Introduction to the Special Issue Anxiety and Change in International Relations.

• Author: Rumelili, Bahar

Despite being the prevailing emotion of our times, anxiety has received scant attention in the international relations discipline. While political theorists and philosophers have long paid attention to anxiety as distinct from and constitutive of fear, international relations theory has assumed that much of international behavior is guided by fears of specific threats to state survival. (1) However, today, the uncertainties surrounding the future of the world order, unanticipated crises like the COVID-19 pandemic that radically change our lives, unforeseeable terrorist attacks, and the unexplainable lure of radical fundamentalist ideologies all evoke a pervasive anxiety about what we do not know and what we cannot control, rather than the fear of a specific and known enemy.

This special issue joins a growing set of recent publications employing a theoretically informed notion of anxiety and highlighting its distinct effects on international politics. (2) This emerging research program shares a number of common premises. The first is the conceptual distinction between fear and anxiety. The second is an interest in how international actors manage anxiety and how various anxiety management techniques and practices affect international outcomes. Thirdly, anxiety research in IR is interested in exploring the distinct potential in anxiety to be a force for emancipatory and /or radical change. Fourthly, anxiety scholarship in IR is interested in theorizing how anxiety is manifest not solely as an individual-level but also as a social and collective phenomenon. Finally, scholars are building on the neglected insights of existentialist and psycho-analytical thought, where anxiety figures prominently and underscoring their relevance for IR.

The following section of this Introduction will briefly introduce these common premises. Subsequently, an overview of the anxiety literature in IR as it has developed up to date will be provided. Finally, the contributions to the Special Issue and the ways in which they further anxiety research in IR will be discussed.

The Study of Anxiety in IR: Common Premises

Fear versus Anxiety

Drawing on a conceptual distinction between fear and anxiety, the former depicting a state of aversion from a threatening external entity and latter being a state of inner unease caused by uncertainty, possibility, and change as established in existentialist (3) and psycho-analytical thought (4), anxiety researchers have criticized IR for being unduly focused on fear, and not taking the possible distinct effects of anxiety into account. In particular, anxiety has been theorized as both an individual-level and state-level emotional state arising out of deep uncertainty and unpredictability (5), radical changes and crises (6), and non- or misrecognition (7).

Anxiety Management

Many anxiety theorists in IR have associated anxiety with a state of ontological insecurity, by building on the broader literature on ontological security. Thus, along with Giddens, they have stressed the important role of narratives and routines in keeping existential anxieties at bay. Anxiety theorists have especially highlighted how anxiety is commonly managed inter alia by securitization (8), ideologies that promote clear Self/Other distinctions, such as populism and nativism (9), fantasies that link anxious subjects with various objects of desire, (10) symbolism of home produced via references to borders (11), vicarious identification with broader communities, such as nations and civilizations (12), and the certainties sought from risk probabilities and expertise. (13) Thus, they have associated the increasing prominence of such narratives, symbolism, and practices with the anxieties induced by structural conditions of modernity and recurring crises. (14)

At the same time, some scholars have insisted on the qualitative difference between ontological insecurity and anxiety: while the former is an extreme and incapacitating condition that has to be avoided with whatever means possible, anxiety is a matter of degree and lower-level or 'normal' anxiety can be creatively and reflexively managed in ways that avoid the negative consequences of the means discussed above. (15)

Positive Potential of Anxiety

That anxiety can never be fully contained or managed has been one of the most enticing aspects of the notion for IR theorists. Building on the revelatory potential of anxiety highlighted by Heidegger, anxiety theorists in IR have pointed out the potential of anxiety to create awareness about the limitations of existing orders and drive some form of a radical agency. (16) Although the literature is yet to specify how and the ways in which this potential materializes, studies have identified anxiety as playing a mobilizing role in peace processes (17) and protest activity. (18)

Anxiety as a Collective and Structural Phenomenon

IR theorists stress that anxiety affects international developments not solely as an individual level emotion, but also as a collective and structural phenomenon. A distinction is made between contexts where anxiety is managed and evaded and consequently where the effects of anxiety are manifest in the ways in which it is managed, and contexts where one fails to manage and evade anxiety and hence its effects are distinctly and independently manifest. Referring to the former, Rumelili identifies anxiety as a constitutive condition of IR, which gives rise to the power competition in the state of nature, (19) and Hom and Steele consider anxiety management a systemic feature of the international system. (20) Thus, the anarchical structure of the international system, which mainstream IR theory takes as the default condition, is a derivative result of the ways in which international actors manage their anxieties.

In analyzing the effects of anxiety when it is independently and distinctly manifest, IR theorists tend to conceptualize anxiety as an affect, a logic, or a mood (21) that affects not only particular actors and their behavior but also circulates and creates an overall atmosphere that shapes collective dispositions in particular contexts. (22)

Existentialism and Psychoanalysis

Anxiety theorizing in IR has drawn on existentialist and psychoanalytical thought, two important bodies of theory, which have so far been neglected by IR theories. (23) A common element in these intellectual traditions is the assumption of anxiety as being integral to the human condition, thus departing from contemporary psychological approaches which regard anxiety as an individual pathology. Hence, these intellectual traditions provide anxiety theorizing in IR with a solid theoretical ground on which to conceive of anxiety as a constitutive and collective condition.

Anxiety Literature in IR: An Overview

It would be myopic to claim that anxiety is just being introduced to the study of IR. The term has certainly frequently appeared in IR texts in various colloquial senses, either as synonymous with fear or to denote intense or pathological fear. The post-structuralist literature of the 1990s also frequently referenced and critiqued the presence of a 'Cartesian anxiety', a modernist epistemological unease that without an ultimate foundation to knowledge, there would be a plunge into the void of relativism and arbitrariness. (24) The production of anxiety has also been widely seen as a critical instrument of the politics of security in the various strands of the critical security studies literature. (25) While these accounts, to some degree, have adopted a theoretically informed notion of anxiety -as without an obj ect-, they have not reflected on how anxiety as a distinct condition is affecting international politics

The recent surge in interest in anxiety builds on previous explorations of the significance of this concept within the much larger field of ontological security studies. Among the founding works of this field, Brent Steele's Ontological Security in International Relations has employed the fear/ anxiety distinction to differentiate between traditional and ontological security and enriched the notion of ontological insecurity with existentialist insights. (26) Jennifer Mitzen has associated ontological security with anxiety/uncertainty management and highlighted the role of narratives and routines in the management of anxiety. (27) Subsequently, in the edited volume, Conflict Resolution and Ontological Security, Bahar Rumelili has drawn further on Kierkegaard and Tillich to specify how conflicts contain anxieties by defining objects of fear and a framework of certitude in meaning systems and morality, and to highlight the positive potential in anxiety to drive the leap of faith toward peace. (28) This positive potential in anxiety has also been underscored in...