Emotions as narrative anchors of armed group mobilization

The role of emotions in armed group mobilization is increasingly recognized, but existing approaches tend to examine emotions primarily in relation to participation itself. At the same time, though retrospective narrative interviews are a central source of evidence for studying individual pathways into armed groups, the emotional content of these accounts has received less attention. Drawing on 24 qualitative interviews with former Kosovo Liberation Army combatants, this paper identifies three recurring ways in which participants locate emotional experiences within their narratives: stock emotions, associated with enduring circumstances; event-triggered emotions, associated with identifiable events; and socially mediated emotions, associated with interactions with other people. I interpret these forms as performing different functions within retrospective mobilization narratives: stock emotions provide rationale anchors through which participants explain why participation made sense; event-triggered emotions provide temporal anchors around which important moments are organized; and socially mediated emotions provide relational anchors that bring particular relationships into focus. The paper contributes to research on emotions and armed group mobilization by shifting attention from emotions as causal mechanisms of participation toward their role in the retrospective narration of individual mobilization trajectories.

Emotions have long been recognized as an important dimension of political mobilization. Research on social movements and political violence has shown how emotions such as fear, anger, resentment, humiliation, hope, and pride can acquire political meaning and become associated with participation in collective action (Jasper, 1998; Jeff et al., 2001; Jasper, 2011). Research on armed group mobilization has likewise examined how individuals respond to repression, perceive threats and opportunities, and become involved in collective violence. Yet much of what we know about individual pathways into armed groups comes from retrospective accounts: interviews in which former members are asked to reconstruct how they joined (for example, Bosi and Della Porta, 2012; Koinova, 2013; Viterna, 2006). Despite the prevalence of this form of evidence, retrospective narration itself has received comparatively little analytical attention. Accounts of mobilization are generally treated as sources from which motivations, recruitment pathways, or causal mechanisms can be recovered, rather than as narratives whose characteristics may also shape what becomes salient within the account.

This became particularly apparent in the interviews for this study. Upon analysis, it was observed that participants’ accounts were repeatedly laden with emotion. They recalled fear associated with years of repression, shock and grief following particular acts of violence, hope when the KLA emerged as a visible possibility, pride at becoming a member, and relief, apprehension, admiration, or trust in interactions with people around them. This raised this study’s research puzzle: if emotions appear prominently in retrospective accounts of mobilization, are they simply experiences being recalled, or do they also perform a function in how participants reconstruct their trajectories?

This paper therefore examines how emotional experiences feature in former combatants’ retrospective accounts of becoming mobilized, rather than treating emotions primarily as causal mechanisms of participation. The focus is not on determining whether a particular emotion led an individual to join the KLA, but on how participants locate emotional experiences within the trajectory they recount and what becomes salient through their narration.

The analysis identifies three recurring ways in which participants locate emotional experiences within their narratives: stock emotions, event-triggered emotions, and socially mediated emotions. These are not distinct categories of emotion. The same emotion may appear in different forms depending on how the participant locates it within the trajectory. What distinguishes the three categories is therefore the source and narrative location of the emotional experience: enduring circumstances before and during mobilization, identifiable events, and interactions with other people, respectively.

Further, these different forms of emotional experience are interpreted as performing different functions within participants’ narratives. Stock emotions provide a background against which participants explain why participation made sense; event-triggered emotions mark emotionally salient moments that help structure the trajectory in time; and socially mediated emotions bring particular relationships into focus. I call these rationale, temporal, and relational anchors, respectively.

Emotions, mobilization, and narration: an overview

The question of how emotions relate to mobilization is well established. Research on contentious politics has challenged accounts that explain political action primarily through strategic calculation (Olson, 2003; Lichbach, 1994), organizational opportunity (McCarthy and Zald, 1977; Tilly, 1978; McAdam et al., 1996; Tarrow, 2011), or ideological alignment (Snow et al., 1986; Benford and Snow, 2000). Jeff et al. (2001) placed emotions more centrally within the analysis of political action, while Jasper (1998, 2011, 2018) demonstrated that emotions encompass different forms and processes, including moral shocks, affective commitments, moral batteries, moods, and reflex emotions. Research on political violence has similarly shown how emotions such as resentment, fear, humiliation, dignity, and pride can become politically meaningful and associated with participation (Wood, 2003; Petersen, 2001, 2002; Pearlman, 2013).

Much of this literature, however, has developed around protest and social movements rather than armed group mobilization. Joining an armed group involves particular conditions of uncertainty, clandestinity, trust, and risk (Forney, 2015; Shesterinina, 2021; Parkinson, 2013), while participation can also generate substantial obligations toward family and other close ties (Viterna, 2006; Ketola, 2025). Research on micromobilization and social networks provides an important account of these processes. McAdam and Paulsen (1993) and Passy (2003) show that social ties are not simply channels of recruitment but can shape identities, perceptions, opportunities, and meanings. Klandermans and Oegema (1987), Oegema and Klandermans (1994), and Ward (2016) further conceptualize mobilization as a process through which individuals move through different stages of participation, while recent work on armed groups similarly emphasizes social embeddedness and individual pathways into participation (Bosi and Malthaner, 2022). These approaches establish the importance of understanding joining as a process embedded within social relationships rather than as a single decision.

Civil war research has likewise moved beyond explanations based primarily on grievances (Gurr, 1970), selective incentives (Collier and Hoeffler, 2004), coercion (Eck, 2014), security (Kalyvas and Kocher, 2007), or organizational capacity (Eck, 2010). Wood (2003), for example, demonstrates how participation in insurgency may be connected to experiences of dignity and autonomy, while Petersen (2001, 2002) shows how perceived group subordination can generate resentment with political consequences. More recent work has emphasized how threat is interpreted through families and local communities (Shesterinina, 2021), how state violence affects recruitment and insurgent organization (Schubiger, 2023), and how familial and affective relationships shape belonging and participation in armed groups (Ketola, 2025; Ketola and O’Reilly, 2025; Aldoughli, 2024). Together, this literature demonstrates that armed group mobilization is embedded in emotional and relational environments that extend beyond the formal relationship between an individual and an organization.

A related issue concerns the use of retrospective interviews as evidence of individual mobilization. Research on autobiographical memory and narrative suggests that remembering is not simply retrieving an unchanged record of past experience (Holland and Kensinger, 2010). Emotional experiences can affect the salience and reconstruction of autobiographical memories, while autobiographical narration involves organizing remembered experiences into accounts that connect particular events and experiences to broader life trajectories (Smorti and Fioretti, 2016). The emotional content of retrospective accounts can therefore provide information not only about what participants remember experiencing, but also about which aspects of their past remain salient when they reconstruct those experiences in the present.

This issue has also been examined in research involving former combatants. Katto (2018), for example, shows how emotions form part of ex-combatants’ oral-history accounts of the Mozambican liberation struggle, demonstrating the importance of emotions expressed in the present when examining narratives about past political violence and participation. Such work cautions against treating retrospective accounts as transparent records of the emotional or motivational states that existed at the time of mobilization, while also showing that reconstructing those experiences can itself be analytically meaningful.

The present study brings these strands of literature together. It retains the insight that emotions, social relationships, and particular events are important dimensions of armed group mobilization but examines how these dimensions appear within retrospective accounts of individual trajectories into the KLA.

The Kosovo liberation army: case background

The Kosovo Liberation Army emerged from a convergence of historical grievance, structural exclusion, and political opportunity in the 1990s. The foundational tensions between Serbian and Albanian claims over Kosovo stretch back centuries, with the 1,389 Battle of Kosovo Polje central to Serbian national mythology (Daskalovski, 2003), while successive waves of Ottoman-era demographic change consolidated an Albanian majority in the territory (Malcolm, 2002). Following incorporation into socialist Yugoslavia, Kosovo’s formal autonomy fluctuated: expanded under the 1974 constitution, it was systematically dismantled after Slobodan Milošević’s rise to power. The constitutional amendments of 1989 abolished Kosovo’s autonomous status, triggering mass dismissals of Albanian state employees, the closure of Albanian-language media, and the exclusion of Albanians from formal education (Kostovičová, 1996).

