Emotions and war on YouTube: affective investments in RT’s visual narratives of the conflict in Syria

Recent scholarship claims that narratives and images of war have political effects, not simply because of their content and ‘form’, but because of their affective and emotional ‘forces’. Yet, International Relations scholars rarely explore how audiences respond to narratives and images of war in their research. Addressing this gap, this paper combines discourse analysis of RT (formerly Russia Today) ‘breaking news’ YouTube videos of Russian...