(2017) Book Note: Korostelina, Karina, 2014. Political Insults. How Offenses Escalate Conflict. Political Studies Review, 15(2).

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PSW0010.1177/1478929916686366Political Studies ReviewBook Review – International Relations

Book Review – International Relations

Book Review Political Insults: How Offenses Escalate Conflict by Karina V Korostelina. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 234pp., £16.99 (p/b), ISBN 9780822358558

Although critiques of Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia and his close relations to the Orthodox Church are frequent, the majority of Russia’s population supports the imprisonment of Pussy Riot, known for singing protest songs at a cathedral in Moscow. A group of Ukrainian youth, who represent the liberal and westernised part of their society, direct their aggression toward the veterans of World War II who contributed to the fall of Nazi Germany. In Azerbaijan, despite the fact that their mainstream politics are broadly shaped by normative frames, both the government and the public celebrate the brutal murder of an Armenian soldier by an Azerbaijani colleague during a peace training exercise in Hungary and thereby grant legitimacy to a vast humanitarian disease. Japan, China and South Korea demonstrate their power and experience dramatic diplomatic crises in a struggle over small, uninhabited islets. Finally, North Korean leaders cavalierly declare nuclear war against the US, as if it were nothing more than a honey bee sting, which could set the stage for the end of their power status quo. The book at hand presents one common aspect that unites these complex puzzles: intergroup-political insults. Those insults reshape group identities, transform patterns of political decision-making, create new social boundaries and reconstruct the balance of power between

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groups. Through qualitative discourse analyses of the above-mentioned cases, the book categorises political insults according to their interconnected types and forms, thereby providing an innovative approach to intergroup conflict dynamics. The author’s main argument is that specific forms of insults are indicators of particular conflict types. Concerning these causal links between forms of insults and conflict types, the book concludes with a list of conflict mediation methods and their practical relevance. The study’s foremost and repeating presumption, however, that ‘members of groups with [a] strong salient identity are more willing to put down other groups and even support intergroup hostility’ (pp. 15, 26) causes a main problem. Although using a pragmatic-insult lens helps the author filter and demonstrate processes of escalation in an innovative way, the approach applied here reduces the given cases of conflict to a scenario, whereby the peaceful actors, who do not attempt to produce insults, are ignored. Overall, offering an interface between peace and conflict studies, international relations and political communication, the study provides a micro-scale analysis that hopes to capture the inner workings of various grievances between groups. Ibrahim-Can Sezgin (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany) © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1478929916686366 journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev