ABSTRACT
Fear propels people to flee their homes and become refugees. The violence that refugees fear, however, is often understood in terms of distinct events: as immediate acts of terror that threaten human life. In this chapter, Ramsay describes how the fear that propels refugees to flee stems not only from the immediate probability of direct violence but also from the potential effects or outcomes of those acts over time: a fear of possibility. Ramsay refers throughout this chapter to the trope of the use of sexual violence and rape as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to describe how such imaginaries reify the violence that refugees flee. Ramsay describes how, although such violent events evoke fear for refugees, it is the potential effects of such events to disrupt and destroy reproductive potential and the continuity of family lineage that situates how refugees themselves come to know and experience the fear that forces them to flee. These refugees fear not only death and violence but the possibility of destructed futures.
