Description
This paper focuses on “ressentiment”, 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, and the claim to moral superiority as a powerful status-enhancing strategy used to offset it has also been studied, 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. Populist leaders can make claims of moral superiority against the status-denying institutions, and these are given particular force by the background situation of latent injustice. 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.
