prompt individuals to focus on potential future threats. The fearful are often less able
to see how their defensive behaviour might be seen by others as threatening –
enhancing what is already a cognitive bias. The fearful also have a decreased ability
to calculate the costs, risks and benefits of options. And an individual’s emotions and
emotional states can be the basis of categorization: ‘things that evoke fear, for
example, may be categorized together and be treated as the same kind of thing, even
when they are otherwise perceptually, functionally, and theoretically diverse’.^34
Further, an individual who has first-hand or bystander experience of a highly
emotionally charged event will likely have strong emotionalmemories of that event.
Brain research also demonstrates what we know historically: ‘conditioned fear
reactions are notoriously difficult to extinguish and once extinguished they can recur
spontaneously or can be reinstated by stressful experiences’.^35
For fear to be functional our brains have to do three things. First, we have to
react to actual threats. Further, we have to stop the fear response once an actual
threat has passed, so that our bodies can relax and recover. And third, we need to
distinguish real threats from neutral or benign stimuli. If we can’t do that, our brains
and bodies are essentially worn down.
Fear, homo politicus and the structures of world politics
I make three arguments about fear. First, fear is not only a private experience. Fear
can be institutionalized within organizations and in patterns of action and reaction
between groups, including states. Second, institutionalized fear may become a
perceptual filter and analogical trigger. Third, fear may become a self-sustaining
climate, almost independent of its initial trigger, and difficult to dislodge even in the
face of evidence that the threat has diminished. These arguments suggest that the
deliberate attempt to use fear as a precise tool of foreign policy is likely to be
counterproductive and dangerous in the short and long term. Conversely, as Ken
Booth and Nicholas Wheeler argue, trust can mitigate security dilemma spirals.^36
To the extent that the anarchical structure of world politics, the lack of a
hegemonic power to enforce law and order among nations, creates the conditions
for insecurity, such insecurity also waxes and wanes. In other words, the structural
condition of anarchy is relatively constant, but fear and the level of felt insecurity
among nations is not constant. Foreign policy is, to a large degree, about managing
threats and fear – we threaten others or make treaties with them so they will not
become a threat to us.^37 How we think and feelabout ourselves and others is as
important as the brute facts of anarchy or military technology. Announced
preventive war doctrines may initiate a spiral of anticipation.
Although neurobiologists and psychologists understand a great deal about the
effects of fear on individuals, we know relatively less about the effects of fear on
political communities and organizations. Yet in the same way that traumatic fear is
written on the bodies of individual victims of violence – literally seared into the
brain – traumatic fear can be institutionalized in foreign policies and military
doctrine. This institutionalization of fear, in turn, writes itself on the bodies of
Rethinking ‘man’ 165