ABSTRACT
During the late twentieth century, fear was closely related to crime in the public and academic imaginations. In fact, a project of critical, feminist geography was precisely to ground fear in the very real acts of violence and appropriation that inspire it. Pain (1995, 1997), for example, shows how women’s and older people’s fears, so often dismissed as being disproportionate to the risks manifest in official statistics, are partly related to hidden abuse encountered in the domestic sphere. However, the events shaping the twenty-first century have focused attention towards a different kind of fear: towards anxieties that are new, (ostensibly) ‘global’, and which express the uncertainty of life in a fragile world whose disparate parts and peoples are more connected than ever before. Attention now given to issues (which are not new, but which have the appearance, at least, of accelerating) such as immigration and asylum, infectious disease epidemics, terrorism and environmental catastrophe, is indicative of the growing portrayal and experience of risk and fear as globalised phenomena. Fear has become part of the geopolitical terrain; it is drawn explicitly into political discourse and action, and increasingly into the commentaries of political scientists. The fears that inspire this seem very real. But what is curious about current understandings of these fears is how readily assumptions are made about people’s emotional responses to internationally mobile threats, without the need for the firm evidence base, rooted in an appreciation of actual risks, which has previously fixated criminologists. Fear really has taken on a life of its own, and in this short chapter it is this we seek to explain, and resist.
