National Humiliation: Emotion, Narrative, and Conflict

Abstract

National humiliation is increasingly being used as a way of explaining certain kinds of international conflict. In this article, I argue that while such explanations are presented on the back of plausible assumptions about emotion, such assumptions also make it unlikely that humiliation can play the myriad of explanatory roles attributed to it, for example, to explain the rise of Hitler, growing Chinese antagonism towards the West, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and so on. In response, I consider some other ways humiliation may play a role in international conflict and argue that what are likely to be most relevant are not humiliating experiences, felt by individuals or groups, but rather humiliation narratives, which are often used as a discursive mechanism to justify conflict. This is important because it means a nation's willingness to engage in international conflict depends not on something which seems intractable (that is, the emotions felt by its citizens), but something more malleable: the narratives it accepts as frames for historical events.