Luis Lobo-Guerrero

Biopolitics of security in the 21st century: an introduction

This essay addresses two questions. It first asks what happens to security practices when they take species life as their referent object. It then asks what happens to security practices which take species life as their referent object when the very understanding of species life undergoes transformation and change. In the process of addressing these two questions the essay provides an exegesis of Michel Foucault’s analytic of biopolitics as a dispositif de securit e and contrasts this account of security with that given by traditional geopolitical security discourses. The essay also theorises beyond Foucault when it interrogates the impact in the twentieth century of the compression of morbidity on populations and the molecular revolution on what we now understand life to be. It concludes that ‘population’, which was the empirical referent of early biopolitics, is being superseded by ‘heterogenesis’. This serves as the empirical referent for the recombinant biopolitics of security in the molecular age.

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

Insurance, climate change, and the creation of geographies of uncertainty in the Indian Ocean Region

This article is a geopolitical–biopolitical interrogation of the global insurance discourse in relation to climate change. Based on two general assumptions made by the insurance industry, namely that the ‘Global South’ remains uninsured, and that insurance is the technology for coping with environmental risk, it is argued that a risk management insurantial imaginary is effecting a globalisation of spaces of liberal security. As a result, the globalisation of a rationality of governing uncertainty through insurance aligns ‘other’ non-Western ways of being in the world with a Western financial capitalist rationality of governance. The argument is explored in relation to the Global South and is illustrated through the case of parametric rain insurance in Ethiopia.

Life Securitisation, the Event Object of Insurance and the Strategisation of Time

Understanding the matter of insurability as a problem of governing uncertainty has led to thinking ‘the event’ as the object of insurance. How the event is understood and conceptualized determines to a great extent the ways in which its related uncertainty will be rendered. This, in turn, will determine how such uncertainty will be managed. Although this idea has been widely explored with important nuances by various scholars, what has not been discussed in great detail is the problematic idea of temporality and the role time plays in helping constitute the event object of insurance. Such a problem is of great relevance for pushing forward the debate on the limits of insurability. The empirical cases used in this article, Swiss Res Vita and Kortis, launched and developed during the last decade, relate to hedging the exposure of life and health insurance portfolios to events that would generate excess mortality and excess vitality. The schemes, as explored here, are not simply actuarial, although actuarial practice still figures prominently in their crafting. They involve the strategic articulation of varied forms of knowledge that enshrine particular understandings of time and produce the truth-base of insurable events.

LLOYD'S AND THE MORAL ECONOMY OF INSURING AGAINST PIRACY

In the context of heightened maritime piracy, the role of the maritime insurance industry is increasingly seen by governments as central to the management of this peril. What is not normally observed, however, is that the industry, while embracing piracy risks, actively seeks to transform the security environments under which issues such as piracy take place. In doing so, market entities like the Joint War Committee of the Lloyds Market Association become important actors within a global security apparatus which normally escapes the attention of students of power relations. Employing the concept of moral economy proposed by Lorraine Daston, the effects of insuring against piracy are analysed to make explicit the micropractices of power through which insurers perform the markets of risk in which they operate. This article analyses the role of marine underwriters at the London market as ‘silent’ security professionals whose decisions have global effects.

Connectivity as the strategization of space – the case of the Port of Hamburg

Taking the Port of Hamburg as a site for analysis, this article is used to theorize the idea of connectivity as the strategization of space. Drawing on Foucaults understanding of strategy as an art of combinations, connectivity is explored as a quasi-transcendental, as a site of experimentation and innovation which opens up the possibility for a ports future market development and growth. The argument is drawn out of an analysis of specific practices and strategies currently developed by the Hamburg Port Authority, particularly the operation of Vessel Traffic Service and by exploring some of the historical forms of connectivity and dis-connectivity of the port.