The dominant Albanian political response, led by Ibrahim Rugova and the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), was organized non-violence, sustained by a parallel system of education, healthcare, and taxation funded largely by the diaspora (Judah, 2000a; Koinova, 2013). The KLA’s organizational roots lay elsewhere, in the Popular Movement for the Republic of Kosovo (LPRK), founded in the early 1980s, which persisted underground through a clandestine cell structure before producing the Popular Movement for Kosovo in 1993, explicitly committed to armed struggle (Pettifer, 2013; Judah, 2000b).

Two external shocks transformed this marginal organization. The Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the Bosnian war while leaving Kosovo unaddressed, delegitimized the non-violent strategy and created political space for armed actors (Florian and Židas, 2003). The collapse of the Albanian state in 1997 flooded the region with weapons, financed and transported through diaspora networks (Perritt, 2008). The KLA’s first deliberate public appearance at a teacher’s funeral at Lausha in November 1997 was followed by the killing of Adem Jashari and most of his family at Prekaz in March 1998 (Judah, 2000b), which subsequently featured prominently in many participants’ accounts of their mobilization. Crucially, mobilization into the KLA was not centrally coordinated but decentralized and grassroots, with local militias and networks joining under the KLA banner through distinct pathways (Duclos, 2020). NATO’s air campaign began in March 1999, and Serbian forces withdrew following the Kumanovo agreement in June 1999, ending the war.

Structure of the paper

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 outlines the methodology, including the research design, data collection and sampling, and analytical approach. Section 3 presents the empirical findings, organized around the three forms of emotional experience identified in the analysis: stock emotions, event-triggered emotions, and socially mediated emotions. Section 4 discusses the findings and develops the argument about the different narrative functions of these emotional experiences. Section 5 concludes the paper by summarizing the main findings, discussing its limitations, and outlining directions for future research.

This study adopts an interpretivist, relativist approach, treating interviews as accounts through which individuals retrospectively interpret and narrate their experiences rather than as transparent records of objective facts. The analytical approach was inductive: the empirical material was initially approached without a pre-existing typology of emotional experiences, and the analytical categories were developed through iterative engagement with patterns identified across the interviews.

Data collection

The empirical basis consists of 24 semi-structured interviews conducted with former KLA combatants in Kosovo across two fieldwork periods, October to December 2023 and July to August 2024. Interviews lasted between one and a half and two hours. Three were conducted in English; the remaining twenty-two were conducted in Albanian with the assistance of an interpreter. Working with interpreters in conflict-sensitive contexts introduces well-documented risks, including summarization, omission, and the interjection of the translator’s own views (Fujii, 2013, 2017). Reliance on mutual contacts as translators also introduced some variation in translation quality across interviews. However, this arrangement was necessary given interviewees’ insistence that someone familiar to them should undertake the interpreting.

All interviews were conducted by the author. The interviews were originally designed to address a separate research question concerning the role of personal social networks in armed group mobilization. Emotional experiences were therefore not the primary object of the interviews and were not systematically elicited through targeted questions. Instead, affective material emerged organically as participants recounted their experiences of mobilization, relationships, and joining the KLA. This feature of the research design reduces the likelihood that participants’ accounts were shaped by the emotional categories ultimately developed in the analysis.

Sampling followed a fixer-based approach, in which interviewees were identified through local intermediaries who did not know one another, introducing an element of independence across referral chains. Conventional sampling strategies were significantly constrained by the recent trials of former KLA members by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office, seated in The Hague (Hitaj, 2023), which produced a climate of considerable caution among potential participants.

While all interviews were conducted face-to-face, most (22 of 24) took place at a neutral public venue chosen by the interviewee, usually cafes and restaurants. The other three took place at the interviewees’ homes, always at the interviewees’ request.

Verification of KLA membership was not always possible, though most interviewees provided membership cards from the KLA Veterans’ Association or photographic evidence of their service. All names have been redacted and replaced with anonymized identifiers. A small number of interviewees requested that their accounts not be quoted directly; in these cases, material informed the analysis without appearing as a direct citation. Care was taken throughout to minimize retraumatization, though given the nature of the subject matter, this could not always be avoided entirely. Given participants’ confidentiality concerns, verbal rather than written consent was obtained at the start of each interview, consistent with ethical guidelines for research in conflict-affected settings (Cammett, 2013; MacLean, 2013; Wood, 2006). Audio files and transcripts are stored in password-protected cloud storage accessible only to the author, in compliance with EU GDPR regulations.

Data analysis

Interviews were transcribed and coded in MAXQDA. The first coding round focused on identifying passages in which participants explicitly named an emotion or described an experience that could reasonably be interpreted as emotional, even where no explicit emotion word was used. Coding was therefore deliberately inclusive and did not impose the three-category framework developed later. This process required interpretive judgment: the emotional material identified in the analysis reflects the author’s reading of participants’ accounts rather than classifications interviewees made themselves.

The subsequent analytical process developed through comparison of the coded emotional passages across interviews. The first indication of a meaningful distinction was not the type of emotion or its presumed function, but the degree and form of identifiability attached to the emotional experience in participants’ accounts. Some emotions were clearly recalled in connection with a particular moment or interaction, while others were associated with a broader period of experience without reference to a specific event or encounter. Examining this difference more closely showed that the variation in identifiability corresponded to differences in the source of the emotional experience: some were rooted in enduring circumstances, some in identifiable events, and others in interactions with particular people.

An important limitation concerns the interpretive nature of the coding process. A single researcher conducted the coding and subsequent development of the analytical categories, meaning the identification and organization of emotional material necessarily reflect the author’s interpretation. The three anchors should therefore be understood as an interpretive analytical framework rather than as an independently validated typology.

Table 1 provides an overview of the frequency and distribution of the analytical codes across the 24 interviews. The table reports both the number of coded segments assigned to each code and the number of interviews in which the respective code occurred. The codes are grouped into event-triggered emotions, socially mediated emotions, and stock emotions, reflecting the analytical categories developed through the iterative coding process. As the coding process involved consolidating initial descriptive codes into broader analytical categories, the frequencies reported here refer to the final codes used in the analysis rather than to all codes generated during the initial coding stage.

In the following, I elaborate on this typology of emotional experiences based on their source and degree of identifiability. I do so with the help of the various narratives I encountered in the interviews and present the reader with several quotes from the interviewees in order to demonstrate how these emotional experiences emerged in participants’ narratives.

Stock emotions

The term stock emotions describes emotional experiences that participants associate with enduring conditions of everyday life and that participants do not locate in a specific identifiable moment. Jasper (2018), drawing on Ratcliffe (2009), uses the concept of ‘deep moods’ to describe such affective states that provide a background to how individuals experience subsequent situations. This provides a useful way of understanding the diffuse and persistent quality of the emotional experiences examined here, as well as their role in participants’ retrospective accounts of mobilization. The qualifier, stock, however, refers specifically to the grounding of an emotional experience in such an enduring source, rather than to a distinct category of emotion.

These enduring individual experiences can also be situated within a wider collective context. Páez et al. (2013) use the concept of emotional climate to describe the “predominant collective emotions perceived as shared by members of social groups” (p. 113). The concept helps explain how particular emotional experiences may be embedded within a broader social environment. Their example of Pinochet’s Chile resonates directly with the Kosovo Albanian experience under Serbian rule in the 1990s: a pervasive climate of fear in which it was dangerous to say certain things in public, social distrust, and the resulting isolation that prevented political organization. Such a climate provides the wider social context within which participants experience and later locate the source of the emotions analyzed here as stock emotions. Within this broader context, two forms of stock emotional content were primarily identified in the interviews.

