Fear Endurance: Temporal Organization and the Institutional Persistence of Threat

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Political Institutions (Table 20)

Abstract

Title: Fear Endurance: Temporal Organization and the Institutional Persistence of Threat

Sociological research has extensively examined how fear emerges, circulates, and becomes politically consequential, particularly in moments of crisis, securitization, or affective intensification. Yet these approaches remain oriented toward activation, escalation, and resolution, offering limited analytic leverage for explaining how fear persists beyond episodic crisis without dissipating or culminating in exceptional intervention. This paper introduces the concept of fear endurance to theorize fear as a temporally organized institutional condition. Rather than treating fear as a transient emotional response or discursive event, this framework conceptualizes fear as an outcome of how institutions organize their temporal orientation toward uncertainty.
Drawing on temporal sociology and theories of governance, the paper identifies three distinct temporal configurations through which fear endures. Reversible fear arises when institutional attention withdraws and classificatory normalization reabsorbs the object of concern into routine categories, allowing fear to dissipate without formal resolution. Ambient fear persists when institutions sustain perceptible and administrative attention without reorganizing governance, thereby stabilizing concern as a background condition embedded in routine institutional processes. Durable fear emerges when institutions reorganize governance around the expectation of persistence, embedding monitoring, infrastructure, and anticipatory management within ordinary administrative practice.
Through comparative historical analysis of German carp in early twentieth-century environmental governance, Asianness in late twentieth-century racial formation, and Asian carp in contemporary ecological management, the paper demonstrates how institutional temporal organization shapes whether fear dissipates, persists, or becomes structurally embedded. These cases show that the endurance of fear is not determined by the objective persistence of threat but by institutional alignment with anticipated continuity. By shifting analytic attention from episodic crisis to temporal organization, this paper advances a temporal sociology of fear and reconceptualizes fear as an institutional effect of governance oriented toward persistence.

Author

• Satomi Yamamoto, Seinan Gakuin University