Fear

2. Intractable Conflict Threat and Opportunity

Fear is "an unpleasant and often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger." Fear is completely natural and helps people to recognize and respond to dangerous situations and threats. However, healthy fear -- or fear which has a protective function -- can evolve into unhealthy or pathological fear, which can lead to exaggerated and violent behavior.

Dr. Ivan Kos  studied fear in the context of recovery from the Yugoslavian war. He described four types of fear. The first is real fear, or fear based on a real situation. If someone or something hurts you, you have a reason to fear it in the future. Second is realistic, or possible fear. This is fear based in reality that causes a person to avoid a threat in the first place (i.e. waiting to cross a busy road for safety reasons). Next, exaggerated or emotional fear deals with an individual "recalling past fears or occurrences and injecting them into a current situation." This type of fear is particularly relevant to conflict. because emotional fear affects the way people handle conflictual situations. If they fear that the wrongs of the past will be repeated in the future, they will strive to prevent those wrongs from occurring again, sometimes by attacking those who were seen to have perpetrated the past wrongs. This keeps the conflict cycle going and prevents resolution or reconciliation. Research has shown that fear is frequently a driver of hate — both hate speech and hateful actions. So hate and fear drive each other, and must be addressed together. Kos's last kind of fear is imaginary or behavioral fear which occurs when belief changes from a potential danger to a certain threat, which causes people to avoid probably harmless situations for fear of what they imagine might occur. This, too, of course will drive hate and aggressive actions toward the feared person or group.

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