The first is chronic fear, associated with the Serbian state, particularly its police and armed forces, and, to an extent, the usually armed co-inhabitants of the village or town. The second is collective resentment, associated with the long-term experience of unequal treatment, the large-scale loss of jobs, restricted access to formal education, and the broader treatment of Albanians in Kosovo.

Chronic fear

The condition of chronic fear is a persistent, background sense of danger or vulnerability, associated, in this case, with the presence of various elements of the Serbian state. Theoretically, it parallels Jasper’s (2018) understanding of anxieties: a more abiding version of fear that usually operates in the background. This aligns it with a type of fear that operates as a ‘deep mood’, explained above. Crucially, Bar-Tal (2001) elucidates a mechanism whereby fear acquired through prolonged exposure to threat becomes stored as implicit emotional memory, resilient over time, and can be reactivated by associated cues. This mechanism helps explain how experiences of prolonged threat may continue to shape emotional experience even when the immediate source of danger is no longer present, a pattern visible in participants’ retrospective accounts.

However, the significance of chronic fear lies in the way participants locate it within the ordinary conditions of everyday life. The source of this fear is its continued and pervasive presence through encountering police patrols, searches, checkpoints, armed personnel, and the possibility of abuse.

Chronic fear manifested most consistently in the interviews as restrictions on movement and association with peers stemming from the abuse perpetrated by security personnel. Interviewee 1RC said there was a police station in the village where he lived, and because of the constant presence of police patrols, he had to take a circuitous route to the school where he taught to avoid them. In several instances, the police checks were often accompanied by beatings and what he calls “psychological violence” (1RC101123Ma1, Pos. 158), consisting of humiliation and threats when one could not speak Serbian. He even reports the police having dogs, one of which was infamous for having bitten several people in the village. More significantly, the presence of this police station was also the main reason why his sisters had to drop out of school: “Two sisters were forced to stop school because of that police station. They didn’t even try to go out of home. They were scared.” (1RC101123Ma, Pos. 190).

Interviewee 18SJ also echoed similar circumstances in his village, mentioning that, “At that time, [w]hat you could see during the night was only Serbian police, nothing else. And some dogs.” (18SJ300724Mb, Pos. 39).

This sense of fear was not just of Serbian armed forces, but also Serb civilians, who were, according to several interviews, armed by the Serbian authorities (see U.S. Department of State, 1999). Interviewee 16KK describes how “all the Serbs who were living here nearby were all armed and uniformed, especially the male one(s). Just the presence of a number of policemen and uniformed people created an environment that wasn’t that good to live in. During that time, you can see people with uniforms, with guns all the time, walking in the streets” (16KK270724Ma, Pos. 59–62).

This fear also necessitated a heightened sense of awareness: a need for constantly being on the lookout for police forces, having regular searches conducted in their homes, and the expectation of abuse and mistreatment at checkposts during travel from one city or village to another. Participants sometimes connected this anxiety, in retrospect, to their subsequent involvement in organizing resistance. For instance, Interviewee 19SJ, who lived in Drenac in central Kosovo, recounts how, around 1995–96, he and his family, largely due to these police raids, began setting up guards in and around the neighborhood to warn people about approaching Serbian police. These village guards were the precursor of armed groups that ultimately coalesced into the KLA a few years later. The strain of this vigilance was well reflected in his words: “The Serbs are entering your property. We count that like a heart attack. And I saw [them] 10 or 12 times until the beginning of the war, […] because I was in front, the first house was mine” (19SJ300724Mc, Pos. 150).

A related response to this constant exposure was secrecy, particularly once individuals began participating in resistance activities. Interviewee 7GA recalled that even fellow members avoided using their own names, “so they [the police] didn’t know we were family members of somebody, and we didn’t tell that we’re joining because [we didn’t want] our family to get attacked” (7GA170724Ma, Pos. 52–54). This logic of protecting the family recurs in other interviews: Interviewee 2PA described working in complete secrecy, with knowledge of his activities restricted to his wife alone (2PA121123Ma, Pos. 19), while 23PA noted that awareness of his involvement was confined to his closest family, since, in his words, “it was really dangerous […] if they had known” (23PA010824Ma, Pos. 240–245).

However, perhaps the most significant way this fear featured in the mobilization narrative was the high degree of initial skepticism among Albanians in Kosovo toward the possibility of a group like the KLA even existing. This was tied to the perceived might of the Serbian armed forces, often conveyed by older family members. For instance, 9PA mentioned that his father, who “served military service in the time of Yugoslavia […] knew the power of the Serbian army. He was very worried because he knew what they and [their] guns could do” (9PA230724Ma, Pos. 95). Combined with the regular repression faced by the people, this led to disbelief that such a group could possibly organize itself. Instead, many interviewees recall believing that the incidents concerning the group were false-flag operations by the Serbs in order to justify even harsher repression.

Interviewee 15FJ, when asked about what he felt when he first started hearing about the KLA, reports that he “couldn’t believe that it was the KLA. We thought it was something else. Something orchestrated. We thought the Serbians created it with the intention of giving the fall to the Albanians” (15FJ270724Mb, Pos. 121). Later on in the interview, when speaking about his father, he narrated, “So the grown-up people, who were older, as my father was, they were so afraid of the system and [of] Serbia. […] They never even thought, they never believed that something would show up and liberate the nation. Because they [Serbs] were so strong” (15FJ270724Mb, Pos. 381–388).

Collective resentment

Collective resentment is attributed to experiences of collective injustice, targeting, or mistreatment directed at Albanians as a group, narrated by an interviewee. It partially overlaps with Petersen’s (2002) concept of resentment, defined as the emotion that arises when a group perceives itself as unfairly subordinated to a group it considers equal to or superior to; some passages, however, may be closer to moral indignation, along the lines of Jasper (2014) and Costalli and Ruggeri (2015), at acts of violence and mistreatment than a broader, status-based resentment.

In contrast to chronic fear, where the emotional content is located in the continuing presence of threat, the source of collective resentment is an enduring experience of unequal treatment. The resentment is usually attached to the accumulation of experiences that participants retrospectively understand as evidence of the subordinate position of Kosovo Albanians.

Interviewee 21SJ, at the beginning of the interview and without prompting, offers a broad sense of the former, Petersen- esque sense of resentment: “Why were we not satisfied? Because we had two nations and we were at, let’s say, the same level, but they had different privileges. We thought we believed that our requests [demands] are just, are right. We were not looking for something more than they had” (21SJ310724Ma, Pos. 13). The wording of this account is particularly significant. The narrator does not locate resentment in a single personal experience, but in a comparison between two groups and the collective unequal treatment of the group he belonged to.

Such resentment stemmed primarily from the exclusion of Kosovo Albanians from educational and employment opportunities beginning in 1989. This was consistently raised across interviews, and several interviewees (including 13PN, 24FJ, 23PA, and 9PA) described fathers, uncles, and entire family networks being dismissed from work. Interviewee 24FJ summarized the situation well: “In the 90s, you know, those were very hard days for us because it was a classic occupation. The moment that our schools were closed [and] employment was stopped. The whole purpose of it was to exclude us from Kosovo. […] Half of the population went outside” (24FJ030824Ma, Pos. 377–379). This exclusion led the Albanians to establish parallel educational institutions, which provoked severe reprisals from Serbian authorities. 2PA describes raids from the authorities, where they “grabbed the children and they beat students and teachers” (Pos. 22).

