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Event Date: 21 – 22 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University
and the Centre for International Relations, Department of War Studies, King’s College London

Download workshop package here

“There is no liberalism without a culture of danger.” (Foucault)

Threats and risks have become the preferred categories for imagining contemporary security. Practices such as defence, border control and the surveillance of populations, insurance, risk profiling to identify suspicious subjects, and risk assessments to protect objects and systems such as critical infrastructure, rely heavily on well-established paradigms of security. Discourses and practices of threats and risks, with their allied technologies of measurement and calculation, however, relate to the wider problem of danger and its allied concept of ‘uncertainty’. Thinking ‘danger’ relates to understandings of uncertainties, otherness of being, and spaces and environments of protection in excess of those accounted for in the language and metrics of discourses of threats and risks.

What happens, then, if the analysis of security resorts to understandings of ‘danger’, ‘dangerousness’, and processes of ‘endangerment’? Is it possible to think security by referring ideas of danger to understandings of life, livelihoods and lifestyles, instead of ready-made ‘objects’ of security such as sovereignty, territory, the nation-state, citizens, borders, and sociological categories such as class and gender? Is it possible to think security in relation to danger away from utilitarian economic categories such as cost-benefit analysis, risk calculus, and rational choice?

The workshop aims to explore these questions and to challenge participants to wonder if current policy security priorities such as terrorism, climate change, weapons proliferation, resilience and migration can be thought in relation to ‘danger’ outside discourses of threats and risks.

In the first three workshops of this seminar series we began to explore an agenda for contemporary biopolitical security research around problems such as mobilities and circulations, resilience, values and processes of valuations in relation to the technologies through which lifestyles and livelihoods are treated as referents of security. In this fourth workshop we intend to spark a conversation around the implications of thinking dangerousness in relation to security and life.

The workshop is based on participants’ work and invites a reflection on the following questions:

- How are ideas of danger constituted? What forms of ‘data’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’ are involved in constituting a dangerous subject or a dangerous environment?

- What are the preconditions for understanding endangerment in and how do they question the ‘new security challenges’ of for example, terrorism (and cyber-terrorism), proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and health pandemics?

- Can discourses and practices of security be different if reflections on the consequences of endangerment are advanced?

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Programme:

MONDAY 21 FEBRUARY

Luis Lobo-Guerrero and Vivienne Jabri – Introduction

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Panel 1 – Ontologisations of Danger

• Btihaj Ajana – Re-ontologising Danger (AUDIO HERE)
• Joscha Wullweber – Strategies of Danger and Dangerous Strategies (AUDIO HERE)
• David Chandler – The Ontology of Danger:Recasting the Human Subject in Discourses of Vulnerability and Resilience (AUDIO HERE)
• Andrew Neal – The Entropy of Dangerousness (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Martin Coward (Newcastle University)

discussion:

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Panel 2 – Risk managing the dangerousness of terror

• Cerelia Athanassiou – Changing the Global War on Terror: Who is the ‘Ready’ Citizen Arming Against? (AUDIO HERE)
• Lisa Stampnitzky- Constituting terrorism: three attempts at rational governance (AUDIO HERE)
• Christopher Zebrowski – Falling-out: Examining the problematising capacities of danger (AUDIO HERE)
• Jonas Hagmann – Risk registers and the measurement of everything: Security scientism and the reassertion of modernism (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Claudia Aradau (The Open University)

discussion:

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Panel 3 – Danger’s Otherness

• Debbie Lisle – Danger’s Other: Pleasure, Leisure & Travel (AUDIO HERE)
• Sam Okoth Opondo – Fearscapes / Securescapes : Urban Anxieties, Securities and the Domestic Scene (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Vivienne Jabri

discussion:

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Keynote Address:

Professor Marieke de Goede
Networked Danger and Speculative Security (AUDIO HERE)

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TUESDAY 22 February

Panel 4 – Sites, spaces and strategies of endangerment

• Charlotte Heath-Kelly – Counter-Terrorism and the Counterfactual: Producing the ‘Radicalisation’ Discourse and the UK PREVENT strategy (AUDIO HERE)
• Casey McNeill – Danger and un-governed spaces in the US (AUDIO HERE)
• Alex Hamilton – ‘Dangerous tools’ in ‘dangerous hands’: How synthetic biology is imagined as a ‘bioterrorist threat’ (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Peter Adey

discussion:

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Final Roundtable and Conclusions With:

• Mustapha Pasha (University of Aberdeen)
• Marieke de Goede (University of Amsterdam)
• Luis Lobo-Guerrero (Keele University)
• Vivienne Jabri (King’s College London)
• Martin Coward (Newcastle University)

discussion:

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Event Date: 22 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
and the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University

R. Alexander Hamilton
London School of Economics

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Introduction to synthetic biology and synthetic biology ‘security concerns’

Synthetic biology is an emerging science that seeks to make biology engineerable, permitting the rational design and construction of novel living systems. Where this aim suggests many opportunities, possibly ushering in themuch-anticipated ‘century of biology’, offering new avenues for theproduction of health and wealth, it also suggeststhe possibility ofnew, uncontrollable dangers. The reason being, some argue,is because if more people, working in less formal research settings, begin to design and construct novel living systems, they might also use this technology to create novel pathogens, expanding the scope of the ‘bioterrorist threat’.Assessing how this threat might manifest itself, where its dangers lie, and how they might be managed, however, is problematic. Many uncertainties surround synthetic biology, including uncertainties about the current state of the art, its future potential, and the skills and motives of prospective ‘bioterrorists’, as well as the promising yet problematiccommunities of emergingamateur biologists – referred to, sometimes interchangeably,as‘do-it-yourself biologists’; ‘citizen scientists’; ‘garage biologists’; ‘biohobbyists’ or ‘biohackers’. In brief, the synthetic biology ‘threat’ is described as complex, and seemingly open-ended, which challenges a risk calculus that depends on stable factsabout the world.

