Political Uses of Fear

This is the illustrated version of the article "“The Lesser of Evils Versus the Common Good: On the Poverty of Ideology in the Washington Post," a  critique of the article “Yes, you do have an obligation to vote for the lesser of two evils. Here’s why," from the Washington Post (June 1, 2016). Psychic Swamp Special Publications Series #1 (June 4, 2016).

1950 saw the publication of a classic study in social science, The Authoritarian Personality. In this paper I explore the connections between authoritarianism and creativity. Even though there was some overlap between the researchers as well as the research of authoritarianism and creativity, the connection between the two has never been made entirely explicit, or studied in-depth even though the psychological profiles that emerged were mirror images of each other. The study of authoritarianism has taken on new urgency given the current resurgence of authoritarianism in Western Europe and the United States. The connection with creativity research offers intriguing avenues for further research, such as education for creativity as an antidote to authoritarianism.

Thèse déposée à la Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales dans le cadre des exigences du programme de doctorat en études politiques École d'études politiques Faculté des sciences sociales Université d'Ottawa © Jean François Bissonnette, Ottawa, Canada, 2012 i Remerciements La rédaction de cette thèse, sorte de rite initiatique marqué par la souffrance, l'angoisse et la joie de la découverte, n'aurait pas été possible sans le soutien, les encouragements, la nutrition et surtout l'amour que m'a prodigués avec constance et dévouement ma bien-aimée, Cristina Morar, que je remercie plus que quiconque de m'avoir accompagné dans ce périple long et éprouvant. Mes sincères remerciements vont aussi à mon superviseur, M. Gilles Labelle, dont la confiance, la rigueur et les conseils avisés m'ont permis de garder le cap et de ne pas trop m'égarer en cours de route. Je me sens privilégié d'avoir pu côtoyer pendant toutes ces années un intellectuel d'une telle envergure. Je remercie également les nombreux collègues et amis avec qui, entre autres agréments du compagnonnage, j'ai eu tant de belles et inspirantes discussions. J'espère qu'ils et elles sauront se reconnaître ici. Le souvenir de ces amitiés sera sans doute le plus marquant de mes années au doctorat. Je remercie enfin les membres du comité d'évaluation, Mesdames Valérie de Courville-Nicol, Dalie Giroux et Messieurs Martin Meunier et Paul Saurette, qui ont dû me suivre à travers les errances intellectuelles qui m'ont conduit sur les chemins de la connaissance, pour la patience que ma thèse a requise d'eux et pour leurs généreux commentaires. Le travail dont cette thèse est l'aboutissement a bénéficié du soutien financier du Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada, ainsi que des conditions plus que favorables que l'Université d'Ottawa a mises à ma disposition. Qu'ils en soient remerciés. ii Résumé Cette thèse vise à cerner les raisons historiques, intellectuelles et affectives de l'importance que reçoit le problème de la vulnérabilité individuelle dans la culture politique des sociétés modernes. Il s'agit de tenter de comprendre pourquoi et par le concours de quelles transformations normatives et structurelles nous en sommes venus, comme citoyens, à attendre de l'État qu'il nous protège des affres de l'existence. L'oeuvre philosophique de Thomas Hobbes, fondée sur une anthropologie individualiste où l'homme apparaît mû par deux affects, le désir et la crainte, nous paraît être la première formulation théorique de ce problème de la vulnérabilité, et à ce titre, nous posons qu'elle a été déterminante pour l'institutionnalisation d'une rationalité politique proprement moderne. De manière à saisir quelles ont pu être les conditions de possibilité de la philosophie de Hobbes, de même que son influence sur l'imaginaire politique occidental, il nous faut tenter de comprendre non seulement pourquoi l'affectivité humaine a pu se trouver ainsi posée comme enjeu du gouvernement, mais comment elle est aussi liée, de manière générale, au fonctionnement des institutions sociales, lequel est historiquement contingent. Il en va ainsi d'une interrogation, que nous poursuivrons dans un relevé des principaux concepts à l'aide desquels Sigmund Freud, Norbert Elias, Max Weber et Michel Foucault ont pensé les modalités du façonnement social et historique de la subjectivité, et par le biais de laquelle nous espérons expliquer pourquoi le « type d'homme » sur lequel s'appuie le régime libéral moderne implique le vécu d'une expérience affective marquée par un rapport tendu entre le désir et le sentiment de la vulnérabilité.

