Fear never stands still. It moves, enters language, shapes decisions and changes the way a society looks at itself and at others. Sometimes it arises from a real fragility, from a crisis, from concrete uncertainty. At other times, it is fuelled, simplified and turned into a public narrative. And when this happens, fear becomes a political force: it no longer merely explains what we feel, but starts to decide whom we consider close to us and whom we learn to perceive as a threat.
Migration shows this mechanism particularly clearly. In many countries in recent years, the debate around migration laws has often been built around words such as emergency, control, defence, border and security. These words may sound reassuring, because they promise order in a world perceived as unstable. But they do not always describe reality in all its complexity. At times, they create a distorted image: that of the stranger perceived as a danger before being recognised as a human being.
Here, fear produces a deep transformation. The migrant is no longer seen through their concrete story, through the reasons that pushed them to leave, the hardship of the journey or the desire to rebuild a life. They are reduced to a category. They become “the other”, “the different one”, “the one who comes from outside”. And when a person is turned into a category, it becomes easier to stop listening to them.
Sociology helps us understand this shift. Georg Simmel, reflecting on the figure of the stranger, describes them as someone who is at the same time near and far: near because they enter the space of the community; far because they are not fully recognised as part of it. The stranger inhabits this threshold. They bring with them another language, another culture, another experience of the world. For this very reason, they can enrich the group, introduce new ideas and open up different possibilities. But what is new is often perceived as unstable. And anything that challenges what is familiar can be perceived as a threat.
It is at this point that the logic of suspicion emerges. The stranger introduces uncertainty, and uncertainty can become fear. Not because every difference is truly dangerous, but because fear tends to fill the unknown with simplified images. Where relationship is absent, prejudice grows. Where listening is absent, distance hardens. Where understanding is absent, the face of the other is replaced by a narrative.
Public storytelling also carries responsibility. Migration is very often represented through the language of alarm: landings, crises, numbers, borders, social tensions. These are real elements of the phenomenon and they should not be denied. But if they become the only way of telling the story, they end up erasing everything else: the people, the causes of departure, wars, inequalities, work, families, paths of integration, communities in transformation. Migration then ceases to be a human, historical and social phenomenon and becomes only a problem to be controlled.
The result is a more distrustful society. A society that lives on the defensive, that sees change as a threat rather than as a challenge to be governed. In this climate, security is often presented as separation: more distance, more control, more suspicion. But security built only on fear risks producing the opposite effect. It does not make a community stronger. It makes it more closed, more fragile, more lonly.
Because fear does not affect only those who are excluded. It also affects those who exclude. It narrows the gaze, impoverishes language and reduces the space for dialogue. It accustoms us to thinking that living together means defending ourselves, that diversity is a danger, that the other must constantly prove they are not a threat. In this way, however, society loses part of its humanity and part of its collective intelligence.
The real challenge, then, is not to eliminate the stranger. It is to transform the way we look at them. Moving from the logic of suspicion to the logic of understanding does not mean denying problems, nor ignoring the complexity of migration policies. It means rejecting the idea that fear is the only possible principle of coexistence.
Understanding does not mean being naïve. It means looking deeper. It means asking who the other is, where they come from, what they carry with them, which wounds and which possibilities run through their story. It means recognising that no society can build its future if it treats every difference as a threat.
A more just form of security begins here: not from fear of the other, but from the capacity to build relationships. Not from permanent suspicion, but from possible trust. Not from closure, but from the responsibility of living with differences.
Because the stranger is not only the one who arrives. The stranger is also the mirror that forces us to ask what kind of community we want to be.
—
Anna, 28
I hold a degree in Sociology and have a background in research. I came to Rondine with a clear motivation: to understand what contribution I could make, in my own small way, to building a more humane world. This need gave rise to my project, “In the Silence of Fears”, which invites students to reflect on the fears connected to the contexts in which they live, amid global instability, wars and political choices that shape everyday life.