Samenvatting

Deterrence is more than anything a psychological mechanism. It depends on emotions that orchestrate processes across organisms to deal with the challenges of the present and the future. However, deterrence scholarship has had a turbulent relationship with emotions. The main aim of this chapter is to review what we know and what we do not know about emotions and deterrence. The secondary aim is to develop a dynamic and interactive emotion-centric model of deterrence to explain where and how emotions play a role in such a mechanism. We combine the methods of theoretical analysis and literature review to achieve these aims. Our fi ndings indicate that emotions give a new meaning to deterrence by changing the nature of the theory and by highlighting problems of practice. More speci fi cally, scholars should reconsider both the means and the ends of deterrence. Practitioners should be aware that deterrence efforts are hard to sustain and may produce emotional effects detrimental to their original purpose.