An oft-cited precursor of this unequal, unjust treatment was the experiences of Kosovar Albanians in the Yugoslav National Army (JNA). Several interviewees, who were either conscripted to the army (10BB and 15FJ) or had relatives who were members (13PN), narrated discriminatory treatment. For instance, 15FJ recounted how an Albanian soldier was executed for having killed another soldier in his sleep. He claimed that “the whole purpose of it [such acts] […] was that all the states that were part of Yugoslavia during the time to hate Albanians, somehow, with this orchestrated stuff to trigger all of them against Albanians” (15FJ270724Mb, Pos. 84–90).

More broadly, this exclusion was compounded by another sense of enduring resentment, leaning toward indignation, directed at grievances stemming from the less-than-ideal living conditions Albanians were subjected to. As 17SJ puts it, “Normal life was paralyzed completely” (17SJ300724Ma, Pos. 191–193). Interviewee 16KK explained that there were curfews imposed in his village, for example, and “we couldn’t speak about our political opinions and so on. This escalated, [and] we couldn’t trust each other about talking about the political stuff in general” (16KK270724Ma, Pos. 81–88). 1RC, mentioned above, said, “We […] young people, we didn’t have [anything] like life. We didn’t know how to enjoy life” (1RC101123Ma, Pos. 132).

Event-triggered emotions

Event-triggered emotions are emotional experiences that interviewees locate in particular events at identifiable points in their lives. Such events can acquire emotional significance through appraisal processes, whereby individuals evaluate what happened in relation to their circumstances, values, and understandings of the social world. When faced with brutal incidents such as massacres or humiliation at the hands of Serbian authorities, for example, individuals may appraise these experiences as intolerable and highly salient harms to themselves or to their collective (Lazarus, 1991; Moors, 2017). On the other hand, when encountering the emergence of an organized armed resistance such as the KLA for the first time, individuals may appraise these developments as signs of new possibilities for collective action and a challenge to the previously perceived limits of their circumstances.

Across the interviews, event-triggered emotional experiences were the most frequently and intensely narrated, with a specificity that is less apparent in accounts of the more diffuse emotional conditions of everyday life. This prominence suggests that discrete events occupy a particularly important place in participants’ retrospective accounts, providing salient points around which emotionally significant experiences of their mobilization are recalled.

Moral shock

Among negative emotional experiences, accounts of what can be understood as moral shock were particularly prominent throughout the interviews. Moral shocks are “the vertiginous feeling that results when an event or information shows that the world is not what one had expected” (Jasper, 2011, 289), leading to reflex emotions of sadness, anger, disgust, etc.

In the interviews, the moral shock seems to stem from the death of Adem Jashari, the early KLA commander who was involved in a two-day siege against Serbian forces in his compound in Prekaz that culminated in his death and the deaths of 56 family members (Perritt, 2008). Alongside other massacres, this incident operated as a “chosen trauma” (Volkan, 2001), a highly symbolic, catastrophic event that transfixed the collective consciousness of the Kosovo Albanian population. For many interviewees, the Jashari massacre occupies a particularly prominent place in their retrospective accounts of the period, associated with profound sadness and with their subsequent decision to return to Kosovo or become involved with the KLA.

Interviewee 13PN, hailing from Prizren in southern Kosovo, managed to flee to Germany in 1995 to avoid being conscripted into the JNA. It was there in March 1998 when he heard about the Jashari massacre that had affected him fundamentally: “I was working during that time. I was working in Germany. When I heard about the news, about the Jashari family. I didn’t have any more willingness to work. Since that date, I just found the way, I just was looking for a way to come here [Kosovo]. I was so sad when I saw the news about the Jashari Family” (13PN250724Mb, Pos. 407–436).

Similarly, Interviewee 15FJ, when asked about what inspired him to join the KLA, unhesitatingly cited the Jashari massacre, describing the incident in terms of deep sadness and a sense of inevitability: “It was the real situation. […] When you saw that 56 members of the family, all of them were murdered. Children, women, old men, young, everyone. You know, we can sense it, that there is no way out. So it had to be done” (15FJ270724Mb, Pos. 127–130).

However, moral shocks also followed incidents involving close connections. For instance, 3PA narrated in great detail the Serbs’ brutal treatment of his father: “Serbs came and took [my] father. They were looking for guns […] from him. And he didn’t have a gun. So they beat him, beat a lot. And he hadn’t a gun, you know, how can [he] find it if [he] didn’t have one? So they even break his hands. Head. And after he fainted they put [him] on the [road], you know, all with blood and [someone] saw and took him on a tractor. And he stayed about six weeks alive at home. They couldn’t send him to hospital because it was dangerous” (3PA1211Mb, Pos. 102–107).

What distinguishes this case from the Jashari-centered instances above is not only the sustained, six-week character of the trauma, but the acute systemic humiliation (Rothbart and Poder, 2017) embedded in the inability to seek medical care due to the chronic fear of state reprisal described above.

Grief

Grief, indicated by Jasper (2018) as an enduring, long-term sadness, was reported in relation to the loss of specific individuals, most commonly family members or close associates killed or detained by Serbian forces. It appears in close proximity to moral shock, though the emotional experience is more closely associated with personal bereavement.

The distinction from moral shock emerges clearly in the case of Interviewee 20SJ. The Jashari massacre in 1998 was not just a distant event for him; rather, it affected him on a much more personal level since the interviewee’s nephew and brother-in-law were both killed at Prekaz that day, along with the brother-in-law’s mother. The same historical event is recalled by a diaspora interviewee (Interviewee 13PN) in terms of moral shock, while Interviewee 20SJ recalls it as a simultaneous loss of multiple close ties.

In other cases, grief is recalled alongside moral shock. In Interview 13PN, the Jashari massacre was followed shortly afterward by news that the interviewee’s younger brother had been detained by police for two days, beaten during interrogation, and that the family had withheld this from him for a month to avoid alarming him while he was in Germany: “They stopped the brother […] He was locked in the room. He was locked by hand. Two days. Every shift, a new police” (13PN250724Mb, Pos. 373–407).

An interesting pattern in the interviews was the way shared grief was described in relation to bonds with other individuals. For instance, Interviewee 2PA, when asked if all the men with whom he joined the KLA were friends, answered: “Yes, all. Because [we were] united by pain. [name] lost his brother, [name] lost his uncle, [name] lost his brother” (2PA121123Ma, Pos. 87). This pattern recurs in Interview 3PA, where the interviewee and his cousin, described as inseparable throughout the mobilization process, had both lost their fathers to Serbian violence before the war. The description of being “united by pain” illustrates how experiences of grief could also be embedded in participants’ accounts of their relationships with others, particularly through shared experiences of loss and victimhood (Borinca and Spears, 2025).

Humiliation and shame

Humiliation, defined by Lindner (2006) as the “enforced lowering of any person or group by a process of subjugation that damages their dignity” (xiv), was primarily reported in relation to specific encounters with Serbian authorities. A heightened sense of humiliation also appeared in accounts of mistreatment bordering on dehumanization that participants experienced.

First, the most consistent theme across these passages is a felt sense of powerlessness in the face of arbitrary physical force, with forced degradation by an authority stripping the individual of basic human agency (Smith, 2008). Interviewee 9PA described being taken behind a building at a border checkpoint and beaten without cause: “the police stops you [at a checkpoint], takes you behind the building, beats you up without any reason, and you have nothing [you can] do […] it was a time that I felt […] with the least power, with no power at all” (9PA230724Ma, Pos. 21–22). Similarly, Interviewee 17SJ, stopped by six or seven armed policemen in Pristina and interrogated about his identity and occupation, recalled being afraid to even say the country he lived in: “They started to ask in which country you are living. I said ‘In this country,’, because I didn’t dare to say…because I was afraid to say ‘Kosovo’” (17SJ300724Ma, Pos. 154–173). Although these were particular events that were narrated, the interviews made it clear that such incidents were commonplace.