Research aims and methods

This research broadly aims to map and critically examine the social and political processes that permit synthetic biology to be viewed as a security problem for which diverse security solutions are posed. My research is concerned with several distinct features of the synthetic biology security debate, as articulated by experts engaged in assessing and managing emerging risks in the life sciences, including: (1) how synthetic biology is understood as a security problem; (2) the forms of measurement used to qualify and quantify the synthetic biology threat; and (3) the modes of anticipatory governance deployed in the face of uncertainty. In the course of myresearch, I have read widely on the science of synthetic biology and its perceived security implications. I have also complimented this scientific and technical literature review with a series of interviews with a ‘constellation of experts’ (Rabinow 2008), including risk analysts, military planners, law enforcement agents, public health officials, prominent synthetic biologists, and others with a stated interest, and perceived expertise, in negotiating the security challenges posed by synthetic biology.This research principally focuses on the synthetic biology security threat as it is framed in the United States, where biosecurity considerations play an integral role in the synthetic biology debate, and are viewed as the key risks posed by the science.

Conceptual framework

Underlying this research is a conceptual interest in how threats are constructed –that is, how objects, knowledge, and people are identified as security problems; how these problems are elaborated as threats, and how these threats are, at least ostensibly, governed. Although drawing on aspects ofsecuritization theory (Wæver 1995), this research is concerned not only with the naming of security problems, but also with the mechanisms that permit security problems to be rendered knowable and actionable. Of particular interest, then, are the specific rationalities and technologies of risk that are deployed in the name taming chance, including their scope and limitations. To an extent, this research agrees with Beck’s (1992) notion of ‘risk society’, acknowledging that modern, self-generated catastrophespose uncertainties that challenge the logic of probabilistic risk assessment.Yet it also acknowledges, as a number of risk theorists have pointed out (Ewald 2002; Erickson and Doyle 2004; O’Malley 2004),that despite the perceived open-endedness of catastrophic threats, including climate change, terrorism, natural disasters and economic crisis, concerted efforts are being made (by risk analysts, military planners and others) to render these events knowable; with the presumption that they can be managed. Therefore, this research strives to suspend judgment on what types of threats synthetic biology mightactuallyenable – that is, whether they are actually calculable risks or incalculable dangers–in favor of focusing on the words and actions of those presently engaged in assessing and managing the unruly aspects of synthetic biology, and synthetic biologists, in pursuit of a sustainable science. Their words and actions, of course, are no less instrumental in shaping perceptions of the synthetic biology threat, including the knowledge and people bound up with it,as well as mediating possible responses to this threat.

Preliminary findings

As a site of emergence, characterized by uncertainty and rapid change, synthetic biology provides a unique vantage point from which to explore how modern technological threats are assembled; how they are constituted; and what strategies of preemptive governance are proposed to manage them. What stands out at this stage of my research is the manner in which synthetic biology and its practitioners are variously framed as dangerous and risky. Dangerous, to the extent that security experts suggest that DNA synthesis technology might be used to synthesize all manner of dangerous, unknown and potentially unknowable, pathogens; as well as to the extent that this technology is accessible to an expanding universe of amateur scientists, who might deliberately, or accidently, cause grave harm. And,risky, to the extent that practical responses are nonetheless proposed to mitigate the likelihoodof potential harm, including a variety of strategies aimed at screening orders for synthetic DNA (increasingly purchased from commercial ‘gene foundries’), filtering out dangerous sequences and suspicious buyers, while at the same time questioning the dangerousness of synthetic DNA outside of a ‘natural’ cellular context, and acknowledging the difficulties of pinpointing dangerous people. In this context, assessing and managing risk, while drawing on certain empirical indices, such as statistical matches between ‘safe’ DNA and DNA ‘of concern’ or profiles of ‘credible’ buyers and buyers ‘of concern’, depends equally, and perhaps primarily, on making subjective distinctions between who or what should count as ‘dangerous’. Such an approach to managing threats is largely about drawing boundaries, establishing limits, and erecting barriers, in an effort to support the productive aspects of synthetic biology while preempting the destructive ones. As there seem to be few indications of government shutting down, or even greatly curtailing, synthetic biology (at least in the United States), precautionary risk management, in its most restrictive form, does not appear to be on the political agenda (Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues 2010). Instead, efforts are being made to monitor developments in synthetic biology, and the activities of synthetic biologists, and to take measures to lessen the impact, or at least the liability, that might result from the misuse of synthetic biology.

