is formed and then channelled. What humans fear, or what makes them angry, hateful, humiliated or grief-stricken, is shaped as much by culture and group identity as it is by individual biographies and personalities.Footnote 33 Consequently, while individual human bodies ‘feel’ emotion – and at one level of abstraction ‘cause’ emotion – what emotions they feel and under what circumstances they feel them are, in a most fundamental way, shaped by cultural cues and markers that are properties of group life and identities.Footnote 34 Shared emotions are a glue of integration and social reproduction. As Emma Hutchinson and Roland Bleiker observe, emotions ‘bridge the divide between and connect individuals and collectives’,Footnote 35 and are therefore more than the sum of individuals’ feelings.
But on what, exactly, are group emotions premised if not the sum of the emotions of individuals who compose the group? Mercer’s answer is straightforward and compelling: group emotions depend on group identities, and vice versa. To identify with a group is to feel a sense of belonging and emotional attachment to it. We ‘care’ about the groups with which we identify, responding to the vicissitudes of a group’s life and perceived attacks or sleights against it. The circumstances in which we respond emotionally are as much shaped by the group’s cultural norms, mores, ideational structures, and honour codes as by the personalities and idiosyncrasies of individuals. When one person responds to a perceived sleight (a harm) with rage and indignation we can assume that the response springs largely from that person’s biography and psychological predispositions; when millions of Americans, Chinese, or French simultaneously respond, and demand revenge against their perceived tormentors, we have to look to the collective emotional life of the national states with which they identify. That is to say, we have to consider their political identities.
This is evident in the second process – emotional contagion, defined by Ross as ‘the unconscious and unintentional transmission of emotion through a process of display and imitation’.Footnote 36 It refers to the phenomenon of people affected by and affecting the emotions of others. Contact can be of the direct, face-to-face variety, or it can be more indirect and remote, mediated by technologies that project and induce emotion from a distance.
Studies of the former are numerous, running from social psychology and family therapy, to neuroscience and management studies.Footnote 37 These demonstrate that one person’s joy, anxiety, fear, or anger can incite the same emotions in others. While the causal mechanisms driving such emotional contagion are imperfectly understood, the phenomenon itself is widely accepted, even if different labels are used to describe it.Footnote 38 Broadly, three approaches to causation in the field of emotional contagion can be identified. The first emphasises the role of ‘mimicry’. Displays of emotion have a demonstration effect on observers, especially when the observer and the observed identify with the same group and share the same cultural dispositions. We often ‘use how others feel as evidence of how we should feel’.Footnote 39 This manifests itself in the ‘tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally’.Footnote 40 The second approach emphasises the common appraisal of emotion-eliciting events and circumstances.Footnote 41 Here emotional contagion works not so much through mimicry as through shared normative frames, motivations, and group preferences, which tend to elicit similar reactions to particular events and contexts. These in turn reinforce individual and collective emotions through positive feedback loops, such that emotions are ‘passed on’ or, more accurately, passed back and forth, in a widening circle of those affected. The third approach involves ‘empathic’ understanding. When confronted with the emotional expressions of others, humans can imaginatively place themselves in the position of those people, often based on their own experiences. Remembering and imaginative experiencing of similar episodes generates similar emotional responses.Footnote 42 Rather than being mutually exclusive, all three mechanisms are important for understanding emotional contagion, including that which propels collective revenge. All are present in technologically mediated emotional contagion.
The idea of mediated emotion initially appears as something of a paradox for our understanding of contagion.Footnote 43 Studies cited above suggest that contagion depends on two vital conditions: embodiment, and interaction based on co-presence. That is, emotion is manifested and indeed defined as felt, bodily sensations that reveal themselves in physical gestures, vocalisations, facial expressions and postures, which have reciprocal emotional effects on two or more persons whose presence intersects in time and space. And yet, prima facie, neither of these conditions applies when we examine the effects of the mass media (print, radio, television, and film) or more recent social media platforms (Internet, skype, mobile telephony). We argue that this paradox is more apparent than real.
