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‘Fight your Emotions’: Affective Injustice in Wartime

By Olena Komar

Although research on affective injustice is gaining ground (Archer & Mills, 2019; Srinivasan, 2018; Whitney, 2018; Kidd et al. 2020), no attention has yet been paid to wartime experiences. War has many destructive and devastating consequences, but against the backdrop of the physical damage it causes, other detrimental effects are muted, shadowed, and hardly noticeable. Invisible wounds do not trigger a self-healing immune response, so they hurt for a long time, and the suffering even increases over time. I aim to raise awareness of a subtle aspect of war experience by showing the connection between emotional injustice and hermeneutical injustice (Fricker, 2007). Expressing oneself, sharing experiences, being heard and understood by others, and having common meanings are among our social needs as humans. However, the absence of a hermeneutic environment where this experience can be expressed, talked about and evaluated creates additional social pressure that legitimizes, perpetuates, and reinforces unjust moral practices (Alcoff, 2007).

With the outbreak of the Russian war, Western intellectuals had to seek out Ukrainian voices. Due to various reasons, the majority of these voices reside overseas and are female. Have they truly been heard and understood, though? Many Ukrainians would say they have not. The lack of means to express their experiences and a taboo on certain emotions, such as anger or hatred, leads to a systemic failure of understanding, causing an ongoing experience of war despite being in a safe space. Institutional practices developed in Western countries that promote peace, pacifism, the reduction of aggression, and maximum tolerance turn against war victims because there is no positive or neutral way to talk about it when the traumatizing factors cannot be eliminated. The proverb “The full man does not believe the hungry” encapsulates the cognitive aspect of this issue aptly. When expressive means are missing or blocked by others as a manifestation of improper emotions or hate speech, the individual is left with “hermeneutic death” (Medina, 2017) or else the plight of being locked in an echo chamber of like-minded people and falling victim to group stereotypes and stigmatization (cf. The North African Syndrome (Fanon, 1967)). Ukrainians are thus labelled “aggressive,” “traumatized,” “overly emotional,” “cruel,” and “prejudiced” when they try to share their experiences about the ongoing war (Komar, 2024). Their inability to express themselves and therefore self-blame for the communication failure, which reinforces their ‘survivor’s guilt’ and ends up silencing them, are signs of hermeneutical injustice. As war is not just a violation of the normal order of life but an encroachment on fundamental human rights, the language of war is not merely hate speech but a declaration of wrongdoing. The damage caused by hermeneutical injustice should neither be downplayed nor underestimated, and injustice can and should be resisted. Therefore, shifting the perspective on affective injustice may be one of the steps required to reach a possible solution.

Illustration by Freepik, edited by Olena Komar. The site allows free publication.

Improper emotions and affective injustice

How can emotions be wrong? For one thing, they are judged by the same criteria as moral actions. Thus, according to the utilitarian criterion, emotions that express negative internal mental states and/or cause negative states in others should be condemned. Besides particular emotions, which can be considered situationally and contextually, affectivity itself can be negative, for example, if it is the basis for decision-making or evaluation. If someone has formed a belief based on their emotions or acted emotionally, they are criticized because they were not guided by reason and rational thought.

However, there are situations and circumstances in which emotional reactions are justified. In these cases, forcing people to restrain such reactions (both directly and indirectly) is a manifestation of affective injustice. Injustice means wrongdoing, an act that inflicts undeserved hurt, or one that involves unfairness to another or is a violation of another’s rights.

Do those who are oppressed and struggle for their physical survival and identity have the right to feel and express anger, rage, and hatred? Social epistemology says yes, because it is an affective injustice to prohibit the expression of such emotions by the oppressed.

Anger, in particular, as the dominant emotion of representatives of oppressed groups, has become the subject of research in social philosophy (Archer & Mills 2019; Srinivasan 2018; Whitney 2023). The right to anger is a component of resistance to oppression because anger is how a sense of injustice manifests itself.  In this case, anger goes from being a destructive manifestation of affect that harms both the angry person and others to a way of influencing others’ beliefs and drawing their attention to the cause. This is the role that anger has played in the history of confronting racism: “The anger became an impetus and instrument rather than an obstacle, orienting their attention onwards, past itself, through itself, toward what it was angry about.” (Whitney 2023). Anger is not just an affect but a moral demand that requires a response.