A related pattern involves humiliation directed at family members, often in the interviewee’s knowledge or presence. Interviewee 24FJ described his father being repeatedly interrogated and physically attacked, his brother tortured and subsequently forced to flee to France (24FJ030824Ma, Pos. 209–211), while Interviewee 8FJ recalled his father being summoned to a police station on false pretenses, with the whole family mobilizing to protest outside until he was released (8FJ190724Ma, Pos. 83–91). Interviewee 3PA described Serbian forces beating both his father and his sister during the same incident (3PA1211Mb, Pos. 411). Interviewee 24FJ additionally recalled an episode in which fifteen or sixteen villagers doing fieldwork together were forced by police to wade through a river and were accused of conducting military maneuvers. He recalled that there was “no other solution just to grab the arms and join the KLA” (24FJ030824Ma, Pos. 112).

In other narrated cases, however, the humiliation took a more severe turn and showed a certain dehumanizing tendency. Interviewee 21SJ described soldiers entering homes and forcing residents “to swallow the[ir] rings” (21SJ310724Ma, Pos. 120), while Interviewee 8FJ recalled himself and his father being beaten continuously for six hours with wooden and plastic sticks while attempting to submit university applications, until his father told the officers: “if you want to kill us, kill us” (8FJ190724Ma, Pos. 79–80). Interviewee 24FJ described male residents of his village, ranging from fourteen to seventy years of age, subjected to mass harassment and interrogation, and “some of them were also electrocuted” during questioning (24FJ030824Ma, Pos. 207–211). This systematic disregard of the human body, reflecting Kelman’s (1973) conception of dehumanization, has also been noted in Kosovo by Borinca et al. (2025) and Karčić (2023).

Shame, on the other hand, can be understood as “a painful feeling of being unworthy” (Jasper, 2018, 48), associated with a failure to meet a particular (self-)expectation. As a more internally experienced emotion, it was reported by fewer interviewees and usually appeared in accounts of guilt or ostracism by the community in which the person lived. After his release from prison, Interviewee 21SJ found that people who knew him would leave cafes or public spaces upon his arrival, unwilling to be seen associating with a former political prisoner: “when I entered [a cafe] after [being released from] jail […] all the people went out. Because they had prejudices toward [me]. They knew me, but they were not, or better say, didn’t dare to talk to me due to the system” (21SJ310724Ma, Pos. 64).

Finally, a specific form of shame appeared in Interviewee 20SJ’s account, closer to survivor’s guilt: “We started to have also a kind of guilt that we are not there to do something” (20SJ300724Md, Pos. 143). This passage was produced specifically in the aftermath of the Prekaz massacre and the emergence of the KLA and is therefore considered an event-triggered emotional experience. Crawford (2000) describes a related emotional dynamic in which individuals who witness the destruction of their ingroup while remaining relatively safe may experience an emotional cost associated with their perceived passivity.

Pride

Pride is an emotion associated with experiences that affirm one’s sense of self, identity, or standing in relation to valued others or collectives (Jasper, 2011, 2018). In social-movement contexts, pride can therefore be connected to experiences of identifying oneself as a part of the collective, recognition by the movement or movement leaders, and other enhancements of dignity such as felicitation, promotion, etc. (Tausch and Becker, 2013). Importantly, in retrospective narratives, it can signify positive developments, accomplishments, recognition, or anticipated possibilities, marking experiences that participants subsequently recall as positively significant.

The consistent pattern across the interviews is the intensity of pride and fulfillment evident in narrating the moment of joining itself. Several interviewees described this experience in unusually vivid terms, including through sensory language. Interviewee 8FJ recalled feeling as though he was “moving [up] in the air for 10 or 15cm, like flying” (8FJ190724Ma, Pos. 426). Interviewee 3PA described being unable to wait to put on the KLA hat with its symbol, while Interviewee 13PN, given a uniform for the first time, recalled: “I was waiting for so long to wear this uniform” (13PN250724Mb, Pos. 684–694). Interviewee 17SJ, whose registration took place at home in the presence of his mother, wife, and cousin, recalled the arrival of the commander with a gun as an especially intense emotional experience: “I have never been more happy than that day. More enthusiastic and more proud” (17SJ300724Ma, Pos. 362–368).

Similar experiences appear in accounts of the symbolic practices accompanying incorporation into the KLA. Interviewee 9PA described his first day as feeling “quite accomplished because you think that you are doing something important”, mentioning that even menial tasks such as digging trenches were approached with enthusiasm (9PA230724Ma, Pos. 108). Interviewee 1RC recalled swearing an oath before the Albanian flag as “a unique feeling” (1RC101123Ma, Pos. 579), and described a different “feel in the air” (1RC101123Ma, Pos. 404) when he was able to carry his gun openly in KLA-controlled territory, incorporating more of the sensory language, like Interviewee 8FJ. Uniforms, organizational symbols, oaths, weapons, and public recognition thus recur in participants’ accounts as concrete features of the experiences to which these positive emotions are attached. Rituals of this kind are well documented in the organization of armed groups (García, 2020; Davis and Jang, 2018; Collins, 2014). In these accounts, the pride associated with their recounting enforces their enduring significance for the participants.

Hope

In conflict sociology, hope can be understood as an emotional experience oriented toward the possibility that an oppressive status quo can be overcome and the balance of power altered (Wood, 2003). In the interviews, hope is associated with the emergence of an organized resistance and with the possibility that the existing situation could be changed. It is analytically distinct from pride and fulfillment, which are more closely associated with membership and incorporation into the KLA. Hope instead appears in accounts of encountering or learning about the KLA as an organized force, and of subsequently perceiving resistance as a possibility.

Several interviewees described their first encounter with or knowledge of the KLA in terms that go beyond simple relief. Interviewee 5PA stated plainly: “The moment I heard about this group, I felt so good and I couldn’t wait to find and connect with them” (5PA11223Ma, Pos. 18). Interviewee 23PA recalled being “so happy that when I heard that there is someone who wants to go against the regime at that time” (23PA010824Ma, Pos. 95–98). In both accounts, the positive emotional experience is closely associated with the appearance of an organized force capable of challenging the existing situation.

In a few interviews, hope appears in anticipation of joining, associated with the prospect of an organized resistance becoming a viable alternative to the existing situation. Interviewee 18SJ, who had spent time in Lausha in central Kosovo in 1995, described his first encounter with members of the then-emerging KLA: “it was the most miraculous feeling I ever had till that moment […] even though I was 17 years old, it was my dream. When you are a youngster, you don’t think about the danger or the risks. You want to be a hero. And we even have had the reasons” (18SJ300724Mb, Pos. 112–116). Here, the emotional experience is linked to the prospect of joining and contributing to an armed resistance that the interviewee already regarded positively. Kalyvas (2006) similarly notes the appeal of the heroic framing and aesthetics of armed resistance, particularly among young people living in restrictive and repressive environments.

Interviewee 9PA described it in terms of the aspiration he had in the times leading up to then: “we were dreaming about having someone who would be able to kind of return [give back] what you were suffering” (9PA230724Ma, Pos. 44), and recalled the specific moment when, after a successful battle near Peja, the KLA held territory for two or three weeks. He recalled that it was during visiting these areas when he thought “maybe it [can] work” (9PA230724Ma, Pos. 52). Here, the positive emotional experience is accompanied by a changed appraisal of what might be possible; resistance, previously described as an aspiration, is recalled as something that might actually work. A similar combination appears in Interviewee 3PA, who described seeing the KLA symbol for the first time as producing “a big feeling, like the war is in his hands” (3PA1211Mb, Pos. 85–90). The account combines an emotional response to the emergence of resistance with a newly perceived sense of possibility and agency.

