Interview with Simona Dianová and Monika Brusenbauch Meislová: Navigating Brexit through fear

We hear from Simona Dianová and Monika Brusenbauch Meislová, authors of paper Navigating Brexit through fear, published in our Journal of Language and Politics.

Photo via Stock Free Images

Fear can be a powerful rhetorical tool for political actors. While it can bolster public support for political objectives in the short term, it poses a risk of disillusionment and cynicism toward democratic institutions in the long run.

Simona Dianová

Monika Brusenbauch Meislová

Why did you decide to write this piece?

We have long been fascinated by discourses surrounding Brexit, particularly the ways language operates as a strategic device for framing uncertainty and mobilising responses. Our interest in Brexit-related discourse began with our analysis of the so-called Project Fear – a label attributed to the Remain campaign led by David Cameron in 2016. We found that fear-based rhetoric was strongly associated with economic concerns about leaving the European Union. Although Project Fear ultimately failed in the referendum, fear appeals did not disappear but persisted in the British Brexit-related political discourse.

This raised new questions for us: How did fear appeals evolve after the referendum? Through which discursive and linguistic mechanisms were they recalibrated? And how were they used across the political spectrum, not only by the governing Conservatives but also by opposition parties? While existing scholarship has largely focused on pre-referendum rhetoric, we identified a clear gap in research on fear appeals during the post-referendum years. Our article sought to fill that gap by offering the first systematic, longitudinal account of how fear was redeployed throughout the negotiation process with the EU and into the post-Brexit period.

As already demonstrated by many pundits, fear can be a powerful rhetorical tool for political actors. While it can bolster public support for political objectives in the short term, it poses a risk of disillusionment and cynicism toward democratic institutions in the long run. Thus, we considered it imperative to continue exploring the strategic deployment of fear by key political actors at a moment that profoundly shaped Britain’s political trajectory.

What are the key takeaways?

Our analysis showed that fear did not fade after the 2016 referendum, instead, it persisted and evolved throughout the post-referendum years. Fear appeals did not remain static, they became more selectively deployed and adapted to shifting political contexts and leadership styles. Theresa May and Boris Johnson relied on more confrontational and populist rhetoric, often framing failure to deliver Brexit as an existential threat to democracy and national unity. In contrast, Rishi Sunak adopted a technocratic, policy-oriented approach. Yet fear remained a subtle but strategic element even under his leadership. Our study, therefore, demonstrated the flexibility of fear-based rhetoric: fear is not a fixed device, but a resource that can be readapted to meet evolving political demands.

We further refined Lazarus’ theory of emotion, an influential appraisal model, by combining two appraisal dimensions into a single element called “personal motivation,” aiming to better capture the significance of perceived threats to national interests. As a result, we enhanced the theory’s analytical utility for studying policy-oriented communication, where emotions are strategically expressed. Empirically, the article offered a rare longitudinal perspective, tracing fear-based appeals across three Prime Ministerial tenures (2016–2024) and multiple genres of communication. Beyond Brexit, the findings underscored how elite-driven fear appeals shape public debate – a dynamic with profound implications for crisis politics and democratic trust.

Where do you plan to go next in your research?

Building on our previous work on fear-based political communication in the Brexit context, we think about turning to one of the most pressing and polarising issues in contemporary British politics: immigration. We could examine how fear appeals are deployed not only in political rhetoric but also in media discourse surrounding migration. Since the emotionally charged debates during the 2016 EU referendum, fear has often been instrumentalised to frame exclusionary narratives and amplify anti-immigration sentiment.

We aim to explore whether and how mainstream governing parties adopt or resist fear-led, far-right framings of migration. This question is key to understanding how ideas that were once confined to the fringes of the political spectrum have become part of mainstream discourse. By tracing these patterns, the study would shed more light on the discursive strategies that shape public attitudes toward migration and their broader implications for democratic governance. Ultimately, such research would seek to contribute to debates on the role of emotional appeals in sustaining exclusionary politics and the risks they pose for pluralism and institutional trust.