Fear as an Infrastructure of Power. From the War on Terror to the Chinese Challenge

Abstract

This article examines fear as a structural technology of governance in United States foreign policy and as a discursive infrastructure capable of integrating external security, domestic politics, and transformations in the international order. Drawing on a theoretical framework that combines political realism, securitization theory, and legal-political critiques of the state of exception, the study reconstructs the evolution of threat narratives in the United States. It shows how terrorism, transnational organized crime, non-state armed militias, and states perceived as hostile became, particularly in the post-9/11 period, the central elements of a profound restructuring of security institutions, technological policies, and the political economy of defence. The article then focuses on the most recent transformation of this paradigm, highlighting the shift of fear from asymmetric violent threats to systemic competition with China. While primarily understood as an economic, technological, and infrastructural challenge, this competition has increasingly been recoded within a military-derived grammar of security. The analysis contrasts the American construction of threat with the different Chinese conception of security, which emphasizes internal stability and a relational management of international order. In doing so, it argues that the rivalry between the two powers reflects not only a conflict of interests but also a deeper divergence in the political grammars through which security itself is conceptualized. Finally, the article contends that the normalization of fear as an ordinary language of governance produces significant consequences both for the structure of the international system and for the quality of American democracy, encouraging the persistence of exceptional measures, the expansion of securitarian logic into civilian and economic spheres, and an increasing permeability between external conflict and internal tension.