Interviewee 13PN, in Germany when he first heard the news of the KLA’s organization a few days after the moral shock and grief of hearing about the Prekaz massacre as well as the distressing news about his younger brother, described the emotional effect as something that directly countered the negative emotions: “I was released from the sadness of my family when I heard about the group” (13PN250724Mb, Pos. 438–442). The contrast in this case is particularly striking: the emergence of the KLA is recalled alongside a movement away from sadness and toward a sense of possibility, that is, a reappraisal of his own emotional state.

Socially mediated emotions

Socially mediated emotions are emotional experiences that participants associate with interactions with other people, particularly close ties such as family members, neighbors, friends, and local community figures. Given the nature of mobilization into the KLA, these relationships were generally embedded in existing social networks rather than formed through the organization itself. This emphasis on existing social ties is consistent with the micromobilization literature, which has highlighted the role of social networks and interpersonal relationships in shaping individuals’ pathways into collective action and group membership (see Passy, 2003; Ward, 2016; Kalyvas and Arjona, 2012).

Participants’ accounts describe emotional experiences arising from encouragement, approval, persuasion, and concern expressed by people around them. These experiences could be associated with both motivation to join the KLA and hesitation about joining it. This section, therefore, emphasizes the relational context in which participants experienced and later recalled particular emotions, rather than social ties as independent mechanisms of mobilization.

This distinguishes socially mediated emotions from the two categories above: while stock emotions are associated with enduring circumstances and event-triggered emotions with identifiable events, socially mediated emotions are located in interactions with particular people. Because these interactions involve processes that extend beyond the emotional experience itself, this section takes a somewhat different analytical approach. Rather than organizing the analysis around individual emotions as before, it examines broader relational processes through which social ties shape participants’ experiences of joining, and considers the emotions associated with these processes, such as providing approval for the individual’s participation in the KLA, in some cases, and resisting it in others. This approach allows the analysis to capture both the emotional experiences and the relational dynamics within which they are embedded.

Relational approval

Relational approval refers to the endorsement, validation, or acceptance of an individual’s decision to join the KLA by people within their existing social relationships. In the interviews, this most commonly involved close family members, particularly mothers, wives, siblings, and fathers. Such approval ranged from explicit verbal endorsement to practical participation, and in some cases involved acceptance of the decision despite explicit recognition of the risks it posed to the wider family. The emotional experiences accompanying these interactions, particularly relief, pride, and apprehension, provide an important part of how participants retrospectively describe these relational encounters.

Relief appears particularly where participants had anticipated opposition from their families. Interviewee 20SJ stated plainly that he would not have joined without explicit permission from his mother and sister: “Without their permission, I wouldn’t enter. So I got their permission” (20SJ300724Md, Pos. 218–220). The account places family approval directly within his recollection of joining, while the relief associated with receiving it reflects the removal of an anticipated obstacle. Interviewee 15FJ similarly recalled that his parents recognized “that it was a final decision of his” (15FJ270724Mb, Pos. 390) and chose not to oppose it. Interviewee 3PA described a comparable acceptance by his mother and sister, whose decision not to prevent him from joining was framed as arising “not from their own will, but because we didn’t have other way” (3PA1211Mb, Pos. 163–174). Across these accounts, approval need not take the form of enthusiastic endorsement; acceptance itself could carry considerable emotional significance for participants.

Approval was also expressed through explicit enthusiasm and pride. Interviewee 10BH recalled that, upon learning that he had joined the KLA, his father told him: “This is the greatest news I have heard since your birth. I’m very proud of you. You have all my support” (10BH240724Ma, Pos. 64–67). Interviewee 5PA similarly recalled his wife’s response: “She was proud. If your family doesn’t support you, even the journey of life does not work out” (5PA11223Ma, Pos. 36). In these accounts, pride is narrated not simply as an emotion experienced by the participant, but as an expression of recognition from a significant other. The approval of the relationship therefore becomes part of how participants retrospectively describe their joining process.

Approval was not always expressed verbally. In several accounts, relatives participated practically in the process surrounding joining. Interviewee 23PA recalled fondly that his father, who had been a consistent source of motivation throughout his childhood, accompanied him on the journey to the village where he would join his brigade. Interviewee 7GA recalled that his mother and aunt volunteered to transport arms on his behalf, leading him to state that they were “already a part of the army” (7GA170724Ma, Pos. 200, 294). The latter account is particularly revealing because approval is expressed through participation itself: the distinction between the individual joining the KLA and relatives supporting that decision becomes less clear when family members actively contribute to the process.

The recurrence of mothers in these accounts also suggests that approval was embedded in existing familial expectations and norms. Interviewee 19SJ explicitly situated his mother’s approval within what he described as a Muslim familial practice: “It’s always the mother who approved to [go to] war. […] So you must have, like, mother approve [to] be part of something” (19SJ300724Mc, Pos. 100–104). Whether or not such expectations were shared universally, the account demonstrates how participants could understand approval as part of an established relational order rather than simply as an individual’s emotional response to a decision.

Approval could also coexist with an explicit recognition of the risks imposed on the wider family. Interviewee 19SJ recalled that his mother, while giving her blessing, warned him: “Protect others more than yourself” (19SJ300724Mc, Pos. 117), while recognizing that Serbian forces might retaliate against his brothers, uncles, father, and other relatives. Similarly, Interviewee 20SJ recalled that his sisters and mother did not attempt to stop him because they had experienced first-hand what had happened in Prekaz and believed that “we had to do something” (20SJ300724Md, Pos. 224). In these accounts, approval was therefore not synonymous with an absence of concern. Relatives could acknowledge that joining exposed the family to danger while nevertheless accepting or supporting the decision. The decision is consequently narrated not only as an individual assumption of risk, but as one negotiated within relationships.

Relational hindrance

Hindrance refers to relational interactions in which people close to the interviewee expressed concern, opposition, or reservations about their participation in the KLA. These interactions involved two main emotional registers: fear, most commonly expressed by family members and peers concerned about the interviewee’s safety, and fear and guilt experienced by the interviewees regarding the possible consequences of their participation for others.

The most consistent emotion expressed by personal ties was fear, particularly fear of losing the interviewee to death or Serbian punishment. Interviewee 1RC’s sisters, on seeing him with a gun for the first time, showed “sadness in their eyes” and were later described as “terrified, thinking [I] will not come back alive” (1RC101123Ma, Pos. 351–356, 406–412). Interviewee 24FJ’s youngest sister was crying and wanted him to stop (24FJ030824Ma, Pos. 254–259), while Interviewee 22SJ recalled that his family “didn’t accept it well” when they learned that he had volunteered to go illegally to Albania to collect and bring back arms (22SJ310724Mb, Pos. 75). These accounts locate fear within the relationships surrounding the decision to participate, with relatives responding to the anticipated risks attached to the interviewee’s involvement.

Fear and concern were also expressed through arguments rather than direct emotional appeals. Interviewee 9PA recalled that friends from his hometown, who had a longer history of coexistence with Serbs, argued for peaceful means of resolving the conflict instead of collaborating with groups like the KLA (9PA230724Ma, Pos. 47–48). Interviewee 13PN similarly recalled that his Albanian friend in Germany argued against his decision shortly before he was due to leave for Kosovo, pointing to his existing employment and responsibilities toward his family: “You’re young, there are already enough people in Kosovo doing that [fighting the Serbs]. Your family needs more financial support” (13PN250724Mb, Pos. 601–605). In both accounts, the interaction is recalled as part of the circumstances surrounding the decision to join. The arguments themselves provide a way for participants to situate their decision in relation to the concerns and expectations of people close to them, even where the precise emotional basis of the arguments cannot be established.

