Anxiety of the Unknown and (Mis)recognition in Public Perception of International Crises

How do people make sense of distant but disturbing international events? Why are some representations more appealing than others? This paper seeks answers to these questions in the interrelationship between the uncertainty of international events, anxiety inherent to collective identity construction, and a subject’s need for identity security. By drawing on psychosocial approaches, I argue that public perception of international crises is fraught with anxiety of the unknown – the urge to allocate the unknown to familiar, even if inaccurate and feared frames. Consequently, societies construct the illusions of ‘recognising’ unexpected events, which in gaining familiar contours become less troublesome. (Mis)recognising the new as familiar fulfils an important identity function: it resumes the illusion of control over one’s circumstances, helps avoid self-examination, and preserves continuous self-conceptions. (Mis)recognition is therefore not about inaccuracy, misunderstanding or distortion, but about the underlying need to reduce uncertainty, to ‘know’ in order to be able to act and protect one’s identity narratives and boundaries. Events and others may be reimagined over time, but the security of the self lies in the seeming finality and precision of this imagining at any given moment. (Mis)recognition is therefore about the illusory, introverted, and protective nature of perception, and only secondly, about the imprecise or erroneous images that result from it. I provide evidence of (mis)recognition in a range of political situations in recent years: from the public attitudes towards migration in Britain prior to Brexit to the political and media discourses that confine uncertainty to particular threats in the aftermath of terrorist attacks or in the strained Russia-West relationship. Through an interweaving of past and future, (mis)recognition acts as a source of empowerment and self-validation and contributes to the formation of routines. These are routines of feeling, which provide security but still possess dynamism as they are not based on a true likeness between the new and previous events. The paper concludes that public perception of international crises is largely dependent on the depth of inner anxiety revived by the unknown. Instead of accuracy, a subject is motivated by anxiety avoidance. For politics, this means that hostile or escalating responses, traditionally regarded as reactions to the other’s behaviour or located in the interrelationship between two or more sides, can be approached as a manifestation of an ontological crisis within one. Deconstructing social and political knowledge as a routine – a source of continuity and confidence rather than accuracy and fact – begs the question whether the other can be known at all, or if subjects seek the feeling of knowing as the source of their own identity and empowerment.