Fear in the crowd or fear of the crowd? The dystopian politics of fear in international relations
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While Western reactions to ISIS are commonly situated in a ‘politics of fear’, there has been surprisingly little reflection on what role fear plays in disciplinary arguments central to International Relations (IR). I argue this absence of reflection can explained by a shared doxa over fear’s mobilising potential in the politics of security. This doxa can be traced to a 19th Century strand of social theorising concerned with mass movements – crowds – which were envisioned as emotionally volatile and prone to manipulation. While subsequent social theorists were skeptical of how these claims reduced crowds to panic politics, scholarship in IR has uncritically reproduced them to argue fear remains a reliable pathway for expanding and intensifying the politics of security. Critical of this reasoning, I argue it leads to a dystopian vision of the politics of fear which obscures a more open and indeterminate politics of emotion.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it