In terms of mass media, the efficacy of the three mechanisms through which emotional contagion occurs differs with respect to the platform in question. Print media is not an effective medium for emotional mimicry, because of the absence of bodily or aural cues. Yet it can be an excellent medium for empathic understanding driven by common appraisal of events situated within shared normative frames. This is especially true of print images, many of which have had a collective, sometimes global emotional impact with significant political repercussions.Footnote 44 Radio is similarly able to act as a vehicle for emotional contagion prompted by shared appraisal and empathy, but it is also, to a limited extent, able to operate on the terrain of emotional mimicry. While visual cues are absent, aural cues, including the tone, tempo, and timbre of the speaker’s voice, can be mimicked and emotions inferred, a premise on which many talk-back radio hosts build their anxious, angry, and fearful audiences.Footnote 45 Television, film, and various Internet media largely negate the necessity of physical co-presence, compressing time and space to project audio and visual representations into places at once private and collectivised. Despite a screen being interposed between the viewer and the viewed, many cues of face-to-face communication are also present in these forms of media. Thus the argument about direct emotional contagion is applicable to technologically mediated forms, with the difference that the latter’s effects are more predictable and readily manipulated for aesthetic, commercial, and political purposes.Footnote 46 In a collaborative study between academic researchers and Facebook, for example, the newsfeed of 700,000 users of the social networking site were manipulated to test the effects of emotional contagion. Reducing the positive messages flowing to users had the statistically measurable effect of reducing the emotionally positive content that users were in turn likely to post. Negative emotion induced negative emotion; anger begat anger.Footnote 47 None of this means that emotional contagion is automatic and inevitable, affecting all who are exposed. Similar to how contagious diseases do not affect all people equally, emotional contagion has different effects on persons subject to the same stimuli.Footnote 48 Some will be more susceptible, others more resistant, and some will be immune.
The third element in the collectivisation of emotions is group interests, or, more precisely, the intersection of personal and group interests. ‘Interest’ connotes an evaluation of that which is positive or negative in terms of the wellbeing of individuals, groups, social strata, and states. In classical social and political theory, especially its Marxist and Liberal variants, such interests have been conceived in narrowly materialist and instrumental terms, and posited as more real or important than non-material dimensions of social life. Later research established that ideational phenomena like codes of honour, esteem, status, and prestige are shapers of group interests and motivators of individual and collective action.Footnote 49 Events or conditions that impact negatively on the group’s interests impact negatively on the interests of persons who compose and identify with the group: ‘The stronger the identification’, Mercer suggests, ‘the greater should be the impact of the group on the individual.’Footnote 50 That extends, most pertinently, to collective emotional response.
A fourth element in the collectivisation of emotions, one not included in Mercer’s schema but which is, in our view, essential for understanding public emotion, is group leadership. At the national state level, leadership includes all of those individuals, organisations (especially political parties), and offices that are formally or informally able to shape political agendas and outcomes. This admittedly broad definition includes individuals and groups within and outside the state and government. We focus on formal, executive political leadership within the structures of the state. Such leadership is able to channel and focus collective emotions while also manipulating and magnifying them for the leader’s advantage. Heads of state, in particular, symbolically convey the collective emotions of their publics, acting and emoting on their behalf, whether they personally experience those emotions or not. In times of national tragedy or crisis, the effective leader can divine the ‘mood of the nation’ and reflect that in their own gestures and public pronouncements. Indeed, political charisma is the ability of leaders to channel and reflect the collective emotions of their publics, and to fashion narratives and programmes that speak to these.Footnote 51 Hitler, for example, personified the feelings of humiliation, resentment and rage that large sections of the German population felt towards the 1919 Versailles ‘treaty of shame’. He exploited those emotions, promising to avenge Versailles and restore German pride by punishing the internal and external enemies who allegedly contributed to that settlement and resulting economic and social dislocation. In large part this explains the appeal of such an unprepossessing individual as Adolf Hitler.Footnote 52 The broader point is that political leaders embody collectivised emotions, and often amplify those from which they benefit.