Dreams about 9/11 -- Paper presented at the 19th Annual International Conference for The International Association for the Study of Dreams, Tufts University, Medford, Boston, Massachusetts; 05/2002
An analysis of trauma dreams collected after 9/11

"The wound is the place where the light enters you." 1 -Rumi "…The movement to make fear the problem is also dangerous. What is needed is courage to resist the oppressive causes for unnecessary suffering 2 , and fearlessness in actions [on] behalf of children at risk [,] and we can only do this by teaching courage and fearlessness to act according to our courageous choices without hesitation." (Four Arrows 2018)

Lars Svendsen's 2008 book, a philosophical analysis of fear, was written at the end of the Bush presidency, when US foreign policy had inflicted its ideological "war on terror" onto the world for 7 years.

In that time since the infamous attacks on US home soil of 9/11, the US had launched two wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq, to devastating effect. These full-scale incursions of America's "coalition of the willing", fully destabilised both countries, and forcefully shattered Iraq into the chaotic state we find it in today.

The driving force behind such actions was fear on a cultural scale. Specifically the fear that further attacks on the scale of 9/11 could be perpetrated again by an invisible enemy of unfathomable number, presenting a threat to the very way of life of Western civilisation at large. To combat these terrorists, the public of the developed world accepted sweeping restrictions on their freedom, in the name of protecting the very same freedom. This huge irony, of course, is not lost on the author of this compelling book, and it is this cultural manipulation of fear to maintain power that is its central theme.

"... the exaggeration of the danger of terrorism has given fear proportions the terrorists could never have achieved on their own. A state that legitimises itself and ensures the obedience of its citizens by the use of fear is not basically creating a democracy, since the strategy of fear undermines the liberty that is the core of democracy."

So how does one define Fear?

http://www.whenthenewsstops.org/2016/05/a-philosophy-of-fear-by-lars-svendsen.html

Fear and anxiety are evolutionarily developed responses to perceived or anticipated threat. They involve behavioral, autonomic, and endocrine alterations aimed at increasing an organism's chances of survival. Excessive or uncontrolled fear and anxiety may lead to anxiety disorders. Animal and human studies indicate the critical role of the amygdala in adaptive and maladaptive fear. Recent advances elucidating the organization of the neural circuitry and molecular mechanisms of fear provide new insights in normal as well as pathological fear. In this chapter, we review the microcircuitry of the amygdala with a special emphasis on its relevance to fear processing and fear learning. We also discuss recent developments in understanding the basic molecular mechanism of fear. Finally, we address some of the implications of amygdala research for developing novel therapeutic approaches to maladaptive fear and anxiety.

Fear is a natural part of life. it occurs whenever we are threatened. Threats come in many forms. A snake on the ground in front of you is a biologically prepared threat, and so is being face-to-face with an angry human. Evolution has put this kind of information into our brains as a way of dealing with recurring and common themes. When we encounter them we have the familiar fight/flight response. But not all threats are genetically programmed. Most of the things that make us afraid are things we have learned about in our lives.

Our societies of fear go along with an increase of populist movements in politics. This article explains the basics of populism and shows how easily it joins highly likely political friend‐enemy patterns. Anthropologically, we have to deal with parochial altruism undergirded by a static type of religion. A further step deals with the relationship between politics and fear by referring to terror management theory and its insight into the relationship between mortality and fear. The concluding part addresses ways out of fear and in what way a dynamic type of religion helps to avoid scapegoating and political enmity.

La presente investigación se inscribe en el campo de estudio de las memorias de los pasados dictatoriales en el Cono sur, y se enfoca en el recuerdo de la experiencia del miedo en personas que no fueron víctimas de violaciones a los derechos humanos durante la dictadura cívico-militar chilena.
Basada en entrevistas en profundidad a veinte mujeres y hombres que en 1973  -año del golpe de Estado- tenían entre 18 y 40 años, que han residido en Chile durante los últimos 45 años y que en la actualidad pueden ser asociadas con distintos contextos socio económicos, la tesis recupera el relato de situaciones que estas personas recuerdan asociadas al miedo en sus experiencias pasadas, las actitudes asumidas y prácticas en el marco de esas vivencias, junto a la temporalidad presente en sus memorias. A partir de ello, se relevan los sentidos que se asocian al pasado al recordarlo, y la relación de éste con las circunstancias del presente.
La tesis contribuye a ampliar un campo de estudio generalmente centrado en la memorias de las víctimas, a la vez que advierte la necesidad de mirar el pasado según temporalidades que exceden limitaciones emblemáticas como 1973-1990, concluyendo también que el miedo es un recuerdo transversal con independencia de la posición respecto la dictadura, que la memoria del miedo afecta las interpretaciones de peligros y amenazas en el presente, y que la práctica del recuerdo constituye un ejercicio reflexivo por medio del cual algunas personas entrevistadas interrogan sus propias actuaciones pasadas.

