Introduction: Toward a New Politics of Fear

At the start of the pandemic, 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 had been rendered inadequate by the pandemic. We argued that influential critiques of fear as anti-political, irrational, and borne of ignorance, were contradicted by examples of collective action, effective responses to real and concrete threats, and the central role of scientific information in framing the pandemic as a fearful threat (Degerman et al, 2020). Our conclusion was that, as a consequence, there was space for new scholarship on the politics of fear. This volume is the most substantive iteration of that work. COVID-19 reminded us of a truth apparent since our emergence as a species: we are animals vulnerable to communicable disease. In that context, it seems not just arrogant but ridiculous for human beings to have dismissed as pathological an evolutionary adaptation so vital for dealing with threats to existence. Fear stems from perception of threat and serves as a stimulus for action. It is not just a trigger of fight or flight.