Rens van Munster

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

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.

Reclaiming nuclear politics? Nuclear realism, the H-bomb and globality

As nuclear weapons are again becoming the subject of critical scholarship and progressive activism, this article seeks to widen the perspective of critical security studies in relation to nuclear weapons and to provide a better understanding of the historical precursors of current ambitions. We do so by focusing on the central decade of the thermonuclear revolution (ca 1952–1963) and on a body of thought we term ‘nuclear realism’. Nuclear realists were united by the central conviction that liberal modernity could survive collective suicide only by radically rethinking and transforming its foundations. Günther Anders, John Herz, Lewis Mumford and Bertrand Russell take centre stage, and we highlight that the central pillars in their project of nuclear critique was a dissection of the legacy of the Enlightenment and an incisive examination of its implications for (international) politics in the nuclear age. These dimensions came together in their critique of the prevailing concept of deterrence. In an attempt to reclaim nuclear politics for a wider public, nuclear realists stressed the absolute centrality of imagination as a strategy for unmasking the power and rationality of a growing national security establishment, on the one hand, and bringing a distinct, alternative vision of global politics and security into view, on the other. This comprehensive yet multifaceted project, while afflicted by its own challenges, is deeply relevant for today’s nuclear politics.

Nuclear Realism : Global political thought during the thermonuclear revolution

What is a realist response to nuclear weapons? This book is animated by the idea that contemporary attempts to confront the challenge of nuclear weapons and other global security problems would benefit from richer historical foundations. Returning to the decade of deep, thermonuclear anxiety inaugurated in the early 1950s, the authors focus on four creative intellectuals – Gunther Anders, John H. Herz, Lewis Mumford and Bertrand Russell – whose work they reclaim under the label of ‘nuclear realism’. This book brings out an important, oppositional and resolutely global strand of political thought that combines realist insights about nuclear weapons with radical proposals for social and political transformation as the only escape from a profoundly endangered planet. Nuclear Realism is a highly original and provocative study that will be of great use to advanced undergraduates, graduates and scholars of political theory, International Relations and Cold War history.

The Securitization of Catastrophic Events: Trauma, Enactment, and Preparedness Exercises

Psychological knowledge has become incorporated into a range of security practices, discourses, and interventions in catastrophic events, including terrorism. By engaging the existing literature on the medicalization and psychologization of security, this article reads the enactment knowledge deployed in preparedness exercises from the perspective of psychodrama and sociodrama rather than that of psychoanalysis or psychosocial risk management. Enactment has become an important mode of knowledge for the governance of terrorism, as preparedness exercises deploy action methods, drama, enactment, and performance to prepare for unexpected, catastrophic events. Taking seriously the conceptualization of enactment, as deployed in psychodrama and sociodrama, can also challenge the securitization of catastrophic events. The article concludes that enactment, which foregrounds action rather than speech, and suggests that meaning follows action, can also offer critical insights into securitization theory.

Europe, Knowledge, Politics — Engaging with the Limits: The c.a.s.e. collective Responds

HAVING ONE’S WORK closely read and critically debated is a rare pleasure. It was thus with great joy that we saw that our collective article ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006) provoked several thoughtful responses to the theoretical premises of the manifesto and its intellectual and political ramifications. The replies to the manifesto created a new space of selfinterrogation in which the c.a.s.e. collective grappled with some of the limits that our critics addressed. Before we address some of these more directly, it may be useful to restate the original objective of the collective manifesto. First, the authors that were part of the collective had a desire to push critical innovations in security studies beyond the framing of critical security studies in terms of schools. The aim of working and writing as a collective, as a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a common perspective, was based on a desire to break with the competitive dynamics of individualist research agendas. Alluding to the emancipatory connotations of the word ‘manifesto’, the aim of the article was to carve out and open up an intellectual space for critical thinking – both in the disciplinary sense of formulating an alternative space to mainstream security studies and in the political sense of thinking through the ethico-political implications of security and securitizationHAVING ONE’S WORK closely read and critically debated is a rare pleasure. It was thus with great joy that we saw that our collective article ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006) provoked several thoughtful responses to the theoretical premises of the manifesto and its intellectual and political ramifications. The replies to the manifesto created a new space of selfinterrogation in which the c.a.s.e. collective grappled with some of the limits that our critics addressed. Before we address some of these more directly, it may be useful to restate the original objective of the collective manifesto. First, the authors that were part of the collective had a desire to push critical innovations in security studies beyond the framing of critical security studies in terms of schools. The aim of working and writing as a collective, as a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a common perspective, was based on a desire to break with the competitive dynamics of individualist research agendas. Alluding to the emancipatory connotations of the word ‘manifesto’,1 the aim of the article was to carve out and open up an intellectual space for critical thinking – both in the disciplinary sense of formulating an alternative space to mainstream security studies and in the political sense of thinking through the ethico-political implications of security and securitization. If, in this sense, the article can be read as a manifesto (with, we should note, the important prefix ‘networked’), we did not assert, as Andreas Behnke Rejoinder

Pro-Nuclear Environmentalism: Should We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Energy?