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Event Date: 22 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
and the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University

Casey McNeill
Johns Hopkins University

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In Foucault’s account of biopower, as power that takes the life of the population as its object, he describes the ‘military-diplomatic apparatus’ of the modern state as being particularly resistant to biopolitical technologies, demonstrating instead the persistence of sovereign and disciplinary power. Questioning the continued relevance of this claim, I explore the prominence of biopolitical strategies in U.S. military interventions in Africa via the new Africa Command (AFRICOM). I aim to complicate critiques that AFRICOMis a neo-imperialist effort to gain access to Africa’s strategic resources. While, as a space embedded in historically produced relationships of power, the legacy of colonialism and imperialism in Africa remains, the practices and strategies of power that actualize these relationships develop and change over time. Describing practices in Africa with reference to a past iteration of global power—that of imperial conquest—precludes inquiries into temporal adaptations and evolutions in the distributive and circulatory effects of power across spatialdifference.

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Defense defined “ungoverned spaces” as a new “threat paradigm” for Africa; this paradigm has since been consistently invoked to justify AFRICOM’s interventions in Africa. Following Foucault’s claim that “Liberalism turns into a mechanism continually having to arbitrate between the freedom and security of individuals by reference to this notion of danger,” I understand ungoverned spaces to be such a notion of danger. It arbitrates U.S. security practicesvia ontological determinations about what forms of life and freedom are dangerous and what forms must be secured, locating threats not in a regime or an ideology, but in a particular way of life – a life that is undergoverned or ungovernable.

The Sahara-Sahel region was one of the first areas identified as a dangerous ungoverned space. Currently, AFRICOM oversees a State-Department led program in the region, the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership (TSCTP) and a military-led program, Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara (OEF-TS). The goal of these programs, according to AFRICOM’s 2010 Posture Statement, is to “deny safe havens to terrorists” by “increasing border security, promoting democratic governance, and reinforcing regional as well as bilateral military ties.” The tools needed to achieve these goals reach beyond the traditional military apparatus. AFRICOM emphasizes the need for a “holistic view of security that includes defense, law enforcement, and customs and border security” and attention to issues like public health, economic development, and democratization.

AFRICOM interventions in the Sahara-Sahel demonstrate biopolitical rationalities and instrumentalities of governance. As a rationality, biopolitics arbitrateswhat freedoms and interests are valuableorthreatening according to its valuation ofways of life that must be protected. As an instrumentality, biopoliticsconnectsparticular people, practices and interests to these definitions of danger, as it securitizes discriminately. Thus, the rationality of ‘ungoverned spaces’ as a way to arbitrate between desirable and dangerous forms of life is instrumentally applied to the Sahara-Sahel region, enabling particular interventions.

According to AFRICOM’s biopolitical rationalities and instrumentalities, life in the Sahara-Sahel region is conceptualized in opposition to the resilient, productive, and adaptable population that neoliberal governance seeks to foster. In contrast, it is imagined as (a) not properly participating in processes of global circulation, particularly due to its large volume of unregulated trade and smuggling activities and (b) not adapting properly to a globalizing (post)modernity on any number of fronts, including (i)poverty/development, (ii)responses to illegal activities, and (iii)enforcement of national borders and related forms of government surveillance(especially among nomadic Tuareg populations).

How, according to this framework, might life in the Sahara-Sahel be made governable, and thus rendered less dangerous? The objectives of AFRICOMare to produce institutions and practices that signify a resilient, adaptable population according to neoliberalism’s (evolving) valuation of life. Adaptability to issues of poverty, terrorism and crime, climate change, disease and human rights are managed and regulated via particular institutions and knowledge practices, which produce authoritative assessmentsand cost-benefit calculations. This governance work, carried out under AFRICOM by the U.S. military, State Department, USAID, and non-governmental “partners”, participates in its own economy of resources, standing, and influence, in which a project’s correlation with hegemonic “best practices”

determines its viability. These governance practices produce assessments of regions like the Sahara-Sahel that identify vulnerabilities and then apply these “best practices.” As in the case of AFRICOM, these interventions oftendisrupt existing strategies of adaptability. According to regional analysts, the TSCTP and OEF-TSare exacerbating local vulnerabilities associated with environmental change, political marginalization of minority and nomadic groups, and poverty.US counter-terrorism military aidis strengthening contested national governments’ ability to repress, rather than negotiate with, dissident groups. This is the case for rebel groups, largely made up of nomadic Tuaregs, in Algeria, Mali, and Niger, whose demands include greater political autonomy and increased investments in economic development. Additionally, regional militarization is disrupting vital sources of income, including tourism and trading routes. These routes represent more than income, but the protection of a nomadic way of life that has been under threat, not only from the rigidity of international borders and systems of land tenure, but also by increasing environmental and economic pressures.

Observers who are attentive to ways in which these interventions disrupt or destroy local practices and livelihoods, and especially where theycirculate resources into the global economy to benefit corporations and financial institutions who are not accountable to local communities, call these practices a form of neo-imperialism. This is analogous to imperialism because it is a form of domination – domination over the ways in which life adapts and participates in global processes of circulation. This expression of power is made possible by hegemonic regimes of knowledge/power, expressed in discourses of security, development, humanitarianism, and human rights via states, the UN, civil society groups, NGOs, and humanitarian groups. This is an important claim because it shows how liberal projects to mitigate real human vulnerabilities can and do produce forms of domination that do not challenge states’ political violence, but rather enable it.

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Event Date: 22 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
and the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University

Charlotte Heath-Kelly
Aberystwyth University
cch08@aber.ac.uk

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This paper considers how ‘knowledge’ about ‘radicalisation’ produces a dangerous Muslim subject, but also how opacity concerning transitions to terrorism generates that will to knowledge. Looking at the underpinnings of the UK PREVENT strategy, this paper utilises conceptions of risk and governmentality to understand how the radicalisation discourse produces criteria of dangerousness and opportunities for intervention in British Muslim communities.