Combined with our observations on the connections between certain emotions and revenge, the four processes through which emotions are collectivised provide a lens through which to consider the politics of killing OBL. If the assassination of OBL was an act of state revenge, we could expect the empirical expressions of relevant emotions to be consistent with the theoretical bases we have outlined above.
Act of state revenge
The mission to kill OBL was an act of state revenge framed as the realisation of justice. Justice and revenge were discursively merged to such an extent that alternative interpretations were marginalised.Footnote 53 The message of righteous redress that was communicated to the US populace – a majority of whom felt themselves to have been in some sense victims of OBL – to terrorists, and to third parties, had a powerful emotional and political resonance, beginning with the announcement of the operation and its reception.
A solemn President Obama addressed the nation on the evening of 1 May 2011. From the first sentence he linked the killing of OBL to his responsibility for the ‘murder of thousands of innocent men, woman, and children’. In language formulated to engage the emotions of listeners – linking the present with the past and individual biographies with the nation – he evoked ‘images of 9/11 seared into our national memory’, alongside personalised, unseen images: ‘The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace.’ As was noted later, the security of US citizens also warranted hunting down and killing OBL. But it was the demands of justice on which the assassination ultimately rested. Hence, ‘on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to Al-Qaeda’s terror: Justice has been done.’Footnote 54
These words were not spoken by a ‘smoke them out of their holes’, ‘dead or alive’ cowboy caricature.Footnote 55 They were spoken by a cerebral Harvard law professor-turned-President who embodies mastery of his emotions. Whether or not the President himself experienced the emotional satisfaction and closure that psychologists say is often afforded by revenge, we do not know, and nor does it really matter.Footnote 56 What we do know is that the President’s initial framing of the killing as an act of justice was uniformly embraced by US political elites and the mainstream media. Former President George W. Bush also invoked ‘those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001’, and concluded that ‘tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.’Footnote 57 New York’s Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg concurred: ‘New Yorkers have waited nearly 10 years for this news. It is my hope that it will bring some closure and comfort to all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.’ New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer summarised: ‘This is a thunderous strike for justice for the thousands of my fellow New Yorkers – and citizens all over the world – who were murdered on 9/11.’Footnote 58 These political figures, representative of reactions amongst Republicans and Democrats, explicitly justify the killing in terms of redressing past harms perpetrated by Al-Qaeda and OBL, principally the attacks of 9/11; they view the killing as sending a message, to victims, perpetrators and the world; they speak in the moral register of justice having been done; and they convey the comforting idea that victims of OBL, assumed to all be Americans, can take some emotional solace from his death. They all speak the language of revenge.
The same sentiments were reflected in the US media’s framing of the killing the day after President Obama’s speech.Footnote 59 A content analysis of the headlines of 401 US newspapers on 2 May 2011 confirmed that there was ‘little variation in terms of public endorsement of the act’, though its authors noted that there were differences in how that support was expressed in different parts of the country.Footnote 60 Liberal-leaning areas (as determined by voting patterns at the 2004 and 2008 national elections) awoke to headlines that were more likely to emphasise ‘the notion of justice restoration’, while headlines in conservative parts of the country, although also impressing the justice theme, tended to emphasise notions of patriotism, Americanism, and in-group loyalty. Notwithstanding these differences, the US media uniformly embraced and reinforced the narrative of retributive justice articulated by political leaders.
