Recently, the nexus of international development and emotion has received increasing attention from diverse sectors. While scholars from postcolonial, post-structural, and feminist perspectives have long called for increased attention to emotions and the more-than-rational, more recent pieces such as the World Bank's World Development Report 2015 on Mind, Society, and Behavior have also taken up the refrain that "emotions matter" in development. Whether viewed as motivating factors, explanatory devices, or phenomena to be harnessed and manipulated, emotions are emerging as a key piece in development theory and practice. This paper critically analyzes the ways in which the nexus of emotion and development has been conceptualized from various perspectives. In particular, it raises questions related to geographies of power and control and highlights the implications of this emotional turn for both the theory and practice of development.

among the numerous debates and discussions of development, the element of fear is rarely given explicit consideration. In this article, I review current development literature to demonstrate the incomplete treatment of fear, as it is often implicitly incorporated via discussions of security, power, identity, social cohesiveness or resistance. In the second part of this article, I utilize the case study of post-conflict guatemala to examine how fear shapes, and is shaped by, development at multiple, overlapping scales. By elaborating on the complex interrelations between fear and development, this case study demonstrates the importance of directly engaging with fear in development analyses, particularly in post-conflict settings.

This paper investigates the long‐term ties between security, development, and fear in Guatemala. I argue that as the development apparatus in Guatemala has long been structured around violence and security concerns, development encounters in the contemporary era continue to be shaped by fear. The confluence of multiple mechanisms of fear, including the legacies of violence, surveillance, and coercion, structure development encounters in profound ways. Drawing on semistructured interviews with development practitioners, I examine their perceptions of fear's impact on development encounters at the local level to highlight the problematic culture of fear rhetoric, which serves to obscure practices through which lived experiences of fear are reproduced. Emphases on social cohesion, solidarity, and behaviors which “better contribute” to development work to mask the racialized elements of these discourses and ultimately serve to silence and delegitimize indigenous demands for structural change and justice in the country

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