The major assumption which underwrites UK PREVENT strategy is that a ‘radicalisation process’ actually exists; this conception evolved from academic and policymaking discomfort with post-Cold War ‘religious’ terrorism and from the discourse of ‘New Terrorism’ – which produced knowledge about increasing connections between religiosity and violence. As well as focusing policymaking attention on religious ideas as the ‘contagion’ behind contemporary violence, and producing understandings of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘intervention’ within PREVENT, the idea that a ‘radicalisation process’ exists presents a counterfactual to terrorism – which enables governmental intervention in its supposed production. This presents an interesting overlap between disciplinary and security governance, as those presenting vulnerability indicators for radicalisation are also (viewed as) threats to the wider collective – they are both ‘at-risk’ and ‘risky’, vulnerable and dangerous.

Converse to the role of knowledge, Lacher’s (2008) conception of opacity is also used to explain governmental mapping exercises of Muslim communities. Perceived illegibility drives a ‘will to knowledge’, which reproduces understandings of disorder in Muslim communities (post-Bradford, Oldham and the Satanic Verses controversy) and upon which calculations of dangerousness and risk (qua terrorism) are made. This paper argues, then, that a combination of knowledge and opacity (the perfect conditions for risk) concerning Muslim ‘borderlands’ produced governmental mapping strategies and ‘knowledges’ which underwrite PREVENT.

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Event Date: 21 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
and the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University

Marieke de Goede
University of Amsterdam

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Abstract

The network has arguably become the main metaphor for imagining contemporary danger. From the dispersed global terrorism threat, to the spread of (computer) viruses, to the identification of organized crime ‘hubs,’ the network is thought to pose a severe security threat because of its diffusion, unpredictability, and global reach.

This talk examines critically the discourse of networked danger and its concomitant security practices. A genealogical reading shows the network metaphor to be rooted in critical sociological theory, meaning that it now constitutes a shared vocabulary between security experts and security critics. I offer a close reading of a few exemplary critical thinkers to tease out the unlikely affinities between their conceptualisations and the vocabulary of the contemporary security apparatus.

The talk subsequently traces the appropriation of the network metaphor in contemporary security discourses, and analyses the way in which it rationalizes and underpins particular contemporary security interventions in Europe. As Martin Coward has argued, the network trope effects a substantial expansion of the battlespace and a securitization of everyday urban environments. Novel security practices premised on the network imagination include social network analysis with financial data, the continuous generation of investigative leads, and cycles of preemptive arrest. The logic of networked security interventions is a targeting of undesired social associations – simultaneously, it valuates and professes to safeguard the modern, connected, (way of) life. However, it is argued these interventions amount to a practice of speculative security – both because they are premised on the deployment of imagination and speculative investigation, and because they lead to a particularly vulnerable state of ‘security.’

The final part of the talk entertains the problem of critique: because the network has no ‘outside’ – neither spatially nor discursively – it poses a special challenge to critical scholarship. There is no external point from which to critique the network; the binary language of being ‘with us’ or ‘against us’ seems obsolete. New avenues of critique have to be entertained, that include critical reflection on our own discourses of networked danger, including the language of hubs, nodes, links and associations. They may also include a revaluation of risky association and a critical attachment to the disruption of moral order.

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Event Date: 21 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
and the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University

Sam Okoth Opondo
University of Hawai’i at Manoa
opondo@hawaii.edu

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In this essay, I examine how modern politics is related to everyday cultural practices concerned with ‘dangers’ and a desire to account for what can and cannot happen within the space of the postcolonial African city. Among other things, I engage the conceptions of risk emanating from a desire to manage the contingencies that modern science and the state have failed to address. Such a treatment of urban cultures raises fundamental questions that enable us to problematize the relationship between the management of contingency and a politics of security that is attentive to domestic anxieties and their manifestation in various spheres of public life. It also foregrounds a vernacular micropolitics and the minute texture of everyday life and suggests a treatment of security that is concerned with more the official macropolitics of the postcolonial city. For example, rumours and banal profiling practices that implicitly figure the immigrant or the diseased body as a threat acquire new meaning as they are presented as part of a postcolonial fearscape/securescape. Similarly, the turn to ‘occult economies’ and healing processes aimed at enhancing lives, acquiring and securing property and relations present some useful sites for thinking about the production and management of threats to urban sociality.

In order to supply a critical perspective on the aforementioned postcolonial securescape, I summon a number of fictional, ethnographic and historical accounts of urban life that illustrate how relational techniques of the self and new subjectivities are produced as a response to these threats. As such, much of my engagement with Nairobi’s domestic spaces seeks to illustrate how discourses on danger are deployed to actively organize perceptual experience, consolidate habits and compose ethical dispositions that are central to the idea of proper urban and civic life. What is at stake here is the recognition that in an attempt to secure certain forms of urban domesticity, a variety of bodies, spaces, identities and functions are marked as a threat to ‘peaceful and developed’ city lifestyles and livelihoods and therefore subjected to policing practices and modes of surveillance that limit their circulation or the forms of ambiguity that they articulate.

