Affective regimes and ontological security: When empathy threatens the state

Abstract

The ontological security of states may be threatened by the politics of empathy. Empathy—as a contested affective‐political field—has a capacity to both consolidate and unravel dominant understandings of identity, security, political subjectivity, and self‐other relations. This article connects a politics of empathy to patterns of state violence and resistance in situations of conflict and authoritarian politics, arguing that the distribution of feeling that underpins a politics of empathy is structured by positionality, power, and social context. The article argues that states construct “affective regimes” through which they seek to manage the legitimate subjects of empathy in order to maintain their ontological security, and focuses on empirical testimony from the Syrian uprising in 2011 and the Assad regime's strategies of violence to explore these affective dynamics. It reveals ways in which the state's efforts are always resisted and transgressed by citizens, generating counter‐narratives of security‐identity and affective relations. A politics of empathy offers analytical tools for understanding the construction and effectiveness of states' affective regimes to maintain ontological security as well as being normatively essential to the task of challenging forms of state power, political violence, and generating alternative imaginings of ontological security and subjectivity.