War survivors have a right to negative emotions, including anger and hatred, because these emotions

  • are essentially consistent with their current affective state
  • reveal their attitude towards the cause and perpetrators
  • point directly to these causes and perpetrators.

A poor affective life with restricted expression of emotions is, therefore, a negative phenomenon in itself. It is unjust when a person is deprived of access to fundamental affective goods (Gallegos 2022). The war has deprived Ukrainians of the right to affective goods, plunging them into suffering, uncertainty, anger, fear and hatred. It is as unfair to blame people who are emotional in their manifestations on the basis of the norms and conventions of a prosperous society as it is to blame someone for poverty or illness by contrasting this with one’s own well-being and good health. If a person develops an illness not as a result of irresponsible and deliberately harmful behavior, but rather as a result of exceptionally difficult life circumstances, blaming the person is immoral and unjust. However, the comparison with illness is itself unfavorable, as it stigmatizes an adequate emotional response to abnormal circumstances when it comes to people living through war. Their emotionality, including their anger and hatred, is a healthy response to their challenges. And these challenges lie not only in the area where the war is raging but also in a peaceful environment that rejects, does not tolerate and cannot accept those with different experiences. ‘Why can’t you be like everyone else?’ is an inappropriate response when a person cannot make their life go back to “normal”. And in many cases where people go through borderline experiences, such as loss, torture, sexual violence, etc., “normalcy” remains an unattainable expectation. The result is a lack of affective recognition by those who do not share this experience. One cannot sincerely sympathize with someone without sharing, if not their experience, then their emotions.

Unreliable knowers and testimonial injustice

As soon as someone is labelled as mentally unstable, overly emotional, hateful, or incapable of the cold rational judgment of a clear mind, their testimonial status inevitably decreases due to a loss of credibility. If statements made by Ukrainians that cause discomfort and go beyond the established worldview are marked as “raw emotion,” this allows them to be labeled as hate speech within the colonial mindset and the built-in power relations (Достлєва, 2022).

The Ukrainian case also calls for a consideration of the decolonisation perspective, where the emotionality of the war is superimposed on the stereotype of Ukrainians as ‘one of the peoples of Russia’ without their own cultural or political subjectivity (Komar, 2024).

A striking example of testimonial injustice is the story of the 6-year-long ignoring of dozens of appeals by Ukrainian art historians to the New York Museum of Modern Art MoMA regarding a painting by Kharkiv artist Vasyl Yermilov. As Tatiana Filevska argues, firstly, the artist was described on the museum label as Russian, not Ukrainian, and secondly, the painting was hanging upside down (Філевська, 2023). Only with the beginning of the full-scale invasion, due to the global interest in Ukrainian culture, was the scholar finally able to reach the museum’s management and get these blatant errors corrected. This ignoring of the voices of Ukrainian art critics for 6 years was certainly not due to any weakness in their arguments or evidence (which included a lifetime photo of the artist in front of the painting), but rather to a lack of trust in them as knowers or experts.

Silenced voices and active ignorance

“Calm down, dear.” A. Tanessini used these words of the British Prime Minister David Cameron in the title of her article about ignorance, intellectual arrogance and silence (Tanesini, 2021). He said it to the shadow chief secretary during a debate in the House of Commons in 2011 to silence his opponent. Ukrainians are also regularly advised to calm down when they try to talk about the war and Russian crimes. To be taken seriously, they must first overcome their emotionality, as if their own emotions were their real enemy, not those who caused them.

The practice of silencing, along with gaslighting, is a major manifestation of hermeneutical injustice. Silencing is a completely different process than the situation when a person is denied the right to speak not allowed to express themselves. Sometimes, on the contrary, the oppressors grant the right to speak, formally “listen to the voices” of underrepresented categories or the oppressed in order to check off the box of fulfilling their duties (as curators of art festivals, academic conferences, and other public events do), but make no significant effort to really hear and understand them. This is not surprising, because such a process requires systemic, structural changes that are undertaken reluctantly, often only as a result of prolonged and significant pressure from activists.

If there are not enough activists willing to stand up to such systemic injustice, or if the structure is too strong, powerful, and financially supported (as is the case with the propaganda of “great” Russian culture in the West), silencing is almost inevitable.

