The Politics of Betrayal

This paper aims to explore the inter connections between betrayal and political behaviour—domestic and international. It proposes that different forms of betrayal--sexual, economic, and political--are related because all have a physiological basis and all are mechanisms for transmitting important information to others who are implicated in the actions that led to betrayal. I also suggest that betrayal is unlike other emotions, like fear, which are primal, automatic, visceral and seemingly universal across the animal world. Rather, betrayal is a complex and multi-dimensional feeling-state like grief and anxiety in the sense that it implies social, emotional, cognitive and behavioural properties.  The paper will subsequently outline different case studies of betrayal and analyze the similarities and differences between them, arguing that this emotion is relatively easy to study in some case studies, such as WW2. The challenge for scholars is study it in harder cases, such as the betrayal that some groups feel as a result of the structural changes in the economy that have rendered their positions insecure. Finally, some preliminary hypotheses and methods to investigate the politics of betrayal will be applied to the political dynamics of the debt crisis in the Eurozone.