In light of repeated failures to reach political agreement on effective policies to combat climate change, pro-nuclear environmentalists have set out to reverse the traditionally anti-nuclear inclinations of environmentalists. This essay examines the ideological commitments and assumptions of pro-nuclear environmentalism by performing a critical, historical analysis of the nuclear-environment nexus through the prism of documentary film. We focus on the work and career of documentary filmmaker Rob Stone, whose most recent production, Pandora’s Promise (PP) (2013), has emerged as a central statement of this creed. PP actively forges a new political imaginary that replaces the apocalyptic image of nuclear fallout with that of catastrophic climate change. In terms of its rhetorical and visual strategies, however, PP also reveals that pro-nuclear environmentalist arguments have a long lineage. A close study of such continuities reveals a number of political implications that call for reflection as well as caution.

Appetite for destruction: Günther Anders and the metabolism of nuclear techno-politics

It is well recognized how the modern social sciences, particularly in the United States, fed off and contributed to a nuclear state associated with the military-industrial complex. But it is less known that the thermonuclear revolution also constituted a productive moment for critical theories of (nuclear) techno-politics. In this article, we recover a strand of the latter by focusing on Günther Anders (1902–1992), a German philosopher of technology for whom thermonuclear weapons symbolized the self-destructive capacity embedded in a disenchanted modernity. We stress the techno-political dimensions of Anders’ philosophy by approaching it through his concept and metaphor of metabolism. Anders sought to update Marxist thinking to the age of technology to reawaken his readers to the realities and power dynamics of the nuclear condition and the ways in which these were consistently obscured. He pondered the grotesque human ability to live with a monstrous and suicidal weapon, while highlighting the dynamics of extraction and consumption that characterized both modern ‘mass’ society and nuclear techno-politics. Anders’ quest for emancipation focused on a nurturing of the imagination of modern human beings. We stress the critical, global and activist orientation of his analysis and discuss its merits and contemporary relevance.

The thermonuclear revolution and the politics of imagination: Realist radicalism in political theory and IR

Both within political theory and International Relations (IR), recent scholarship has reflected on the nature and limits of political realism. In this article, we return to the thermonuclear revolution and the debates it spurred about what was real and possible in global politics. We argue that a strand of oppositional and countercultural thinking during this period, which we refer to as realist radicalism, has significant theoretical and practical relevance for current scholarship on political realism. Indeed, debates during the thermonuclear revolution speak to questions about the nature of realism and whether it is possible to develop a realism that is attuned to progressive or emancipatory ambitions. By focusing mainly on two radical American intellectuals – C. Wright Mills and Lewis Mumford – we show how their responses to the thermonuclear, superpower standoff challenged conventional understanding of realism and utopianism. By harnessing the concept of the imagination, they called into question pre-existing conceptions about politics and reality. The contribution of the article is twofold. First, we argue that realist political theory and IR should pay more attention to thinkers that are not conventionally regarded as canonical but whose writings and politics interrogated the limits and potential of political realism. Second, we demonstrate that the work of such public intellectuals and their calls for cultivating the imagination connect directly to current debates about political realism, including its statist bend and its (purported) conservatism.

Modernity, Technology and Global Security: A Conversation with Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)

Despite various proclamations about the ‘death of the author’, the historian, critic and public intellectual Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) rather looks like a thinker whose time has come. Mumford is chiefly remembered for his literary and architectural criticism and his historical writings on cities. He won the National Book Award in 1962 for The City in History and was awarded the Presidential Award of Freedom in 1964 (which was swiftly followed by Mumford’s strongly worded attack on the President’s Vietnam policy in 1965).1 But Mumford’s reflections on technological modernity, nuclear weapons and global ecology also deserve a wide audience in the twenty-first century – an age that has reached its own cul-de-sac in dealing with issues of technology and global security. We staged a meeting with Mumford in an effort to recover his ideas for contemporary IR theory. What follows is the edited transcript of how the interview took place in our heads.