This article examines how fear of human Otherness affects the contemporary breeding and marketing of dogs in America. We trace the history of pit bull-type dogs in the United States along race and class lines (early 20th century - present), showing how the efforts to control and contain certain humans runs parallel to the profiling and elimination of certain domestic dogs. We argue that it is the prevalent American fear of disorder – and, in more recent decades, 'disorderly' racialized bodies – that has had the paradoxical effect of both vilifying the pit bull, and laying the groundwork for the emergence of a new breed of pit bull-type dog called the American Bully.

Embodying exaggerated and "extreme" features of the pit bull that the American public has been conditioned to fear, the American Bully functions as a pointed retort to the socio-economic and political systems that have kept American 'Others' on the margins of society and made sense of this discrimination by way of the understood inherently violent capacities of the Other'd body. By studying the aesthetic and rhetorical paradigms used in the online sale of the American Bully, we show how, and why, the pit bull has been both physically redesigned and ideologically reconstructed as a vehicle by which its breeders and owners might now claim patriotic belonging and social normativity.

Drawing on studies of the history of emotions, trust- and community-formation, and on medieval as well as modern religious violence, this study re-evaluates the predominantly military view of medieval sieges. Instead, this article examines sieges as extreme, often purposefully histrionic, and emotionally ambivalent social events, based
on the descriptions of sieges in two Baltic missionary chronicles: Helmold of Bosau’s ‘Chronica Slavorum’ (12th c.) and Henry of Livonia’s ‘Chronicon Livoniae’ (13th c.). By focusing on the means of emotional bonding during sieges in the Baltic Rim, this article argues that emotions expressed and accentuated the social, political, and religious
predicaments of missioning and crusading. Frequently, emotions in sieges were actively deployed and navigated as means of warfare or as the performative fuel of the theatre of war. Often employed as a motivational force, emotions could also serve as a paradoxical method of socialisation within groups of faith and across religious divides.

WE DO NOT WANT US TO KNOW THAT WE ARE GOD.
JESUS IS AN EXTENSION OF THE GOD OUTSIDE OF US DESIGN FEATURE OF THIS SKID MARK,  WHICH IS A GOOD TRICK BECAUSE THE JESUS / VISHNU ENERGY HOLDS THE IMAGE INFO THAT MAKES EVERYTHING.  WHY WOULD WE KNOWINGLY TAKE AN ENERGY FORM THAT PERMEATES ALL THINGS AND EXTERNALIZE IT??  HUH??  MAKING IT LIKE UNATTAINABLE, WHEN IN FACT, IT IS THE ROOT SOURCE OF FORM.  ANSWER:  SEPARATION FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES.

La presente investigación gira en torno al impacto del Post 11S en las ficciones enmarcadas en la Tercera Edad Dorada de la televisión estadounidense, con especial atención al caso de Perdidos (Lost, ABC, 2004-2010). El estudio tiene dos grandes partes. Por un lado, un acercamiento a la producción y audiencia de la serie a través de un estudio documental, deteniéndonos en su narración transmedia y el juego entre creadores y los llamados prosumidores. Por otro, a través del Análisis de Contenido, se detectan mensajes que, de forma explícita o latente, hacen referencias a valores o ideas sociopolíticas. Principalmente a aquellas relacionadas con las consecuencias de los atentados del 11S en torno a dos dimensiones: la Cultura del Miedo y el Conservadurismo. A partir de aquí, el estudio se amplía a Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008-2013), The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010 ) y a otras 33 producciones contemporáneas para detectar patrones y rupturas. Todo ello bajo el amparo de tres paraguas teóricos fundamentales para comprender estos productos culturales como son los Estudios Culturales, la Economía Política de la Comunicación y la Cultura y la Teoría Crítica Feminista.
The current investigation resolves around the Post 9/11 attacks on the fictions framed in the American Television's Third Golden Age, with special attention to Lost (ABC, 2004-2010). This research comprises two parts. On the one hand, an approach to the Lost production and audience, though a desk study. Special emphasis is being placed on transmedia storytelling and the game between the creative team and the so-called prosumers. On the other hand, using Content Analysis, explicit or latent messages referring to sociopolitical ideas or values are detected. Primarily this involves those that are related to the consequences of Post 9/11 attacks: The Culture of Fear and the Conservatism. Beyond that, this survey takes a closer look to Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008-2013), The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010 ) and another 33 contemporary productions in order to detect possible patterns or breaking points. All of this is analyzed under three theories that are essential in understanding the cultural products: Cultural Studies; Political Economy of Communication and Culture and the Feminist Theories.

