ANXIETY IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS: MEDIATING EFFECTS OF NORMS

ended

This interdisciplinary research project examines how anxiety impacts individual –level political attitudes toward international issues, and in turn how prevalence of anxiety interacts with nativist and cosmopolitan norms in shaping international political attitudes. Bridging the fields of International Relations (IR), Psychology, and Philosophy, the research project will contribute to the distinct but related literatures on ontological security, emotions, and norms in IR with a systematic analysis of anxiety. In its outgoing phase at the University of British Columbia, the research will focus on the development of a novel conceptual/ analytical framework linking anxiety, norms, narratives and international political attitudes drawing primarily on existentialist philosophy and terror management theory in psychology. In the second phase at University of Columbia and the third phase at Koc University, the research will derive comparative cross-cultural findings from experimental analyses conducted with university students at UBC in the outgoing phase and at Koc University (KU) in the reintegration phase.