ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why many people in Uzbekistan were so afraid of perceived threats to their country that they could readily countenance the unprecedented state killing of large numbers of people. It includes an alternative theoretical paradigm, that of critical security studies and its geographical component, critical geopolitics. To avoid the danger of generalising, it is important to examine how the thesis works in other places than the North American and European contexts where it was devised. Campbell's thesis was narrowly focused on elite textual reproductions of discourses of danger. The chapter focuses on the production and recycling of notions of danger in sites of both elite and popular discourses. Critical security studies have often obscured the lived experience of fear by those intended as the receivers of discourses of danger, the general public. The chapter considers three sites of the production and circulation of discourses of danger presidential speeches and books, the news media, and popular music.