This paper explores political fear in classical thought. Through an analysis of Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and Sallust, I discuss two broad uses of fear: fear as a source of unity and of moral energy. In addition, the paper addresses the enervating role of political fear in Tacitus’ writings. The discussion centers on three issues: first, I draw attention to an important and often neglected set of themes in classical thought; second, I provide a historical resource for contemporary discussions of political fear; third, I argue that fear’s multiple uses in political theorizing ought to be a focus of scholarly inquiry.

Alarmism has enabled the extension and reconfiguration of
sovereign power at thresholds of human mobility in ways
that exemplify the shifting and polymorphic nature of borders.
Extending critical geopolitical scholarship on alarmism and the
geographies of bordering, this paper examines how alarmism
is used to exert control over legal-discursive thresholds that
people must cross to gain political asylum in the US. By analysing
the most ambiguous area of asylum protection: proving
that persecution is motivated by one’s “membership in
a particular social group”, I demonstrate how refugee definitions
are often contested and changed in response to “floodgate
fears”, a type of alarmist legal argumentation. Rather than
addressing the merits of an individual asylum case, the floodgate
argument invites speculation about the effects
a particular juridical decision will have on future cases, and
therein translates wider racist, nationalist fears of being overwhelmed
by alien “others” into otherwise banal legal codes. In
precedent-setting asylum law, these fear-laden speculations
can shape legal-discursive thresholds for years to come, enacting
targeted exclusion and widening the pool of “legitimate”
targets of evolving border enforcement tactics. This analysis of
legal alarmism and the formation of asylum case law focuses
on the unique relationship between the particular social group
threshold and the history and contemporary struggles of
Central American asylum seekers.

What role, if any, should appeals to fear play in climate change communication? Moral and practical worries about fear appeals in the climate change debate have caused some to turn toward hope appeals.  I argue that fear can be a rational and motivationally powerful response to climate change. While there are good reasons to worry about the use of fear in politics, climate change fear appeals can be protected against the standard criticisms of political fear. Hope appeals, by contrast, seem vulnerable to serious motivational drawbacks in the case of climate change. We should not therefore abandon fear appeals in favor of hope appeals.  Instead, we should take our bearings from Aristotle in an effort to cultivate fear more responsibly.  Aristotle offers an appealing model of “civic fear” that makes room for the best aspects of hope, elicits rather than extinguishes our sense of agency, and invites rather than forecloses deliberation.

What role, if any, should fear play in the politics of existential crises like nuclear catastrophe and global climate change? This paper considers why the postwar thinker Hans Morgenthau set aside his principled worries about the politics of fear and began to cast the prospect of nuclear catastrophe in terrifying and apocalyptic terms. I argue that Morgenthau’s resort to existential fear appeals may have seemed like an appropriate strategy in the face of the representational and motivational difficulties of prospective catastrophes like nuclear annihilation and in response to the forms of organized denial and political inertia that these difficulties enable. His aim was to cultivate the salutary fear required to construct new forms of political order as a bulwark against nuclear catastrophe. I suggest that there are lessons from this engagement with Morgenthau for the contemporary question of the place of fear appeals in the climate change debate.

Identity-building processes require exclusiveness, besides the categories of belonging, which paint the profile of the self- Turkishness and Islam in the case of Turkey-, an equally important role is reserved to the categories of alterity- respectively to the non-Muslim and non-Turkish elements. Othering is a necessary precondition for asserting exclusive Turkishness, while the fear of division and the traumatic memory of the Treaty of Sèvres ensure the exclusion of minorities from the identity sphere and nurture paranoia. In this climate of distrust those who express or display their belonging to other groups than the Turkish-Muslim or stand for minority rights and tolerance are labelled as bölücü (separatists), whether we talk about groups that resort to violence like the PKK, or non-violent human rights activists. When discussing both about the effects and historical roots of the Sèvres syndrome, foreign politics, and subjects like Turkey’s euroscepticism, in close relation with minority rights and policies are primarily considered. Without neglecting this issues, the paper focuses on the identity dimension of the Sèvres syndrome, highlighting the way it has contributed to defining and building Turkishness by distinguishing it from the doubtful Otherness, arguing, in the meantime, that even though the so-called disease has exceeded its historical boundaries and threats, it is still alive in the collective consciousness triggering fear and suspicion in relation with the others and preserving the exclusive definition of Turkish identity.

