How do Western liberal democracies produce trust, mistrust, and belonging by fabricating archetypal enemies — zombies, beasts, predators — and binding charged affective registers to them through repeated cycles of crisis? This paper argues that sovereignty relies increasingly on the aesthetic governance of social anxieties. Reading Neocleous’ Universal Adversary alongside two critiques of modernity, Veblen on emulation and predatory habit, Mathiesen on the synopticon that primes surveillance where the many watch the few, I demonstrate how institutional trust is secured by turning racialised, migrant, and precarious populations into recurring figures of dread, while mistrust is redirected away from state power. Institutional trust here is not earned but exploited, fabricated through fear, while the mistrust such governance provokes proves protective, fostering the solidarity and grassroots activism that this paper’s final section documents. Iceland offers a small scale setting for these processes, yet the innocence paradigm dominating its scholarship on racism, is uneqipped to register them appropriately, since it treats racism as a matter of national self-image rather than of rule. I instead read archetypes as working parts of an aesthetic and affective apparatus of governance. The method combines policy documents, police body-camera transcripts, media coverage, and public debate across three episodes: the policing of pro-Palestine protest, where participants were figured as beasts and handled as illegitimate citizens; public discourse casting immigrants as predators and agents of debauchery; and migration reporting that visualises arrival as an invading swarm. In each case symbolic enemies are entrenched through emergency rituals that turn diffuse anxieties into governable threats and justify expanded policing and surveillance. I situate these figures within a longue durée genealogy of bestiality and monstrosity as a recursive apparatus that trains publics to mark certain bodies as perpetually suspect and sacrificial. The conclusion returns to modernity’s discontents in Veblen and Mathiesen to ask what antiracist and anticolonial solidarities might make of trust once it is detached from these archetypes, grounding belonging instead in practices of co-existence and co-suffering that disavow predation, conquest, and domination. I close with concrete instances in which these antagonisms are already being rearticulated in Icelandic grassroots organising, particularly around Palestine.

Keywords: aesthetic governance; affective governmentality; monsterisation; racialisation; trust and mistrust; policing and surveillance; Nordic exceptionalism; Iceland

Salim, the young protagonist of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Gravel Heart, arrives in England with great aspiration and trust that he can find the best education and make a life for himself. But the reality of arriving and coping within a new society and environment is far from what he imagined. Gurnah’s writing is a prime example of how postcolonial subjects negotiate new spaces within an “alien” culture where they play out the complexities of occupying the metaphorical border space of identity. Arrival in an alien culture is the first and sometimes most traumatic stage in the life of an immigrant. Racial tension is another aspect that often comes with the arrival in a foreign culture, which is usually fraught with fear, anxiety, and host societies’ (mis)trust of newly arrived migrants. Paul Gilroy’s observation from the 1980s about British nationalism with racial connotations still holds true; society has had to entertain the notion that the categories of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic are not sine qua non to being British, and it is within this rewriting of national belonging that the immigrant writers leave their mark. The feelings of nervousness, difference, and estrangement that the migrants felt when confronted with English society are directly addressed in many of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s writings. This paper will look into Abdulrazak Gurnah’s oeuvre in general and Gravel Heart (2017) specifically from a postcolonial perspective that explores the self and others. In Gravel Heart, the young protagonist grapples with immigrant identity, racial tension, and a sense of non-belonging, feeling somewhat disconnected from English society as he tries to forge a new identity for himself. Therefore, this paper will argue that Salim, the young protagonist, represents immigrants’ search for a home, identity, and a place in the host society.

As the global ecological condition deteriorates rapidly, ecologically induced migration is increasingly becoming both an empirical fact and an object of intense public debate. As critical research has demonstrated, in the Global North, apocalyptic portrayals of ‘human floods’ have often been used to incite racialized fear, to justify securitization, and to legitimize the structural violences of borders and nation-states. The ways that prospective climate migrants are portrayed and discussed has close links to existing practices of racism, othering, and exclusion directed against racialized groups in the present. In this way, the politicality of anticipation intertwines future possibilities with contemporary experiences. It also connects the global scale of ecological expectations with localized everyday situations. Also in Finland, climate migration remains most often a matter of anticipation, expectation, and speculation – not a clear-cut empirical fact. In this paper, I explore how anticipatory politics concerning climate migration works at the level of ordinary language use. More specifically, I examine discourse on and around ‘climate refugees’ for how it works to create, sustain, and challenge spatial imaginaries that define intimacies and solidarities, as well as borderings and exclusions. The paper draws together lessons from a close reading of Finnish media representations concerning ‘climate refugees’ as well as from my ongoing exploration of corpus-based methods to study the topic on a wider scale. All in all, the paper discusses i) the theoretical grasp of ordinary language as an anticipatory medium that spatializes global, prospective, and abstract ecological conditions into recognizable and relatable imaginaries; ii) empirical findings on Finnish discourses on ‘climate refugees’ as they take shape in different media formats; and iii) methodological challenges arising from shifting the research focus from close reading to large datasets.