Anxiety and the creation of the scapegoated other
Abstract
This article examines how anxiety saturates the neo-Orientalist driven thesis of new terrorism, especially in how both anxiety and new terrorism are related to the unknown. Of particular importance is the description of al Qaeda as an amorphous and thus unknowable threat by Western academics and the media, which reifies the discursive neo-Orientalist binary of the West versus Islam. Scholars of International Relations are increasingly engaging with emotions and their impact on binary and hierarchical structures. Emotions operate relationally as they are the articulation of affect. The emotions discursively constitute identity and community structures, helping to inform ideas of self and other. The more specific study of anxiety reveals similarities, but anxiety also operates differently from other emotions as it is focused on future potentialities. Thus, terrorism and anxiety are co-constitutive in their conceptual dependency on futurity and uncertainty that sustain the neo-Orientalist binary.
Citation
Gentry , C E 2015 , ' Anxiety and the creation of the scapegoated other ' , Critical Studies on Security , vol. 3 , no. 2 , pp. 133-146 . https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2015.1027600
Publication
Critical Studies on Security
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2162-4909Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2015 York University. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Critical Studies on Security on 24/04/2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21624887.2015.1027600
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