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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)

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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

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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

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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)

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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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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

Cerelia Athanassiou
University of Bristol
cerelia.athanassiou@bristol.ac.uk

Obama’s US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has declared a determined move against the Global War on Terror’s (GWOT) ‘culture of fear’ towards a more reasoned, and ‘ready’, ‘culture of preparedness’ (Napolitano 2009). Yet, despite this commitment by the Obama administration to ‘de-securitise’ (Waever 1995) US responses to terrorism, understandings of threat and security remain similar to those articulated by Bush’s GWOT. Obama’s efforts to privilege calm over constant heightened security, and to equate the category of ‘terrorist’ with that of ‘criminal’ (rather than ‘war criminal’), are happening while a fearful population is being trained within a framework of war. Among the instruments of the DHS’s ‘Ready’ campaign is a newly mobilised citizenry, trained to detect, report and, if necessary, tackle individuals suspected of ‘terrorism’. These model citizens are supported in their efforts by resources such as the DHS website, which is becoming increasingly userfriendly and contains multiple sections dedicated to informing, and training, concerned citizens about the terrorist threat.1 These are all resources very much embedded in the tabloid framework of US politics (Debrix 2008), and are part of the Obama strategy of ‘change’. In this paper, I look at the DHS’s ‘Preparedness’ website section and the online resources it makes available for concerned citizens, like the YouTube video ad ‘The 8 Signs of Terrorism’2 and webinars on ‘preparedness’. The aim is to understand how the subject position of the American ‘us’ versus the terrorist ‘other’ is changing, if at all, from its previous articulations, by looking at the intertextualities with previous definitions and understandings of security, threat and danger.

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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

Andrew Neal
University of Edinburgh

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My current work:

• analysing counter-terrorism lawmaking in Parliament
• from publication of Lord Lloyd’s ‘Inquiry into terrorism legislation’ in 1996 to present day.
• by taking a longer view, trying to look beyond the core themes of security debates in the last decade:
  1. Temporal moment/rupture
  2. Sovereign exceptionalism/executive decisionism
  3. Binaries (e.g. norm/exception, before/after)
• Questions: 
  • What happens to exceptionalism and emergencies over time?
  • What is their lifespan?
  • What does security look like from a lawmaking perspective, rather than an ‘exception to law’ perspective?
  • What does security look like from a parliamentary perspective, rather than a sovereign/executive perspective only?
  • What does security look like from a parliamentary perspective, rather than a governmentality perspective?
  • What does normalisation look like and how does it work?

Parliament occupies a very interesting position

• in some ways an arcane power
• very limited/weak in policy terms
• very limited/weak in relation to ever expanding executive
• very limited/weak in relation to ever expanding technologies of governmentality beyond the traditional institutions of government
• following Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick’s recent rereading of Foucault in relation to law
  • ‘expulsion thesis’ of established interpretations: 
    • governmentality supplants sovereign and juridical powers of law
    • the power of the law is repressive, limited, negative, monotonous, the pure statement of power (History of Sexuality)
    • corresponds to experience of parliamentary counter-terrorism lawmaking
    • repetitive, symbolic, monotonous, repressive, written
  • but, law presents an excess, it opens up unexpected possibilities, it is constitutive of powers of governmentality, it exceeds the intentions of the those who use it, it is ‘dangerous’ 
    • corresponds to problem of CT law for parliamentarians
    • immense political and social pressure to make new laws in response to security events
    • but the big problem for parliamentarians is that they don’t know the consequences of their actions
    • how will the laws be used?
    • Will new police powers be misused?
    • Will new definitions of terrorism bring protestors or liberation movements into their remit?
    • Will the mistakes of the past be repeated?
    • The history of CT legislation shows that despite executive assurances, all the fears of parliamentarians have come to pass.

Danger’

• Not a commonly found term in the parliamentary debates
• Actually not a great discussion of the nature of the threat, dangerous individuals, dangerous forms of life 
  • Much of this is assumed as obvious in the wake of events like 9/11 and 7/7
  • Much of this discussion depends on expert knowledge from the security establishment, since parliamentarians have little of way of contesting this 
    • (lack of symbolic capital on security due to lack of access to intelligence and constitutional convention of deference to executive on security)
  • What are the ‘dangers’ for parliamentarians?
    • The dangers of the laws they are being asked to give assent to: 
      • What will their effect be?
      • Danger of negative/counter-productive consequences of certain powers: 
        1. recruiting sergeant argument
        2. alienates community that is most important source of intelligence
        • E.g. extending pre-charge detention presents the danger of making Britain less safe in two ways (David Davis as shadow home secretary in 2008):
    • Dangers of repeating the mistakes of the past: 
      • Some Northern Ireland MPs and MPs with constituents who were ‘suspect’ communities 
        • Counter-terrorism laws used to terrorise communities
        • Some argue that they were needed, others argue that they were not effective
        • Peace came from political solution and de-escalation of these powers
    • Future dangers of threats
      • But once away from the immediate focus in the wake of terrorist attacks, these future dangers become hypothetical
      • Entropy of dangerousness – when time passes from spectacular event, political effect of emergency becomes much weaker
      • Hypothetical discourse of danger very divisive and highly contested in parliament, not persuasive
        • Counter-Terrorism Bill 2008
        • E.g. discussion of powers needed for three 9/11s in future – not credible
        • Impossible to quantify what powers might be needed, impossible to quantify any lack in current powers
        • Some security professionals asking for more powers (some police), others happy with current powers (Crown Prosecution Service)
    • Danger to constitution of Britain itself 
      • Threat to magna carter, British liberties, relationship of individual to the state, of ‘giving the terrorists a victory’

