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This article reconceptualises the emotions associated with 'anti-Americanism' and sketches an alternative account of impassioned protest in the Middle East and South Asia. I identify two overlapping discursive images that mistake what emotions are and how they fuel political resistance: 'Islamic anger', which delegitimises emotional expression as a form of political agency, and 'anti-American hatred', which assumes that popular emotions in these regions are tied to a clear and distinct object — America. Drawing on two recent cases widely discussed in the American media, I show how the emotional quality of political resistance is used to undermine its legitimacy. Using ethnographic sources, I then offer a preliminary sketch of the normative, historical and interactive contexts of those protests. The article encourages international relations scholars to view grassroots actors as neither impulsive insurgents nor aggregations of survey data but instead complex moral agents embedded in local struggles.

AbstractAffect and emotion are key elements of our lived experience as human beings but currently play little role in how we theorize actorhood in international relations. We offer six amendments for integrating affective dynamics into existing conceptions of individual-level actorhood in IR. From these amendments emerge the theoretical micro-foundations upon which we build propositions concerning potential collective-level affective dynamics and political strategies. We illustrate the analytical payoff of our proposals by examining the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. By amending existing understandings of actorhood to include human affective experience, we can integrate and make sense of a variety of psychological, social, and political consequences stemming from the attacks, both within the United States and internationally.