Combining Emotions: Hope, Anger, Joy, and Love in Israeli Peace Movements¹

This chapter focuses on the emotion management strategies used by groups who want to mobilize people for peace. Author Liv Halperin compares Standing Together (ST) and Women Wage Peace (WWP)-two Israeli movements that were attempting to prevent conflict during her fieldwork in 2018-2021. ST and WWP engaged in actions such as demonstrations, marches, workshops, conferences, awareness-raising campaigns, and lobbying. Halperin argues that ST and WWP attempted to trigger different sets of emotions. ST incited both negative and positive feelings-generating anger over suffering and injustice but also promoting hope by building solidarity and envisioning a better future. WWP, in contrast, aimed to inspire only positive feelings, such as joy and love alongside hope for change. Members of WWP used music, dancing, and singing to build community, and focused only on the successful impacts they had made rather than dwelling on failures. Halperin’s work highlights a dilemma that any activist or social movement must face: Whether to try to motivate change by triggering negative emotions (e.g., fear, anger), positive emotions (e.g., love, hope), or some ratio of the two.