Attentiveness to these vernacular aspects of urban security reveals the multiple ways in which conceptions of danger and risk in the postcolonial city exceed official security discourses. It also illustrates how statist, secular and techno-scientific modes of abstraction and standardization of threats translate or transform the constantly changing social reality into something that more closely resembles the administrative and epistemological grid familiar to official observation, calculation and policing. Generally, a more open conception of urban anxieties and threats reveals the complex network of actors concerned with the administration of ‘life’ and the multiple ways in which a ‘general problematic of improvement’ and a concern with bodies, health, subsistence and habitation operates in the city

Consider the following snapshots:

Snapshot One: The ‘war on HIV/AIDS’ has led to various interpretations of the meaning of ‘evil’, the healing or infecting potential of ‘blood’ and the resource draining capacities of the disease. In response to the threats posed by HIV/AIDS, local idioms have emerged and inserted themselves into larger global circuits and concerns suggesting forms of conversion geared towards providing moral agency and erasing the ambiguity and contingency that HIV/AIDS brings into the city life. Key among these is the salvation and healing promised through Pentecostal churches and the access to Anti-retroviral medication and material support which accrues from ‘coming out’ with ones status. Outside official sanction, we also witness a turn to occult beliefs – phenomena often associated with tradition and bucolic life – as part of the ‘organization of circulation’ of bodies [and body parts] geared towards securing health, wealth, procreation, lovers and general well being in a world that HIV/AIDS makes uncertain.

On the whole, the spread of HIV/AIDS in cities like Nairobi has been productive of significant forms of sociality, signification, enterprise and activism, both negative and positive.[] Doubtless, HIV/AIDS has redrawn the parameters of circulation, calculation and existence in the city. It has contributed to the need for a self awareness and sometimes demanded openness about ones HIV status with the announcement of CD4 T-cell counts and viral loads, the histories and networks of sexual liaisons and more recently ones sexual orientation. HIV/AIDS has been presented as a threat to intimacy as it turns ‘intimate pleasures’, forms of labour and cultural expression into ‘mortal risks’ and contributes to the profiling of high risk groups ; prostitutes, refugees, the sexualized domestic worker, long-distance truck drivers, polygamists or those trapped in ‘anachronistic’ traditional practices like wife inheritance or the lack of male circumcision. It is for these reasons that trust, fidelity, faith, conversion and knowledge of the body’s makeup, risky relations and behaviour change are presented as part of the solution to the pandemic. For, with HIV/AIDS, there is a need for care and vigilance based on the knowledge that things/people are not always what they seem to be.

Snapshot Two: Nairobi, Kenya 2008-10, the clamour for a new constitution, the desire to re-imagine the nation anew following the ethnocidal character of the 2008 post election violence. A return to ‘normalcy’ is marked by the shift of empathic concerns from a focus of encampment of refugees fleeing neighbouring states due to ‘well founded fears’ to sympathetic identification with fellow Kenyans –the Internally Displaced Persons – now living in IDP camps.

A nationwide population census shows that the Somali population in the country has increased thus illustrating the failure of the state to effectively make distinctions between citizen and refugee populations.A distinction that is predicated more on the policing of circulation of the Somali body [through encampment in designated areas and provision of movement passes] rather than through the calculation of births, mortality and the level of health or life expectancy.

The Indian Ocean piracy and the capital flows it enables emerge as a form of Somali ‘bio-piracy’. A cover that enables ‘Somali money’ and bodies to surreptitiously make their way into Eastleigh Nairobi where they are laundered and authenticated through the purchase of real estate and national identification cards thus changing the demographic, proprietary and racial-spatial character of the city.

These anxieties about Kenyaness, about an Islamic threat to city and family space is inter-articulated with other anxieties about the politics of life itself. On one hand, aspirational Nairobians express an anxiety about the prospect of home ownership in a city with ever increasing property prices.On the other hand, Pentecostal Christians provide a reading of city and national space that discerns a Muslim [read Somali,Gulf states and Libyans] plot to buy up the city and create an Islamic space that will pave the way for a legal order that is more sympathetic to their concerns. A further desire to determine the politics of life itself, is articulated through the clamour for unambiguous sexualities and a ‘pro-life’ abortion debate that focuses on when life begins and under what conditions it can be terminated and by who.

From the above, it is evident that security is always directed towards the securing of a referent object that is problematised through different discourses on danger-through the formation of fearscapes and securecapes. Whether it is a health concern ,an existential anxiety or the question of foreign bodies, we cannot merely focus our analysis of these dangers as problematic in the given society , but must examine how the formation and articulation of the ‘body politic’ is also implicated in how we understand danger. That is, any treatment of the explosion of discursive interest in the politics of life itself must engage the ontological predicates and epistemologies associated with the securing of life that do not fall within the register of rational surveillance, calculative practices, secular profiling of individuals and collectivities. Thus, a concern with the problematization of danger in the postcolonal city indexes a more complex concern with how one cares for the self as a means of averting risks and threats emerging from lifestyles and forms of ‘circulation’ that exceed neo-liberal normative trends and contemporary biopolitical practices. It invites us to take seriously the numerous modes of meaning making and disambiguation that seek to render the future knowable through the management of circulation, calculation and optimization of life both within and outside of western rationality.

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Event Date: 21 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
and the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University

Debbie Lisle
D.Lisle@qub.ac.uk

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Is it possible to think security by referring ideas of danger to understandings of life, livelihoods and lifestyles, instead of ready-made ‘objects’ of security such as sovereignty, territory, the nation-state, citizens, borders, and sociological categories such as class and gender?

