Claudia Aradau

Governing Terrorism Through Risk: Taking Precautions, (un)Knowing the Future

The events of 9/11 appeared to make good on Ulrich Becks claim that we are now living in a (global) risk society. Examining what it means to ‘govern through risk’, this article departs from Becks thesis of risk society and its appropriation in security studies. Arguing that the risk society thesis problematically views risk within a macro-sociological narrative of modernity, this article shows, based on a Foucauldian account of governmentality, that governing terrorism through risk involves a permanent adjustment of traditional forms of risk management in light of the double infinity of catastrophic consequences and the incalculability of the risk of terrorism. Deploying the Foucauldian notion of ‘dispositif’, this article explores precautionary risk and risk analysis as conceptual tools that can shed light on the heterogeneous practices that are defined as the ‘war on terror’.

Security That Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection

Critical infrastructure protection is prominently concerned with objects that appear indispensable for the functioning of social and political life. However, the analysis of material objects in discussions of critical infrastructure protection has remained largely within the remit of managerial responses, which see matter as simply passive, a blank slate. In security studies, critical approaches have focused on social and cultural values, forms of life, technologies of risk or structures of neoliberal globalization. This article engages with the role of ‘things’ or of materiality for theories of securitization. Drawing on the materialist feminism of Karen Barad, it shows how critical infrastructure in Europe neither is an empty receptacle of discourse nor has ‘essential’ characteristics; rather, it emerges out of material-discursive practices. Understanding the securitization of critical infrastructure protection as a process of materialization allows for a reconceptualization of how security matters and its effects.

Security, Technologies of Risk, and the Political: Guest Editors' Introduction

THE PROLIFERATION AND PERVASIVENESS of risk in late modern societies has spawned numerous analyses of the new governance of societies, the role of knowledge and the reshaping of modern subjects. From natural disasters and terrorism to health and finance, risk is now everywhere. While risk had long been a problem of thought, from antiquity to modernity (Maso, 2007), its relation to security and politics has now encountered renewed interest. From anthropology and criminology to cultural studies and sociology, the problem of risk has been rendered as the signifier of our present condition (Beck, 1992; Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982; Luhmann, 1991; Foucault, 2007). But, as risks come to constitute more and more areas of social and political life, it is necessary to ask ourselves, echoing Michel Foucault (1997), what difference today introduces with respect to yesterday. International relations scholars concerned with the concept of risk generally trace the notion back to the end of the Cold War, when major states and international organizations such as NATO, the UN and the EU began to refer to their security environment in terms of risks rather than dangers. This change in terminology has allowed for an understanding of the post-Cold War security environment as highly uncertain and characterized by an explosion of risks, including pandemics to organized crime, global warming, failed states, terrorism, poverty and nuclear proliferation. Given this representation of the security dynamics at play in the post-Cold War environment, early appropriations of risk in the field of international relations have tended to simply conflate the concept of risk with those of danger and threat (Rasmussen, 2001, 2004). Failing to spell out the conceptual difference between security and risk, these studies constitute the difference Special Issue on Security, Technologies of Risk, and the Political

Critical methods in International Relations: The politics of techniques, devices and acts

Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in International Relations (IR) and social sciences more generally. This article explores the role of methods in IR and argues that methods can be part of a critical project if reconceptualized away from neutral techniques of organizing empirical material and research design. It proposes a two-pronged reconceptualization of critical methods as devices which enact worlds and acts which disrupt particular worlds. Developing this conceptualization allows us to foreground questions of knowledge and politics as stakes of method and methodology rather than exclusively of ontology, epistemology or theory. It also allows us to move away from the dominance of scientificity (and its weaker versions of systematicity and rigour) to understand methods as less pure, less formal, messier and more experimental, carrying substantive political visions.

Law transformed: Guantánamo and the ‘other’ exception

Abstract Guantánamo Bay is almost unanimously seen as an exceptional space inhabited by ‘bare life’. This article unpacks the double rendering of the exception in Carl Schmitts work and argues that the conceptualisation of the exception in The Nomos of the Earth can help us understand the form of exception that is at work in the ‘war on terror’. The nomos as the junction of order and orientation appears as a way of closing off the space of political decision from Schmitts earlier concept of the political. The constitution of order is no longer dependent upon the sovereign decision on the exception, but upon the division and appropriation of space, upon the geopolitics of uncontested spatialisations and a philosophy of concrete life. Therefore, Guantánamo will be exposed not as a singular and exceptional occurrence, but as symptomatic of the transformation of law. Law is moulded onto the order of what is; it is sustained by the situational characteristics of spaces and people at a distance from the contingency of sovereign decisions.

