Fear in the crowd or fear of the crowd? The dystopian politics of fear in international relations
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".