Fear Endurance: Temporal Organization and the Governance of Fear

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

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of fear endurance to explain how fear persists beyond
moments of crisis, escalation, or emergency. Existing sociological research has shown
how fear is socially organized, politically mobilized, and institutionally mediated. Yet
less attention has been given to situations in which fear continues through institutional
continuity rather than a visible crisis. This paper distinguishes fear, understood as an
affective orientation toward danger, from threat, understood as the point at which
danger becomes socially legible and institutionally consequential. Drawing on
comparative historical analysis, the paper identifies three temporal configurations of
fear endurance: reversible, ambient, and durable fear. German carp illustrates reversible
fear, in which concern recedes through classificatory normalization and institutional
disengagement. Asianness illustrates ambient fear, in which unease persists as a diffuse
but socially legible field of perception, comparison, and episodic activation without
becoming a singular object of durable governance. Asian carp illustrates durable fear, in
which institutions reorganize infrastructure, monitoring, and administrative coordination
around the expectation of an ongoing threat. By shifting attention from fear’s
emergence to its temporal organization, the paper argues that fear endures not simply
because threats remain unresolved, but because institutions organize attention,
intervention, and expectation in relation to uncertainty over time.

Author

• Satomi Yamamoto, Seinan Gakuin University