The media also reflected and buttressed public sentiment. On the streets of Washington, New York, and other US cities crowds gathered to celebrate, chanting ‘USA, USA, USA’ in affirmation of its triumph over an evil other, and a rebalancing of the scales of justice and morality. Dozens of YouTube videos were posted in the coming days, some to the macabre soundtrack of ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’.Footnote 61 The public’s satisfaction was confirmed in opinion polling, with 93 per cent of Americans surveyed by Gallup approving of the killing. In the same poll, when asked if it would have been better to capture or kill bin Laden, 60 per cent expressed a preference for killing and 33 per cent for capture.Footnote 62 As stated earlier, a CNN poll reported that four out of every five respondents were either ‘thrilled’ or ‘happy’ with the killing of OBL, while 88 per cent expressed pride in the way that the military had executed the operation. A PEW poll in the same week found that the American public had reacted with relief (72 per cent), pride (60 per cent), and happiness (58 per cent). This was reflected in a spike in the President’s approval rating of between 9 and 11 percentage points.Footnote 63 The sharp partisan divides that mark US politics were, for a few days at least, set aside. Notwithstanding some malcontents who raised concerns about the lawfulness of such a killing on foreign territory, most Americans could agree that liquidating OBL gave cause for national celebration.Footnote 64
Finally, perhaps the most compelling evidence that the killing of OBL was an act of state revenge was the absence of alternative narratives by government officials and the media. Although ritual observance was paid to US security concerns, they were marginal to the headline theme of killing he who had killed and realising some justice for his victims. There could be few clearer expressions of the ancient principle of lex talionis, or an eye for an eye, according to which justice demands and accepts commensurate retaliation against those who have inflicted harm.Footnote 65 Given that there appears to have been no effort to capture OBL, who was unarmed at the moment of his death,Footnote 66 and given that US intelligence suggested he no longer played a pivotal role in Al-Qaeda, the state revenge proposition is all the more persuasive.Footnote 67 The operation entailed considerable risks for those who participated directly and for the political decision-makers.Footnote 68 But it was an operation whose success promised and delivered rich symbolic, emotional and political rewards, which rested on realising, and being seen to realise, ‘justice’, a proxy for revenge. To understand why and how, we return to the four processes of collectivising emotions and making them public.
The first involves (political) culture and (political) identity. Support for the collective revenge hypothesis necessitates identifying aspects of American political culture and identity that, under certain conditions, predispose their bearers to emotions associated with revenge. In a society as large, diverse and divided as the United States, this presents difficulties, not least of which is ascribing shared culture and identity to groups, constituencies and parties that continually assert their differences, vilify their opponents and embrace contrasting positions. Despite this, we can still meaningfully speak of an over-arching ‘American’ political culture and identity that transcends other subnational cultures and identities, and attains a high degree of unity in times of national emergency. This identity is bound to beliefs and assumptions shared by sufficiently large numbers of Americans, and expressed with sufficient frequency and intensity by US leaders, that we can legitimately generalise an American political culture that transcends cultural and sectional differences. While not exhausting its key constituent parts, two elements standout as being particularly relevant to the killing of OBL and its reception.
American exceptionalismFootnote 69 – the belief that the US is unique, exemplary, and positioned to lead the world – provided a pivotal axis around which collective humiliation and anger were galvanised.Footnote 70 Portrayal of the US by its political leadership, public institutions, and media as exceptional and omnipotent, fired those emotions and the desire for revenge after 9/11.Footnote 71 In his stimulating analysis of post-9/11 global politics, Saurette argues that the attacks on key symbols of US economic, political, and military power exploded American myths of invulnerability and omnipotence: ‘[f]ar from exceptional, the US was revealed simply as one nation among many that was at risk of terrorist attack.’Footnote 72 The US had been disrespected or ‘dissed’, and the state’s response on multiple fronts (Afghanistan, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, Washington DC) was retribution.Footnote 73 Retribution was not just about security or punishment; it was also about public reassertion of American pride and respect, domestically and internationally, which manifested as counter-humiliation: ‘What is central is not merely that punishment will be meted out, but that the humiliated nation, the humiliating terrorist, and the viewing world public will be witness to counter-humiliation.’ The urgency would burn as long as OBL was alive. As a result, ‘counter-humiliation’ was operationalised as a global policy by a President whose persona reflected those of a public that evinced an ‘absolute unwillingness to turn the other cheek’.Footnote 74 Whatever changes may have occurred in US foreign policy during the Obama Presidency, and there have been many, the killing of OBL demonstrated that this ‘policy of counter-humiliation’ was, at least in respect to OBL and the category of terrorist he personified, still operative.
