Description
The experience of danger in International Relations
Threat perception is a crucial element in the study and practice of international relations, playing a central role in general theories of war, deterrence, compellence, alliance behavior, and conflict-resolution, and in shaping leaders’ responses in high-stake situations. Yet, we know little about how individual leaders experience security threats. Meanwhile, health and environmental studies have shown that the experiential mechanism informs individuals’ assessments of susceptibility to health and natural threats to a large extent. As such, there is good reason to believe that the experience of threat plays an important role in national security assessments as well. By integrating a framework developed by linguist Ray Jackendoff to describe the character of experience with the study of threat perception in international relations, and by testing this framework empirically on leaders embedded in different cultural settings perceiving different security threats in different periods of time, I demonstrate how individuals experience entities as dangerous. Thus, by illustrating the applicability of the framework to research in international relations, the paper contributes to both theorizing threat perception and to equipping policy practitioners with reflexive knowledge about their experience of threat.
