The emotional reinvigoration of the USA: north-american emotions and affections as key elements to domestic legitimation for the War on Terror (2001 - 2021)

• Grant number: 22/11729-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: January 01, 2023
• End date: December 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - International Politics
• Principal Investigator: Samuel Alves Soares
• Grantee: Afonso Brito Bandeira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais (FCHS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Franca. Franca , SP, Brazil

Abstract

For the USA, the War on Terror represented more than a global counterterrorist incursion. It represented the north-american search to the other that dared attacking a collective I - the north-american being. Under attack, this being would be under an existential threat, once that harming the north-american collective I means harming the exceptionality, the omnipotence, the agency of the USA in the world, that is, harming its identity. It was necessary the ontological security, an act that enables north-american identity security, through a global counterterrorist conflict that, over its first twenty years (2001 - 2021), showed up as catastrophic on political, social and economical terms for the north-americans themselves. But the deliberated entrance on a global military incursion needs to be legitimated, and the legitimation had to come, especially, from the USA's domestic realm. For this purpose, a discursive movement was built right after the attacks of september 11, 2001, from two actors, the State - through the government - and the nation, recovering the national identity formation in order to reinvigorate the emotions and affections of the north-americans. Because pain, hate, fear, shame, disgust, love and other sentiments can legitimate or contest political decisions, and the emotions together with affective memories were the ones that endorsed the War on Terror: the love that generates the pride for the harmed nation, the fear that generates the hate and the disgust that generates the prejudice of the other were the compounds for the acceptance to the entrance in a conflict which material and human losses were dramatic.