Fear, Use of

Fear is an emotion. Following the subtle analysis of emotions in Jon Elster's Alchemies of the Mind, fear may be a visceral reaction, in which case it is referred to as phobia, or it may be rationally induced by the expectation of something occurring with consequences that are deemed terrible.

Fear plays a crucial role in the maintenance and subversion of order at both the domestic and the international levels. Fear is a key element in the theory of nuclear deterrence (fear of mutual destruction), in the internal working of terror regimes (fear of repression if people act against the system), and in ethnic conflict (fear of rival groups victimizing people in one's own group).

From a theoretical point of view, the debate hinges on whether fear as an emotion has some causal or motivating power on its own, interfering with cognition, or whether the effects of fear can be subsumed in the standard explanatory framework of rational choice theory. There is no unique [Page 244]answer to this problem, depending on the nature of the problem.

The emotional impact of fear is probably strongest in the case of ethnic conflict. It is often argued that fear created by the threat of victimization by another ethnic group generates anxiety about security that may lead to the use of violence to neutralize the threat. Political entrepreneurs concerned about their survival may manipulate fear to gain the allegiance of their ethnic constituencies. Fear of an attack by another ethnic group may produce cohesiveness in the threatened group. This analysis has been applied, for instance, to the violent conflicts that took place in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Yet other authors have developed game-theoretical models in which fear is nothing but the expectation of terrible consequences. The bigger the threat for the group, the greater the fear, and the more likely people will support extreme solutions, including ethnic violence, to avoid the threat. In these models, fear does not interfere with rational calculations. The emotion is merely an epiphenomenon with regard to the costs and benefits at stake.

When the state engages in indiscriminate repression, spreading terror in the population, fear may have a paralyzing effect. Collective action is prevented simply because no one is willing to initiate protest given the generalized fear in the population. However, from a more “rationalist” perspective, indiscriminate state terror fails to induce compliance because the administration of violence is unrelated to the behavior of people. Indiscriminate repression punishes people randomly, regardless of their action. To be effective, ruling by fear must be selective.

Stathis Kalyvas, in The Logic of Violence in Civil War, has offered a theory of state indiscriminate terror. If the state cannot bear the costs of identifying and locating wrongdoers, the only available tactic is to instill fear in the population. This tactic provokes a backlash when the opposition is powerful enough to protect civilians from state repression because, under these conditions, many people will shift their allegiance to the rebels. On the other hand, the tactic succeeds when the opposition is so weak that it cannot relieve people from state terror.

...