Ressentiment, status and populism in international relations

Presentation atBISA 2022 (British International Studies Association), New Castle, United Kingdom This presentation has been preparedas a part of EMOFORTE Projectthat has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No.896311 This paper will focus on ressentiment in Turkish foreign policy discourse vis a vis the European Union in reaction to the stagnated membership process, employing mixed methods and corpus-assisted discourse analysis to establish the linkages between status, ressentiment and claims to moral superiority. “Ressentiment” is a reaction emerging from situations of profound systemic injustice and inequality, which includes, but goes beyond, ordinary sentiments of resentment. While the role of ressentiment in populist discourse has already been discussed in the literature, research so far has rarely explored the particular role of ressentiment in the triangle of international relations, populism and emotion. The resentment resulting from status denial in international relations, such as not being admitted to an international organization, can activate underlying ressentiment and serve as a strong tool for populists in foreign policy discourse. Following the previous research which considers that status-seeking is a subcategory of state identity politics and political claims to moral superiority is one of the status-enhancing strategies adopted by the small and middle powers (Wohlforth et al. 2018), this study attempts to show how the emotions can function as status markers in populist foreign policy discourse and how they can empower the identity articulations positioning Turkey in a category of higher moral status comparing to the ‘malevolent’ West. With the help of emotion discourse analysis, it explores how populist leaders make claims of moral superiority against the status-denying institutions, and these are given particular force by the background situation of latent injustice.