Disappointment's Magic: Negative Emotions, Transitional Justice, and Resistance

This article explores how an existential account of emotions can enrich debates about negative emotions in transitional justice and peacebuilding scholarship. A growing literature has examined the challenge that the ex-resisters’ negative emotions, including disappointment, pose to the creation of sustainable peace in post-conflict societies. It has however not sufficiently accounted for disappointment’s potentially productive political value. The paper fills this gap by examining how the ex-resisters’ disappointment affects their capacity for political action against the remainders of past violence and oppression, with a specific focus on the South African context. I draw on Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential account of the emotions’ ‘magic’ as a way of coping with the complexities of political action arising from our situated condition. I put Sartre’s account in conversation with Nadine Gordimer’s novel No Time Like the Present and experiences of disappointment among South African ex-resisters to show how disappointment can lead ex-resisters to different ways of confronting the complexity of political engagement in the wake of the incomplete transition. This dialogue reveals disappointment as a powerful source of resistance against the persistence of injustice, while also disclosing significant constraints upon political engagement in conditions of systemic violence.