“Who’s Afraid of ISIS?” : Towards a Doxology of War

This book looks at the given assessments of ISIS, focusing on the regular and persistent association of ISIS with fear in contemporary political discourse. In the process, it uncovers an unexamined relation between forms of contention that ‘go without saying’ (doxologies) and the perpetuation of ‘threat imaginaries.’ This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies on Security.

"Who’s Afraid of ISIS?" eschews familiar debates about the status of ISIS as an existential threat to the West, with the aim of submitting those types of arguments to a reasoned examination of the political place of anxiety itself. This collection concerns itself with the doxologies that attend such arguments, or with that which, as Bourdieu wrote, "goes without saying becomes it comes without saying" and so become the unexamined points of departure for contentions about ISIS that may, for that very reason, hold entire life worlds together. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies on Security.