Why They Don’t Hate Us: Emotion, Agency and the Politics of ‘Anti-Americanism

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.