This topic is a small part of a more  comprehensive investigation into a mythic legend which is also of central importance for the understanding of Greek religion. A central theme here was that the continued existence of both divine and human communities was defined in terms of a never-ending antagonism - the existing order against the everlasting forces of disintegration and destruction. The divine order was, as was the case in many other religions of early advanced civilisations, defined in terms of the waging of a primeval struggle from the very beginning of creation and in the subjection of hostile powers. Since telling the story of this particular myth was used in an extraordinarily intensive manner in several different periods of history as a projection screen for various contemporary political threats, as well as for other types of existential anxieties, and finally for an epitome of ethical and moral general principles, this study seeks as primary objective to record its functionalization, reception and effect and to make the many secondary levels of meaning transparent which were associated with it time and time again across centuries. The implied meaning “behind” the myth manifests itself, however, all the more clearly against the background of an analysis of its explicit meaning and function for the societies which lived with it and both quoted and used it as guiding principle as well as counterpoint for their concept of their own way of life, their actions as well as of their demeanour.
Because this study analyses the preserved visual depictions of the myth in virtually all different types of monuments by covering a broad timeframe - from the early manifestations of these monuments in the second quarter of the sixth century B.C. until late Roman Antiquity – and interprets these and evaluates them - whilst always directly taking into account both the importance of the different functions of the various types of image-bearing media - in the light of the context of contemporary documents, it modifies as a result the interpretations of older research history which were nearly always limited to the political aspects of the mythic story only, and thus allows to achieve a more vigorous and extensive insight into the changing intellectual and cultural structures of Greco-Roman Antiquity.
This study is therefore also an attempt, against this background, to improve our understanding of the specific relationship between the two media of “image” and “language” by illustrating the potential inherent in images, possibly even more so than in language, to communicate myths, both in its exemplary core as well as on the basis of  its own fairly flexible grammar, in a way which is adjusted to the specific needs of its contemporary recipients thus continuously communicating them in an updated manner. Finally it also attempts to shed some light on the phenomenon of the myth itself whose current rise in popularity is determined both on the one hand by the conflict between the increasing rationality of our everyday lives, combined with a need for another understanding of the world and of the self; an understanding which provides more meaning for the individual, and on the other hand by a general lack of orientation of our society.

In this paper I argue that Foucault is relevant to the discussion of mass incarceration beyond his disciplinary analysis of prisons. I will respond to a popular critique of Foucault posed by philosophers of mass incarceration, such as Angela Davis, that suggest that Foucault’s omission of race fails to provide an accurate analysis of prisons in the United States. A discussion of race is important since many philosophers of mass incarceration argue that mass incarceration is a racist institution. I argue that an adoption of a Foucauldian conception of race, instead of Davis’ conception, provides a more comprehensive analysis of mass incarceration. In doing so I hope to show that Foucault is a resource for understanding and analyzing the rise, practices, attitudes, and continual existence of mass incarceration. I will not limit his contribution to ideas found in Discipline and Punish but will also include other work during this same intellectual period of Foucault’s. I will first define mass incarceration and provide Angela Davis’ argument for its racist roots. I will then offer a critique for why her concept of race and her slave analogy is insufficient. Lastly, I will provide a Foucauldian conception of race as a more comprehensive alternative to Davis’ view as well as critique “state racisms” moral problems.

ABSTRACT:
This article provides a theoretical and empirical contribution to the political history of technology by articulating a new conceptual perspective on the power of technological things and through outlining a history of modern urban technological terror and terrorism. It introduces a user-centered perspective on technological politics in the form of ‘subject histories of technology’ which, contrasting with prevalent ‘object histories of technology’ on technological inventions and innovators, emphasize the self-fashioning power of technological artifacts. Through an overview history of technology of ‘terrormindedness’ covering the three subsequent waves of urban terror arising from aerial bombardment, nuclear weapons and substate terrorism it shows how technologies have been used by individual citizens to cope with the experience of man-made fear and insecurity. In conclusion it argues that the political history of technology should to the focus on community politics and system politics of big institutional technologies add an attention to the personal politics of the emotional and material power of small technical things."

