Flagging, affect, identity and solidarity at an international youth camp

The importance of affect to actors’ sense of social belonging, bonding, and boundary-drawing has been documented in several articles on ‘everyday’ or ‘affective’ nationalism (eg. Antonisch 2020, Zembylas 2022). Arguably, such emotions arise from people’s emotional attachment to particular places, events or objects, which foregrounds the importance of materialities to the study of nationalism (Merriman and Jones 2017). One ‘thing’ of particular significance is the national flag, which is commonly waved at international events to express identity or solidarity with nationals from a specific country or region. Flagging will therefore serve as the focal point of the current paper.

The author develops her argument from incidents involving three specific flags: The Russian, the Ukranian and the Palestinian. All episodes took place at the Danish guides’ and scouts’ national jamboree 2022, where the author functioned as member of the International Task Force, or ‘intercultural troubleshooter’. While dominated by Danish participants, the jamboree was generally celebrated for its promotion of international friendship and solidarity. Yet the three flags provoked very different emotional responses, ranging from anger and fear to sympathy, solidarity, and support.

The paper explores what emotions are displayed in the flag-waving incidents, as well as the role of affect in the subsequent trouble-shooting. Inspired by practice theory (eg Reckwitz 2002), the author highlights the importance of site/setting in foregrounding or silencing specific discourses and forms of identification. To establish how this plays out in the particular incidents, a conceptual framework is adopted from literature on affective and everyday nationalism. This leads to the identification of affective nationalism/cosmopolitanism and identity/solidarity discourses as key factors motivating actors’ responses.