Knots, Port Authorities and Governance: Knotting Together the Port of Hamburg

Ports and port systems have historically been pre-eminent global sites. Their role, which transcends that of connecting landed with maritime domains, is one without which the historically specific global connectedness and disconnectedness of cultures and regions such as Europe could not be understood. They are, however, largely forgotten as sites for the scholarly study of power and International Relations. Inspired by Foucaults work, connectivity is here understood as an outcome of governance, the result of the strategic combination of practices of power that presupposes agency. The connectivity that ports afford constitutes a rich empirical space from which to interrogate how global and regional spaces such as Europe are actively constituted. The analytical challenge, however, is how to render port connectivity as an empirical site. The metaphor of knots is explored in this article as a way to explore how port governance as the result of actively combining disparate interests into a coherent whole provides such a site. To do so the figure of the port authority as a governing structure in the context of the European Union is explored. The case in point is that of the Hamburg Port Authority whose role is analysed as that of a “smart knot”.

The Capitalisation of ‘Excess Life’ through Life Insurance

The role of life insurance, as portrayed by the industry, is to get individuals and heirs back in financial circulation after accidents and catastrophic events. This role, however, is not innocent. It involves a complex problematisation of what it means to render life as valuable, commodifiable and securable. Life insurance effects a translation of the current and potential economic value of a life into investment capital. In return, it offers a form of security that promises compensation against insurable events. While insuring, the industry creates economies of security that have a historical dimension as they are anchored to the development of liberal economies. These economies are possible by what is here termed the “excess of life,” which in turn becomes potential for resisting the biopolitical order of insurance. This article critically engages with the film Code 46 as an empirical site from which to make evident the political possibility of “excess life.” After an analytical depiction of the film, the article offers an analysis of the valuation of life as practices of inclusion, which involve a vital ontology and which produce moral economies. The article concludes with a reflection on the immanent resistance to lifes valuation.

Connectivity as problem

ON 20 MAY 2015, Professor Smith landed at London Heathrow airport to examine a PhD thesis at one of the colleges of the University of London. After showing his passport and clearing customs, he headed towards the airport’s Underground station where he took a train to Piccadilly Circus. Once there he took out his smartphone, opened a navigation application that a colleague had recommended to him by saying ‘it will make you a local anywhere’, and entered the address where he was expected within the next hour. From there on he followed the visual and audio instructions emitted by his phone and reached his destination in thirtyfive minutes. With the aid of the public transport network and its information maps as well as with the smartphone, the navigation application, and its instructions, Prof. Smith felt confident that he would arrive at his destination in good time for the PhD defence. In fact, his colleague’s statement was right: an observer would not have noticed he was foreign to the city although this was his first visit. The trip was an easy one. Only four hours earlier he had woken up at his home in Hamburg, and he was now in Central London conducting his academic business. After the PhD defence and whilst resting at his hotel Prof. Smith had a chance to reflect on how smooth his journey had been and what had made it so. He thought first of the security aspects of it, of how he had to demonstrate via documents and inspections that he was a good citizen and a safe traveller. The way in which he had been securitychecked at the airport in Hamburg and had been asked to identify at passport control when travelling to a country outside the Schengen Agreement were for him examples of forms of sovereign security (cf. Edkins et al. 2004). He also had to provide some information to his airline in advance so they could check that he was not on a restricted travel list. Had any of his data matched a profile that the technology had been set to identify, his case would have raised a flag and more questions would have followed (see Hagmann and Dunn Cavelty 2012). He also had to alert his employer, by completing a form, that he would be travelling for academic business to a different

World insurance: the evolution of a global risk network

As Frank C. Spooner noted in 1983 (Risk at Sea: Amsterdam Insurance and Maritime Europe, 1766-1780, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), it was insurance and not war or diplomacy what made possible the opening of the markets in the Far East in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Travelling with traders, insurance not only enabled venturing into unknown markets but also began to effect the globalisation of a rationality of thinking and managing uncertainty as risk. Insurance, more than a financial instrument is the embodiment of a rationality of thinking and managing uncertainty, a crucial element for the understanding of western globalization in the modern period.