This book looks at the given assessments of ISIS, focusing on the regular and persistent association of ISIS with fear in contemporary political discourse. In the process, it uncovers an unexamined relation between forms of contention that 'go without saying' (doxologies) and the perpetuation of 'threat imaginaries.' This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies on Security.

Daniel Bertrand Monk holds the George R. and Myra T. Cooley Chair in Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University, where he is a professor of Geography and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. He is the author of An Aesthetic Occupation as well as a number of other studies on war. Monk has been awarded a Mac-Arthur Foundation Fellowship in International Peace and Security, as well as a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for his research on critical theories of contemporary conflict.

1 'Who's Afraid of ISIS?' Security doxa and the doxa of insecurity Daniel Bertrand Monk 2. Towards a doxology of war Daniel Bertrand Monk 3. Instilling judgement: counter-narratives of humour, fact and logic Hedvig Ördén 4. Fear in the crowd or fear of the crowd? The dystopian politics of fear in international relations Eric Van Rythoven 5. 'Who's Not Afraid of ISIS?' M. L. deRaismes Combes 6. Imag(in)ing the severed head: ISIS beheadings and the absent spectacle Jessica Auchter 7. Forgetting ISIS: enmity, drive and repetition in security discourse Charlotte Heath-Kelly 8. Security games: the coded logics of the playable war on ISIS Laini Kavaloski 9. Evil(TM) - Islamic State, conflict-capitalism, and the Geopolitical Uncanny Amanda E. Rogers 10. Threat inflation as political melodrama: ISIS and the politics of late modern fear Daniel J. Levine