Fear, Geographies of

Geographers who study fear are interested in its social and spatial rather than purely psychological qualities. Fear is an emotional reaction to a perceived threat that acquires meaning from its context. It may have positive and negative effects on people and places. The interest of geographers in fear is long-standing, traditionally associated with studies of landscape and crime and most recently flourishing within the fields of emotional geographies and geopolitics. Fear inhabits, moves between, and shapes particular environments, altering the patterning of social relations. In turn, places may create or reinforce fear. Fear is implicated in restrictions on the use of space but also in reclaiming of space by individuals, groups, and organizations.

The earliest studies of fear in geography focused on subjective aspects of cultural and physical landscapes that interplay with human emotions. From the 1970s, attention was focused on the effects of crime on physical and emotional security in Western cities. The enduring mantra that fear presents as much, or more, of a problem than crime itself was born—arising partly from conservative governments’ shifting of responsibility for security to the individual and partly from the growing desire within the social sciences to measure and pin down social problems that seem unknowable. At the same time, the rapid attachment of the label fearful to certain people and places traced lines of sociopolitical hierarchy: Women, older people, and children were placed as quintessentially but irrationally fearful victims.

Feminist geographers joined critical realist criminologists in conducting intensive local research to contest such widespread constructions. They showed that fear and crime are concentrated among poorer neighborhoods and among groups with the least social and political capital. Fear is closely associated with systems of privilege that produce systemic violence (e.g., sexual, racist, and homophobic violence and child and elder abuse) that grounds and shapes wider social fears. Much of this violence and fear inhabit private spaces outside the traditional terrain of geographers’ focus of attention. Many social “others” who are the subject of cultural fear live with structural vulnerability and insecurity, for example, homeless people, people of color, recent migrants, and teenagers.

A closely related focus of geographical research has been the fortified city. As urban redevelopment has become increasingly corporate, fear has been used to justify exclusionary social and [Page 1089]physical planning. Policies seek to target and exclude “feared” groups whose presence intimidates or interferes with the economic imperatives of city spaces. Recent fears around terrorism have given new life to situational crime prevention through environmental management and surveillance, in opposition to the ideal of peopled, inclusive public spaces. Many such strategies have been criticized as anticommunitarian, easing the fears of some at a high cost to others.

Recently, these localized concerns have been joined by interest in “globalized fear,” relating to issues such as the war on/of terror, the threat of infectious diseases, and international population movement. Geographers have described the use of fear as a tool of governance, particularly the rallying of support for Western military intervention using fears about terrorism. Older anxieties about race are being recast in concerns over religious difference, with Muslims feeling especially insecure in the current geopolitical climate. The media are viewed as having a primary role in whipping up public fears: Long-standing notions about dirt, disease, and the “other” are remobilized as calls grow for a halt on immigration to the West.

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