Introduction to the special issue: Anxiety and change in international relations

Abstract

Despite being the prevailing emotion of our times, anxiety has received scant attention in the international relations discipline. While political theorists and philosophers have long paid attention to anxiety as distinct from and constitutive of fear, international relations theory has assumed that much of international behavior is guided by fears of specific threats to state survival. However, today, the uncertainties surrounding the future of the world order, unanticipated crises like the COVID-19 pandemic that radically change our lives, unforeseeable terrorist attacks, and the unexplainable lure of radical fundamentalist ideologies all evoke a pervasive anxiety about what we do not know and what we cannot control, rather than the fear of a specific and known enemy.