Interesting findings:

• in the wake of terrorist attacks, parliament has a long history of legislating in a knee-jerk way (rushed, reactive, repetitious)
• laws often proved to be problematic/unworkable
  • e.g. 1998 post-Omagh legislation (Criminal Justice (Terrorism and Security) Act 1998)
  • widely recognised in reflexive discourses of parliamentarians and commentators
    • ‘this is what we do, let’s not do it this time’
  • exceptional events promp exceptional response (almost unfailingly)
    • consensus to act, consensus on threat
  • but also, strong parliamentary principle
    • ‘exceptional laws require exceptional scrutiny’ 
      • as soon as exceptionality enters the legislative discourse, parliament demands special scrutiny, limits, restrictions 
        • e.g. sunset clauses
        • annual review
        • special independent reviewer (Lord Carlile until recently, but a long tradition)
        • annual debate/parliamentary renewal
      • can be very critical of these 
        • 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act meant to be temporary for six months, but was debated and renewed every year for 25 years.
        • One MP – ‘a sham’
      • special scrutiny/oversight measures didn’t stop legislative excess, but did win significant concessions.
      • Clive Walker – given weakness of parliament in British constitution, least we can hope for.
  • But, when the exception/emergency has faded, there are also periods/acts of normalisation 
    • Terrorism Act 2000 
      • In context of peace in N. Ireland
      • Consolidating/modernising previous laws
    • Interesting parallels with current review of CT laws/powers by new government
    • When the new laws are not introduced as exceptional/emergency laws, the parliamentary response is much weaker. 
      • When the aim is normalisation, not exceptionalism, parliament does not dig its heels in for exceptional scrutiny.
      • Allows what was previously exceptional to become normalized
        • Some reductions in powers, but also making permanent of others.
        • Removal of scrutiny mechanisms.
        • True in 2000 and 2011.
        • Terrorism Act 2000 broad and sweeping, still causing problems today (e.g. stop and search)
    • Arguably, normalisation is more ‘dangerous’ than exceptionalism, in terms of civil liberties, change to constitution of UK, in terms of normalizing assumptions of dangerousness of ‘suspect’ groups (including protestors, e.g.)

 

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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

David Chandler
University of Westminster

This paper explores how danger has acquired an ontological status taken as a starting assumption in discourses of global insecurity, particularly at the interventionist nexus of policy-making in relation to state failure, conflict and underdevelopment. The key point it makes is that framings of human rationality are held to make us dangerous subjects – permanently subjected to danger – with the solution to vulnerability being the universalising of preventive intervention with the goal of the empowerment and capacity- or capability-building of the subject to enable resilience to, in and through danger. Modern liberal rationality is constructed as making us vulnerable through the hubris of universalizing, linear, teleological views of progress – and the policy interventions reflective of this. Equally, pre-modern frameworks of rationality, reproduced through the path-dependencies of social orders, are held to make us vulnerable through their role in the reproduction of power relations in states making the transition to liberal modernity. In both cases the rationalities of power and knowledge are held to perpetuate danger reproducing both the frailties and vulnerabilities of peoples and ecosystems. The dominant policy-solution of the empowerment, voice and capability-building of those marginalised from power is held to enable social resilience and the management of vulnerabilities. This perspective which accords danger with grounding ontological status is critically engaged with here, through the work of AmartyaSen, new-institutionalist economics and Foucault’s birth of biopolitics, suggesting that the discourse of vulnerability, empowerment and resilience can easily rationalise the status quo and reinterpret social, economic and political problems in therapeutic frameworks, problematically suggesting that work on the self can resolve problems in the absence of any transformation of social relations.

