Understanding Emotions in Post-Violence Societies: Beyond Anger-Shame-Guilt, Study notes of Sociology

Download Understanding Emotions in Post-Violence Societies: Beyond Anger-Shame-Guilt and more Study notes Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! 1 The Sociology of Peace Processes Lecture 9: dealing with emotions in peacemaking The point I want to make today can be stated at the beginning quite simply. The interest in understanding the emotional dynamics of post violence societies does not come from within the sociology of emotions. It comes instead from within the sociology of law, particularly the famous restorative justice approach and its new focus on what it calls ‘restorative peacemaking’. This gives an exclusive focus on anger-shame-guilt-reintegration as the emotions that are aroused by communal violence and which need to be managed in peace processes. This seriously misrepresents the emotional dynamics of post-violence societies. The sociology of emotions has the potential to offer a broader understanding of emotions but has not so far interested itself in post violence adjustments. We need a much wider understanding of the emotions at play in post-violence adjustments. Let me begin with a few remarks on the return of emotions in the sociology of law, particularly restorative justice. The reference to emotions in law and criminal justice is now so popular as to constitute a new paradigm in legal studies. However, there is only a narrow range of emotions identified within the sociology of law because the pioneering idea of restorative justice initiated the concern with emotions in law. John Braithwaite in his famous book Crime, Shame and Reintegration first outlined restorative justice. The idea is fairly simple but was revolutionary. Many criminals, the kind who are not thought to be a danger to society, ought not to be punished through retributive justice – the courts of law – but by restorative justice. Restorative justice involves invoking public shame – like the old village stocks in medieval times docsity.com 2 or the tarring and feathering that once occurred in Ireland. Nowadays, case conference meetings are organised in which criminals have to face their victim, experience directly the victim’s anger, and in the process display shame, making a ‘shame apology’ and receive from the victim an emotional response that facilitates reintegration. It is claimed that their chances of recidivism – of further crime – are reduced when shame restores and reintegrates the offender. The ‘return to emotions’ in the sociology of law therefore is really the ‘return to shame’. Anger, shame, guilt and humiliation are very strong feelings, and they consist of several different emotions at once. Yet they are limited amongst the range of emotions that people can publicly hold and display. The sociology of emotions proffers a much broader understanding of people’s public emotions. Sociologists, as well as others who draw on the sociology of emotions, address a broader set of sentiments that dominate people, such as moral indignation, happiness, hope, rage and revenge. All of these emotions – and more – are relevant to post-violence adjustments, although the sociology of emotions is not applied to this area. If it were, the sociology of emotions would dethrone shame from the primacy it is routinely given. But if the sociology of emotions hasn’t been applied to an understanding of the emotional dynamics of post-violence adjustments, the anger-shame-guilt-reintegration paradigm has been. In a later book entitled Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation, John Braithwaite has developed what he calls ‘restorative peacemaking’ and Thomas Scheff has suggested that shame and revenge can be used as forms of peacemaking. All of this work is on the reading list for this week. docsity.com 5 grace by the victim. Shame apologies help with victims’ feelings of anger; and they soften the emotional reactions to amnesties or prisoner releases. Truth commissions, or other truth recovery projects, have strong restorative justice elements and are intended to achieve much the same purpose but by means of dealing with the emotions around memory of past violence. I’ll say no more on truth commissions because we have a later lecture on the topic. The final contribution of the paradigm to peacemaking is the advocation of what Braithwaite calls restorative diplomacy (for initially negotiating the settlement) and responsive regulation (for maintaining it afterwards). Restorative diplomacy is not restricted to elites but extends simultaneously to the grassroots in order to generate bottom-up consent to the deal. It involves as a first choice ‘restorative peacemaking’ amongst elites and masses, on the lines established above, but carrying with it the threat of escalating intervention by the international community – UN Security Council warnings, selective or comprehensive sanctions and UN peacekeeping forces – in a hierarchy of responses intended to generate reintegrative shame that brings perpetrators to the negotiating table. Encouraging shame however, is only one part of restorative diplomacy. It also involves the international community strengthening the hand of tolerant elites and supporting, materially and symbolically, a range of grassroots peacemaking initiatives. Braithwaite stresses a range of regulatory measures to manage adjustment problems, including economic regulation to prevent warlords using patronage to sustain the conflict, the introduction of human rights law to regulate the use of state power, and forms of legal regulation that prioritise restorative justice to avoid retributive criminalisation. This is very like the ‘good docsity.com 6 governance’ approach we have talked about earlier, although Braithwaite is silent on political regulation. Now, not all of this is bad. It’s just that restorative peacemaking has three weaknesses: • Naivety over what post-violence means. • The privileging of shame-guilt as post-violence emotions. • Narrow depictions of the post-violence regulatory framework. I want to close by addressing these, concentrating on its depiction of the emotional dynamics of post-violence societies. OK to the first weakness. It’s naïve because violence very rarely ends with peace processes, not even in the medium term. As I’ve said before, most peace processes have to manage the constant risk of renewed violence. Restorative peacemaking has to operate in other words, in a situation where the old enmities continue, where mistrust has not been assuaged and where violence can destabilise elite and grassroots initiatives by closing the space for compromise. Restoration conferences to be successful require the communal violence to be at an end and that the emotions brought to them are not continually inflamed and reproduced by more violence. In ordinary crime, offender and victim bring into restoration conferences an event that is over and done with. In a setting of continued communal violence however, the emotions are kept raw and are repeated during the conference as a result of violence taking place outside and for which the parties involved are taken to be representatives. The paradigm assumes willingness to compromise, even desire to want to participate in restoration conferences, that cannot be guaranteed or may only exist for a very docsity.com 7 short ‘honeymoon’ period before renewed conflict and killing destroys it. The paradigm presupposes there is enough willingness to search for common ground. And the ongoing violence may undermine facilitators’ efforts, lose them trust and never put an end to the emotions they need to manage. Misconceptions about the nature of violence impact negatively also on the paradigm’s focus on anger-shame-guilt as the primary emotion. Peace processes require an envisioning of the future as much as an emotional packaging of the past. Politicians and lay people alike may lack a peace vocation, being concerned only for the killings to stop rather than enacting an agreed future, or be dominated by short term expectations – wanting change now and quickly – rather than be prepared for the long haul. The likelihood of travails during the long haul require there be a vision to sustain people. Hope, in other words, is as critical to restorative peacemaking as shame-guilt. A thoroughgoing sociology of hope explores the impact social conditions have on structuring hope, both in the sense of hope as the act of imagining a future desirable state and in the sense of hope as the emotion aroused by the end state that is being envisioned. In this way hope is a public emotion that can be constructed for social goals, to manipulate private loyalties and to imagine a desirable future. There are various social practices or technologies for this purpose, including museums that envision the future as much as record the past, such as the Holocaust Museum or Robben Island Museum, education curriculum in schools, media initiatives, citizenship education programmes, public memorials and so on. docsity.com