Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide: inescapable dread in the 2020s

Abstract

This article appraises Professor Rumelili’s important central focus on anxiety by broadening the scope of the challenges the age of anxiety poses. With reference to recent events, such as the covid-19 pandemic and authoritarian politics, it argues that practices and strategies once thought to alleviate anxiety are now resources for it. The article concludes by calling for scholars to consider the possibility of anxiety as a structural feature of global politics, and organising our theoretical interventions, analyses, and politics around that constitutive feature. Ontological security, therefore, proves more elusive than ever before.

Anxiety and possibility: the many future(s) of COVID-19

“…17 The COVID-19 pandemic has provided IR scholars an unparalleled opportunity to study what happens when anxiety unexpectedly erupts and unsettles the existing means of its containment. Even though the COVID-19 virus was quickly identified as the cause of the increasing occurrence of serious respiratory conditions in January 2020, and scientists advised and governments rapidly adopted various defensive public health measures against it, COVID-19 could not be pinned down exclusively as an object of fear 18 and contained within the remit of the politics of fear. By bringing an acute awareness of mortality, of the ever-present possibility of unanticipated developments, of the prospect of extraordinary measures changing the very definition of normal overnight, and of the limitations in government competence and scientific knowledge, it has also deeply unsettled the existing frameworks of meaning and routines that help contain people's existential anxieties.…”