Participation in political violence draws on identities and world views that have been shaped and influenced by emotion. This article uses data drawn from interviews conducted with 15 former members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army to highlight some of the ways that emotion is intertwined with decisions to use violence in pursuit of a substate political goal. Six themes emerge that help to demonstrate how participant’s emotional lives have helped to build the identities, beliefs, and motivations that have led to violent acts. The study illuminates how the experience, elicitation, and management of emotions played an integral role in the participant’s trajectory towards violence. Drawing from a background in Cultural Criminology, scholars of terrorism would benefit from a deeper exploration of how violent nonstate political activists feel, not only how they think and act. This observation is a jumping-off point for their broader argument that greater attention to the phenomenology of violent political activity is needed to balance what they view as a disproportionate focus on the organizational, ideological, and psychological processes of becoming involved. In a similar call, Thomas Hegghammer has suggested that emotional processes are clearly important when someone decides to join a violent clandestine group, noting that, “[t]he cultural?emotional dimension of jihadi activism remains largely unstudied and offers a promising line of inquiry.” While it is important not to conflate different forms of nonstate political violence, or to continue a fruitless search for a generic violent persona, the idea that there exists a generic “terrorist” personality has been largely rejected. Human agency, including violent political activism, is unrecognizable if devoid of any concept of emotion. Emotion therefore needs to be examined alongside other possible drivers of violent political behavior, particularly in relation to how they are related to wider social and political contexts.