How, exactly, do emotions influence political action? We all know that emotions matter, but how do they spread across society to prime political environments for conflict or for reconciliation? Is it the emotions of political leaders or the mass publics that move societies toward violence? In this brilliant book, Andrew Ross offers a new, richly textured, and wonderfully illustrated theory of political emotional contagion. Moving away from crude individualistic accounts of leaders’ emotional states and equally simplistic structural accounts of fixed emotional narratives, Mixed Emotions sees emotions as by-products of everyday, often quite banal, social interactions but nevertheless crucial, constitutive elements of political action.

The book’s structure follows the development of Ross’s principal argument. Chapter 1 explains the mechanism of “circulations of affect,” an emotional contagion understood as “unconscious and unintentional transmission of emotion through a process of social display and imitation” (p. 10). Chapter 2 applies research from psychology, social theory, and cultural theory to show how emotional circulations endow social phenomena with special properties, especially ambiguity and flexibility. The chapter also demonstrates how emotions lie at the center of human capacity for creativity and how they can bring about renewal and change. Chapter 3 explores the very different political emotional aftereffects of two terrorism attacks: September 11, 2001, in the United States and the Madrid bombings of March 2004. Here, Ross discusses the post-9/11 construction of the Arab terrorist subject in the United States that has arisen from already existing narrative tropes in U.S. popular culture, while the Madrid bombings’ aftermath reflected antigovernment political anger in Spain and did not lead to the similar Islamophobic outcome as was the case in the United States. Chapter 4 explores the role of emotional circulation in creating an environment that led to violent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Chapter 5 looks at sites of transitional justice—courts and truth commissions—as sites of public emotional change. The book concludes with broader remarks about conceptualizing emotions in international relations and a call for a new research agenda.

Ross begins by positing that people, over time, accumulate “repertoires of emotional expression” (p. 1), which then become integral to the way they occupy cultural and political spaces. He sets out to explore “affective dimensions of global politics by investigating the way social interactions intensify, harmonize and blend the emotional responses of those who participate in them” (p. 1). To get at this process of emotional intensification, Ross selected four significant stories of violence and their long-lasting emotional impact: the attacks of September 11 and the Madrid bombings of 2004, the ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and the genocide in Rwanda. And while all of these cases have already been studied in extensive detail, Ross brings something quite new to their analysis: He revisits these cases in order to study an array of everyday practices, some common in studies of political narrative construction (political speeches or mass rallies), and some less often observed by international relations scholars than by anthropologists (commemorative ceremonies and public reburials). What these practices have in common are “coparticipation, focus of attention on a common object or activity, and concentrations of public communication” (p. 4). This inspired choice of empirical material then allows Ross to trace the emotional buildup among not only participants in these events but also coparticipants—thousands of others who may not have attended the event but have been exposed to it through media coverage, word of mouth, or rumor.

The author is interested in reconceptualizing the social genesis of emotion: where we look for emotions and, once we find them, how we understand their significance for the study of global conflict. He defines the core concept of circulations of affect—ways in which emotions are socially transmitted—as “conscious and unconscious exchanges of emotion within a social environment” (p. 1). The main argument here is that people who act together over time develop “shared repertoires of emotion” (p. 2) as they are exposed to a series of “emotion-generating objects” (p. 2), as well as to emotions of their fellow participants and coparticipants in the emotionally charged event or ritual. Participants themselves absorb and then emit massive social displays of emotional exchanges. Thus strengthened into a state of “affective density” (p. 95), emotions move across various social and political fields, in a type of contagion. For example, the pent-up emotional charge of national resentment moves from one target (one racial or ethnic group) to another, because emotions have become contagious and they “inflict” new social relations. Politics of ethnic resentment (which very much describes the current political moment in the United States) “absorbed anxieties, grievances, rivalries, and hopes from different areas of political, economic, and cultural life” (p. 95), redirecting this anger onto a whole new target.

By understanding emotions—affect—as generated “from below” but then transmitted across society, Mixed Emotions also offers a helpful methodological response for concerns about investing states (collectives) with individual characteristics (emotions). Ross allows us to see emotions not as “private feelings, but public expressions that circulate in and through a variety of social actors in global political events” (p. 7). Emotions, in other words, are not scaled up from individuals to the state; instead, they exist at both levels, and are effortlessly permeating both public and private spheres. They are “a connective tissue constituting social collectivities” (p. 35).

While speaking primarily to an audience that already values the role of feelings and beliefs in explaining international action, Mixed Emotions also issues an important rejoinder to constructivists, reminding us that “shared emotions emerge from lived social interactions rather than from abstract cultural identities” (p. 8) with which much of constructivism operates. The book can then be best described as the constructivism of the everyday, an understanding of how identity is socially lived and experienced. Looking at a variety of truly “mixed” emotions—collective memories, social insecurities, evocative rituals—the author demonstrates the impact of routinized but informal actions and the way in which people become socialized into a particular political idea, not solely as a result of a fairly fixed identity structure, but instead through everyday “habit, memory, and emotion” (p. 37). While Ross is careful not to argue that emotions cause any particular policy, he persuasively demonstrates how they instead lay a social foundation upon which previously unimaginable polices (use of torture, genocidal violence) over time become normalized.

This beautifully written and persuasively argued book will have a big theoretical and methodological impact on the cultural approaches to international relations. It offers a whole host of new possible sources for finding sites of narrative construction beyond the analysis of discursive content, which has so far been the bulk of narrative approaches in IR. Ross has paved a research path toward focusing on everyday social interactions, which give big political narratives their emotional and lasting energy.