State Discourse, Violence Mobilization, and Fear Politics

With the paradigmatic shift from viewing organizations as merely contexts for violence to perpetrators of violence, organization scholars have been uncovering oft-obscured structural injustices. Nevertheless, few studies anchor their units of analysis in the organization of nation-states with their active, ongoing role in inflicting violence, and even fewer studies examine how the states justify and mobilize violence such that collective interpersonal violence may emerge and sustain. Aiming to address this puzzle, we draw upon Butler's (2009) discussions regarding the intimate relations between language and state violence and Massumi's (2010) writings on the significance of fear to bodily (re)actions to inform our inquiry. We ask: how does the organization of nation-states justify the "necessity" of violence through fear-producing discourse? We explore the case of McCarthyism, a notorious state-organized, mass-administered violence purging Communists and their sympathizers in the post-war US. Our findings surface two techniques underpinning the state's violence-mobilizing discourse: chiaroscuro (i.e., a sharp contrast between the virtuous, vulnerable self and the monstrous ideological other) and decontextualization (i.e., uprooting monster bodies from the localities where their words and deeds make sense). We make a two-fold contribution to the violence literature. First, we lay bare nation-states' discursive techniques whereby individual citizens are mobilized to embody and execute violence against each other. Second, our study illuminates further the role of affect in violence mobilization by dissecting how the state organizes by fear & hatred via discourse, thereby unveiling the mechanisms and the consequences of instrumentalizing affect in the service of ideological wills.