Therefore, “Ukrainian voices” can often be equated to the expression “Graeca sunt, non leguntur” (Latin for “Greek, unreadable”), a common expression that means that a text is unreadable, dating back to the Middle Ages when teachers who did not know Greek skipped passages written in the language. In other words, ‘Let it be, but it’s not worth understanding.’ Ukrainians are formally given the floor, but they are not listened to because what they hear may be unpleasant and require changes that are unwelcome to the listener, including abandoning the colonizing optics, changing the established image of Russia (and the Soviet Union, which Europeans still identify with) and recognizing that this war is about Europe as well. It is easier to believe that ‘trauma speaks for them’, ‘they want revenge, not justice’, ‘they are blinded by hatred’, and so forth.

Illustration by Olena Komar. A reference to the idiom ‘It’s all Greek to me’, which means lack of understanding.

The social practice of silence is so reluctant to change because it is sustained by active ignorance. In the epistemology of resistance, active ignorance is defined as a deliberate bias motivated by a lack of knowledge, defense of privilege or status quo of the listener. Jose Medina argues that active ignorance is ‘the kind of ignorance that involves a whole battery of mechanisms of avoidance and resistance to know and to learn; the kind of ignorance that is deeply invested in not knowing.’ (Medina, 2016, p. 182). Unlike ordinary ignorance, which consists of a false belief or lack of true beliefs and is based on incorrect evidence, active ignorance is not directly related to the level of awareness and involves cognitive resistance (Medina 2013).

Vicious circle: conformist bubble, echo chamber or affective niche?

‘Your post violates the community’s standards for hate speech. No one will see your post. We have implemented these standards because we want all users to feel safe, respected and welcomed.’– this is how Facebook explains why no one will know what happened to you and how you feel. Therefore, Ukrainians are denied even the right to say, ‘Your war violates the standards of our life’. How do you talk about your experience if all of this experience is saturated with grief and hatred, and there is no other way to talk about the war but in truth, because the language of war is the language of hatred?

Hate speech is so broadly interpreted by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance that it is impossible for those who have had and are currently experiencing the war to describe their experience of it. Literally everything that relates to the description of reality will to some extent violate standards or deviate from established norms. It seems that the only approvable emotional form of war language that can be accepted by the European community is crying, all others will be at least intolerable. If the grievances are not heard, the meanings are not exposed, hermeneutical injustice occurs.  

How does hermeneutical injustice appear to work? It works through a vicious circle of silence: Ukrainians often keep silent about their experiences and feelings because these are too horrific to be voiced by those who have not had similar experiences, and Europeans downplay the real meaning because they are outside the context in which they could comprehend the terrible reality. The hermeneutical space is either left empty or filled with false interpretations. The initial lack of understanding of Ukrainians and their emotions, due to a lack of relevant experience by those living in peaceful countries, could be remedied by empathic engagement. However, this primary ignorance is complemented by active neglect, which is based on avoidance of other people’s traumatic experiences in order to protect oneself from negative impressions, and thus block empathy. Therefore, for the most part, Ukrainians do not find a truly broad interest in their negative war experience.

The fact that affective injustice makes people who have suffered the trauma of war feel even worse is only a surface level of harm. The deeper harm is the one that threatens a person’s identity, self-concept, that is, their existential dimensions. The impossibility for a person to exist in isolation as a social being is one of the basic axioms of social theory. If people around you do not understand you, do not accept you, and condemn you, there are only two adaptation paths that do not threaten self-destruction:

  • to merge, i.e. to agree with the rules of this group
  • to separate, to find your own group.

So, the first, and most widespread is the path of conformism: merging, dissolving with the environment, with the new society, accepting their way of life, their language, their traditions, and partly their political beliefs. The choice of conformity does not mean an emotionally comfortable life, because consciously separating yourself from emotionally meaningful content is not just the formation of a protective bubble, but also the support of an unjust system. Affective injustice here “lies rather in the fact that it forces people, through no fault of their own, into profoundly difficult normative conflicts – an invidious choice between improving one’s lot and justified rage” (Srinivasan 2018, p. 136).

The second way is opposition, and thus polarization: the cultivation of national identity, the closure of one’s own group, the rejection of those who disagree. In particular, this is evident in the well-known phenomenon of increased patriotism among emigrants and nostalgic love for their homeland (especially if for some reason it is impossible to visit it). It is a way of isolation in a community of like-minded people, attuned to the same wave, attracted to a shared voice. In other words, creating an echo chamber effect and occupying an affective niche with those who share common emotions.

