What makes for successful deployment of fear during a crisis?

A year ago, 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 negative or pre-political emotion failed to grasp not just its adaptive evolutionary value, but the vital role it can play in enabling societies to deal with crises. We (Degerman et al, 2020) set out the ways in which four key frames of analysis had been rendered inadequate by the pandemic.