When security is framed through constituent objects, the first critical move is to work out how danger constitutes itself, and is constituted, over and against its opposite. For me, some of the key forces that danger constructs itself against are not ‘safety’ or even ‘security’, but rather the ‘life, livelihoods and lifestyles’ that emerge around pleasure, leisure and travel. One way to work out this oppositional logic is to trace how, since the events of 9/11 (and more specifically the bombings of hotels, bars, and nightclubs in Bali and Mombasa in October / November 2002), the tourism and leisure industry as a whole has become a strategic ‘object’ of security that needs to be protected from the dangers of terrorism. Governments, policy-makers, media commentators and scholars in Tourism and Hospitality Studies have used the emerging rhetoric of ‘soft targets’ to make sense of how seemingly benign places like hotels and tourist attractions are now on the front line of the War on Terror. Tourism and leisure’s vast labour force, its wealth generation, its cultural capital, its advertising and marketing campaigns, its increasingly comprehensive insurance arrangements, its ever-regenerating fantasy landscapes, and most importantly, its material infrastructure, have all become objects of utility that can be calculated. These objects are accorded monetary value in terms of how much it will cost to protect the tourism and leisure industries from terrorist attacks (e.g. the hastily arranged flights home for tourists in Egypt January 2011), and how much potential revenue will be lost if the industry is attacked (e.g. American airline reservations and hotel occupancy dropped 50% after 9/11). Such calculations opened up the tourism industry to all kinds of invasive techniques and practices of security, surveillance and monitoring all in the name of protecting holiday makers and valuable tourism infrastructure from terrorism. The notion here is that if the securitizing process is successful, it will restore more robust and protected circuits of travel, cultural exchange and commerce all over the world, allow tourists to start travelling again, and allow the tourism industry – the world’s biggest – to start generating revenue again. What this suggests is that the rhetoric of soft targets helped, in part, to resolve the security / freedom contradiction that emerged after 9/11: it allowed people to keep travelling for business and pleasure, but it ensured that those travellers and their hosts were safe within the security envelope of the Coalition of the Willing.

There are, of course, further implications of an approach that traces the oppositional framing of danger / pleasure and reveals the manner in which travel, tourism, and leisure come to be taken as objects of security. For example, there is a powerful geopolitical imaginary at work here which positions those who value travel and cultural exchange squarely within the liberal moment – they are members of a diverse, global, cosmopolitan community that is committed to fighting radical Islamic terrorists who, apparently, do not value travel and cultural exchange in the same way. After the events of Bali and Mombasa especially, governments, media commentators and scholars in Tourism and Media Studies reproduced this geopolitical imaginary uncritically, which led to claims that (a) terrorists have a ‘Medieval’ mindset whereas we are ‘Modern’ (ignoring the clear Orientalist and racist implications of such a logic) and (b) Western tourists are entirely innocent victims of terrorism (ignoring that tourism is complicit in many forms of cultural imperialism and exploitation)

This kind of genealogical tracing of the opposition between danger / pleasure is a necessary move, but it is not sufficient. Too often it remains a static framing (both in space and in time) that lifts practices of tourism and leisure out of the realm of the political. I want to argue that danger’s relationship with pleasure, leisure and travel is, and has always been, a much more complex and entangled affair. Indeed, to think about danger outside of dominant discourses of security and risk requires us to move on from tracing static oppositional logics as if the assemblage of hierarchies and asymmetries never moves. What we need to think about is how oppositional logics such as danger / pleasure operate relationally; that is, how danger has always been juxtaposed with pleasure, leisure and travel in ways that do not necessarily or always privilege the urgency and drama of danger.

Thinking relationally requires an additional and rather difficult re-imagination: it requires us to think of oppositional logics such as danger / pleasure in terms of their constant mobility, circulation, adaptability and transformation. This suggests that the juxtaposition of danger with pleasure, leisure and travel is constantly mutating and reforming. Certainly there are times when it coalesces into a recognizable asymmetry that must be revealed and resisted (e.g. the War on Terror’s securitization of the leisure and tourism industry). But there are many other moments in which these two forces circulate, mutate, reverse and infect one another such that their constituent subjectivities and power relations are reassembled. To start thinking about how these mutations occur, we need to start not with oppositions, but rather with the juxtapositions of danger / pleasure, leisure, travel:

Experiences of pleasure, leisure and travel in martial contexts (e.g. a soldier’s thrill at killing enemies; the voyeurism of watching war and playing war games; the leisure infrastructures accompanying force deployment; the travel opportunities afforded by active service and R&R)

War’s mobilization of existing leisure and travel infrastructure (e.g. troop requisitioning of hotels; soccer stadia used for mass killings; hotels used for detention and deportation)

Leisure and tourism experiences that seek out danger (e.g. journeys to war zones immediately post-conflict by journalists, artists, amateur war reporters) or take conflict and war as their object (e.g. battlefield tourism; War tours; museum commemorations of war; war re-enactments).

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Event Date: 21 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
and the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University

Jonas Hagmann
ETH Zurich

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1. In the early 2000s, the production of national risk registers emerged as a novel element of Western security practice. National risk registers aim to assess, locate, compare, and rank all kinds of possible public dangers, ranging from natural hazards to industrial risks and political contingencies. With their thematic breadth and systematic approach, risk registers are unparalleled attempts at comprehensive and secure construction of danger knowledge.

