What neuroscience and linguistics tell us about threat perception in International Relations?
Channel: War Studies KCL
Date: 2021-09-15

How do state leaders perceive foreign military threats?  Previous studies suggest that civilian leaders perceive threats in multiple different ways, including through related to the capabilities and intentions of adversaries; their pre-existing dispositions and biases; their impressions gained through diplomatic encounters or their theories about the link between anadversary’s behaviour and its underlying characteristics.

While these studies have advanced our understanding of how leaders select, combine, and interpret information to perceive threat, they do not theorise about important aspects of threat construction, including the core systems of the brain and body that shape perception, the mental structures that encode incoming information, and the distinctive features with which leaders experience the world.

In this talk, Dr Eitan Oren will draw on the neuroscience theory of constructed emotion and the linguistics framework of conceptual semantics to develop an approach to describing how leaders construct foreign military threats by using core systems of the brain and body.

He will highlight how this approach carefully integrates insights from neuroscience and linguistics to expand our perspective on threat perception in International Relations. He will also show how it charts dynamic pathways by which leaders both understand and experience foreign military threats in the international system. Finally, he will reveal how it provides a new framework by which others may pry open questions concerning the interplay between individuals and the international system.