"Merchants of Menace": Extra-factual Sources of Threat Conception and Proliferation

Open to the Public

When uncertainty is high, and verifiable facts are inconvenient or few, how do individuals learn about what to fear and how to respond to the threats they have identified? In this seminar, Professor Greenhill will demonstrate that across time and space, during the Internet era as well as long before it, some distinct and oft replicated patterns are discernable, whereby invented, embellished or simply unverified sources of security-related information materially inform and influence real world foreign and defense policy formulation and implementation.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Date: Thu, Apr 21, 2016 Time: 12:15pm - 02:00pm Location: Littauer Building - Belfer Center Library, Room 369

At the United Nations, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell holds a model vial of anthrax, while arguing that Iraq is likely to possess WMDs, February 5, 2003.

When uncertainty is high, and verifiable facts are inconvenient or few, how do individuals learn about what to fear and how to respond to the threats they have identified? In this seminar, Greenhill will demonstrate that across time and space, during the Internet era as well as long before it, some distinct and oft replicated patterns are discernable, whereby invented, embellished or simply unverified sources of security-related information materially inform and influence real world foreign and defense policy formulation and implementation.

Marrying insights from cognitive and political science, Greenhill will argue that by exploiting human cognitive, psychological, and biological limitations and predispositions, enterprising actors both inside and outside governments—"merchants of menace," if you will—strategically deploy emotionally compelling, albeit unverified, sources of information to transform vague, (often) inchoate, objective sources of anxiety into proximate, existentially menacing—albeit unverifiable—threats to domestic and/or international security via a process she calls "threat conflation." Illustrative examples ranging from late 19th century Britain, through mid-20th century Germany and to post-9/11 America will be examined as will the theory's applicability to the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.