Participants likewise recalled their own concern for family members as part of the process through which they made sense of their decision to join. Interviewee 16KK described a period of deliberation in which his intention to join was accompanied by concern about what would happen to his family: “I was thinking about the family, what will happen of them, [about the fact that] I am going to be responsible if something would happen to them” (16KK270724Ma, Pos. 169).

Similar concerns appear in accounts of interviewees attempting to prevent younger relatives from joining. Interviewee 7GA told his brother, who also wanted to join, to remain behind and care for the family: “And there were a lot of females in the family, a lot of kids. There must be a male to cover to protect them. I said you stay and take care of the family. I go and fight” (7GA170724Ma, Pos. 301–307). Interviewee 12PN described stopping his younger brother from joining for similar reasons, as someone needed to remain at home to tend the farm and care for their parents (12PN250724Ma, Pos. 540–557). This outward-directed concern could also take the form of guilt associated with potentially exposing others to harm. Interviewee 8FJ, for example, did not want to invite his friends to join, knowing that there was a “99% [probability] of death” and that he did not want “to be the guy who invited someone [and] tomorrow, if he would end up dead, I felt guilty about it” (8FJ190724Ma, Pos. 320). In these accounts, concern for family members and friends is recalled as something that shaped how they interacted with social ties around them, and as a window into their emotional experiences at the time.

Relational influence

Relational influence (Friedkin, 1998; Mason et al., 2007) refers to emotional experiences that participants associate with particular individuals whose conduct, position, or relationship with them became significant in their accounts of joining the KLA. Unlike relational approval and hindrance, which involved explicit responses to an individual’s decision, whether by accepting, supporting, or opposing it, the interactions studied here were not always framed as direct attempts to regulate the participant’s decision. Instead, participants recalled particular individuals as figures they admired, trusted, found inspiring, or whose invitation carried particular significance.

Admiration, understood as a positive emotional response toward individuals perceived as possessing valued qualities or standing, has also been examined as an intergroup emotion in relation to collective action (Jasper, 2018; Sweetman et al., 2013). It appears particularly clearly in the accounts of Interviewees 9PA and 10BH.

Interviewee 9PA recalled encountering a friend and former roommate who was responsible for logistics in a KLA brigade. He described the encounter in explicitly aspirational terms: “it was a time that you would see, okay man, I want to be […] like him” (9PA230724Ma, Pos. 54–55). Later in the interview, he connected this encounter more directly to his own trajectory, recalling: “it was the time when I said yes, I think that I can be part of this group. When I saw him” (9PA230724Ma, Pos. 77). The individual therefore occupies a distinctive place in his retrospective account, with admiration for his friend’s position and conduct accompanying the participant’s recollection of becoming able to imagine himself as part of the KLA.

A similar emotional significance is attached to the figure of an uncle in Interviewee 10BH’s account. The interviewee described his uncle as someone who had “decided to die rather than live in this condition” (10BH240724Ma, Pos. 46). The uncle subsequently invited him to join the KLA, while explicitly leaving the decision to him: “I don’t want [you to] say yes or no tonight. You must think. And tomorrow we will meet again.” After one day, the interviewee recalled, “I said yes” (10BH240724Ma, Pos. 51). Here, the relationship combines admiration for the uncle with a direct invitation. The emotional significance of the relationship therefore goes beyond just persuasion; rather, the participant retrospectively presents the uncle as a person whose example and invitation became closely associated with his own decision.

Trust appears in accounts in which particular individuals were regarded as sufficiently reliable or legitimate that their involvement carried unusual significance (Weipert-Fenner et al., 2024). Interviewee 24FJ recalled that his community was “waiting just for one word from someone,” identifying a respected diaspora returnee as the person whose word carried this weight (24FJ030824Ma, Pos. 222–228). Interviewee 26FJ similarly described a friend from the diaspora as building a “spider net” (26FJ050824Mb, Pos. 194) of trusted contacts and recalled being included within this circle. In these accounts, trust is attached not simply to the existence of a social tie but to the particular standing that an individual held within the participant’s social world.

The findings primarily support existing literature in showing that emotions are not merely passive aspects of individuals’ experiences of armed conflict. At the same time, shifting the analytical perspective toward participants’ personal trajectories and, in particular, toward how they retrospectively recount their experiences, reveals that emotional experiences associated with different sources occupy different positions within these accounts.

The three categories identified in this study function as different types of narrative anchors through which participants make sense of their trajectories into the KLA. As explained below, stock emotions function as rationale anchors, event-triggered emotions function as temporal anchors, and socially mediated emotions function as relational anchors.

Stock emotions as rationale anchors

The findings extend existing emotion-based approaches to mobilization by showing how enduring emotional experiences become part of participants’ retrospective explanations for joining an armed group. Concepts such as emotional climate, resentment, indignation, and Jasper’s (2011) notion of moral batteries (combinations of opposed emotions, such as fear and hope) already demonstrate how emotions such as fear, anger, and humiliation can acquire political meaning. The present findings suggest that, when participants retrospectively recount their trajectories into the KLA, such emotions provide an enduring emotional background against which their decision to participate becomes intelligible.

This is particularly evident in accounts of chronic fear. Participants’ recollections of Serbian police, soldiers, and armed civilians establish an enduring sense of vulnerability that extends across individual incidents. The significance of this fear in retrospective narration therefore lies not simply in the danger it describes, but in the reference point it provides for understanding what participants perceived as possible at different stages of their trajectories. The strength attributed to Serbian state power, for example, helps explain why the emergence of an organized armed resistance could initially appear implausible to some participants. Chronic fear thus provides an emotional baseline against which later changes in the perceived possibility of resistance can be narrated. That is, it situates the narrator within a world in which armed resistance was initially difficult to imagine and against which its subsequent emergence becomes particularly salient.

Collective resentment performs a related but distinct function. Unlike an event-triggered emotion, resentment is not generally attached to a single identifiable episode in the interviews. Rather, participants retrospectively associate it with conditions extending across time and across community members, including exclusion from employment and education, political restrictions, and unequal treatment. In doing so, resentment connects experiences that might otherwise appear as separate episodes into a broader account of what it meant to live as an Albanian under Serbian rule. Its narrative significance therefore lies in its capacity to connect the personal and the collective: experiences of an individual’s employment, education, family, and everyday life can be situated within a wider history of perceived collective injustice. Indignation sharpens this moral dimension by rendering experiences of domination and mistreatment not merely undesirable but unacceptable (Costalli and Ruggeri, 2015).

In some accounts, participants went beyond describing the conditions that surrounded their participation and recalled that they had already wanted to join before a specific event or person became involved. Interviewee 26FJ, for example, explicitly described his decision as his “own motivation and will to join the KLA” (26FJ050824Mb, Pos. 312–314), while Interviewee 5PA similarly stated that he “got motivation from myself” (5PA11223Ma, Pos. 26). These accounts suggest that participants sometimes remembered the emotional environment not just as the background to joining, but as one in which their desire to participate had already taken shape. This resembles McAdam’s (1982) description of cognitive liberation as a shift from “hopeless submission to an aroused readiness to challenge oppressive conditions” (Pos. 34), although the interviews here focus more specifically on how participants retrospectively described their own readiness to participate.

Chronic fear and collective resentment therefore function as rationale anchors in participants’ retrospective accounts of mobilization. They provide the emotional background against which participants explain why they wanted to join the KLA. While chronic fear provided a retrospective rationale grounded in the experience of persistent threat and insecurity, collective resentment provided a rationale grounded in the perceived injustice and unequal treatment of Kosovo Albanians.

