Learning to feel, learning to fear? Emotions, imaginaries, and limits in the politics of securitization

Abstract

Despite a growing interest in the role of emotions in world politics, the relationship between emotion and securitization remains unclear. This article shows that persistent, if sporadic, references to fear and emotion in securitization studies remain largely untheorized and fall outside conventional linguistic and sociological ontologies. The tendency to discuss emotion but deny it ontological status has left securitization theory incoherent. This article offers a theoretical reconstruction of securitization where emotion, specifically collective fears, serve as the locus of an audience’s judgment for the practice of securitization. Yet rather than simply accepting that fear facilitates securitizing moves, the article draws on appraisal theory from psychology to argue that collective fear appraisals are often fragile cultural constructs. The generation of these emotional appraisals is often constrained by the limited symbolic resources of the local security imaginary and how agents contest and employ these resources. When the capacity to generate collective fears is constrained, so too is the practice of securitization. An empirical discussion of threat images in US foreign policy is used to explore these constraints. The tendency for securitizing moves to be interpreted as comic underscores the precariousness of social practices seeking to elicit particular collective emotions.