ABSTRACT
This chapter explores themes which, in a bout of recent writing and theorizing, have been placed, unsatisfactorily in my view, under the rubric of ‘risk’ or ‘fear’, terms which it would seem have become indispensable to social scientists attempting to both characterise the times we live in (‘world risk society’, ‘liquid fear’) and explain the tensions between our securitized forms of governance and the insecurities and anxieties experienced in everyday life. However, accounts of fear and risk offer only partial explanations of an important dimension of the contemporary policy responses to uncertainty and apprehension. This chapter seeks to place the strangeness of (and in) the world at the centre of accounts of insecurity, and examines the role that processes of globalization can play in increasing this sense of strangeness, with particular reference to the strangeness of political spaces, some of which, it is argued, have become ‘spaces of wonder’.
