The COVID-19 pandemic thrust fear into the heart of political debate and policy making. In the wake of the pandemic, it is critical to clarify the role of fear in these processes to avoid repeating past mistakes and to learn crucial lessons for future crises.
This book draws on case studies from across the world, including the UK, Turkey, Brazil and the US, to provide thought-provoking and practical insights into how fear and related emotions can shape politics under extraordinary and ordinary circumstances. Offering interdisciplinary perspectives from leading and emerging scholars in politics, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, the book enables a better understanding of post-pandemic politics for students, researchers and policy makers alike.
At the start of the pandemic, the three of us came together out of shared concern for the place of emotions in politics and shared belief that many orthodoxies on fear as an instrument of public administration were just wrong. As the pandemic worked its way through communities and countries across the globe, it became increasingly clear that longstanding rejections of fear as a politically destructive or pre-political emotion failed to grasp the vital role it can play in enabling societies to deal with crises. We set out the ways in which key frames of analysis
replacements for other intimate relations at the time, despite being perceived as based on fear rather than friendship. When talking about their time being gang-involved, all the men in the study described there being a bond or ‘ties’ between the men in the gang. Jordan spoke frequently about being ‘tied’ to the gang, which conveyed loyalties, as well as resulting in him not being able to freely walk away and leave the gang. Jordan conveyed his affiliation to the gang during his time involved, likening them to ‘blood family’ who you are ‘willing to die for’. Dylan talked
The refugee status determination process is often, rightly or wrongly, fixated on the first words of the definition of a refugee: a person who has a ‘well-founded fear’. These simple words do not have a precise, legal meaning. They are capable of being understood in different ways, as the literature and jurisprudence on refugee status have amply established. Many have argued, with considerable weight of authority to support them, that the phrase connotes both a subjective and an objective element to the definition of a refugee. UNHCR argues, for example, that
The COVID pandemic provided a totally undesired but nevertheless useful natural experiment about fear and politics. With good reason, people feared for their lives – and many still do. The level of fear varied from country to country but was arguably present to some degree everywhere. Governments had to react, and made widely varying responses. Some prioritised health, imposed and enforce lockdowns, and were quick to develop or place orders for vaccines. Others privileged the economy over public health and denied the severity of this new coronavirus and its
The COVID pandemic provided a totally undesired but nevertheless useful natural experiment about fear and politics. With good reason, people feared for their lives – and many still do. The level of fear varied from country to country but was arguably present to some degree everywhere. Governments had to react, and made widely varying responses. Some prioritised health, imposed and enforce lockdowns, and were quick to develop or place orders for vaccines. Others privileged the economy over public health and denied the severity of this new coronavirus and its
of the most influential Labour politicians of the 20th century. Here we present an extract from his book In Place of Fear, where he laid out his blueprint for the NHS. It was his intent that the NHS should be a free service, and when prescription charges were first introduced for false teeth and spectacles by Chancellor Hugh Gaitskill (in order to pay for armaments for the cold war), he resigned from the government. The spirit of Nye Bevan’s beliefs and the force with which he conveyed them continue to inspire those who defend the NHS today. A Poverty, inequality
Introduction The emotion of fear is a phenomenon gendered to its core. Over centuries, fear has been associated with femininity, while masculinity has been connected to bravery ( Kanz, 2013 ). This is reflected in quantitative studies that confirm higher levels of fear and anxiety for female as compared to male participants ( Cops and Pleysier, 2011 ; Rackow et al, 2012 ). Yet, while fear is frequently mentioned both as explanandum and explanans in various fields of gender studies, it is rarely analysed as a gendered phenomenon in its own right (see Stanko
Introduction This article offers an empirical critique of trauma-informed fear models by documenting how mothers experience recurring fear in the context of domestic violence as an occasion for future-oriented action. In France, advocacy discourses on sexual violence, child sexual abuse or domestic violence often articulate fear and neurological trauma and draw on a paradigm of intense fear – called ‘terror’ – to explain why victims cannot ‘resist’, ‘leave’ or ‘speak out’. The category of ‘terror’ describes modalities of being paralysed by fear; it is
Fearing Crime, Avoiding Crime 377 Chapter Thirteen Fearing Crime, Avoiding Crime Crime, clearly, is an important element in deciding where to live – or, more potently, where not to live. But overall, crime in London does not turn out to be the issue that most Londoners might imagine. People do not seem over-worried about it, and that is directly related to the fact that – as just seen in Chapter 12 – they know plenty of people in their local area and feel that there is a good sense of community there. But this is not true everywhere: we found a sharp