2. Risk registers are directly linked to national security strategies, for which they formally set out central knowledge bases. The assembly of risk registers is also popular: Risk registers have already been produced in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Norway, in Switzerland (twice), and in the United Kingdom, while other countries, but also the European Commission and the US Department of Homeland Defense plan on constructing danger inventories.

3. Risk registers are coming to occupy central places in the production of danger knowledge in Western countries. By laying out comprehensive maps of public dangers, risk registers define national danger realities, and in doing so instruct Western security practice both directly and indirectly. Nevertheless, the actual rationales and methodologies guiding risk register production remain largely intransparent: How do risk registers determine dangers? How do they define dangerousness, and which endangered objects are identified?

4. The assembly of national risk registers follows a peculiar syllogism. First, it is asserted that the national security dispositif must be made more efficient and effective as a whole. Second, it is argued that for such reform to be successful, full danger/situation awareness is necessary. Third, it is suggested that danger awareness can be achieved through comprehensive risk assessments, i.e., calculations of the likelihood and impact of danger.

5. This syllogism is politically efficacious. At a higher level, it moves security politics away from grand political determinations of danger towards technical assessments of object vulnerabilities. Effectively, the focus no longer rests on the actual sources of danger, but on the ‘endangered’ status of objects as it is conditioned by that object itself. Rather than focusing on the causes of danger, the primary focus of security policy comes to rest on the inherent strength and resilience of objects, whether they be technical infrastructures, elements crucial for the functioning of the economy, or political structures. This larger shift affects how security policy is organised more practically: a. First, the shift entails a bureaucratization of security policy. The determination as to what is a danger is made not so much by presidents or prime ministers in grand statements, but by civil servants or specialists working for public administrations. In risk registers, engineers determine the vulnerability of infrastructures to flooding and rockslides, physicists determine the technical redundancy of power grids, and doctors assess and determine how dangerous a pathogen is. b. Second, the formulation of dangerousness becomes object-centric. It is not the subject of danger, but the potentially endangered object that lies at the heart of political action. The focus is not on the terrorist, but on mitigating the blast effects of a potential bomb. The focus is not on the polluting company, but on the mitigation of environmentally adverse effects on the human body. Such a focus on objects dispenses with an analysis of the actors responsible in creating dangers. c. Third, risk registers empower a managerial security agenda, and they project a state of permanent public insecurity: Risks are not evaluated in terms of whether they exist or not – they are assumed to exist and merely differentiated according to likelihood and impact. With this, security politics becomes a matter of simply managing an existing situation. Everything is aimed at prevention and object-hardening in what is considered to be a perpetually insecure risk context that constantly remains in a state of potentiality. d. Fourth, the focus on vulnerabilities, and the absence of grand identifications of enemies, empowers administrative decisions about the referent object. What is held to be vulnerable – and thus also judged to have legitimate claims to protection – follows from the risk maps drawn by engineers and civil protection experts. There is no conscious political agenda that posits, for instance, that the general population or individual human beings should be the primary referent objects of security – a decision that has obvious disempowering consequences for such actors. e. Fifth, the mapping of dangers as established by risk registers relies on, and also projects, scientist sources of danger knowledge. By employing scientific and scientist assessment methodologies – from engineering in particular, but also by drawing on expert validation systems more generally -, risk registers draw their authority from ‘science’, i.e., the notion of science as objective arbiter of truth. In doing so, risk registers effectively advance science as an authoritative and supreme source of knowledge about danger, rivalling both grand political and democratic, participatory sources of danger determination.

6. The emergence of risk registers is a remarkable novel element of Western security practice. Risk registers not only provide comprehensive systematizations of public danger. They also advance a managerial, vulnerability- and object-centred security agenda that draws its legitimacy from efficiency concerns and scientist inquiry.

7. This shift not only challenges more subject-centred and reflexive security agendas. It also challenges established research foci and critical security scholarship: Risk registers suggest that the production of danger knowledge largely resides within public administrations rather than with the declarations of presidents and prime ministers. Also, risk registers direct attention towards the mobilization of science as source of truth in security affairs, as opposed to other forms of influence and/or capital and processes of convincing. Last, but not least – whether we like it or not -, the popularity of managerial risk registers also challenges the political impact of reflexive security studies on government practice.

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Event Date: 21 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
and the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University

Chris Zebrowski
Keele University

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The contamination of the crew of the Japanese fishing vessel the Lucky Dragon brought worldwide media attention to what were intended to be secret American H-bomb tests conducted in the Bikini Atoll in March 1954. It also announced, in spectacular fashion, the emergence of the threat of fallout: radioactive dust kicked up by the blast of thermonuclear weaponry and spread by the vicissitudes of the wind. Historians have located the advent of thermonuclear weaponry as a turning point in British logics of Civil Defence (Cf. Grant, 2010, Hennessy, 2010), which had until then maintained a common trajectory from the Second World War. While historians have centred attention on the massive amplification in blast power offered by the H-bomb (no doubt because the blast itself would be directly and indirectly responsible for the majority of casualties), my research into this area has focused on the ‘discovery’ of fallout in problematising British civil defence thinking. In my intervention I would like to move beyond the distinction between risks and threats and focus specifically on the event of fallout’s ‘discovery’ and, specifically, its capacity to problematise sufficiently stabilized and technologized logics of civil defence.