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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

Joscha Wullweber
University of Kassel, Germany
j.wullweber@jpberlin.de

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The radical outside

My approach to danger rests on Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony as well as Jessop’s strategic-relational approach. It is based on the assumption that society is constitutively divided. The “radical outside”, represented by antagonistic counterparts, marks the very possibility for stabilizing identities. A reconciled society – a fullness – is always only partially achievable by way of hegemonic struggles trying to represent that fullness. Furthermore, class antagonism (in the singular) marks only one possibility of all sorts of antagonisms (in the plural). These antagonistic divisions potentially cross every social sphere, while no antagonism is a priori more important or dominant than others.

One possibility of such a radical outside – of “the Other” – is danger. Generally, the specific content of danger is not important. A particular danger becomes a radical outside, because it is (strategically) constructed – by language and action – as something radically opposed to society or as something radically threatening society. From this it follows that the social structure of society is the result of historically antecedent social struggles, which involve the drawing of lines of inclusion and exclusion. Different articulations as parts of competing hegemonic projects try to fill – that is, give meaning to – the (empty) concept of danger as well as the (empty) common good.

In this sense, hegemonic struggles constitute the basic principle of social organization. It is therefore necessary not to look for one single antagonistic border, but to be aware of the different positions from which different dangers are constructed. From this perspective, the presence of antagonistic frontiers in the form of certain generally accepted dangers can be a sign of a stable hegemonic discourse or relatively stable social community. This is because, as indicated above, identities do not have a positive identity. They ‘need’ the construction of a radical outside in order to ensure their own long-term existence.

Hegemony

The concept of hegemony as it used here derives from Antonio Gramsci. It deviates from the conventional understanding – the still common tendency to equate hegemony with dominance – in that it rests on the ability to universalize a particular interests of a group as a socio-economic, cultural, and political (etc.) structure. According to Gramsci, the ruling group pursues its interests in ways that lead other groups to regard these interests as common or general interests. Hence, hegemony involves active consent on the part of the ruled.

Gramsci was already aware of the constructiveness of identities. His term catharsis – which is astonishingly close to the term governmentality coined later on by Foucault – indicates that subjects are constructed within the hegemonic process. The struggle for hegemony does not take place among stable subjects, but implies the production of new (collective) identities. What is more, it is a struggle for the hegemonic construction of identities. Accordingly, the hegemonic “collective will” does not confront the subjects in terms of an alienation of their real interests. Instead – at least at this specific spatio-temporal moment – it is the expression of the interests of the majority of people of a certain society. Hegemony is therefore not so much an external and constraining social structure as it is a productive power relation.

Emptiness

According to post-structural hegemony theory, hegemony denotes a specific relation between particularity and universality. In the first place, every hegemony comprises only a definite social and spatio-temporal realm. Correspondingly, it is not possible to speak in general terms of a hegemony of a certain state on a global scale, as is the tendency, for example, in Realist theory. Rather, it is necessary to specify the form, scope, and temporal framework of a hegemony.

Second, it is an imaginary universality which becomes hegemonic, the imaginary status being represented by an empty signifier. Through (strategic) articulations, this signifier tends to lose its particularity – it becomes detached from its previous specific content in order to become the embodiment of fullness, i.e. a universality. Thus, an empty signifier is a hybrid of a particularity and a universality. The empty signifier will always be a universality which is contaminated by a particularity – that is, a tendentially empty signifier – an empty signifier to come. Political actors can try to promote a hegemonic project and attempt to make sure that their respective interests are inscribed within that project at a privileged stage. But in contrast to Gramsci and neo-Gramscian approaches, from a post-structuralist point of view it is not possible – or at least it lacks sufficient complexity – to say that a certain person, class, or political group has become hegemonic. Rather, it is a certain element of common sense, a ‘world-view’, a societal relation, or a specific danger that is or becomes hegemonic. That does not mean that certain actors and political groups do not benefit more than others from a given form of discourse organization. On the contrary, and almost by definition, a particular hegemony expresses and covers the interests of some actors more than others. Third, the concept of hegemony implies making alternatives unthinkable, at least to a certain degree.

Danger

In short, the starting point of my approach to danger is grafted on the post-positivist assumption that there is no such thing as objective danger. There is nothing intrinsic to the concept of danger that infers a specific threat, risk, or danger. Accordingly, it is not an intrinsic form of ‘data’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’ that constitutes a dangerous subject. Danger is first and foremost an empty category. While this does not suggest that the content of danger is arbitrary or indifferent, it does mean that danger should be understood in terms of its relation to strategy.

From this perspective, the content of danger is the contingent outcome of struggles among competing discourses and articulations. It is a reflection of hegemonic struggles which define what must be seen as endangerment or dis-endangerment. Different articulations as parts of competing hegemonic projects try to fill the (empty) category of danger. Thus, it is a question of strategy. These strategies, in turn, are embedded into a relatively stable spatio-temporal, socio-political, and strategic-selective structure – the contingent and discursive fundament of every society where meaning no longer floats freely but has become largely fixed. It follows that the horizon of strategic possibilities is limited. At the same time, actors have an adaptive capacity. They are able to change their strategies if necessary. (A particular) Danger is thus transformed into a socially and politically relevant concept. According to this line of reasoning, an understanding of endangerment must be based on the comprehension of strategies, power relations, and struggles within a discursive field.