The promise of security: resilience, surprise and epistemic politics

Over the past decade, resilience has become a quasi-universal answer to problems of security and governance, from climate change to childrens education, from indigenous history to disaster response, and from development to terrorism. This article places the proliferation of resilience in relation to the earlier proliferation of security discourse and practice. Why resilience today? It answers this question by unpacking the epistemic regimes that underpin the move to resilience. Rather than tracing the differences between protection, prevention, pre-emption and resilience, the article argues that the political transformation that resilience entails becomes explicit in relation to the promise of security. Although the language of ‘promise’ and ‘promising’ has been widely used in relation to security, its political implications have remained unexplored. Underpinned by an epistemology of surprising events, resilience discourses reconfigure the promise of security. Through an empirical engagement with the turn to resilience in DFIDs humanitarian policy in the UK and a theoretical reconsideration of Hannah Arendts conceptualisation of the promise, I offer a critical vantage point on the transformation that resilience portends for our contemporary condition.

Questioning security devices: Performativity, resistance, politics

Algorithms, biometrics and body scanners, computers and databases, infrastructures of various kinds, ranging from what is commonly referred to as ‘hi-tech’ to ‘low-tech’ items such as walls or paper files, have garnered increased attention in critical approaches to (in)security. This article introduces a special issue whose contributions aim to further these approaches by questioning the role and political effects of security devices. It proposes an analytics of devices to examine the configuration and reconfiguration of security practices by attending to the equipment or instrumentation that make these practices possible and temporally stabilize them. The aim here is not to advance devices as a new unit of analysis, but to open new forays in ongoing debates about security politics and practices, by asking different research questions and developing new research angles. We start by outlining what is at stake when thinking of and analysing security practices through devices, or shifting from the language of technology and ‘technologies of security’ to security devices. The remainder of the article then specifies how an analytics of devices involves a more varied vocabulary of performativity, on the one hand, and agency, on the other.

Insuring terrorism, assuring subjects, ensuring normality: The politics of risk after 9/11

Security has been located either in the political spectacle of public discourses or within the specialized field of security professionals, experts in the management of unease. This article takes issue with these analyses and argues that security practices are also formulated in more heterogeneous locations. Since the early days of the “war on terror,” the insurance industry has had an instrumental role and “underwriting terrorism” has become part of the global governmentality of terrorism. We explore the political implications of the classi-ficatory practices that insurance presupposes and argue that the technologies of insurance foster subjects who are consistent with the logic of capitalism. Insurance entrenches a vision of the social where antagonisms have been displaced or are suspended by an overwhelming concern with the continuity of social and economic processes. These effects of insurance will be discussed as the “temporality,” “subjectivity,” and “alterity” effects.

The Time/Space of Preparedness: Anticipating the “Next Terrorist Attack”

The “next terrorist attack” has become one of the main fixtures of the collective imagination of catastrophic futures. Reflecting on a series of exercises and scenarios deployed to prepare for terrorist attacks, this article interrogates the co-constitution of temporality and spatiality in such practices. The main argument is that practices of preparedness enact a withdrawal of time, where the temporal uncertainty of the future event is displaced on the management of space. The separation of space and time implies that actions are not focused on understanding the conditions of possibility of the disruptive event but shift attention to the management of spaces and attention to behaviour that is considered out of place.

The (Big) Data-security assemblage: Knowledge and critique

The Snowden revelations and the emergence of ‘Big Data’ have rekindled questions about how security practices are deployed in a digital age and with what political effects. While critical scholars have drawn attention to the social, political and legal challenges to these practices, the debates in computer and information science have received less analytical attention. This paper proposes to take seriously the critical knowledge developed in information and computer science and reinterpret their debates to develop a critical intervention into the public controversies concerning data-driven security and digital surveillance. The paper offers a two-pronged contribution: on the one hand, we challenge the credibility of security professionals’ discourses in light of the knowledge that they supposedly mobilize; on the other, we argue for a series of conceptual moves around data, human–computer relations, and algorithms to address some of the limitations of existing engagements with the Big Data-security assemblage.