Mobilisation through Emotionally Resonant Collective Action Frames: The Case of the Foreign Fighters of the YPJ

Abstract

In the past few decades, the field of conflict studies and especially the theoretical approach of collective action frames have experienced an emotional turn. This thesis addresses this turn by operationalising the concept of emotional resonance in collective action frames and applying it to the case of foreign fighters of the YPJ in North-East Syria. The operationalision entails three aspects: Emotional consistency, emotional centrality and emotional goals that have to be addressed by the frames. I order to apply these concepts to the case, texts and online communication by the YPJ and YPG are analysed for the emotions they evoke, using the NRC Emotion Lexicon created by Mohammad and Turney at the National Research Council Canada to detect emotions in text. The frames are then analysed for their emotional consistency, centrality and goals for foreign fighters, using secondary data collected in the form of interviews, personal statements and account’s of friends and family of the individuals. The results show that while all criteria have to be fulfilled to a certain extend, the emotional goals an SMO addresses can mitigate low or insufficient emotional centrality and render a frame emotionally resonant.