Anxiety and the creation of the scapegoated other

Abstract

This article examines how anxiety saturates the neo-Orientalist-driven thesis of new terrorism, especially 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.

Keywords:

• emotion
• anxiety
• terrorism
• neo-Orientalism
• discourse
• poststructuralism

Notes

1. Richard Devetak (2005) demonstrates how the indeterminate qualities that surround constructions of al Qaeda were also used to construe bin Laden as a ‘ghost’ (as opposed to the construction of Saddam Hussein as a ‘monster’).

2. The URL is: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/05/03/us/20110503-osama-response.html?_r=0

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caron E. Gentry

Caron E. Gentry is a lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. Her primary research is on gender and terrorism, but she also has a research focus in feminist political theology. She is the author of Offering Hospitality: Questioning Christian Approaches to War (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013) and the coeditor of The Future of Just War: New Critical Essays (University of Georgia Press, 2014).