In the editors' introduction Martin Collins says: "In this issue, Mats Fridlund and Lissa Roberts, in their respective articles, take up a central problem in recent historiography and discussions of historical explanation: the interplay of materiality, the articulation of social and political space, and the constitution of individual experience. Each article seeks to make strong historical and methodological claims. In Fridlund’s narrative, it is to bring forward ‘subjectivity’ as a problem, using the history of terrorism as his interpretive lens. The sociocultural effects are his focus; he considers historical actors in the everyday world and their encounter with terrorism- related objects and discourse about these objects in particular places and times – early nineteenth century Copenhagen, London in the interwar years, and the United States after World War II, and, respectively, to each case, associated objects such as buckets; warning sirens and gas masks; and, then, bomb shelters and bollards.""

Modern military training exercises often include an information warfare component. Combat manoeuvres and weapon tests may be combined with large-scale information operations, including attempts at mass deception and cultivation of fear via strategic uses of narratives in media. The ways in which fear is constructed in strategic narratives deserve more detailed discursive analysis.

In this article, we use the largest recent Russian war games on NATO's eastern borders, the 'Zapad 2017' military exercise, as an example to show how to interpret fear narratives. We identify and analyse three strategic narratives that were formulated by Russian official spokespeople in relation to the exercise and uncover some of their underlying meaning-making tendencies: the logic of antithesis, affirmation through negation, and the rhetoric of moral victimhood. Our analysis sheds new light on the uses of fear discourses that are more sophisticated and indirect than straightforward threats or (rhetorical) demonstrations of power to inflict damage.

This article analyses the perception of the ‘Congregation’ (a key-word for Fethullah Gülen’s religious community), by the leader cadre of AKP. The study rests upon Erdoğan’s public speeches during the campaign for elections in March 2014 and argues that the style that alienates the ‘Congregation’ reminds the anti-communist propaganda techniques. This discourse, which condemns Congregation morally and ethically, accuses the supporters of Congregation as being immoral traitors. This strategy followed by AKP during these elections also led to the raise of a specific king of ‘fear politics’.

Keywords: JDP, Investigation of 17-25 December, anti-communism, Congregation,
internal enemy.

Fearful talk surrounding ISIS discloses two ‘public secrets’ that collectively define the dilemma of late modern politics. The first is a transition from politics that is experienced and narrated chiefly as tragedy to one that is experienced chiefly as melodrama. The second is a motivated wish to shed the moral burden which tragedy places on the contemporary political subject. ISIS, then, is terrifying not because it represents a throwback to premodern forms of charismatic domination or political atavism, but because its embrace authorises a politics informed by what Tamsin Shaw calls ‘the freedom and exhilaration of moral insensibility.’ Assessing the effects of, and developing responses to, the wish for such freedom should be a priority for students of democratic and normative international theory.

The link between man and the world is broken (...) Restoring our belief in the world-this is the power of modern cinema.". In this paper we will analyze the four last works of the American Indian director and writer M. Night Shyamalan -Signs (2002), The Village (2004), Lady in the Water (2006) and The Happening(2008)-, in order to classify the types of monsters and aliens chosen for these stories, and what kind of threat do they represent. Through this classification of creatures and fears we will try to study the dramatic consequences that the structure of each screenplay, and the main characters' evolution and internal conflicts. Finally, the conclusions will be shown in the social and political context after 9/11 attacks.

It is not at all difficult to become afraid of an endless range of things. Just so much as opening the newspaper in the morning will do. A brief glance over the headlines will be sufficient to make you afraid of the food you were planning to eat today, since it will increase your chances of getting cancer; of your neighbor, since he's Muslim and for all you know he might be among that percentage of Muslims in your country who have 'extremist' opinions of some sort, or his son might be an alienated second generation adolescent who is likely to commit all sorts of crime out of sheer frustration; of the streets after dark, since someone in your town has been raped again; of the office where you work, since any of your colleagues might be infected with some new pandemic flu virus; of traveling, since a terrorist has tried to explode a train and there has been a plane crash as well and add that to the yearly death rate caused by traffic accidents. The list can be extended far beyond the limited amount of pages assigned to this paper. The function of the information offered to us by the media seems to be not just to inform us, but also to make us aware of the things we should worry about, of the risks we face.