Event-triggered emotions as temporal anchors

The second pattern concerns the temporal role of event-triggered emotions. Existing work on moral shock (Jasper and Poulsen, 1995; Jasper, 2011), shifts from fear to defiance (Bar-Tal, 2001), collective threat framing (Shesterinina, 2016), and the effects of state violence (Schubiger, 2023) all point to the importance of particular events in shaping how individuals understand political conflict and their own possibilities for action. The interviews suggest that such events also acquire particular significance in retrospective accounts because the emotions associated with them provide temporal anchors: salient points around which participants organize the trajectory of their mobilization. Shock at hearing about the Jashari massacre, elation upon first hearing about the KLA, and pride associated with joining the organization and taking part in its rituals are more than emotional experiences attached to different moments; in retrospect, they help mark the moments through which participants connect the different stages of their stories.

This temporal function is particularly visible in the recurring formulation across interviewees of the moment they decided there was no choice but to join the KLA. Participants used closely related expressions, including “there were no other alternatives” (22SJ310724Mb, Pos. 71), “we had no other alternative” (18SJ300724Mb, Pos. 166–168), and “the peaceful road was over, we had to do something more” (17SJ300724Ma, Pos. 125–132). While these formulations referred to different events, including the Prekaz massacre and the Serbian reprisals following NATO’s intervention, they share the same retrospective before/after logic: a rupture in which the situation came to be understood differently and another course of action appeared to have closed off (Goodwin, 2001). In this sense, the emotions carried with narrating these moments signify the weight of such events and allow participants to mark such inflection points in their trajectories.

The teacher’s funeral in Lausha provides a particularly clear example because it appears as a shared temporal anchor across several individual narratives. Interviewees 15FJ, 24FJ, 5PA, and 8FJ all identify the 28 November 1997 funeral, when the KLA made its first public appearance, as a moment when the organization became tangible, and resistance became more conceivable. Interviewee 15FJ recalled that from that moment “there was nothing to think about. I was just thinking about how to find a contact with someone to join them” (15FJ270724Mb, Pos. 137), while Interviewee 24FJ remembered the event as a “plea to the public” signaling that a military formation was taking shape (24FJ030824Ma, Pos. 171). The significance of the event in these accounts may also be understood through Collins' (2001) concept of the movement event, in which collective rituals generate emotional energy and a shared sense of confidence. The funeral’s public display of defiance therefore provides more than a date in the participants’ stories: it represents a moment of collective emotional intensity that several interviewees subsequently use to mark the point at which the KLA became real.

Therefore, event-triggered emotions provide the when of retrospective mobilization narratives. They do not necessarily establish that a particular event caused participation, nor do they constitute a distinct motivational stage. Rather, emotionally salient events become milestones through which participants organize the movement from one part of their story to another.

Socially mediated emotions as relational anchors

The third pattern concerns the role of socially mediated emotions in participants’ retrospective accounts of mobilization. Social movement research has long emphasized the importance of interpersonal networks in shaping pathways into collective action (Klandermans and Oegema, 1987; Oegema and Klandermans, 1994; Passy, 2003; Ward, 2016), while research on armed group mobilization similarly demonstrates that individuals rarely join in isolation from existing social relationships (Bosi and Della Porta, 2012; Forney, 2015).

The interviews for this study support the importance of social ties, but also go beyond in pointing to a different role for emotions within some of these relationships during retrospective narration. Where interactions with particular people were associated with salient emotional experiences, such as relief, pride, fear, guilt, admiration, or trust, those experiences appear to help preserve and highlight said social connections in participants’ subsequent accounts. The tie itself may have been important to the mobilization process, but the emotional experience associated with the interaction(s) helps explain why that particular person remains salient in its retrospective narration. In this sense, emotions associated with particular social ties can serve as relational anchors through which participants retrospectively identify who featured in their trajectory and what those relationships signified during joining the armed group.

This relational interpretation extends network-based accounts in two related ways. First, it brings a wider range of relationships into focus, including mothers, wives, siblings, friends, neighbors, and other locally respected figures. Research on armed group recruitment has often emphasized ties that have a direct or instrumental role in mobilization, such as recruiters, fellow combatants, or contacts who provide information and access to the organization (Bosi and Della Porta, 2012; Forney, 2015). The focus on emotions, however, allows the retrospective account to extend beyond these instrumental ties to include people who may not have directly facilitated recruitment or participation but nevertheless featured meaningfully in the individual’s trajectory. A sister who expressed fear, a mother who offered approval, or a daughter whose safety generated concern may have played little direct role in getting someone into the KLA, but their emotional significance made them part of how that trajectory was experienced and subsequently recounted.

Second, the significance of these relationships cannot be inferred from the type of tie alone. Close relationships, for example, can carry very different emotional content. A mother may respond with pride and approval, while a childhood friend may express fear or argue against participation. Both are close ties, but the emotions associated with them give the relationships different significance within the participant’s trajectory. The emotional content of relationships, therefore, helps differentiate not only which ties become salient in retrospective narration, but also what those ties meant to the participant’s trajectory.

This paper examined how emotions feature in former combatants’ retrospective accounts of their trajectories into an armed group, using 25 qualitative interviews with former KLA combatants as its empirical basis. Rather than treating emotions as background context or isolated triggers for participation, the analysis distinguished three types of emotional experiences by source and temporal identifiability: stock emotions, event-triggered emotions, and socially mediated emotions. This distinction highlights differences in how participants recall and connect emotional experiences across their trajectories in the KLA.

The findings suggest that these different forms of emotional experience have different narrative functions. Stock emotions provide an emotional background against which participants retrospectively explain why joining the KLA made sense. Event-triggered emotions are associated with identifiable, emotionally salient moments that participants use to mark key moments in their trajectories. Socially mediated emotions arise in interactions with other people and, where emotionally salient, bring particular relationships into focus, helping participants recount who featured in their trajectory and what those relationships meant. These patterns can be understood as rationale, temporal, and relational anchors, respectively, within retrospective mobilization narratives.

The contribution of these anchors is therefore primarily analytical rather than causal. They offer a way to understand how emotional experiences connect to different aspects of participants’ accounts of mobilization: enduring emotions to the circumstances that made participation intelligible, emotionally salient events to the moments that structured the trajectory, and emotionally significant interactions to the people who featured within it. The framework does not suggest that these emotional categories constitute distinct psychological mechanisms through which individuals became willing to join the KLA. Rather, it shows how different forms of emotional experience are woven into the ways former combatants recount and organize their paths into armed participation.

Several limitations follow from this interpretation. First, the findings are based on a single case: Kosovo Albanian combatants who joined the KLA in the late 1990s. The cultural, political, and historical specificities of the Kosovo Albanian experience under Serbian rule limit the direct transferability of the findings to other armed groups and conflict settings. Comparative research is therefore needed to establish whether similar patterns of emotional narration appear in other forms and contexts of high-risk mobilization.

A further limitation concerns the underlying psychological mechanisms of mobilization. The interviews reveal emotional experiences, relational dynamics, and retrospective interpretations, but they cannot establish the extent to which these experiences changed perceived agency, identity, moral obligation, or willingness to bear the costs of armed participation. The findings should therefore be understood as identifying patterns within narration, rather than demonstrating the psychological mechanisms through which emotions produced mobilization.

At the same time, the retrospective nature of the data points to a broader opportunity for research on mobilization. Retrospective interviews are an important source of evidence in research on individual pathways into collective action and armed groups. Yet analyses of such accounts often focus on explicit motivations, instrumental recruitment ties, or identifiable pathways into organizations. Attention to emotional experiences can further open this analytical field. It can bring into view relationships that were not directly instrumental to recruitment but nevertheless featured in the participant’s mobilization trajectory, as well as events and experiences that participants themselves continue to treat as significant when recounting how they came to participate. In this sense, studying the emotional content of retrospective narratives may reveal dimensions of mobilization that remain less visible when attention is restricted to who recruited whom or what explicitly motivated an individual to join an armed group.