Theorizing anxiety and its relation to fear (of crime): An Heideggerian inspired polemic

While there is a voluminous literature on the fear of crime, it is marred by significant gaps. Particularly, while anxiety has been acknowledged as important to understanding fear (of crime), the failure to explicate and adequately theorize anxiety has impoverished intellectual inquiry. This article addresses this issue by theorizing anxiety in great detail. To this end, Martin Heidegger's insightful analysis of fear and anxiety is introduced and discussed. The article draws on the paradoxes of anxiety "developed" by Heidegger to address the purported risk-fear paradox that has dominated fear of crime research and explicates why this paradox is more apparent than real.