"La ricerca Fearscapes affronta l'analisi delle relazioni tra sentimenti di paura – connessi con il pericolo di essere vittime di crimine nello spazio urbano –, discorsi di paura – testi diretti alla generazione di sentimenti di paura –, politiche e pratiche urbane, forme spaziali della città contemporanea.
A partire dagli anni '90, nelle città occidentali, ad una diminuzione dei volumi di criminalità corrispondono accresciute sensazioni di insicurezza. Nella convinzione che esista un uso strumentale dei discorsi di paura per giustificare politiche e pratiche, Fearscapes analizza, dal punto di vista della pianificazione urbana, questioni come le politiche urbane di sicurezza, processi di fortificazione, privatizzazione e militarizzazione dello spazio urbano."

Türk siyasal yaşamında sağ geleneğin ayırt edici özelliklerinden olan ve komplo teorilerinin kolaylaştırıcı etkisiyle kurgulanan mağduriyet söylemi ya da mazlumluk ideolojisi, 30 Mart 2014 yerel seçimleri öncesinde Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP)’nin seçim stratejisinin ana eksenini oluşturmuştur. Bu makalede kriz dönemlerinde daha yoğun biçimde kullanımda olan mağduriyet söyleminin, AKP tarafından yerel seçimler sürecinde hangi siyasal aktörlere karşı ve hangi bağlamda kullanıldığı, miting konuşmaları üzerinden incelenmiştir. 17/25 Aralık soruşturmalarının yarattığı krizi aşmak ve sandık aracılığı ile bu iddialara yanıt oluşturmak adına AKP, mağduriyet söylemi dolayımıyla seçimleri bir tür güvenoyu mekanizmasına dönüştürmek istemiş ve bu maksatla seçim yarışını da “ötekinin zalimliği” ve “kendi mazlumluğu” üzerinden yönetmiştir.

The fear of the elections of 1852 in France, generally known as the ' Fear of 1852 ' or the ' crisis of 1852 ' , is an event little known in the history of the Second Republic. It was nonetheless a major phenomenon, one that struck contemporaries forcibly and which helps to explain the coup d ' état of 2 December 1851. History has underlined the extent to which the Fear of 1852 was instrumentalized by Bonapartist propaganda and the organizers of the coup d ' état , but the duc de Morny and his colleagues in no way invented it. This article describes the phenomenon, analyses the way it operated and its consequences and relocates it within the historiography of the Second Republic.

In the construction and acknowledgment of responsibility towards the Other, this edition of 'New Talents' challenges the contradiction of a lucky country sustained by processes of forgetting and, more critically, the processes of silencing. Beginning with Levinasian ethics applied to a scenario where the immediate physical presence of another human asks us to account for our enjoyment of life, 'Other Contact Zones' explores mechanisms of responsibility and avoidance, including: the politics of gender representation, signs of sexual deviance written on the convict body, the invention of the white woman as an object of fantasy in captivity narratives of early colonial Australia, the creation of multicultural senses of belonging, and the complexities of identity construction in the face of mechanisms of silence and misrecognition. If you would like a free copy of this scholarly work, please contact me. Jason Ensor, Iva Polak and Peter Van Der Merwe (eds), 'Other Contact Zones', Perth: Network Books (Australia Research Institute, Curtin University of Technology), 2007, 269pp.

Si l'ira du princeps et le metus qu'elle vise à ins-pirer au populus sont généralement réprouvés dans le De clementia, quelques passages semblent ad-mettre la validité d'une colère maîtrisée et d'un ti-mor temperatus, ce qui paraît contraire à la doctrine stoïcienne. Il faut sans doute y voir la conséquence de trois caractéristiques du traité: l'importance qu'y prend le modus; la personnalité du destina-taire (Néron), qui a sans doute le rôle le plus important ; le dévoilement progressif de la théorie de la clementia.

As is clear from the tendencies towards "renationalization" and the rediscovery of separate and irreconcilable identities that have recently been such a feature of the political rhetoric in the European Union as well as in the United States, the "politics of fear" have been successfully building up over the last several years, largely through the efforts of right-wing populist parties and movements . To shed light on these dynamics, the first issue of De Europa will discuss several aspects and a few of the many political interpretations of fear in the modern and contemporary age, as expressed in Continental Europe and, more generally, in the West.

