Fear inevitable in IR

Fear and Threat Perception. Among the emotions generally considered to be basic, the impact of fear is the most widely studied. Fear has been central to the study of foreign policy and international politics. From Thucydides, the great student of the Peloponnesian Wars, to Hobbes, who wrote about the state of anarchy that induced fear, to Morgenthau, the twentieth-century classical realist, who started his analysis of international politics with a Hobbesian analysis of international anarchy that generated fear and an unending search for power, realists have premised their analyses of international politics on the ubiquity of fear. In these realist and rationalist accounts, however, fear remains an assumption, unexplored, rather than a dynamic process that is experienced.

Neuropsychologists and behavioral economists treat fear very differently. Fear is conditioned in part by our evolutionary makeup and is frequently evoked by crude or subliminal cues. Fear typically peaks just before a threat is experienced and is highly dependent on mental imagery and vividness. It is, of course, highly adaptive; fear heightens attention and vigilance, and prepares people to respond to what they perceive as imminent danger. Neuroscientists have now demonstrated that fear conditioning, however, may be permanent, or at least far longer lasting than other kinds of learning. “To the extent that these differences exist between the calculus of objective risk and the determinants of fear, and to the extent that fear does play an important part in risk-related behaviors,” argues Loewenstein and his colleagues, “behavior in the face of risk is unlikely to be well-described by traditional consequentialist models” (2008: 280). Fear, in other words, last longer than the threat and can become a learned response that is embedded over time.