Jonas Hagmann

National risk registers: Security scientism and the propagation of permanent insecurity

Aiming at the measurement, comparison and ranking of all kinds of public dangers, ranging from natural hazards to industrial risks and political perils, the preparation of national risk registers stands out as a novel and increasingly popular Western security practice. This article focuses on these registers and the analytical power politics in which they are complicit. We argue, first, that positing science as an objective determinant of security truth, national risk registers advance a modernist understanding of how knowledge of national dangers can be arrived at, discounting both sovereign and popular authorities; second, that by operationalizing a traditional risk-assessment formula, risk registers make possible seemingly apolitical decisions in security matters, taken on the basis of cost–benefit thinking; and, third, that risk registers’ focus on risk ‘themes’ tiptoes around the definition of referent objects, avoiding overt decisions about the beneficiaries of particular security decisions. Taking all these factors into account, we find that risk registers ‘depoliticize’ national security debates while transforming national insecurity into something permanent and inevitable.

Measuring resilience: methodological and political challenges of a trend security concept

Modern societies are characterised by global connectedness and complexity. At the same time society, and the various infrastructures that connect and define it, are understood to be increasingly threatened by unpredictable and uncertain (or unknown) global risks. With this, the conceptualisation and development of resilience has become a dominant, yet enigmatic preoccupation: dominant because it is seen as a fundamental component of devolved proactive approaches to mitigating complex threats whatever their nature; and enigmatic because its practical application is as diverse as its definitions. Today, however, a significant challenge still lies in the accurate characterisation and quantification of resilience, and thus also the ability to provide a systematic basis for policy-making in resilience-based threat mitigation. This article examines the methodological challenges of operationalising resilience. It draws on several cases that detail ways of measuring resilience, reflecting on the development, benefits and limitations of these and highlighting important considerations pertinent in the construction of resilience indices. Doing so, however, the article also maintains that resilience should not be reduced to a methodological problem only, given that the methodological operationalisation of resilience also connects with analytical ideas of what and whose kind of responsibility should be measured and political conceptions of who assumes what tasks and responsibility in a resilience framework.

Fukushima: probing the analytical and epistemological limits of risk analysis

The Fukushima catastrophe tragically epitomizes the limitations of dealing with natural and technical hazards. Remarkably yet;authorities’ review of the catastrophe continue to be limited to mistakes and responsibilities of practical risk management. Although state regulations are questioned;technical protection measures verified;and disaster management processes optimized;no deeper discussion about the actual analytical limits of risk analysis has been engaged thus far. What can risk analyses address and what remains beyond their scope? How trustworthy can risk analyses be;and what kind of statements about the future can they actually formulate? This article examines these broader analytical and epistemological boundaries of risk analysis. Drawing on cases of international nuclear risk management;it tests and problematizes how the definition of risk;the methodology of their registration;and the interpretation of results are reaching their limitations in contemporary risk analysis. Following this critical discussion of risk analysis;the article draws conclusions concerning the usefulness and necessity of a differentiated and informed discourse on the potential and the limitations of the risk analysis method;an approach which today enjoys increasing popularity in a variety of policy sectors ranging from critical infrastructure protection to national and international security.

Beyond Exceptionalism? New Security Conceptions in Contemporary Switzerland

Switzerlands traditional, military-centred and isolationist Cold War policies began to be vehemently contested in the 1990s. However, since the early 2000s, debates on security policy and foreign affairs have gradually lost public salience, and recent popular votes suggest increasingly consistent support both for a broader conception of national security and a more internationalist interpretation of neutrality. Have Switzerlands traditional policy frameworks thus been overcome? Investigating elite positions, this article argues that indeed, conventional disputes between military and civilian understandings of security have been transcended recently, as Swiss policy-makers settled for a remarkably broad and non-traditional conception of national security. At the same time, the article also argues, the perception of increasingly global security challenges has started to provide powerful rationales against traditional Swiss isolationism. By showing the processes through which Swiss security conceptions have been reformulated into a new dominant elite agreement, the article points out how Switzerland has slowly come to embrace security in European terms – not least also thanks to its new focus on non-traditional security agendas.

Representations of terrorism and the making of counterterrorism policy

Reflexive approaches not only maintain that representations of danger are socially constructed but also that they relate with political behaviour. Representations of terrorism, for instance, are argued to constitute that danger in distinct ways and thus to make certain counterterror policies possible. This article challenges this popular association of reflexive security studies with constitutive effects. It argues that constitutive argumentation advances an insufficiently tangible argument of effect, and that this conceptual weakness derives from both a problematic foundational social theory and a premature rejection of causation. Drawing on the social theory of Margaret Archer and Roy Bhaskar and a differentiated notion of causation, the article advances a “dialectical causal” framework for the analysis of representations of danger instead. Applying it to contemporary Swiss terrorism politics, the article shows how this framework improves on constitutive argumentation in disentangling the political powers involved in the production and enactment of representations of danger.