An additional aspect that shaped the emotions demanding revenge for 9/11 was the masculinity that dominates the US strategic community of policymakers, and the broader public discourse around foreign and security policy. A body of scholarship has argued that US politics in general, and foreign policy in particular, has been dominated by values of uncompromising toughness in the face of threat, adversity, and even lack of respect.Footnote 75 American leaders are widely expected to publicly embody the traits that predominate in commonsense understandings of what it is to be a man.Footnote 76 These include a belief that it is not only legitimate to strike back when struck, threatened or ‘dissed’, but that it is obligatory, lest one be dishonoured and labelled a ‘wimp’, as George Bush Snr was prior to 1989. Bush Snr exorcised the wimp demon when the US invaded Panama in December that year. Paradoxically, it seems that even female US political leaders, if they are to be successful, have to play up to the script of idealised traits of toughness, strength, and invulnerability. They may have to do so even more energetically because they are women. Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton have been amongst the most hawkish members of the Cabinets to which they belonged.
The effects of identity abetted these political-cultural dispositions. Those identifying as Americans were and are more likely to interact with and care about other Americans – even if only on the plane of an imagined, national abstraction – and are therefore more likely to have their emotions influenced by them. In other words, emotional priority was and is given to the American in-group vis-à-vis other groups. Americans could have their moral emotions inflamed by the 9/11 attacks, but be less moved by disasters of greater magnitude that befall other groups. The attacks were understood in media, amongst US leaders and the general populace, as not simply harming those who died and were injured, but as harming America as an entity and identity, and in the most outrageous way. Hundreds of millions who identified as American could not help but feel harmed. This elicited not only fear and grief, but also the emotions most impactful in terms of the revenge motive – humiliation, anger, and hatred.
These emotions were amplified by the effects of emotional contagion, in all three identified senses, after 9/11 and after the killing of OBL. Regarding the former, Randall Collins suggests that emotional contagion was sustained through photographic and television coverage ‘focusing on those individuals in the crowds who were crying, were choking back tears, or otherwise were showing themselves as being overwhelmed by emotion’.Footnote 77 The contagion mechanisms of mimicking and the mobilisation of empathy were at play in such reporting, as was the deployment of particular normative frames. Continuous displays of public emotion in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but also in the memorialising of the event in the following years, provided a template for how patriotic Americans should feel, think, and act.Footnote 78 They should not only hang the American flag in their front yards, they should get angry and they should get even.Footnote 79 Or at least they should empower, support, and even demand that their political leaders get even on their behalf. This partly explains the willingness of a majority of Americans to support military action in Afghanistan and, more controversially, Iraq, and their enthusiasm for targeted assassinations of ‘terrorists’, a category whose invocation became increasingly permissive under the Bush Presidency and which continues to inform Obama’s targeted drone killings. Todd H. Hall and Andrew A. G. Ross cite public opinion polling from late 2001 showing that 79 per cent of Americans supported the extra-legal assassination of known terrorists, which was a 25 percentage point jump from similar polls conducted prior to 9/11.Footnote 80 Despite the elapsing of nearly a decade before the actual assassination of OBL, as the polling cited earlier showed – 93 per cent satisfied with the killing, 80 per cent thrilled or happy – this support was sustained and perhaps even increased.
The dominant narrative expressed in the media and amongst public officials at the time of OBL’s killing reinforced and reflected the positive emotions that accompanied his death. The repetitive media drumbeat of ‘justice has been done, the killer has been killed’ occurred against a continuous backdrop of 9/11 images of collapsing buildings and terrified Americans escaping the destruction. A review of US television on the night of the announcement and the following day reveals an almost uniform coverage.Footnote 81 A serious President Obama announces the successful operation, justifies it by invoking 9/11, and concludes that justice has been done. This is followed by images of triumphant revelry in Washington and New York, which is then juxtaposed against images of the fear, grief, and sorrow that accompanied the attacks in 2001. Collective memory of the 9/11 tragedy was re-energised through vivid visual imagery, reanimating the emotions Americans then experienced, and linking them to the experience of OBL’s killing in the present. Grief, outrage, and humiliation transformed into the pleasure and satisfaction of revenge.