*Published in Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, Vol. 15, 2017*

My contention in this article is that in the contemporary moment live
performance encounters offer a means with which to attend to both discourses
and politics of fear and anxiety and the effacement of reality with complexity.
That is, performance seems to be attending to plural social discourses and
working through the geo-political complexity of the social milieu in ways
that go beyond the theoretical frames of analysis provided by, for example,
psychology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. This essay explores the political,
ethical, and socio-cultural implications of two contemporary performances
that deliberately attempt to unsettle their audiences through what I’m calling
a performative aesthetics of ‘dis-ease’: Greg Wohead’s 'The Ted Bundy Project' (2014) and Action Hero’s multimedia, immersive installation 'Extraordinary
Rendition' (2015). In analysing how these works might be seen deliberately to
attempt to induce an experience somewhat cognate to anxiety in the audience,
I want to explore why they might be doing so: what does such a practice ‘do’ in
the world with regard to understanding the politics of fear and anxiety?

My evidence has just been published by the UK @CommonsCMS Fake News Inquiry on #CambridgeAnalytica #SCL #brexit #USelection Drawing on interviews conducted for my upcoming co-authored book with Prof Robert Entman 'What's wrong with the Democrats? Media Bias, Inequality and the Rise of Donald Trump'. This has not been easy to do but it was my public responsibility as an academic and matter of personal conscience to submit to the inquiry and I am delighted to see they have published what they have. Please do read and republish the accompanying essays linking to the original source. Thanks!

This paper examines the concept of political fear, its background and usage in the history of political thought. Fear is an emotion, which is caused by an anticipation of harm from a possible (or maybe imaginary) danger. According to Robin, what makes political fear differentiated from personal fear is that political fear "emanates from society or have consequences for society [...] Political fear arises from conflicts within and between societies." 1 The fear in everyday relations between individuals can be political as well, as they rely on the inequality and traditions of that society, which are created or at least supported by governmental policies.

This paper explores an understanding of the Postmodern crisis through Greek mythology and philosophy of history. A revival of the interior fear as a colective phenomenon of contemporary society that characterize our cultural situation and that appeared with the modernity origin specially from Hobbes, Luther and Machiavelli influence. Finally, a overcoming alternative is proposed from an oppeness to God through Anthropology
as a method.

Este artículo aborda una comprensión de la crisis de la post-modernidad a partir de la mitología griega y la filosofía de la historia. Se propone la reposición del miedo interior como un fenómeno colectivo de la sociedad contemporánea que caracteriza nuestra situación cultural y que tuvo su aparición en el origen de la modernidad especialmente a partir del pensamiento de Hobbes, Lutero y Maquiavelo. Por último se propone como alternativa de superación de la situación crítica la apertura a la trascendencia desde la antropología como método.

Dans l’imaginaire collectif ainsi comme dans la plupart des théories philosophiques, la peur est souvent conçue comme un sentiment irrationnel, une passion qui nous paralyse et nous empêche d’agir de façon rationnelle. Par rapport à cette façon dominante de concevoir la peur, il y a deux auteurs qui, loin de reconnaître à cette passion un rôle uniquement négatif, pensent qu’elle puisse avoir une fonction ‘productive’. Ces deux auteurs sont Thomas Hobbes et Hans Jonas, lesquels, en dépit des très grandes différences qui caractérisent leurs pensées, partagent l’idée selon laquelle la peur ne représente pas une passion qui paralyse les êtres humains mais, au contraire, qui les pousse à agir. Dans la première partie de notre travail (1.), nous analyserons le rôle fondamental joué par la peur de la mort violente (fear of violent death) à l’intérieur de la pensée politique de Thomas Hobbes, à savoir le fait qu’elle représente non seulement la passion la plus naturelle que les hommes possèdent, mais aussi le fondement de l’ordre sociale. Dans la deuxième partie (2.), nous aborderons ce que Hans Jonas appelle l’heuristique de la peur, théorie qui souligne le fait que la peur à l’égard du destin futur de l’humanité peut représenter à la fois un instrument de connaissance qui nous permet de découvrir ce que signifie vraiment ‘être humain’ et aussi un impératif catégorique qui nous pousse à agir de façon responsable. Enfin (3.), nous conclurons notre travail par des considérations critiques à l’égard des deux théories.

El miedo se produce por un sentimiento de inquietud causado por un peligro real o imaginario, y acaba consolidándose como una sensación de inseguridad que, desde lo individual, se vuelve colectiva. Así, el miedo de una sociedad es el estado de inseguridad.

This paper explores the usage of fear by nationalist forces in the pursuit of a political objective, particularly those employed by political elites to advance a state-building project. By examining the manipulation of sectarian fears in state-consolidation processes (using Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia as an example), we can see how policies and perspectives are built around a culture of fear to advance a specific goal.