This event was the third part of a four part series: Governance and the power of fear. It is available as an audio podcast.

The relationship between fear and regulation is not well understood. Fear may be misplaced – think of our outsized fear of sharks, or it may be misused – as when fears of terrorism are used to justify curtailing civil liberties and invading privacy. This panel examines how fear has been misused and misplaced to justify either regulation or inaction.

Blogs from the speakers are now available:

• Jeremy Youde: Coughs that kill! Fear and global health

• Adam Henschke: Fear, cyberspace and public policy - or, why I’m afraid of toothpaste

• Kate Henne: Fear and social assistance: How wider social anxieties give way to personified fears

Kathryn Henne, Adam Henschke and Jeremy Youde explored the implications of misplaced and misused fear as justifications for misguided regulatory responses and as distractions from urgent and pressing issues. Henne considered the examples of drug testing and biometric authentication of welfare recipients. Henschke explored the role of fear in regulation of surveillance and cyberspace. Youde examined the role of misplaced and misused fear in global health governance.

About the speakers

Kathryn (Kate) Henne is an ARC DECRA Fellow at RegNet. She is also Canada Research Chair in Biogovernance, Law and Society at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Balsillie School of International Affairs. An interdisciplinary researcher whose work is situated at the intersections of socio-legal studies and science and technology studies, she is currently studying how different populations navigate the regulatory conditions associated with seeking social assistance.

Adam Henshke is an applied ethicist, working on areas that cross over between ethics, technology and security. He is a lecturer at the National Security College (NSC) at the Crawford School of Public Policy and a research fellow with Delft University of Technology (TUD) in The Hague, The Netherlands. His research concerns ethical and philosophical analyses of information technology and its uses, military ethics and on relations between ethics and national security. He has published on surveillance, emerging military technologies and intelligence and cyberspace. He is also interested in moral psychology, experimental philosophy and their relations to decision making and policy development.

Jeremy Youde is a Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the Coral Bell School of Asian and Pacific Affairs. His research focuses on questions of global health governance and global health politics. He is the author of three books and co-editor of two recently edited volumes. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in a wide variety of outlets and is a member of the editorial board of Global Health Governance. He is also Treasurer and member of the Executive Council of the Global Health Section of the International Studies Association as well as Member-at-Large on the Executive Board of the International Studies Association’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Allies (LGBTQA) Caucus.