Conclusion

What is perceived as aggression and anger, a manifestation of temperament or trauma, is a legitimate assertion by Ukrainians of their right to identity, which is a condition for survival in a genocidal war, as well as to cultural identity instead of the imperial dissolution of colonized peoples. It is the right to have their voices understood, not just “heard.” As war is not just a violation of the normal order of life, but an encroachment on fundamental human rights, the language of war is not merely hate speech, but a declaration of wrongdoing. The damage caused by hermeneutical injustice should neither be downplayed nor underestimated, and injustice can and should be resisted. Therefore, shifting the perspective on affective injustice may be one of the required steps toward a possible solution.

The theory of epistemic and affective injustice, although relatively new in social theory, has already drawn attention to social problems and epistemic practices that need to be corrected. In this article, I tried to prove that the topic of the affective experience of war, which affects tens of millions of people, definitely deserves separate consideration, and the experience of Ukrainians is priceless at this point.


References

Alcoff, L.M. (2007), Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types, in: Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, pp. 39–57.

Archer, Alfred / Mills, Georgina (2019), Anger, Affective Injustice, and Emotion Regulation, in: Philosophical Topics 47 (2), pp. 75–94.

Fricker, Miranda (2007), Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gallegos, Francisco (2022), Affective Injustice and Fundamental Affective Goods, in: Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (2), https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12428.

Kidd, Ian James / Battaly, Heather / Cassam, Quassim (Eds.) (2020), Vice Epistemology. New York, NY: Routledge.

Komar, Olena (2024): An Angry Ukrainian Syndrome: Stereotypes About War and Peace, and Injustice, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 09.09.2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/129q3.

Medina, Jose (2013), The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination, in: The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199929023.001.0001

Medina, Jose (2017), Varieties of Hermeneutical Injustice, in: Kidd, Ian James / Medina, José / Pohlhaus, Gaile Jr (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 41–52.

Srinivasan, Amia (2018), The Aptness of Anger, in: Journal of Political Philosophy 26 (2), pp. 123–144.

Tanesini, Alessandra (2021), Ignorance, Arrogance, and Privilege: Vice Epistemology and the Epistemology of Ignorance, in: Kidd, Ian James / Battaly, Heather / Cassam, Quassim (Eds.), Vice Epistemology, New York, NY: Routledge.

Whitney, Shiloh (2018), Affective Intentionality and Affective Injustice: Merleau-Ponty and Fanon on the Body Schema as a Theory of Affect, in: Southern Journal of Philosophy 56 (4), pp. 488–515.

Whitney, Shiloh (2023), Anger and Uptake, in: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (5). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09924-z.

Достлєва, Лія Ненависть: крик у лісі. Dwutygodnik (November 2022) https://www.dwutygodnik.com/artykul/10413-nenavyst-kryk-u-lisi.html Філевська, Тетяна. Деколонізація в музеях. Український поворот. Українська правда. Життя. 14 лютого 2023. https://life.pravda.com.ua/columns/2023/02/14/252839/ 


About the Author

Olena Komar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Methodology of Science at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, PhD in Philosophy. She is a senior fellow at the Research Training Group Situated Cognition and a research fellow at the University of Osnabrück. She is currently working on a project “Bad beliefs, echo chambers, and the epistemic conditions of moral responsibility” supported by the Philipp Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She has been a visiting researcher at the Institute Vienna Circle and a research fellow at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.


Other recent articles in the TRAFO series Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval:

Anastasiya Leukhina et al., Rethinking Slow Science from the Perspective of Warzone Academics, 17.04.2025.

Tomasz Hen-Konarski, The Bells of Klevan′: Was the Polish-Lithuanian Rule in Rus′ a Form of Colonial Oppression?, 15.10.2024.

Olena Komar, An Angry Ukrainian Syndrome: Stereotypes About War, Peace, and Injustice, 10.09.2024.


Citation: Olena Komar, ‘Fight your Emotions’: Affective Injustice in Wartime, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 06.05.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/58163


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (May 6, 2025). ‘Fight your Emotions’: Affective Injustice in Wartime. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved May 20, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13v8s


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