This relates to the third mechanism identified for the collectivising of emotion: events and circumstances that are viewed as impacting on the interests of a group as a whole, and on the personal interests of the individuals who identify with that group. 9/11 constituted precisely such an event, as did the killing of OBL. While the immediate impacts of both events on the interests of most Americans are debatable, the perception of such impacts is indisputable. With 9/11, attacks on key symbols of US economic and military power were routinely presented and viewed as attacks on the interests of all US citizens, with politicians, pundits, and the public pondering why they hate ‘us’. These were attacks that demanded and, initially at least, instigated a closing of national ranks and demands for revenge against the perpetrators, whoever they might be. But it would be nearly ten years before the demand for revenge was realised. When it was, the emotional continuity linking the two events was manifested in a public discourse that overwhelmingly celebrated justice having been done in the interests of all Americans.
Here the symbolism was as much if not more about communicating a message of righteous redress to Americans as it was to followers and fellow travellers of OBL, and the rest of the world. The message was that ‘we’ will never submit to ‘them’; we will always prevail against those who would destroy us, our liberties and our way of life; that we are to be respected and will not tolerate disrespect; that we will respond forcefully to what justice demands; that we will always, ultimately, triumph over enemies who would harm us, even if it takes ten years. Thereby a besmirched American honour was restored. The boundary separating American insiders from outsiders was highlighted, Manichean certitudes of good and evil were reasserted, and the distinctive qualities of being American were reaffirmed. Love of country and hatred of those who would harm it were mutually constitutive emotions realised in revenge and its communication.
All this was channelled through, and found its most focused form in, the final element that we identified as essential to the collectivisation of emotions: political leadership. In his speech announcing the killing, President Obama embodied a ‘spirit of revenge’. While striking a pose of gravitas, his words reinforced the dominant emotions of his audience – the American public. The essence of the speech, and later statements, was that a great historical wrong had been righted, that righteous justice had been served on a killer by having him killed. Such discursive repertoires have always accompanied collective revenge. In that respect, there is little that is novel about the state revenge killing of OBL, except that those who had ordered it could savour it visually in real time, in the comfort of a White House briefing room thousands of kilometers away.Footnote 82
Whether or not Obama personally felt the emotions associated with revenge and its realisation is uncertain. But he was surely aware of and channelled the collective emotions of his public to an end that was beneficial to his political fortunes and legacy. In his public persona Obama played the righteous, vengeful role demanded of him by a majority of Americans. He terminated an absolute evil that embodied everything harmful and humiliating to the US. He turned the post-9/11 world right side up again. Americans were again on top, the emotional wounds of 9/11 at least partly salved.
Conclusions
Our investigation encompasses a specific case and makes a general point with political-social and scholarly implications. The processes outlined above provide a lens for understanding the power of emotion and the revenge motive to drive politics and policy. These forces propelled the state’s extrajudicial killing of OBL, and were felt by almost all strata of American society. To counter the humiliation of 9/11, and salve the palpable public anger that followed the fear and grief, it is almost inconceivable that any US President would not have deployed military force in some form.
Five years on, we can conclude that the assassination of OBL was a state-initiated, twenty-first-century revenge killing, one that crystallised collective emotions in a moment of national redemption. These emotions were amplified and circulated by and through US political culture and identity, emotional contagion, the intersection of personal and national interest, and the channeling effects of political leadership. Revenge was exhibited in mass form in the world’s most materially and technologically powerful country. Is the US then a ‘special case’ or, given similar circumstances, would similar emotional responses and behaviour result elsewhere? Both 9/11 and the assassination of OBL manifest a world of increasing anxiety and uncertainty, where violence proliferates as a response to individual and collective grievance. Future research might further explore the grim potential of latent and overt collective emotions and their political effects in other national or subnational settings.