The strategic use of the concept of danger is a dangerous undertaking: if successful, the ‘menacing’ sliding signifier can fill the constitutive lack of society’s identity as the presence of the Other. At the same time, as constitutive outside endangerment threatens (democratic) societies and gives way to potential states of exception.

 

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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

Dr Btihaj Ajana
Centre for Culture, Media and Creative Industries (CMCI) King’s College London
btihaj.ajana@kcl.ac.uk

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This intervention starts with an assumption: that ontology has retreated from the notion of danger insofar as the latter and its governmental conceptualisations are less thought of in terms of being and embodied experience, and more in terms of future-oriented managerial and strategic processes that seek to pre-empt danger or even capitalise on it. In this sense, ‘re-ontologising danger’ is a call to bring back the question of being to bear on the notion of danger and on the consequences of thinking danger and dangerous thinking as a way of challenging the mind-sets that govern governance itself.

So, why ontology?

Studies concerning security, securitisation, risk management and other related developments have been largely conducted through the lens of governmentality thesis and that of the risk society. Such analytics have doubtless been instrumental in providing a diagnosis of the hybrid arguments, strategies and modalities of thought and action that underpin security mechanisms and their attitude towards danger, and in revealing how specific forms of subjectivity come into being through the different governmental practices. Yet the focus of such analytics has been mainly based on an ‘empiricism of the surface’ (Rose) and directed towards abstract rationalities and technologies of rule.

In this sense, an engagement with ontology may complement these approaches by providing a different level of analysis. It can allow the issue of danger to be viewed from the very humble layer of the everyday (Jean-Luc Nancy) and to be reconnected to the embodied question of being and to the ways in which it unfolds within the material fabric of life itself. This is particularly important in the current climate where security strategies towards danger and risk are largely based on abstracted calculative technologies of simulation and pre-emption that often lead to the ‘fictionalisation of the world’ (Bigo) and the construction of spaces of simulacra and projections whose ramification has been the paradoxical increase in instances of endangerment and insecurity rather than their total pre-emption. As such, this intervention argues that an ontological approach can help reclaim the question of danger from the fear-driven strategies of security and their regimes of control, and at the same time, placing it (back) within a more embodied material sphere that is present in and to its own actualisations.

In addition, ontology also opens up unique sets of political and ethical questions, questions that challenge the normative assumptions that underpin liberal individualism, reconfiguring the very basis of what counts and qualifies as an ethico-political question in the first place. So in place of the familiar concepts of risk/benefit analysis, agency, rationality, subjectivity, choice and so on, an ontological approach incites the retrieval of and engagement with notions such as relationality, singularity, alterity, affects and embodiment. This can also allow the redefinition of the problem spaces and the reframing of what is cast as a question and solution beyond the technocratic formulations of contemporary modes of governance.

Rethinking danger from an ontological standpoint demands a reconsideration of the foundational categories of governance and with it the rethinking of the political itself. Jean-Luc Nancy’s work provides a touchstone for this task. In his refusal of the dominant articulations of the political as ‘the techno-economical organization or “making operational” of our world’ (Nancy), Nancy provides an alternative vision of the political that is based on a co-existential analytic of ‘being with’, that is, on relationality and acts of sharing between singular beings that are irreducible to projects, programmes and governmental operations.

Nancy’s anti-managerial stance towards the political carries over to his approach towards the future. Whereas governmental approaches vis-à-vis the future are often based on images of otherness and dangerousness, and the belief that one can create ‘a grammar of futurantérieur’ by which the future can be read as a form of the past in order to manage risk and prevent unwanted events (Bigo), Nancy, on the other hand places a demand on politics to reconceive ‘uncertainty’ as a condition that is carved in the heart of human existence itself (Hutchens), and re-imagine the future as a space that is ‘wholly beyond the reach of free agency [and] resulting from incessant surprisings of experience’ (ibid.). This, however, does not amount to a sense of passivity in the face of uncertainty, but to a sense of ‘openness’ towards the future and a responsible engagement with the world-in-the-present.

I argue that both Nancy’s take on the notion of the political and his foregrounding of open futurity have the potential to act as an antidote to the prevailing politics of fear and its stifling systems of control, challenge the “us and them” divide, encourage more generous, accountable, indeterministic and non-assimilationist modes of relating, and incite a careful and mindful examination of how our (in)actions and interactions affect the material fabric of our being-with-others (elements that are crucial to rethinking how danger unfolds within and through politics of immigration, borders and citizenship, for instance).

 

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