From the Second World War British Civil Defence was guided by the allied priorities of protecting the British population and maintaining UK war-fighting capabilities. Over the course of the war, a Civil Defence apparatus originally designed for strike-breaking purposes was ameliorated through application of the emerging science of Operational Research (OR) within the Civil Defence and Research Committee. Research focused on the effects of high explosives on both the body and the material infrastructures of the city. Research was particularly influenced by the controlled experiments of Solly Zuckerman, a primatologist, on direct and indirect effects of ‘blast’ on lab animals (Cf. Zuckerman, 1978, Zuckerman, 1941, Zuckerman, 1940) which would be used to inform both Civil Defence and, in later years, Allied strategic bombing campaigns. Adey (2010: 155-61) suggests these studies “had important consequences for understanding the process of aerial bombing, scientifically perpetuating the analogic and affective amplifications of morale and panic through the trope of the explosion and the body’s susceptibility to indirect environmental effects” (Adey, 2010: 159). A strong understanding of the material and affective effects of blast were reflected in the bunker logic of Civil Defence: the prophylactic securitization of material bodies which underpinned the broader objective of protecting the collective national psyche from fear.

This bunker logic would continue to inform Civil Defence thinking from the Second World War until 1955 despite the advance of weaponry including the advent of the atomic bomb. This can be explained, I believe, by the extent to which each of these advances could be conceptualized by operational researchers as simply representing an amplification in blast-power: something which was already well-understood, and could be responded to by simply by ‘scaling-up’ existing metrics (Cf. Smith, 2009). Fallout however could not be sufficiently absorbed into these metrics. This was made clear within the 1955 ‘Strath Report’, officially titled The Defence Implications of Fall-out from a Hydrogen Bomb. In contrast to the direct blow to the materiality of the body perpetrated by blast, fallout threatened to poison the environmental milieu in which biological life subsists. It was a threat which integrated with the multiple flows comprising the atmosphere to spread its deadly effects over a wide geographic area—an instance of what Peter Sloterdijk (2009) would term ‘atmoterrorism’. Contaminated agriculture and livestock would be unusable for a minimum of two months whilst contamination would ‘immobilize considerable areas of the country and force inhabitants to cover for some days and in certain areas for a week or more.’  Rather than attempting to target the circulatory infrastructures directly as in doctrines of strategic bombing, fallout would arrest these circulations through the poisoning of the environmental milieu itself. Strategic studies suggested that the condensed geography of the UK meant that as few as 10 ten-megaton bombs, strategically placed on the Western seaboard and ground-detonated to maximize fallout, would ensure “no part of the country would be free from the risk of radio-active contamination.”[ Ibid.]

While blast and fire were expected to claim many more lives—estimated at 3 deaths to every 1 caused by radiation—it is the advent of fallout which appears to have initiated a fundamental reorganization of British Civil Defence. Focusing specifically on the ‘problematic potential’ of fallout, I’ve been tempted to place a greater emphasis on the epistemological insecurity—or uncertainty—related to fallout, than its capacity to highlight vulnerabilities within a civil defence apparatus designed to protect against blast. Specifically, I’m interested in the way in which the danger of fallout was amplified to the extent that it exceeded a stabilized framework of intelligibility for understanding, and thus controlling, threat based on calculative metrics of assessing blast. In thinking about this issue, I’ve been influenced by Foucault’s thinking on problematisation as an event which inspires (reflective) thought on a practice which has been technologized (reduced to instrumental knowledge, know-how, or savoir-faire). I’d also be interested in exploring with the audience similarities between Foucault’s notion of panic, and contemporary thinking on trauma within discourses of PTSD, which similarly stress the significance of an event which exceeds the subjects framework of intelligibility.

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Event Date: 21 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
and the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University

Lisa Stampnitzky
Institute for Science, Innovation, and Society, University of Oxford
Lisa.stampnitzky@sbs.ox.ac.uk

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This intervention identifies three rationalities through which early terrorism experts attempted to constitute terrorism as a particular sort of governable problem, each of these not only implied a different understanding of terrorism as a problem, but also enabled to a different mode of governmentality, or set of practices through which the problem might be managed. The earliest U.S. response to terrorism envisioned international law as one of the primary methods forgoverning terrorism, reflecting the State Department’s primary role, which saw this as an issue tobe handled through diplomatic channels, and indeed, to a certain extent a problem aimed primarily at diplomats. A second approach focused upon developing practical strategies for managing and responding to terrorist events (particularly hijackings, kidnappings, and hostage situations) through routinized event management responses developed through fantasy scenarios.

By developing planned, routine, responses for various potentialities, experts and policymakers sought to tame the frightening and seemingly unpredictable terrorist event. Where the legal approach sought to manage terrorism at the level of the international world-system through legal regulations and treaties, the operational approach focused upon managing terrorism at the level of the incident. A third approach sought to rationalize terrorism and make it subject to techniques of risk management, largely through the creation of terrorism event databases. The production of such chronologies, in which counts of terrorist events and deaths/casualties are plotted over time, and databases, in which events are correlated with characteristics of perpetrators, victims, and methods of attack, aimed to make terrorism subject to calculable technologies of risk management such as insurance. However, as the problem of “terrorism” took shape over the course of the 1970s, however, it resisted such rationalizing logics, and no one of these approaches was able to successfully “capture” the management of the terrorism problem.

Terrorism thus remained a difficult problem, unable to be subsumed under prevailing logics of risk management.

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